“Yes, ma’am.” I dropped my knife back on the table and unknotted my napkin, but not before gesturing in a twenty-one-gun military sort of way.
“There is no need to salute. Now, Mr. Bean…” Miss Melton-Mowry turned to Delton. “How would you get the waiter’s attention? Remember, as we discussed last week, speaking in a loud voice is distracting. If the waiter is not nearby, you’ll need to use your body language.”
“Well…” Delton sat up and cleared his throat like he was going to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. “In your video on fine dining, I seem to recall that you can get the waiter’s attention by looking at him, and…” He paused, searching his massive data bank for fine-dining details. “Hmmm…sometimes you can do it by directing your energy; but if that fails, you can…you could…”
“Poke him?” Officer Weston prompted.
“Clock him in the shins?” A favorite of mine.
“I remember!” Delton forgot himself and snapped his fingers. “Arch your eyebrow.”
“You can’t be serious,” Officer Weston said. “How’s he going to see that across a crowded restaurant?”
“Let’s practice, shall we? Now, Officer Weston. Please direct the intensity of your gaze at Miss Information and draw her to your assistance.”
Officer Weston screwed up his face like a rock had just landed on his foot.
“All right, and if that doesn’t work, then you can raise your hand slightly. Try that, Miss Corcoran.”
I let my hands float up from the table like I did in yoga class, only they floated a little too far and knocked Miss Information off balance; she fell forward like a chopped tree, smacking her head on the table—where it stayed—while the rest of her fell to the floor.
“Miss Corcoran! You do try my patience. The purpose of these lessons is to demonstrate the correct way to behave in a fine-dining situation. Your aim is to be polite, gentle, seemly. You are not to draw attention to yourself. Does it exist—in the realm of your imagination—to conduct yourself in a manner appropriate to the young lady you seem to be, at least on the outside? Need I remind you that there is more at stake here than your…entertainment!”
There were more words, but I was focused on using the intensity of my gaze to tell Miss Melton-Mowry that her spit was landing on our tablecloth and my napkin wasn’t big enough to cover the spray!
“Excuse me, Miss Melton-Mowry?” Officer Weston had returned Miss Information’s body to a standing position. “If you hand me the head, I think I might be able to fix it.”
“This!”—Miss Melton-Mowry picked up the head and thrust it at Officer Weston—“was made by the gentleman who repairs all the antique clocks for the royal family in Dubai. It is extremely unlikely that you can fix it! But by all means, Officer, give it a try.”
Miss Melton-Mowry was having what my dad calls a Michelin-three-star tirade, tugging first on her sleeves and then on the bottom of her blazer before closing her eyes and pressing her hands to her very red cheeks. “Do you believe in miracles, Mr. Bean?”
“I’m going to be an aeronautical engineer, Miss Melton-Mowry. Miracles are not a mechanically valid—”
“Well, start believing. Now! And that’s an order.” When her eyes finally opened, Miss Melton-Mowry stared at us as if she wasn’t sure why we were there. “I need to excuse myself for a moment. Just…practice polite conversation.”
Officer Weston blew into the hole in Miss Information’s neck and tried again to insert the screw into it. “You should go apologize, Cassidy.”
“Me? What did I do?”
Officer Weston and Delton stayed silent, letting me figure it out for myself. “I didn’t mean to make her so mad—” I broke off, trying to think of something to say to defend myself. But I couldn’t. I’d really done it this time. I beheaded her best doll—twice!
Bending Miss Information’s body so that she sat in his lap, Officer Weston tried to screw her head back into place, but her hair kept getting caught in his shirt buttons. Delton helped out by pulling the hair into a ponytail and holding it above her head.
“You’re so natural at being a pain, you can’t even see it,” Delton said, smoothing Miss I’s hair back down and tucking it behind her ear. “I think her collar’s stuck in the neck seam,” he told Officer Weston.
“She’s only trying to do her job and make us civilized, Cassidy.” Officer Weston managed to unpinch Miss I’s collar, but now her head tilted again. She looked at us with her head cocked like that—like she wished she could figure us out.
Figure me out, I should say.
“We need an even bigger screw,” Delton said. “Maybe a plaster screw with an anchor bolt.”
“We better leave her headless until we get one. I’m afraid if she loses her head again, there will be permanent damage.” Officer Weston carried Miss Information back to her chair and set her head in her lap.
“But why?” I persisted. “Why do we have to be civilized?”
“It’s called growing up, Cassidy,” Delton said. “And it’s going to happen whether you want it to or not.”
“It already has happened to me. How’d you like to be doing this when you’re twenty-seven, Cass?” Officer Weston asked me.
That was definitely nightmare material. “All right, all right. I’ll go apologize.”
I pressed my ear to the door of Miss Melton-Mowry’s office and heard music again. It wasn’t the same as before. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the river and the drops of water, but I couldn’t do it. This wasn’t river music.
I knocked.
“I’d like a few moments to myself, please.”
“I know,” I said, opening the door anyway. “But I was thinking…well, maybe if you put on the water music you’d feel better. This sounds more like…a bunch of birds in a tree, screeching at one another.”
Miss Melton-Mowry was looking at a photograph, but when I opened the door, she slipped it into the top drawer of her desk.
Even I knew it was rude to ask her about the picture. “My sister Magda found a photograph of my great-grandma,” I told her. “She was hunting poachers in Africa.”
Miss Melton-Mowry took a tissue from the box on her desk and pressed it to her cheek.
“Miss Corcoran, when someone tells you they need a private moment, you should respect their wishes.”
“I know.” I stood there wondering if apologizing trumped respecting Miss Melton-Mowry’s wishes. “I…just wanted to say I’m sorry. I know I’m obnoxious. My great-grandma used to say I got on her last nerve.”
“You do…have a knack.”
“I am sorry,” I said again, and was surprised to find that I really meant it. “I pushed you to the brink. When I do that to my dad, he calls it the full moon of madness.”
“Maybe…you were right about the music.” She pressed a button on her radio and found something better…not the water music, but…calmer. “What makes me feel sorry is that I haven’t been able to demonstrate the importance of these lessons. To you, they are just an endless series of pointless rules designed to keep you indoors and bored half to death.”
I nodded, but stayed quiet, since the only honest thing to say was that I couldn’t have agreed with her more.
“But they’re not, really. Manners are useful; they are the means by which…people can enter another world, you might say. They can bridge a gap that exists between their stations in life—” Miss Melton-Mowry broke off, possibly because she could see I didn’t have the foggiest—as my dad would say—what she was talking about. “Well, there’s no point in repeating myself.”
“We could chant om, maybe. That’s where you take a deep breath and moan. If you do it three times, you pretty much forget what you were sore about.”
“Thank you, but I think I’d rather try to find some Debussy.”
I had almost closed the door when she said, “And that was a nice apology, Miss Corcoran. It felt…sincere.”
—
The best part of a bath is prete
nding your toes are shark teeth bobbing just above the surface of the water, coming closer and closer to your head until—they devour you!
“Don’t blame me.” Magda sat on the edge of the tub while I mopped up the floor with an old bath towel. “I didn’t force you to play Jaws in a bathtub that was dangerously overfull.”
“It wouldn’t be so disgusting if you’d actually cleaned under here when you drew our bathroom from the chore list.” I had made it to beneath the sink, where a bunch of Magda hairs climbed up the porcelain. “Next time, I’ll make my toes an iceberg and re-create the story of my life as the Titanic crashes into it.”
“For a girl who wishes she were a boy, you’d make a darn good drama queen.”
I didn’t have a snappy comeback to that. I was beginning to understand what my dad meant when he said, “Whatever happened to my happy carefree Hopalong Cassidy?” I really was turning into a world-class whiner.
“Mom wanted me to give you this.” Magda held out a razor.
“You want me to…hurt myself? I’m not that depressed, Mags.”
“No, she wanted me to inform you that shaving your armpits will help with your, um…body issues.”
“You mean my BO? Is everybody talking about it? Geez.” For the first time in my life, I was happy to have a reason to keep my head down and scrub. It’s creepy to think of people talking about what’s happening under your arms.
“Well, it makes sense, in theory. We have about three to four million sweat glands, and your forearm, for example, doesn’t smell when you’re sweating there. At least mine doesn’t.”
Head down, I kept swabbing the deck, but I was listening.
“The smell people associate with sweat isn’t actually sweat. It’s what results when the bacteria that live on our skin break down sweat into acids. Therefore—and I wasn’t able to definitively solve this with an Internet search—it seems like common sense that the more sweat is trapped on the hairs that grow under your arm, the more bacterial action, thus the stronger the odor will be.”
I was about to protest that I didn’t have any hair under my arms, but the truth was I did. Not a lot…but some. “I bet Great-Grandma Reed didn’t shave under her arms while she was chasing poachers and whatnot.”
“Probably not.” As usual, Magda had that look she gets when she’s contemplating chemical reactions. “The distinctive smell we give off doesn’t have to be perceived as bad. That’s a cultural notion. Our body odor is a result of genetics, our diet, our lifestyle, the medications and supplements we take. Our ancestors loved the smell of their family members. And just think of the way dogs want to get into your—”
“Magda! It is possible that you are the most disgusting sister on the planet. Just give me that and make yourself disappear!”
Reaching out, I swiped the razor before putting my hand back down on a pile of fifteen-year-old-sized toenail clippings.
The Friday before Fourth of July weekend, I set my intention to do no harm to the already headless Miss Information. In fact, as she sat next to me with her hand resting on her genuine-human-hair head, I realized she was proof that this was not the same day. At the beginning of our last class, her head was on her shoulders.
“So much of our etiquette training has stood the test of time,” Miss Melton-Mowry began. “However, fears over the spread of disease have changed how we politely deal with basic body functions, and today we will focus on those changes. I know that schools teach children the most sanitary way to cough or sneeze…”
This seemed like basic stuff, making it safe to play a round of Frisbee golf in my mind.
“Is that right, Mr. Bean? Miss Corcoran?…Miss Corcoran?”
“I see what you’re saying, Miss Melton-Mowry.” I’d been caught daydreaming—a hole in one that sailed right over the duck pond, to be exact. “But I wonder…,” I continued, hoping Officer Weston and Delton would help me out. “Does everyone feel that way?”
Delton covered for me by giving Miss Melton-Mowry the rundown on how we’d learned to cough and sneeze into our elbow in preschool, more or less bringing me up to speed.
“The trouble is, coughing into one’s elbow has a way of drawing attention to oneself,” Miss M&M said after Delton’s impressive demonstration. “There are subtler ways, especially if you’re not infectious. The back of the wrist is an excellent alternative. Let’s practice that for a minute, shall we?”
Officer Weston raised his hand. “Excuse me, Miss Melton-Mowry, but I have an etiquette emergency. Can we cover things that get stuck in your mouth? Last night, Elizabeth had a piece of spinach in her teeth…” He opened his mouth and pointed to his front two chompers. “Right here.”
“And you alerted her to this how?”
“Like I’m doing right now. I pointed.”
“Yes, well. We can add that to our list.” Miss Melton-Mowry looked up at the ceiling and then back at us.
“I’d appreciate it. The word ‘clod’ came up again right before she stomped to the ladies’ room, but I have no idea what I did wrong. I mean, it was as plain as the nose on her face. How was I supposed to have polite conversation when a blob of spinach was playing peekaboo with me?”
A noise escaped from Delton’s mouth that sounded suspiciously like a giggle. To cover it, he raised his hand. “Miss Melton-Mowry, if this is the time for special requests, I’d like to know if there’s any special etiquette for picnics. Our neighborhood Fourth of July picnic is this Monday and both Miss Corcoran and I will be in attendance. I remember, last year, Cassidy—”
“Seems to me that Mr. Bean and Miss Elizabeth could use a good dose of etiquette class,” I said. “You for changing topics, Mr. Bean, and Miss Elizabeth for stomping. Even I know that stomping isn’t polite.”
“Miss Corcoran is correct. We need to stay on task, and I’m afraid picnics are not in our purview at this time. You’ll have to…do your best with transfer of knowledge, Mr. Bean. Officer Weston, I’m sure we’ll breeze through this lesson and have time for…blobs of spinach at the end of class. Now, to practice.”
Miss Melton-Mowry demonstrated a fake cough, holding the back of her wrist up to her mouth. We all copied her.
“There is no need to make contact with your wrist, Miss Corcoran. Simply hold it up to shield others from your cough. Remember the point is not to draw attention to yourself.”
“That’s a big challenge for Cassidy,” Delton said. “Uh, sorry. Miss Corcoran.”
To show Delton how very wrong he was, I stopped goofing around and coughed politely, using the back of my wrist. “How about sneezing?” I asked. “Same drill?”
“Thank you, Miss Corcoran. Yes. Same drill. The only tip I have for you here is to remember to keep your nose down slightly.”
“I get it. To control the force of the blast?” Officer Weston asked.
Miss Melton-Mowry coughed into the back of her hand again, but it was pretty obvious she was laughing this time. “Officer Weston, your language is so…colorful.”
“Yes it is,” I agreed. “When you get hitched to Elizabeth, you’ll have to talk in black-and-white.”
“I know.” Officer Weston shoved his hands in his pockets and studied the floor.
Getting married to a girl who thought etiquette was the bee’s knees made me wonder about Officer Weston’s mental state. Did this start with his hairy legs, too? Did all men and boys lose their marbles over a pretty girl? He once let it slip during polite conversation that he called her Honeybun, since her real name is Miss Honeycutt. Seems to me, a honeybun should be covered in cinnamon glaze, not red lipstick. Why would a perfectly good guy like Officer Weston give himself a life sentence of talking about the fine weather and never getting the last of the mashed potatoes?
I’d seen this honeybun after class. She wore big sunglasses and she made him kiss her on the cheek so he didn’t smear her lipstick.
“Now, don’t be discouraged, Officer Weston,” Miss Melton-Mowry was saying. “Let’s practice yawning politely and t
hen we’ll move on to spinach.”
I didn’t need practice yawning since I’d got plenty of that during previous etiquette sessions. We learned from Miss Melton-Mowry that you could cover up little yawns by pressing your lips together. If it was a whopper and pressing your lips together meant that your eyes bugged out, you used your handy-dandy wrist back to shield your companions from knowing that you were bored out of your mind!
“Now, to Officer Weston’s emergency. It’s equally likely that we’ll encounter this issue at our luncheon. Alerting someone to an unpleasant situation such as food stuck in her teeth can be accomplished in the same way you summon a waiter—using the intensity of your gaze.”
I raised my hand. “But didn’t you say staring at people is rude?”
“Staring, especially staring cross-eyed, Miss Corcoran, is rude. But, as we’ve seen, the intensity of your gaze can be very useful. Observe. Without Miss Information’s head, I’ll have to use Officer Weston as my example. Let’s say that he has something stuck in his teeth. Now watch my face closely.”
We all watched as Miss Melton-Mowry straightened her shoulders, picked up her knife and fork and pretended to be cutting up food. She put an imaginary piece of food in her mouth and started to chew it. Smiling, she looked around the table, still pretending to chew and swallow.
Finally, after another two bites of invisible food, she stopped and looked at Officer Weston. Her eyes opened wider as she tucked her chin. Even though her head was down, she kept looking at him. After about thirty seconds of this, she set down her fork and knife, picked up her napkin and patted her mouth with it.
“Now, if you didn’t know what all this was about, Officer Weston, how would you feel when I looked at you this way?”
“Um, like you were trying to hypnotize me?”
“That’s not entirely off base. I am using my body language to help direct your thoughts.”
“Couldn’t you just slip me a toothpick? All that staring gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
“If we were in a diner, possibly. But we’ll be at the Egypt Valley Country Club, where they don’t provide each table with a toothpick dispenser.”
Cassidy's Guide to Everyday Etiquette (and Obfuscation) Page 15