Over the next two weeks, the leaves start to turn and at lunchtime I watch as they smoke and crisp at the edges and a thin ribbon of ants unspools over the tip of my shoe and between classes I become a leaf too, buffeted by students through the hall, and I watch through the bus window as the city passes by in the brisk light of the afternoon sun.
Each evening, everything is as it should be, the earth balanced on its axis just so, and customers continue coming in to sample chocolate pots de crème with orange whipped cream, their faces lighting up as the little pot pours itself luxuriantly over the waiting ladle.
The first Sunday of October brings with it a whisper of the winter to come, and a delivery for Mrs. Ida Bonnet. I wrap a scarf around my neck and then I am on my way—past the church with its bells tolling for the faithful, and street vendors setting out handmade jewelry and jewel-colored pashminas, and the ice-cream shop announcing its limited edition seasonal flavors, and the bookstore with its cramped nooks and teetering paperback towers like being in an eccentric professor’s attic.
The streets teem with a kaleidoscope of locals and visitors united in their determination to drink in the last honeyed drops of sunshine, brunching in sunglasses and peacoats and ordering scoops of pumpkin spice gelato. I skid to a halt in front of the Italian bakery, my shoes squealing like race car tires. The lights are off and the tables and chairs are stacked in the corner and the counter is empty and the displays are empty and the floor is empty and all is still. The walls watch as dust settles on the stools.
For a moment, I think that I have gotten my storefronts mixed up. There is a sign taped to the door and I run over to it, forgetting to hold the delivery box steady. The letters are lopsided and bleeding in spots like the writer was pressing too hard, stringing together a sentence that did not want to end. CLOSED AFTER 40 YEARS OF SERVICE: Lost our lease thank you for your support over the years and allowing us to live the dream every day it has been our privilege to be a part of the community and we will miss you our dear customers our friends.
I walked by just a few days ago and the bakery was right here where it had always been, a feature of the landscape like a gnarled tree stump, marking the fork in the road where things converged—the story of the neighborhood, and of the old friends living in it.
How could such a place vanish without any warning?
I have not seen the landlord since he visited the shop but now he rises out of my mind like a submarine that has been lying in wait. My other new place, he said to Lucy. Dingy, underutilizing. Maybe it is a warning. It is unsettling to think of what else the landlord could do, if he could erase a place that time itself could not touch.
I imagine what Mrs. Ida Bonnet would do if The Lavenders disappeared without any warning—she would wait for her delivery, believing that I was on my way, and when there was no knock at the door she would ease out of the armchair and look for her shoes and it would be a long journey, her joints creaking with the stairs, people parting and rushing around her on the street, her mouth dropping open when she stood bent in front of the empty shop, seeing that it, too, had passed, and left her behind.
The rest of the journey to Mrs. Ida Bonnet’s apartment, I can’t stop thinking—what would I do?
“The Italian bakery has gone out of business?” Lucy repeats, raising her voice to be heard over the whirring mixers.
She pulls a tray of meringues out of the oven and takes one look at my face and says, “You’re worried about the shop.” She pushes the kitchen door open with her foot. “Come with me.”
She puts the tray on the counter and one by one, as if awakening from a deep slumber, the meringues stretch and pop into the air and hover like cumulus clouds. When she nudges them into their section of the display, three little girls squeal and drag their mother behind them and squash their noses against the glass, and Milton trots up and places his nose against the glass with a sigh too.
“We’ll take two dozen,” the mother says, squeezing in next to Milton to admire the weightless meringues. His nose, sticky with residual caramel, is glued to the glass, and so he lifts just his eyes to look at her.
Lucy puts both hands on my shoulders. “Look around,” she says, and I see the meringues floating, the vols-au-vent mice bouncing on the little girls’ shoulders, the desserts fidgeting and showcasing their personalities. The air moves with a million oven-warm breaths, invisible eddies conveying impossible properties.
“You see all of this?” She does a significant sweep with her eyes, encompassing the simple chandeliers and the decorative moldings that frame the ceiling and the working fireplace along the side wall and the hand-painted floor tiles and the brass trim lining the mirrors and banisters and narrow arched doorways, and all of it goes back to Walter Lavender Sr., who convinced Lucy that she could.
I turn back to Lucy and she lifts a flour-bleached brow. “No one is evicting us,” she says, and I am reminded that she has uncanny powers of knowing. She can stir and smell and know if she needs to add a twist of Meyer lemon juice, an extra quarter cup of raw sugar, a dash of chili flake, and she can tell with her back turned if the crêpes in the griddle are taking on too much color or if the batter I am mixing needs more water to thin it out.
When a regular comes in with a creative block or a scratchy throat or a sleepless night, she knows to add a dusting of wasabi powder and black sesame to the dark chocolate frosting, or a nugget of honeyed Brie in the center of the cupcake, or a quenelle of cucumber sorbet on the side of the plate. Her sense of intuition means that she is usually right, even if she has not yet figured out what to add to a dessert to keep my mind open and confident so that I can speak. She would not let the landlord catch us by surprise and push us out—not before she stumbled across the solution and not before Walter Lavender Sr. could see what he helped create, not when I could still believe that he was looking for the light in the window, and finding his way back home.
8
I am sure Lucy is right but two weeks later I dream about the submarine rising out of night-water and I sink to the sandy bottom and find myself face-to-face with a skeleton wearing a pilot’s hat at a jaunty angle.
My head is waterlogged and my limbs float, and in the lonesome darkness before dawn it feels like I have accidentally slipped awake while the world slumbers on, at peace, as one.
I work my way around Milton, who is sleeping at the foot of my bed, and ease onto the floor. His paws are twitching and I wonder what he is running after. I tiptoe down the steps and the stairwell smells warm and sweet and light seeps under the door; Lucy will be behind it, preparing for the morning rush before José and Flora arrive. I crack the door open and Lucy looks up and sets down her sifter. The radio in front of her is dusted in flour and set to low on a golden oldies station.
“Early morning. To both of you,” she says as Milton pads half-asleep into the kitchen after me and collapses under the sink. “Wash up and you can help me with this olive oil cake.”
She resumes sifting dry ingredients into a large bowl and I tie off my apron and pat my hands dry against the front. I heat a pan and add a stick of butter, and while it melts I pour out the milk and add the olive oil, watching as it separates into beads on top of the milk.
Once the finished cake comes out of the oven, Lucy will set it on a cooling rack and pour a grapefruit glaze over the center. Her olive oil cake with grapefruit glaze is a favorite with the Pilates crowd and, less obviously, with the students. When midterm exams roll around in a few weeks, they will turn up seeking peaceful refreshment in the pale yellow squares, eating with their hands and licking the glaze off their fingers as the angry stress-induced bumps on their faces clear up between bites.
The mixer switches on with a metallic whir and Lucy cracks eggs and zests tangerines into the bowl as I whisk melted butter into my olive oil and milk. When the eggs are pale and thick, Lucy paddles in a quarter of her flour mixture.
“Now y
ou,” she says. I tilt my bowl over the mixer and we alternate adding our wet and dry ingredients so the bubbles of air in the batter don’t pop and the cake emerges tender and fluffy from the oven. Lucy pours out the batter and it cascades across the first baking pan in a butter-silk curtain.
“Masterful,” she pronounces. She slides the pan into an unoccupied oven and I trudge up the stairs to get ready for school.
Throughout the day, I think about Clyde, the lost cockatiel I am searching for. Since finding the flyer last week, I learned that Clyde belongs to a girl my age who is losing her hair in Memorial Sloan Kettering, and that her mother was the one who posted the flyer. At lunch I draw a diagram and make a list in my notebook but the tabletop is lumpy and the straight lines of the birdcage look like they are shivering.
I knock down the walls with my eraser and start again but each time I do Beaver throws a ball and it hits my table or my back or my knee and my pencil jerks and punctures the paper. I pick up my lunch and retreat to the bathroom, locking the stall door and sitting on the toilet seat to start a new list undisturbed.
The FOLA is this: the girl’s mother had cleaned out the cage in the morning and when she came to change Clyde’s water in the afternoon, the bird was gone. So far, we have searched the cage, looking under the toys and inside the nesting box and behind the mirror and around the play wheel, and after that we looked in the ZOLA, cleaning and organizing the living room where the cage sat, and then we checked the natural places, the eaves and gutters where other birds liked to roost.
At that point I started to feel drained from the extended period of talking; it takes a lot of energy to focus on all the muscles and movements and rhythms involved in keeping my words straight. When we resumed a few days later, I asked the mother to return to her thoughts as she cleaned the cage, hoping to trigger a forgotten memory. It is an effective technique—the shooting guard who lost his lucky socks had been thinking of how hungry he was as he unpacked from his trip, and that made him remember that he had wandered to the pantry, where he saw a pack of sesame buns, and that prompted him to grab the burger patties in the freezer, and that’s where he found his socks, frozen solid and unharmed.
The girl’s mother said that she had been worrying about things as she vacuumed seed husks off the cage floor—the lab results, the runny consistency of Clyde’s droppings, the strange cautious tone in the nurse’s voice, the arugula that would wilt in the crisper if not eaten soon—and when she returned Clyde to the cage she worried also that she might have left the latch loose.
After that, we searched every inch of the apartment, high and low, in case Clyde had accidentally flown into a cabinet or made a nest in the spare linens. He has not turned up yet and it is time to widen the search. Someone clomps into the bathroom and I put my notebook away and flush the toilet.
After school, I set out to search for Clyde, keeping my eyes open for signs and thinking back through the stories the girl’s mother told me. She is not sure what to make of me—she was excited at first to have me there to stifle the echoing silences of her home, but I was not what she expected or knew and she floundered uneasily and took a little longer to realize that I could not respond to her chatter in the normal way.
I asked her my usual questions and she answered with upbeat force, slowly and brightly, with her limbs held in tight, controlled lines. I listened to her talk and watched carefully, and this made her more uncomfortable and so she blinked too much and repeated her simplified answers without being asked, her eyes flashing red with alarm. EMERGENCY PLANNING FOR CONTINGENCIES, I wrote as she locked up her disappointment and prepared herself for what she would say later in the hospital.
Still, I teased out the information I needed, and there was a moment as she described Clyde when she forgot about being guarded. She said that he was yellow and white with coral cheeks that fooled you into thinking he was bashful when he was very affectionate, actually, and vocal with his singing. She said it was silly and wouldn’t help with the search but she would never forget this one moment—walking back into her daughter’s room during chemotherapy and seeing Clyde perched on her daughter’s gloved hand, cocking his head at her and whistling “Strawberry Fields Forever,” coasting around the lilts and dips.
I wonder if Clyde has gone south for the winter and wander that way, keeping an eye on the sky. A large flock of silver birds rises and falls like a mushroom cloud over Washington Square Park, and I change direction to follow the sign. As I am walking past the place where the Italian bakery used to be, I notice a makeshift banner strung across the front, emblazoned with a name I remember seeing on the food channel, the letters arcing over a smirking man who slices into an onion with knives like lightning: Coming Soon. Jacques Pierre Patisserie. Men in hard hats and boots take weighty steps over paint cans and hammer at the walls and their saws bite into slabs of wood. I feel a twinge of melancholy for the bakery, and I imagine what is to come and tell myself that it will be inventive and fresh and sleek, and it will not be a threat.
In Washington Square Park I sit by the fountain and look at the coins bright with wishes, and something brighter flashes among the pigeons roosting on the arch. I reposition myself under the arch and hum “Strawberry Fields Forever” and wait for Clyde to land.
The girl’s mother goes still when she opens the door and sees Clyde with his feather-light claws gripping my wrist. I give her a moment to pack away her shock and then she lurches into motion, inviting me in and making tea, and in her relief she relaxes and slouches into the chair, unguarded and herself, and for the first time since the musician, it feels like someone else finally knows me.
9
Halloween descends in a flurry of first snow and polyester costumes, Little Red Riding Hoods and Spider-Men entering the shop for sour eyeballs that purse their lips and raise the hair on their heads. I watch through the window as pumpkins and princesses and gladiators dash by, their grown-ups hurrying to keep up. The other kids from school must be out there too, but it has been years since I ventured out with them.
One week later while I am out on Sunday deliveries, I am caught in the tentacles of a slow-moving street parade and by the time I return to the shop the sky is a deep blue dome flushing orange along the rim. I open the door and the energizing noise of customers hits me first and I wait for the warmth but there is a foreign chilled bite to the air. Sugar snow glitters as it swirls through the displays, and in one of them the mice are squabbling over the limited number of fondant scarves that Flora must have decorated and distributed among them.
Still, the crowd is as thick as ever and Milton struggles toward me, panting as he swims against the current, a dark substance staining his gums. A harried Lucy chases after him.
“He stole a hot chocolate beignet,” she says irritably. She reaches to pry his mouth open but the crispy beignet has already liquefied and rich hot chocolate oozes between his teeth. “No,” she says to him, and he huddles against the backs of my legs. “You know you’re not authorized to eat chocolate.”
She shifts her attention to me and the roots of her hair lighten as her bad mood recedes. “How were the deliveries?”
I draw a check in the air. “Well done,” she says. “You are my bright spot in an uncooperative day.” She scowls at the air conditioner behind me and to my surprise I see José next to it, bracing himself on a stepladder and unscrewing a panel.
Just seeing him up there makes me nervous that he will fall and sweat pools now on my palms and I stuff my hands in my pockets. Walter Lavender Sr. was fearless when it came to high places; he climbed easily into the sky while the highest place I have been is a beginner ski hill, and even then I could only peer down and cling to trees until Milton, barking in alarm, broke free of the barriers and pumped his way up the slope to rescue me.
José climbs down and we do our handshake. “Broken,” he says, to explain his uncharacteristic appearance in the front of the shop.
> “José’s tinkering with it to see if he can get it unstuck but if he doesn’t, the repairman should be here any minute. Can you two look out for him and holler when he gets here?”
Lucy heads back to the register and I check the oil lamp before going upstairs to collect my math homework. When I come back down, I take a seat against the window so that I can see the door from the corner of my eye. Milton crowds under the table with my legs and Flora drops off a plate of sliced apples on her way out of the shop, along with a mug of cider with a cinnamon stick that stirs itself clockwise and then counterclockwise.
“It was an indecisive batch,” she says in apology. “You enjoy your night now.”
Four graphs later, the door bursts open and the chandeliers tremble and my spine snaps ramrod straight, vibrates with the ominous pluck and thrum of a low bass. The landlord fills the open doorway and my mind darkens and jumps to him raising a crowbar and smashing the tables and I reel it back in. It could be an innocuous visit to pick up another box of double butterscotch pops—except there is a dull roar coming from outside, stomping feet and a muddled chanting that separates into words when he clears the door. I push my seat back and the customers around me stand too, everyone straining to see into the black night, the reflection of the shop like a thin gloss of ice on the window.
Lucy appears next to me with her arms full of fairy lights and pine wreaths. “What is that racket?” she says, dropping the decorations and pressing me to her side, and someone blows a whistle and the stamping picks up again, the chanting rattling the windowpanes, and suddenly I am terrified that the landlord has brought a mob to drive us out and I imagine them pumping their picket signs, the bottoms sharpened into glinting stakes. The screech of a loudspeaker pierces the air—“What do we want?”—and I screw my eyes shut, slap my hands over my ears, and Lucy leaps forward.
The Luster of Lost Things Page 6