The Wonder Bread Summer: A Novel

by Jessica Anya Blau

  “Fucking amazing,” Jonas said, and he let go of her arm. “But if you run out on me or something, I’ll send my man Vice Versa after you and Vice Versa will kill you.” Jonas smiled big and winked.

  “Vice Versa?” Allie asked. She felt her body jerking into yin-yang circles, the physical manifestation of the word vice versa.

  “Go take those clothes off!” Jonas slapped Allie on the ass. “I’ll tell you all about Vice Versa when we’re done. He’s a mean motherfucker. Scary as shit.” Jonas laughed hard and gave Allie a little push.

  Allie yanked the curtain shut behind herself, then wobbled into the stockroom. Her purse was sitting on a cantilevered metal shelf with the Wonder Bread bag of coke and a stack of white blouses that were supposed to be marked down that day.

  “Hurry!” Jonas shouted. “My pants are already off!”

  Allie snatched up the purse, shoved it onto her shoulder, and shouted, “I’m coming!”

  The Wonder Bread bag was ballooning and shrinking like a lung. It was alarming, but Allie knew it wasn’t real. She had heard enough stories about “bad trips” to know that she was experiencing one right now.

  “Stop moving,” Allie said to the bread bag.

  Take me! the bread bag mewed. Or didn’t, really.

  It occurred to Allie that the coke in there was worth at least as much as the money Jonas owed her for her work. But there was no time to measure it out. Maybe she could take the bag home, remove the equivalent of her accrued pay, and then return the remainder somehow.

  “You naked yet?!” Jonas shouted.

  “Almost!” Allie called out. And then she leaned toward the bread bag and whispered, “I gotta go now.”

  Don’t leave me here with him! the bread bag whispered back.

  As if it were her desperate little companion, Allie reached out and grabbed the bag by the neck. And then she started running. Out of the stockroom. Past the fitting rooms. To the front door that she unlocked and opened in wobbly speed. Then down the street and around the corner. She didn’t once look back.

  Chapter 2

  Jonas didn’t know where Beth lived. Beth had a car, she had never needed a ride home from Jonas like Allie often did. So that was where Allie planned to go to ration out the coke. She ran toward the Ashby BART station, her heart pumping like a machine gun, powering her along. She wasn’t even winded as she clambered down the steps to the train, hoisting herself up and over the turnstile since she had no money, or time even, to buy a ticket. The train pulled in and Allie stepped on. She sat with her back to the station as they pulled away. If Jonas had followed her, she didn’t want to know.

  The man across the aisle stared at the Wonder Bread bag. He was middle-aged, nice-looking. There were cracks along his face that looked like they’d grown there from smiling, not scowling. Allie couldn’t help but think that her life might be better if he were her father: he probably lived in a big house, threw dinner parties at home, saw his kids off to college, and sent them money when they needed it. She wouldn’t have been working for Jonas if this man were her father. She wouldn’t have lifted her top for him while he jacked off, or done the crazy-cut coke that was making her feel like her body was an alien organism and she was in a color-infused movie—everything burnt-red, turquoise-blue, and the yellow of a fully bloomed sunflower.

  “Do you like Wonder Bread?” the man asked, and laughed.

  “Yeah.” Allie lifted the bag and looked at the perfectly formed color circles on the vanilla-white plastic. Wonder was spelled in big, ruler-sharp, thick letters. The bag didn’t hang like a loaf of bread—there was weight, pull, a slightly rounded sag at the bottom. At that moment, Allie realized exactly what she had done. Her heart drum-rolled and her hand began to sweat so much she had to place the bag on her lap before it slipped loose.

  Allie dropped her head back against the seat and shut her eyes. She could feel her ears. They were weighted, filled with sizzling blood. For a second, Allie feared her ears might start slipping down her cheeks, gliding the length of her neck. Then the BART train went suddenly silent. Or maybe Allie had lost her hearing. She pulled her head up and looked around.

  “My wife won’t let me buy Wonder Bread,” the man said. (Relief! She could hear!) “Claims it’s as good for you as a doughnut.”

  “My mother never bought it either,” Allie said. Penny had never bought any food. Frank brought food home from his restaurant, or the family would go there and eat. Expensive gourmet hamburgers, French dip, onion soup au gratin, rice pilaf or fries. Allie had probably eaten enough salt to preserve herself. Upon her death, salt would take over and she’d become a giant piece of jerky.

  The man lifted his hand. His lips parted slightly. Allie felt certain she knew he would speak soon. He was going to ask for a piece of bread.

  The train pulled in to the North Berkeley station. Allie went to the doors and stood inches away from them. She felt as if her body might burst out and break the glass if the doors didn’t open soon.

  “You don’t want to leave me a piece of Wonder Bread for my ride home?” the man asked, just as Allie had predicted.

  “Sorry.” Allie wished there were bread in the bag. Things would be so much easier if she had simply stolen a loaf of Wonder. The doors whooshed open and Allie stepped onto the platform. She jogged up the steps and out of the station, and then she was running again.

  Beth’s apartment was on the second floor of a Spanish-style building, El Conquistador, which had a red-tiled roof, a sun-flooded tiled courtyard, and arched exterior walkways. Each upper-level apartment had a small half-circle balcony enclosed with a curved wrought-iron rail. El Conquistador even had one of the few parking garages in the city of Berkeley. If the building were a woman, it would be Princess Grace: calm, reserved, unpretentiously beautiful.

  Allie ran up El Conquistador’s painted-tile front steps, then down the exterior hallway. She knocked on the wooden-plank door to Beth’s apartment.

  Beth opened the door with her bare foot, her big toe pressing down on the cedilla-shaped handle. She was on the kitchen phone—the cord was stretched as far as it could go. Allie stared at Beth’s foot. The toe turned into a hammer. Allie blinked and it was a toe again.

  “Oh my god!” Beth said. “She just walked in the door!”

  Allie’s pulse throbbed in her feet—it felt like her toes were pushing out into giant sausages. She didn’t speak. Her palm was growing more and more slick around the neck of the Wonder Bread bag.

  “It’s Jonas,” Beth said. She backed up into the open kitchen counter so that the phone cord wasn’t stretched, and held out the phone toward Allie.

  “Tell him I don’t want it all. Only what he owes me.” Allie spoke quickly, so quickly she wasn’t even sure she was speaking English.

  Beth put the phone back against her ear. “Jonas heard you,” she said, to Allie. “He said your future lover Vice Versa is on his way over to meet you.” Beth placed the phone against her chest. “Like, you’re going to go out with a guy named Vice Versa?”

  Allie backed away toward the door, the bread bag still clasped in her hand. She knew that she should drop it there and run, but something—the coke she’d just done, her sense that Jonas owed her, her shame about the fitting-room encounter, and her regret over having given all her money to Marc—compelled her to tighten her fist around the bag.

  “She, like, won’t come to the phone?” Beth said to Jonas. She lifted her eyebrows and waved Allie toward her with one arm, then cupped a hand over the mouthpiece. “What is going on? What is he talking about?!” Allie could both see and hear Jonas’s muffled voice coming through Beth’s fingers. The words were the color of green smog. Allie shook her head no at Beth.

  “Jonas,” Beth said. “She just dropped off some shoes she borrowed and then left. Tell Vice Versa to call her back here later.”

  Allie moved her fist up and down slowly, miming a receiver being set in the cradle. She mouthed the words HANG UP NOW.

  “Okay .
. . okay . . . okay I’ll tell her when I see her,” Beth said. “But I swear I won’t see her for, like, at least four or five hours . . . no, I live near Peet’s Coffee . . . yeah, yeah . . . okay, good-bye.” Beth hung up the phone.

  “What’d he say?” Allie asked. She figured she had seven minutes before Jonas could make it to Beth’s building. Floating in front of her face was a giant pocket watch ticking the seconds. It wasn’t until she took a swipe at it that Allie realized the watch wasn’t really there.

  “He said his pal Vice Versa has a date with you and is going to pick you up no matter where you are and that you need to give Vice Versa the hundred K you took?” Beth said. “What is going on? Like, what hundred K is he talking about?!”

  “Shit.” Allie’s heart rate increased, an engine revving in her chest. She looked at the bread bag. Could this much coke be worth a hundred thousand dollars? Even though Jonas dealt coke from the shop, Allie had no idea how much he charged, how much he made, or what people were paying for the little packets they walked out with.

  “By the way, did you know that you’ve been evicted?” Beth asked.

  “What do you mean I’ve been evicted? How do you know I’ve been evicted?!” Allie pressed the bread bag against her chest.

  “I was walking by your place today, and then I remembered that jean skirt that you borrowed last week that I, like, totally wanted to wear tonight? And those chubby, dopey-looking twin guys let me in and I went up to your room and there was a bolt lock on your door and an eviction notice.” Beth picked up the notice from the counter and handed it to Allie, who shoved it into her purse without reading it.

  Allie lived in a grubby, shingled boardinghouse with a shared kitchen that always smelled like cooked beans and cabbage. She was more sorry that she was now the sort of person who got evicted for failure to pay rent than she was sorry that she was no longer legally able to live there. “I’m sorry you couldn’t get your skirt. Does Jonas know where you live?”

  “I didn’t give him the address. He’ll never find you.” Beth peered into Allie’s face. She tilted her head and Allie saw her as a parrot. “You totally don’t look right,” Beth-the-parrot said.

  Allie closed her eyes. When she opened them, Beth had turned back into a person. “You aren’t listed in the phone book, are you?” Allie had the presence of mind to ask.

  Beth opened her mouth but didn’t speak. She picked up the giant white pages from the kitchen counter and flipped through. “Shit.” She flashed her bottom teeth in a grimace. “Tell me what’s going on! Like, what is this hundred K thingy, who is Vice Versa, and why are you so freaked out by a blind date?!”

  “Vice Versa doesn’t want to date me, he wants to kill me so he can get this coke!” Allie held up the bread bag.

  “No way. There’s coke in there?”

  “Jonas still hasn’t paid me, so I sort of borrowed this from him so I could pay myself what he owes me.” Allie stared up at the floating pocket watch. It ticked louder now, as if someone had turned up the volume.

  “Oh my god!” Beth took the bag from Allie’s hand, removed the wire twisty, let it twirl open, peered inside, and laughed. “Oh my god,” she said again. “You could exchange this coke for, like, a house in the flats!” Beth stuck a finger into the bag and shoved some coke up her nose. She dipped again and served the other nostril.

  “I gotta get out of here.” Allie took the bag, spun it shut, and tied it with the twisty.

  “You need to give it back to Jonas. That’s like, what’s it called, grand theft larceny or something?”

  “He needs to pay me!” Allie actually stomped her foot. Like a child.

  “Take out the equivalent of what he owes you, and like, leave the bag here and I’ll give it back to him.” Beth seemed, Allie thought, remarkably unfazed by the situation.

  “You think that will work?” Allie asked. “What if this Vice Versa guy really wants to murder me?” The pocket watch was thundering the seconds now. Allie took another swat at it to make it disappear.

  Beth followed her hand, then stared down Allie’s eyes. “No one’s going to kill you. Just give back the coke.” Beth put her hand on the bag. Allie pulled it in against her chest. Beth’s delicate nose was starting to lengthen into a beak again.

  Beth laughed. “You’re, like, fucked up, aren’t you?”

  “I did that stuff Jonas keeps in a baby-food jar.”

  “The baby-jar coke?” Now Beth was cracking up. “No wonder you stole the hundred K bread bag! I had the tiniest toot of that the other day and, I swear, it made me crazy.”

  “Crazy? How?” Allie wanted to ask about Jonas masturbating, but she didn’t. Her body was a quivery mess. It was hard enough just to speak.

  “I don’t know, he put on music and I was, like, dancing, and the walls were all, like, colorful, and Jonas was, like, watching me and I swear he wanted me to go into the dressing room and take off my clothes or something so he could jerk off and I was, like, no fucking way, there’s no way I’m going to take my clothes off for some freaky guy like you! I mean, can you imagine? Who would do that? I mean what kind of pathetic loser would just sit there and let some guy totally jerk off while he’s looking at her?!” Beth sniffed, wiped each nostril, and erased the beak.

  Allie could feel twin snakes of regret in her bloodstream, moving in a double-helix rotation through her body. Regret was going to poison her if she didn’t flush it out of her system soon. “So you just danced?” she asked.

  “Yeah but I said some stupid shit. I told him about my third eye and my long nipples. Oh and I told him about Marc, too, and I swear that’s, like, all he wanted to talk about the rest of the day.” Beth stared into Allie’s eyes again before her focus dropped down to the coke clasped against Allie’s breasts.

  The pocket watch bonged, like a grandfather clock. “I’ve gotta get outta here,” Allie said. “Can I borrow your car?”

  Beth reached into a ceramic bowl on the counter and plucked out her keys. She held them out to Allie. “Are you totally too messed up to drive?”

  “Maybe,” Allie said. “I’ll put my rabbit foot on your keys and that will keep me safe.” She placed the bread bag on the counter so she could dig through her purse for the rabbit foot. Allie believed in her rabbit-foot luck. It had kept her from getting pregnant that time the condom broke with Marc; and it was probably the thing that had prevented her from dying from whatever it was she had stupidly snorted out of that baby-food jar with Jonas. Wai Po often said, IF LUCK COMES NOT, WHO COMES?

  The rabbit foot glowed up at Allie from the bottom of her bag. She thought she saw the tiny claws flickering back and forth just before she pulled it out. Allie opened the silver chain that looped through the top of the rabbit foot and attached it to the small ring that held Beth’s keys. “Can you talk to Jonas or Vice Versa and try to work it all out? Negotiate a little, okay? Let him think we have the upper hand.”

  “Yeah, yeah, fine.” Beth gave a little smile. The smile, Allie was relieved to see, dissolved the persistent bird beak that had started growing once more. “Come back in, like, two hours—I’ll have it all settled by then.”

  “Okay. So tell him I’m just going to take out what he owes me.” Allie was panting. She consciously shut her mouth and breathed in deeply through her nose.

  “Yeah, I get it.” Beth waved her hand. “Everything will be fine. Jonas is like a total pussycat at heart.”

  “He owes me!” It took tremendous force for Allie to say the words clearly and slowly. “Remind him of that. Marc owes me, too. I just want someone to pay me for once, okay?” There was an explosion of light in Allie’s head—a crackling power surge.

  “Allie, fucking relax! Now get out of here, go for a drive and come back in two hours.”

  “He owes me!” Allie said, and she walked out the door.

  “WAIT!” Beth ran down the exterior hall after Allie. She put her hand on the bread bag. “Can I have another hit before you leave?”

  Allie
took off the twisty and let the bag spin until it unwound. She held it open toward Beth. Beth looked around to make sure no one was out, then stuck both her hands into the bag. Her fingers looked long and twisted, like licorice. When Beth pulled out two pinches of coke, her fingers had magically transformed again, now flickering back and forth between human fingers and lobster claws.

  “Done?” Allie asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll see you in two hours,” Beth said.

  Beth had a brand-new 1983 Honda Prelude with a moon roof. It had power windows and locks, a tape player, air-conditioning, everything. It even had a license plate that Beth had picked out when she registered the car: CAL GRL. California Girl. Or Cal—the common moniker for the University of California, Berkeley—Girl. Allie almost thought she couldn’t be friends with Beth after she had first seen that plate—the amount of attention it brought, the showiness, was too much. But eventually Allie saw that in spite of all the things Beth owned (all of which Allie would have gladly taken), she was not a thingy person. She had a nice car, but she’d let anyone borrow it. She had a nice apartment, but she’d let anyone crash on the couch. She wasn’t a hoarder, and this, Allie believed, was a good quality in a friend.

  Allie placed the Wonder Bread bag on the seat beside her. It appeared to be punching out sporadically as if there were a kitten in the sack. She shifted the car into reverse and backed out of the parking space slowly—her fear of bumping the cars on either side of her was equal to her fear of Vice Versa and Jonas.

  The yellow wooden arm that would allow Allie to exit the garage seemed to take hours to lift (the pocket watch, now floating on the ceiling of the car, ticked off thousands of seconds). As it was rising, Allie examined the cassette that hung out of the player like a plastic white tongue, pushed it in, and changed the song seven times. Peter Gabriel. Beth loved Peter Gabriel. When she and Allie went to the Peter Gabriel concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Beth started crying every third song. Allie had been bored senseless. She had tried to make the time pass quickly by entering into a daydream in which she was married to Billy Idol and they lived half the year (when he wasn’t on tour) in a hillside villa in Cannes, France. She had been so immersed in the fantasy that she had been shocked when Peter Gabriel took his final encore bow. She and Billy Idol hadn’t even finished decorating the villa.