The Wonder Bread Summer: A Novel

by Jessica Anya Blau

  “Someone gave it to me. Hold on, I’ll go get it and meet you back here in a sec.”

  Billy waved Sassy in the air as if he planned to continue his reading while Allie was gone. “I’ll be right here, doll!”

  Mighty Zamboni was in the middle of “Thunder Falls Arcade,” a song with a rolling tambourine shimmer throughout the chorus. Allie positioned herself by the side of the stage, almost in a crouch. The minute the chorus started, Allie ran onto the stage, grabbed the Wonder Bread bag that sat at her mother’s feet, and ran off again, as efficient and swift as a ball boy at Wimbledon. Penny barely noticed the distraction as she was also harmonizing, eyes shut, hair swishing behind her head while she whacked the tambourine in a series of quick little spanks.

  Allie’s heart thumped happily as she returned to the room and found Billy Idol still on the couch reading Sassy.

  “Don’t tell me you’re carryin’ the blow in that bread bag!” He tossed the magazine to the ground and patted the seat of the couch beside himself.

  “Crazy, huh?” Allie scooted in next to him. She was so close she could feel the heat off his thigh.

  “Give us a peek, will you?” Billy took the bread bag, removed the twisty, let the neck unwind, and looked inside. “You gotta be bloody kiddin’ me? This is real?” He stuck his long, angled index finger in, pulled out a bit, and rubbed it on his gums.

  “What do you think?”

  “You a bleedin’ dealer? A China-Jewish-blackie bird dealer?” Billy Idol was grinning so big that Allie had the urge to lean over and lick his teeth.

  “No. My boss is. Or former boss. I have to return it to him soon. And, really, I shouldn’t give any more away but if you want just a little—” Allie shrugged. How could she let her mother do some and then withhold it from Billy Idol?

  “I’ll take as much as you’ll bleedin’ give up!” Billy Idol laughed and the gold cross earring in his left ear shimmied and shook.

  Allie’s head was jumbly and her heart was wobbling around like a top that was about to fall. She hadn’t done any of the coke with Billy, but the longer she sat with him, the more she felt as if she had. Desire was like an oil fire burning in her veins. Other than when she knew she was in love with Marc, Allie had never felt such a strong pull toward another human being.

  Billy spun the bag shut and handed it to Allie. It seemed even rock stars had their limits.

  “D’you wanna have sex?” He opened his leather pants and pulled out his dick. It was as white as flour, the size of two Babe Ruth candy bars, side by side. Allie wondered if this was how things would be until she hit middle age. After nineteen years on the planet, she had seen a total of zero live dicks in her life. Then she turned twenty and was introduced to Marc’s. And now, in less than forty-eight hours, she had seen three more.

  The difference between this display and the previous two was that Allie was happy to see this penis. “Yeah. If you do. You don’t have VD, do you?” She dropped the bread bag on the floor and waited. Because Allie had only been with Marc, she wasn’t sure how these encounters usually operated.

  “I don’t have any venereal diseases that I know of. But the worst anyone can get is gonorrhea and my blokes tell me you just take some antibiotics for that and, bam, it’s gone!” He pushed his leather jeans down like a snake shedding a skin.

  “I don’t have my diaphragm,” Allie said, with a little panic in her voice. She hoped they could still make this work.

  “No worries, doll! I got me willie snipped so I’m only shootin’ spit!” Billy kneeled on the gritty couch beside Allie and unfurled her curls with his finger. Within seconds, she was naked, too, and they rolled, bounced, and flipped around like dolphins in a tiny, shallow tank. It certainly wasn’t the greatest sex Allie had ever had, but it was the most exciting and, strangely, the most joyful. It was as if Billy Idol were the happiest man on earth, and she, Allie, was able to feed off it if only for those few minutes.

  Afterward, Billy Idol lay on his back and patted his belly for Allie to lie on top of him. “That’s nice,” he said, and swirled his hands along her back and down to her ass.

  “I can hear your heart beating.” Allie wished she could record it and carry it around with her. It was a beautiful heartbeat, deep and powerful. Sexy.

  “I must apologize to you, darling. We had beautiful bleedin’ intercourse and I never even got your name.” Billy ran his palm along Allie’s face. He stuck his finger in her mouth, swirled it around, and then pulled it out.

  “Allie.”

  “Allie.”

  “Yeah. Allie.”

  “Beautiful China-black-Jewish-American curly-haired United Nations amalgamated Allie doll.”

  “C’est moi.” Allie laughed and wondered, how do you make time stop? How do you pause life so that nothing changes?

  “C’est bleedin’ toi!” Billy slapped Allie’s ass and laughed again.

  All too soon Billy’s band was knocking on the door. It was almost time to go on stage. Allie unstuck herself from Billy’s perfectly ridged body. They dressed side by side. Then he pushed his snarling mouth against hers one more time.

  “Allie. It was bloody wonderful spendin’ time with you. You are one beautiful bird.” Billy winked, went to the door, and left.

  Allie’s flesh was still vibrating. She didn’t want to leave the room where she could smell Billy’s almost rose-scented skin, and his woodsy sweat, and the perfumed gel that held up his hair. But Mighty Zamboni would be back in seconds, and if Allie had any hope of returning to the Bay Area, she had to abandon the idea that her mother would help her, and leave quickly, before Penny snatched away her only negotiating chip.

  Chapter 8

  Once Allie was on the road, away from the County Bowl, the pain of Penny’s betrayal motored in with the force of a speedboat.

  Allie had to pull the Prelude over to cry. It was a flooding, thrusting cry—pouring out of her like a rush of opened dam water. She had found her mother, she had seen her mother, and, as usual, her mother had failed her. Periodically, as she was crying, Allie lifted her arm and tried to smell Billy Idol in the crook of her elbow. Anything to help pull her out of this moment and return her to the state of bliss she had been in only thirty minutes ago. Eventually she calmed and was able to sit up.

  When she was younger, Allie had cried every birthday or holiday when her mother was missing. But by the time she was twelve, she had stopped crying. She still yearned for Penny at certain times, such as when she took the bus down to JC Penney with her father’s credit card tucked deep into her pocket to buy a minimal wardrobe for school. Or when she got her first period in eighth grade and was too embarrassed to ask her dad to buy pads. Instead, Allie had stuck folded paper towels in her underpants and, whenever she could, borrowed pads from girls at school. This went on for a year until Frank must have figured she’d had her period and began stocking the bathroom vanity.

  And Allie had missed the energetic fun her mother had brought to the household—putting on records and dancing, a glass of wine in one hand and a wooden spoon for a microphone in the other. Alone with her father, it was a placid life: two people in the same room, Allie doing homework, her father, who always smelled like burned beef, watching TV. A white Styrofoam container of something would be sitting on the coffee table in front of Allie—the dinner her father had brought home for her from the restaurant. Theirs was a silent existence, spaces of hollow time punctuated with hellos and good-byes, like they were riding a city bus together, only acknowledging each other when one of them got off or stepped on.

  Allie thumped her head into the center of the steering wheel. Just once, she would like to leave her mother and feel happy and filled up rather than depleted. She cried her last bits—as if she were wringing out a sponge—then calmed, her shoulders rising and falling as she breathed.

  “Okay,” Allie said. “Time to move on.” She popped open the glove box and slipped out the scrap of paper with her father’s phone number. The red ink Penny had
used made the number look urgent, important.

  There was a steakhouse across the street, with a wooden tiki mask taller than Allie guarding the front door. With the paper in one hand and her purse in the other, Allie marched in. At the hostess stand stood a brown-haired girl who was skinnier, taller, more angled, and yet also sultrier than any human Allie had ever seen in person.

  “Number?” the hostess mumbled. She didn’t smile.

  “Huh?” Allie held up her father’s phone number.

  “You eating tonight?” The hostess dropped her head toward her shoulder as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold up.

  “Oh. No. I just wanted to use the phone if that’s okay.”

  There were wooden benches in the entranceway. People were lined up on them, waiting for their table. Everyone seemed to be watching the hostess stand, or maybe they were watching the hostess.

  “You know how it works,” the hostess said. “Dial nine to get an outside number.”

  “Is it okay if I call long-distance?” Allie asked.

  “Are you kidding? I make all my long-distance calls from this phone. There’s no way I’m going to call from home and pay for it!” The hostess picked up three menus, called “NINTZEL,” and then walked off with a trio of men.

  Allie went behind the hostess stand and glanced down at the list. There were two pages of names, only a quarter of them crossed out.

  A woman approached, put her hands on the edge of the stand, and clacked her nails. “How long for a table for four?”

  “Ummm . . .” Allie ran her pointer finger along the list as if she knew what she was doing. And, actually, she did know. Allie had sat people at her father’s restaurant since she was old enough to reach the hostess stand. She could look at a list of names and say exactly how long each person would wait. “A little over an hour.”

  “Fine. Sloane. With an E on the end.” The woman stood and watched as Allie wrote down the name.

  “I’ll call you at the bar if you want,” Allie said. That’s what she had always said at Frank’s restaurant, and she assumed it was the same here. As she was speaking, the hostess returned. She was about five inches taller than Allie.

  “We’ll call you at the bar,” the hostess repeated, and Sloane walked away.

  “I told her it’d be over an hour,” Allie said.

  “Thanks,” the hostess said. “Did you make your call?” She indicated with a cigarette-slim finger the phone tucked into a nook below the podium.

  “Ah! Thanks!” Allie picked up the receiver, looked at the scrap of paper that had FRANK written in all capital letters, punched nine, then the number. The hostess called another name and walked off with an older couple, both wearing red: she in a red dress and shoes, and he in a red dinner jacket. Allie wondered if they had deliberately matched up like that.

  A thin, square-shouldered man approached the podium just as Frank answered the phone.

  “It’ll be more than an hour,” Allie said to the man.

  “What’ll be more than an hour,” Allie’s father said. His voice, when he used it, boomed.

  “Hold on a second, Dad, I’m hostessing.”

  “Allie, don’t call me if you can’t talk.” Frank hung up. Allie felt an immediate panic. She was worried that that was the only moment she’d ever have to talk to her dad. Things had been so out-of-the-ordinary lately that a death—hers or her father’s—didn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to anticipate.

  “Five,” the man said. Allie took his name, then called her father back. When the phone started ringing, she dropped down into a squat behind the podium. The hostess’s legs approached.

  The phone rang fifteen times. Allie was now sure she had blown her one chance. And then, finally, Frank answered.

  “Dad,” Allie said. “We were just on the phone. Why did it take you so long to pick up again?”

  “I wanted to make sure you really wanted to talk to me. I figured you’d wait if you did.” Allie could hear echoed laughter from a sitcom in the background. She imagined her father in the dark living room lit only by flickering blue TV light. He looked good in that light, with his peanut-butter-colored skin and his massive body. Frank was six-four, with hands the size of baseball gloves. As a kid, Allie liked to stare at his ears, which looked like tiny butterscotch snails curled up on either side of his giant rectangular head.

  “I do want to talk to you,” Allie said.

  “What do you need?”

  “Did you close the restaurant?”

  “Moved it. We’re reopening in a week.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why do you need to know?”

  “I don’t know. That restaurant’s been there my whole life. You’re my dad.”

  “That I am,” Frank said.

  Allie paused, then said, in a rush, “I’m sort of in trouble.”

  “Pregnant?”

  “No.” The hostess’s legs walked off with another group.

  “If you’re not pregnant, you’re not in trouble.”

  Allie paused. She didn’t know how she could possibly tell her father she had stolen a Wonder Bread bag full of coke and fled to Los Angeles, where she had almost killed a quadriplegic, had a disappointing reunion with her mother, and had sex with Billy Idol.

  Frank spoke again into the silence. “So I suppose you didn’t get the money back from that thieving boyfriend of yours?”

  “No.” Allie’s chest heaved at the thought of Marc. She had rarely told her father about her failures, humiliations, and disappointments. Not even in third grade, when Oliver Jones got all the kids to call her Little Orphan Allie because her mother didn’t show up for the Mothers’ Day luncheon. Not in fourth grade, when she felt ugly and invisible when she and all the girls in school (many of them blondes) were collecting Barbie dolls and not one person had a doll that looked anything like Allie. And not in the past year, when she discovered a whole new range of emotions in falling in love and then having her heart destroyed. If Allie had known ahead of time that Frank wouldn’t help her out of her financial jam, she never would have told him about Marc decamping with the cash.

  Allie slumped her head against the phone, letting it drop into the nook of her shoulder.

  “Be a good girl,” Frank said. “Work hard at that job and listen to our great first lady and just say no to drugs.” Frank had always loved Ronald Reagan, and Nancy by association.

  “Got it,” Allie said, and her father hung up before she could say good-bye.

  “You okay?” The hostess tilted her body and looked down at Allie.

  “Yeah.” Allie stood. The hostess’s thick brown hair was cut in a perfect line across her shoulders.

  “I’m going to seat this party of four. If anyone else comes in, tell them the kitchen closes in an hour and they probably won’t be able to get served by then.” She walked off with four menus and four people trailing behind her.

  Sloane approached the podium again. “How much longer?” she asked. “Sloane.”

  “Yes, Sloane, with an E on the end.” Allie ran her finger down the list of names. “You still have about fifty minutes.”

  “You’re shaking,” Sloane said.

  “Too much coffee,” Allie said. Of course she hadn’t had coffee all day; Allie’s anxiety was simply radiating out her fingertips.

  “Caffeine’s a stimulant. You shouldn’t do stimulants.” Sloane had tiny red veins snaking across her cheeks and nose. They reminded Allie of maps, and roads or rivers as seen from an airplane.

  “I try to stay away from them,” Allie said. “I swear.”

  The hostess returned. “Name?” she said to Sloane.

  “Sloane with an E on the end,” Allie said. “They’re here.” She pointed to the name on the page.

  “About fifty minutes,” the hostess said. Sloane returned to the bar.

  “Do you mind if I make another phone call?” Allie asked.

  The hostess pointed her long, fin-like hand to the floor. Allie dro
pped down into a crouch, picked up the receiver, dialed nine, and then called Beth.

  Beth picked up on the first ring.

  “Hey, it’s me,” Allie whispered.

  “Hey!” Beth wasn’t whispering. Allie heard a grumbling beside her. Then Beth’s voice, barely muffled by her hand over the receiver. Allie could make out: Be quiet, it’s Allie!

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Oh, no one.”

  “Well, it’s got to be someone.”

  Beth sighed. “Okay, it’s Rosie? But he’s really cool now. We’re like, I don’t know, totally hanging out—” Beth got cut off. It sounded like the phone had fallen onto something soft, like a bed. Allie could hear stifled giggling and the grumbling voice again.

  “Are you with Rosie?” Allie wasn’t sure she could envision it. Beth in her chic little Spanish-style apartment with a drug-gangster hit man named Rosie.

  “Listen, he’s totally not who I thought he was last time you called. We’re having, seriously, like, the best time together? I mean, I don’t even want to leave the apartment!” More giggling, more grumble voice, and then what sounded like the smacking sound from kisses.

  “So he’s not a guy with gun-butt who’s taking ten-hour dumps in your bathroom?”

  “Come on, Allie! That was before I knew him. I swear, this guy is just like you but with a penis! Like, after you sneeze you wrinkle your nose up like a rabbit a few times. Rosie does the exact same thing!”

  “I had sex with Billy Idol,” Allie said, to get away from the subject of how similar she was to Rosie the gun-toting thug.

  “No way!” Beth laughed as if it wasn’t true.

  “I swear. Way.”

  “You swear? Like, where did you meet him?”

  “I stopped in to see my mom, and her band was opening for him.” Allie had told Beth about her mother leaving to be the tambourine girl for Mighty Zamboni. They even went to the library together and sorted through old magazines so Beth could see Penny in photos of the band. The only picture Allie owned of her mother was taken the day Allie was born. She was wrapped in a pink blanket, nestled in Wai Po’s arms with Penny sitting beside her.