The Wonder Bread Summer: A Novel

by Jessica Anya Blau

  Before Gumba died, Jessica and a boyfriend impulsively got a dog named Fritz, who looked like a dwarf German shepherd. Fritz was a girl, but they liked the name. They took Fritz to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, where they were camp counselors for the summer. When they returned, they give Fritz to Jessica’s mother, who loved her until her death of dog old age.

  Just after college, Jessica and her new husband (who were living in Berkeley) got a black lab named Giusi. The dog’s name was inspired by a guy they had met in Italy who had a daughter named Giusi. Giusi galloped around the house like a wild mustang, slept on the white couch, where she left behind fallen needles of black hair, and chewed furniture. When Jessica and her husband moved to Toronto, they gave the dog to an uncle in Ventura to keep until they found a house. The dog ran away before they found the house, and neither Jessica nor her husband were too sad about it (although they both hoped the dog was happily frolicking on the beach, chewing driftwood).

  In Canada, before she made friends, Jessica was exceedingly lonely. To alleviate her loneliness, she went to the Humane Society and adopted a black dog that she named Moses. Moses was leggy and sleek, and had a hound’s yowl. Jessica loved Moses in spite of the fact that he chewed the legs of the kitchen chairs and once gnawed through a seatbelt and a headrest in the car. Moses was the fastest runner in Withrow Park in Toronto. Every time a group of dog owners stood at the top of the hill for dog races, each owner throwing a ball for their dog, Moses would win. (There are other dogs and dog owners who would disagree with this, but this isn’t their bio page—whoever types it first gets the last word.) When Jessica had a baby, she and her husband gave Moses to a man who ran every morning and wanted a running partner in dog form. The other dog owners in the park thought it was creepy that Jessica and her husband traded in the dog for a baby. Some of them gossiped about it. Jessica ignored the gossip because she knew Moses would be happier with the running man than at home with Jessica and the nursing baby.

  While living in Baltimore with her second husband, David, Jessica thought it was time for a new dog. Two friends (who had just given birth to triplets) gave her their giant, horsey black lab named Jordan. Jessica’s younger daughter looked at Jordan and said in her tiny baby voice, “You’re not Jordan, you’re Georgie.” Georgie was faithful and kind and let the kid who named her ride on her back and slide across the hardwood floor while hanging on to her tail. Georgie was old when the family adopted her, and very old when she died on her favorite down sleeping bag in the middle of the living room where she had insisted on spending her final days. Before Georgie died, Jessica wanted a transitional dog for Georgie to train. She figured the new dog would behave as Georgie did, and Georgie was a perfectly polished lady. David did not want a new dog, but on Hanukkah, David’s brother gave Jessica a small, white toy poodle named Pippa. The whole family, including Georgie but not including David, fell in love with her. David didn’t like her because he thought poodles were showy and embarrassing. After Pippa’s first haircut, she and Jessica were frolicking on the front lawn when David pulled up in the car. He glanced at the pink bows in Pippa’s hair and the puffy shaved cotton balls of hair on her legs, and quickly backed up and drove away. Pippa has never had a haircut like that since. When Georgie died, David grew to love Pippa like a daughter. Or not quite a daughter. Maybe the way you’d love your best friend’s daughter.

  One Christmas, Jessica’s mother’s dog—an overly muscled rottweiler-shepherd mix—took a bite out of Pippa’s head and punctured her eye, which now looks like a foggy blue marble. Pippa has become increasingly neurotic since losing the eye. The list of things she won’t do has grown to this: Won’t walk up or down the stairs. Won’t walk past anything shiny or reflective (like the kitchen trash can). Won’t walk over sewer grates. Won’t let strange men pet her. Won’t let big dogs sniff her butt. Jessica doesn’t think the butt-sniff is much of a loss, but she finds it terribly inconvenient to carry the dog up and down the steps. Jessica hopes one day to get one of those old-lady chairs that ride the stairs. It would have to be nonreflective and not resemble a sewer grate, a strange man, or a big dog, so that Pippa would be willing to use it.

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  About the book

  Chinese Proverbs

  I love Chinese proverbs because they can reveal monumental truths in the most economical and succinct way. It was great fun finding these proverbs for the character of Wai Po, who, I imagined, lived by most of them. Here are some of my favorites that didn’t make it into the book.

  How to Live Your Life

  Keeping company with the wicked is like living in a fish market: one becomes used to the foul odor.

  Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.

  If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.

  If the first words fail, ten thousand will not avail.

  The wise person listens to his mind; the fool listens to the mob.

  A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.

  Relationships/Love

  Oh eggs, don’t fight with rocks!

  Curse your wife at evening, sleep alone at night.

  Do not employ handsome servants.

  In bed be wife and husband; in the hall be each other’s honored guests.

  He who strikes the first blow admits he’s lost the argument.

  Do not hasten to rejoice at someone’s departure until you see his replacement.

  Family/Children

  It is easier to rule a nation than a child.

  Govern a family as you would cook a small fish: very gently.

  If you want your dinner, don’t insult the cook.

  The house with an old grandparent harbors a jewel.

  Parents who are afraid to put their foot down usually have children who step on their toes.

  Work

  Be the first to the field and the last to the couch.

  The poor are those without talents; the weak are those without aspirations.

  To rise high, conceal ambition.

  A goal without a deadline is only a wish; a dream with a deadline becomes a goal.

  If you get up one more time than you fall, you will make it through.

  To read more Chinese proverbs you can go to:

  http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Chinese_Proverb/

  http://www.sonoma.edu/users/d/daniels/chinaproverbs.html

  http://www.sacu.org/proverbs.html

  http://www.chinese-traditions-and-culture.com/chinese-proverbs.html

  Read on

  An Excerpt from Drinking Closer to Home

  THE YEAR ANNA WAS ELEVEN, Portia was eight, and Emery was three, Louise decided she quit being a housewife. Anna was playing Parcheesi with her sister on the family room floor when Louise told them.

  “Portia, Anna,” Louise said, and she began searching through the little piles of papers, mail, phone books, and pencils that covered from end to end the white tile counter that separated the kitchen from the family room.

  “Yeah?” Portia asked. Anna looked at her freckle-faced sister, her white, hairless flesh, her wispy brown hair that shone like corn silk. As much as she often hated her, she could understand why her parents were always pawing at her with hugs and kisses: the girl was like a pastry or a sweet. She looked edible.

  Anna was as small as Portia. But she was all muscle and sinew, as if she were made of telephone cables. No one ever wanted to pinch telephone cables. She rolled the dice and ignored her mother.

  “Come here,” Louise said. She continued to shift things around. Portia pushed her doughy rump up and went to the counter. She moved aside an empty box that had held ten Hot Wheels racing cars and handed her mother the pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes she was most likely looking for.

  “I quit.” Louise tapped out a cigarette, then lit it from the pack of matches she kept tucked in
the cellophane wrapper. She had grown her hair long at a time when mothers didn’t have long hair. And she didn’t wear makeup—a habit that made her look fresher and more alive than the other mothers. Anna hated it when Portia said that their mother looked like a movie star—she hated that her sister couldn’t see the drop-out anarchist mentality their mother conveyed through her hippie clothes. And it really drove Anna crazy when she witnessed Louise opening the front door to the Fuller Brush Man or the Avon Lady and they asked Louise, “Is your mother home?” What kind of a mother didn’t look like a mother?! One like Louise, Anna supposed, who only wore wide, drapey bell-bottoms, cork platform shoes, and flowing silk shirts with no bra. In her ears were always two gold hoops that hung almost to her shoulders. Anna knew that people in other parts of town dressed like Louise. But no one in their neighborhood did. They lived in a place of pantsuits, helmets of hair, waxy lipstick, sensible sneakers. Anna didn’t know any mother who worked, or did art. At least her parents weren’t divorced, Anna thought. The only person she knew who had divorced parents was Molly Linkle, a girl who was so fat she wore bras that made her breasts look like cones and shopped in the Ladies’ Department at Robinson’s.

  “What do you mean you quit?” Portia climbed onto the orange stool. Anna wondered when her sister would stop asking questions.

  “Your turn,” Anna said. She looked toward her sister’s back and watched as her mother pursed her lips and let out a slow stream of smoke.

  “I quit being a housewife.” Louise shook her hair and smiled.

  “Can you do that?” Portia asked.

  Anna was going to pretend she wasn’t listening. There was something inside her that often led her to believe that if she ignored certain things they would cease to exist. She turned the Parcheesi board over and dumped the pieces on the rug.

  “Of course I can. I just did. I quit!” Louise took another drag off her cigarette.

  “Anna!”

  Anna knew Portia was staring at her but she refused to look up.

  “Mom quit!”

  “I heard,” Anna said. She could feel her face darkening, like a mercury thermometer.

  “Does Dad know?” Anna asked. She crossed her legs and glared at her mother.

  “I told him last night.”

  “What about Emery?” The idea that her mother wouldn’t have the same occupation as her friends’ mothers enraged Anna. Who would have the nerve to give birth to children, move them into a house, and then declare that she wasn’t going to take care of them? A drug-addicted hippie, Anna decided, that’s who.

  “You girls are in charge of Emery now.”

  “Really?!” Portia’s cheerful voice made Anna want to knock her off the stool. Portia was such a wannabe mother, she coddled Emery as if she owned him. In fact the only thing Portia had ever claimed she wanted to be when she grew up was a mother. She had a doll, Peaches, with whom she slept every night. When the family traveled, Portia always packed Peaches first in the bottom of her white, satin-lined suitcase. The current Peaches was actually the second Peaches, as the first Peaches had devolved into a repellent floppy, dirty thing with a body like a lumpy mattress and arms and legs that were four different colors from dirt and stains. She’d gone bald from Portia’s carrying her by her hair, and she smelled like spit. Anna didn’t even like being in the same room with old Peaches. When Portia was seven, Louise had sewn Peaches a pink satin retirement gown with a matching satin-and-lace cap, and gave Portia a new, fresh Peaches who smelled like plastic and who, Anna thought, wasn’t the embarrassing rag that was old Peaches.

  “Yeah, Emery’s yours,” Louise said.

  “Can he be mine alone?” Portia asked Anna.

  Anna couldn’t believe that her sister felt compelled to ask this question. It was like asking if Anna wanted to share old Peaches.

  “What do you say, Anna?” Louise asked.

  “I don’t want him,” Anna said. “He’s dirty and he smells.”

  “He’s adorable!” Portia said.

  “Are we getting a maid?” Anna asked. Her friends’ mothers cleaned their houses, but people on TV, characters with apartments and homes that seemed much smaller than theirs, had maids.

  “No!” Louise snorted. “There are enough people hanging around here between your and your sister’s friends. Besides. We don’t have that kind of money.”

  “So who’s going to cook dinner?” Portia asked.

  “Anna will cook.”

  “Fine.” Anna stood up and joined her sister at the counter. She could feel rage inside her like a team of insects crawling through her veins.

  “And what about everything else?” Portia asked, although to Anna she didn’t seem particularly concerned. And why should she be concerned? Other than giving Emery an occasional bath, Anna couldn’t really name the things Louise did as a housewife. By all appearances, their mother did little other than swim naked in the pool and write poems or paint in her studio. On the rare day when Anna’s friends came over (despite Louise’s claims of frequency, Anna always tried to steer them to someone else’s house), she had them wait on the porch on the pretense of having to ask her mother if it was okay if they came in when, really, she was checking to see that Louise was dressed. Anna preferred to hang out at her friends’ houses, as even when Louise was dressed, she was an embarrassment.

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  Also by Jessica Anya Blau

  Drinking Closer to Home

  The Summer of Naked Swim Parties

  Praise

  PRAISE FOR

  Jessica Anya Blau and The Wonder Bread Summer

  “This is as fast, fun, and outrageous a book as I’ve read in a long time. But beneath all the antics is a poignant story about racial identity, fathers and daughters, and coming-of-age in one totally messed-up decade.”

  —Matthew Norman, author of Domestic Violets

  “I think this book is laced with something! I swear I could not put it down. Jessica Anya Blau [is] like the naughty Southern Californian soul mate of Nick Hornby.”

  —Matthew Klam, author of Sam the Cat and Other Stories

  “No one writes like Jessica Anya Blau. Funny, tender, and outrageous, The Wonder Bread Summer is more than a road trip through 1980s California. It’s a caper about race and sex, cocaine and rock ’n’ roll, with unforgettable characters who will say or do anything and who find kindness in the most unexpected places.”

  —Michael Downs, author of The Greatest Show

  “Jessica Anya Blau’s The Wonder Bread Summer is a lightning strike of a novel, sexy and dangerous and aglow with adventure. Allie is a tenacious and deliciously complicated heroine, and it’s impossible to resist the ride she takes you on.”

  —Laura van den Berg, author of What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

  “This novel is addictive! I was hooked the moment straight-arrow Allie steals a bread bag full of blow, and I flipped the pages faster than she could drive from one disaster to another. How many wrongs make a right? The author poses that question as she sends Allie head-on into drug, family, and boy trouble. You won’t be able to look away.”

  —Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive!

  “A rollicking, irreverent sweep of a novel. Blau has written another shining, no-holds-barred California heartbreaker.”

  —Deborah Reed, author of Carry Yourself Back to Me

  “Jessica Anya Blau is a fearless, hilarious writer with a genius for pacing and a massive gift for creating fabulous characters. In The Wonder Bread Summer, through the adorable although not completely innocent college student Allie, we get to live through a California summer in 1983 in all its glory: cocaine, Candie’s high heels, sexual misconduct, and even Billy Idol! Blau has crafted a totally unique coming-of-age story, wrapped in a road trip with a drug caper center. It’s a wild, exuberant novel, full of humor, heart, and a solid dose of bad behavior. I lov
ed it.”

  —Paula Bomer, author of Nine Months

  “In The Wonder Bread Summer, Jessica Anya Blau returns with all the comedic powers of a master trickster. Her astonishing ability to stun and disarm, shock and smite the reader using humor and a new kit of outrageous antics and 1980s characters, tosses us deep into humanity’s darker waters of loss and abandonment while simultaneously yanking us back onto the bows of our buoyant but fragile boats. Her heroine, Allie, a college coed, is enmeshed in a cohort of petty cocaine thieves, aging rock stars, Billy Idol, and a porn producer in a wheelchair who only Hunter S. Thompson would embrace. Add Allie’s pathetic absentee mother and a peripatetic father to the mix and it’s a mad, mad car chase up and down California’s sunny coasts. Urged on by the voice of her dead Chinese grandmother, Allie flees for her life and lunges toward personal truths that promise to set her free.”

  —Jessica Keener, author of the nationally bestselling novel Night Swim

  “Jessica Anya Blau has taken the story of a young woman’s search for self and rendered it into a hilarious, cocaine-fueled thrill ride. From its Tarantino-esque opening scene to its twisty final pages, The Wonder Bread Summer is an unrelenting delight.”

  —Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

  “The Wonder Bread Summer is the best ever! It even made me a little jealous, and that doesn’t happen often.”

  —Madison Smartt Bell

  PRAISE FOR

  Jessica Anya Blau and Drinking Closer to Home

  “In Drinking Closer to Home, Jessica Anya Blau has created an unforgettably unique family—Buzzy, Louise, Anna, Portia, and Emery—and done them a great service by placing them in a compelling story that is alternately funny and sad as hell. I don’t think I’d last twelve days in this family, but I could read about them forever. With this novel, Blau announces herself as a fearless writer, capable of anything and everything.”