I grabbed tighter to his waist. His shaggy golden hair whipped me in the cheek, a strand catching in my mouth. We rode all the way to the coast and then arced north.
He took one hand off the handlebars. I didn’t panic. He pointed to the ocean. “Check out those barrels!”
I had a vague sense this had something to do with surfing, but I wasn’t totally sure.
I shouted back, “Cool!”
Nick had graduated from high school the summer before and was taking a few classes at the community college. He’d had a job pumping gas until he came across Mom’s ad in the newspaper. Now when he wasn’t in the Cheese Shop or at school learning mechanical engineering, he could always be found at the beach. He smelled like the sea.
Nick’s mother had followed a man she met in a bar all the way to Argentina and never come back. She’d left Nick the apartment, a year’s worth of rent, and her old Vespa. He’d been taking care of himself since age sixteen, and from what I could tell he was doing a bang-up job.
He was Mom’s first hire and she adored him. She wanted more for him than his current existence. She wanted him to go to a real college. Get more serious. Stop wasting his natural talents. Come fall, she’d harass him daily to fill out applications to schools he couldn’t possibly afford, especially after everything he’d been through, but that was still a ways off.
On this early June afternoon I could count the days until summer vacation on one hand. Other kids had plans for sleepaway camp in the High Sierras, or visits to grandparents in far-off towns, maybe a local class in oil painting or photography.
Not me.
I had a job lined up at the shop. I’d sweep floors and wipe countertops. Take out the trash. Wash windows. Sometimes I’d even have to stock the walk-in freezer. And I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect.
As Nick fishtailed his Vespa, bringing it to a screeching halt, I couldn’t help thinking that he was showing off. (Showing off for me!) I grabbed on tighter and buried my face in his back. I also couldn’t help thinking that maybe this was how I would meet my end, with my arms around Nick Drummond’s waist, and I guessed that there might be worse ways to go.
He turned off the engine. I released him finally and caught my breath. Only then did I think of Hum.
He was where I always kept him: in my backpack. Inside his wire cage. I’d stopped carrying my books in my bag and had lined the bottom with rags and old T-shirts so he wouldn’t knock around too much. Inside his cage I’d put a sock with the toes cut off that he liked to burrow his way through and a few macadamia nuts in the shell, his favorite snack. I took my books to school in a brown paper shopping bag, but school was almost over, and I didn’t have much use for books anymore.
I undid the zipper, carefully lifted out Hum’s cage, and peered through the wire mesh. “Hum?”
Rats can’t vomit, but I didn’t know that yet. I’d learn it later, as I came to know everything about rats. So when I took Hum from my pack after this wild ride up the coast and back again, I expected to find him coated in his own sick.
Instead I found a rat, dead asleep.
I glanced up to see Nick entering the shop. He’d left me in the parking lot alone with my rat and my unnecessary worry, and this struck me as the cruel and inevitable part of loving someone like Nick Drummond from a distance. To him I was only a kid with unnecessary worries.
I returned Hum’s cage to my bag and zipped it shut. Mom didn’t know I took Hum with me everywhere, and she certainly didn’t know that he accompanied me to the Cheese Shop in the afternoons after school. I’d never looked in the large spiral notebook that contained the county health code, but I was pretty sure it said something about not keeping a rat in your store.
My face was still flushed from the ride. From my sudden lack of caution. From my fear about Hum. From the taste of Nick’s golden hair in my mouth.
I knew this all showed. My face didn’t know how to keep secrets.
I found Mom sitting at the desk in the back room, furiously punching numbers into a calculator. A long ribbon of paper spilled down to the floor, tangling around the legs of her chair.
She reached out without looking up and touched my windswept hair.
“Hiya, Birdie,” she said. “How was the day?”
I opened my mouth, but then the front door jingled, someone wandered in for a wedge of St. Nectaire, and Mom didn’t stick around for my answer.
swoozie
She came from Wisconsin, the state famous for its cheese.
I’d decided that Wisconsin, in addition to dairy farming, must be in the business of growing the largest breasts known to humanity, because Swoozie had a major pair.
I had nothing to show for myself yet, not that I was in such a hurry, but breasts were very much on my thirteen-year-old mind. Most of the girls in my class were wearing bras, and complaining about it in a way that sounded suspiciously like bragging.
I was hoping that when my time came, I might split the difference someplace between Swoozie and my mother.
Swoozie was freckled and doughy, a year older than Mom, going through a divorce. She had no kids.
“I came out West to start over, to reinvent myself, to get away from my Wisconsin roots,” she liked to say, although not so far away from those roots that she steered clear of cheese.
She hugged me when she saw me. Every time. They were the sorts of embraces others might reserve for people they hadn’t seen in ages. She’d push my hair back from my face and say, “Tell your aunt Swoozie something she doesn’t already know.”
She was the type who took the role of aunt seriously. It’s how she got her name, from a nephew who couldn’t pronounce “Susie,” and she had a fattened wallet filled with pictures of the freckled, doughy nieces and nephews she’d left behind in Wisconsin. I was the only youngish person she knew in her new life, and so I received the full bounty of her auntlike energy.
Swoozie fancied herself a matchmaker. Her own failed marriage inspired her to find love for others, and this annoyed me because I had no interest in watching Mom or Nick Drummond fall in love, and they were her two primary targets.
There were men who came in regularly, twice a week or more, and engaged Mom in long discussions about soft French cheeses versus Italian ones. The difference between virgin and extra-virgin olive oils. They’d talk wines too, and mom would write a list of recommendations they could take next door to Fireside Liquor. I thought they were just men who loved food, but Swoozie insisted they came to catch a glimpse of the “Cheese Babe.”
It was hard for me to see Mom as anything but devoted to cheese and to me. As far as I knew, and I liked to think I knew, she hadn’t dated anyone since my dad died.
And Nick, well, I was pretty sure Nick didn’t need any help from Swoozie when it came to girls, but that didn’t stop her from pointing out the cute ones. Especially as summer approached. Cute girls were everywhere, wearing spaghetti-strapped sundresses, sometimes even less.
I found Swoozie easy to talk to. We’d sit in the freezer where nobody could hear us, and while she shelved sauces I’d hold Hum on my lap and feed him ice chips. She kept Hum’s visits to the shop a secret. It was understood that if Mom ever caught me I’d take full responsibility. I’d never throw Swoozie under the bus. We trusted each other.
I’d ask her about the things I couldn’t ask anyone else. Like, for example: What’s a Fu Manchu?
That came from the List of Biggest Mistakes. I never asked Mom about anything from Dad’s Book of Lists because it made her too sad to talk about Dad. And there was the fact that Mom didn’t know I’d stolen Dad’s book, or that I kept it under my mattress, and that on more nights than not, I’d read from it with a flashlight, under my hand-stitched quilt, before going to sleep.
“A Fu Manchu is a mustache,” Swoozie told me. “A very thin, unfortunate-looking mustache.” I imagined it was especially unfortunate on a redheaded Irishman like my father.
I asked her about things like Geraldine Moore, a
girl in the eighth grade who was two inches shorter than me and wore black eyeliner and cork-soled sandals. I’d heard something about her sneaking into the boys’ bathroom with Doug Jensen, Peter Mason, and Eric Strauss. I wasn’t totally certain what this was about, but I was supposed to know. Everybody knew. And I learned to nod and sigh like I got it, which I totally did not.
“Oh, Bird-girl,” Swoozie would say. “Junior high is a strange land inhabited by strange creatures. The best you can do is keep your head down and your nose clean, and hold your breath till college.”
This pretty well summed up what I was already doing. Waiting. For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure.
All I knew was that nothing ever happened to me, at least nothing that counted. Nothing mattered to me in the way cheese mattered to Mom. Or surfing to Nick. I was holding my breath, waiting for my life to begin.
I wouldn’t, as it turned out, have to hold it too much longer.
friends: a history
It’s not like I didn’t have friends. I did. It’s just that I preferred the company of Swoozie and Nick to pretty much anybody else on the planet.
I know how that sounds, like I was one of those kids who didn’t know how to talk to her peers. Whose jokes fell flat. Who never wore the right clothes or listened to the right music. But I’d always had friends.
I can prove it:
Stephania Allessio.
Born three weeks after me in a house two doors away. We moved after my dad died, and like most things from that time in my life, I don’t remember Stephania Allessio. But Mom always said she was my first friend. That we spent hours in each other’s company. We shared a babysitter who called us Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
I thought about her often, more than you’d think someone could of a person she didn’t remember the first thing about. I wondered whether if we’d never moved, if Dad had never died, maybe Stephania Allessio and I would have grown up the best of friends. The kind who finish each other’s sentences. The type that makes people say, “Just look at those two.”
Because even though I made other friends, somehow I always felt like a one. Singular. Alone. A Dee without a Dum.
Aaron Finklestein.
Kindergarten. The Blue Room. We napped side by side. His orange curls would sometimes spill over onto my mat. He sucked his thumb. I sucked my index finger. We had so much in common.
But by second grade, when a boy wasn’t supposed to have a girl as a best friend, I lost him to Gavin Bell.
Georgia McNulty.
My research partner on the Eiffel Tower. Fourth grade—Ms. Sherman’s class. We had to work on the project outside of school, so she came to my house. This was before the Cheese Shop when Mom worked from home trying to launch a mail-order business selling holiday decorations.
We came home hungry and Mom served us éclairs and used an embarrassing French accent, but Georgia McNulty laughed and whispered Your mom is so funny, and later she confided that she had a crush on our science teacher.
The project lasted a month or so during which Georgia McNulty came over seven times. We built a replica of the Eiffel Tower out of paper clips and got an A, and then a few days later I heard that she’d told a bunch of people that my house was small and messy, both of which were true, but I stopped speaking to her anyway.
Alison Samuel.
Kids said Alison Samuel ate her own boogers, and I have no proof that this was true, but once you become known as the girl who eats her own boogers, it’s a reputation that’s hard to shake.
I felt sorry for Alison, which I now realize is not the greatest foundation upon which to build a friendship. We started sitting next to each other in fifth grade, when we were finally allowed to choose our own seats. Choice might be a generous way to put it considering nobody wanted to sit next to Alison Samuel, and nobody seemed all that interested in sitting next to me, which got me wondering what I was known as.
The girl who …?
Alison hated school and she hated everyone in the school, and she hated the way our art teacher tucked her shirts into her skirts and the way our PE coach chewed his gum. All this started to rub off on me—hate has its way of doing that—so I spent most of fifth grade in a fairly miserable state.
Then her parents decided to send her to a private school where she could start over, though I have my doubts that even without a reputation for ingesting the contents of her nose, Alison Samuel was any happier.
Georgia McNulty.
Georgia returned to my life without apology, which was fine by me, because over the intervening years my decision to stop speaking to her struck me as rash.
As usual, Georgia was standing by her locker with Beatrice and Janice. It was just before lunchtime. I stopped to tie my shoes. My laces were new; rainbow ones I’d swapped out for the usual boring white ones, and intended for roller skates, they were way too long.
“Hey, Drew,” she called. “Wanna come with us to Antonio’s?”
I paused, waiting for her to add Just kidding, a favorite joke of the moment among the girls in sixth grade. But she just let the invitation hang there.
“Sure,” I said.
So I walked with Georgia and her two best friends off campus to Antonio’s for lunch, which those of us with permission from our parents were allowed to do, and I sat with them as they talked and laughed. Occasionally one of them would address a question or a comment to me and I’d say something back, and sometimes they’d say Shut up, which actually meant that what I’d said was interesting, and then sometimes they’d act as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
The next two years continued in pretty much the same fashion.
They were my friends, but they weren’t people I could ask about what was happening in the bathroom with Geraldine Moore and all those boys, and I certainly couldn’t ask them about the things in Dad’s Book of Lists.
Still, I was grateful to have a group of friends, though I never quite got over the suspicion that if I’d done a better double-knot that morning with my rainbow laces I might have spent sixth and seventh grades alone.
This summer I would get a taste of friendlessness.
They were all gone. Georgia and Beatrice and Janice were off to an eight-week program together on the campus of a boarding school near London. Georgia to study acting. Beatrice and Janice to study the same, because that’s what Georgia was doing.
I didn’t mind. I was relieved, even. In a way, they’d started leaving me behind before buying tickets to London. They had boyfriends. They hated their parents. They didn’t get why I liked hanging out after school in a shop that stank like sweaty feet. Rats made them squeal.
Anyway, I still had Swoozie. I still had Nick. I still had Hum. And I thought I still had Mom.
mom, a vanishing act
The first sign should have been that coiled snake of calculator ribbon. Or maybe that Mom was doing less yoga, eating more cheese, and still losing weight.
I’d never bothered to think about the challenges of opening a new business. How stressful that might be. To me, the shop was all fun and adventure. It was a place to hang out.
I’d been dreaming all year of escaping school: the narrow hallways, the smell of lead and chalk, the crushing weight of my own invisibility. All I wanted was to be with Nick, to watch him work the new pasta machine. He’d promised to teach me to make squid ink linguini, which came out black and left your hands ash-gray for days.
That this new machine had cost the equivalent of several months’ rent on the shop didn’t matter to me. Nick loved it; he became not just the guru of broken electronics, but also an artisan of the lightest, most delicate pastas. The way I saw it, the investment paid for itself. But what did I know?
If I’d heard the words recession or economic downturn I didn’t take them in. They were the sorts of things deep-voiced men on the radio droned on about when all I could think of was how to switch the dial back to KISS-FM. I didn’t understand that those words struck terror in the heart of a small-business own
er like my mother.
All I knew was that after the close call with the freezer and the Belcher the year before, things seemed to be going fine. We were about to start carrying desserts! It was shaping up to be a perfect summer.
On Monday, my first day of work, Mom had already left by the time I woke up. The shop didn’t open until ten, and I’d always assumed that was when Mom went in, with her gigantic ring of keys, and opened the front door to a waiting customer or two.
On school days, the bus picked me up at 7:42. Mom waved goodbye from the window. And on weekends I’d sleep until eleven (this was a new phenomenon, my love of sleep), so on Saturdays it was no surprise to me that Mom was already gone by the time I got up. We were closed Sundays. Sunday was our day together.
On this morning, when I came downstairs at nine, there was a note on the table beside a hardened English muffin. It was timed in the top left corner—Mom always timed her notes to the minute.
7:51
Birdie—
off to the shop. Come in whenever you like. or don’t come in at all. It’s your first day of summer. You’re free! Enjoy yourself! whatever you decide, keep me in the loop. Love you madly.
She always timed her notes and she always signed off Love you madly, even when the notes weren’t so cheery. Like the kind that would appear on the top of a pile of dirty dishes.
3:27
Birdie—
Exactly whose job do you suppose it is to wash these? Mine? I think not! stop treating this house like a hotel. Last time I checked we had no cleaning staff.
Love you madly.
Why would she suggest I take this day off? It was my first day. She needed me, didn’t she? Nick needed me. Monday was ravioli day. He’d make enough to sell fresh for the next three days and then some more for the freezer.
The Summer I Learned to Fly Page 2