Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost

by Karen Karbo

  Dr. Lozano led us to her office instead of an exam room. The walls were painted dark coral, and pictures of wild mustangs were on the wall. There were two chairs across from her desk, and I plopped down in one. Mark Clark fetched another one from the other side of the room for Mrs. Dagnitz. I’d been trying to calm myself down after having been persecuted by Mrs. Dagnitz (“persecuted”—one of last years spelling words—“to oppress or harass with ill-treatment”), and only now did I begin to feel excited.

  Dr. Lozano had invited me to go with her to a big national meeting of brain doctors in New York City. I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but we would fly together to New York and stay in a hotel with room service and a minibar.

  “I thought it would be a good thing to sit down and discuss the conference and the trip, and what Minerva here can expect. As Mark may have told you, Mrs. Clark”—Awkward! Dr. Lozano obviously hadn’t gotten the memo that Mother Dear was now Mrs. Dagnitz, married to Rolando of the man braid and yoga pants—“this is the annual meeting of the American Association of Neurologists. There’ll be more than five thousand neurologists from all over the world. I’m going to be presenting a paper on the effect of trauma on the mind of the young adolescent, focusing on Minerva’s accident and subsequent personality change.”

  “That sounds fascinating,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “What will Minerva have to do to prepare? Should she wear something nice?”

  Dr. Lozano smiled and flipped open a file folder. “What will happen is that I will get up and tell the story of how I met Minerva, and her trauma from electric shock, and what I think has happened to her—from a neurological perspective—and then I’ll ask Minerva to join me at the podium for a question-and-answer session. She should wear whatever she feels comfortable in.”

  “Well, what with her … personality change, that’s just about anything!” Mrs. Dagnitz wailed. “I’m sick to death of seeing her in those high-top tennis shoes. They do nothing to flatter a big foot.”

  I took that opportunity to throw my feet up on the desk and show off my brand-new turquoise Chucks.

  “Minerva, put your feet down this instant.”

  I put them down. I liked Dr. Lozano, and I was going to New York with her. I didn’t want her to think I was an insufferable brat.

  “There’s something else,” said Dr. Lozano. “This week I received a phone call from a producer at Late Night with Seamus O’Connor. He wants to do an interview with Minerva.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “How cool is that?” asked Mark Clark. He reached across Mrs. Dagnitz’s lap and punched my leg. “Min’s going to be famous.”

  “An interview?” asked Mrs. Dagnitz doubtfully. She sat up straighter in her chair. “What kind of an interview? Isn’t that the show where people with strange professions come on and O’Connor mocks them?”

  “Actually, I don’t watch it,” said Dr. Lozano. “It’s on much too late for me. But the producer is apparently married to a neurologist and heard about Minerva’s transformation. He’s curious to talk to a thirteen-year-old with true self-esteem.”

  “But this isn’t true self-esteem. She was the victim of an unfortunate accident. She could have died!”

  Why was Mrs. Dagnitz making such a production about this? I traded glances with Mark Clark behind her back. My look said, help me out a little here. Because Mark Clark had known me from birth, he could read it quite easily.

  “I don’t think Dr. Lozano would say yes to anything that wasn’t good for her patient, Mom,” said Mark Clark.

  “It’ll be fun,” said Dr. Lozano. She picked up the phone and dialed a number listed in the folder. “And while I’m thinking of it, I’ve got to call the conference organizers to make sure they’ve got Minerva’s name on the program. Another patient of mine had an accident similar to Minerva’s, but at the last minute we decided Minerva was a better representative of— Oh yes, hello!”

  We never heard what, exactly, I was a better representative of, because Dr. Lozano had at that moment gotten through to the conference person who was in charge of making the change on the program. She spelled my name out, M-I-N-E-R-V-A, to make sure the person on the other end of the line got it right.

  Going to New York was the sort of thing that made me see how it wouldn’t be so bad to be a grown-up. The problem was, in adulthood, there were many more lame and boring phone calls—like the one Dr. L. was making now—than there were fun trips to big cities that featured appearances on late-night television shows. What I really wanted to do in New York was go to the Metropolitian Museum of Art and see the mummies, and buy a cute fake purse. Chelsea de Guzman said you could buy a cute fake purse on the sidewalk for twenty dollars.

  As we waited for Dr. Lozano to finish her call, I thought about how if you were a celebrity, you had other people to make the phone calls, and that’s probably why every person I knew wanted to be famous. If you were famous, you could avoid the boring bits.

  After Dr. Lozano hung up, we talked about airplane tickets and what the weather was going to be like, and whether I should get my hair straightened for the occasion (Mrs. Dagnitz), and what was actually going to be expected of me at the conference (Mark Clark), and then we were all standing up, and Dr. L. shook hands with my mother and brother, and hugged me, and said she was counting the days, and we were ushered back out of her air-conditioned office and into the insane-making heat.

  5

  We left Dr. Lozano’s air-conditioned office and tromped back down the hill, crossing Twenty-fifth Avenue, where the car was parked, and on to Twenty-third Avenue. Mrs. Dagnitz bounced along, chattering about how this part of the city always reminded her of a college town, with its huge old three-story houses and wraparound porches. Most of the tiny front yards had been turned into flower gardens, overrun with yellow daisies and spiky purple flowers, and rosebushes that someone had paid a lot of attention to until several weeks ago, when the temperature pushed into the hundreds and people lost the drive to do anything but go in search of air-conditioning.

  Mrs. Dagnitz and Mark Clark walked ahead of me in lockstep. Mark Clark always matched his step to the person he was walking with. One day I hoped to see him walk down the street with an old and proper Japanese lady wearing a kimono and high-heeled flip-flops—then what would he do? They swung down the hill, chattering about the best airline to fly to New York and about frequent-flier miles from some credit card. I knew if the discussion about airline tickets got too far down the road, they would forget all about getting ice cream.

  “Mark Clark said we were going to get ice cream,” I said.

  “I could go for some mango gelato,” said Mrs. Dagnitz.

  We turned right on Twenty-third, nearly colliding with a lady and her two chocolate Labradors, panting in the heat.

  “Don’t their tongues look like bologna?” I said.

  “Don’t say that!” said Mrs. Dagnitz.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s disgusting,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. She looked at Mark Clark. “Tell me you’re not keeping lunch meat in the house.”

  Mark Clark opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything, which was fine with Mrs. Dagnitz, who stopped to look in a small shop that sold only cotton T-shirts and cotton pants in pale colors. A clothesline was strung across the inside of the narrow window with a single pale yellow T-shirt clipped to it with wooden clothespins. I felt like saying something snotty about how if she cared so much about Casa Clark being all poisoned by lunch meat, she could come home and monitor the fridge, but it was too hot to shoot my mouth off. My neck beneath my hair was drenched with sweat. I wished I’d put it in a braid.

  Next to the cotton-only shop was the Vespa store. I peered in the window at a candy-apple-red scooter and thought about Angus Paine’s Go-Ped lying in plain sight in the back of Mrs. Dagnitz’s Pathfinder. I hoped no one had tried to steal it.

  We continued on, past a fancy taqueria that smelled of fried tortillas and blared soft rock, and a shop that sold handmade
soap that looked like pastries, and then a real pastry shop. If Mrs. Dagnitz hadn’t stopped in front of the bath shop to marvel at a huge block of black soap, I wouldn’t have noticed the sign in the window of the pastry shop: VISIT US SOON AT OUR NEW LOCATION AT 222 S.W. CORBETT.

  I stared at that 222, three twos all in a row, like a stuck key on a keyboard. Why was it familiar? Corbett Street Grocery was on Southwest Corbett. Just as the thought began to form itself in my mind that Southwest Corbett was a neighborhood of small, brightly painted hippie houses, and that the grocery was the only store on that stretch of street, I saw the address letters bolted beside the cinder-black front door of the grocery, the iron address letters with their eerie rainbow sheen.

  Could it be?

  I looked up at the sign painted on the inside of the window: Paisley’s on 23rd. Was Paisley’s on 23rd moving into the grocery, or what had been the grocery before the fire?

  My palms felt itchy with possibility. I needed to go in there and do something—I didn’t know what. I peered inside the window. At the far end two pastry cases formed an L. No one was at the register. A ceiling fan hung from the ceiling, twirling like a tired ballerina. I’d hoped they also sold ice cream, or frozen yogurt, or something so I could drag Mrs. Dagnitz and Mark Clark inside, but there was nothing but pastries, lined up in neat rows on trays behind the glass.

  I glanced over at Mrs. Dagnitz. She was still transfixed by the chunk of black soap, as if it were a rock from another planet, which it looked as if it could have been. She sighed and said she wished they had this particular shop in Santa Fe. She wondered if she should go in right now and splurge on some of the black soap, or whether she should come back later. Mark Clark glanced down at his watch. He would stand there forever and let our mother blather on about the stupid soap. I had an idea.

  “Come on,” I said. “I need some shampoo and conditioner. Maybe there’s something in here that can get rid of the frizzies.” I threw open the door and went inside, passing through an invisible wall of pure odor—fruits, flowers, herbs, cinnamon, vanilla, the beach on a breezy day, and that smell hippie girls love that I can never pronounce. Working here would give your nose a heart attack. How did anyone do it? Mrs. Dagnitz came right in behind me, stepping accidentally on my heel. I may have become a stranger to Mrs. Dagnitz since she’d been gone, but in a few basic ways she was no stranger to me. She loved buying anything that you could carry away in a cute little handled bag.

  Mark Clark planted himself just inside the door. The longer Mrs. Dagnitz was in town, the more he just went along with the program. He picked up a piece of plum-colored soap and put it down without smelling it. He stuck his hands in his pockets.

  Mrs. Dagnitz grabbed a basket just inside the door and started filling it up with bath bombs and tubes of cream and hunks of that frightening black soap, happy as could be.

  “Oh,” I said, making a show of looking around with a frantic expression. I wrapped my arms across my stomach, hoping to make my situation look desperate, as if I might be on the verge of food poisoning. “I really need to use the bathroom.” I scurried over to the clerk and asked whether they had a restroom. She looked up from where she was piling pink squares of bath salt in a tower. She said sorry—but there was a Starbucks three doors down. Thank you, surly counter-helper girl!

  “Ohnnn,” I said, scurrying back toward the front door, where Mrs. Dagnitz was smelling a tangerine-colored bath bomb twice the size of a real tangerine. I bent over like a bad actor doing a hunchback impersonation. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  Mrs. Dagnitz placed the bath bomb back in the bin and looked at me, her tanned face expressionless. I could tell she was trying to figure out what was going on with me. Finally she said, “Mark, go with her.”

  “I’m all right!” I said, pulling the door open and hurrying out before Mark Clark could say a word to anyone. I didn’t know what I would do if he followed me, since I had no intention of going to Starbucks.

  Before entering Paisley’s on 23rd, I stopped to reread the sign in the window three times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, to double-check that the business was moving SOON to 222 S.W. Corbett, and not 1222 N.W. Corbett or 2222 S.E. Corbett.

  VISIT US SOON AT OUR NEW LOCATION AT 222 S.W. CORBETT, the sign said in blue marker. I was positive that was the address of Angus Paine’s family grocery. I stood there for a minute, wondering whether I should text Angus to double-check the address, or whether I would just be using that as an excuse to text him. Why would I want to text him anyway? I already had a boyfriend. Would Kevin care if I was sending random texts to another boy, even if it was a boy I was solving a mystery for? And was I actually solving a mystery for Angus Paine? Hadn’t I just said a few hours earlier that I didn’t think there was any mystery to be solved? I shook my head like a dog after a bath, to clear my mind of troubling thoughts that would only slow me down.

  Inside, I hurried to the counter and stared down through the glass at a tray of pale yellow snickerdoodles, as if I might want to buy some. It was way too hot for cookies, too hot for anything. The tired ceiling fan stirred around the smells of vanilla and butter.

  Where was the counter person, anyway? The longer I stood there, the more wiggly I got. I bounced first one leg, then the other. Any minute now my mother would be standing on the sidewalk, her hands on her hips, staring at me through the pastry shop’s big window. I looked back over my shoulder, back out the window. Nothing. Two girls in baggy shorts straggled past, each carrying an icy coffee drink.

  I drummed my fingers on the glass counter. Once Mrs. Dagnitz had purchased her soap, she’d be wondering where I’d gotten off to, and why I wasn’t back, and what was going on here, had I really needed to use the bathroom or was I just using it as an excuse to run off and call my boyfriend. She sometimes talked about my brothers with their short attention spans, but they had inherited them from her. She was worse than a ferret—obsessed to death about one thing until a minute or two later she was obsessed about something else.

  Finally a tall blond man in a white apron came out from the back, wiping his floury hands on his chest. His hair was the same color as the snickerdoodles, and he wore it in a small ponytail. His face was long and pale, his hands were long and pale, everything was long and pale, like an elf from one of Mark Clark’s video games.

  “So hey,” I said, “when are you guys moving?”

  “Moving?” he said. He scratched his head, then wrapped his arms around his skinny middle. I could tell he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “I saw the sign. In the window.”

  “Oh, right!” He smiled. His front teeth overlapped. “Not sure. Was supposed to be next month, but now we’re just not sure. Can I get you something?”

  “Isn’t that where the Corbett Street Grocery is? At 222 Southwest Corbett?”

  “Where what is?”

  “Where you’re moving?” Adults could be so irritating. They always got on you about the tone of your voice, never stopping to think that if they weren’t so annoying, you wouldn’t be forced to give tone. Either Mr. Elf-Man was just the baker and really didn’t know anything, or he was hiding what he knew, and why would he do that?

  “You’d have to ask Paisley,” he said. “She’ll be in tomorrow.”

  I thanked the baker, then scooted out the door and into the heat. I could feel his curious stare on my back.

  I’d beat cheeks out of there not a moment too soon. Mark Clark and Mrs. Dagnitz walked out of the soap store just as I walked out of the pastry shop.

  Mrs. Dagnitz stopped. “Weren’t you going to Starbucks?”

  “I thought they’d have one in there,” I said. “It was closer.”

  “The Starbucks restrooms are always so nice,” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “They’re so reliable. They always have a nice piece of art and plenty of toilet paper.”

  “This one was fine,” I said. Why did I bother to say anything?

  “You should stick to the Starbucks,” s
he said. “It’s a known entity, and known is always better than unknown.”

  I shut up. I fell into step behind Mark Clark. We continued our search for gelato, which I didn’t even want anymore. Didn’t Mrs. Dagnitz know anything about me? That for me, now, the unknown was better? Or at least more interesting? There are three gelato shops on Twenty-third, but only one of them was acceptable to Mrs. Dagnitz, for some reason I didn’t listen to, something to do with one hundred percent organic something, or recycled whatnot. But the acceptable gelato shop didn’t have any gelato that day because their refrigeration was broken. We drove home with all the windows rolled down. Mrs. Dagnitz had an attack of guilt over using the air-conditioning because it contributed to global warming. I was all for it. Doing our part to keep the polar ice caps good and frozen meant it was too loud to talk, which meant too loud for Mrs. Dagnitz to talk. Her wedding reception was on Saturday. Because I knew I would feel too guilty, I kept myself from counting the hours and days until she cut her second second-wedding cake and would go home to Santa Fe.

  Kevin showed up on his bike just as I was finishing the dishes. We’d had leftover halibut (yuck!), which I’d snuck to Ned, praying to St. Francis of Assisi that there would be no bones. Did dogs choke on bones like people did?

  Through the window over the sink I saw Kevin fly up the driveway on his little bike. Usually, just the sight of Kevin made my internal organs feel as if they were part of a dolphin show, flipping and spinning. But not when I saw him on his bike. He was the largest boy I knew, and he rode the smallest bike. Why? I wrung out the sponge and set it on the window ledge. Mrs. Dagnitz went insane when someone left a soggy sponge in the sink. Ned was sprawled on the kitchen floor by his water bowl, panting. I never realized corgis had such thick coats. I nudged him and he rolled over. I pet his tummy with my foot.

  My middle older brother, Quills, appeared from upstairs, his bass guitar case dangling from one hand. The case was long and black, sinister looking, as if it held a deadly weapon inside and not a musical instrument. Quills poked me in the side to see if he could get me to jump, then looked out the window as Kevin leaned his bike against a tree. Together, we watched as Kevin answered his cell.