Killer Pancake (14 page)

"Well then, take him another cup of coffee." Not five years old. This was true. So at the last minute I poured an ounce of

Tom's VSOP cognac into Julian's second latte. Julian was nineteen, in fact, but he wasn't going to be driving anywhere today, and it was my - our - house, and I thought the kid needed a drink.

Arch steadied the cup, took a whiff, said "Blech," and left the kitchen. Five minutes later he returned, just as I was mixing skim milk into powdered sugar to make a vanilla glaze for the fudge cookies. "Okay. Julian took the coffee and he's out of bed.

He's just kind of staring out the window and saying, 'She was so beautiful, she was so perfect,' and junky stuff like that." He shrugged. "He didn't want me to stay, though."

"Want to help me cook?"

"Sure." He washed his hands, watched what I was do- ing, then meticulously began to spread thin layers of white icing over the dark cookies. As I sat beside him icing my own pile of cookies, I knew better than to ask what he was thinking, and why he had decided to come home from Todd's.

"So," Arch said at length, "d'you think Julian liked Claire so much because she was beautiful or because she was, you know, a good person?"

I considered the icing on one cookie. "I have no idea. Probably both."

"I don't think anyone will ever love me because of my looks."

I iced my last cookie and put down my spatula. "Arch, you are good-looking."

He rolled his eyes, then bent his wrist to ease his glasses back up his nose so he wouldn't have to let go of his spatula.

"You're my mom. You're supposed to say that."

Without looking at him, I started to sprinkle cocoa powder over the first row of iced cookies. The dark chocolate cookies with their pale icing and cocoa dusting looked beautiful. My son, the most precious person to me in the world, thought he was ugly. What's wrong with this picture?

"Arch, I don't care what anyone says, you are attractive."

"Uh-huh. Remember the Valentine's Day dance I went to at Elk Park Prep this year? My first and last dance at that school?"

"But I told you, when you're older you should try again - "

He waved his spatula for me to be quiet. "There was an artist there. The school hired him for, like, entertainment. An artist who makes people look like cartoon characters, you know? What's that called?"

I sighed. "A caricaturist?"

"Yeah. He drew caricatures of all the kids. Instead of dancing, we stood around watching him work. He gave each person's... caricature... titles like Class Hero, Class Brains, Class Beauty. He would exaggerate each kid's appearance, so that they would be flattered, you know?" I nodded, unsure of where this was going.

"So then he did me. He exaggerated how thick my glasses are, how dark my freckles are, the way my chin goes in and my hair sticks out. He wrote in big letters at the bottom Class Nerd. Everybody laughed. So please don't tell me I'm good-looking, when you know and I know and everybody else knows that I'm not."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, sometimes the people at that school just make my flesh crawl - "

"Don't worry, Mom, the guy, the artist, apologized when the dance was over. Everybody was gone by then, but he did say he was sorry. The dance would have been awful without that happening anyway." He waved his spatula dismissively. "Looks like all the cookies are done."

I took his spatula and mine and placed them in the sink. Embarrassed by his revelation, Arch stood up to leave. "Wait, hon, please. Sit down. I want to tell you something."

The air outside was heating up, and with all the cooking, the kitchen was even hotter. Arch threw himself into one of the kitchen chairs while I poured us both some lemonade.

"You know I lived in New Jersey during most of my growing-up years."

"Mom, so what? What does that have to do with anything?"

"Have you ever seen the famous Miss America pageant? It's held in New Jersey. In Atlantic City. When I was growing up, we used to watch it on television. The neighborhood kids, I mean. It seemed like it was our pageant because it was held in our state."

Arch sipped lemonade. "I think that pageant is stupid. Todd and I always watch horror movies when it's on."

"Listen. When I was fourteen, I was the oldest girl in our group of neighborhood kids. That year, I remember, we all watched the pageant and ate lemon Popsicles. At one point the announcer said this and that about the contestants, what they had to do to enter, blah, blah, and that young women had to be eighteen. So one of the kids in our little group piped up, 'Gosh, Goldy, you've just got four years to go!' "

Arch furrowed his brow. "So is that supposed to make me feel better about being called a nerd? That your friends wanted you to enter the Miss America contest?"

I reached out for his hand, but he pulled it away. "You don't understand. All the eyes of my friends turned to me.

Expectantly. I wasn't long-legged and skinny and I never would be. But that's the problem. Whoever said girls should be expected to be in beauty contests? Why should anyone expect it? And that's what I'm trying to say. They called you a nerd. Whether. or not you believed it, you accepted it. What I realized at age fourteen is that everybody was counting on me to want to be in a beauty contest. But it was a contest that I had no intention of ever, ever entering." I took a deep breath. "The problem is, if you're a woman, and maybe if you're a man too, when you get to be a teenager, it seems as if your whole life is going to be absorbed by a long series of stupid beauty contests, and I'm not just talking about Miss America. I'm talking about the way people judge you when you walk down the street. Or walk into a class. Or go to the gym. And the only solution is to say, 'I'm not going to play this game! I quit the beauty contest! Now and forever!'"

Arch waited to see if I had finished what I was going to say. He took a careful sip of his lemonade. Then he said, "May I go check on Julian now?"

I exhaled, suddenly exhausted. "Sure. I'm going to see Marla."

"Okay. I'll let you know if Julian comes out of the bedroom." He paused, then said, "I don't think he's crying because Claire was so beautiful. I think he's just feeling really empty."

"Yes, Arch. I'm sure you're right." Feeling disoriented and exhausted by my diatribe, I gathered up my purse and keys.

That was when Arch did something that surprised me. He walked over and gave me a hug.

At the hospital, a new receptionist referred me to the CCU nurses station. "We don't know when your sister will be back,

Miss Korman," a nurse informed me. "They just wheeled her down to the cath lab."

"Will the angiogram take more than an hour?" I asked.

"It shouldn't, but you never know."

The thought of waiting in that hospital for an indeterminate amount of time seemed unbearable. I looked at the clock: three-thirty. Courage, I said to myself. She's your best friend, and you're going to be there for her. "Thank you. I'll be back in an hour." I still had to get my check from Prince & Grogan, so I drove over to the mall. A larger group of demonstrators was massed at the outside entrance to the department store than had been the previous day. Because of the accident, I doubted the police would let them back into the garage that day to wave their signs at the other entrance. Afraid that Shaman Krill might catch sight of me, I parked the van at the edge of a nearby bank parking lot. As soon as I got out of the car, I could hear the hoots and chants of the activists. Most of them were wearing white sweatsuits. As I came closer, I could see the chanting white-clad group wore blindfolds.

Hip, hop! I can't see! Hip, hop! Whaja do to me?

Scores of hand-held placards denouncing Mignon Cosmetics' animal-testing practices bounced up and down above the crowd. I looked around helplessly for a way to get into the store that did not involve trying to slip past crowd restraining sawhorses.

A thin stream of shoppers was headed for a nearby pasta place. I followed.

Once inside the mall, I ran up a chrome and polished granite staircase and entered Prince & Grogan on the second level.

Bright lights and mellow piano music - coming not from speakers but from a real piano player in the center of the store - took me off guard. After a moment of attempting to get oriented, I saw a far-off neon sign. OFFICES. Someone there, presumably, would have my check.

I negotiated a labyrinth of sparkling crystal and china displays, blaring audio equipment, whirring small appliances, and large, blank-faced mirrors. These were not like Tom's quasi-antique mirrors with their charming, wavy glass. These were oversize, glaring department store looking-glasses, the kind the ad maven surely had in mind when he said, Make a woman insecure enough and you can sell her anything. I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see myself in my denim skirt, white T-shirt, and sneakers;

I just wanted to find the department store office.

Eventually, I was successful. The Prince & Grogan personnel, security, billing, credit, and customer service departments were grouped together in a section of the second floor that was still being renovated. After several misdirections I finally ended up sitting in a tiny office across from a straight-haired woman named Lisa, who claimed she handled accounts payable. Lisa shuffled through papers and files with no luck, however, and went off mumbling about finding someone from security.

While she was gone I looked around her office, which was in desperate need of the upcoming paint job. The interior walls of the old Montgomery Ward had been covered with a mind-numbing aquamarine pigment. On the far wall of the office, paler squares indicated spots where framed recognition of merit awards, maybe even family photos, had once hung. Next to them, also painted aquamarine, was what looked like a medicine cabinet or key box. On the floor, computer print-outs were neatly stacked two feet high. Then by the wall closest to me was a gray set of file cabinets. My fingers itched to open the cabinet and look up

Satterfield, Claire. But with my luck, not only would the drawer be locked, but Lisa of accounts payable would sashay back in while my hand was still on the handle.

Lisa did indeed sashay back in, and luckily my hands were placed innocently in my lap.

"The head of security has your check, and his office is locked. Nick's out dealing with some insurance investigators today, and was wondering if you could come back tomorrow."

I wanted to growl something unappreciative, such as Why doesn't the bonehead just mail it to me? but I was coming back to the mall the next morning for the food fair. Besides, after a few years of running my small business, I was becoming somewhat cynical. Promises of checks coming in the mail all too frequently meant We might mail this when we get to it. Then again, we might not.

I checked my watch again: three forty-five. I still felt repulsed by the idea of going back to the hospital to wait, so I made the instantaneous decision to go down to the Mignon counter. Just briefly, just to see if Dusty and Harriet and maybe even Tom were there. I had Julian grieving at home. Perhaps if I returned with something to tell him...

Before I knew it I was on the down escalator. As I descended I could see both Harriet and Dusty on the floor below.

Harriet was talking to a hunchbacked woman whose white hair was piled elaborately on her head. One of Harriet's hands held a bottle, the other tapped the bottle's shiny gold top.

"And what's that one called?" I heard the older woman ask as I neared them.

"Tangerine Tide," confided Harriet smugly. "It's coordinated with Raspberry Dunes and Apricot Sunset - "

I imagined a beach full of fruit.

" - and it's exactly the hue the designers are using for the fashion colors of late summer. We sell so much of it, we can't keep it in stock!"

"Well, then!" said the white-haired woman decisively. "I'll take some!"

Dusty was lifting the long, heavy pages of what looked like a ledger. A handsome, balding customer had approached the counter and was picking up bottle after bottle and appraising each one. Dusty, shaking her head over the pages, seemed not to see him. She did catch a glimpse of me, however, and came scuttling over. Her forest-green uniform barely swathed her ample tummy. Her orange-gold hair was somewhat wilder than usual, and her eyes were bloodshot.

"Goldy, did you hear about Claire?" Her voice was raw. I figured she'd been crying for quite some time.

"I did. I'm sorry. You all must be devastated."

She took a shuddery breath. "We are. How's Julian doing?"

"Not well. I'm trying to convince him to take some time off."

She said, "We have to work. Do you believe that? So, the cameras are watching. Are you interested in something? What kind of problems are you experiencing with your face?" she asked brightly.

"What cameras? Can I look around? Will you show me?"

"I can't now," she replied softly. She brought out a slender white tube with a gold top. "This is Timeless Skin." She squinted at me. "This will do wonders for those dark circles under your eyes. Why don't you let me do a free makeover?"

"Er, thanks, but not now. I was thinking that sleep would do wonders for my dark circles."

"Well," Dusty said, scrutinizing my face, "how about some Ageless Beauty/Endless Appeal night cream for when you're getting all that extra sleep? What kind of skin regimen are you using for your face?"

"No regimen." I gestured at the stacks of glistening bottles arrayed on the glass countertop. "Nothing, really. I don't want to buy anything, Dusty. I just wanted to check on you. Because of Claire."

She shook her head. "We have a new line of - " she began.

The man at the counter cleared his throat loudly; Dusty glanced nervously at him.

"Go help him," I pleaded. "I'm really just looking."

"Okay," Dusty said with a hasty look back at the ledger book. "But I doubt he's going to buy anything."

I moved away from the blushes and scanned a pyramid of Carefree Color lipsticks. Cherryblossom Cheesecake. Fudge

Souffle. Rose-hips Revolution. The person who named Mignon lipsticks must have been a dessert caterer.