Pish Posh (2 page)

“It wasn't difficult, after all—not if you really paid attention. Most people don't, however, ” Clara explained. “First, I noticed your shoes when you came in. They were dull and scuffed. The very first thing that a brand-new Nobody does is neglect his footwear. Then I noticed that you ordered the tapioca pudding, which is a dessert that people order when they are feeling nostalgic about their childhood. And important people get nostalgic about their childhood only when they are no longer important. But most of all”—Clara took a breath and lifted her chin—“I noticed that your right hand was trembling. Just a tiny bit. But you are an eye surgeon, Dr. Piff, and an eye surgeon
cannot
have a shaky hand. ”

“Very clever, Clara.” Dr. Piff nodded appreciatively. “And you are absolutely correct. ”

“I'm sorry, Dr. Piff,” Clara said, and she looked away. She wished he would leave her alone with her tuna-fish sandwich.

Then Dr. Piff did the most extraordinary thing. He reached across the table and removed her sunglasses. Clara gasped and her back stiffened.

“What did you do that for?” she demanded angrily.

“I used to take you skating in Central Park on Sundays,” he said, absently holding the glasses between his fingers. Clara began to wonder if he had gone mad. She glanced around the restaurant to see if she could summon one of the busboys to help her, but no one was nearby.

“You were such an enchanting child, ” he continued. “You used to whistle while you skated. You said it helped you keep your balance. ”

“I don't remember that at all, Dr. Piff. Please give me back my glasses. ”

Dr. Piff looked very seriously into Clara's eyes. No one had ever looked so seriously and closely at her eyes before. It made her feel very small and breakable. Then Dr. Piff sighed and handed her the glasses, which she promptly put back on.

“You have a very cunning pair of eyes, Clara.” He had lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “But surely you can't know
everything
that happens at Pish Posh. ”

“Of course I do!” she said indignantly. “I know everything that happens in this restaurant! You don't believe me? Look over there.” She pointed to Fiona Babbish, the pale, sickly, rather tragic-looking young heiress, who always dined alone at a table near the back. “Do you see that fly on the edge of her bowl of squid chowder? That fly came in through the front door at seven twenty-eight P.M., hovered around my mother's head for seven seconds, then flew close to the princess of Thailand's baguette, where her bodyguard tried to catch it in his hand, but missed. Now Fiona Babbish will stare at it sadly for a few seconds—look at her lower lip droop—decide that it has ruined her entire dinner—look at her eyes well up with tears—and will stand up and leave ...
now.”
At which point Fiona Babbish stood on her thin, feeble legs, adjusted her pink Chanel suit, and minced out of the restaurant.

“And yet,” continued Dr. Piff, as if he hadn't heard her, still in a quiet voice, “you have failed to notice a most peculiar and mysterious thing that is happening right under your nose. ”

“Nonsense!” Clara declared. “If there was anything at all peculiar or mysterious happening here, I would be the first to know about it.”

Dr. Piff smiled a little and shrugged. “Perhaps it is better that you haven't noticed. It would probably unnerve such an elegant young lady as yourself. Well, Clara”—Dr. Piff stood up and put on his gray hat, then tipped it at her—“I wish you a good evening and a life free of troubles. ”

With that, he walked out of Pish Posh for the last time.

C
lara sat at her table a moment longer, staring absently at the remaining three triangles of tuna-fish sandwich. The conversation with Dr. Piff had upset her. What in the world had he meant?
Peculiar and mysterious?
How could there be something at Pish Posh that she had failed to notice? She decided Dr. Piff was mistaken. Or perhaps he was just a liar. She thought about what he'd told her—that she used to whistle to keep her balance while she ice-skated. That was simply not true. She never, ever whistled. Whistling was for people who had unimportant lives. Her maid whistled, for instance. She determined then and there that Dr. Piff was a chronic liar and that she would think no more about it. But still, when she picked up her sandwich to take a bite, she found that she had lost her appetite.

The customers in the restaurant were no longer watching her. In fact, they had forgotten all about her, since she had clearly chosen the Nobody and they were safe. Her eyes drifted over to the princess of Thailand, who was only two years older than she was. The princess had stopped throwing bits of baguette, and now she had engaged one of her bodyguards in a sword fight, using their utensils. She was laughing loudly, and all the bodyguards were laughing, too. She was acting just like the girls at Clara's school, which was very unbecoming of a princess. In a fit of pique, Clara thought that she would have the princess declared a Nobody.
That
would stop her laughing! But then, she knew that was impossible. That was the problem with royalty—they almost never became Nobodies, even when they acted like savages.

Clara rose and walked up to her mother.

“I'm going home,” Clara said.

“So soon?”

Just then, Prim LeDander and her friend Bitsey Fopah walked through the door. They were both terribly thin, terribly rich, and, amazingly, without eyebrows.

“Hello, ladies, and how are—” Lila started, but when she noticed the pale, smooth skin where their eyebrows should have been, she stopped.

“Are you looking at our eyebrows, darling?” Prim asked.

“Not at all.” Lila quickly collected herself. “Why on earth should I look at your eyebrows?”

“We've had them waxed,” Prim said in a quiet, confidential voice.

“It was dreadfully painful,” moaned Bitsey.

“It's all the rage,” said Prim. “On account of the upcoming medieval costume exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. ”

“The women were born without eyebrows back in the Middle Ages, you see, ” Bitsey explained, and she raised the skin where her eyebrows should have been to show just how shocking this piece of information was.

“Nonsense, Bitsey! They simply plucked them all out.” Prim turned to Lila. “It makes the eyes look wider, you see. ” She opened her eyes wide to demonstrate.

“Extraordinary!” Lila exclaimed.

“The museum is going to choose the ‘Face of the Middle Ages' among New York's high society—” Bitsey said.

“Of which we are most certainly the highest,” Prim added.

“—and whomever they choose will have her face cast in a mold, out of which they will create the mannequins that wear the costumes in the exhibit. Can you imagine! Your own face being on permanent display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art! Oh, wouldn't that make one's friends revoltingly jealous!”

“Deliciously so!” Prim agreed.

 

Clara went into the kitchen to say good night to her father, Pierre Frankofile. He was the owner of Pish Posh, but he was also the chef. Right now, he stood behind the shelves of gleaming metal where they put the plates of food, and was sautéing onions in a black-singed pan. He wore a white chef's jacket and a white chef's hat, and his round face was sweaty and pink.

“I'm going home, Papa,” said Clara. She had to speak very loudly over the clatter of pots and pans and the roar of the dishwasher and the yells of the waiters calling their orders. The kitchen had at least ten other people working in it, chopping garlic, grilling meat, stirring soup, and in the back, washing racks of dishes and glasses in a giant silver dishwasher. Clara did not like the kitchen. It was dirty and hot and chaotic, and the workers were, of course, not the sort she cared to have anything to do with. In fact, she only ever came into the kitchen to say good night to her father.

Pierre Frankofile turned away from his pan of onions to say good night to his daughter, when his eyes suddenly shifted to the woman ladling up the soup.

“Audrey, you
imbecile!
You have garnished the soup with a carrot peel instead of parsley! Can you not tell the difference ? !” He spoke with a slight French accent, having grown up in a luxurious chateau in France, with a slew of nannies and governesses, before moving to the United States as a teenager.

“I'm sorry, Chef Frankofile,” Audrey, the soup-maker, said. She was a tall, slender young woman with a mass of bright red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her thick glasses were steamed up at the moment from the squid chowder simmering in the pot.

“Well, have your eyes examined, you blind bat, or I will slice off your right thumb and serve it up as shish kebob, is that understood?!” Mr. Frankofile's face was perfectly red now and his eyes were bulging. Yet no one else in the kitchen even bothered to look up from what they were doing, since he yelled at them and called them nasty things on a regular basis.

“Well, good night, Papa, ” Clara said.

“Oui, bon soir,
Cla—hey you! The new dishwasher! Yes, you, the boneheaded moron!” A perspiring, tattooed young man had just pulled a tray full of water glasses out of the steamy dishwasher. “If you break one of those glasses, I will hang you upside down from your—” Clara missed the rest of her father's tirade as she walked out the back door.

Outside, the evening was warm, but there was an occasional cool breeze that felt wonderful on Clara's shoulders. Across the street was Washington Square Park, a busy, loud park with a great marble arch at its entranceway. Her father had told her that he bought the restaurant because it faced the arch, which reminded him of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The streets were busy, full of people chatting and laughing on their way to somewhere else—the theater, a party. They were people who would never be allowed in Pish Posh-not in a million years—and it amazed her that they could still be so cheerful.

On her walk home she thought again of what Dr. Piff had said. What on earth was he talking about? Her mind sifted through all the possibilities, but she could come up with nothing and, frustrated, she resolved not to think about it again.

At least not until tomorrow.

The Frankofiles lived in a high-rise luxury apartment building, just a few blocks uptown from Pish Posh. They owned the top two floors, so that Lila and Pierre lived on the thirty-fourth floor and Clara lived on the thirty-fifth floor. This way, Lila and Pierre explained to their friends, no one got in anyone else's way.

“Hello?” Clara called when she entered her apartment. Sometimes the maid was still there in the early evening. She listened for whistling, but the apartment was perfectly silent.

To take her mind off Dr. Piff, she thought she should try to amuse herself. She ambled past the grand living room with its sumptuous Moroccan carpets and its green silk couches and armchairs and, hanging above it all, a great chandelier with a hundred crystal teardrops, which always threatened to clink against one another but never actually did.

After the living room came a tremendously long corridor. There were a great many doors on each side of the corridor, and as Clara walked, she stretched her arms out to the side and let her hands idly drift across the doorknobs.

No, not that one, not that one..., she thought to herself as she ticked off each room in her head. When the corridor took a sharp turn, she came to a room on her right and stopped.

“Maybe.” She turned the knob and entered.

Twisting all across the room, looping over and under itself, was a miniature roller coaster, its highest peak exactly over the room's door. On the far side, three roller-coaster cars, red, blue, and yellow, were waiting to be boarded. The walls were painted to look like a state fair, complete with sloppy, fat children eating corn dogs and a sinister-looking fortune-teller hunkered under a tent.

In the center of the room was a real cotton-candy machine, stacked high with paper cones. Clara turned it on, then expertly put the cone in the machine and let the candy billow up around it. She liked the sweet, hot smell and the sight of the whipping pink sugar. But once she had made the cone, she didn't really want to eat it. Still, it seemed the right sort of thing to have on a roller coaster, and she held on to it as she climbed into the first car—the red one—and pushed a button on its front panel. A great whirring motor started up, and loud music with a heavy beat began to play. The car lurched forward, trailing the other two behind it, and began a slow ascent up the first hill.

Clara's father had told her that she used to scream so loudly when she went on the roller coaster, he could hear her in his apartment below. She supposed it must be true, since her father never lied. Yet she could not remember ever having screamed on the roller coaster or anyplace else. In fact, there were so many things that Clara could not remember about being a child that she often wondered if something was terribly wrong with her. Did she have friends when she was little? Had her mother ever zipped up her jacket for her? Had her father ever picked her up when she cried?
Had
she ever cried? She had no idea. The past was so fuzzy. She might have asked her parents these things, but she was afraid they would consider her questions silly and childish, and she would not risk it.

Her first clear memory was of when she was eight years old. She tried on a pair of large dark sunglasses in a boutique on Fifth Avenue. Behind those glasses she could stare long and hard at people in the store, and they never even noticed. She purchased the glasses, and soon after that she began to sit at her little round table in the back of Pish Posh, scanning the room for Nobodies.