The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (14 page)

“We would like you to feed it once while we are gone. Only once. We would like you to do this for us. Will you?” she asked. “For Geoffrey and me?”

“I will if you tell me what a starter is.”

“It's our flour-and-water mixture that contains the yeast used to make bread rise. Ours is a very famous starter. We sent to San Francisco for it. I haven't used it yet because it is still so new, but when I do use it, our bread will be sourdough.”

“And you want me to feed it?”

She giggled girlishly and reached for my hand, which I had been keeping out of reach. “It's the yeast, silly. Yeast is a living organism. Yeast needs to be fed. It is a type of fungus, and it is used in fermenting bread to make it rise. Although the instructions say we can let our starter go for even a month without feeding it, it's new, and it is special. We don't want it to go so long. I saved its feeding for today, so if you'll come over to our house, I'll show you how.”

We entered the back door of 17 Schuyler Place. The Klingers' was the first house on Schuyler Place to add on a room in the back to use as a living room. They had also completely renovated the kitchen, adding large windows along the back that captured the afternoon sun to warm and brighten the kitchen. It was the nicest room in the house. The countertops had more appliances than I had ever seen outside a Williams-Sonoma catalog. On a magnetic holder there was a full range of knives from small to large, like the bars of a xylophone, and hanging from an overhead rack were pans in more shapes than you would find in a geometry book.

From her refrigerator, Gwendolyn took a pint-size jar that had a rubber gasket and a metal clamp to keep it sealed. She opened the jar, and a sour smell filled the room. I winced, but Gwendolyn seemed not to notice. I coughed. “Can you tell me what that is on top?” I
asked, pointing to a ditchwater-dark liquid that floated on top of the jar.

Gwendolyn smiled. “It's called
hootch,”
she said. “It's the liquid that comes from the fermentation. Yeast is also used to make beer and wine.” Then, with loving patience, she showed me how to feed a starter. With every step, she refined the instructions with a running commentary of do's and don't's. When she stirred the mixture with a wooden spoon, she warned, “Never use a metal spoon with yeast.” She kept up a low hum of conversation as she slowly, slowly blended in the liquid until the mixture started to froth. She carefully, carefully measured out a cup full of the frothing mixture and washed it down her disposal. As she rinsed out and dried the measuring cup, she told me, “We don't use tap water. It's too chlorinated.” Telling me to make certain that the bottom of the meniscus is at the onecup line when held at eye-level, she poured bottled water—not too cold, not too hot—into the cup and then into the jar and followed that with a cup of white powdery stuff from a canister marked FARINE but that looked like flour to me. She stirred the mixture with the wooden spoon again and covered the jar with a dishtowel. “We allow it to sit at room temperature for a little while so that the new ingredients can communicate with the old before we cap it and return it to the
refrigerator.” She handed me the key to her back door. “We would like you to come over Friday and do this for us. Just this once.” She folded her hands as if in prayer and asked, “Will you?”

I nodded.

“Do you have any questions?”

I didn't want to have one, but I did. “What's meniscus?” I asked.

“The convex upper surface of a liquid.”

“And that's to be at the one-cup line?”

“The bottom of it is. That is, the bottom of the curve of the meniscus is to be at the one-cup mark.”

“When at eye-level,” I said.

“Yes, at eye-level,” she repeated. And then she asked, “Would you like me to write out the directions?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“Would you mind repeating them?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Well?”

I pursed my lips, raised my eyebrows, and stretched my neck toward her so that she could read my body language. I said nothing.

“Oh,” she said, smiling awkwardly. “You feel you already know them?”

I nodded.

•   •   •

The weather had held that whole week. By Friday, Uncle Alex was worried that his roses would set buds too soon and be nipped by a late freeze. I fed the starter at midmorning and went back to Uncle's, where we had an early lunch, after which I mixed up the paint that became known as orange sherbet. Uncle Alex supervised, which made him late for the Time Zone. He called Uncle Morris and told him he was running late and asked me to walk Tartufo while he cleaned up for work. The sun that had warmed us all day was high and hot as I put Tartufo on the leash and sauntered over to the Klingers' to put the starter back in the refrigerator.

The kitchen door was not even all the way open when I knew that something was wrong. It stank. I thought I would pass out or throw up. Before I could catch my breath, Tartufo darted past me and was licking hootch off the floor. Splinters of glass were sprinkled over a moonscape of farine paste. Puddles of hootch were everywhere.

Tartufo was racing around the kitchen, slipping on all fours, licking the floor and scattering mounds of gray-looking farine. He was getting wild. I had to get him out of there. Slipping and sliding and using words I had only read in banned books, I made my way over to Tartufo and managed to grab him by the collar. He would not budge. He had been trained for years to hunt
the musty smell of truffles. What a time for his training to kick in!

“Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop it now!” But Tartufo was in hootch heaven. He was licking the floor clean. I knew that he was already feeling no pain, even—God forbid!—the pain of swallowing glass.

I made my way back across the slippery kitchen floor and ran to Uncle's house. Fortunately, Uncle Alex had not yet left for work. He recognized panic when he saw it. He ran next door with me. He entered first and quietly sneaked up behind Tartufo and grabbed him by his hindquarters. Tartufo looked back at Uncle very briefly—I think he snarled—and returned to lapping up the foul-smelling stuff—liquid and paste. His paws made a sucking sound as Uncle lifted him up off the floor.

When we returned to 19 Schuyler Place, Tartufo started running around the kitchen. Around and around. “He's drunk,” Uncle said.

“Should we give him black coffee?”

“Couldn't hurt,” Uncle replied. Handing me the leash, he told me, “Try to get him to walk it off.”

I took him around the block, tugging on the leash to make him keep going. His stomach was swollen, and the skin on his underbelly, which was never a thing of beauty, looked like an uncooked egg roll that a sloppy chef had dribbled with soy sauce. When I got back,
Uncle Alex was brewing coffee. (This was a household where instant coffee was not allowed. Uncle Morris said that he spit on it.)

Tartufo curled up in his corner, farted three times, and fell asleep.

“Do you think he will be all right?” I asked, worried.

“Wake him and keep him moving,” Uncle replied. He looked down at his trousers and shirt. The farine was starting to dry like splotches of Portland cement. “As soon as the coffee brews, cool some down and see if you can get him to drink some. I've got to go upstairs and clean up. Please call your uncle and tell him that I missed the bus.”

Uncle Morris started every day a little bit irritated with his brother. This would be the second call about Uncle Alex's being late. On a normal one-call day when Alex missed his bus, Morris would explode. I had had enough explosions for the day, so I began by saying, “Uncle Morris, this is Margaret, and I've made a terrible mistake.”

It wasn't until I reviewed for him what I had done that I realized that I had skipped one step. In the mass of sub-instructions about meniscuses and eye-levels, I had forgotten to put a tea towel over the jar while the starter communicated. I had screwed the lid back on too soon. The sun beating in through the Klingers'
bright, sunny windows had made the gases build up pressure and caused the jar to burst.

Uncle Morris said, “Don't worry. It was a mistake. I'll wait here until Alex comes. As soon as he arrives, I'll come home to help.” Before he hung up, he asked, “Is Tartufo okay?”

“He's sleeping it off.”

By the time I felt it was safe to leave Tartufo, the flour paste had hardened and stuck to the spotless Klinger floors. Uncle Morris was home by then, so he and I put wet paper towels over the globs to moisten them so that we could scrape them off without causing damage to the floor. It took hours.

I insisted on the Uncles giving me an advance on my allowance so that I would be responsible for paying for a new starter and for Federal Express delivery, but, it did not arrive until after Geoffrey and Gwendolyn had returned from their Arizona torts. I went over to their house with the new starter and an apology. When I told them the part about Tartufo, they didn't laugh.

“I skipped a step,” I explained.

“If you remember, Margaret, I had volunteered to write them down, and I did ask you to review the procedure.”

“I remember.”

“Then you would say it was negligence?”

“But not willfully done. I did not do it on purpose. I
made a mistake,” I insisted. “I didn't mean to kill your starter, and I am sorry about it. If my apology and cleaning up the damage and buying you this new starter aren't enough, you'll have to tort me.”

Geoffrey laughed unpleasantly. “No, no,” he said. He examined the starter that I had brought over. “This is from the same place we got ours, Gwennie. What do you say we just start over?”

Gwennie nodded and murmured, “I
had
asked her to repeat the instructions.”

I left.

Neither Gwendolyn nor Geoffrey had asked how Tartufo was doing.

Later that spring when the Uncles did due maintenance on the towers—after they had painted the towers with my orange-sherbet paint—Geoffrey Klinger called the towers an “off-color joke.” Uncle Alex said to him, “The towers themselves are a joke, Mr. Klinger. They would be useless if they weren't.” To which Geoffrey Klinger replied, “You and I have very different definitions of
useless.
” To which Uncle Alex replied, “And jokes.”

—
time and your side of history

As
I
stood across the street and looked at the Klingers' own tastefully painted sign, I wished that Geoffrey and
Gwendolyn had gone to Arizona to study tortes instead of torts. They undoubtedly suffered from OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. Such people are to be pitied. But the Klingers were only part of the problem. The full weight of the treachery belonged to the Home Owners Association of Old Town and the Redevelopment Authority. The Klingers were enemies only because they were part of them. What made the home owners and the redevelopment people think they had the right to destroy something that had been part of the town for longer than they had been?

I had defined the enemy. I was prepared to fight.

It would be me against them, just as it had been me against the Alums. But there was this important difference: I would be fighting to save something other than my own sweet self.

—
When you get older,
édes
Margitkám

In only one day, I had already gotten much older.

—
you realize that all you have is time

I
checked my digital watch. I had four and a half hours before Uncle Morris returned. Four and a half hours that were all my own. Four and a half hours to think and eight and a half days to take action.

—You have time and your side of history

I
didn't have much time, but there was forty-five years of history on my side.

—
And that's all you have

But that was not all I had. I also had two of the three steps it would take to change things.

The first step was being unhappy with things the way they were. I already had that step well behind me. I was more than unhappy. I was pissed.

The second step was having a desire to change things. Well, I was there already. I was burning with desire to change things.

The third step was having a plan.

Unfortunately, that was still in my future.

Uncle Alex had said that you can't stop history from happening because the entire past tense is history. But the future is choices. And the choices of a single person can change future history even if that person is underage and does not have a driver's license or a credit card. I thought about Joan of Arc (but not her fate) and Anne Frank (but not her fate either).

As soon as I had a plan, I was ready to change history.

T
he minute I got back to the house, I dialed the number that Mrs. Vanderwaal had given me. I expected to get an answering machine but got a human voice instead. Unprepared, I asked, “Who is this?”

A pleasant male voice answered, “This is Peter.” Pause. “Now, who are you?”

“I am Margaret Rose Kane,” I began, and then I rattled on. “I am the daughter of Naomi Landau, who is the daughter of Margaret Rose Landau, who was the sister of Morris and Alexander Rose. They were your neighbors when you lived at 21 Schuyler Place. I am their grandniece, Margaret Rose, and we need to talk.”

“Can we start at the beginning? Please?” Peter Vanderwaal had lightly dusted his native Epiphany accent with the vowels of the British royal family. But there was also something welcoming and kind in his voice. “This sounds like a matter of some urgency.”

“Very urgent,” I said.

“Because?”

“It is urgent because the towers are coming down
unless we can save them.” I heard him gasp. I began reading him the newspaper article. He interrupted when I had gotten no further than
“The city has awarded the contract to demolish the structures to
—” He asked me to repeat what I had just read.