Authors: Lila Perl
They had all sorts of crispy fried things at the counter and lots of roasted meats and stews all sloshing around in thick brown gravy. It just made my eyes pop and my mouth water. I figured if I could eat enough of that stuff every day at lunchtime I wouldn't even mind having a cold apple and a piece of sour-tasting cheese for supper. I finally made up my mind what to choose and got something called Hungarian goulash, with corn and French fried potatoes on the side. The lady who took my money at the cash register shook her head and said, “Too starchy.”
On the way back to the table there were so many kids milling around I nearly tipped my tray bumping into one of them. It was a boy, brown-haired, wearing glasses, and with a funny sort of grin on his face. He looked familiar, but at first I couldn't place where I'd seen him before.
“Oh, 'scuse me,” he said. “Hey, let me take that for you. Where are you sitting?”
I pointed with my chin to the table straight ahead where Mary Lou had already sat down with her cocoa. He put the tray down and, with that funny grin still on his face, he said, “Hi, Mary Lou.” Then, before I could thank him he was gone, walking fast and slithering between the tables like somebody in one of those walking races where you're not allowed to run.
“I guess you know him,” I said, sitting down next to Mary Lou.
“Oh sure, everybody does. His name's Roddy Fenton. He's all right but he's tricky. Know what I mean?”
I wasn't surprised when Mary Lou said his name. Of courseâit was the same face I'd seen for a second at Glenda's front door after the airplane zoomed into the room. I wondered if I should say anything about that to Mary Lou and right away I decided not to. When you're new in town, it's better to ask questions than to tell tales.
I dug into the food on my tray. Mary Lou was still stirring her cocoa and hadn't even opened her lunch bag yet. “If I stop stirring it, it'll get scummy,” she whined. “I just know it will.”
I kept on eating. The Hungarian goulash was awfully good.
“Don't you find that stew kind of fatty?” Mary Lou wanted to know. “I'd be sure there'd be little bitty pieces of fat clinging to all those pieces of meat. So hard to see them, too, with all the potatoes and carrots and gravy and everything.”
“What if there are? Fat's not poison, you know.”
“Ugh,” Mary Lou said, shuddering. She looked at me a moment. “I'm surprised you're not fat, eating the way you do.” She lowered her voice. “Like Glenda Waite. My, she's
really
a fat pudding, isn't she? By the way, she was here just a little while ago and she gave me a message to give you. Something about she's seeing her grade adviser at three o'clock, so don't wait for her after school. Said she couldn't stay to see you because she was late for her French class.”
“Glenda was here?”
“Um-hmmm. Like I said, just for a minute. I found her standing here when I got back to the table with my cocoa. She said she recognized your red sweater hanging over the chair and my books on the table. I always cover my books with flower-sprigged paper because I think it's so pretty. Are you two really old friends from California?”
“Well no, not exactly. I only met her last week.” I couldn't help thinking how fast everything had been happening lately. “I only just moved here to Havenhurst last week.”
With her long, thin fingers, Mary Lou started to untwist the top of the paper bag that had her sandwich in it. “Oh, I see,” she said slowly. “Then I guess you don't know her very well, do you?”
“No, I guess not. I guess I don't know anybody around here very well yet.”
Mary Lou nodded her head with an air of great wisdom. “Um-hmmm. That's right. Oh well, you'll find out.”
She sounded so mysterious that I couldn't resist asking, “Find out what?”
Mary Lou reached one hand into the paper bag, waving her head around slowly so that her straight white-blonde hair fell like a curtain of satin fringe. Her eyelashes, too, I noticed were very very pale, almost white.
“You'll find out,” she said, “that Glenda's a squealer.” I must have looked puzzled because she repeated, “That's what I said, a squealer. Now, you know, if there's one thing people don't like it's somebody . . .”
Mary Lou had just drawn her sandwich out of the bag. “Why, that's funny,” she said, staring at the sandwich that was still wrapped in wax paper. “She never put lettuce on my sandwich before. She knows I hate it when it gets all soft and slimy. And why ever's this sandwich so fat?”
I was really beginning to get fed up with Mary Lou. I'd already finished every single thing on my plate
and
my two chocolate-covered doughnuts
and
my glass of milk. And Mary Lou was still stirring her cocoa, which had probably gone stone cold, and hadn't even opened her silly old watercress sandwich yet. Glenda might be a “fat pudding” and maybe even a “squealer,” whatever that was supposed to mean, but I certainly preferred eating with her.
“Mary Lou,” I said, “it's nearly the end of the lunch period.” Lots of kids had already left the cafeteria. “Why don't you open that sandwich and eat it and get it over with?”
“I will,” she said determinedly. She started unfolding the wax paper as though she really meant business. Then she stopped and stared at the unwrapped sandwich some more. Finally she took hold of the edge of the top slice of bread and started to tip it up to see what was inside.
I was so disgusted with her I put my elbow on the table and rested the side of my head in my hand while I looked as far away as I could, across to the other side of the lunchroom.
All of a sudden I heard a scream like an exploding siren coming from just behind my left ear. Right on top of this there was a terrible clatter followed by a crash.
I turned around to see Mary Lou's chair lying on the floor. Mary Lou herself must have jumped up from her seat and was already ten feet away holding her head between her hands and still letting out a sound like a police siren. Kids were all over the place trying to find out what the excitement was about. One of them even jumped up on the table where we'd been eating.
Then I looked down at the table and right beside me I saw Mary Lou's sandwich where she had left it. The top slice of bread was knocked off it and so were the lettuce leaves. And there, on the bottom slice of bread, they lay. Two
scaly, yellow, raw chicken feet, side by side, the little clawlike toes covered with creased crackly skin and strewn with bits of feathers.
I looked up. The teacher who was on lunchroom duty had her arm around Mary Lou's shoulders and was leading her, still sputtering hysterically, toward the exit. The teacher tapped me on the shoulder. “You come too, please. Bring her books along and her sweater.” She glanced down at the chicken-foot sandwich. “Oh, that's just too disgusting. I wonder who could have played such a mean trick?”
I wondered, too.
Roddy had shown up in the cafeteria during lunchtime. And Mary Lou had said he was “tricky.” Then another thought came to me. Glenda had also been in the cafeteria during lunchtime, even though I hadn't seen her, and Glenda hadn't liked my having lunch with Mary Lou. Could Glenda have been the one who put the chicken-foot sandwich in Mary Lou's lunch bag? What a thought!
It was all too confusing and too difficult to try to figure out just then. So I picked up Mary Lou's things and my own, and followed Mary Lou and the teacher out of the cafeteria through the crowd of staring and whispering school kids.
After school that afternoon I was helping Inez paint the big upstairs bedroom when the doorbell rang.
“Sara love,” Inez said, from the third rung of the stepladder, “see who that is and tell them we don't want any. I've simply got to finish this ceiling today.”
I went downstairs and saw a plump, smiling woman standing on the other side of the long, narrow window beside the front door. She was rapping on the glass with her knuckles and calling out in a loud musical voice, “Yoo-hoo. Anybody home?” Her other arm was curled around a big crimson cooking pot with a cover on it.
“Hello dear,” she shouted, when she saw me approach the door. “Open up. I'm Mrs. Waite.”
She didn't have to tell me. I knew right away that she could only be Glenda's mother and nobody else.
I opened the door and Mrs. Waite charged in, sort of breathless, and then stopped short and began looking around.
“Is your mother home, dear?”
“Yes, she is,” I said. “She's upstairs painting the bedroom. I'll go get her.”
“I hope I haven't interrupted anything,” Mrs. Waite called after me. “Just wanted to say hello. And welcome to the neighborhood.” I could see her moving around in the living room, looking for a place to set the pot down.
“You better come right down,” I whispered to Inez the minute I got inside the bedroom. “It's Mrs. Waite, Glenda's mother. You know, I told you. . . .”
“Oh drat,” Inez said, climbing down from the ladder. “I was hoping it wouldn't come to this.” She stopped to peek into the bathroom mirror, and I watched her rearrange some of the clumps of hair that fringed her face. Then she gave a vigorous tug to the brightly dyed scarf she had tied around the rest of her long black hair.
Inez was dressed pretty much as she had been on moving day, in old black leotards (these even had holes at the knee) and a loose, short sleeveless smock of hand-dyed cotton in green, orange, and purple. Just for comparison, there was Mrs. Waite standing at the bottom of the stairs with her short honey-blonde hair frozen into stiffly sprayed waves and curlicues, and wearing a bulging strawberry-pink afternoon dress, nylon stockings, and tight shoes the color of vanilla ice cream. I hung back near the top of the stairs expecting that there just had to be an explosion when these two met.
“I guess I must have come to call too soon,” I heard Mrs. Waite saying. “I see your furniture hasn't arrived yet.”
By now I figured she'd taken in the array of dyeing vats on the living-room floor, the broken harpsichord and other dilapidated musical instruments in the dining room, and the bedrolls in the downstairs den.
“Oh yes it has,” Inez said lightly. “It's all here.”
There was a deafening silence.
“Well,” Mrs. Waite said loudly and cheerily after a moment or two had passed, “I brought you a pot of nice homemade beef stew.” I had reached the bottom of the stairs now and saw her extending the pot to Inez. “I cooked it this morning, early, because I had to go out to a luncheon. Otherwise I'd have brought it over sooner. I hope you haven't cooked your dinner for tonight yet. I thought it would come in handy with all the work you must have to do around this house. It's my own family's very favorite recipe.”
Inez took the pot from Mrs. Waite and stood there dumbly.
I said, as hastily as I could, “Oh thanks, Mrs. Waite, thanks awfully. I just love beef stew. I'll bet it's delicious.”
Mrs. Waite looked at me approvingly. “Everybody loves my beef stew,” she said loftily. “But I'm afraid I'll need that pot back. If you could just put the stew into something else. . . .”
Still in a sort of daze, Inez went toward the kitchen with the pot of stew, mumbling something about going to look for a plastic container.
There wasn't any place to sit down in the living room except on the straw matting on the floor where Mom and Pop usually satâand I'm sure that didn't occur to Mrs. Waite. So she remained standing and I could see she was sort of uncomfortable. But I didn't know what to suggest. Mrs. Waite wasn't as fat as her daughter Glenda, but then nobody was. She was kind of bulgy and lumbering, though, with a spare tire around her middle, and I could see why she'd gone to that exercise class and been on a crash diet and all.
“It looks as if your mother and father still have quite a lot of furniture to buy for this house,” Mrs. Waite commented. She glanced around her in dismay. “It's a pity what they pay college professors these days. It's no wonder they have to take on an extra business on the side. Stillâoh, I don't mean to get personal, of courseâI just keep wondering how profitable that junk-collecting business of your father's can be.”
Immediately there was a loud crash from the kitchen and Mrs. Waite jumped.
“It's nothing,” Inez called out sweetly. “I'm just washing out your pot, Mrs. Waite.”
“Oh, by the way,” Mrs. Waite said, lowering her voice and looking at me intently with her pale blue eyes. “You
mustn't think I came over here to tattle to your mother about that little mishap you and Glenda had in my living room last Friday when you came over for lunch.”
“Mishap?”
“I know how it is when girls of your age get together,” Mrs. Waite said. “You were just having fun and I'm sure you never intended to turn over a table full of pretty little glass and china pieces, and damage a valuable lamp.”
I didn't know what to say. Had Glenda told her the accident was my fault?
Mom saved me by coming back into the room at that moment with the washed-out stewpot. “Actually Drew and I only eat foods that are as close as possible to their raw or natural state,” Inez said briskly, as she handed back the pot, “so beef stew would be quite out of the question for us.” She turned to me. “But I know Sara here will enjoy it.”