Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost (6 page)

“Do you think I was born yesterday?” said Mrs. Dagnitz. “I had a boyfriend when I was your age. I know how it is. I do not want you hanging out with him when there are no parents around.”

“How do you even know there were no parents around?”

Mrs. Dagnitz fiddled with the rearview mirror so she could glare at Mark Clark while she drove. I didn't think that was very safe. In two and a half years when I get my permit, I'm sure that I will never be allowed to adjust the rearview mirror so I can have a conversation with someone in the backseat while I am driving.

“Is she always like this?”

“Worse,” said Mark Clark. “She used to have a meth lab, right in the basement.”

“Don't you start, too!” said Mrs. Dagnitz. But you could tell that she'd figured out that all this hollering wasn't going anywhere.

“Just tell me,” she said, “were you at Kevin's? Yes or no.”

“He works all day. He's not even home,” I said.

“Is this another lie? This is exactly why lying is so
bad, so … pernicious,” said Mrs. Dagntiz. We'd turned into a neighborhood in northwest Portland with narrow streets. Mrs. Dagnitz leaned forward, looking for a place to park. I could tell she was losing the will to lecture me.

“What's ‘pernicious'?” I asked.

“It's … it's … Could I fit into that space, do you think? I can't believe the parking around here. I've really gotten out of practice parallel parking …”

The truth is Mrs. Dagnitz had never been a good parallel parker. She would back up traffic for blocks, then get the car stuck half in, half out of some tiny space meant only for a motorcycle. She asked Mark Clark to do the parking. She leaped outside and stood on the curb and made a big show of directing him into the spot.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Where were you?” he asked. He easily steered the car back into the spot with one hand.

“With this kid I know named Angus. He let me borrow his scooter to get home, because he didn't want me to get into more trouble than I was already in.”

“Cool scooter,” said Mark Clark.

I heaved a huge sigh, but before I got out of the car, Mark Clark put his hand on my arm. “Listen, I know she can be annoying, but she's right, or half right, actually. Lying sucks because—”

“I know, I know, the boy who cried wolf,” I said.

“Exactly, but think about it for a minute,” he said
quickly. Mrs. Dagnitz was standing on the curb, waiting. “Knowing you and what you've been up to lately, the day will come when you're going to need someone to believe you, and if you keep lying, no one will.”

Dr. Lozano had moved offices since my last checkup. She used to be near the Rose Garden, where I saw Green Day play last fall, but now she was in a big brick medical building up the street from Twenty-third Avenue, a street of small, fancy shops that sell stuff you always want but never need: fancy soap, pointy high-heel shoes, bedsheets from France, and brightly painted plates from Italy.

Mrs. Dagnitz, Mark Clark, and I turned off Twenty-third and trudged uphill toward Dr. Lozano's office. I instantly started getting a sweaty head. If it had been Mark Clark driving, we'd have circled the building to see if there was parking closer to the air-conditioning of Dr. Lozano's office. But Mrs. Dagnitz grabbed the first place she saw. I really wished she'd go back to Santa Fe. People said having a dog was too much work, but it was much easier taking care of Ned than having a mother.

Mrs. Dagnitz hustled into the office ahead of us and said, “Minerva Clark is here to see Dr. Lozano.” She made it sound as if I were the president.

Why does she do that? Why does she do anything? It was very air-conditioned. My legs got instant goose bumps. I should have changed into pants. Oh well. One
good thing about having been so late—I escaped the world of shoes for another day. Mark Clark and I grabbed a
Highlights
magazine and started doing the Hidden Pictures puzzle. This is a doctor's-office tradition. We race to see who can find all the pencils, spoons, and scissors first. The loser has to buy the winner an ice cream. Even when I lose, Mark Clark buys the ice cream.

I'd found the canoe (in the branches of a tree) and Mark Clark had found the saw (in the side of a wooden cart) when Dr. Lozano called us back into her office. She wore skinny black pants, black low-tops, and a blue-and-black-striped blouse. She'd traded her gold nose ring for a ruby. She had to be the coolest doctor in the city. Dr. Lozano led the way, followed by Mrs. Dagnitz, who carried her giant purse over her arm as if she were the queen and complimented Dr. Lozano on the wall art. She acted as if she'd been here a million times before, when it had been Mark Clark who had brought me to see Dr. L. after my accident and every time since.

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.

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.