Pish Posh (6 page)

“Then why doesn't he just become a hypnotherapist and give up being a thief?” Clara asked. It seemed an obvious enough question, but Annabelle looked at Clara like she'd just suggested that her dad lick an electrical outlet.

“Where's the sense in that?!” she exclaimed angrily, kicking one of the stone flowerpots. “I mean, that would ruin everything. What would I do? Go back to school? Join the debating team and trade friendship bracelets? No thank you.”

In a way, Clara could understand Annabelle perfectly. She would have felt the same if someone suggested that she spend less time at Pish Posh and do things other kids her age did. But the mention of bracelets made her remember why she was there in the first place, and her former indignation returned.

“I thought you said you were getting my jewelry, ” she said sternly.

“Oh, right. Here. ” Annabelle handed her the paper bag. Clara opened it promptly. Inside was the Tahitian pearl necklace. Clara should have felt victorious; but she didn't. For some reason, the pearls seemed less important now that she had them back.

“Fine. That's all I wanted. Good-bye,” Clara said. She felt a sudden cramp in her stomach. She must be getting sick. Summer flu. She got one every year. Tomorrow she would be sneezing and achy and would have to stay in bed all day.

The front door opened and Amber stepped out, with Annabelle's father behind her. “I'll see you next week, Amber,” he said. “Just stay away from fire for twenty-four hours—no barbecues, no campfires. ”

Amber blew a thin bubble with her gum, then snapped it. “You're the best, Doc.”

“And no cigarettes, ” he called after her when she reached into her bag and pulled out a pack. But she pretended not to hear him as she strode off down the street.

“Poor Joan of Arc is probably rolling over in her grave,” Annabelle's father said, shaking his head. Then he winked at Clara and pinched Annabelle's nose and went back inside.

“So, Clara,” Annabelle said, “will you come back to visit me again?”

“Possibly,” Clara said. She adjusted her sunglasses. As she walked down the stairs, she began to feel better. Much better. Miraculously, the summer flu had instantly left her body.

E
very table at the Pish Posh restaurant was occupied that very table at the Pish Posh restaurant was occupied that evening, as usual. Clara sat at her little round table in the back, trying hard to focus on ferreting out the Nobodies, but she kept thinking about Dr. Piff. Pish Posh was different without him. You wouldn't think his absence would matter so much since Dr. Piff was such a quiet and plain man. But somehow Pish Posh seemed a little less glittery and fabulous when he wasn't there.

Clara thought about Dr. Piff's words again and gazed around the restaurant. What could be so peculiar and mysterious?

Her eye caught Mavis Von Mavis, the famous artist, who was eating at a table in the corner with someone whose portrait she had been painting. Mavis Von Mavis held up a brussels sprout and cried, “This is the exact shade of green I will use for your face!” Then she dropped the brussels sprout into her bra for safekeeping, while the woman whose face was going to be painted brussels-sprout green looked decidedly unhappy.

Mavis Von Mavis was certainly peculiar. But so were many of the other customers at Pish Posh.

Just then the restaurant's door opened and in walked Ms. Blurt, dressed in a purple velvet pantsuit. Cinching her waist was a shiny red belt with the words SASSY LADY ... SASSY LADY .. SASSY LADY ... printed all around it. She had attempted to tame her light brown curls by pinning them up here and there, but the effect was that she looked as though she had clumps of caramel corn stuck to her head.

Oh, no, Clara thought, I forgot all about Ms. Blurt!

Up front, Clara's mother was staring at Ms. Blurt with wide, incredulous eyes. Ms. Blurt said something to her, and Lila looked down at the reservation book, then shook her head vigorously.

Clara got up to explain the situation to her mother, and the moment she rose, all conversation stopped and every eye in the restaurant turned to her in dread. Everyone thought she had found a Nobody.

“You are not in our book, Ms. Blah,” Lila Frankofile was saying.

“Blurt,” Ms. Blurt corrected her. “Clara Frankofile invited me to dine here tonight.” Her voice resounded loudly in the silence.

“Is this true, Clara?” Lila Frankofile looked appalled, and some of the customers murmured, “Clara Frankofile invited that to Pish Posh? Impossible!” and “She looks just like a stick of grape chewing gum in that outfit.”

Ms. Blurt blushed to nearly the same shade of red as her Sassy Lady belt and looked at Clara helplessly. Clara hesitated. Ms. Blurt was so obviously a Nobody. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who was more a Nobody than Ms. Blurt. What would everyone think if Clara admitted that she'd personally invited Ms. Blurt to Pish Posh? Clara opened her mouth, then closed it, cleared her throat, and looked down at the floor.

“I guess I must have misunderstood, ” Ms. Blurt said finally. She gave her belt a sad little tug and turned to leave.

“Wait,” Clara said to Ms. Blurt. Then to her mother, “It's true. I invited her to have dinner at the restaurant tonight.”

“Clara, how could you?!” Lila was aghast. “And in any case, we are completely full. There's not a table to spare.”

“She'll dine at my table,” Clara said decisively.

“Impossible!” Lila cried. But Clara hated to be told that she could not do something, so rather imperiously she hooked her arm through Ms. Blurt's and ushered her to the little round table in the back of the restaurant. One of the waiters rushed to bring a second chair to the table, and Ms. Blurt, still red in the face, sat down. Every customer fell to whispering, filling the restaurant with a sound that was uncannily like that of an industrial washing
machine-phiddle slush, phiddle slush.

Clara ordered onion soup and braised lamb and roast Cornish hen and sautéed truffles and spinach quiche and asparagus spears in hollandaise sauce and chocolate mousse cake and crème brûlée and raspberry tart with vanilla ice cream, and much more—so much, in fact, that the waiter had to set up a little cart beside their table to hold it all. And the whole time, all the famous and glamorous people in the restaurant stole surreptitious glimpses at this woman who was
so very
important that Clara Frankofile herself had invited her to dine at her table.

Ms. Blurt declared that she had never in her life tasted anything so delicious, and she tasted it ALL until her belly began to bulge beneath her purple pantsuit so that she looked a little like a bug. It was only when she had had a bite of every dessert on the menu (well, maybe two bites) that she asked about Caleb Fizzelli's drawing on the wall.

“Can I see it now, do you suppose?” Ms. Blurt asked.

Pierre Frankofile never allowed customers into his kitchen—no exceptions. It didn't matter if you were a movie star or a king. But Clara was feeling especially contrary tonight. She smiled, imagining the look on the other customers' faces if she brought Ms. Blurt back there.

“Why not,” Clara declared, and she led Ms. Blurt in through the kitchen to the astounded looks of everyone, including her mother.

As usual, Pierre Frankofile was screaming at one of the cooks, so he didn't notice right away that a customer was in his kitchen.

“You ham-brained, slobbering pimple! I will stick your head in a pot of boiling pasta water if you ever do that again, you web-footed—”

“Papa,” Clara interrupted loudly enough to make her father turn away from his victim, who was taking the abuse relatively calmly, “Papa, this is Ms. Blurt, and she is here to see that drawing on the wall. ”

Pierre took one look at Ms. Blurt and his already pink, angry face turned a shade of dark violet. He glared at her for a moment, speechless.

“Sacre bleu!”
he screamed finally, his eyes bulging. “And how would she like it if while she was looking at that drawing, I took out my paring knife and cut off her—”

“And
I
want her to see it, Papa, ” Clara said firmly, for she was not afraid of her father at all, since he was generally all hot air and nonsense and had never really cut off anybody's appendages.

“Victor,” Clara called to a short, burly man with a cracked front tooth. “You were the one who found that drawing on the wall, weren't you?”

“S'right.”

“Please show us where it is.”

Victor gazed questioningly at Pierre.

“Show them where it is, Victor,” Pierre cried, “or so help me I will bite off the tip of your nose, chew it up, and spit it into the East River! ”

“Yes, sir. ” They followed Victor through a door near the back of the kitchen and into a little side room. Lining every wall were stacks and stacks of crisp white linen tablecloths and napkins, wrapped in plastic and piled one on top of the other. The stacks were twice as tall as Clara, and not an inch of wall space could be seen between them.

“S'round here somewhere,” Victor said. Stack by stack, he took down the fortress of linen, revealing the wall a bit at a time. Finally, toward the bottom of one wall, faint markings appeared, and once Victor had removed all the stacks, the painting could be seen clearly.

It was a painting of a garden, with a crescent moon hanging over it, and two figures sitting on a bench. The details were shadowy, since the painting was only sketchily done, as though the artist had only just started to work on it before abandoning the project.

Ms. Blurt knelt down and examined it, making small sounds the whole time, until she declared the drawing “most definitely a Fizzelli. Oh, my!”

She stared at it for a good long time, until Victor began to shift his legs around impatiently. Taking the hint, Ms. Blurt stood up and brushed the linen lint off of her pantsuit.

“He must have intended to make a fresco—a painting on plaster—and never finished it,” she said, her face flushed with excitement as they made their way out of the room and back into the kitchen.

“Thank you, Mr. Frankofile. ” Ms. Blurt nearly curtsied to him. “And I'm sorry to disturb you all ...,” she said to the rest of the kitchen staff, but her voice trailed off when her eyes fell on Audrey, who was chopping escarole. Ms. Blurt stared at Audrey for a moment, her lips parted in surprise. Audrey looked up and squinted at her through her thick glasses, then abruptly turned her back to Ms. Blurt and dropped the escarole in a pot on the stove.

“What's wrong?” Clara asked.

“Who is that?” Ms. Blurt whispered to Clara.

“Nobody. Just the woman who makes the soup.”

“Ask her to turn around,” Ms. Blurt said with urgency.

“What for?”

“Just ask her.” There was a rare tone of authority in Ms. Blurt's voice, one that she had never used even in the classroom.

“Audrey!” Clara called loudly to be heard above the clatter of plates and steamy roar of the dishwasher. “Audrey, turn around!” But to Clara's great surprise, the young woman utterly and willfully ignored her.

This act of disobedience caught Pierre's attention, and he flung a spatula at the soup cook, hitting her on the back, and boomed, “Turn around!!”

Slowly and reluctantly, Audrey turned around and faced Ms. Blurt. Ms. Blurt gazed at her, her eyes growing wider.

“Oh ... but... how can it be? ...” she muttered right before her legs buckled and she passed out on the kitchen floor.

T
he busboy wadded up a kitchen apron and put it under Ms. Blurt's head, and Clara dabbed at her face with a wet kitchen rag.

“Ms. Blurt... Ms. Blurt... ,” Clara said.

“Slap her,” suggested Pierre.

“Ms. Blurt, open your eyes,” Clara pleaded.

“Poke the bottoms of her feet with the meat fork,” Pierre said. He began to search in his utensil drawer for a meat fork, when Ms. Blurt's eyes fluttered, then opened fully.

“Are you all right, Ms. Blurt? You fainted,” Clara said.

Ms. Blurt struggled to raise herself up. With Clara's help, she got to her feet and adjusted her belt.

“Much better now! Yes. Thank you,” she sputtered, her eyes nervously darting at Audrey and then away again. “I'll be on my way. ” She headed out the kitchen door and Clara followed, perplexed, while Pierre called after her, “I still think a quick slap would do her good.”

All the customers turned to gawp at the illustrious Ms. Blurt, but she did not appear to notice their stares. She said a hasty good-bye to Clara, thanking her for the meal and the sight of the little drawing, and hurried out the front door.

Clara hesitated for a moment. Then she went after her, following Ms. Blurt, who was already halfway up the block, heading uptown, her reedy legs working double time. Clara had to break into an all-out run to catch up with her, and when she grabbed the velvet-clad elbow, Ms. Blurt shrieked.

“It's just me, Ms. Blurt.”

“I really must be going.” She pulled out of Clara's grasp with surprising strength and began to hurry off again.

“What did you see back in the kitchen that startled you?” Clara pursued as she rushed to keep pace with her.

“Nothing,” Ms. Blurt said shortly, without slowing down.

“I don't like secrets, Ms. Blurt. Tell me what you saw!” Clara demanded.

Ms. Blurt stopped then, so quickly in fact that Clara suddenly found that she was walking by herself and had to turn around and walk back.