B Is for Beer (3 page)

At that moment there was a time-out on the football field and Mr. Perkel got up to go to the bathroom. You yourself may have noticed that beer causes big strong men to piddle like puppies.

“Have you heard of Julia Child, the famous cook? When she moved to Paris in 1948, she brought along a case of American beer. Her French maid had never seen beer in cans before, and she tried to flush the empties down the toilet. Naturally, it overflowed. Took a plumber nearly three days to unclog the pipes.”

Gracie laughed. She looked at the empty cans lying around the den, thinking that flushing them down the toilet might be a 15

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funny trick to play on her daddy. Or would it? She ’d have to think about it some more.

Once again, Uncle Moe passed his beer to Gracie. She hesitated, but being an adventurous little girl, she eventually took another swallow. Although she didn’t say “ick,” it didn’t taste any better than the first time.

“Your pediatrician isn’t likely to mention this—unless he ’s Irish, of course—but beer does have some nutritional value.

The Chinese word for beer means ‘liquid bread.’ ” Uncle Moe paused to drink. “Even the most wretched macrobrew contains a six-pack of vitamins: thiamine, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, pyridoxine, biotin, and… oh yes, cyanocobalamin. Can you say cyanocobalamin?”

“Cyno… cyho… cyoballyman… cy…”

“Okay, close enough. Presumably, they’re each a member of the vitamin B family but precisely what health benefits those little jawbreakers provide I haven’t a clue.”

Gracie didn’t care what benefits they provided. As far as she was concerned, vitamins were even ickier than beer.

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“I’ll tell you what,” said Uncle Moe, almost in a whisper.

“On Monday we ’ll inform your mother that I’m taking you to Woodland Park. Instead, we ’ll secretly ride the bus out to the Redhook brewery. We ’ll go on their tour and you can see for yourself exactly how beer is made. Most educational, my dear, most educational. After the tour, I’ll sneak you into the taproom and we ’ll watch the bartender water the monkeys.

It ’s better than the zoo.”

Practically burping with excitement (or was it the beer?), Gracie skipped out of the den. Her birthday was so darn slow in coming she feared she was likely to be a teenager before she could ever turn six, but now she had something right away to look forward to.

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2

At Sunday school the next morning, Gracie took a seat in the rear of the classroom. If she could, she always sat toward the back because she had a sensitive nose and the teacher’s breath was so bad it could paralyze a rattlesnake.

Gracie was not really paying attention, was in fact kind of dozing off, fantasizing about the pink cell phone and the puppy she wanted for her birthday, when she thought she heard the teacher say something about the ancient Egyptians.

Gracie hit the Pause button on her daydream machine and looked up just as the teacher asked, “Why, class, do you suppose that ol’ Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, commanded all Israelite boy babies to be drowned in the river?”

Fully awake now, Gracie believed she might have the answer.

She raised her hand. “To keep ’em from growing up and drinking all the Egypt ’s beer,” she said brightly.

The teacher gave her a very long, very strange look before going on to answer the question herself, all the while exhaling fumes that would have parted the Red Sea and saved Moses the trouble. Later, out on the church steps, the teacher drew 18

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Mrs. Perkel aside and talked to her in a low voice, directing occasional glances at Gracie.

After Sunday lunch, which Gracie and her mom ate alone, Mr. Perkel being off playing golf with his buddies, she was sent to her room. Jail time. She didn’t mind much because she often spent afternoons in her room, listening to music (and sometimes dancing: she had a lot of really great moves in her repertoire), but that day she was troubled by the uneasy feeling that she was going to be more severely punished when her daddy came home from the golf course. (You know what the game of golf is, don’t you? It ’s basketball for people who can’t jump and chess for people who can’t think.) To make matters worse, she had no idea what she had done wrong.

As it turned out, however, the family drove to Picora’s for a pizza early that evening, and not one word was uttered about Gracie ’s behavior. Maybe the Sunday school teacher’s breath had frozen the memory section of Mrs. Perkel’s brain.

In any case, Gracie, relieved, fell asleep that night with a secret smile because in the morning she and Uncle Moe were going off on an adventure. And because she wasn’t a baby Israelite boy in ancient Egypt.

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3

Have you ever felt—or imagined—that there is more than one world? Does it sometimes seem to you that there is the familiar world you wake up in every morning and another world to the right or the left of this one, just out of reach, where interesting things (some wonderful, some rather creepy) are occurring that you can’t quite describe or put your finger on: a world where your Hello Kitty ticktock clock refuses to obey rules of time, where mommies and daddies don’t work all day; where trees, certain rocks, and maybe even shoes live secret lives of their own? You never talk about this sensation or even think about it too much because it has a fragrance of silliness about it, but once in a great while, such as when you’re lying in bed or walking down an exceptionally dark street, doesn’t it seem almost too real to be denied?

Well, that famous Seattle drizzle, the ceaseless thin gray rain that we described before, the mist that can soften and even erase the lines that separate one shape from another, that very same penetrating drizzle has the ability to melt the shadow between Our World and the Other World. At least, some people think so, although to be truthful, most of those people are old Indians, hippies, mushroom hunters, or children such as Gracie Perkel.

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Monday morning turned out to be especially drizzly, needled with a silent, spidery rain that was almost as thick as fog.

Normally, on such a damp, dark day, Gracie might have stared out of her bedroom window, alert for signs of angels, Sasquatch, mossy-haired spooks, magic gods, or half-invisible wild fox spirits. Today, however, she bounced immediately from bed—and you know the reason why.

She padded into the bathroom, splashed water on her face, took what she called a “speed poop” (barely two grunts), and swiped a toothbrush across her gums so quickly it didn’t even tickle any bacteria, let alone kill them. Then, still in her jam-jams, she slid down the bannister and skipped to the breakfast table, already tasting the strawberry Pop-Tart on her tongue.

There was really no need to rush around in that manner.

Gracie was well aware that Uncle Moe never rolled out of bed before ten a.m. Uncle Moe believed early rising was an unhealthy practice, harmful to both the nerves and the liver.

Nevertheless, she was too anxious to dawdle. Recently she ’d been a bit bored with her life (her kindergarten was only in session Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays), so the prospect of an excursion with the so-called family nut job had thrilled her more than might seem logical.

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Brurble-urbel-urbel!
Gracie had just lifted a freshly filled milk glass to her lips when the telephone brubled. Mrs. Perkel answered the kitchen wall phone, saying, rather sarcasti-cally, “Well, well, if it isn’t the ol’ philosopher.” There was a pause. Gracie held the milk glass in place without drinking.

“Gee, that ’s too bad,” her mom said then, with what struck Gracie as a certain lack of sincerity. “Very sorry to hear that.”

The arm that held the milk glass was frozen in place. What could possibly be the matter? No amount of rain would cause Uncle Moe to delay or cancel their plans. To Uncle Moe, who often boasted that he owned neither a slicker nor an umbrella, a rainy day was merely another cause for celebration.

“Okay, I’ll give her the sad news,” Mrs. Perkel said. She hung up and turned to Gracie. “I’m afraid Moe won’t be taking you to the park today, honey. He hurt his foot and has to see a doctor.”

“Oh.” Gracie set the glass down without having taken a sip.

So disappointed was she that she nearly forgot her manners.

Finally, after a long moment, she asked in a concerned but faint little voice, “How did he hurt his foot?”

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Planting her hands on her hips, Mrs. Perkel shook her head from side to side and smiled. “He dropped a beer can on it,”

she said.

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4

If it is the ambition of every Pop-Tart to be eaten and enjoyed, there was one in the Perkel household that was destined to exist in vain. Gracie left the table without touching a single bite of breakfast. Back to her room she scurried, closed the door, and flopped onto the bed. So deeply did she bury her face in the white pillowcase you might have believed that above the neck she was one of those Egyptian mummies (though of Egypt we should probably say no more). Soon her pillow was as soaked as if it had been left out in the yard.

Do you think she was overreacting? Could her disappointment really have been that horrible? No, Gracie was no crybaby wimp.

Furthermore, she was hardly a stranger to disappointment as her daddy was forever—forever! forever!—promising to take her places, to play games with her or buy her things, only to forget about it when the time came. What had upset Gracie, what had gotten her so worked up, was not so much disappointment as it was embarrassment and humiliation.

She was only five (okay, almost six) but she wasn’t stupid. She knew that no beer can was heavy enough to injure a grown man’s foot by falling on it. Maybe it was her mother, maybe it was Uncle Moe, maybe it was both of them together, but 25

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somebody was fibbing in order to shame her. Somebody she loved was making cruel fun of her, undoubtedly because of all that interest she had shown in beer on Saturday; and probably, too, for having mentioned beer during church on Sunday. They were mocking her for that beer business and she didn’t exactly know why.

She did know, however, that she wanted nothing to do with beer ever, ever again! Beer could totally disappear from Planet Earth for all she cared. She was through with beer. She hated it. She wished the damn baby-drowning Egyptians had choked on their dumb, icky invention.

Her tearwater finally used up, Gracie rolled over and blew her nose on her pajama sleeve. (Don’t pretend you’ve never done anything similar.) She lay there throughout the morning, uninterested in listening to music, choosing not to watch her
Finding Nemo
video for the thirty-seventh time, and most assuredly not inspired to dance.

Mostly, she just gazed through the drizzle-speckled window at the distant hills, as if expecting, actually longing, to detect otherworldly signs in the mist; signs, for example, of legendary stick Indians, signs of tricksters, phantom outlaws, enchanted dwarves running through the forest in long velvet robes, or, 26

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most particularly, runaway orphan girls searching out hollow trees in which they might make homes for themselves. Once or twice, she believed she saw something along those very lines, although she would have hesitated to bet her allowance on it.

Next, she tried imagining what her socks might be saying to one another in the privacy of their dresser drawer, straining hard as if to overhear socky conversation, but, alas, this game failed to amuse her the way it had so many times in the past.

Gracie Perkel had lost her giggle. She ’d lost it. Her giggle had deserted her. It had gone far away. And she wasn’t sure she ’d ever get it back.

“Hello up there!” Her mother was shouting from the bottom of the stairs. “Lunch is ready!” When there was no response, she added, “Grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup!”

Don’t think for a second that Gracie wasn’t tempted. Wasn’t her tummy as empty as outer space? Wasn’t grilled cheese with tomato soup her favorite lunch? Yes, it was, but why should she eat food prepared by a mommy so heartless as to ridicule her only daughter for merely being curious about the unusual drinking habits of adults? Forget about it! No way, José!

Gracie would sooner eat poison.

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At that moment, she heard a car pull up in the driveway. It was a big yellow taxi. And soon there was the ol’ Moester being helped from the vehicle. Uncle Moe in his pinstriped suit, dark glasses, and artistic French beret. He was supporting himself with crutches. On his left foot there was one of those medical boots.

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5

“Technically speaking,” explained Uncle Moe, “it was not a beer can.”

“What was it then?” asked Mrs. Perkel. “Technically speaking.”