The Place Will Comfort You (11 page)

“Sure. Either one.”

“Poached is just as bad, and fried with runny yolks or omelets not mixed-up enough, that slippery white. Disgusting.” You move the rope up to your armpits. “She ever give you three-bean salad?”

“Yes.”

“Sour pickles?”

“Yes.”

“But only if you want, right? Anything with vinegar they can't make you eat. It tastes like nail polish. That stuff's on the side. She make you eat that? She really crazy in the head?” Everyone knows about the cook. Everyone could be wrong.

Shlomtzee weaves the white elastic with her gray-kneed legs. “Be sick the week your turn is up. Get better on a Friday. Friday is without exception schnitzel.”

“I can taste the vinegar in ketchup.”

“Ketchup's optional.” She completes the stage successfully, and starts as if from the beginning—the elastic fully lowered—but with added complications in the steps. Shlomtzee Ateeya didn't used to be your type, a bolter and a brayer. Her mouth opens so wide it might unhinge her face and stick limbs from a recent growth spurt finish off the look. But she is winding down.

The fifth grade marks the start of a peculiar decline. It seems the shrill girls, like balloons, are caving in to circumferential pressures. Then again, some of the softer girls are growing tense. You have earned unprecedented black marks in the roster. You've been reprimanded,
twice kicked out of class, and once sent to the office, each time for garbling answers through a mouth stuffed full of food. It started with you simply getting hungry earlier, but now you gobble on the sly on principle. Shlomtzee does, too, but isn't caught. She never brings her own snacks, being on the meal plan. You're the supplier. Food is how you two got close.

Your first exchange: Prophets class. “Give,” she whispers. You've been assigned to the same desk and she has picked up on your habits.

You give, break bread over plump knees and drop it on her bony ones. Then she is whispering again, sputtering crumbs. “What kind of sandwich you call this?”

You grab a pencil and dig its point into the margins of Joshua, II, where at the moment you believe they're still fighting on the way to Canaan. You add this: MARGARINE. QUIET.

The Prophets teacher turns the focus of the class to the two girls in back, who, she explains, are grappling with a matter clearly so important that it can't wait until break. “Perhaps they'd like to share the insight with the rest of us,” she speculates.

“They wouldn't.”

Again Shlomtzee sputters, this time at your wit. The teacher hasn't heard you but her interest in you grows. She nears, discovers you eroding Joshua with your eraser and counsels you to kiss the holy text, secure the remnants of your sandwich back within their bag, recite the Grace After a Meal, with feeling, and leave the room.

Despite such interferences, the feasting carries on. In days to come, there are your strawberry jam sandwiches, every last strawberry picked off, your crackers, nice and limp after a morning tucked in plastic wrap with cheese, your sponge cake, your cold boiled potatoes. The two of you stuff your craws like single-minded hatchlings, drowning out the lessons with your grinding jaws. You eat such baby food, says Shlomtzee, as she crams another bite. The
question of her adding to the spread never comes up, thank God. Mornings, your treats help mask her bitter coffee breath, afternoons they cover cafeteria traces, smelly portents of your fate.

Your letter approaches: Yud, Caf, Lamed, and you're it. You have set foot inside the cafeteria only for school rallies in bad weather. You have never seen the crazy cook.

“Tell me today's dish.”

On a Wednesday, at the end of lunch, Shlomtzee emerges from that place, her uniform exuding sourness. The last of the Yud surnames was called today.

“Spaghetti in sauce.”

“The sauce on top or mixed through?”

“Of course mixed through. How else can the spaghettis go all orange?”

You offer her a bite of ripe banana, too odorous for classroom eating. She accepts it, furtive even now, and rightly so. There is no eating in the yard; it isn't cultured, it isn't clean. The Civil Defense man at the gate, someone's granddad with a rifle, a hankie on his head against the sun, he doesn't care, but there are the Health Monitors, sixth-graders who will tell on you. As their reward, they get to tote the first-aid kits on field trips. They are in congress with the nurse and carry out her law. They launch surprise inspections. Hand towel folded in thirds? Sandwich hygienically wrapped? Place mat clean? Hands washed? Fingernails trimmed? You bite them! (Ten points off.) Say grace before and after.

“Who heard of such a thing, spaghettis plain? Even for you!” Shlomtzee received a bad grade on a pop-quiz in geometry today. You let her finish up the fruit.

The two of you traverse the concrete yard towards the classrooms. Bell time nears. Sixth-graders are a pink and gray fortification, hip to hip against the fence. Their gazes sweep the boys'
school, across the street. You count the bra-strapped backs and ridicule—you're not sure what. But Shlomtzee isn't game today.

“My baby brother Elkhanan eats spicier than you.”

You squeeze the bruised banana peel in your fist. “You don't like my food maybe don't eat it from now on.”

“I eat it out of interest,” Shlomtzee says. Black hair is pulled so taut across her scalp, her eyes are stretched, the frizz bunched in two puffs, a new look for this year. “You better learn to eat some real food,” she says. “Your turn is coming up next week.” Gold rings with garnet chips loop through her ears, and also new is a pink plastic belt, the pearly heart-shaped buckle in perpetual migration. It's on her back now. “You don't lick your plate clean by the end of lunch, what she won't do!”

“She won't do anything.”

“As if.”

“You seen it?”

“Everybody knows.”

“I'm saying no. I'm going to say no,” you say. “You all eat garbage like you have to and all the time it's just a myth that she goes crazy. No one's seen it. No one's seen it happen.”

“Garbage, you and what you eat!” Her arms crook back with such a snap, that for a moment you consider the new hairstyle and accessories stand not for budding ladylikeness but a hazardous excess of energy, a mounting rage.

“I got some wafers.”

“Give!”

Next thing, she's got a handful of banana-peel tentacles, and you are bounding off, she after you, but only for a spell before she catches herself, tosses you an adult scowl, and heads for class. Her luminous belt buckle rides on her left hip.

You do have wafers, in your pocket, so you work on them yourself, chomping and kicking through the dirt behind the classrooms, balancing along the edges of the bomb shelter, till a Health Monitor
appears. You dodge her, but not soon enough. She screams she's going to report you. You run for your life, and in the process slice your thigh on a torn fence link.

Back in the classroom you must treat the bleeding cut with spit, and by the time you get home it's inflamed. So is your mother, prophesying lockjaw and demanding to know why in God's name you did not involve the nurse. The scar will stay, old as you get, scythe-shaped, paler than pale, forever threatening to fade.

There is a problem with a thing you have been given.

Walking home on Monday, you approach the new falafel stand with its long sign:
TAWILI AND SON OUT OF THIS WORLD SELF SERVE
. Shlomtzee gulps the smells of fermentation and eyes the goods in the steel tubs. The vendor hands out slit-top pitas, which the clientele packs with crisped chickpea balls, sauced eggs, diced salad, fries and Turkish eggplant, hummus, hilbeh, zkhoug, harissa, a kaleidoscope of condiments. Some patrons understand self-service in a way the vendor didn't intend. They clutch their pitas, eat the stuffing out, then step over for refills.

Tawili or his son flails a tongs behind the counter, shouting. “Get out of my eyes!”

You hold your breath, step over trampled cucumber cubes, turmeric-yellow stains of amba relish, pepper paste and cabbage on the pavement. The smells thin out as you walk on. Shlomtzee makes loving eyes at pigeons and at people you don't know. In gym today she jumped the longest in the long jump. She is buoyant, bouncing with each step. You slip your book bag off one shoulder and undo the buckle.

“Look what my mother's doing to me now.” The thing inside has crushed your notebooks out of shape.

Shlomtzee is dumbstruck. She stops short.

You elucidate: “A lunch box.”

“A lunch
box?”

“A box for lunch.” As soon as you turned the corner on your block this morning, you concealed it, tin and painted red, with hinges and a clasp. A birthday gift.

“A box? For lunch?”

“My mother put some money in the mail and they sent it.”

“Who keeps their lunch in metal safes?” Here, those who bring food from home carry synthetic leather bags hanging by straps around their necks, maybe a Minnie lookalike stitched on, a knock-off Daisy Duck. The practice begins as soon as the teacher is no longer one who makes sandwiches. Those who elect to carry on with institutional feeding carry meal cards instead. Their lunches are hot and on a plate and subsidized as needed. “For tools, maybe,” Shlomtzee says. “Is it for tools? Looks like a toolbox.”

“My mother said when she was little she had one just like this.”

“No! For children, metal boxes? Where? Not in our country.”

“It keeps your food in better shape. That's what she says. It's sturdy.”

“Where'd they send it from?”

“From Pittsburgh.”

“That's what country she comes from?”

“Yes.”

“You, too?”

“No. Here.”

“So tell her no one else does.”

“Like I didn't.”

“It's stupid-looking,” Shlomtzee says.

You know it. It's a problem, though your mother called it a solution. Just the thing to stand up even to your level of abuse, she said. No seams to fray, no strap to twirl to death, no zipper to untooth.

A problem. A resilient one, a well-constructed mark of shame. Shlomtzee averts her eyes. You seal your bag. You walk on to a bus stop shelter, where you pause to wait with Shlomtzee for her transportation.
Settling on the bench, you kick the air with both your feet, you drop the book bag and what's in it to the pavement. Maybe you'll forget it there.

“Today,” says Shlomtzee, “the cook gave us chicken soup. With noodles. Chicken soup you like.”

“Strained.”

“One girl from fourth grade,” she says. “Her father drives her every day to school.”

“So what?”

“He drives her in a garbage truck.”

You make embarrassed faces at each other, cringe and simper, shake your heads for the poor kid till you feel better about things, almost contented, generous, finding how good to spend your own disgrace on others.

“Also!” Shlomtzee comes off festive now. “I'll tell you what. The terrorists are stupid.”

“They're retarded.” Public service ads on television demonstrate how watermelons, loaves of bread, dolls, if split open, may reveal ugly coils, fuses, clocks. Touch nothing you find on the street. Depart at once from the vicinity. Alert a grownup. “Stupid because why?”

“Look up.” The two of you twist back your necks, your legs continuing to kick and dangle under the roof of corrugated metal shading you from the white sun. “If they were smart they'd rig up bombs on top of every bus stop. Who would see them there?” She rises.

You, too. Single-file, you stalk around the bus stop, trying for a full view of the roof. A grandma wheels her groceries by. She, also, cranes her neck.

“You lost a ball?” she says. “You shouldn't play on the street with a ball.”

Shlomtzee and you plod with bent knees, pushing imaginary groceries, with rolling eyes, a mushy smacking of the lips. You prowl around the shelter a bit longer and sit back down.

“You're right,” you say. “You wouldn't even notice any bomb up there at all.”

“They're stupid,” Shlomtzee says, but this time hushed, because you both see, suddenly, that once you've thought a thing, the world has thought it, and now what have you done.

In the gym changing room there is increasing prowess at dressing through and under layers, never entirely disrobing. Backs are turned, appearances transformed through narrow openings. Shlomtzee hides nothing, hasn't yet had a thing to hide. But there today are swelling nipples, pushing at her ribbed boys' undershirt. She seems oblivious. You are privately appalled.

You're drawing gym pants over good, straight hips when the teacher comes in with a note. The cook awaits, she says. Your turn is up.

“It's not. We're still on Caf with two to go: Cohen, Catabi. I'm not till the day after tomorrow!”

Well, today's girl is out sick; tomorrow's girl is present but disqualified by a productive cough.

You cough, producing nothing.

Grab your bag, the teacher says.

“The Tuesday dish,” you whisper as you're ushered out. “Quick!”

Shlomtzee, lost inside her regulation gym shirt, doesn't respond.

The hair goes back; every last strand is kept in place with rubber bands and bobby pins she offers from a yogurt cup. Your head is crowned with starched white cotton and a whiff of bleach, your waist cinched in an apron which she double-knots behind.

Enormous whisks and spatulas hang side by side with colanders and pots the size of kettledrums; a touch would start a racket like a band of cymbalists. Everything is scoured steel and white enamel.
Everything is oversized. There is no package on the shelves that you could carry. Behind the kitchen door, you wash down with the pink school soap.

She says to scrub especially the nails.

The cook is pinafored, the fabric peach with light blue stripes. She looks like someone's grandma, although lovelier, by far, than any grandmother you know. Her skin is candlewax, of a dull sheen, the cheeks, the slim bridge of the nose, see-through although not, changeable seeming. Low on the forehead arc heroic pencil strokes, twins, each the perfection of a brow for just one day; above them glows a purple flame caged in a hair net. She doesn't smile. She doesn't look crazy either, only contained; human brown irises hooded in lids, although waxen, of skin. There is no need to be afraid.