The Whole World Over (2 page)

Just below the windows, Greenie had hung her copper and stainless-steel
bowls, in pairs. It was a minor joke she still enjoyed: displayed this
way, they looked like pairs of great armored breasts, the warrior bosoms
of Amazons, of Athena, Brunhilde, and Joan of Arc.
Count me in!
Greenie told herself while inspecting her private battalion.
Carpe diem,
ladies!

She addressed them as she sang, which she liked to do when she
worked alone. A cassette player, beside the wooden spoons, gave her
reliable backup from Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, Billie, and
Aretha, though lately she had taken to buying old-fashioned soundtracks,
musicals, so that she might belt out toward her feminine army
songs like "My Boy Bill," "Gee, Officer Krupke!" and "I'm Gonna
Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair."

When the phone rang, she was tying up the last box of hot cross buns
for Sherwin to deliver to an East Village coffeehouse. Along with Julie
Andrews' mother superior, she sang "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," heedless
of the notes she couldn't reach, and had looked up just long enough to
watch a pair of man-size schoolboy galoshes, complete with ladder
clips, pass from west to east. "Happy Leap Year Day," she answered.

Greenie was thrown off by the way in which the caller addressed
her—for Charlotte Greenaway Duquette had an assortment of names,
each of which identified the user as belonging to a particular period
of her past. To relatives and friends of her parents, she would always
be Charlotte, unabridged. To schoolmates and other people who had
known her in the town where she grew up, she was Shar; to a certain
clique with whom she'd hung about in high school, Charlie. In college,
her first roommate had taken to calling her Duke. Liking the tough,
feminist ring to this name—it made her feel as if she'd pierced her navel
without going to such physical extremes—she had let it follow her on to
cooking school and then to New York City.

Within a few months of moving to the city, she met Alan, who disliked
this nickname and told her so on their second date. "It's too butch,
and you are anything but butch," he had said, boldly touching her
long, unruly hair as they walked down the street. "I can tell you're
strong, but you are much too agreeable to have the kind of name a
boxer or a pimp would choose."

For a time, he insisted on calling her Charlotte. One night when he
spoke her name in a searing whisper, she told him that she was sorry, but
she felt as if a member of her family were making love to her. "It's sort
of like if you wore my father's aftershave," she said, "even though he
doesn't wear one."

Later, as they lay awake together, he murmured her whole name
aloud several times, as if to search out every pocket of air in its vowels.
"Well, Miss Charlotte Greenaway Duquette," he concluded, "I'll have
to make up a name of my own." That was when, with a secret thrill,
she'd become Greenie; when, looking back, she had become his bride.

When it came time to name her business (her business with a little b),
she was tempted to use this new name, but it still felt private then, like
a love charm she should be careful not to bandy about. With more
calculation than sentiment, she decided on Pastries by Miss Duquette.
She opened during the craze for all things Creole, zydeco, Margaret
Mitchell: to steely New Yorkers, just about anything with a southern
flair had the wistful allure of cotillion chiffon, and Greenie liked to
think of her surname as calling to mind the pink oleander, mannerly
verandahs, and ubiquitous angels of New Orleans (though she had no
such personal claim to make, having grown up west of Boston). On the
pale green boxes in which she packed her sweets, the name swooped
from corner to corner, a flounce of curlicued purple letters trailing
wisteria blossoms.

People who called her for business nearly always asked for Miss
Duquette or "the manager" or, if word of mouth had sent them her way,
Greenie. On this occasion, she picked up the phone to hear "Would this
be Charlotte Duquette?"—her name pronounced "Shallot Dee-oo-kett"
by a young woman who sounded as southern as Greenie was not.

"That's me," said Greenie, and she waited to hear how this woman
was connected to her parents. Not even the four banks that issued her
credit cards knew her as Charlotte.

"Shallot Dee-oo-kett," the woman repeated, "will you please hold,
then, for the guvna of Nee-oo Maixico?"

A ratcheting of telephone connections followed, clearing the way for
a hearty male voice: "Girl, excuse my informality here, but you make
one hell-and-back of a coconut cake."

Helplessly, Greenie burst out laughing.

"Oh, and I see you are prone to easy amusement. I like that in a person,
I do." He laughed briefly, easily amused himself. "Well, this is Ray
McCrae, and you are excused if you can't quite place the name, being as
you are from these distant, more sophisticated parts, but as your friend
Walter will have told you, I have a proposition, Miss Duquette, based
solely on that knockout punch of a cake I sampled yesterday. No, did
not sample, Miss Duquette, that would be inaccurate. A fib. Ate—no,
ravished—one gigantic slice and scraped the plate clean with my fork.
Then ordered a second to go and gobbled the whole thing down in the
car. Ate the crumbs right off the seat."

"Thank you. I'm flattered." This had to be a prank, friends from
cooking school colluding with Walter, but why not play along?

"So now, right now as a matter of fact, I'm just about to pull up to
your city hall for face time with your powers that be. I'm hoping you
won't mind if Mary Bliss, my assistant here, takes over and does the
explaining—but," said the charming impersonator, "I do hope we'll
meet in person, Miss Duquette. I do."

"Well, I do too," said Greenie, after which she covered the
mouthpiece.

"Miss Deeookett?" The southern belle was back on the line.

"Yes, that's me, but could you please explain what's going on?"

"That Walter fella didn't ring you up like he promised, now did he?"
the southern belle said pleasantly. She explained to Greenie that there
was a job opening in the Santa Fe Governor's Mansion. House chef.
"Now I know this sounds fah-fayetched," said Mary Bliss, and Greenie
could tell that she thought it was more than that, "but it so hayapens
that the guvna has a sweet tooth the sahz of Mount Rushmoah, and the
sweet spot in that sweet tooth hayapens to be coconut cake. So he has
this impulsive notion, see, that you just might like to . . . audition for the
job while he's here on your turf."

Greenie contemplated her bulbous reflection in a steel mixing bowl.
She remembered the time one of her more ambitious classmates, now
sous-chef at a Park Avenue bistro, had been invited to make a six-course
meal for Princess Diana and an unnamed companion. All on the QT, the
classmate was told, so she mustn't discuss the meal with anyone. She
had delivered it to the Carlyle only to be met in the lobby by a group of
her girlfriends, all wearing rhinestone tiaras and hooting with laughter.

Greenie would throttle Walter.

"Miss Duquette? Would you do me a favor and humor us here? I
know it may sound outrageous . . ."

"Humor you? Oh, in any way I can, just you name it!"

"Well you know, make him a nice meal while he's here in town, tell
him you'll consider the offer? We'll pay you a bundle, whatever you'll
lose in work that day and more. Does this sound a little insane? Probably
does."

A long pause. The woman was serious. If there was a punch line, it
was much too long in coming. Greenie said carefully, "But wait. I'd be
moving to Santa Fe. If I got the job." Except for a week's vacation with
Alan in San Francisco, to visit his sister, she had never been west of Saint
Louis. She pictured cartoonish saguaro cactuses, Spanish missions with
ruffled terra-cotta roofs, honest-to-goodness cowboys herding honest-to-goodness
cows. Wouldn't George love that.

"Yes," said Mary Bliss. "That's what I mean by insane."

"For what it's worth, you ought to know I'm a Democrat," said
Greenie. Now she recalled why Ray McCrae was in New York. Sherwin
had complained about traffic during the previous day's delivery;
apparently—though he didn't find this out till he was mired at an intersection,
standing still through three green lights—a convention of
Republican governors had cut off most of the Upper East Side, causing
bipartisan gridlock all the way over to Chelsea.

"Oh Miss Duquette, we know plenty more about you than
that,
we
wouldn't waste the time on this call without at least a thumbnail daw-seeay."
Mary Bliss's tone told Greenie just how much she enjoyed opening
people's government files and spying on the haphazard details of
their lives. Greenie was on the verge of telling her where she could stow
that thumbnail daw-see-ay when Mary Bliss added lightly, "Besides
which we're equal opportunity employers and love nothin' so much as a
house full of friendly debate."

As opposed, thought Greenie, to a house full of unfriendly debate.
She could just see Alan's face if she were to tell him later tonight that
she'd turned down this blue moon of an offer. ("You did what? You
refused the chance to impress a head of state? Who knows what connections
you could've made?")

"I'll make the guy a meal. Sure," Greenie said. "Why not?" How
often did she get a break in her routine, a professional lark? She named
a price that was three times her usual income for a day's production—
which Tina could, with a little overtime, cover in Greenie's absence—
and asked about the governor's favorite foods. All right, so she would
spare Walter's life.

LIKE OTHER BOYS HIS AGE
, George loved dinosaurs, poop talk, and
reminding his parents about The Rules (no shoes on the furniture, no
talking with your mouth full, no saying "Jesus!" not even under your
breath and never mind why). He had outgrown his fascination with men
working under the city streets and his early, oblivious tolerance of broccoli
and peas. When George grew up, he would be an astronaut
palaeontologist, digging for fossils on other planets. Pluto, he told his
mother this evening, was not a planet anymore.

"Oh? What is it?" Greenie asked, genuinely curious.

"It's make-believe. Like aliens. There is no such things as aliens."

"Not that we know of," said Greenie. Poor Pluto, she thought, now
to be accorded the same disdain a teenager held for Santa Claus.

George frowned at her, as if she'd spoken out of turn. "There's not!
We
know
there's not!"

His vehemence cowed her a little. "Right!" she reassured him. Alan,
resolutely truthful, would not have colluded in such simplification, but
she had learned that splitting hairs with a four-year-old was counterproductive.
And Alan was working late. He had a new couple; such referrals
were generally for a limited time, six or ten weeks to steer (if not
determine) the fate of a courtship or marriage. The high stakes of this
particular work—the work of just a dozen hours—astonished Greenie,
though Alan had told her that quite often all he did was guide these couples
toward recognizing and voicing decisions they had already made in
their hearts. "I don't have as much power as you might suspect. At least
I hope I don't."

Begrudgingly, George was working his way through the three baby
carrots Greenie had exacted as the price of a heart-shaped Linzer cookie
(thawed from a freezer stash of VD overrun).

When she handed him a small plate holding the cookie, he beamed.
"A story, a story!"

She went to his bookcase and ran a finger across the bright narrow
spines. "
The Sneetches
? We haven't read
The Sneetches
in a long time."

"I am taking a break of Dr. Seuss," George declared imperiously.
George was an articulate child, already a language person, just like his
father, but he spoke like a not-quite-fluent foreigner, tenses and prepositions
often skewed.

"How about just a little Dr. Seuss and then something else?"

"No. I want the dinosaur book with the flaps and the one of the
wide-mouth frog and
Me and My Amazing Body,
" he answered. Alan
claimed that George's confidence in his choices was a trait that came
from Greenie, but she believed it was simply a fact of four-year-old life.
"I want
Me and My Amazing Body
after I've putted on my pajamas."

"
Put
on my pajamas," Greenie said.

George laughed at her. "Not
your
pajamas."

"You're right. Mine would be way too big, wouldn't they?"

Greenie searched for the books he'd named, reluctantly passing her
favorites by. The more she read Dr. Seuss, the more brilliant she thought
he was. She had become even mildly smitten, the way one customarily
felt about a movie star: Andy Garcia or Kevin Costner or, if you were
younger, Leonardo DiCaprio. That's how Greenie felt about the late Ted
Geisel. (Twitterpated, her mother would have said.)
Horton Hears a
Who!
was a tale that brought altruistic tears to Greenie's eyes every time
she read it; others, by simple recitation, could dispel almost any anxiety
or minor attack of the blues. Tonight, she craved the curative absurdity
of "Too Many Daves," a brief story about a certain Mrs. McCave who
had twenty-three sons and foolishly named them all Dave—twenty-four
lines of shamelessly silly verse that, Greenie once remarked to Alan, triggered
in her brain the release of more serotonin or some other feel-good
neurochemical than any dose of Zoloft ever could.

Nevertheless, she read the dinosaur book (not a story but a patchwork
of scientific facts and speculations) while George ate his cookie,
retrieving every precious crumb from the table around the plate. Then
he stretched his arms out toward her, a wordless request for her lap.
She folded her son's slim, bony form—the nimble body of a mountain
goat—into her lap and read him the fable about a frog whose bragging
leads to fatal consequences.