Under the Egg (3 page)

“You eat already? You hungry?”

What could I say? I had eaten, but I'd been hungry for about a month. I nodded.

“Sit,” Mr. Katsanakis growled and tossed a clean dish towel onto the counter. I slid onto a stool and dried off while Mr. Katsanakis located a plate of meat loaf with mashed potatoes and string beans. It was pretty much the last thing you'd want to eat on a humid summer day, but it was all I could do not to grab the food with my bare hands. I hadn't even seen meat in months.

“You eat,” he said, and plunked the plate in front of me. Then he sat back and watched me with his hairy arms crossed over his apron, clearly proud of his generosity.

“You eating these days?” he asked.

The question stirred a feeling of disloyalty in me. “Enough,” I said, through a mouth full of mashed potatoes.

“Ha!” His laugh was like a rifle shot. “Ha! That's why you eat like a wolf! A wolf with a meat loaf, ha!”

“Actually, I just ate, thanks.” I pushed my plate toward him, with what was probably a visible wince.

“Okay, okay, girlie.” He pushed the plate back to me. “You are hard, just like your grandfather. But it does not have to be difficult. You are hungry. I have food. You eat. You come by when you are hungry. Okay?”

“Okay,” I mumbled, scruples abandoned in favor of meat loaf again.

“Your grandfather . . .” Mr. Katsanakis sighed heavily. “Jack was a good man. But also a pain in my
popos
.”

“I know. He used to say the same thing about you. Except he said
keister
.”

Mr. Katsanakis's thick eyebrows lowered threateningly, then popped up again. “Ha! He was right! We are the same that way.” He looked at me with tenderness. “We were, I guess.” The door jingled with a group of tourists, and he started to move away.

“Um, Mr. Katsa—” I ventured.

“Mr. K, you call me.”

“Mr. K then. Just—thanks, I mean.”

I was astonished to see him wiggle his eyebrows at me, then wander away, wielding big plastic menus.

I dug back into my feast, feeling happy with just a side of guilty. As I looked around for a copy of the
Post
, I noticed a girl my age sitting alone at the table behind me.

It was strange to see another girl alone in the city. Jack had given me free rein from the time I was eight, but I might as well have been an orphan. Anytime I went out, someone would stop to ask if I was lost. Even now, other kids my age are almost always in tight groups, arms draped over shoulders, plugged into the same electronic device. “That's the problem with your generation,” Jack would say, “letting machines doing the thinking for you.”

In fact, the girl at the next table was immersed in her cell phone, too, sometimes jabbing, sometimes swiping, and occasionally even speaking into it. Which is all very well as you sit at a diner, but you wouldn't believe the people stumbling around the sidewalks with their faces glued to these things, not paying attention to a thing around them.

“May I help you?”

I realized I'd been staring this whole time and, naturally, pretended I was studying something utterly fascinating just beyond the girl's head.

“Listen, I don't have any autographs on me, so don't bother asking.”

Autograph? So this girl was a famous . . . what? My knowledge of famous faces was limited to whoever I passed on the newsstand, but this girl didn't look like much of a celebrity. She was wearing a white button-down shirt tucked into high-waisted khaki pants, and her dark, glossy hair was braided in long pigtails, tucked behind each ear. She looked less like a pop star and more like Pocahontas with a job at the Gap.

I let a
psshshh
out of the side of my mouth. “So? Who wants an autograph anyway?”

“Well, I don't do pictures either.”

“Well, that's good news, because I don't have a camera.”

This struck the girl as very funny. “Oh, okay! Ha. I guess you'll just be getting out your cell phone now. . . .”

“Don't have one of those either.”

Now it was the girl's turn to look surprised. “What? How do you text people?”

I shrugged.

“I mean, okay, you can just use e-mail. But what about calls? Do you use pay phones or something?”

I wasn't about to explain that I didn't have anyone to call. I shrugged again.

“Wow, that's cool. Kind of like meeting someone from the olden days who time travels to the future. Like
Return to Tomorrow
, you know?”

“Yeah . . . The book?” I ventured.

“The
book
? No, the movie. Came out last summer? It grossed, like, three hundred mil domestic, seven hundred worldwide. The sequel's in post-production now for release next summer, but you should really download the original first.”

“Sure.” I understood about three of the words in her last two sentences.

The girl put down her phone and squinted at me. “So you really don't know who I am?”

“Should I?”

The girl smiled, revealing a row of teeth so white and perfect they could only be called dazzling. “Nope, not at all.” She got up and joined me at the counter. “I'm Bodhi. What's your name? You live around here?”

“Theo. I live on Spinney Lane.”

“Oh yeah? Me too! Just moved in last week.”

“Oh, the house with all the—”

“Paparazzi. Yeah. I hate it.”

“So your parents are—”

“Jessica Blake and Jake Ford. Yeah.”

I was glad she'd filled in the names, because while I might recognize their faces from the newsstand, their names would definitely be pushing the limits of my pop culture knowledge.

“Big house,” I said reluctantly. It was the only house on the block bigger than ours. It was also a lot,
lot
nicer.

“It's okay, I guess. They're still moving in and finishing the renovations, so it's too crazy to hang around. I try to stay out all day. This place has become my second home.”

“And your parents don't mind?” My experience was the richer the family, the more people watching the kids.

“Who's gonna mind? My mom's in Morocco shooting a new movie. My dad's on set all day in Brooklyn. And we have eight different employees—oh, sorry, I'm supposed to call them ‘team members'—anyway, eight other people in the house, all of whom think someone else is watching me.” Bodhi looked over to the counter. “Hey, want some pie? On me. Mr. K, two coconut, please!”

First meat loaf, now pie? Yes, please.

Mr. Katsanakis clattered two plates in front of us and went back in the kitchen to yell at the line cooks.

In the space of one rainstorm, I had gone from being one of the Village's eccentric outsiders to being the kind of girl who wanders into her local diner to chat with the owner and share some pie with a buddy.

I kind of liked it.

“Hey,” said Bodhi, looking down, “I used to have a pair of sneakers like that! OnDa1 gave them to me—you know, the hip-hop artist? No? He was in a movie with my dad last year. Only got to wear them a couple times before I outgrew them. Where'd you get 'em? I thought the company only made, like, three pairs.”

“Hey, I like your . . . shirt.” I fumbled for anything to change the subject.

“This?” Bodhi snorted. “This is just my paparazzi uniform. I wear the same thing every day, no matter what. I got the idea from this rock star who used to go jogging in the same outfit every day so the paparazzi's pictures would always look the same. That way they can't sell the pictures, and they leave you alone.”

“Aren't you hot, though?”

“Oh, man, I'm sweating my pits out. Why do you think I hang out all day at this diner? AC, baby.”

We finished our pie in silence, neither of us able to think of a topic of common interest.

“Why don't we go to your house? Watch TV or something.” Bodhi threw some bills on the counter and hopped off her stool.

I hesitated. We hadn't had a visitor in . . . years? Decades? I'd certainly never had friends over. I didn't even have friends.

Plus there was a certain safety here in the diner, where I existed outside the backyard chickens, the ramshackle house, the strange mother. Couldn't we just stay here? We had pie. We had air-conditioning. What more did we need?

“Hey, let's go.” Bodhi already had the door open. “The
America's Got Reality Stars
marathon is coming on.”

To my surprise, I found myself saying, “Sure. It's just, we don't have a TV . . .”

And as I left, I wrapped the rest of my pie in a napkin and tucked it in my bag.

W
hat looked increasingly shabby to me each day looked positively condemned through Bodhi's eyes. I saw the house clearly now: the water stains, the unraveling rugs, the hallways taken over with Jack's hoard of street finds. I rattled on about the house's history and our sidewalk treasures, trying to fill the gaping silence left by Bodhi, whose eyes got wider and wider the deeper we dove.

After a brief tour of the kitchen (puddle under the leaking fridge, mouse droppings under the radiator), I led the way to the garden.

“So . . . this is where we grow most of our food. We don't just go to the grocery store and buy, you know, Chili-Powdered Cheez Janglers, or whatever most people eat. We grow it here. It's a lot better than what you get at the overpriced farmer's market, too. And the chickens—that's Adelaide, and that little eye-pecker is Artemesia—um, they live over here in the coop. They're pretty quiet. They're all hens, no roosters, you know. But our neighbor,” I lowered my voice, “Madame Dumont, she complains all the time that they wake her up in the morning. And that they smell, which you can see, they don't . . .” I stopped, at a loss, and just let the silence settle over the yard.

Bodhi stood rooted, slowly shaking her head. She finally murmured: “This . . . is . . . awesome!”

She walked slowly around the garden, touching the vegetables and tapping at the chickens with her foot. She finally looked up, her face bright with excitement.

“So cool! Seriously. Just phenomenal. I've gotta wrap my head around this. Okay, so . . . do you have a TV?”

“No. Never have.”

Bodhi nodded to herself. “So no DVR? No DVDs? No TiVo? Not even a VCR?”

“No.”

“Okay, this is fun. What about a dishwasher?”

“Nope.”

“Washing machine?”

“Laundromat on Grove Street.”

“Okay, don't tell me you don't have a computer?”

“Just the terminals at the library.”

Bodhi's eyes narrowed. “What about a bathroom?”

“Yes, of course. Jeez.” It was one thing to be thought eccentric but another to be thought unhygienic.

“Okay, okay, had to ask.” Bodhi peered around the yard, still looking for an outhouse.

“Seriously. We have two bathrooms. In fact, the one upstairs has one of those old-fashioned toilets where you pull the chain to make it flush.”

“Cool! Show me everything! Race you to the top.” And before I could stop her, Bodhi was back inside, her footsteps pounding up the stairs.

• • •

“What's this room?” I heard from the third-floor landing.

By the time I reached Jack's studio, Bodhi was already riffling through his canvases, pulling out paintings that caught her eye. “I like these,” she said, sliding around some wall-sized abstracts. “And I like the colors on this other one. My dad has one like that in his meditation room.” She paused momentarily to look up at the painting I'd put back over the fireplace. “But what's that one? Kind of old school compared to the other stuff, isn't it?”

I paused. I thought about how my grandfather had hidden this painting for decades. How he left it to me—and me alone—as a “treasure.” How carefully I needed to tread, not knowing what this unpredictable stranger would think or who she would tell.

Blame it on the heat. I spilled it. The paint, the rag, Jack's last words, all of it.

As it turns out, Bodhi was fascinated.

“It's what—a Madonna and Child, you said?” Bodhi pulled out her phone, snapped a few photos, and then started mining Google. “Okay, let's see, search Madonna plus child plus painting plus bird . . . Oh man, twenty million results! Let's try Madonna plus
sleeping
child plus
flying
bird . . .”

“I don't think that's going to help. You could probably find thousands of paintings that fit that description.” Impressive words from Jack's art history lessons bubbled up into my mouth. “It's a popular composition of the Renaissance era, perhaps
cinquecento
 . . .”

“So, it's what, a family heirloom?”

“I'm not sure. But . . . my grandfather did work at the Met. He was a security guard.”

Bodhi's eyebrows went up.

“In European paintings. But he never—”

“Wow. Did he bring home . . . souvenirs?”

“Of course not! You can't sneak anything out. They check your bags; they check your background and references; there are cameras and alarms everywhere.” I reached up to pat the painting's elaborate gilt frame. “One time when I was little I put my hands on the frame of a Degas, and a zillion sirens went off. How would you fold up this thing and tuck it in your pocket?”

Bodhi thought for a moment. “I saw this movie once where they cut a painting out of its frame, rolled it up, put it in a suitcase. . . .”

“It's painted on a wood panel,” I interrupted, “not canvas. So you could remove the frame maybe, but you'd still have to smuggle the whole thing out.”

“Where'd he get it then? And why'd he hide it?” Before I could answer, she finished, “That's the question—well, two questions—isn't it?”

I nodded.

We stood unified before the painting.

“So who painted it?”

“I don't know. But there's something familiar about it . . .”

“What about a signature? What's all this stuff down here?” Bodhi poked her finger at the letters marching along the bottom edge.

“It's not signed. The words are Latin, but I don't know what they mean.”

Bodhi was back on her phone. “Well, that's easy enough. Latin-to-English dictionary. We just punch each word in, write it down, and voilà—we have our first clue.”

I was liking this. In the five minutes since Bodhi barged in, we'd made more headway together than I had all morning with the painting myself. I grabbed a nearby sketchpad and charcoal pencil, while Bodhi methodically worked her way through the verse. In no time, we had this:

Bread alive, that grew but didn't grow, suckled the plump, and also cured a doctor angel

“Maybe there's a better website,” mumbled Bodhi.

Jack was right. This is what you get when you let machines do the thinking for you. “Would you put Picasso into Paint by Numbers? I don't think translation software is the answer here.”

“Then you need a translator. Know anyone who just happens to speak fluent Latin? And won't report you and your mysterious discovery to the cops?”

I smiled. “Actually, you just gave me an idea. Wanna come?”

“I guess. Is it really far away? It's brutal out there.”

I wrapped a drop cloth around the painting like a present and looked around for something to carry it in.

“I think you'll like it. It's pretty cool.”

• • •

“I don't know if I'd call this place ‘cool.'” Bodhi looked suspiciously around the church sanctuary. “Is someone going to come out and ask me if I love Jesus?”

“You've got to admit it's a lot cooler than my house.” And I was right. Stepping into Grace Church was like leaving summer outside and landing in the middle of October. Dark and easily twenty degrees cooler than the street, I was tempted to take off my shoes and chill my bare feet on the marble floor, but thought that might be considered sacrilegious. Or something.

Bodhi was unfazed by such concerns and sprawled out on a pew. “So why are we here? Are you going to confess?”

“No. At least, I don't think so.” To be honest, I wasn't sure how this how church thing worked. Always on the lookout for free cultural events, Jack and I had sometimes attended Grace Church's organ concerts, but I'd never entered the building for any spiritual purpose.

As a family, the Tenpennys had been members of Grace Church since 1853—until Jack came along with his committed brand of atheism. Over the years, he'd devised his own worship schedule: Sunday mornings sketching at one of the city's museums, Christmas reading Sartre before the fire, Easter morning working in the garden. I'd followed his lead and never had much need for any church—until now.

But I'd read enough history books to know that priests read Latin. And I'd read enough mystery novels to know that they have to keep whatever you tell them secret.

Just as I was wondering how to summon a priest when you need one, a plump lady in full clerical garb entered the sanctuary from a small door by the altar. She stopped and gave a small bow to the altar, then turned and walked toward the back of the church, her Birkenstocks squeaking up the aisle.

“Hullo there,” came a British voice from halfway up the aisle. “May I help you ladies?”

“Um, yes. We're looking for a priest, I guess?”

She came to a stop in front of us and chuckled. “Well, you found one, I guess. Reverend Cecily, you can call me.” She shook my hand firmly. “And you are?”

“I'm Theo. Theodora, really. But you can call me Theo.”

“Theo-Theodora, welcome.” She held my hand in hers warmly. “We are truly happy to have you here.”

“Uh, okay, thanks.” I withdrew my hand and wondered if Bodhi was right and Reverend Cecily was going to ask if I loved Jesus. “And this is my friend, Bodhi.” As soon as I used the word, “friend,” I wished I could take it back. But if Bodhi minded, she didn't show it. She just stayed where she was on the pew and gave a little wave.

“Hello there. What a wonderful name, Bodhi. The Sanskrit word for ‘enlightenment.' Your parents are Buddhists?”

Bodhi propped herself up on her elbows. “They were when I was born. Or at least their guru was.”

“Ah. Well, what can I do for you girls today?” Her eyes dropped to the 1970s blue hardside Samsonite I'd found in the attic, where the painting was zipped neatly into one side.

I moved the suitcase behind my legs. “We're looking for a priest to read some Latin. But you're a . . . I didn't know women—”

“—could be priests? This is an Episcopal church, and indeed they can. And yes, I read Latin. Ancient Greek, too. I studied them for my divinity degree.” Reverend Cecily looked confused. “Do you need homework help?”

“Not exactly.”

• • •

Reverend Cecily set to work with the painting in her study and sent Bodhi and me to the kitchen to raid the coffee-hour cookies.

“How did you know those words were Latin?” Bodhi asked, her mouth full of Social Tea Biscuits. “Do you take it in school?”

“No, Spanish.” I shoved another Nutter Butter in my mouth and slipped three more into the patchwork pockets I'd sewn onto Jack's old T-shirt. “What language do you take?”

“I don't take anything. I'm unschooled.”

“What's that?”

“It's kind of like homeschooling but without the school part.”

“So . . . it's just . . . being home?”

Bodhi huffed. “No, it's pursuing your own interests, when you want to. Independent study projects, they're called. Like, when my mom was on location in Tanzania, I worked at an animal rescue center, working with baby hippopotamuses. And when my dad did that movie about the inner-city teacher, I wrote a history of hip-hop. And the summer they did that disaster movie together, I pretty much just read all the Tolkein books.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever. I'm going to school in the city this fall.” Bodhi took a swig of apple juice from a paper cup. “Besides, it's not homeschooling when you don't have a home.”

“So where did you live before?”

“On sets. On location. In trailers. In hotel rooms. At other actors' houses. Oh, and one year at a Collective Living Experience.”

“What's that?”

“Just a bunch of hippies arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes.”

Another cookie in the mouth, another in the pocket. “What about friends?”

Bodhi shrugged. “What about them?”

“Well, how did you make them? Or keep them?” This wasn't just a hypothetical question. I was looking to her for ideas, like a seminar in one of those free flyers around Manhattan: Making and Keeping Friends When You Have Nothing in Common with Your Peers (and Dress Weird).

“Eh, didn't need 'em. I had my mom. I had my dad. Not usually both at the same time. But, y'know, I had the world. Tanzania! New Zealand! Hollywood movie sets of Tanzania and New Zealand!”

“Sure,” I said.

“And there were always people around. Tutors, nannies, assistants, assistants to the assistants. There was always someone to take me where I wanted to go.”

“Uh-huh.”

The room was filled with the sound of munching cookies.

“But not always someone to go
with
.” Bodhi met my eyes again and seemed to search out something there. “Do you know what I mean?”

I knew exactly what she meant. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“Ah, there you are, ladies.” Reverend Cecily appeared at the door. “Let me fix a cup of tea, and then come to my office. I think I may have solved your mystery.”

• • •

When we got to Reverend Cecily's office, I saw that the painting was propped on the chair across from the reverend's desk, as if she was offering it counseling.

“Well, a nifty little piece your grandfather picked up here. Where did he get it?”

Reverend Cecily's stream of chatter rescued me from answering. “Now, I don't know much about painting—styles, artists, that sort of thing—but religious iconography I know.”

Bodhi perched herself on the corner of Reverend Cecily's desk. “Ico-whattery?”

“It's the symbols,” I jumped in. “What they mean, what they're trying to say, sort of like a visual code. Like . . . a skull means mortality. Or a dog means fidelity.”

“Or a mirror means vanity. Exactly!” Reverend Cecily clapped her hands again. “You are quite the art scholar.”