Pish Posh (13 page)

The world, as it turned out, tasted pretty great. Annabelle reached down behind her bed again and pulled out a cellophane pack of red sticks, which she said were Twizzlers; a somewhat smooshed package of tiny chocolate-glazed doughnuts; and a bag of pork rinds.

“Hey, a girl can't live on spirulina alone,” Annabelle explained, spreading the feast out on the bed. Then she reached into her tote bag on the floor and pulled out the thick manila envelope.

“And I didn't peek in it, in case you're wondering,” Annabelle said. She handed the envelope to Clara, then picked up a teen magazine off the floor and buried her nose in it.

Clara took a deep breath, then uncoiled the string from the round clasp.

There were many papers inside, almost all of them dated, and apparently in chronological order. Clara thought it best to start at the beginning. She pulled out the first page, which was closest to the front of the envelope and had the earliest date marked on top of it, and began to read the neatly printed handwriting:

Fizzelli? Why was that name so familiar, Clara wondered. Then she realized it was the same last name of the artist who had once lived in Pish Posh's building.

Below that, and on several pages after, were columns of numbers and technical names that Clara did not understand. Probably test results of some kind.

Then, scribbled hastily on the back of one of the pages:

The following page read:

Clara had been reading so raptly that she had forgotten about her Pop-Tart. She popped the rest of it into her mouth, then pulled a Twizzler out of its package.

“Anything good in there?” Annabelle asked, lifting her head from the magazine.

Clara nodded and, after biting into the Twizzler, which was a little like biting into a strawberry-flavored electrical cord, continued reading. There were many more entries documenting Audrey's other visits to Dr. Piff's office. It seemed, however, that nothing too dramatic happened until November 17, 1990:

Work something out with her father? What would he work out? Clara turned the page, and her question was answered immediately.

After that there were pages and pages of things that Clara could not make heads or tails of, mostly medications and tests, she guessed. Here and there a few brief notes:

Then...

The last passage took Clara by surprise. How odd it was to hear someone describe her that way. She smiled a little, then quickly glanced over at Annabelle, embarrassed. But Annabelle was too engrossed in her magazine to notice.

Next came notes from a medical conference, and several more tests. Then, on March 18
^th
, 2005:

Clara's face burned bright red. A mixture of rage and embarrassment flooded her body. How dare he pity her?!

She gathered up the papers and shoved them back in the envelope.

“What's wrong?” Annabelle asked.

“Nothing.” Clara turned away so Annabelle wouldn't see how red her face had become. “I'm tired. Can we shut off the light?”

“Sure,” Annabelle said. She closed the magazine and shut off the light, and the two of them climbed under the covers.

Much as she tried, though, Clara could not get Dr. Piff's words out of her head. She felt an odd crumply feeling around her throat and a wettish tickle creep across her cheek-bone. She swiped her hand across it quickly, but it came again, faster and faster, and she could not stop it. I'm crying, she thought, stunned. Stop it, she told herself. You are not an infant. You
will
stop crying, you
must
stop crying! But though the tears were part of her body, they seemed to govern themselves. Utterly humiliated, there was nothing left for Clara to do but turn away from Annabelle and let the tears flow—which they did, long after Annabelle was snoring.

T
he next morning, Clara sat down to breakfast in the kitchen. Mr. Arbutnot had made twelve-grain hot cereal, which tasted like a cross between wet bread and beach sand. It was topped with soy nuts and chased with a tall glass of watery-looking rice milk.

“You're not eating your breakfast.” Mr. Arbutnot nodded toward Clara's barely touched bowl of cereal.

“I'm not very hungry, ” she muttered. Which was actually true. Her stomach felt knotted up, and her eyelids were swollen and hot-feeling from crying.

“Soy nuts are good for lots of medical ailments, ” Mr. Arbutnot said. “Like fungus, for instance.”

Clara turned to Annabelle angrily, but Annabelle deliberately avoided her eyes and gazed down at the newspaper on the table instead.

“Hey, look at that!” she said and read the headline: “Metropolitan Museum of Art Announces Its Face of the Middle Ages.” She held the paper up for them to see. There was a picture of June Loblolly, looking stunned as she stood outside the 464 Fifth Avenue office. Although she hadn't been
officially
selected, all the hoopla must have convinced the Met that they had found their woman.

Mr. Arbutnot considered the picture for a moment, then said, “Well, I guess she does have a certain look about her. But if the Met wanted to find a
real
Face of the Middle Ages, they'd have been better off finding someone with missing teeth and greasy hair. I have a patient who was a nursemaid in 1402, and she said she bathed once a year and cleaned her teeth with the end of a twig. ”

 

After breakfast Clara asked to use the phone, first spending a few moments perusing the Manhattan phone book. Blurt, it turned out, was a most uncommon name. In fact, there was only one Blurt listed: Shelly Blurt. Clara dialed the number. The phone rang so many times that Clara nearly hung up, but finally there was a breathless voice on the other end.

“Yes? ”

“Ms. Blurt?” Clara asked.

“Yes? ”

“This is Clara Frankofile. I need to talk to you. ”

Ms. Blurt hesitated. “Oh? What about?” It sounded like she was trying very hard to sound nonchalant.

“The other night, when you fainted—”

“It was all the excitement, I'm sure,” Ms. Blurt cut in nervously.

“It was the soup cook, Ms. Blurt, let's not pretend. You must tell me what you know about her. ” Clara thought it best to be stern with Ms. Blurt.

“If I did ... no, really, the whole thing is impossible,” said Ms. Blurt.

“Ms. Blurt, the world is full of impossible things.” Clara repeated Ms. Fizzelli's words with a conviction that surprised even herself. There was a pause on the other end.

“All right. But I'll have to show you, rather than tell you. Can you come to my apartment? ”

Ms. Blurt gave Clara her address. It wasn't far from Annabelle's.

“I'll be there in ten minutes,” Clara said.

 

Ms. Blurt lived in a tiny one-room apartment, up five steep flights of stairs. The stairway smelled of tuna casserole and cat litter, and all the doors had at least half-a-dozen locks on them.

By the time she reached Ms. Blurt's apartment, Clara was fairly out of breath from the climb and queasy from the odor. She knocked on the door, panting a little, and listened as the locks in Ms. Blurt's apartment clicked and snapped for a full minute before the door opened.

Ms. Blurt was wearing a pink pantsuit with a giant green butterfly sewn on to the bottoms of her pants' legs and a matching butterfly on the pocket of her jacket. Multicolored butterfly barrettes were sprinkled through her mass of wild hair, their silver antennas wiggling.

“Come in, come in,” she said hastily, and she hustled Clara inside the apartment. “I'm still looking for it ... I know it's around here somewhere ... Sit down, sit down ... ” Ms. Blurt indicated a small brown sofa in the middle of the room that was completely surrounded by thick mounds of books, magazines, and papers, strewn all across the floor. “Just be careful not to step on anything,” she added.

Not to step on anything? There didn't seem to be any bare floor to put your foot upon. Still, Ms. Blurt trotted off easily through the clutter and began to scour a bookcase that covered the entire back wall.

Clara looked down and saw that indeed there were bits of green carpet peeking through the clutter, and that the bits of green formed a trail, rather like stepping-stones across a stream, that led directly to the couch. Another trail, the one that Ms. Blurt had taken, wound its way around to the bookshelf with smaller branches that led to the tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom.

Clara took the trail to the couch, staring down at the reading material as she planted her feet on one spot of green carpet after the next. The books and magazines were all about art—Renaissance art, primitive art, impressionist art. What was odd was that Ms. Blurt had no artwork at all on the walls. Instead, the walls were covered with different colored Post-it notes, scrawled with cryptic messages:
Was the musician in Giancarlo's painting a local pickpocket in venice? and The princess with the golden hair in DePonsy's portrait looks bored, but really she was very ill and probably feverish. She died right after the portrait was painted.