The Wonder Bread Summer (2 page)

“How are you today?” Allie said, to the last one through the door.

“Just looking,” the woman said, and she rushed toward the sale rack in the back where Jonas had hung a few poorly stitched madras frocks he had bought by the pound from a South American merchant who couldn’t speak English. Although she always knew there was cocaine in the back, had seen people walk in then out after “visiting” Jonas, and knew Beth and Jonas did coke together, Allie hadn’t understood
that
was the real business until the day that she’d witnessed Jonas buying dresses without regard to what they looked like.

Allie watched the customers for a moment, although she wasn’t sure why. She placed herself behind the glass-top counter in her customary position, elbows down, butt waggling behind, in an effort to force her body to feel comfortable. Jonas sauntered out of the dressing room and stood before Allie on the other side of the counter. Allie’s stomach bumped and recoiled.

“That was reaaaaaly fun,” Jonas said, and he winked as if they’d shared a tender secret. “Ain’t nothin’ sweeter than a yummy little Jewish-Asian-black girl.”

“How do you know I’m part Jewish?” Allie asked. It seemed impossible that Jonas could perceive this tiny bit of her.

“I can see it!” Jonas laughed. “Just like I saw the black and Asian.”

Allie couldn’t even fake a smile. “Okay, so you said you’d pay me and I could leave at one, remember?” Was the barbed-wire feeling in her veins from the coke or remorse? How long would it take for all this to wear off?

“Yeah, yeah,” Jonas said, just as his beeper went off. He flipped the beeper up from his belt so he could see the number, then said, “I’ll write you a check as soon as I finish some business in the back.”

Jonas went to the stockroom, where his desk was. Two more women came in. It was unusual to have so many customers. Miss Shirley’s was on a shady intersection with a liquor store across the street and a rib joint two doors over. No one would have driven there to buy a dress—the customers were mostly people who lived in the neighborhood, wandering in because they were curious, or bored, or because they didn’t have the energy to go elsewhere. But that afternoon, Thursday, one followed the other in and out the door, keeping Allie busy while she tried to ignore her shaking hands, her heart beating in her stomach, and the stone of regret in her throat.

At one thirty, Allie was ringing up what would be the last sale of the day. Jonas still hadn’t come out of the stockroom and Allie didn’t want to go back there, where she might once again be alone with him. She made conversation with her final customer, a middle-aged, dreadlocked woman with the soft, pillowy body of TV grandmothers, in the hope she would stay until Allie had her paycheck in hand.

“So where do you plan on wearing the dress?” Allie asked.

“I don’t know.” Middle-aged-TV-grandmother smiled. “I hadn’t really thought of that.”

“What shoes do you have at home to wear with it?” Allie glanced toward the back. She worried about what Jonas might ask of her before handing over the check. Allie stared down at the register, opened it, and counted out, in twenties and one ten, the amount owed her for the past eight weeks: $1,530.00.

“I suppose I could wear sandals.” The woman hesitated. She seemed startled by the sudden friendship. Or maybe she was surprised by the large sum of cash Allie had just removed from the till.

“Jonas!” Allie yelled to the back, “I’m leaving now, I paid myself from the register.” How could he say no? The money was there now and he had promised to pay her.

Jonas rushed out and stood in front of Allie and middle-aged-TV-grandmother. He looked from one to the other.

“We’re going,” Allie said, pointing at middle-aged-TV-grandmother with her thumb. “I paid myself.” Allie held up the thick wad of bills for Jonas to see. She was quivering so hard it looked like she was using the money for a fan.

Jonas snatched the cash, divided it in two, and shoved it down the front pockets of his gray slacks. “I said I’d write you a check,” he said.

“Can you write it now?” Allie asked. “I have to pay at least part of my tuition or I’m going to be kicked out of school.”

Middle-aged-TV-grandmother watched the conversation, wary.

“Come in the back with me and I’ll give you a check.” Jonas put his hand on Allie’s upper arm and pulled her toward him.

“Will you wait for me?” Allie smiled at the woman.

“You want me to wait for you?” Middle-aged-TV-grandmother’s brow furrowed in anxiety.

“You don’t have to wait for her,” Jonas said. “We’re closing up early—I’ll give her a ride home.” He released Allie, walked to the other side of the counter, and stood by the door.

“But it should only take you a second to write the check,” Allie said.

“Allie!” Jonas smiled real big. “Let the woman go!”

“Well, thanks so much,” middle-aged-TV-grandmother said hastily, and she bundled her plastic shopping bag with her macramé purse, held them both against her chest, and went out the door, which Jonas shut behind her. As he was turning the bolt, she looked back through the glass and caught Allie’s eye.
Save me
, Allie thought, but middle-aged-TV-grandmother didn’t seem to understand; she turned and walked down the sidewalk.

“Who was that?” Jonas asked. “Your boyfriend’s mother?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Allie said.

“Marc,” Jonas said.

“Who told you about Marc? Did Beth tell you about Marc?” Allie asked. Each time she said his name, Allie felt a finger jabbing the bruises on her heart—it was still tender, throbbing.

Marc and Allie had first seen each other in the outdoor courtyard of Café Roma during the first week of the fall semester. Allie was alone at a table, reading
Le Grand Meaulnes
in French.

“You can read that?” Marc had asked, peering in to look at the book from the table beside her. Something like a tidal wave had washed through Allie’s head. She hadn’t been able to hear, could barely see, felt numbness in her legs, and had to deliberately search inside her mouth for her tongue. First love at first sight.

Marc had a BA from Berkeley and an MBA from Stanford. He was tall, with broad shoulders and wide white teeth that lined up perfectly, like train cars. His eyes were brown, his hair was brown, his skin was like suede. He looked like someone out of a tuxedo catalog.

Impossibly, he seemed to like Allie. And he was impressed by her—her good grades, her fluency in French, the fact that she had never had alcohol or smoked pot, or cut a class, or had sex even. And so, Allie went on the second date of her life, the first having been senior prom with Blake Freid, who was a pimply genius. Unlike Blake after their evening, Marc asked Allie out again. And again. And again. At first Allie felt like she was in a dream where all she had to do was float, but eventually she relaxed and became her authentic self around Marc—she did goofy robot dances; she pulled up her pants to underneath her breasts, stuck her belly out, and pretended she was a middle-aged woman; she teased her hair out into a giant ball of frizzy red and laughed at herself in the mirror. And Marc seemed to like her even more.

In the beginning of October, in spite of his busy schedule (he was never able to see her two weekend nights in a row and could usually only get away one night during the week), Marc was officially Allie’s boyfriend. That’s when Allie’s
trying
period began. She tried alcohol, got slightly drunk and discovered she liked the liquid feeling it gave her, the soupiness that ran through her veins and swirled in her head. Twice she tried pot, but smoking pot made her feel like she was shouting when she was whispering, so Allie decided that was the end of trying pot.

Eventually, and in spite of the fear that she would be irrevocably changed for the worse (slummier, less youthful and optimistic), she tried sex. The girls at school had told Allie that the first few times would be awkward and painful. It takes some time to figure out what you’re doing, they said, and don’t even think that you’ll have an orgasm! Not so for Allie. It was great sex. Her body seemed to know just what went where. And Allie only felt changed for the better—like she moved better, danced better, walked taller. It was like discovering a country you never knew existed and finding that you already were familiar with the customs and could even speak the language. Sex was the highlight of Allie’s year. If getting into Berkeley hadn’t been so important to her, she might have said that sex was the highlight of her life.

When Christmas came, Allie went home to her father, Frank, in Los Angeles. She decorated a potted fig tree with tinsel and made a tinfoil star to put on the top. Frank made cocoa on Christmas morning and gave Allie a gift certificate to Berman’s Office Supply so she could buy typing paper, typewriter ribbons, notebooks, and pens for school.

When Allie returned to Berkeley, Marc took her out to dinner, gave her two tickets for an Eddie Money concert, and asked to borrow $7,000 for the best business opportunity he’d seen since getting his MBA.

“It’s a bar in San Leandro,” Marc had explained. “A cash machine. The owner’s in some trouble with his family—had an affair with his brother’s wife or something—and has to leave town now.”

“He slept with his brother’s wife?!” Allie asked.

“No big deal,” Marc said, and Allie should have known then that there were ways in which Marc would not be good for her.

“Kind of a big deal,” Allie said.

“I’ll pay you back in time for you to pay your spring tuition and I’ll even give you five hundred dollars interest,” Marc said.

It would be the quickest and easiest five hundred dollars Allie had ever made. It would be gourmet coffee money, snack money, or maybe she’d even take Beth out to a fancy dinner to repay her for all the food Allie ate from Beth’s refrigerator. Beth’s apartment was stocked like a real home. Not Allie’s home in L.A., but like her high school friend Kathy Kruger’s: Life cereal, milk, Oreos, Laughing Cow cheese, Triscuit crackers, oatmeal in packets, bags of oranges, bananas that went brown before you could eat them all.

The payback dinner with Beth never happened. Marc called Allie at Beth’s (Allie herself didn’t have a phone and so made and took calls at friends’ houses) the day before she was to pay her tuition and explained that the bar had been broken into, the big-screen TV had been stolen, and without a TV there were no customers and no way for him to borrow against the equity. Three days after that, he broke up with her.

“Come back to the fitting room,” Jonas said. “I’ll tell you who told me about Marc, and then I’ll write you a check.”

“I’m not interested in the fitting room and I don’t really care who told you about Marc.” Allie hoped that at the end of her life, lifting up her shirt for Jonas would be the worst thing she’d ever done. If that were the case, she could take some joy in knowing it was behind her.

“Then forget about Marc and just come back to the fitting room.” Jonas raised his eyebrows, then winked.

“I don’t want to do what we did in there again,” Allie said. And then, because it was almost impossible for her not to be polite, she added, “I’m sorry.”

“Takes me less than thirty seconds—you know that!” Jonas slinked toward Allie in a slow shoulder-churning serpentine move.

“I’m really tired, Jonas,” Allie said. Her voice was starting to quaver again. “I just want to get paid and go home.” She pulled her pink satin purse out from under the register and dropped it on the counter. It was a sad-looking purse. The pink was turning gray with dirt.

“No reason to be tired with all the pick-me-up I’ve got in the stockroom,” Jonas coaxed.

“I don’t need any more pick-me-up.” Allie tried to stand up straight, as she had read once that if you place your body in a position of control the feeling of control will come to you.
Take control, take control, take control
, she thought. “Jonas, you need to pay me right now.”

“Stop worrying about your paycheck!” Jonas said.

“I quit. Pay me NOW.” Allie splayed her hands on the counter, as if to exert some force.

“What do you mean you quit?” Jonas’s face changed from rubber to stone.

“I was offered a job at that bagel place on Telegraph Avenue,” Allie lied. She usually tried to be honest (
HALF LIE WILL RUIN WHOLE REPUTATION
, Wai Po had often said), but it seemed that a white lie was a necessary evil in this case.

“Why would you waste your time at some dumb-ass bagel place on Telegraph Avenue when you could be here, get paid,
and
get free blow whenever you want it!” Jonas thumped his hand on the counter as if to emphasize his last point.

“I can walk to the bagel place,” Allie improvised, “and I’m sick of taking the bus—” She reached for her purse, but Jonas snatched it up first.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Jonas held the purse behind his back.

Allie stood still as a cat. She tried to tally up everything that was in her purse. Maybe she didn’t even need it. There were her IDs (school and driver’s license); a dried, black Cover Girl mascara (she’d been meaning to throw it out); a tube of Lancôme lipstick (Beth gave it to her because she, Beth, didn’t like the color); a pink comb (her only one); some Bic pens (accidentally stolen from the library at school, where she always borrowed a pen from one of the librarians); her quilted fabric wallet (empty save a few pennies and a dime); tampons (covers shredded, white cotton mice popping out of their cardboard inserters); rolling papers (Beth’s); a miniature water pipe (Marc’s, a souvenir, really); a Eurythmics cassette (useless, as she had no way to play it since her Walkman had died); a year-old index card with a phone number where she could allegedly reach her mother, Penny, in case of emergency (and in case Allie had enough money to make a long-distance call to area code 316, wherever that was); and the one-white, empty rabbit foot key chain Wai Po had given Allie on her sixth birthday.

Allie wanted the key chain. She had been carrying that rabbit foot, almost black and slightly bald now, for fourteen years. It brought her good luck, she believed, just like Wai Po had said, ensuring Allie’s place in Berkeley, among other things. And, though she was loath to admit it to anyone, Allie hadn’t spent a night without the rabbit foot nearby since the day her grandmother had handed it to her. Also, she wanted her mother’s number. Penny may not have taken care of her in years, but Allie still held on to the thought that if she ever really were in trouble, her mother would bail her out. And without her student loan money, without her scholarship money, and now that it looked like she’d be without her paycheck, Allie was feeling like this might be the time.