Not! That’s the Barney’s magic. And once you feel it, you can never get enough.
My grandmother puts up these fresh air things all over her apartment. They have names like Irish Meadow and Seaside. I want a gizmo I can plug in and Wham! My room smells like Barney Greengrass.
Normally, Barney’s won’t let you sit unless everyone in your party is there, but since we’re regulars, Zippo let me go straight to our table.
“Hey, kid,” he said, holding out his palm.
“Hey,” I said, smacking it as I slid into a booth next to the window display of challah breads.
“The usual?” he asked, rolling a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other.
“Uh-huh.”
“What about Mom? I have to check if the kreplach’s ready.”
Zippo has known Mom all her life. She grew up coming to Barney’s with her parents, and Zippo was already a waiter back then. The guys in the kitchen love her because she gets the kreplach. According to Zippo, very few people order kreplach anymore, and nobody but her ever orders it for breakfast, so she’s something of a celebrity. If you don’t know, kreplach is like Jewish wonton soup. I’m not a huge fan, but you should decide for yourself.
“She and Dad both want kreplach,” I said.
“Really? Tom’s getting kreplach,” Zippo said, impressed. “And what about Thing One and Thing Two?”
“Plain bagels with cream cheese.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I said.
Zippo rolled his eyes and then disappeared into the kitchen.
I don’t know how long I was waiting, but by the time everybody else got there, the food was already on the table, and I was halfway done. When I looked up from my plate, they were making their way through the crowd by the counter. Zoe was crying, and my father was carrying her way out in front of him to keep from getting stuck with one of the many chopsticks poking out of her hair.
Mom puts her own hair up with chopsticks when she’s cooking, but she uses only two. Her hair wouldn’t even hold more than two, but Zoe’s hair is like Velcro—curly, orange, gravity-defying Velcro. Of course, my parents love it because the rest of us, including them, have boring, dirt-colored hair. It’s not just my parents either. Everyone loves Zoe’s hair: teachers, waiters, bus drivers, strangers on the subway. And the ones who don’t know about the biting will even try to touch it.
“No more crying, Zo Zo,” Mom was saying as they got to the booth.
Zoe dialed back the wailing to a whimper.
“What happened?” I said.
“The you-know-what was out in front of that new restaurant on Eighty-Sixth,” Jeanine said as she slid into the booth.
Zoe is terrified of this twenty-foot, blow-up rat with red eyes that shows up around the city whenever somebody hires nonunion workers. If you hire guys who aren’t in the union, you can pay them less, but the union guys get really mad and park the rat outside your job so everyone knows you don’t hire union guys. I’m not sure why it’s a twenty-foot rat, except that it’s gross and hard to miss.
“I wanna go home the other way,” Zoe whimpered.
“Don’t worry. We’re going to the garage anyway,” Dad said, groaning as he lowered Zoe into the booth. I don’t know how my parents can lug Zoe around everywhere. She feels like she’s made of bowling balls. It’s not as if she’s a big four-year-old either. Dad says it’s because she’s solid, which I don’t get. Aren’t we all made of the same stuff inside? How can her insides be more solid?
“What do we need the car for?” I said.
“Road trip,” Mom said. “Apple picking. They have those Pink Ladies, the small ones we got at the farmers’ market that time. And I found another farm on the way that makes its own ice cream.”
“Cool,” I said. “Do you know what flavors they have?”
“If you’re asking if they have olive oil, I think it’s unlikely,” she said.
I had been. Ever since my parents took us to this Italian restaurant downtown that made it, I’ve been on a quest. I know olive oil ice cream sounds like it violates some basic law of the universe, but the weirdest thing is, when you taste it, everything you ever thought about ice cream gets completely turned around. Vanilla seems wrong. Chocolate? Crazy. Olive oil? What God put on the earth so we could turn it into ice cream. The whole experience really messed with me. I mean, if olive oil is really supposed to be made into ice cream, maybe we’ve been using other foods all wrong too. Like maybe there should be a steak-flavored yogurt.
“Sorry,” Mom said, “but maybe they’ll have some fabulous flavors they make with stuff from the farm, like pear or buttermilk.”
“Not the same,” I said.
“Get over it, nuddy,” she said, swatting me with her scarf.
“Nuddy” is what Mom calls us when we’re being thick. It’s short for nudnik, which means “stupid” in Yiddish, a language her grandparents spoke and pretty much nobody else does anymore. I guess that’s kind of the point. It’s not like she wants people to understand what she’s saying. Besides, “nuddy” sounds sort of nice the way she says it, and “moron” sounds bad no matter how you say it.
Mom tasted the soup and made a face. “Kreplach’s cold.”
“Zippo will reheat it,” Dad said.
“It’s busy. I don’t want to bother him.”
Jeanine pushed her untouched bagel across the table.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said through a mouthful of egg.
“Ask her.” She pointed at Zoe with one hand and showed me a Band-Aid on the other.
“She was taking too long,” Zoe said, looking at me through the holes in her bagel halves.
“It doesn’t matter how long she was taking,” Dad said. “No biting ever. We use our words.”
For some reason, when my parents talk
