He wheeled his bicycle back to the front door, slipped the cable through the letterbox slot as quick as he could, and then pedaled away, thinking hard.
The Jinni stood among the shards of his work, cursing himself.
He never should have opened the door. He should’ve had the sense to ignore it. But the incongruity of the boy’s taunt—Was that Yiddish?—had wrested his attention away. He’d joggled the pane upon the stack, and they’d all shattered, four days’ worth of glass gone in an instant, and before he could stop himself he’d opened the door—
And the world had come rushing in.
Sunlight, near to blinding. A messenger-boy in a uniform, a badge on his cap. Children running away in fright. A chemist’s across the street that should’ve been a grocer’s. The Woolworth’s crown, the new copper already tinged with green. The shock on the boy’s face as the envelope burst into flame.
He wiped a shaking hand across his eyes and looked down at the fragments, then up at the Amherst, his private, perfect world.
Something’s missing.
No. Nothing was missing. It was merely unfinished. He would melt down the shards and begin again.
He swept up the fragments, heated himself at the forge, lost himself in his work. It was some time before he passed by the front door, and saw the singed envelope. Without missing a step, without allowing himself a moment’s thought, he grabbed it and turned it to ash.
* * *
“Hollandaise,” said Charlotte Levy, “is the most difficult to master of the five basic sauces.”
The girls of the third-period Culinary Science class listened in rapt attention.
“In fact, given the delicate chemistry of the sauce, it would not be out of place to cook it in a laboratory. But since this would be inconvenient for our purposes, we must make do with our classroom instead.”
This was as close to joking as Miss Levy ever came. She smiled at them, and they smiled back—all except for the new girl, Kreindel Altschul, who stood crammed into a corner of the island like an extra hour added to a clock. Had there been more warning, Miss Levy might’ve created a separate lesson for Kreindel, to smooth her way into the class. Then again, perhaps the girl would relish the challenge. At the moment she mainly seemed resentful of having to wear the cook’s whites.
Miss Levy launched into her lecture: the process of emulsification, the role of the egg-yolk and the binding properties of lecithin, the need to hold the sauce at a low and constant heat to keep it from curdling. From there she reminded them of the dangers of bacterial growth, and the symptoms of salmonella. When at last the girls began to light the burners and crack the eggs, the room was so charged with trepidation that they might’ve been stirring up batches of gelignite.
She began her circular patrol, watching their progress. Four of the girls’ sauces had curdled immediately; they stood over pans of thin, lumpy liquid, desperately whisking. “If the sauce has merely separated, an extra egg-yolk may be whisked in to improve the emulsion,” she told them. “But a curdled sauce can only be rid of its lumps.” The girls sighed, and fetched their strainers.
She came around to the corner where Kreindel stood beside Sarah Rosen, her reluctant partner. Kreindel was whisking their pan, her face a portrait of frustration.
“It’s gonna curdle,” Miss Rosen hissed.
“No, it won’t.” Kreindel whisked harder.
“Girls,” Miss Levy said—and then Kreindel’s head came up to glare at her, and she nearly gasped as the girl’s anger struck her with shocking force, near to a physical blow.
She took a step backward. “Excuse me,” she heard herself say. And then she was walking out the door, down the hall to the teachers’ lavatory, as time slowed down and the world pulled away.
The lavatory door closed behind her with a calm and faraway sound. She went to the sink, gripped its sides, and stared at herself in the mirror, her sharpened vision showing her the minuscule particles of clay that made up her face, the rouge smeared atop them like paint on a wooden doll. There was a crack beneath her fingers. She released the sink, saw the new fracture that webbed through the porcelain—like the cracks in the concrete, the crater in the alley where—
No, she told herself. You are not her. You are Charlotte Levy.
She stretched her fingers out, pulled them in. Slowly, the world in the mirror returned to normal. Time resumed its usual pace.
She frowned down at the crack in the sink, and left the lavatory.
The class was quiet when she reentered. Inevitably, a few of the girls were wondering if she’d fallen pregnant, and had left to vomit in secret. Kreindel had abandoned her whisking and now stood with folded arms, staring at her saucepan and its mess of curdled yolks.
“I told you,” Sarah said.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, it’s just a sauce,” muttered Kreindel, a touch too loudly.
The room stilled in shock. Didn’t matter? Only Kreindel would dare say such a thing—an insult to their teacher, not to mention their own accomplishments! And yet she’d said it with such offhanded certainty that they were suddenly unsure of their convictions. Was Kreindel right? Did a sauce matter, like other things mattered?
Miss Levy took a steadying breath. “It’s true,” she said, “an individual sauce may not ‘really matter,’ as you say.” She turned to address the class as a whole. “But tell me, if you would. Above all else, what is every resident’s complaint about the Asylum?”
“The food,” the girls groaned in chorus.
She smiled. “Exactly. And this is not to disparage our kitchen-workers, by any means. In fact, one might argue that theirs is the most difficult task in the entire Asylum. They must plan nutritious meals for over a thousand children, on a closely monitored budget, using ingredients that can be purchased in large quantities and held in storage for days—and on top of all that, they must also follow our dietary laws. Given so many restrictions, it’s
