I don’t know if it’s Women’s Lib or what, but somebody decided that all the boys had to learn how to be little housewives. So now there’s coed Home Ech classes. The boys have to learn to sew and decorate and cook. I don’t see them teaching the girls how to put a patch on a bike tire or how to survive without a handkerchief.
I just started Home Ech this semester. Cooking is first.
A cooking room is like a combination classroom and kitchen. You walk in and the first thing you see on your right is this big bin full of white stuff. Turns out to be flour. Other bins have other stuff, like sugar. The next wall is a whole row of ovens. Then comes sinks and refrigerators and cabinets. In the middle of all this is a bunch of tables. The back part of the room is where the desks are.
The way it’s supposed to work is, you sit down at your desks first, and the teacher tells you how to cook something. Then you get up and go cook.
Our teacher is Miss Perch. She’s about ninety-nine years old and she has pure shiny white hair all in a million tiny rings and she always wears an apron with flowers. One time it’s daisies, the next time daffodils. I don’t know how tall she was in her prime, but she’s practically a midget now. She’s way smaller than me. It’s weird looking down on a teacher. Her earrings never change.
It’s like Miss Perch got lost in the wrong time and place. Sometimes it’s hard to believe she knows who she’s talking to. She’s crazy about cooking. She thinks cooking—and etiquette—are about the most important things in the whole world. She gets all excited about it. Telling us about this breakfast she had on a veranda once. Or how to make gravy without lumps. (Big deal. I always thought lumps were the best part.) Or what a big tragedy it was once when somebody at a fancy dinner ate his salad with a spoon.
If the story she’s telling is supposed to be funny, she titters through the whole thing. Or she goes into this big frown—she actually looks heartbroken—if it’s about a dish that flopped or bad table manners. And the funny thing is, that even though she really gets into it, she doesn’t notice that she’s the only one. The rest of us are back there rolling little dough balls or yawning or doing just about anything except listening.
She talks funny too. Not like we’re a bunch of junior high school kids, but like we’re all hoity-toity grownups nodding and sipping away in some royal tea garden. “Can you imagine!” she’s always saying. And “Just a tad, dear.” And “Glorious!” And “to-mah-to.”
No matter what’s going on, whether somebody moos in the back row or we’re having a chocolate chip fight, she never changes. You get the feeling that when boys first started coming into her class, she never really noticed. I heard that a ninth-grader farted real loud once while she was beating an egg, and she just said “God bless you” and went on beating.
Whatever Miss Perch does, she does it delicate. The grossest thing you’ll ever see her do is sweat, and then she dabs her forehead with this little pink tissue she keeps in her apron. When I think of her house I think of a cottage made of doilies and glass birds with thin stem legs. I never saw her sit down.
As far as Miss Perch is concerned, there isn’t a morsel of food anywhere in the world that isn’t “Glorious!” Not even a crumb. One time she held up an egg and said, “Behold, the egg,” and went on talking about it for half the period. You would have thought it was lamb chops or a foot-long hotdog or something.
The first thing she ever had us make was toast and tea. First off she told us about the glories of toast. How heating bread actually makes it sweeter by changing starch to sugar. And how no emperor in history ever ate anything better than a slice of thick homemade toast with fresh-churned butter on it.
Then she made her first mistake: she brought out the tongs. She has these wooden toast tongs for picking out the toast instead of getting your grungy paws on it. Well, all you heard for the rest of the period was squawks from girls who were getting pinched.
As for the tea: no bags. Miss Perch never uses bags. That’s low class. You put these loose tea pieces in a silver ball that has holes in it, and then you put that in the hot water. You’re supposed to mix different kinds of tea pieces so you get these “exquisite blends.” You can have tea a thousand days in a row this way, she says, and never have the same taste twice.
When she heard Linda McDowell scream with delight, she just swung her head in that direction and smiled. You could tell she figured Linda just discovered an exquisite blend. What she didn’t know was that Linda was having her tea leaves read by Grace Lott, who’s a little on the weird side and has a second aunt who’s a reader and adviser on the boardwalk. Linda squealed because Grace just told her that somebody whose name starts with L would ask her to the Valentine’s dance, and everybody knows Linda has the hots for Larry Delong.
That’s how it went just about every class. One time a blender got stuck on HI, and before a janitor came and was brilliant enough to pull out the plug, there was mashed potatoes flying all over the place.
Another time the dough turned green because somebody with dirty hands kneaded it too much.
Another time Bonnie Osteen threw up her own pancakes. She did it because while she was eating them she happened to look across the table and see Eddie Nedich grinning at her. Eddie is known as Nedich the Nosepicker. Most people try to dig their boogies out on the sly. Not Eddie Nedich. His calling cards are all over school. Knowing Eddie is in your Home Ech class, when it comes time to eat what you cooked, you get a little nervous. You have to be very careful. Bonnie Osteen forgot—until she saw him grinning.
Years from now, if you ever visit Avon Oaks Junior High School, you’ll know exactly what desks Eddie Nedich the Nosepicker sat in just by running your finger under the seats.
And while I’m on the subject, I have this theory: emeralds are petrified dinosaur snots.
Anyway, I don’t think there’s ever a class that turns out exactly the way Miss Perch plans it. But you wouldn’t know it from her. At the end of each period, there she is at the doorway, like a little old hostess, nodding and smiling and going, “Bon appeteet.”
The big event was when Herman the janitor retired. He was there about as long as Miss Perch, and he had to go down to Florida and couldn’t wait until the end of the school year. So the teachers (he was everybody’s favorite janitor) decided to give him a little farewell party. Miss Perch said we would make the food.
For a couple periods we just talked about the party and great farewell parties of the past. It was going to be all desserts. We would work in pairs.
My partner was Richie.
Calvin is in my class too, and his partner was—of all people—McAllister. The tromboner. It’s the first class I ever had with her. She’s so goody-goody she makes you feel like Godzilla next to her. You can tell she’s Miss Perch’s pet: she’s the only one whose name Miss Perch remembers.
And she must love Miss Perch too, because Miss Perch calls her Marceline, instead of Marcy. She hates to be called Marcy. Her homeroom teacher did it on the first day of class, and the tromboner goes, “My name is Marceline.” So naturally everybody calls her Marcy. The kids anyway.
No eggs smashing at McAllister’s feet. Oh no. And you won’t find her sticking a carrot in her ear or stomping on a muffin or sneaking some raisins into her pocket. She even goes home and makes some of the things Miss Perch talks about. I stay away from her. One time we were both backing away from stoves with pans of cinnamon buns and we bumped into each other. She sort of looked over her shoulder, like I was a bug, and said, “Excusez-moi.”
Strange pair, her and Calvin. I asked him why he picked her for a partner. He said she asked him. Because none of the girls wanted her, probably. She wouldn’t exactly beat Debbie Breen in a popularity contest.
Me and Richie decided we would make fudge for the party. My mother said it was easy. So we were talking about it.
“What kind of fudge we gonna make?” I said.
So we listed the kinds we knew, which were vanilla and chocolate. We voted fo
r chocolate.
“We gonna put anything in it?” I said.
“Like what?” Richie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nuts, coconut, peanut butter…”
Then he said, “Bugs.”
That’s Richie for you. He’s got a weird brain. When there’s a question, it just sort of skips right over all the sensible answers and lands on the craziest one. But not so crazy that you don’t stop and think about it
We thought about bugs, and we talked about it, and the more we talked about it the better it sounded. We talked about people eating chocolate-covered ants. And how some guy in the Bible ate locusts. And how the aborigines in Australia eat grubs and stuff. (“Glorious!” I guess Miss Perch would say.) And Richie said there’s even bugs in the food we eat. It’s just that they get all ground up, and the government says as long as there aren’t too many, it’s okay. Just for instance, say you have a truckload of spaghetti sauce. Well, maybe the government says it’s okay to have a hundred fleas in it, but not a hundred and one. And that’s just fleas. The other kinds of bugs get limits too. I don’t know who counts them. And anyway, once you cook a bug, it’s like anything else: the germs all get killed.
So we figured it wouldn’t hurt anybody. And that meant there were no reasons left not to do it.
We forgot one thing though: it was winter. Most of the bugs were gone. All you could get were some inside types. Our house, we have some of these little white spiders, and every once in a while you might see a thousand-legger on the wall. But no way I was getting close enough to catch any of them. It was pretty much the same in Richie’s house.
About all that was left was roaches, which neither of us have.
“I bet Dugan’s house has ’em,” I said.
“Yeah, I bet,” said Richie.
Then Richie remembered hearing about this lady who works at the museum of natural history in the city. She decided to see what would happen if you caught a roach, but instead of killing it you gave it all it wanted to eat. He said when he heard about it, the roach was big as a hotdog and still growing.
So much for roaches.
It looked like we were going to have to give up the whole idea. (“Does your sister really have cooties?” Richie wanted to know.) Then one day in the middle of science class Richie throws a pencil at me. He’s pointing to the back of the room, and before I turn around I know exactly what he’s thinking. Right under our noses all the time: the ant farm.
The teacher made a big deal out of it the first couple days of school, then everybody pretty much forgot about it. It was pretty neat, you had to admit that. This big tank, all glass, so you could see the ants underground making all their little tunnels and rooms and all. There were a lot of them.
The only problem was hanging around the room long enough after school until we were sure the teacher was gone. We flipped. I lost. Richie stayed lookout at the door. I slid off the cover of the tank and stuck a giant pinwheel taffy in the ground. When some of the ants crawled up onto it, I just took it out and shook it into an empty cole-slaw container. I did it enough times to get about fifty ants. Then I shut the tank, put the container and taffy in my gym bag, and we took off.
We had to work fast. Herman’s party was the next day. We went over to Richie’s house, because he doesn’t have a loudmouth sister or a squealing little brother around. The plan was to fix the ants at Richie’s, then do the rest at school. Our class was allowed to take all morning to get the stuff ready.
First thing I did was start to poke tiny holes in the cole slaw container.
“What’re you doing that for?” Richie said.
“Let ’em breathe,” I told him.
“Why?” he goes. “Aren’t we cooking them?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
So how do you cook an ant? We sure didn’t know. It wouldn’t be in a book, not in our library anyway. And we couldn’t ask anybody.
“Are you sure we have to cook them ahead of time?” I said. “Maybe it’s like turkey stuffing. They just cook along with the fudge.”
“But you don’t cook the fudge,” he said, “except to melt the chocolate.”
“So, we melt ’em along with the chocolate,” I said.
We talked about that for a while. We figured if there’s anything worse than eating an ant, it’s eating a soft ant. We didn’t want the whole party throwing up at once.
“They gotta be crunchy,” I said.
“Crispy!” Richie goes. “Like the Colonel’s fried chicken. Extra crispy.”
“Yeah,” I said.
So we figured that left out boiling them. And we couldn’t roast them, because we weren’t allowed to use the oven. Toasting was out.
“We gotta fry ’em,” I said.
“Yeah,” Richie said.
So we put on a frying pan.
“High or low?” Richie said.
“Medium,” I said. I was starting to feel confident.
“We need butter for frying, right?” he said.
“Nope,” I said. “Look.” I pointed to the pan.
“What?”
“Teflon. They won’t stick. Nothing sticks to Teflon. Don’t need butter.”
Richie didn’t give up. He said bugs have amazingly sticky feet; that’s why they can crawl around upside down. “And besides,” he goes, “they never tested Teflon on ants.”
He had a point. “Yeah,” I said, “but if we put butter in, it might keep them soggy.”
Then he said, “Yeah, but suppose we don’t use butter. And suppose they don’t stick. Then they might go flying all over the place. Like grease. We need butter to hold ’em down.”
So we argued back and forth. Butter or no butter. Then I happened to look into the pan cabinet, where the door was open, and my eye caught something. “Popcorn popper!”
Richie knew how to use it. He put in some oil, plugged it in, and pretty soon there they were: fifty unsalted, unbuttered, popped ants.
In school the next day everything went great. The only hairy moment came when we dumped in the ants; we had to sort of huddle over the bowl to keep everybody from seeing. When it all hardened we cut it into squares. You could see some of the ants. They looked kind of like pieces of burnt raisins. I was glad we picked chocolate fudge. They would have showed up a lot worse in vanilla.
Miss Perch came by. Her eyebrows went up. Her fingertips went to her chest. “My, my,” she goes, “you boys have done a fine fudge, now haven’t you? Are samples in order?”
I looked at Richie. He looked at me. I said, “I guess so.”
She didn’t eat a whole square, just a little piece of one. She worked on it for a while with her eyes closed, her fingertips still on her chest, kind of fluttering like they were thinking about it. Then they stopped. She looked like she was sleeping. Dreaming. Then all her wrinkles went into a smile. Her eyes opened. “Glooorious,” she said. “May I ask what is in it?”
“Rice Krispies,” I said. “We fried them first. That’s why they’re black like that.”
She walked away nodding and smiling.
Calvin and McAllister made the fanciest thing of anybody. It had about four layers and all different kinds of icing and whip cream and fruit and nuts. They called it a torte. The Waterloo Torte.
“That ain’t no torte,” I told Calvin. “It’s a cake.”
“It’s a torte,” he said.
“Calvin,” I said, “don’t you know what a cake is?” (For a microsecond I thought maybe he didn’t. Maybe blacks just had pies.) “Cake is cake. You trying to be high society or something?”
“It’s a torte.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw it in a magazine.”
“What magazine?”
“Gormay.”
“Gormay? What kinda magazine’s that?”
“It’s about food. People that are experts in eating.”
“Where’d you see it?”
“Marceline’s.”
It figured. Then he asked f
or a piece of fudge.
“Just a tiny piece,” I said. “Miss Perch said to save it for the party.”
I broke off a little piece from a corner that I was sure didn’t have an ant in it. He liked it.
“Here,” I said, “why don’t you give a piece to your partner?”
He looked surprised. “Why you giving her something? I thought you didn’t like her.”
“I don’t,” I said. “That’s why. There’s ants in it.”
He laughed and took it over. He didn’t believe me, like I figured. I didn’t actually see him give it to her, but her mouth was working away on something while she was icing the Waterloo Torte.
By the time the party was over, not a piece of fudge was left.
Richie fluttered his fingertips at his chest. “Glorious!”
“Bon appeteet!” I tweeted.
HEARTS
“I’M ONLY GOING FOR THE FOOD,” I KEPT TELLING THEM, BUT they wouldn’t believe me. Mom kept trying not to grin, and Ham kept saying, “Of course. The food. Why else?”
Well, it was true. I was going to the Valentine’s dance because of the free food. Mainly, anyway. Richie came up with the proof. He said: “I can prove we’re goin’ just mainly for the food.”
“How?” I asked him.
“Because even if they were having a class in the gym that night, if they were serving free food, we would still go.”
There’s your proof.
So, with that out of the way, I could start concentrating on other stuff. Like Debbie Breen, and what to do about her and Valentine’s Day. I know one thing: it was time to move up from those second-grade paper hearts and “Guess Who” and “Your Secret Admirer” and “from 10-1-19-15-14.”
Things were going pretty good lately. She came the closest yet to coming to my house to see the space station. She said okay, she’d come, and she would have, except at the last minute she had a toothache and had to go to the dentist right away.
And then, when I asked if she was going to the Valentine’s dance, she said, “Sure,” and then she asked if I was going.
I was cool. I just sort of nonchalanted it and said, “I might.”