Читать книгу Miss Boo Is Sixteen - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 8

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Nothing in our house was ever quite the same after Dr. Frank Frederick Ishinara took over. He wanted to do the shopping, and at first, in an exuberance of liberation, I let him. But he was too frugal a shopper. The first week, we endured the austerity, each of us being more than delighted with what the bathroom scales had to say on the subject. But finally, because the cooking, though excellent, was so miniature, we had to speak about the size of the portions.

He looked disgusted. “Everybody too fat,” he said categorically, and we couldn’t very well deny it.

“Everybody eat too much.”

“Yes, I suppose we do,” I conceded meekly. “But we’re all very active people ... and we’ve fallen into the dreadful habit of enjoying food.”

His little quince-like face did not change its expression in any way, but you could see by his silence that he had a volume of rebuttal he was withholding.

“I think ... perhaps I’d better do the shopping myself,” I said. “You see, I’ve always done it, and I know the situation.”

“Waste money,” he said laconically. “I get bargains.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said diplomatically. “The fact is, you’re such a good cook, we want to give you everything possible to work with.”

“I very bad cook,” he said fiercely. So we let it go at that.

The very first day when I brought home the provisions, I ran into trouble. I brought home lamb chops, one large one for each of us, and one for Frank. He counted them and then looked disgustedly at me. “Who other chop intended to be devoured by?”

“Why ... by you, of course.”

He let one of his rare expressions nearly demolish his face. Then he said with dignity, “Dr. Ishinara would not eat such thing.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. What would you like?”

“I provide own food,” he said with dignity. “I cook nice for me. Lice!” My horror at his diet was dispelled in a moment, when I recalled his difficulties with r's and l's.

We soon took to calling him by a pet name. Frank just didn’t seem to fit, and of course that was because it wasn’t really his name. One of the Oriental’s first and easiest concessions when he comes to America, is to take on a good solid American name. Frank, who never did things by half, had taken on two.

But we called him Tumptigubben, which is what we seemed to remember Swedish children call the good fairies that get all the boring tasks done when nobody is around. At first we called him Tumptigubben behind his back. But finally the name slipped out, and seemed to please him, so from then on we called him Tumpti.

In his cooking he could make absolutely anything, from ingenious canapes, which our friends called “landscapes on toast,” to huge towering decorated cakes. Often he would create a birthday cake, at a time when none of us could possibly claim an anniversary. On these masterpieces he would print in Gauguin pink or neon blue frosting “Hapy Birsday, dear House.” Or even “Hapy nineteen March.”

Once, wanting to please him, I suggested he cook us something out of the recipe book he had sired.

“Those recipes no good,” he said, grinning. “I write for show. Help get good jobs.”

He couldn’t bear to see any extravagance around the premises. One Friday morning, after his Thursday off, we found our table decorated with stiff paper flowers.

“I make,” he said. “Real flowers waste of money.”

Appalled though we were, we had them on the breakfast table for months. The eye is, alas, a great peacemaker; what can’t be cured it finally renders invisible. And besides, I think all of us understood that what the paper flowers lacked in aesthetic value, they more than made up in human meaning.

Another Friday morning we found at each place when we came down to breakfast, a hard, sticky sweet roll. Made, I should think, of chipped isinglass held together by sweetened varnish.

“I bring gift,” Tumpti said demurely.

We bit into the rolls with gusto, and tried not to let the taste seep through to our expressions. Each of us cried appreciatively, and Tumpti stood there with his eyes almost lost in wrinkles of delight. We overdid our enjoyment, however, for every Friday morning after that we sat down to some indescribably horrific piece of pastry brought from First and San Pedro Streets. We became very skillful in secreting the gifts about our persons, wrapped in handkerchiefs. Once I still had mine in my sweater pocket when I took my afternoon walk. I crumbled it to offer to some sparrows who tried it and indignantly refused it, not even having the politeness to secrete the crumbs about their persons. I imagine these delicacies were a special breed put out by a cynical bakery especially for cooks to offer Occidentals on Friday mornings.

I’m sure Tumpti must have had acrobats in his ancestry. Of all his household tasks he most enjoyed washing windows, and our panes were scrubbed thin. It was a terrifying spectacle to watch, for he would stand on the narrow window sills with his little feet turned out in a ballet position, while he wielded the huge screens as if they were balancing parasols. The only way you could get through the nerve-wracking performance without raising your blood pressure, was to anticipate when a window washing yen was about to strike, and then arrange to be out of the house.

The larger the job, the more he seemed to enjoy it. He’d romp around the rooms with our big vacuum cleaner like a child playing hobbyhorse. We always said that if some day he turned up missing, we’d look for him first in the vacuum cleaner’s dustbag.

The first time he cleaned the living room, I went down to explain that when the time came to move the huge divan, in case he insisted upon sweeping behind it (which no one ever had attempted before), we’d borrow the neighbor’s houseman to help move it.

But the huge divan, which looked like a recumbent elephant and must have weighed as much, was already standing in the middle of the floor. He, all eighty-nine pounds of him, was crouched behind it, scratching its back with a whisk broom.

“But ... how on earth ... ?” I gasped.

He looked at me and grinned.

“Jujitsu,” he said.