There was a time, way back before she could remember but so she’d been told, that they’d even lived with Uncle Saul. But that was when she was a baby, when they’d first come to the States. There were no slide shows of all this, and they never really talked about it. She did have a Polaroid of all of them, though—her mom and pop looking so young as to be strangers to her, and Uncle Saul in a tuxedo. He had this wavy hair and he looked like an emcee at a nightclub, which was exactly what he was.
“Ooh!” shouted Nadine. “Bring me a Yoo-hoo if they have them!” she fished a quarter out of a coin purse in the shirt she had wadded up beside her. Frannie dutifully took the two bits and hit the trail before any more requests could be lodged.
She walked back up the stairs, up to the sandy path next to the parked cars. The traffic on Ocean Highway beyond the cars was sparse enough that the cars seemed to be rolling out from the horizon as if announced in a fashion show for fins and giant lights, the bigger cars swaying with their own weight, rolling on their suspension and reflecting brilliant gleams of light as they passed.
Frannie read and followed street signs aiming her towards the 200 block, where she knew the café lay. She made out a hotel on the cliff side about a quarter mile up, white with huge balconies and a diagonal elevator carrying tourists down to the beach.
Across from the hotel was a low-slung black building with a great statue in front, holding something in its arms she couldn’t make out. From a distance it looked like kind of thing you saw in front of a muffler shop.
That couldn’t be it.
Come back.
As she walked along the sidewalk between the cliffs and the street, the place drew closer.
A hot Santa Ana wind blew, making her tingle. For a moment, the café shimmered, and she blinked as the image of whiteness filled her vision, and filtered away as soon as it had come.
That was strange. She blinked away the concern that welled up inside her, a deep, whispering fear that maybe she was suffering from some unknown after-effect of the concussion. She felt fine.
When she reached a hotel on the right, she turned and looked across the two-lane highway.
It wasn’t a statue of a mechanic holding a muffler. The stone statue, its mouth stretched wide and its blank eyes wide open as it reared back its head, was a Greek god in a loin cloth, and where its muffler should be it held a long, muscular infant. Frannie recognized it: the statue was Kronos, about to eat the infant Zeus.
A sign leaned against Kronos’ feet, black wood painted with white.
CAFÉ MONSTRO. FEED FOR YOUR BODY AND MIND.
Another tingle. It wasn’t a concussion coming back to bite her. It was something else. She didn’t recognize the feeling; she wasn’t that old-world kind either. But the tingle was something more than curiosity, something beckoning, like a voice in the crackle at the end of a record.
Come in, Frannie. Come home.
She tried to blink this away as well. Because that was crazy. Places didn’t whisper at you.
Her uncle had asked her. For a moment she wondered if it were possible that the free will they talked about in Hebrew school could fool you, take a hike and say, something else is running us for now, but we’re going to just pretend. Was she pretending?
A squat, ugly building with black walls and glass doors. Just two cars in front.
And a tiny voice, dimly remembered: Come back to the truth, to Emet. She felt herself shrink.
Enough. She was wigging herself out. Stop it. She put the toes of her sneakers on the edge of the curb and made a decision. She was tired of walking slowly. She was gonna bound, now.
“Cafe Monstro,” Frannie repeated.
She began to move like the athlete she was and had been running from, and determined she would drag her feet no more.
As Frannie reached the door, a woman was coming out of the café and nearly ran into her.
Chapter 7
At about the time that his niece was just laying out a towel on the beach and deciding not to soak up rays after all, Saul Cohn heard the door chime in the café.
He emerged through the beaded curtains of the book section to see a silhouette of a woman entering, backlit by the glass doors. The woman stood there for a moment near the reception stand in the dim light, her elbows out and her hands clasped. Saul could make out a jacket and skirt. Not a beachcomber.
At the wall near the stage, Saul’s business partner Kurt Macintyre looked at Saul and then at the door, and shrugged. He had a paintbrush in his hand and was hunching his long, lean body over a two-foot tall statue of Donald Duck, applying the eyeballs. Donald was in an executioner’s robe.
“Don’t stop what you’re doing on a visitor’s account,” Saul said, tipping back the baseball cap he wore.
“You’re the people guy.” Kurt was already focused once again on his duck statue.
“Yeah.” Saul walked with a deliberately jaunty step towards the stranger.
The woman looked about thirty-five, neatly put together with a hat and matching jacket and skirt. Her light hair was pulled back and glistened slightly in the near darkness. She seemed to be taking the place in. She saw Saul, but her attention seemed drawn to one of Kurt’s pieces of art. She opened a hand and gestured at it, as though about to ask a question about it but not sure if she should start right off. She moved towards it and Saul offered, “Do you like it?”
“It’s... a statue,” she managed.
“Mixed media, actually.” Saul smiled. Next to the first booth in the cafe, a sculpture stood some eight feet tall. Most of it was a figure in iron, the Frankenstein monster as envisioned by Hollywood, right down to the flat head and little electrodes in his neck. The monster’s arms and chest were bare and scarred, its eyes cast upward in St. Stephen-like ecstasy. He was being crucified on a cross of wood, real redwood, polished deep and so silky looking that patrons were tempted to dig their fingernails into it, and sometimes children did. Out of the cross grew tendrils of colored glass, separated in chains of glass and lead, until the tendrils met up with a stained-glass window that hung suspended from the ceiling. The stained-glass window showed the monster again, crawling up a hill, an army of torch-bearing peasants behind him.
“Um,” she said.
“I’m Saul Cohn. How ya doin.’” He offered his hand.
She turned away from the monster and saw his hand, said “Oh!” as if suddenly remembering the rituals of society.
Kurt, apparently moved by a possible patron of the arts, had dislodged himself his work and was walking towards them. Saul said, “Kurt, we have a visitor looking at your work.” But he couldn’t tell if the lady were at all pleased to be here.
If she wasn’t pleased to be here, then she was here for a reason that wasn’t that pleasing. Everything felt just slightly off, Saul thought. Normally when someone came in between lunch and dinner, they made a beeline for the counter where a sign said, “Call us and we’ll find you a SPOT!” Or they headed to the book section in the back. This woman was idling like she had walked in and lost her way.
“This is Kurt Macintyre, my partner,” Saul said. “He does the art.”
“Right.” Kurt’s pinched, hand-rolled cigarette danced in his mouth as it had for as long as Saul had known him. “I do the art.”