Diane Davidson - Dying for Chocolate

The sweat suit was part of a stage. Arch wore them all day and all night. The parenting trick with this all-purpose wardrobe was occasionally to insist that there be a change—for example, from a gamey green set to a clean gray one. After his swim the previous night in the Farquhars’ heated pool, I had convinced him to put on the blue. This was to avoid an argument over clothes the first morning of summer school. Now I just had to get used to the idea of my child spending the day in his pajamas.

I said, “Time to get up, kiddo.”

“Oh, why, why, why?” said Arch as he stretched and moaned and burrowed beneath pillows and sheets. “Why do I have to get up?”

I said, “Summer school.”

He burrowed deeper. “I’m not going” was the muffled reply.

“Arch.”

“No, no, no, I’m never going. I hate that school. This is supposed to be my vacation. Go away.”

“You don’t even know anything about that school.”

He growled.

One problem with living in someone else’s house was that you couldn’t raise your voice when you needed to. Especially when the other residents were asleep. I leaned in close to where I thought his ear was.

“Arch,” I said softly, “you said you wanted to go.”

A few moments of silence passed. I knew him well enough to recognize when he was reviewing his strategy.

Then his voice was behind me. “Please, Mom,” my son said. “Please don’t make me.”

I whirled around. His actions had been completely noiseless. Now he giggled at my surprise. I said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that disappearing act when I’m talking to you.”

He squinted at me. His face was all white skin and freckles since he’d had his hair cut in a flattop. This new military-short haircut I put down to General Farquhar’s influence. But Arch was so thin and pale he looked like a young prisoner of war. I handed him his glasses.

“You are mean,” he said. He pushed his glasses into place and regarded me with magnified brown eyes. “None of those rich kids will like me. They all play tennis and have fancy parties and they never invite kids like me.”

“What kind of kid are you?”

He groaned, a deep guttural sound warning against further probing. He looked at the wall and said in a low voice, “Not cool. That’s what kind.” He turned away from the wall but avoided my eyes. He said, “I had bad dreams again.”

Before I could reply, he stumbled past me into the bathroom. I stared at the wall. The lush pink roses on the Farquhars’ cheery wallpaper stared back. A few mementos from our house—Arch’s new paraphernalia for magic tricks, his sixth-grade class picture, and a glass container of dice for his role-playing games—were propped up on shelves around the room, but they offered scant comfort.

Bad dreams.

I remembered the night three years ago, a year after the divorce was final, when John Richard had slashed my van tires, trashed my mailbox, and kicked in my front door. He was drunk. Arch was asleep and I had rushed into his room, blocked the door with a dresser and a desk, and screamed so loudly that John Richard left. John Richard had never harmed his son. Yet Arch still had faceless nightmares in which I died. Oh yes, the flimsiness of our house, compared with a week at the Farquhars’ palace, had shown Arch and me what it was to be not rich and not cool. But we were going to be all right. Safe, once Aspen Meadow Security finished with our old home. And soon the bad dreams would end.

“Listen, Arch—” I began softly when he came out of the bathroom. But words failed. “Look, I have to go over to Elk Park for that brunch. I’m going to meet Philip afterwards—” I stopped to check his face. He was rolling his eyes, a modest indication of his opinion of Philip Miller. I went on, “There are fresh blueberry muffins in the kitchen for you. Marla will be by. In forty minutes.”

He glanced at me ever so briefly, then pulled the rumples out of the blue sweat suit. He gave me the full benefit of his large brown eyes, so vulnerable behind the thick glasses. He said, “I’ll be okay. Don’t worry about me.

Sprinkles of rain blew across the windshield of Adele’s Thunderbird just before the turnoff to Elk Park. Her car was the day’s transport vehicle because my VW van was undergoing a clutch transplant and would not be out of the shop until Monday. It would take twenty minutes to drive up Colorado Highway 203, which rises to eighty-five hundred feet above sea level, five hundred feet above Aspen Meadow. Blasted out of hillsides, 203’s few straight stretches are bordered by sheer drop-offs. I piloted the T-bird carefully around the mountains’ curves, then dipped with a little more speed into the high mead-owlands. The meadows burgeoned with the gold-green of lush mountain grasses and goldenrod, like green onions melting in a pool of butter. . . .

I clenched my teeth. Melted butter. As is served at the National Cholesterol Institute. How could someone say such a thing? Pierre hadn’t even gotten the menu right. For the Symphony dinner I had made deviled eggs. A long way from heavily sauced. The soup had been gazpacho garnished with avocado. The London broil was sliced thin with a variety of accompaniments, one of which was sour cream with horseradish. And he hadn’t even mentioned the steamed green beans.

What a simpleton! I braked to slow down around one of the road’s lethal curves. I was going to find this Pierre, whoever he was, if I had to picket the office of the Mountain Journal for a week.

Think about the scenery, I told myself. Calm down. Look at the mountains. People move here to get away from stress, remember?

The mountains, the meadows, Aspen Meadow, Elk Park—these had been cool summer havens for wealthy Denverites before the advent of interstate highways. This was one of the places I had hiked with Philip only last week. We had made it as far as Elk Park Prep, the stucco and tile-roofed villa that had begun as an elegant hotel early in the century.

How idyllic the school had looked when a brief snow shower ceased that Saturday afternoon. The electrified gate meant to keep out flower-and-shrub-eating deer had been left open. Philip and I trudged silently up the muddy winding driveway. We breathed air that was like milk. Steam from the snow melting on the red tile roof gave the school an ethereal look that reminded me of the southern boarding school I’d attended for five years. Up to last year, Elk Park Prep also offered boarding. Philip asked why I didn’t send Arch to Elk Park Prep as a day student, get him out of those large public school classrooms. Great idea, I said, I’d wanted to for years. If only John Richard would foot the bill. But my ex maintained I wanted Arch to go because I was an eastern snob at heart. Private school, I told Philip ruefully, was like money. You only appreciated it when you didn’t have it anymore. But how do you feel about that? he asked, ever the shrink. I said, How do you think I feel?

Now, as I swung the T-bird through the open gate and past the high stone wall with its massive carved sign, Elk Park Preparatory School, a shudder went down my back. It was as if an invisible camera were filming my entrance: Get that woman out of here! She’s plummeted from the moneyed class to the servant class! It was not until I had wound halfway up the long driveway that I realized I had not yet come to the turnoff marked “Deliveries.”

The switchboard operator and admissions officer, my ad hoc helpers, were bustling about the school kitchen. With the elimination of the boarding department, the large kitchen crew of previous years was only a memory. In fact, the other staff person at the Farquhars, an eighteen-year-old named Julian Teller, was a casualty of this recent final closing. He had been one of the last boarding students and was now one of Adele’s charity projects. Since Arch and I had taken up residence, General Farquhar had kept Julian busy putting together state-of-the-art gardening equipment and doing other odd jobs. Julian had only eaten with us once, although Arch dutifully reported that Julian said my leftovers were the best he had ever tasted. Unfortunately, I had not had the chance to get to know the teenager.