Pish Posh Read Free Page A

when his eyes suddenly shifted to the woman ladling up the soup.
    â€œAudrey, you imbecile! You have garnished the soup with a carrot peel instead of parsley! Can you not tell the difference ? !” He spoke with a slight French accent, having grown up in a luxurious chateau in France, with a slew of nannies and governesses, before moving to the United States as a teenager.
    â€œI’m sorry, Chef Frankofile,” Audrey, the soup-maker, said. She was a tall, slender young woman with a mass of bright red hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Her thick glasses were steamed up at the moment from the squid chowder simmering in the pot.
    â€œWell, have your eyes examined, you blind bat, or I will slice off your right thumb and serve it up as shish kebob, is that understood?!” Mr. Frankofile’s face was perfectly red now and his eyes were bulging. Yet no one else in the kitchen even bothered to look up from what they were doing, since he yelled at them and called them nasty things on a regular basis.
    â€œWell, good night, Papa, ” Clara said.
    â€œOui, bon soir, Cla—hey you! The new dishwasher! Yes, you, the boneheaded moron!” A perspiring, tattooed young man had just pulled a tray full of water glasses out of the steamy dishwasher. “If you break one of those glasses, I will hang you upside down from your—” Clara missed the rest of her father’s tirade as she walked out the back door.
    Outside, the evening was warm, but there was an occasional cool breeze that felt wonderful on Clara’s shoulders. Across the street was Washington Square Park, a busy, loud park with a great marble arch at its entranceway. Her father had told her that he bought the restaurant because it faced the arch, which reminded him of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
    The streets were busy, full of people chatting and laughing on their way to somewhere else—the theater, a party. They were people who would never be allowed in Pish Posh-not in a million years—and it amazed her that they could still be so cheerful.
    On her walk home she thought again of what Dr. Piff had said. What on earth was he talking about? Her mind sifted through all the possibilities, but she could come up with nothing and, frustrated, she resolved not to think about it again.
    At least not until tomorrow.
    The Frankofiles lived in a high-rise luxury apartment building, just a few blocks uptown from Pish Posh. They owned the top two floors, so that Lila and Pierre lived on the thirty-fourth floor and Clara lived on the thirty-fifth floor. This way, Lila and Pierre explained to their friends, no one got in anyone else’s way.
    â€œHello?” Clara called when she entered her apartment. Sometimes the maid was still there in the early evening. She listened for whistling, but the apartment was perfectly silent.
    To take her mind off Dr. Piff, she thought she should try to amuse herself. She ambled past the grand living room with its sumptuous Moroccan carpets and its green silk couches and armchairs and, hanging above it all, a great chandelier with a hundred crystal teardrops, which always threatened to clink against one another but never actually did.
    After the living room came a tremendously long corridor. There were a great many doors on each side of the corridor, and as Clara walked, she stretched her arms out to the side and let her hands idly drift across the doorknobs.
    No, not that one, not that one..., she thought to herself as she ticked off each room in her head. When the corridor took a sharp turn, she came to a room on her right and stopped.
    â€œMaybe.” She turned the knob and entered.
    Twisting all across the room, looping over and under itself, was a miniature roller coaster, its highest peak exactly over the room’s door. On the far side, three roller-coaster cars, red, blue, and yellow, were waiting to be boarded. The walls were painted to look like a state fair, complete with sloppy,