Go, Mom! I thought. That apparently wasn’t the reaction Idris was expecting. To be perfectly frank, I wasn’t sure what he was after. This seemed to be merely a nuisance call, something intended to keep me off-balance. Well, I wasn’t going to let it work. “Yeah, I needed a day out. Things are getting so busy and hectic at work,” I said, then waited to see how he’d respond.
“Yes, I imagine they are. And things will probably get busier very, very soon, so I hope you’re up to the task—in every possible way.” He emphasized every other word or so, like he was embedding extra meaning into his simple statement. He might as well have swirled his cape and said, “Mwa ha ha!” That would have been more effective as a threat. As it was, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I suspected that my theory about him just wanting to throw us into chaos was proving accurate.
“You can bet Katie will be up to any task,” Mom said. “She’s our little go-getter.” I turned to stare at her in shock. Did it take being forced to sit with the bad guy for her to praise me without qualifiers? I almost felt like I owed Idris a favor.
The waitress brought my sandwich and Mom’s bowl of matzo ball soup. Mom picked up her spoon, then shrieked and shoved the bowl away. “Mom, what is it?” I asked, trying to see what was wrong but distracted by the way Idris was smirking.
She was beyond words, which is really saying something when it comes to my mother. All she could do was point with her spoon at the soup bowl. I couldn’t find anything wrong with her soup. “Those are just matzo balls,” I explained. “I guess I didn’t describe them right. They’re not the kind of dumplings we make back home.”
“Are they supposed to blink?” she asked.
Idris giggled, and I turned to glare at him. As I did so, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the matzo balls were, in fact, blinking. They weren’t matzo balls at all. They were eyeballs. I screamed almost as loud as Mom had. The really gross thing was that if Mom and I saw the eyeballs, it wasn’t just an illusion. There really were eyeballs floating in the soup bowl. Ewwww. I’d never be able to eat matzo ball soup again.
The waitress came over, probably drawn by the screams. “How is everything?” she asked. Then again, maybe not. Either she hadn’t heard the screams, she was tuning them out like a good New Yorker, or Idris was blocking out the fun at our table from the rest of the deli. In the latter case, I was grateful to him, but the good deed was more than mitigated by the trick he’d played on Mom.
“I don’t think the soup was quite what she expected,” I told the waitress, handing her the bowl with my eyes averted so I wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact with the soup. You never want to make eye contact with your soup. “Could we maybe get some plain old chicken noodle?”
The waitress studied the soup bowl like she couldn’t see anything wrong with it. Now that she was holding it, I couldn’t see anything wrong, either, but I suspected Mom had lost her appetite for matzo balls, judging by the sickly green shade of her face.
Idris was still giggling. I’d have loved to read him the riot act about playing magical practical jokes, but I couldn’t do that without spilling the beans to Mom. Fortunately, Mom could more than take care of herself. “Young man, it’s rude to laugh at other people’s discomfort,” she scolded. “Do they not teach manners up here? Really, Katie, I question your choice of friends.”
“I never said he was my friend,” I muttered while trying to get my leg into a position where I could kick him in the ankle under the table without stubbing my toe on the metal post supporting the table. Then I pushed my sandwich over to Mom. “Here, why don’t you eat this? I guess the soup was a little too exotic for you.”
Mom didn’t even argue, which told me how upset she was. Normally, she’d play the suffering martyr role to the hilt, gladly (and noisily) starving. I had no doubt that she fully believed matzo balls were really eyeballs, and she’d be telling everyone back home all about it.
She took a tentative bite of the corned-beef sandwich—like she expected it to moo at her. I held my breath, not sure what to expect, but I soon realized that his next prank had nothing to do with food. One by one, the other patrons in the deli stood and formed a chorus line. With precision to rival the Rockettes, they launched into a synchronized dance number. All I could do was stare openmouthed as elderly women, paunchy middle-aged men, teenaged girls, and every other type you might find in a Midtown deli at lunchtime tapped and shuffled their way across the floor like it was the most normal thing in the world.