Except for an occasional glass of wine, Gracie had never known her mother to touch alcohol. “Mo-Mo-Mommy,” she began, stuttering as if she were back in that chilly conditioning room at the brewery. “Please don’t.” She paused, searching for the right words.
“Beer’s nice for being glad and dizzy and sometimes for the Mystery and stuff, but the happy that comes out of a beer can is not like the real happy you got to make in your heart.” She paused again. “When the beer’s done working, you’ll only feel badder.”
It was Karla’s turn to entertain a teardrop. She pushed her chair away from the table and rose to give her small daughter a hug. “I swear, Grace Olivia Perkel, sometimes you almost scare me, you’re so…so wise. Where on Earth did you learn to give advice like that?” She supposed it was the influence of the “ol’ philosopher,” though she couldn’t conceive of the likes of Moe Babbano having anything negative to say about beer. Or if he did, it wouldn’t be in plain American television English that people could actually comprehend. “Where did you ever learn…?”
“From a fairy,” Gracie chirped, just blurting it out — and instantly regretting it, wishing she could stuff the syllables back in her mouth.
The mother smiled. “A fairy, huh? Despite everything, you’ve certainly not lost your imagination.” She walked to the sink, hesitated, took one last swallow, and poured the remaining beer down the drain. “Well, maybe you and I can imagine we’re going to share a pint of vanilla Häagen-Dazs for our dinner tonight.”
“Rocky road,” muttered Gracie.
As it was, they dined on buttered noodles that evening, and there was no dessert.
Eventually, the ol’ philosopher himself got wind of their situation. At once, he invited them to come live with him and Dr. Proust in Costa Rica. Karla politely declined. There quickly followed a second invitation. Karla declined again. Ah, but Gracie: she pleaded and pleaded and pleaded; pleaded so long, so hard, so persistently, so sweetly, so annoyingly, that she could have landed in the Guinness record book for pleading, as well.
Finally, with the arrival of a third invitation that included plane tickets, her poor mother caved in. On a Tuesday near the middle of summer, the pair found themselves on a flight jetting south-southeastward: past Texas, past Mexico, past Nicaragua, down to far Costa Rica. If they flew over Pimple-on-Chin, Gracie didn’t recognize it.
Travel-weary, but excited (well, Gracie, at least, was excited), they were welcomed to a roomy, colonial-style house in between the jungle and the sea. Surrounded by coconut palms, the house had a white stucco facade, a red-tile roof, and heavy brown shutters to hold back hurricane winds and the tropical sun. There were ceiling fans that kept mosquitoes off-balance and lulled nappers to sleep.
Outdoors, the air seemed as thick and sweet as chocolate cake batter; flavored by spice plants, scented with blossoms, stirred by the wings of neon-feathered birds, purplish bats, and butterflies the size of table-tennis paddles. At first, the Seattle girl took offense at the heat. She actually missed the drizzle — or did she miss that “Other” that lay between the mist and the murk? (Between the chop and the suey?)
It was always cool and dim in the house, however. Gracie especially liked padding barefoot along the ceramic tile floors. She would have relished walking around birth-naked, but there were too many eyes. From the walls of every room small lizards constantly monitored human activities, and, moreover, Uncle Moe had acquired a parrot. A fat, cherry-lemonade-colored bird, it commanded a perch in the courtyard, occasionally squawking long sentences in Spanish. Within a week, Gracie had taught it to say “hi de ho.” The parrot seemed to enjoy the phrase as much as Gracie, uttering it with such frequency it just about drove everybody nuts.
While her departure had little or nothing to do with the hi-de-hoing parrot, shortly after Gracie and her mom moved in, Madeline Proust moved out. Her hot romance with Moe Babbano had cooled off (as, kids, hot romances often do), and she’d come to miss the tortured feet of Seattle. Before departing, she generously offered to sign over the house to Moe. On one condition: he had to shave off his mustache. She claimed it was for the benefit of society at large, since she, personally, would no longer be exposed to it.
The shaving ceremony was held in the courtyard. Pausing periodically to pronounce lines in Latin that nobody understood, Moe took an hour to scrape the melancholy growth, that electrocuted chickadee, off of his upper lip. “It’s the end of an era,” he said solemnly. “Mustaches such as this come around once in a generation.” The rest of the party applauded when the terminated whiskers, laid out elaborately in a coconut shell, were buried beneath a jasmine bush.
With Dr. Proust gone and autumn on the way, homeschooling began in earnest for Gracie. Her mother taught her simple arithmetic and how to read and write in English. Uncle Moe instructed her in Spanish vocabulary, in philosophy, poetry, cool jazz, how the stars and planets got their names, and other subjects which, to her mind if not to his, had a hint of the Mystery about them.
Gracie taught her uncle something, as well. Although Imperial beer was widely available, and the ol’ Moester consumed his share of it (he never once offered Gracie a sip, nor did she request one), he decided to brew some beer of his own. He purchased a sack of malted barley and set about cooking and fermenting it in a shack behind the house. Were it not for Gracie, who offered him helpful tips along the way, he might not have succeeded. Moe was astonished at her knowledge of brewing techniques.
“How do you know all this?” he demanded. Gracie merely shrugged. It did occur to her that of all people, her Uncle Moe would have accepted, understood, maybe even personally related, but when it came to her adventure with the Beer Fairy, her lips were forever zipped. (Should you travel to Costa Rica one of these days and run into a spunky little blonde with guitar-blue eyes, don’t start bugging her about pixies, poofs, and pilsners, she’ll just turn her back and skip away.)
For brewing, Moe used collected rainwater from a barrel. The water had run off of the shack’s tar paper roof. As a result, the beer he produced was black as night and had some kind of green moss growing on its surface. Whether it would have pleased the palate of vinegar eels is hard to say, but Moe declared it quite tasty. On the evenings when he drank it, he invariably saw UFOs.
If you quizzed her, Gracie would have answered that her life in Costa Rica was pretty good. At times, it came close to being glad and dizzy. For her seventh birthday (yes, a whole year had elapsed since fateful Number 6), she failed once again to receive a pink cell phone, and it appeared that she was destined to go through life without one. She didn’t get that puppy, either. But she did get a monkey.
She named the monkey Häagen-Dazs, but since no one present, not even the heavily educated Moe Babbano, could spell Häagen-Dazs, she soon changed its name to Hiccup. The two became rapidly inseparable. At last, the only child had a dance partner.
Out on the veranda, Gracie and Hiccup would perform cheerfully wild boogaloos, largely of Gracie’s invention, although the monkey did contribute routines of its own. Children from the area would gather to watch. Normally bashful, they’d sometimes break into giggle fits and shy applause. They’d bring gifts of coffee beans and bananas. Usually, they’d scatter and hide behind trees whenever Uncle Moe ventured out onto the veranda to join in on bongo drums, hiding even though Moe wasn’t nearly as funny looking now that his facial hair had gone to mustache heaven. Or mustache hell.