The Persian Pickle Club

by Dallas, Sandra

  “They know that,” Agnes T. Ritter said. She’d always thought she was better than the rest of us, even though home economics wasn’t something important like teaching. I thought it was stupid to spend all that money going to college to learn the very thing you learned growing up on a farm.

  “Tom and I had a small wedding. Just the two of us. We were married by a judge, but I had a new pink dress.”

  “Married in pink, your fortune will sink,” Forest Ann said.

  “No such a thing,” Nettie told her. “It’s ‘your husband will stink.’“

  Rita didn’t pay any attention to them. “Then I lost my job ...” she said, and she didn’t have to finish. We understood. She wasn’t the only one going through hard times.

  “We needed Tom on the farm,” Mrs. Ritter added quickly. “We’d been trying to talk him into coming home.”

  “Well, I for one am glad Tom went to farming,” I said.

  “We all are,” Nettie added. But we all weren’t. We were glad Tom had come back to Harveyville and brought Rita, but going to farming that summer meant you had reached the end of your row. With the crops burning up and the dust blowing in, farming was the last thing anybody wanted to do. I looked out the window, the way we all did from time to time, hoping I could be the one to say, “Why, lookit there. It’s raining off to the west.” It wasn’t raining, however. It never was. The air was hot and dry and dusty. I picked up my needle and felt the grit on it. The quilt piece I worked on was smudged from the dust, and so were my hands, which were as wet as Opalina’s.

  “You’re a city girl, are you?” Mrs. Judd asked.

  Rita nodded. “Tom wasn’t sure I’d like it here. Once, he wrote me a letter asking if I thought I’d like this part of Kansas or whether I thought it would be too much like heaven for me.” Rita blushed and ducked her head. Ella sucked in her breath, and I thought I’d never read anything that pretty in all of the one hundred and one poems in Ada June’s book. No wonder Rita fell in love with Tom.

  “Well, is it?” Ella asked, and we all laughed, even Mrs. Judd. Ella looked confused.

  We returned to our sewing and were quiet for a time. Then Mrs. Judd cleared her throat, and I wondered what we were in for. “The Reverend Foster Olive called me,” she said, and I let out a little groan. I wasn’t alone. Reverend Olive was the pastor of the Harveyville Community Church, which even the Catholics attended, because it was the only house of worship in town. Grover said he’d rather listen to a dog bark than Reverend Olive preach. But that wasn’t the only reason I didn’t care for him. He was always asking the Persian Pickle Club to make a quilt so he could raffle it off to our husbands to buy hymnals or a fancy new altar to replace the one Grover’s grandfather had carved.

  “He’s like a hard woman. He always comes back,” muttered Forest Ann.

  “What is it this time?” Mrs. Ritter asked. “I wouldn’t mind it so much if we were helping less fortunates, but Foster wants money to buy things the church doesn’t need.”

  “You’d think he’d ask our opinion about what to spend the money on, since we’re the ones who’ve got to raise it. Reverend Olive doesn’t ask our husbands to plant corn for the Lord. What makes him think we want to be quilters for Jesus?” Nettie asked, looking at Forest Ann. Sometimes Nettie blasphemed just to make Forest Ann blush. The two of them always tried to get the better of each other, although I knew they were close, closer than either one of them was to Tyrone, in fact. But that figured. Who’d want to be close to Tyrone Burgett?

  Forest Ann pretended she hadn’t heard, and Nettie added, “That man’s like a sore thumb, always on hand.”

  Mrs. Judd stuck out her chin with its little collection of warts that looked like the tips of screws and said, “He wants a steeple, like the one they just got for the Methodist church over to Auburn.”

  “Oh, it’s ugly. It looks like it came from the ugly-steeple factory,” I said, which made Rita laugh out loud. Everyone turned to stare at her, because it wasn’t a joke.

  “How are we going to tell him no?” Mrs. Judd asked.

  “Why, it looks like Foster has put the fear of God into you, Septima,” Mrs. Ritter joshed. I looked over at Ada June, who put her hand in front of her mouth to hide her smile. There weren’t many people Mrs. Judd wouldn’t stand up to, so you almost had to admire Reverend Olive for that. I was disappointed, however, because if Mrs. Judd didn’t have the nerve to tell him we weren’t going to make him a quilt, who would?

  “I say we tell him we’re busy with our own charity,” Nettie said.

  “What charity’s that?” Mrs. Judd snorted.

  We all thought it over for a minute. Then I piped up. “There’s a home in Kansas City where girls who aren’t married but are in the family way can go and live until their babies are born. We could make a quilt to raise money for them.”

  Nettie and Forest Ann looked at each other and frowned, but they didn’t object until they heard what Mrs. Judd had to say. Mrs. Judd took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose while she thought it over. I held my breath until she said, “That’s an awful good idea, Queenie. I guess I’d rather help girls like that than buy a steeple.” Nettie and Forest Ann stopped frowning and nodded.

  “We can make a Rocky Road to Kansas,” Opalina suggested.

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Mrs. Judd told her. “I’ve seen too many of those Kansas rocky roads to put them in a quilt, especially one that goes to help a less fortunate.”

  Before anyone else could suggest a pattern, I spoke up. “Let’s make it a Celebrity Quilt. You send a square of fabric to famous people and ask them to sign their names to it.” I’d read about Celebrity Quilts in the Kansas City Star and had wanted to make one ever since, but who’d autograph a quilt square for me? Now that the quilt was for a good cause, famous people all over the country would want to send in their names. I said we should each make a list of the people we admired and bring it to the next meeting. Then we’d write letters to the celebrities, explaining what the quilt was for. The rest of the club agreed that was a fine idea.

  “Here’s something else. Famous people are pretty busy, and they won’t answer by return mail. So it’s going to take a long time to get that quilt put together, and by then, Reverend Olive will have given up on the steeple or found some other way to buy it,” I said.

  “Besides,” Ada June added slyly, “us raising money for unmarried mothers will surely get under Reverend Olive’s skin. Lizzy’s, too.”

  That tickled us all.

  “What do we do if Foster sends Lizzy over to help us?” Opalina asked. “Do we have to let her sew?”

  “In a pig’s eye! You leave Lizzy to me,” Mrs. Judd said, being her tough old self again. She glanced at Ella, who never was nasty to anyone and once or twice had said it would be a kindness to invite Lizzy to join Persian Pickle. “Now, don’t you say anything about it,” Mrs. Judd told Ella. “You’ve got the problem of thinking people are nicer than they are. Pickle just wouldn’t be the same if Lizzy was to join.”

  We all nodded. Lizzy Olive was thin as whey and just as tasteless. She wanted to be in the Persian Pickle more than anything. It was odd the way women were about our club. There were some, like Lizzy, who would have given six months’ rain to belong, but we didn’t invite them. Others, like Nettie’s girl, Velma, who was automatically part of the club because her mother was a member, never came.

  Velma Burgett worked at the Hollywood Cafe in Harveyville until Tyrone heard about how the men acted around her. He slapped her face, dragged her home, and said he’d take a strap to her if he ever heard of her going in there again. I guess he was afraid she’d turn out to be a drunk like him. Forest Ann told me that Velma sneaked out nights. She was wild as hemp, which worried Nettie and Forest Ann, but I knew sooner or later she’d settle down. She’d start coming to club after she found a husband. It was marrying that made women appreciate other women.

  We had our differences in Persian Pickle. �
��My stars, we’d be as dull as checkers if we didn’t,” Mrs. Ritter told me once. But when any one of us was in need, she got the support and understanding that a man never provided. There wasn’t anything we couldn’t share or a secret we wouldn’t keep.

  Forest Ann must have been thinking the same thing, and she spoke up. “Lizzy’s such a gossip. Why, if she had the least idea—”

  “Be still!” Nettie interrupted her, glancing at Rita.

  Ada June changed the subject. “I have just the thing for you, Rita,” she said, standing up and going to the sideboard. She took an envelope out of the drawer and handed it to her. “Here’s my templates for a Nine-Patch. It’s a good quilt pattern for you to start on.”

  I wish I’d thought of that. “Nine-Patch is as easy as pie, and it goes fast,” I told Rita. “It’s made up of nine patches, three to a row. Three up and three across. That’s why it’s called Nine-Patch. You make a big patch out of nine little patches; then you put it next to a square of fabric that’s the same size as your nine-patch.”

  “Oh, like geometry,” Rita said. It pleased us all that she’d gotten the hang of it right away.

  “I like to think of it like cornfields next to wheat fields,” Ceres said, rubbing her hands. They were crippled with arthritis and Ceres couldn’t quilt the way she used to, but she came to Persian Pickle Club, anyway. She said she’d die if she gave up quilting.

  “When there isn’t a drought and you can tell the difference between wheat and corn,” Mrs. Judd threw in, and we all sighed.

  “That’s the truth,” said Mrs. Ritter. “Maybe that Nine-Patch ought to be all black and brown.”

  “I could make it in yellow and white,” Rita said after she studied the scraps. “I’ll buy the material next time Tom takes me to town.”

  None of us said anything for a minute. Rita had plenty to learn about quilting. You didn’t just go out and buy all the fabric even if you had the money, which most of the members did not. You made quilts out of what was on hand, like flowered feed sacks or pieces remaining when you cut out a blouse, or from trading scraps with one another. You got pleasure knowing this piece was left over from your high school graduation dress or that one was passed down from your grandmother. Forest Ann said quilt scraps were just like “found money.” Of course, sometimes you went out and spent a nickel at the Flint Hills Home & Feed for an eighth of a yard of material you just had to have, but you didn’t buy yards and yards to make a quilt top.

  We couldn’t explain that to Rita when it was something you didn’t say, you just knew. Who would be that rude?

  Agnes T. Ritter would. That’s who. “I guess Tom has a pot of money buried someplace,” was the way she put it. Agnes T. Ritter was the only one of us who was mean-spirited.

  Rita didn’t get it. She looked at me—the way you look at somebody who is your friend when you need help. That pleased me.

  “We’re used to making do,” I explained, looking around the table. “Rita’s too polite to ask us for scraps, but I expect we have enough to get her started.” Since I don’t always say things right, I was pleased with the way that came out.

  Ella was right behind me. While I was speaking, she took out her scissors and snip-snipped a little piece of yellow-flowered goods with green dots in it. The cut piece was exactly the size of Ada June’s small template, even though Ella hadn’t measured. Without a word, she pushed the patch across the table to Rita with her needle.

  Before you knew it, we’d all reached into our work baskets for our best material, everybody but Agnes T. Ritter, that is. She didn’t have any scraps, anyway. Ceres gave Rita a piece with cherries printed on it, saying it came from the Marshall Field’s store in Chicago. She wasn’t bragging. She just wanted Rita to know it was special. Forest Ann handed her a sliver printed with windmills in what we called “that green.” It was the color of the enamel trim on my stove and Mrs. Judd’s double boiler, and it was in all the new material nowadays.

  Then Opalina handed Rita a small piece of gold velvet with a pansy that she’d embroidered that very afternoon for her crazy quilt. “You cut that into a little square and let it peek out of your Nine-Patch,” she said. Of course, velvet didn’t have any place in a plain old Nine-Patch made of wash goods, but it was the thought that mattered, and later, long after Rita was gone and Mrs. Ritter had brought out the top for us to quilt, I got to make the stitches around the pansy. After we quilted it, Mrs. Ritter kept the Nine-Patch in the kitchen, over the rocker, and whenever I looked at it, I searched first for the yellow zigzags I gave Rita that day, then for the pansy.

  Time always went fast at the Persian Pickle Club, but that day it just flew. Even Mrs. Judd, who usually gave the high sign when it was time to go home, forgot to keep track of the hour. Not until we heard the parlor clock chime did we realize that we’d gone an hour past our time.

  “Oh, dear, it’s five!” Forest Ann said, as upset as if she’d looked out and seen a dust storm boiling up over the house. Ada June and I exchanged glances, and Nettie shot out an angry look, but whether it was to show her disapproval to Forest Ann or to warn the rest of us to keep our mouths shut, I couldn’t tell. None of us would have breathed a word of criticism, anyway. If Forest Ann let that man stop by her house every night at five o’clock, it was her business, not ours, even if he was married.

  “Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a man to feed each and every evening. It’d be nice to go home to the radio and my sewing,” Opalina said. She wanted to let Forest Ann know she thought being a widow wasn’t always such a bad thing. I didn’t look at Forest Ann, however. I looked at Ella, who didn’t have a husband, either. She didn’t have even a radio to keep her company. In fact, the old Crook place had no electricity, but Ella didn’t mind. She sewed in the evenings by kerosene lamp—or even candlelight sometimes, because it was like having stars inside her house, she said.

  Mrs. Judd looked at Ella, too. “Come along, sweetheart. You can stay to supper with me. You’re better company than Prosper. He can’t talk about anything but the crops drying up.” The rest of us sighed, because that’s all any of our husbands talked about. Mrs. Judd tucked the sugar-sack square of cloth with the butterfly she’d been embroidering on it into her sewing basket and stood up. “What do you say we make us a big dish of popped corn for dessert, Ella, even if it is the middle of summer? I haven’t had popped corn for the longest time.”

  “Oh, my favorite!” Ella said.

  Outside, Rita passed her hand around again for us to shake, and Ella couldn’t resist touching the hem of Rita’s pretty dress. “It’s just like milkweed silk,” she murmured.

  Mrs. Judd told Rita, “You have any sewing you want done, you come see Ella here. She sews better than anybody in a hundred miles.” Then she added, “She’s a worker.” We all nodded, because that was the biggest compliment you could give a Kansas woman. You didn’t say she was smart or pretty. You said she was a worker. And Ella was a worker. In her embroidered white dress, with the wisps of hair curling around her thin face, Ella resembled the girl on the Whitman’s candy box, but she was a regular farmwife who chopped wood and slaughtered pigs. She was stronger than she looked—and older. She was as old as Mrs. Judd, which was more than sixty.

  “Oh, I would, but I’m going learn to sew myself,” Rita said, and blushed. What she meant was that she was broke like the rest of Kansas.

  “You do that.” Mrs. Judd opened the driver’s door of the yellow Packard, and Ella scooted in across the leather seat. The old touring car sagged as Mrs. Judd stepped on the running board. I noticed she’d rolled her stockings down around her ankles when it got hot during quilting and had forgotten to roll them back up. Her legs above the rolls were angled from rickets and as white as birch sticks. Mrs. Judd sank into the seat beside Ella and started the motor, and we watched as the Packard lumbered out onto the road. Sometimes it didn’t make it, and then Mrs. Judd had to tinker with the motor.

  “I always think of Mutt and Jeff when I see Ella and Mrs.
Judd together,” Ada June whispered.

  “Or Laurel and Hardy,” I said.

  “Or Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy?” Rita chimed in. The three of us laughed about that all the way over to my car. I drove a Studebaker Commander that Grover’s father had bought back when farming paid enough to live on. As I opened the door, I knew Rita was going to be more fun than a shoe box of kittens, and I turned around and hugged her, saying how glad I was she had moved to Harveyville.

  That’s what this story is about—Rita coming to Harveyville and joining the Persian Pickle Club and learning the meaning of friendship. It’s about me, too, of course, and about how I never can keep my mouth shut.

  Chapter

  2

  The minute Grover came in, I knew something was eating at him. I knew because he didn’t tell me. In fact, he didn’t say a word, which is Grover’s way. When something’s gnawing on him, he’s silent as the dawn. Not me, however, and I got edgy knowing Grover was upset, so I talked a mile a minute.

  “The cream doesn’t last in all this heat. I put it in the Frigidaire and it should have stayed cool in there, but when I poured it into the churn to make butter, it’d already gone bad. I had to scald the dasher to get out the sour smell. Funny thing is, the buttermilk’s fine. I don’t know why the cream’d go bad and the buttermilk wouldn’t. Maybe it was bad when I put it away.”

  Grover didn’t reply, just took off his hat and tossed it over the knob on the back of a kitchen chair, so I kept on talking. “The bread’s moldy, too. It’s only two days old, and already I found mold. Tell me why there’s mold when everything’s so dry. Sometimes, I think I can hear the crops out there crying for water, calling, Grover, give me a drink.” I stopped, hoping Grover would laugh, but he was washing his hands and still not paying any attention to me. He had a little scrub brush at the kitchen sink that he rubbed on the cake of Ivory, then on his knuckles to get out the dirt. His shirt was wet all down the middle of his back, and the hair on his great big head was damp and matted in a ring on top where his hat had perched.