Eat, Drink and Be Wary

by Tamar Myers

  I was stunned. Public confession of sin was an old Mennonite custom, but one that had been largely ignored in a church as progressive as Beechy Grove Mennonite Church. But even then, whenever it occurred, it was always voluntary, and always involved sin. Sin, not stupidity. And more likely than not, the sin confessed was invariably one that had been directed against the entire congregation.

  “Is that what Reverend Schrock says?”

  “The reverend”—Lodema never calls her husband by his first name—“is a very busy man right now. Margaret Kauffman is dying of cancer, and Reuben Gindlesperger was almost decapitated when his combine overturned. Of course, you’d know all that if you came to church.”

  “I only missed one Sunday!” I took a deep breath of freezing air. “So, the reverend didn’t say that, did he? Then you have no right to put words in his mouth. And not that it’s your business, Lodema, but I didn’t know Aaron was married. Where’s the sin in that?”

  She honked into the wad of tissues. “A sin is a sin. The Bible says—”

  “ ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged,’ ” I said. I made it a point of looking her squarely in the eyes.

  “Very well,” Lodema said, shoving the wad of soggy tissues back into her purse, “try and hide behind Scriptures, but it isn’t going to work. We’ve already taken a vote.”

  “A vote? And who is we? You and the Lord?”

  She gasped. “Now you can add sacrilege to your list of sins! For your information, the we I was referring to was the membership of the Mennonite Ladies’ Sewing Circle.”

  It was my turn to gasp. “You didn’t! Did you?”

  She nodded smugly. “Unfortunately it wasn’t unanimous, but nevertheless, a majority of us voted to revoke your membership.”

  “Ach, du leiber,” I said, reverting to the Pennsylvania Dutch of my ancestors.

  “You brought this on yourself, Magdalena. Fortunately Annie Blough has agreed to take over your Sunday school class on a permanent basis.”

  “What?”

  She sniffed. “You can’t possibly expect to continue on as a teacher, given your morals.”

  “My morals are not contagious!” I wailed. “Besides, I didn’t intentionally do anything wrong.”

  “Of course we had to leave you in the Wednesday Women’s Bible Study Group—how else will you learn right from wrong?”

  “How generous of you!” I flung the door open all the way, inadvertently knocking Lodema Schrock to the porch. When I saw that she wasn’t hurt, I slammed the door shut and locked it.

  I know, a better Christian would have helped her up, and maybe even made her a cup of tea. But the Church is a hospital for sinners, not a country club for saints, and I had a whole lot of healing still to do.

  “Beware the wages of sin!” Lodema screamed, pointing a gloved finger at the peephole in my door. “ ‘The wages of sin are death!’ ”

  A sensible woman would have gone straight to bed and stayed there for the remainder of the week. Enough said.

  Chapter Nine

  George Mitchell was a first-rate cook. His Marilyn Mitchell’s Tortilla Cake Surprise was a hit. Even Freni grudgingly admitted to liking it. In fact, I found her in the pantry after lunch, scribbling what she remembered of the recipe on the inside of a brown paper bag. No doubt future generations of Amish will eat this tasty dish and believe it to be part of their cultural heritage.

  At any rate, our noonday meal should have been a delightful experience for everyone. I am, after all, more lax at lunch than I am at breakfast or dinner. This particular occasion, for instance, I went so far as to permit free seating. Bear in mind that my dining-room table is extraordinarily long—thanks to my ancestor’s lusty loins and fertile wife—so there is invariably a lot of empty space. This is never a problem when I seat folks, because I spread them thin, like a single pat of butter on a double order of toast.

  Imagine my dismay when everyone but Alma Cornwater and Gordon Dolby squeezed together at Susannah’s end of the table. If Gordon hadn’t seated himself at my immediate right, and Alma at my left, I might have been deeply wounded. I shower every day, and change my clothes almost as frequently, so hygiene couldn’t have been the problem. I did a quick sniff test just to be sure. Everything seemed to be okay.

  I smiled benevolently at my two loyal companions and then, just to punish the others, said the longest grace that table has witnessed since Grandma Yoder, bless her senile heart, said the Lord’s Prayer twenty-three times in succession.

  “So tell me, Mr. Dolby,” I said, after grace had been said and the food passed around, “are you a native of Baltimore?” That wasn’t a lucky guess, mind you. I take the time to read the addresses recorded in my guest book.

  “Baltimore, born and bred,” he said. “Birthplace of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

  “Is that so? What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m retired,” he said, and helped himself to a double portion of the entree.

  “Oh? Retired from what, dear?”

  He glanced at his daughter, Gladys. “Let’s just say, I’ve served my country.”

  I turned to my left, where Alma Cornwater sat, her glasses about to slide off her nose, her thick hair straying from its bun.

  “Miss Cornwater,” I said pleasantly, “what do you do when you’re not competing in a cooking contest?” I already knew that woman was a Cherokee Indian, but that isn’t an occupation.

  She pushed her glasses back into place with a pudgy brown finger. “I’m a mother.”

  “Oh.” I don’t mind telling you that I was disappointed. Some of my most unpretentious guests have been my most interesting. Who knew that Nevada Barr was a park ranger who once flung a tranquilized wolf over her back?

  But Alma wasn’t done. “Now that Jimmy, my youngest, is in school, I plan to look for a job.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Eight.” She sounded defensive.

  “I just have the one,” Gordon said, nodding at Gladys.

  “And I have none,” I said lightly. “At least none that I know of.”

  Nobody even smiled. When a man tells that joke, however, folks think it’s a hoot.

  “Being a parent is never an easy task,” Gordon said. Again he nodded in his daughter’s direction. Fortunately she was sitting at the far end of the table and engrossed in a conversation with Marge Benedict. I couldn’t imagine the mild-mannered Gladys giving her father an ounce of trouble. Clearly the man had no perspective.

  “Being a big sister is no picnic, I can tell you that,” I said and stared down the table at Susannah’s empty place. Lunch is a meal she never eats, falling as it does in the middle of her sleeping schedule.

  “In fact,” I said, “look up at the ceiling.”

  They looked up. Mercifully, no one else did.

  “See those footprints up there?”

  Alma nodded. “Women’s size eleven, double A. You don’t see that very often.”

  I gaped like a gulping guppy.

  “My daddy was a traveling shoe salesman. We used to play with his stock.”

  “I see. Well, those are my sister’s. And that’s a ten-foot ceiling. Lord only knows how they got up there. Now look closer.”

  Alma nodded again. “A man’s ten right beside hers. Faint, but definitely there.”

  “Kids,” Gordon said.

  “She wasn’t a kid when that was made,” I said, and stabbed at my salad. “Those were made last week. Susannah is thirty-five years old.”

  “My Gladys is thirty-five.”

  “I bet she doesn’t leave her footprints on the ceiling.”

  “There are other ways to rebel.”

  Rebel? Do thirty-five-year-olds rebel? Perhaps Gladys was a rebel, but that is not a word I’d used to describe my sister. Any woman who has been married and divorced, and served more men than McDonald’s, is not rebelling, she’s indulging. Yes, I know, that makes me a codependent, because I allow her to use the inn as a home base, and
I give her money from time to time. But what choice do I have?

  “Only one of my kids ever gave me trouble,” Alma said.

  She had a matter-of-fact way of speaking that didn’t invite questions. I questioned, nonetheless. She didn’t have to answer, if she didn’t want.

  “What kind of trouble, dear?”

  Alma looked down at her plate. “That was before Ed died. Ed was my husband. He was always hard on the kids. Made them act out, like they say. Anyway, Gary took a car that didn’t belong to him.”

  “You mean, he stole it.”

  “Yes, but he was only fourteen. The slate was wiped clean when he turned eighteen.”

  I patted her arm. “That’s nothing, dear. My sister’s slate is white with chalk dust.”

  She sighed. “Okay, so maybe that’s not all he did. But holding up that gas station was his girlfriend’s idea. And Tiffany’s the one who shot the clerk.”

  I will confess to an intermittent mean streak. “So, Mr. Dolby, can your daughter top that?”

  “What can be worse than a daughter deserting her father?”

  A father deserting his daughter, I said to myself. I still have not forgiven Papa for dying in that tunnel, squished between a milk tanker and a load of Adidas shoes. Neither has Susannah. Sometimes, however, I think my sister is more upset that the shoes weren’t Nike than that Papa perished.

  Alma reached for the ranch, full-fat salad dressing. “In what way has your daughter deserted you?” she asked.

  Gordon Dolby stiffened. “Well, uh—”

  “Go ahead, dear,” I said with a smile of encouragement. “Mrs. Cornwater and I are both parents—so to speak. We will certainly understand.”

  Alma nodded, her glasses held snugly in place with an index finger.

  “She wants to move out,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Please pass the ranch,” someone at the other end of the table called in a loud voice.

  “Will the farm do?” someone else said.

  There was the expected twittering that, I’m proud to say, I ignored. The fact that I tossed the bottle down to the other end of the table was only partly due to the distance it had to travel.

  “Is that really so bad?” I asked Gordon Dolby. Susannah has moved out several times, and each time I danced for joy. Believe me, that’s saying a lot for a woman whose religion not only frowns on dancing, but forbids performing the sex act in a standing position, lest it lead to dancing.

  “She’s all that I have,” he said to his plate.

  Alma stabbed at her salad. “Where does she want to go?”

  “Albuquerque.”

  “New Mexico?” I asked stupidly.

  “That’s the place. She’s never been farther away from home than Washington, D.C., and now suddenly she wants to move to a foreign country. I don’t suppose you could talk her out of it?”

  “New Mexico is a state, dear,” I said kindly. You’d be surprised how many people, even well-educated folks—i.e. my guests—are unsure on that score. Of course there is no excuse for such ignorance. I learned all forty-eight state capitals, and so can they. But, in their defense, naming a state after a neighboring country is a little confusing. And why, for crying out loud, are there two Dakotas? Why not, in the spirit of New Mexico, rename North Dakota and call it New Canada?

  “Just the same,” Gordon Dolby said, “a daughter’s place is in the home. She’s never been married, you know, and her mother’s been dead since she was three. We’re all each other has.”

  “Maybe she wants more,” I said.

  Alma nodded.

  Somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done one thing really rotten. That might help to explain why Art Strump was laid up at the inn with a migraine headache, and I was traipsing up and down the narrow aisles of Pat’s I.G.A. with the child Carlie glommed to my side. Well—maybe not literally, but close enough. I let her push the buggy (what we call shopping carts up this way) while I walked a few respectable, but wary paces ahead. The last thing I needed was to have the buggy sever the tendon to my heel.

  “Do you have a last name?” I asked pleasantly.

  “Davis. I’m supposed to be some kinda relation to Jefferson Davis.”

  “The Jefferson Davis? President of the Confederate States of America?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “You know that kind of stuff?”

  “I paid attention in school, dear.”

  “School! What a waste.”

  We were supposed to be looking for cooking sherry, something which made me extremely uncomfortable. We Mennonites do not drink alcoholic beverages of any kind. Even our communion drink is grape juice, sipped from thimble-size glasses. I know, the Bible says that Jesus turned the water into wine, but it doesn’t mean he didn't go one step further and turn the wine into vinegar.

  I studied the shelf of flavored oils and cooking sherries. The sherries were, by necessity, watered down. Thank heavens one can’t buy full-strength drinking spirits in Pennsylvania supermarkets. One has to go to a state-run store for that. Still, there was the distinct possibility that generations of teetotaling ancestors would simultaneously turn over in their graves, sending the bottles of diluted sherry crashing down on us. “Are you sure we can’t use Welch’s?”

  She blew an enormous bubble, and then deftly popped it, without splattering any of it on her lips, like Susannah usually does.

  “You don’t know anything about cooking, do you?” she asked. “The alcohol burns off. It’s only the flavor that’s left.”

  “Then grape juice will do just fine,” I said.

  “Art said it has to be dry.”

  “Dry, shmy!” I lunged for the offending bottle, grabbed it between a thumb and forefinger, and practically flung it into the buggy. When nothing untoward happened, I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  Carlie laughed. “You’re funny, ya know? But I wouldn’ta minded so much having a mama like you. Your daughter’s lucky.”

  “I don’t have a daughter, dear.”

  “Yes, you do. That tall, skinny woman, who looks kinda like you, only she wears bed sheets instead of clothes.”

  “Susannah? She’s my sister, you little...” I bit my tongue. Carlie, at least, was young enough to be my daughter, and what kind of a mother replacement would I be if I resorted to four-letter words? No, I would save brat for the next time Susannah really made my angry.

  “No kidding? She’s your sister? Geez, she must be a lot older than I thought.”

  “Perhaps I’m a lot younger.”

  “Hunh?”

  “Never mind. What else is on the list?” Although we were buying some of the nonperishables, this was basically a reconnaissance trip. The order in which the contestants would cook had yet to be established.

  “Monkfish.”

  “You’re pretty funny yourself, dear. Now tell me what it really says. I have better things to do than to risk the backs of my heels while I listen to stand-up comedy.”

  “You didn’t have to come, ya know? I coulda done this by myself.”

  I turned. “You mean it really says that?”

  She thrust the paper at me. It had been folded and refolded so many times that the ink had worn off the creases. It was more a case of connect the dots than actually reading the words. It may well have been monkfish, or money dish, or even monkey kiss.

  “He says if you can’t get that, then get red snapper.”

  “What size can does it say?”

  Carlie snorted. “You really crack me up!”

  I decided to take that as a compliment and headed toward the seafood section. There are stores in Pittsburgh with veritable glaciers piled high with marine produce, but Pat’s I.G.A. does not even pretend to compete with those. In recent years, however, Pat has made a conscientious effort to cater to the tastes of urban refugees to Bedford from The Big Apple, The Crazy Orange, and points in between.

  The man means well, but he is still in need of a little tutelage. The one
live lobster Pat obtained, he kept in his son’s freshwater guppy aquarium, where it promptly turned slime green and died. The next day Pat offered complimentary lobster salad on saltine crackers to his customers. I am happy to report that everyone survived.

  “You seem to know something about cooking,” I said. I truly meant it as a compliment.

  “Yeah? Well, I learned it from Art. I wouldn’t be nowhere, if it weren’t for him.”

  “You mentioned your mother before. What about her?”

  “What about her?”

  “What I mean is, what do your parents think about—”

  “Me living with a black man?”

  “With any man,” I said. “You’re only eighteen. And you two aren’t married, are you?”

  “Who says I’m sleeping with Art?”

  I stopped, and was nearly crippled by the buggy. Okay, so my cries of pain drew a small crowd, but I wasn’t trying to attract attention, no matter what Pat claims. I most certainly did not intend to knock over a stack of canned peas taller than the Tower of Babel, and I refuse to pay for the dented cans. Grocery store owners who do not want to have merchandise rolling every which way but Sunday should not set up displays in the aisles. Who knows when the next Carlie is going to come along.

  “Do you know what the Bible says about fornication, dear?”

  Normally I would not take the liberty of speaking like that to a guest, but she was a mere child, and had expressed a preference for me over her birth mother.

  “Ha! Just shows you how much you know. It ain’t none of your business, but Art is gay!”

  “Oh.”

  “So I suppose now you’re going to preach to me about what the Bible has to say about that.”

  I told her everything Jesus had to say on the subject, which was nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  Marilyn Mitchell’s Tortilla Cake Surprise

  1 package 8-inch flour tortillas

  1 16½ oz. can black beans

  3/4 cup chopped onion