by MYERS, TAMAR
“Sorry. I don’t know what came over me; it was like a hot flash of Presbyterianism. Anyway, that kid is so popular. His house is like an ashram or something—but Christian, of course. See that brown square there, poking above the trees on Buffalo Mountain? About an inch from the end?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“That’s his rooftop porch. You can see all the way to Maryland from there. Anyway, despite being a Christian guru, Elias really hated Minerva J. Jay. He blames her for his father’s death.”
Chris rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Maybe. Elias’s father was a drunk who tried to walk the straight and narrow path a number of times—at least to hear him tell it—but each time, Minerva pushed him off. Supposedly she thought she could get her hands on his fortune easier that way. Oh, and Elias volunteered the fact that Minerva was poisoned. You didn’t mention that to him, did you?”
“Absolutely not. Very interesting. What about the Zug twins?”
“I have failed,” I wailed.
“Your wailing is really getting to be annoying—if I may say so.”
“You may, but now I’m annoyed. It’s not like I go through a verb-selection process when I emote and then come up empty-handed. Wailing happens to be my signature vocalization.”
“The Zugs,” he said through clenched teeth.
“Oh, all right. Those Zugs! Rather, I should say that Zug! He weaseled out of my grilling by appealing to my vanity.”
“There’s nothing wrong with taking the easy way out, so long as it’s effective.”
“Whose side are you on anyway?”
“Uh—yours, of course. Although I guess strictly speaking I’m on the side of Lady Justice. Hmm, interesting that she’s a lady, isn’t it?” He rubbed his face with hands that were better tended to than mine will ever be. “Hey, speaking of ladies, we may not be able to tell the twins apart, but their wives look nothing alike. Why don’t you try talking to them? Maybe invite them over to tea?”
“Tea? I’m not Agatha Christie, for Pete’s sake; this isn’t an English cozy. Besides, I hardly know them.”
“Don’t they go to your church?”
“That’s the thing. The Zug twins are Mennonite by birth and joined Beechy Grove as soon as they moved here from Canada, but, like me, they are unequally yoked.”
“I don’t get it. Is that some kind of egg thing?”
I reined in my smile. The chief is a lapsed atheist, a man raised without faith, but he is now at least open to exploring the options. Still, when one is talking to him it is easy to forget that biblical references, which pepper everyday speech in Hernia, are as foreign to him as tofu is to Amish cooking.
“It’s what happens when you hitch an ox and a donkey to the same plow. Take the Babester and me: he’s the bull and I’m the ass, and spiritually speaking it’s not a good match. The Zug twins also married outside the Mennonite fold. One is a Pentecostal—I think—and attends the church with thirty-two words in its name, and the other is a nothing. At any rate, neither of them ever shows up at Beechy Grove for services, although they do come for potlucks and anything that basically involves food.”
“So you have met them.”
I sighed. “Okay, I’ll invite them to lunch at the Sausage Barn and put the screws to them there.”
“When?”
“I’ll call this evening, but I can’t guarantee I’ll even be able to get through. The man who invented caller ID—and it had to be a man—will have his own special place in you-know-where.”
“Why don’t you slip a note under their door on your way home this afternoon, suggesting lunch tomorrow? Say, noon at the Barn?”
“Noon,” I snapped. Let’s face it, it’s hard to be pleasant when someone half your age is micromanaging your avocation.
Yes, a retired husband can be a big help, and so can a mother-in-law. Ditto for a daughter and a housekeeping cousin. But only yours truly was equipped to feed a growing boy in the middle of the night, after which said boy refused to go back to sleep. As a result, I got as much sleep as a polygamist on a ten-minute honeymoon.
The next morning I was dead on my feet, and right after a six a.m. feeding (Little Jacob promptly fell asleep), I went straight back to bed, an act that is just as much a sin in my culture as the aforementioned polygamy.
Just once before I die I would like to spend an entire day lolly-gagging about on the sofa eating chocolate bonbons. I might even watch a television show. I’ve heard that Oprah and The View are both worth seeing, but since I’ll have only this one day in which to commit the second-worst sin, that of sloth, I should probably do some consulting first. Maybe even look at a few clips from the shows before I decide. You can be sure, however, that I will not be watching Ellen, as I’m already in enough trouble with the Good Lord without adding dancing, the worst of all sins, to my litany.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, after a couple of hours I woke up, groggy and grainy eyed, because the little one was crying to be changed.
“Gabe,” I called sweetly.
After I’d added several decibels and tone changes, my dearly beloved finally appeared in the bedroom door. “Hon, can you make this quick? The Yankees are playing the Red Sox.”
I glanced at the bedside clock. “It’s only ten in the morning.”
“Yeah, I know, but since you don’t allow TVs in the house, I’m watching it on my cell phone from a disk I downloaded. The game was actually yesterday.”
“That’s nice, dear. Your son—that’s the infant in the crib next to me—needs changing today. Would you be a darling and do it this time?”
“Poopy or pee?”
Poopy? Gabriel Rosen is a medical doctor, for crying out loud. A cardiologist and well-known surgeon.
“Number two, I think. Does it matter?”
“Ah, hon, you know I can’t handle the stink of really messy diapers; it’s just not in me.”
“This is your son,” I growled, “the fruit of your loins, flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood, and poop of your poop. So put on your big-boy pants and deal with it.” I smiled sweetly to soften my words.
Without another word, Gabe picked up his son, but he held him at arm’s length during the entire changing process. “There, you happy now?” he said when he was done.
I didn’t know if he was speaking to me or Little Jacob, so I murmured soft obscenities. “Ding, dang, dong, ding.”
“What was that, Magdalena?”
To be truthful, my response would have been a lie. Fortunately, I was stopped by the presence of a nun standing in my bedroom door.
“Susannah?” I asked through my veil of grogginess.
“I’m Mother Dispirited, remember?”
I pulled myself to a sitting position. “Oh, right. And I’m Sister Disturbed; I’m disturbed that you’re still going through with this apathy thing.”
Susannah shrugged. “Really, Mags, you’re not supposed to care. Anyway, I’m here to say good-bye to my favorite nephew.”
“You have only one, dear.”
“He’s still my favorite. And Sister Disaster has come to say good-bye to her son.”
“What? But there aren’t any men here.”
“Thanks,” Gabe said drily as he handed Little Jacob to his sister-in-law.
Susannah, who adores her nephew almost as much as she does the loathsome cur that nestles in her Maidenform, took my baby with the utmost delight. It would embarrass me to no end to repeat the gaga-doo-doo baby talk she inflicted on the boy when she wasn’t attempting to smother him to death with kisses. Meanwhile, my question went unanswered.
“Can I take him out to show him to the sisters?” she finally asked.
“Yes, but you have to promise first that you won’t kidnap him and turn him into a monk—or a monkette—or whatever the word is for a tiny male person of your unorthodox persuasion.”
“How about monkey?” Susannah said, and then skipped off giggling with my life’s one ac
hievement in her arms.
It was only when Susannah was gone that Gabe and I noticed the very stout nun standing just inside our bedroom door, to the left and in front of the closet. This sister was so short, and had such an enormous chest, that her habit made her body look square. As for her face—let me say with all Christian charity that with her hair pulled back and tucked under her wimple, she might well have passed for a geriatric gorilla. A lemon-sucking geriatric gorilla.
So alarmed was I that I leaped from the bed and into Gabe’s arms. “These are private quarters,” I eventually managed to gasp. Gabe, of course, had said nothing.
23
“Nu? So I come to say good-bye to my son. Do you mind?”
I did a double take. Then a triple.
“Ida? Is that you?”
“Don’t be silly, hon,” my darling said. “This woman’s a nun.”
“My name is Sister Disaster,” the homely woman in the religious garb said.
“Ida,” I said, “it is you, and you can’t be a nun, because you’re Jewish!”
“Ma?” I’d told Gabe the night before about Susannah and the Sisters of Perpetual Apathy, but he’d been pretty uninterested in the whole thing. “Sounds just like your sister,” he’d said. Apparently now that the wimple was on a different head, it was another story.
“I think we need to talk,” I said calmly. “Gabe, dear, hoist her up on the bed, so we can at least be eye to collarbone with her.”
Although he doesn’t think well under duress, the Babester can sometimes take direction. Thank heaven he did now. With Ida jammed between the two of us, and three feet off the ground (mine is the SUV of king-size beds), I felt that we had at least some control in what was otherwise a totally insane situation.
“Now, dear,” I began, “you do realize that Susannah—aka Mother Dispirited—is wearing a cross around her neck. I know, it’s just a soap cross, and if she showers with it on, it won’t be long before it’s not a cross at all. But my point is that this mother and sisters gig is a Christian, not a Jewish, thing.”
“Oy gevalt!” Gabe said suddenly and clapped both hands to his head. “Ma, you didn’t convert, did you?”
At that Ida tugged on a cheap chain that disappeared down the neckline of her habit and retrieved a startlingly large wooden star of David. “Dis vas supposed to be on de outside, ya? But I dress in a hurry.”
“So you’re still Jewish?” I said.
“Ya, und I see dat you are still meshugah. Of course I didn’t convert. De Sisters of Apathy dun’t care about your religion; all dey care about is dat you shouldn’t care anymore. Give up, und give in. Dat is our message. Vee vill all lose in de end, so vhy vorry?”
“But, Ma, that’s fatalistic. That’s just giving up. And what is it that makes your life so darn hard that you feel like this?”
“Vhat you say? Look around you, Gabeleh. Vhere are vee? In de shticks, dat’s vhere. Und I am living alone in a big house all de vay across de road. Vhat kind of life is dis, I ask you?”
“What kind of life do you want, Ma?”
“She wants to be living with you in New York City,” I said. “She wants to play mahjong every afternoon and talk about her son the doctor. Oh yes, and she’d like to keep Little Jacob with her and leave me behind.”
Sister Disaster wasn’t so apathetic that she could restrain from punching my ribs with her elbow. “I vould only play mahjong five days a veek!”
“Sorry, hon,” Gabe said, reaching around her to pat my back. “I thought that in time she’d learn to love you as much as I do.”
“Sometimes I think she does,” I said.
The Babester didn’t have the courtesy to respond to that. “Ma, why do you call yourself Sister Disaster? That’s such an awful name.”
“Because I am a disaster, yah? First, I vas unable to make you happy in New York. If I had been, vee vouldn’t be here. Dat is a fact. Und now, I am not able to fit into dis litle family dat you have made.”
“Ma, that’s simply not true; you fit in just fine. Alison utterly adores you. Even Freni has learned to tolerate you.”
“Ya? But vhat about dis von?” The cubically shaped pseudo-nun jabbed a thumb in my direction.
“Hon,” Gabe said, turning to me, “tell Ma that you love her too.”
Even though I heard the pleading in his voice, and I have been known to stretch the truth upon occasion (they were all justified occasions, I assure you), I could not bring myself to flat-out lie this time. And yes, I’m well aware that in Matthew 5:44 Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. I accept that as gospel, but at the same time, may I respectfully submit that the Lord did not have a mother-in-law? There, that’s all I have to say on the subject.
“I’m sure you love her very much, dear,” I said sweetly.
“Dere, you see?”
“Hon,” Gabe said in his most pleading of tones, “you’ve got to help me out here.”
“I love you,” I said. Okay, perhaps I mumbled the words. At any rate, what I didn’t add is that I meant those words in the spiritual, God-wants-me-to-do-it sense, not in the warm, fuzzy sort of way.
“See, Ma?”
Ida shook her head so vigorously that I suffered a wimple burn on my left arm. “Ha! She dun’t mean it. Anyvay, it is too litle, too late. I have decided dat de Sisters of Perpetual Apathy is de only vay for me now. I must renounce all my emotions. Or else I explode, ya?”
Sometimes the Devil, who is always standing just over my left shoulder, and who must have received the wimple burn as well, commandeers my tongue. That’s the only way I can explain what came out of my mouth next.
“Isn’t it curious,” my lips said, “that she was able to pronounce the name of this bogus religious order without the slightest trace of an accent?”
“Mags,” Gabe said sharply, “you’re only making things worse. I’d rather you didn’t say anything at all.”
“You’re telling me to shut up?”
“Your words, not mine.”
“In that case, I’ll hie my heinie out to this bus full of hopeless hinnies and rescue my little one from an imitation Mother in gray gabardine garb—pardon the alliteration.”
It was a bizarre sight to say the least. There truly was a bus full of women dressed in nun’s habits and, judging by the expressions on their faces, they were the most phlegmatic folk I’d seen in a month of Puritan Sundays. They may as well have been carved out of the same soap as their neck ornaments.
Although I don’t watch movies on principle, many years ago, when I was but an errant youth, I did drive all the way into Pittsburgh, where I sneaked into a theater and watched The Sound of Music (just so you know, I have long since repented of that sin). The point I am trying to make is that the pseudo-sisters aboard Susannah’s “vehicle” weren’t anything like Julie Andrews. Even the stern nuns, who disapproved of Maria running in the abbey, would have been more fun than this bunch.
I scanned their bland faces, which, for the most part, looked alike to me. Oh, there were a couple of women young enough to be sort of pretty even under these circumstances, and one was an older lady whose mannish features and coarse skin were somewhat unsettling, but on average it was hard to distinguish one woman from another. No doubt the uniforms—I mean the habits—were partly to blame. Devoid of makeup, and with their hair pulled back and hidden behind gray veils, the women of Hernia were proof positive that we were, at our core, a plain people.
After extracting the fruit of my bloomers from his aunt’s loving arms, I sorrowfully bid her good-bye. I even went so far as to hug her, taking care, of course, to keep both my baby and my bosoms from touching her surplice.
“Is the rat still in there?” I said.
“His name is Shnookums, Mags, and he has a good-bye present for you.”
I reared back like a mare with a burr under her saddle. “No thanks, dear.”
“Please, Mags. If not for him, then do it for me. It will mean so much.” Mother Dispirited was no longer spe
aking in a monotone, but in her little-girl voice, the one guaranteed to take me back to days when I was her guardian and primary friend.
“All right,” I said.
“Thanks.” Susannah reached under her surplice and, from the surplus room not occupied by Shnookums, removed a small framed picture.
“This is for you to remember us by.”
I stared at a snapshot that had been taken at a Christmas party. And at my sister’s house at that, even though I hadn’t been invited. Susannah was posed in front of her tree, proudly holding the mangy mongrel, which was decked out as an elf, replete with enormous velvet ears and green boots. In the background were the faces of familiar people—folks who obviously rated higher than I did on the invitation scale.
“What am I on, the B list?”
“Mags, you don’t approve of Christmas parties that don’t stick strictly to the religious theme. I was playing Mrs. Santa Claus, for Pete’s sake.”
“And who was the fat man himself?”
“Our old Sunday school teacher, Mr. Neufenbakker.”
Yup, that was him all right, half hidden by the tree. I’d recognize those splayed feet anywhere.
“You could have at least asked me if I wanted to come,” I said.
“You’ve just validated my new religion, sis,” Susannah said, sounding dangerously excited. “If you were a Sister of Perpetual Apathy, you wouldn’t care if you’d been slighted.”
“So I was slighted?”
“Bye, sis, I have to go!” With that, my baby sister, the one whom my parents entrusted me to take care of before they were tragically squished to death beneath a Pennsylvania mountain, climbed into the driver’s seat of an old school bus and drove away with thirty or so of our town’s most pathetic—I mean apathetic—citizens.
As sad as it was to see Susannah drive off with a bus full of nuns, at least none of them were holding babies—or headed for a cliff, for that matter. I knew from experience that my baby sister would eventually tire of this game and come slinking back to Hernia, because despite all her bravado and brazenly worldly ways, she would never be able to shake what was at her core: inbred Mennonite guilt. But there was something sinister about her departure as well. It wasn’t anything in particular; I couldn’t place a well-shaped finger on it. Then again, it felt like a cold stone at the bottom of my stomach, and few of my digits are that long.
