by Tamar Myers
‘Mags, you’re such a hoot,’ Agnes said. ‘You and your archaic use of English. “Frock” indeed. It almost sounds like a swear word. No, I don’t mind telling you. Lydia Burkholder, that’s who.’
‘Oh, my word!’
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all, dear.’
‘Out with it, Mags. You know that you can’t keep secrets.’
‘All right, I capitulate,’ I said, if only because I had important information to share, and not because I am a gossip – which I most certainly am not. ‘Well, Lydia and Ezekiel Burkholder have fifteen children in all, thanks to the Amish need for farm hands. Freni told me – and you can’t tell anyone – that poor Lydia is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and is desperate to get out of the house. Their oldest child is eighteen and is still unmarried, and quite capable of taking care of the little ones, even though she has a nervous tick. Matilda has the tick, not Lydia.’
‘So?’ Agnes demanded.
‘So, I offered Lydia a job as assistant chef at Asian Sensations,’ I said. ‘This will give her a chance to get out of the house, and out from under Ezekiel – so to speak.’
‘No, you didn’t just hire her to work under Barbara!’
‘I just said that I did.’
‘It’s a way of speaking. Never mind. While she was taking my measurements, Lydia and I got to talking about Barbara and why she didn’t fit in here in Hernia, and Lydia told me that all the other Amish women say that Barbara’s too outspoken, sometimes to the point of rudeness. Kind of like you, Mags.’
I hopped off that goat-scented bed and sputtered like a flooded car engine. ‘S-s-so that’s what you think of me?’ I hollered. ‘You think I’m rude?’
Instead of a snappy rejoinder, Agnes began to sob. As Agnes is my very best friend, I shall never, ever, even on pain of death, reveal what an ugly crier she is. There is possibly only one person in the entire world who presents a more disagreeable visage when shedding tears, and that is Yours Truly. The one thing that I know having grown up with Agnes is that we both hate it when anyone tries to hug us and offer such meaningless platitudes as ‘There, there.’ ‘Where, where?’ we are wont to respond.
There was really nothing that I could do but sit back down on the odoriferous duvet and wait until the monsoon had passed. I briefly entertained the idea of going all ‘English’ on her and fixing a ‘cuppa’, given that Agnes is such an Anglophile that she could rule the waves with one hand tied behind her back, but then I decided that she might feel abandoned if I left the room. Besides, there was simply no telling if the horny beast with the horns would try to sneak his way back into Agnes’s bed during my absence.
At long last the sobs were replaced by a fair bit of sniffling, followed by a good deal of throat clearing. Eventually my childhood friend smiled gratefully. ‘I’m sorry that I called you rude,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said it, even though sometimes it’s true. Thank you for letting me have a good cry. There’s nothing like letting it all out, is there? I’ve been so incredibly lonely. Mags, that’s why I bought all the stuff you saw on your way coming in. I was trying to fill up the hole in my heart.’
‘Because you loved Doc so much?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Mags, you sound jealous, but don’t be. I never really loved Doc all that much, and I know that he didn’t love me. It was you, and only you whom he loved.’
I said nothing. What could I say? I had indeed been jealous of my best friend’s marriage to Doc, but I had never lusted after the grizzled old man. Having lost my own father early in life, Doc had always been more of a wise father figure to me, albeit one with boundary issues.
It’s a fact that we voluble Americans cannot abide silence. ‘And I want you to know,’ Agnes said, ‘that I paid for all those items with my own savings. I’m actually penniless on account of that. By the way, Doc was broke as well when I married him. He didn’t have one thin dime to his name.’
I gasped, which was a huge mistake, as it caused me to inhale several goat hairs. ‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You better believe it. I have all his banking and investment records to prove it.’
I slumped, but immediately straightened, thanks to ‘bouquet d’barnyard’. ‘Everyone in Hernia believes he was a millionaire.’
‘Why?’ Agnes asked fiercely. ‘Doc was only a country veterinarian. He had a kind and generous heart. Too many people took advantage of that.’
‘But most of us are good Christians. We don’t steal. Not paying our bills would be stealing.’
Agnes sighed, sending a flurry of goat hair and dust particles into the air. Who knew that goats had such lightweight hair? Perhaps it belonged to some other hideous mammal, and I shuddered to think of the possibilities.
‘Look at it this way, Mags: a farmer gets a poor return on his corn crop, so he’s strapped for cash. In the meantime, one of his cows gets sick. Doc treats the cow and tells the farmer to pay him back when he can. In the meantime, there are three more bad crops, and two more sick cows, and well – at least one of those treatments gets lost in the shuffle because of Doc’s kind heart.
‘Mags, if I work for you as manager at Asian Sensations, aren’t folks going to think it odd? I mean, aren’t they going to wonder why a millionaire’s wife is managing a restaurant?’
I blew at the air, which only made matters worse. ‘The way I see it, you have two options. The first one is that you start telling people the truth – beginning with Marigold Flanagan, surely our biggest gossip here in Hernia – and then you hold your head high. Your second option, should anyone question your need for employment, is to simply tell them that you enjoy managing people. That will set them in their place.’
Agnes giggled, something she is surprisingly good at for a woman of a certain age. ‘You see what I mean about you being rude?’
NINE
We Mennonites are a humble people. Quite a few of us, myself included, have always been proud of our humility. Yes, I am perhaps more outspoken than most Mennonite women, and it has been said of me that I have a tongue that could slice Swiss cheese, but that is a slight exaggeration. A mild cheddar is more like it.
With my equine face, mousy brown hair, and prominent teeth, I look like the reflection of an anaemic horse in a silt-laden pond. Even though my doctor husband claims that this is not the case, and that I can’t see myself for who I am, thanks to a hypercritical mother and a sexually-repressed culture, I didn’t believe it was worth taking any chances. To that end, I hired the most unattractive woman I could find to replace my beloved kinswoman, Freni.
Thelma Bontrager has a lopsided face that only a mother could love – that was Thelma’s own description, not mine. The Babester, with a wink, told her that ‘no’, Picasso would also have loved her face, which caused the woman to blush the colour of a ripe pomegranate. From that moment on she became his adoring puppy dog until I put a stop to it with my rude, cheese-slicing tongue. What I said was: ‘Less looking, and more cooking.’ How is that rude?
Anyway, I wasn’t all that worried that my Honey Buns would do anything untoward with our new cook, because Thelma was sixty-two years old, and as for her figure, try to imagine a Bactrian camel crossed with a gunny sack filled with large Idaho potatoes. Which are the camel humps, and which parts are the potato lumps? I’ll leave that up to the imagination.
The important thing is that Thelma’s less than stellar looks enabled me to leave the inn and concentrate on the restaurant without having to worry that my handsome groom of just three years might yield to temptation and do the mattress mambo while I was gone. Speaking frankly, every working wife with a stay-at-home husband should have a ‘Thelma’. Due to Thelma’s presence, my inimitable mother-in-law, Ida, a.k.a. Mother Malaise, stayed away. Completely. Whatever Ida’s problem was with Thelma, I dared not ask. I was just happy to have the time to spend getting the restaurant up and running.
My, what fun it was! With the possible exceptio
n of my honeymoon, I’ve never enjoyed something quite so much. Sure, there were no moments when I gouged the headboard with my fingernails, or when fireworks went off in my head and I actually burst into a rousing rendition of: ‘Oh sweet mystery of life at last I found you!’. Nonetheless, my soul soared.
Of course, no woman who is more than half a century old, and long in the tooth (quite literally), should be surprised to discover a fly in her happiness ointment. Yet by the time Asian Sensations had its grand opening on the first day of summer, it was impossible to keep all the flies out.
TEN
Perhaps I really was responsible for the murder that landed me in the Bedford County Jail – which I most certainly did not commit, by the way. What I mean to say is that it was my cockeyed approach to finding a culinary niche that set everything in motion. Plus, if it hadn’t been for my God-given ability to spin straw into gold, none of what follows would have happened.
After careful consideration, I came to the conclusion that an advertising campaign that described Asian Sensation’s unique contribution to the culinary scene was the smartest approach. I studied press releases and then wrote my own with input from my imaginative, fourteen-year-old daughter Alison, who wants to be a novelist, movie star, astronaut, U.S. president, royal duchess, and a race car driver. Meanwhile my sophisticated New York hunk of a husband practically wrung his surgeon hands in horror when he read our finished product. He claimed that no legitimate newspapers would print, for free, what were so clearly advertisements.
The Babester was wrong. Even before Asian Sensations opened, we became the darling of media. The ‘weekend’ sections of the largest newspapers in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Washington, D.C., and New York City were all keenly interested in exploring the ‘next new phenomena’ and sent feature editors to The PennDutch Inn to interview me. The amount of free advertising that we received was priceless.
Alison is a chip off the old block. My darling daughter had taken a page from my success with The PennDutch Inn, wherein bored, rich, city folk will drive ridiculously long distances, and pay through the nose, to be the first in their social set to have some exotic new experience. I don’t mean to disparage the weaker sex, but yes, it is usually the men who fall for this trap, or should I say ‘claptrap’. At any rate, I insisted that she sit in on all the interviews, and it was really Alison who got the feature editors’ juices flowing, and eventually led to a feeding frenzy of media attention.
‘AMISH MEETS SECHUAN’ screamed the headlines in the food section of the nation’s largest paper. ‘TIKKA MASALA MENNONITE STYLE’ read its competitor. Foodies from as far away as Chicago flocked to my (OK, our) restaurant. Eventually, after the first rave review, it was reservations only, a fact which frustrated motorists passing nearby on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, not to mention the citizens of Hernia. On the plus side, with all the people vying for a seat at the trough, we could afford to jack up the prices, which I did.
My best friend has always had a wee bit of a bossy nature. This is not a judgment, merely a statement of fact. Agnes soon discovered that she actually enjoyed turning folks away from Asian Sensations in a fake English accent. American Anglophiles derive enormous pleasure from copying the accents that they hear on such popular programs as Downton Abbey, and from what I’ve been told, they mangle those accents terribly. On the other hand, it is a pity that the British, with the exception of actors, almost never attempt to mimic our more mellifluous way of speaking.
But back to Agnes. That woman blossomed like a patch of fertilized dandelions on a warm spring day. Although I had envisioned her manning the cash register, she had a vision of her own. In fact, in her vision she rose above her assigned station in the restaurant, even before Asian Sensations opened. Hers involved getting a new hairstyle, going on a crash diet, buying a number of fancy-schmancy outfits in Pittsburgh with my money, and playing the part of hostess with the mostest to the hilt.
The clothes she bought looked to me like red silk pyjamas with gold dragons embroidered on them. However, Agnes insisted that she bought them at the Asian market, and that red symbolizes happiness and good luck in China.
‘They are not pyjamas,’ she insisted. ‘You’re just jealous because your strict religious hang-ups preclude any kind of comfort.’
I gasped with righteous indignation. ‘Why, I never!’
‘Exactly. If you tried to wear an outfit like this, all the thick straps and buckles on your so-called “sturdy Christian underwear” would stand out like walnuts on a slice of buttered bread – if they didn’t snag this fine silk to smithereens first.’
‘Harrumph!’ I said. ‘You too could wear sturdy Christian underwear. Verily, I say unto thee, Agnes, forsake your modern Mennonite ways and embrace my Conservative Mennonite customs. I daresay that sturdy foundation undergarments, ones which provide ample coverage, are the foundation of a strong moral character.’
I should have known better than to give my best buddy moral and spiritual advice together in the same sentence. She commenced huffing, and puffing, and nearly blew my house down. Thank heavens we were in my bedroom at The PennDutch Inn, and not somewhere more public, like the dining room at the restaurant.
‘Are you saying that I lack strong moral values?’ she said. ‘And don’t you dare bring up the goat in my bed thing again, or I’ll pull one of the chopsticks out of my bun and jab you in the right eye.’
I nodded warily, as Agnes is a woman of her word. ‘Okey dokey, Annie Oakley. But speaking of your chopsticks, what are they doing in your hair? Isn’t that a trifle unsanitary?’
‘Mags, haven’t you ever seen pictures of geishas?’
‘Agnes. I’m not a country bumpkin; I only come across that way. For your information, geishas use hair sticks in their hair, not chopsticks. There is a difference.’
If we hadn’t been sitting on my bed, Agnes’s bottom jaw would have hit the floor. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Because I read. By the way, wearing hair sticks will be seen as cultural appropriation, so I can’t allow it.’
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Kidding is when goats deliver their young, and I won’t allow that in the restaurant either.’
‘Mags, stop it! Are you joking, or not?’
‘Yes and no. Here’s the bottom line: no cultural appropriation in Asian Sensations other than from our own culture, except for inspiration for the menu. You can keep the silk pyjamas for your own use at home, and I’ll give you double that budget to return to Pittsburgh and find yourself a suitable hostess ensemble. And remember, you’re going to be on your feet for eight or more hours, so buy sensible shoes.’ I fished one of my boat-size black brogans off the floor and waved it aloft. ‘I can recommend—’
‘No, thank you!’ Agnes ripped the chopsticks out of her bun, and threw them to the floor, where they landed with a clatter. Unfortunately for Agnes, her body shape, coupled with her short arms, made it impossible for her to slam the door behind her without it bouncing off her bum.
In deference to our friendship, I pretended not to see her clumsy exit from my boudoir. But there was something else that I couldn’t see either, and that was the fracture that had been developing in our relationship ever since I married the Babester three years ago. Perhaps I hadn’t recognized it at first, because the growing rift started as a thin line, like a hairline fracture, but unless we both put the brakes on our emotions it could escalate until it was as big and dangerous as the San Andreas Fault.
No pun intended, but who was at fault for starting this rift? Why is it that some people like you only when you are down? Why do some folks collect as friends only those people who have less material wealth, or whose relationships can’t hold a candle to yours? Yes, Agnes and I had started out together in adjacent prams, but when in middle life, a rich handsome man came along for me – a knight in shining armour (although chained to his mama) – she started putting distance between us.
That afternoon, with the chopsticks still lying on the f
loor, I slipped to my bony knees. I should have prayed, but instead I sobbed. Trust me, for what was about to happen at Asian Sensations, crying was a waste of time.
ELEVEN
I must confess that on opening day Agnes looked like a million bucks. When she saw me, she flashed me a smile so bright I had to blink three times in order to regain my indoor vision. Before I could say anything, she pulled me aside.
‘Are these women with you my waitresses?’
‘Technically they’re mine and Hortense’s waitresses. But practically speaking, yes, they’re yours.’
‘Wow. They really look fancy. Are those tuxedos that they’re wearing?’
‘Those are women’s tuxedos. If I dressed them in men’s clothes, then that would be a sin, wouldn’t it?’
‘Mags, do you always have to quote scripture? I’m trying to give you a compliment, by telling you that these women really look sharp.’
‘Thanks. So do you.’
‘Really? You’re not just saying that?’
‘No, the words “a million bucks” is what popped into my mind the second I saw you.’
Agnes beamed. ‘I could kiss you right now, but you’d probably run away screaming. Or at the very least, throw some Bible verse at me.’
‘Probably. By the way, these sharp-looking waitresses, who are standing there idly, waiting for their instructions, are none other than Sisters of Perpetual Apathy.’
‘No way!’
‘Way.’
‘But how?’
‘Why, it was no trouble at all. I simply caved in to my mother-in-law’s cajoling, but instead of hiring her – which would have been a terrible mistake – I got these three ladies for a pittance. Besides, since they get to take their earnings back to the convent, including tips, it’s a win-win situation for everyone. Also, I checked to see that they all have their own teeth, so you won’t have to worry about any dentures falling onto a customer’s plate.’
