The Death of Pie

by Tamar Myers

  ‘No vay!’ Ida shouted. She still had not given me the courtesy of looking in my direction.

  ‘Yes, Ma, it’s true,’ Gabriel said. ‘I told you that fact before Mags and I got married.’

  ‘Nu? I shlept since den.’

  ‘Good for you, dear,’ I said. ‘I’ve been schlepping around all day; what does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘Dumkoph,’ Ida muttered. ‘I shleep at night; I dun’t schlep at night. I shlept since I herd dat you vas dee sister of Melvin zee killer.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said charitably, as I hardly rolled my eyes. ‘The point is that Ramat Sreym, the gorgeous, voluptuous, if somewhat vacuous beauty from a breakaway nation of the former USSR – or so I am guessing – stood a more than fifty-fifty chance of having met Her Maker at the hands of repugnant, repelling, rapacious—’

  ‘Rat?’ Ida said.

  ‘Please, dear, I’m on a roll,’ I said. I paused and counted to three. ‘Rat,’ I said. ‘Ramat’s book maligned Melvin’s birth mother, his religion and, above all, his own sweetheart, my adoptive sister, Susannah.’

  Gabe set down the silver baby spoon. ‘What you say makes a great deal of sense. But tell me, hon, what were you doing across the road at the convent this morning, interrogating Ma? You scared her half to death.’

  A faint snicker may have escaped my tightly sealed lips. Erring on the side of justice, I slapped my own face – albeit lightly. Surely, somewhere, someone gives me credit for being just about the only person on earth who lightly slaps their own face in chastisement.

  ‘Puh-leeeze,’ I said, ‘Attila the Hun in drag couldn’t scare your ma. For your information, dearest, I was merely observing formalities. Police Chief Toy gave me a list of individuals who he wanted eliminated as suspects right out of the gate, and your mother’s name was one of them.’

  The foregoing statement wasn’t a lie; it was a ‘shadow truth.’ A ‘shadow truth,’ by the way, is a very clever invention of mine in which one is free to embellish a subject, just as long as the essence of that subject has not been fundamentally altered. Just think how much dimmer the fires of Hell would burn if we didn’t try to force our politicians and teenage children to consistently tell the truth. Accepting a ‘shadow truth’ now and then from each other would make for a more peaceful planet. Oh, don’t get me wrong; a ‘shadow truth’ and a white lie are not the same. The former is yellow at best, tinged as it is with a bit of cowardice.

  Gabriel seemed to have bought my version of things, as well as the left-handed compliment of his precious mother – if that’s how he chose to view it. ‘So,’ he said, ‘who is next on this list of suspects? Am I?’

  ‘Would you be disappointed if I said “no,” darling?’

  My Dearly Beloved can be very sexy when he wants to be, and much to my surprise things took a sudden turn in that direction. There I was, dressed in a long-sleeved white blouse, navy skirts that reached down beneath my calves, thick opaque stockings and the sort of clodhopper shoes that a farm girl of yesteryear would wear to, uh, break up the clods of earth turned up by her plough. Nonetheless, this very handsome, toned and tanned physician, in the sky-blue Lacrosse shirt and the sandstone Chinos, was lobbing pheromones at me with the accuracy of a Wimbledon champ.

  ‘I’d be very disappointed if you said “no,’’’ he purred. ‘If you say “yes,” I can have the proof of our love bathed and in bed in half an hour. That should give you enough time to eat.’

  ‘My, how romantic you are,’ I squealed, barely able to contain myself. Trust me, after I gave birth to a baby whose head was the size of Kim Jong Il’s aspirations, our foreplay has often been reduced to just three words: ‘Brace yourself, Mags.’

  Had I not been so tired, however, I might have predicted what happened next. The intruder with the broad back, topped by the cabbage head, pushed herself off her chair with her doll-sized limbs. Her mood was as dark as the black apron covering her habit; even without a cowl, Ida’s scowl was truly formidable. Between the furrows in her brow I could see lightning flash, and when she opened her mouth to speak I was pelted with hail and brimstone simultaneously.

  ‘Shtop mit der sexy-wexy!’ she commanded, her stubby index finger pointed straight out in front of her or, in other words, about waist-high on Yours Truly.

  That did it! That hiked my hackles up to my armpits. Who did she think that she was? The Almighty?

  ‘My sexy-wexy, as you call it, is none of your ding-dong business.’

  ‘Mags,’ Gabe gasped. ‘Don’t swear at Ma!’

  ‘Swear, schmare,’ I practically screeched, and right in front of my baby too! ‘She’s trying to interfere in our love life.’

  ‘No, she’s not – are you, Ma?’

  ‘Yah, of course I am,’ she said, nodding that cabbage every which way but loose. ‘Dis von eez no gut for you. Gabeleh, how many times do I tell you dis? Much better dat you marry Shoshanna Silverman, the goil mit zee face of an angel, and whose faddeh eez also single. Vee could haf a two-for-von vedding, yah?’

  ‘Ma, no!’ My husband might be slow to develop in the familial relationship department but, unlike his mother, his gray cells are human in origin, and not cruciferous. ‘I’m so sorry, Mags, I had no idea – I mean, I forgot just how meddling Ma can be. Of course, my Little Vixen, my Little Minx, I want the sexy-wexy with you!’

  ‘Judge not,’ the Bible says. Amen to that. I am five foot ten inches tall and shaped like a hitching post. When a handsome, worldly doctor calls me his ‘Little Vixen,’ and his ‘Little Minx,’ the past is instantly forgiven; I am on him like white on a peeled banana.

  Having uttered those erotic words, Dr Gabriel Rosen rose seductively from his genuine faux leather-covered dinette chair to approach me with his arms extended. What exactly occurred next, I will never know. Both Ida and Gabe deny any knowledge of the matter, other than that Ida stumbled on an untied shoelace. For a few aggravating seconds, Gabe looked like a human/octopus hybrid, his eight arms flailing about, as he tried to balance his top-heavy ma back on her undersized feet.

  Somehow – which I’m betting only God and Ida can explain – in the ensuing fracas, their two sets of apron strings became inextricably intertwined. One might think that a thin-gauge knitting needle, or a greased nail, or something could have been slipped into one of the plethora of knots that had suddenly materialized, but au contraire. Either Ida, or Her Maker, had managed to pull off a good magician’s trick in reverse, stumping at least two of us, and in the process bringing a sly smile to the liver-colored lips of the third.

  ‘Oy gvalt,’ the third party said. ‘Look vhat happen! Eez wary funny, yah?’

  ‘And about to get funnier, dear,’ I said. While I may be built like a broomstick, my barge-sized feet render me anything but graceful, ergo I clomped over to the all-purpose drawer, which are found in kitchens everywhere, and extracted a pair of large, extremely sharp scissors. Then, humming a happy little ditty, I clomped over to the entangled pair, and with a couple of snips cut the apron strings that bound mum to son. At that moment a choir of angels filled the room, and I went from humming a simple tune to singing a rousing, operatic version of Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.

  Unfortunately, the mighty do not have far to fall, if they are unreasonably short. Hence Ida recovered in no time. By the end of the evening she had convinced my Dearly Beloved that it was unsafe even for him to drive her back to the Convent of Perpetual Apathy, because Melvin Stoltzfus could be hiding in the bushes by the entrance. When I countered with the notion that fear and apathy were incompatible emotions, she became angry; what did I know about apathy? she yelled.

  Fortunately for me, my Dearly Beloved is never more amorous than when his precious ma and I are housed under the same roof. After we finally got her to sleep in one of the paying guest rooms upstairs in the inn, I gave Ida’s son a night that he would never forget, and one that she would never have approved of – not in a million years. Enough said.

  Karma is not a good Chri
stian term, thus not a word to be used lightly, if at all. However, the longer I live, the more it would appear that good intentions attract good things into my life, and negativity begets unpleasant situations. The morning following my Hallelujah (in more ways than one) moment, I was in for a real letdown.

  TEN

  BROWN SUGAR PIE

  (MILCHE FLICHTE)

  Serves 8 normal people, but sufficient for only 6 people of Amish-Mennonite ancestry

  1 unbaked 8-inch pie crust

  1 cup brown sugar

  3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

  Dash of salt

  1 12-ounce can evaporated milk

  2½ tablespoons butter

  Ground cinnamon

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees. With your fingers, mix the brown sugar, flour and salt directly in the pie shell. Spread evenly. Slowly pour the evaporated milk over the mixture, but do not stir in. Dot with lumps of butter and sprinkle cinnamon liberally over the surface. Bake for 50 minutes.

  The filling is supposed to be gooey. The pie is best eaten at room temperature.

  ELEVEN

  My investigation got off to a late start because I believe that a good wife should be subservient to her husband, as it is written in the Book of Ephesians. I served rather well, if I do say so myself. But even a meek and mild-mannered woman, such as me, is bound to have an opinion from time to time. That said, I am somewhat rankled by this particular chapter in Ephesians. I mean, the apostle who wrote this book was a tent-maker named Paul, a man never married, and who elsewhere comes across as misogynistic.

  Yes, I know, the Bible was inspired by the Holy Spirit, and the Apostle Paul was just the scribe, and yada, yada. That’s what my minister says, at any rate. However, the Gospel According to Magdalena is the following: occasionally the earthly scribes were unable to sufficiently turn down the volume of their mind’s chatter enough to enable them to hear that small, still voice that is God’s. This explains why certain customs peculiar to biblical times feel instinctively wrong to good Christians of today. I do not, for instance, own slaves, nor would I put Little Jacob to death should the day come that he curses me.

  Ach, but just like the Bible, I have wandered again in my telling of what proved to be a harrowing tale. After servicing my husband, serving my child and swerving to avoid my mother-in-law, I headed back towards Hernia. Our village doesn’t have a proper ‘downtown,’ but it does have a Main Street. Along this street, in the approximate center of the village, one will find an intersection fronted by the following four buildings: First Mennonite Church, Hernia Police Station, Sam Yoder’s Corner Market and Miller’s Feed Store. We have stops signs, instead of a stoplight, and hitching posts for horses instead of parking meters. The speed limit is fifteen kph because most of the traffic is horses and buggies.

  I have found from a lifetime of experience that the best way to enter my cousin’s store is via stealth. Yea, I am a homely woman. When I brush out my long brown mane each morning I am sorely tempted to rear up and neigh at the image reflected back in my full-length mirror. There is no way that I can objectively deny that fact. But is that truly how others see me? If so, how can I explain the fact that I have a drop-dead gorgeous husband over whom every other woman in Hernia drools and that I have both a widower, and a married man, chomping at the bit to get into my knickers – er, so to speak.

  Main Street offers precious few parking spaces, so I parked in the lot behind the First Mennonite Church (not my church, by the way) and hoofed it over to Sam’s little grocery store. Because this is the only place in a twelve-mile radius where the Amish can buy staples and not have to worry about having their horses spooked by trucks and speeding cars, the market does a brisk business. Sam was thoroughly distracted at the register, which suited me fine because I had business in the ‘back room’ – an office/lounge/storage area that took up nearly a third of the downstairs level of the two-storey building.

  It was here that Sam had delivered my son, Little Jacob. I have been the recipient of many blessings in my life – too many to enumerate – but one of the greatest blessings bestowed upon me was that I experienced an extremely brief, albeit painful, delivery. At any rate, it wasn’t memory lane that I wished to visit now, but Sam’s cantankerous Methodist wife, Dorothy. In Ramat Sreym’s scandalous book she’d been described as weighing seven hundred pounds. That was an out and out lie. Everyone in Hernia could vouch for that: at her annual weigh-ins, which took place at the stockyard and were well attended (entrepreneurial Sam sold snacks) the poor woman never, ever tipped the scales at more than four hundred and ninety-six pounds.

  Dorothy is an extremely bright woman, who could converse on any number of subjects, if she wasn’t always in attack mode. Perhaps this contentious personality is the reason why Miss Sreym chose to exaggerate my cousin-in-law’s weight; perhaps the two women had words. Or, it could be that the witless writer was simply prejudiced against folks with fluffy flesh. However, in all fairness, Dorothy, being a liberal Methodist and not a Mennonite, was secretly flattered by being described as a ‘strumpet without a trumpet’ and a ‘trollop who packed a wallop.’ I know this because Sam told me in confidence, and what is a secret if not something to be shared?

  Dorothy also has the ears of a kit fox (my Gabe watches National Geographic), and could probably hear a fly sigh at fifty paces. Then again, she might have smelled my approach, given that some have dubbed me Yoder with an Odour, and suggested that I have the bathing habits of a European – possibly someone of French, or even Belgian, nationality. Oh how I resemble that remark! In any case, the Methodist menace met me at the door to the back room, where she’d apparently been waiting for me.

  ‘What took you so long?’ she said.

  For the record, despite her bulk, Dorothy has the voice of a nine-year-old girl who has just discovered a nest of spiders in her pudding. Over the years I’ve trained myself not to show the slightest reaction to this anomaly. My training methods have involved prayer, tongue-biting, pinching my arm, pinching someone else’s arm, biting someone else’s tongue – you name it. Trust me, Dorothy’s voice has got to be heard to be believed. The fact that Ramat Sreym made no mention of it in her novel was, to say the least, a puzzling thought.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Dorothy continued to squeal. ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’

  A little bit of irritation goes a long way to stopping the giggles. ‘My pussy is at home in our barn chasing mice,’ I said coolly. ‘How is your pussy?’

  Dorothy scowled, creating furrows on her brow deep enough in which to plant corn kernels. ‘You have a filthy mind, Magdalena.’

  ‘Why I never,’ I protested. ‘Well – maybe just that once – although I’m not sure what we’re talking about. It isn’t nail polish, is it?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you blithering Mennonite idiot,’ Dorothy squeaked like a shrew on steroids, ‘stop wasting my time and come in.’

  She lumbered aside, allowing me to slip past her to claim my cousin Sam’s chair, which is one of those sinfully comfortable babies that reclines at the push of a button. I realize that this might be a bit picky of me to feel this way, maybe even a mite sacrilegious, but when I get to Heaven, if my new digs don’t have a recliner like that, I might ask to be shown to another room. Anyway, Dorothy’s customary seat was the sofa – a very large daybed, really – that sagged to the floor in the middle. By the time she’d satisfactorily ensconced herself in the giant cup of broken bedsprings, she was no longer squealing. Instead she sounded rather like a bull sea lion on a mating frenzy (again, it was that ding-dong National Geographic channel!).

  Normally, by then I would have already surrendered myself to the Devil by arranging my gangly limbs along the length of the heavenly recliner. Normally. However, on that particular visit, when I glanced down at Cousin Sam’s much-coveted place of reposition, what did I spy but a pair of Dorothy’s bloomers, laid out like the sails of the S.S. Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina combined. I half expected to
see a miniature Christopher Columbus waving up at me.

  ‘Go on, sit,’ Dorothy said.

  All right, but where? Surely she didn’t mean on her floor. I try not to entertain mean thoughts in my head, given that I am a kind Christian woman, but truly, even germs wouldn’t sit on Dorothy’s floor.

  No one likes to be yelled at, not even if that person has broad (albeit bony) shoulders like mine, and not even if the yeller has the voice of a nine-year-old. Folks think that I’m tough just because I’m quick-witted and sharp-tongued, but I have feelings too. What brains I have I got from God, and the sharpness of my tongue comes from having to bite down on it so much in order to keep from speaking what’s really on my mind. That is to say, my poor tongue has been sharpened like a sword’s edge against a whetstone, so what comes out of my mouth is really not my fault.

  Allow me, therefore, to briefly meander this one time. I was born and bred in Hernia. I am a deaconess in Beechy Grove Mennonite Church, the conservative branch also known as Old Order Mennonite. I am related by blood to virtually every Mennonite person of Amish ancestry in the world, and every Amish person in the world. The branches of my family tree are so tangled that I have to share a shadow with my sister. On account of that, plus the fact that I am the best listener you may ever hope to encounter – and I say this with all humility – I am the gossip maven of Hernia. Maven, by the way, is a Yiddish word that I picked up from the Babester, and it literally means someone who is knowledgeable.

  The things that I know about many a fine pillar in our community would light fires under the gossiping old biddies in Hernia. Thumbs would fall off willy-nilly from all that texting, especially in the case of Martha Gerber who really was born with ‘all thumbs.’ Even John Swartzentruber, with his extra pair of ears, will not have heard the tales that could be spun from my thin, colorless lips – if I was ever pushed too far, that is. And tales is not the right word, either, because my gossip is all based on the truth. It is rather what the Anglicans believe the Bible to be, although every real Christian knows that the Bible should be read literally, word for word. At any rate, when I gossip, I simply embroider the facts to make them more interesting, and leave out the boring parts.