Mean and Shellfish

by Tamar Myers

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gabe said. ‘Ma will still be Queen, won’t she?’

  ‘Yes, your ma will still be Queen,’ I said wearily. ‘The question is whether or not she will still want to ride in a goat cart across the bridge when she hears about this? Because if not, she will have to abdicate.’

  ‘Abdicate?’

  ‘Yes. You do realize that the bridge is the central part of the celebration, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, hon, I’m not deaf. You’ve been prattling on about that darn bridge ceremony for the past three months – well, the past four years, really. Ever since you thought up that fekakta festival.’

  ‘Fekakta festival? Silly? That’s what you call it. Let me remind you, sweetie-pot-pie, that the first of these fekakta festivals was to celebrate the fact that Gruff, a billy goat, saved my life by flinging our beloved son’s soiled nappy into the face of a killer who had already successfully poisoned his wife.’

  My husband threw up his beautiful surgeon’s hands in a gesture of defence. ‘Your sweetie-pot-pie surrenders. I remember. You were a hero then, and you remain a hero today. I just don’t want Ma to be disappointed.’

  Gabe didn’t have to worry; given the events of the last twenty-four hours, I had a feeling his precious ma was in for the ride of her life.

  TWELVE

  There are days when that urge to stay curled up in a foetal position and never get out of bed might have been a wise one. But the success of the festival was my responsibility, and along with it my mother-in-law’s pride, and my husband’s happiness. Although I was able to throw off the guest sheet with ease, the feelings I had of impending dread did not leave. Shakespeare wrote: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’. In my case: uneasy was the head that wore coils of mousy brown braids topped with a white organza prayer cap.

  In fact, before I could even plant one universe-size foot on the oak plank floor, my phone rang. Because I am the village mayor, a wife, a businesswoman, and a mother with a teenage daughter away at college, my phone is set up with several different ringtones.

  ‘Good morning, Alison,’ I said somewhat warily. By the way, when our daughter Alison was fifteen, she was our first Miss Hernia, and thus our first citizen to ride across the bridge in a goat cart on Billy Goat Gruff Festival. She wasn’t elected to this honour; she was appointed by me. I chose her only because it was her little brother whose nappy had saved my life. It had nothing to do with the fact that already by that tender age, Alison was a buxom beauty who looked a full five years older than she was. But my, how I’ve digressed.

  ‘M-mam-ma,’ a nineteen-year-old Alison purred over the phone to me. (She usually calls me ‘Mom’.)

  ‘You’re not coming, are you?’ I said. ‘You’re supposed to crown the new Miss Hernia, you know. It’s tradition. Except this year your Grandma Ida has forced me to change the title to Hernia’s Citizen of the Year, because she’s definitely not a miss. Of course, that concession wasn’t enough for her, even though she stole the election. But, oh no, your Grandma Ida wants the title of Queen of Hernia. Can you imagine that? She should count herself lucky that she still gets a crown. So you have to put it on her head, because I’m definitely not doing it.’

  ‘We-ellll, it’s this, Mam-ma – but no, first, I want to know how you and Daddy are doing?’

  ‘Who’s your “daddy”, Alison? If you’re referring to the man with whom I have sexual relations, he’s always been “dad” to you.’

  ‘Ick, Mom! Don’t say that stuff; it’s gross.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear. Your dad and I are married. The two-sheet tango, the mattress mambo, the bedtime boogie-woogie, the pillowcase paso doble, the horizontal hula – they’re all sanctioned by God and country, and we have the papers to prove it. And as you know quite well by now, those aren’t real dances, so there is no sin involved. Those are just different terms to describe the glorious coming together of two naked bodies—’

  ‘Mom! I mean it. Stop. You’re grossing me out.’

  ‘OK, I’ll stop,’ I said. ‘But I was just starting to enjoy this call. I knew from the second that you referred to me as “Mama” that something was up. So spill it, dear.’

  Alison sighed so hard that I could feel her breath tickle my ear through my cordless phone. What made this even more astonishing was that she was at the University of Pittsburgh, which was one hundred and fourteen miles away. After her world record sigh, she inhaled deeply and strove to spill her secret and her guts in a world record run-on sentence.

  ‘You brought me up to care deeply about the plight of others who are less fortunate than I am, and I will always be grateful that you and Dad gave me a forever home and adopted me after my birth parents turned their backs on me, and that you showed me by your love how I could grow up to be a loving person too, and Mom, although your faith is mostly about saving sinners from Hell so that they get to go to Heaven to be with their Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and sure they do a ton of relief work overseas bringing food and medical supplies to people who desperately need it, and you know that Dad’s and my faith is mostly about Tikun Olam, which means repairing the broken state of the world that we find ourselves in now, and since we don’t believe in Hell and really don’t give two figs about Heaven anyway, I decided to help suffering people now instead of waiting until after I graduated from college and then from medical school, so I’m taking what’s called a gap year, and I’m going to Puerto Rico to do whatever I can because they are still rebuilding after Hurricane Maria and the subsequent earthquakes, and people on the mainland seem to have forgotten about them, or else they no longer care, and if you want to blame anyone for me taking a gap year, then blame the Brits, because when I was a young girl I remember reading that Prince William took a gap year to go to Chile to do some volunteer work, and don’t worry I won’t be alone because I met this kindred soul, Alex, at Hillel when I went there for Shabbat services – oops they’re calling my flight now! Love you, Mom! Give my love to Dad. T’amo!’

  I was stunned. I was shocked. I was gobsmacked. Then I was outraged. It had been Gabe’s older sister, a retired psychiatrist, who had urged us to let our nineteen-year-old daughter, along with her two best friends, attend Freshman Orientation at the University of Pittsburgh without parental supervision. ‘They’re adults now,’ she kept saying.

  Phooey on that! They’re still teenagers. Even Gabe would agree that we humans aren’t fully mature until somewhere in our mid-twenties. Just a week ago Alison was gung-ho about beginning the long but exciting road that would lead her to being a medical doctor. Now she was off to the Caribbean with a boy named Alex. And what is a nineteen-year-old male if not a walking, talking, breathing bundle of sex hormones! After all, the human male reaches his sexual peak at about age eighteen and thinks about sex almost constantly. But by age fifty this is no longer the case. At least that’s the line my physician husband fed me when he had to start using little blue pills before we got intimate – not that this is anybody’s business. My point is that without anyone to stop them, my precious daughter might that very night be doing the headboard hoedown, or even just the sleeping bag shuffle, but in the process creating an Alexander Jr. or mini-Alison. Oy Vey!

  I could just wring Gabe’s sister’s scrawny neck. I could probably come close to doing it, too. After all, I was a country girl, and had wrung many a chicken’s neck. Literally. Whereas Cheryl, the former New York psychiatrist, possessed a neck with hardly more girth than a chicken’s neck. What’s more, Cheryl’s neck had been subjected to so many chemical peels, it was a wonder that it didn’t just snap in two when she lifted her head from her down-filled pillow on any given morning. Of course, these thoughts weren’t those of a good Christian, but I was feeling sinfully self-indulgent at the moment. Besides, what good is grace anyhow, if I can’t get a much-needed dollop of it from time to time? Ergo, I dropped to my knees beside our California king-size bed to beg for some assistance.

  ‘Dear Lord,’ I whined, ‘as thou didst se
nd an angel to shut the mouths of the hungry lions so they would not eat thy prophet Daniel, wouldst thou please keep Alison’s knees pressed tightly together until she returns home safely to my embrace, or until such time that she is old enough to be married – maybe ten years from now. And remember, Lord, the saying is: Four on the floor. That means that her and Alex both need to keep their feet on the floor at all times when they’re in her room. Trust me, Lord, a lot of mischief can still be done with one pair of feet on the floor – not that you would know anything about that, of course. Anyway, if you would be so kind as to put that message in her head on sort of a revolving loop so that it doesn’t go in one ear and out the other, I’ll be—’

  ‘A monkey’s uncle!’ Gabe said, and then rolled over to my side of the bed snorting with laughter. ‘Oh, hon, I love you, you know that, and I mean no disrespect, but did I hear you giving God instructions on what to say to our daughter? Plus, what sort of omniscient God needs the meanings of words explained to him?’

  I don’t know which feeling was more intense: embarrassment or anger. I felt that my privacy had been violated, but of course it was my own fault. Any sane person whose aim it is to rant and rave aloud, and not be heard, would probably pick his, or her, automobile over their occupied bedroom. The key word being ‘sane’. However, there are those who would say that ship for me sailed a long time ago.

  My cheeks burned. ‘You just interrupted a hotline to Heaven, buster.’

  ‘Mags, I’m sorry that I hurt your feelings,’ Gabe said, popping my balloon of bellicosity.

  My bony knees had started to feel sore anyway, so I stood. ‘Well, I’m done praying. How much of it did you hear?’

  ‘Beginning with the fifth word into your prayer. Remember, that’s how long it takes for a man to start listening. Even a sleeping man will begin to listen at that point if his wife prays as loudly as you do – no offense intended.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ I said with a sniff, ‘some offense was taken. I’ll have you know that Heaven is a long ways off, so it doesn’t hurt to pump up the volume. But what you really need to know is that tonight your daughter – our daughter – will become a woman in Puerto Rico, unless the Good Lord sends an angel to keep her legs as tightly closed as a clam at low tide, or else the Lord himself whispers that mantra “Four on the floor” into her ears all night.’

  Gabe frowned. ‘Mags, did Susannah offer you anything to eat or drink? Something that she brought into the house with her?’

  ‘What? Do you think that I’m drunk? Or on drugs? You want to know what’s what? I’ll tell you, and it’s all because of that sister of yours!’

  ‘Cheryl?’

  ‘No, your other one,’ I said. Gabe doesn’t have another sister, and I was being sarcastic. However, it could have been a reasonable question, because nothing surprises me about the Rosen family anymore.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Gabe said.

  ‘Cheryl convinced us that our dear, sweet daughter and her best friend could handle a few days unchaperoned in the Middle Apple.’

  ‘The Middle Apple? What the heck does that mean?’

  ‘Well, Pittsburgh isn’t New York, is it? So it can’t be the Big Apple, and it’s certainly not Bedford, which is more cherry size than the smallest of apples. Not that it will do a lick of good at this point to say, but I was right: they did need supervision.’

  Now Gabe was on his feet. ‘Why? What happened to our little girl?’

  ‘Our little girl just ran off to Puerto Rico with a man named Alexander who will despoil her before the village cocks crow tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Come again?’

  So I repeated what Alison had told me – give or take a few words. Well, maybe I gave more than I took, as I am wont to embellish stories in order to drive across salient points. To his credit, Gabe was properly outraged, but alas, clearly not entirely rational.

  ‘Which airlines?’ he yelled over his shoulder, as he raced to put on a pair of pants. ‘And babe, grab my wallet, would you? Also, let me take your car; I don’t have enough petrol to make it to the airport.’

  ‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘Freeze! It’s too late.’

  My Dearly Beloved had already thrust one well-muscled calf into a trouser leg before my words registered with him.

  ‘But hon,’ he protested, ‘it’s never too late.’

  ‘She was boarding the plane when she hung up. On a good day you wouldn’t be able to make it to her gate in less than two hours. She’ll be halfway to San Juan in that time.’

  Then the most surprising thing happened. My middle-aged, retired heart surgeon of a husband started bawling like a baby. He yanked his leg out of his trousers and, blinded by his tears, headed for me with open arms. I am not the most sentimental creature that the Dear Lord ever created, and I still blamed Gabe and his sister for Alison’s predicament, but I am not altogether heartless. (Although your average stethoscope does have trouble locating my shrivelled ticker, eventually a good physician can find it.) That said, I found myself opening my arms as well, and eventually tear-blinded Gabe crashed into me and we tumbled back onto the bed. As for what happened next, it’s nobody’s business. Suffice it to say, that if I had read about a similar scene in one of Agnes Miller’s romance novels, I would have laughed out loud before throwing the book across the room. How could so much external stress, and clashing approaches to parenting, ignite such intense passion? That was, by the way, a rhetorical question.

  THIRTEEN

  On my wedding day Cousin Freni had told me what sex was all about. ‘About three minutes,’ she’d said. Freni is Amish, and Mama, who had already passed, was Mennonite, but their last-minute sex education sessions with me would have been virtually the same. ‘The man will say, “brace yourself,” Freni had continued. ‘Then you must close your eyes and try to think happy thoughts. Maybe plan what you will cook him for supper.’

  What Freni didn’t tell me was that by a certain age the three-minute rule no longer applied, and that eventually an entire week’s worth of supper menus could be planned during – well, let us call it ‘the happy moments’. Suffice it to say, I have also memorized every hairline fracture in the plaster ceiling of our old farmhouse inn. Thus it was that Gabe and I were more than a wee bit late in leaving the PennDutch Inn for the festival. By then, even the Hancocks and Cousin Miriam had departed, presumably taking Susannah with them, as she couldn’t be found either. As for Rebecca, she’d been given the morning off to attend as well.

  Given our late start I was quite surprised that my phone hadn’t been ringing constantly since the time I’d promised my team that I’d be there. I was even more surprised to discover that my phone had been turned off. But I was absolutely devastated to learn that my husband and I had gotten so much into the groove of things that he had been able to reach over and silence my phone during a moment of marital bliss. I felt used and betrayed.

  ‘Babe, come on,’ Gabe said when I complained. ‘You needed cheering up, and that’s always done the trick before.’

  We were getting into his car then, and I slammed the door so hard that it undoubtedly rattled some of his fillings. I know that it did mine, as well as gave me a headache. And if he hadn’t immediately started backing out of the driveway, I would have opened the door and slammed it again.

  ‘Hey,’ he said through clenched teeth, ‘getting your knickers in a knot won’t get us there any sooner.’ Then perhaps realizing that my bloomers were indeed beginning to bunch he shifted tactics. ‘You know, hon, what you’ve managed to achieve with this festival in just a few years is just astounding. I realize that the impetus was celebrating the fact that a goat saved our son’s life, but now it’s become much more than that. It brings the entire town together in a fun, silly way. Also, it’s a perfect solution for those children who aren’t allowed to celebrate Halloween.’

  I smiled. ‘You’re forgiven.’

  Gabe was right. The Fourth Annual Billy Goat Gruff Festival was much more than just about herbivores with
disturbingly humanoid eyes. For instance, there was an Amish fresh market along Main Street in the morning where, in addition to produce, one could buy homemade cheeses and baked goods of many descriptions. There were numerous demonstrations of horses being shod. These were not contrived; they were Amish horses that really needed new shoes. There were buggy rides offered by enterprising Amish teenagers. In addition, there were at least fifty yard sales scattered throughout the village, some of them multi-family sales, and many of them featuring an antique piece or two.

  The first year only villagers attended. The following year brought perhaps fifty outsiders to gawk at our quirky goings-on. The third year, we had hundreds of tourists show up, some from as far away as Pittsburgh. This year, we were prepared. Both Mennonite churches, the Baptist church, the Methodist church and the Presbyterian church had all agreed to lend us their parking lots for the occasion. The only church not cooperating used to be out by the turnpike and was known as the church with thirty-two words in its name. That was back when the Sausage Barn was still in operation. This church has since relocated within the village proper, and has been renamed The Only True, Two Testament Believing, Full-Faith Fellowship Practicing, Final Revelation Dispensing, Exclusive Righteous Interpretation of Scriptures, End Times Celebratory, Passport to Heaven Issuing, Welcoming Those Who Would Walk the Straight and Narrow Path that Leads to Salvation, and Shunning Those Who Meander Along the Broad Road that Leads to Damnation, Church of the One Holy God Who Lives Forever and Ever, Glory Hallelujah, Amen. The pastor of the renamed church, Reverend Gerald Splitfrock, said that his congregation would have nothing to do with a festival that featured a goat. They were satanic, he said. After all, when Jesus spoke of separating the sheep from the goats, it was the sheep who represented the redeemed, and the goats that were the condemned. We were to expect protesters from his church, Reverend Splitfrock said. And maybe ‘something more’.