Mean and Shellfish Read online

  ‘You’re not my type, dear,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid that I’ve recently become virulently anti-Antipodean.’

  Miriam stared at me, obviously without a shred of comprehension. At last she turned to her dear Cousin Gabe for a translation.

  ‘It means that she hates Aussies,’ he said. ‘But she was only joking; two of our best friends are from Melbourne.’

  At that Miriam cackled so hard that poor Fi-Fi, who still hadn’t been walked, howled pitifully. Woe was me, because my pebble-sized heart was beginning to soften.

  ‘You are quite a character,’ she said when she could control herself. ‘I rather think I like you. Yes, I’m sure of it. You and I are going to get along famously.’

  ‘Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, dear,’ I said. ‘You may stay here on two conditions: the first is that you pay a one-time, non-refundable fee of five hundred dollars for your pet to stay with you in your room. This fee does not include any charges for whatever damages your dog might cause. The second condition is that you understand and sign a waiver that states that although you may sleep in my bed, that mutt of yours will not. I’ll be moving our son’s old crib into the room and placing it next to your side of the bed. It has a pee-pee proof mattress on it, and since we won’t be having any more children, that demi-dingo of yours can chew on its wooden slats all it wants.’

  Miriam clapped her hands happily. ‘You’re a fair dinkum mate.’

  ‘Back at you, toots,’ I said. Of course I didn’t have a clue to what she’d just said.

  ‘She said that you’re a true friend,’ Gabe said, who can read my mind – just not when I need him to.

  Hypocrite that I am, I flashed Miriam a wan smile. ‘Wonderful,’ I said. ‘Now I think I’ll make like a bee and buzz off. It’s time to wake my little one and feed him breakfast.’

  ‘But you have to walk her dog,’ Gabe said.

  ‘No, you do,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me, dear.’

  Gabe grabbed my hand and pulled me aside. ‘Mags,’ he hissed, ‘have you no mercy? Don’t you see that she needs help getting into her wheelchair?’ Incidentally, one can only hiss when saying a word that includes the letter ‘S’.

  ‘No, darling, she doesn’t need help. Miriam isn’t handicapped – she is very handicapable. She has one very good leg, one prosthetic leg, and two very strong arms.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because she has to have functioning legs under her lap robe in order to drive, and she drove all the way here from Pittsburgh International Airport. This van isn’t equipped with handicap controls. Anyway, you can bet that Miriam has strong arms, and a good grip as well, because she would have needed them to steer around all the potholes and deer carcases on the turnpike.’

  ‘Good point,’ Gabe conceded. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ I whispered.

  ‘Are you two lovebirds done plotting my demise?’ Miriam called in a voice that managed to be both plaintive and playful at the same time.

  ‘Ages ago,’ I said brightly as we returned to where she sat, still inside the car. ‘We settled that before you came. We’re going to bore you to death, and then dip you in milk chocolate, roll you in chopped peanuts, and sell you at our Billy Goat Gruff Festival this weekend.’

  ‘Excellent! What a way to go – except for the actual demise part.’

  ‘Miriam,’ I said, ‘do you need some assistance getting into your chair? I’d be happy to put you in it.’

  ‘You, Magdalena?’

  ‘Of course me, dear. I am, after all, a farm girl, born and bred. I’ve been slinging bales of hay up into the loft since I was knee high to a grasshopper.’

  ‘Crikey! If you aren’t just about the most amazing woman I’ve met in a long time. Bright, beautiful, and as strong as a wallaby on steroids. You’re everything a girl could want.’

  ‘Feeling wanted can be a powerful aphrodisiac,’ I said, ‘but you can stop flirting with me, Cousin Miriam. There isn’t a snowball’s chance in the Devil’s abode that you could lead me to commit adultery with you.’

  ‘Mags,’ Gabe said sternly, ‘how could you even think such a thing?’

  Miriam had the audacity to pull a hurt face. ‘Am I that hideous? Is it my eye patch?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, your eye patch is quite clever. You’re just too short for my taste.’

  ‘Mags!’ Gabe chided, ‘That’s beneath you.’

  ‘Do you mean because I’m in a wheelchair?’ Miriam said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m just not attracted to someone who is under five feet eight. That’s my bottom line. Six feet would be better.’

  ‘But I’m five eight!’ Miriam cried. ‘At least I was – before that old salty got me leg.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Mags!’ Gabe said.

  ‘I am five feet, nine inches tall,’ Miriam said. As she spoke, she managed to slip out from beneath the steering wheel and was presumably standing, and straight as a soldier at attention. However, since she had also managed to extract the lap robe with her and wrap it securely around her waist in the twinkly of an eye, it was impossible to discern which leg was flesh and bone, and which was prosthetic. Or for that matter, how long her legs were. As far as I could tell, Miriam might only have been five feet tall and wearing ten-inch platform shoes.

  ‘You see,’ Gabe said triumphantly.

  I’m quite sure that a clever retort was about to issue forth from my thin, withered lips, when the shortest male to ever have stolen my heart ran up from behind and threw his arms around my waist.

  FOUR

  ‘Mommy, Mommy,’ my five-year-old cried. ‘Auntie Freni said to tell you that she is beside huhself and that Mona is cwhying.’

  For the record, my son, like many American children his age, still cannot pronounce his ‘R’s, and unlike my husband, I refuse to insist that he does. After all, even most Brits can’t pronounce their ‘R’s when they appear at the end of a word.

  ‘Well, looks like I’m being summoned,’ I said.

  ‘Wait,’ Gabe ordered. ‘You can’t leave; you still haven’t walked Cousin Miriam’s dog.’

  My dear, sweet son, fruit of my once barren womb, released my thickening waist. ‘This lady has a doggie? Where?’

  ‘Come on, Little Jacob,’ I said. ‘Off we go. Back into the house, dear.’

  ‘Oh, what a handsome little devil you are,’ cooed Miriam. ‘The spitting image of your daddy when he was your age, you are. I bet you’ve got the sheilas chasing you even now.’

  Little Jacob stood rooted to the spot. ‘I don’t got no cheetahs chasing me,’ he said hotly, ‘’cause they would have catched me alweddy. They’ah the fastest animals on the eawth. Don’t ya know anything, lady?’ (Note to my gentle weaduhs. Since it is too hahd to twanslitewate the speech of vewy young Amehwicans, I shall cease forthwith.)

  ‘That’s my boy,’ Gabe said proudly. ‘He’s a verifiable genius. Still too young to start first grade in public school, but he’s already reading at tenth-grade level.’

  ‘Good on ya, mate,’ Miriam said, and held out her arms. ‘Come give your Cousin Miriam a welcome kiss.’

  My son shook his head vigorously. ‘No. You’re a strange lady and I don’t like you.’

  ‘Little Jacob!’ Gabe said. ‘Come here and apologize now.’

  ‘No.’ Little Jacob crossed his arms defiantly.

  Gabe glared at me, not at our son. ‘I said, “Come here”.’

  My son adores his father. Likewise, Gabe adores and dotes on his son. That’s all well and good. Unfortunately Little Jacob is keenly aware that the one who wears the pants in our family has never actually slipped into a pair of trousers. When the roles of ‘good cop, bad cop’ are required, it is Yours Truly who is stuck with being the ‘bad cop’. Always. That is to say, it is invariably left up to me to discipline our son. Gabe’s admonishments mean almost nothing to Little Jacob.

/>   ‘Magdalena,’ Gabe said, his face turning red, ‘make your son obey.’

  ‘Go back in the house at once, Little Jacob, and tell Aunt Freni that I’m coming,’ I said, and off he ran.

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘are you satisfied?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ my dear husband growled, ‘and you know it!’

  ‘It’s not? Oh, crikey, you know how rattled I can get when surprises are sprung on me. Speaking of which, poor Freni will be bouncing off the walls by now, having heard that she has to cook for your Aunt Miriam as well.’

  ‘I’m not his aunt,’ Miriam snapped. ‘I’m his first cousin. His mother is my aunt.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said coyly. ‘I’m sure that was already established, but I forgot and was judging by your appearance and, as I’m sure that you must be aware, having lived such a long life, appearances can be deceiving. It’s just that you and his mother could be twins.’

  Know when to walk away, and know when to run, n’est-ce pas? Actually, I tried to stride away nonchalantly, like I imagined a self-satisfied Parisian might do if she’d just delivered a so-called ‘zinger’, but given my gangly physique, it was more of a pitiful lope. As scripture points out, our sins will always catch up with us.

  Freni, who has been the primary cook here at The PennDutch Inn since its inception twenty-five years ago, is a genuine Amish woman. In addition to being my late mother’s best friend, she was closely related to both of my adoptive parents, as well as my birth parents. That’s because both sets of parents were Mennonites of Swiss Amish ancestry, a group that had inbred for centuries. Is it any wonder that I lope when I mean to stride? At any rate, my dear octogenarian cook and cousin is stout, lacks all semblance of a neck, and wears spectacles so thick that one could start a roaring fire with them given some kindling and a few seconds of sunshine. Although she won’t admit it, Freni has reached the point where she can’t always do everything by herself, so now we have Becca as well.

  Thirty-one-year-old Becca’s full name is Rebecca, but Little Jacob, who as I said has trouble with his R’s, has always called her Becca. Rebecca, whose parents are both Mennonites, is also related to me. Her father is a Professor of English Literature at Penn State, and her mother is a homemaker. I have reviewed Rebecca’s genealogical chart, and if I wasn’t college educated myself, I could be tempted to conclude that the young woman is the daughter that I had ‘unawares’.

  Granted, we don’t look exactly alike, but not every woman resembles her mother. To put it kindly, Rebecca resembles a brown-eyed mule wearing a straw hat, minus the hat. In addition, she is knock-kneed, and walks with a most unusual gait. There, I won’t say another negative thing about the way she looks, except that she has exceptionally large teeth. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that much, because who am I to talk?

  Where we differ the most is in our personalities. Rebecca is as sweet as maple syrup, but as slow as molasses outdoors on a January day. And I don’t mean mentally slow, either. Rebecca makes a tortoise seem like an Olympic sprinter. In the spirit of Christian charity, I shan’t dig much further into her myriad personality faults other than to say that as a waitress, she is utterly incompetent. But again, she is as sweet as maple syrup.

  One might reasonably ask why it is that I should employ Rebecca. The answer is simple: I have to put my money where my big mouth is. You see, my people are pacifists. We do not believe in taking human lives. We refuse to go to war, we are against the death penalty, and yes, we believe that abortion is taking a human life, so we are against that too. (Gabe, by the way, is pro-choice, but he is still against the death penalty.)

  At any rate, since I believe that the mother should keep the baby until it is born (although I do hold out for exceptions), I believe that it is my responsibility to see that the child is provided for afterwards. Rebecca was single, working at a minimum pay job, and sharing an apartment with three other women when she became pregnant. At that point she’d been estranged from her parents for a dozen years over something which I will not share, simply because I am not one to gossip. Quite possibly it might have involved a few drugs, petty theft, and more than a wee bit of sex, but again, my lips are sealed. Now, where was I going with this?

  Oh yes, one Sunday morning the wretched woman, heartbroken and feeling hopeless, sat next to me in church. It was the first time that Rebecca had been in the Lord’s house since heading off to college at the age of eighteen. Even if she hadn’t been nine months pregnant, I wouldn’t have recognized her. Long story short, I invited the weeping woman back to eat Sunday dinner with us. I gave her a roof until the baby was born, found her a roof afterwards, and then employed her at a decent salary. After all that Rebecca decided to give her baby up for adoption.

  One need not worry that I am a saint; I have more detractors than there are ears of corn in a dairyman’s silo. The important thing is that my family loves me, and that my young son adores Rebecca. The fact that both my elderly kinswoman/cook and my hunk of a husband find the young woman in question more irritating than a pebble in one’s shoe – well, I keep praying that the Good Lord will change their hearts.

  When I returned to the lobby of the inn I found Delphia Hancock fit to be tied. She was swivelling and spinning so aggressively in the office chair behind the check-in counter that the swirling black cloud above her head had a difficult time keeping up. Her husband Tiny, however, was sitting calmly on the counter with one boot and sock on the floor. It took me a minute to wrap my mind around the fact that he was cleaning his toenails with one of my paper clips.

  ‘Howdy again, ma’am,’ he drawled.

  ‘Don’t you be all sweet to her,’ snapped Delphia, swivelling to a stop so fast that the storm cloud above her head collapsed in on itself and disappeared. The little woman hopped off my chair and advanced on me like a bantam rooster would on another cock encroaching on his harem. Instead of pecking me with a beak, she repeatedly jabbed the air with a miniature finger. The claw-like nails on said digit came so close to my dress that at one point a talon caught a small snag on my bodice and created a noticeably larger one.

  ‘The service here is deplorable,’ she raged. ‘What did you expect us to do while you held that gabfest out there with that creature?’

  I was not amused. ‘First of all, you will not speak disrespectfully about a person who is disabled. And secondly, you will pay for this,’ I said while trying to smooth out the snag.

  ‘So now you’re threatening me?’ Delphia snarled. ‘You lay a hand on me and I’ll have you arrested for assault.’

  ‘Down girl,’ Tiny said. ‘I think Miss Yoder was referring to her dress.’

  ‘What dress?’ Delphia said. ‘That’s a cheap, knock-off costume. I’ve seen better ones at party supply stores.’

  ‘My land o’Goshen,’ I said. ‘This is the genuine article. I bought it from my Aunt Irma Rhody’s estate, and she was a pious Amish woman, who was wearing this very same dress the day that she died. It was a very clean death, mind you; Irma drowned in the mill pond standing on her head.’

  ‘She’s pulling your leg,’ Tiny said with a deep-throated chuckle.

  ‘It isn’t funny,’ Delphia said to her husband. She turned abruptly to me. ‘For your information, Miss Yoder, it wasn’t Aunt Rhody who drowned in the song, it was the old grey goose. I suggest that in future, if you plan to mock your guests, at least go to the trouble of getting the lyrics right.’

  ‘Mock, smock,’ I said, quite justifiably annoyed. ‘I was merely trying to inject a little levity into what was rapidly becoming a somewhat heated discourse.’

  ‘That was your doing,’ she said. ‘Now, what I want to know is where’s your bellhop? Because if you think we’re going to carry our own luggage around this dump, you’ve got another think coming.’

  ‘Me thinks not, dear,’ I said. ‘I do know that you read your contract thoroughly because you initialled and signed all the right places. At any rate, part of the charm of this establishment is that you get to pay t
hrough the nose for the privilege of schlepping your own bags up my impossibly steep stairs, while viewing it as a cultural experience. For an extra one hundred dollars a day you also get the additional privilege of cleaning your own room. Mr and Mrs Morris, who have yet to arrive, have already claimed the honour of mucking out the barn, for a mere two hundred dollars a day. However, my cook and her husband, who are a genuine Amish couple, have graciously offered to allow my guests to muck out their outhouse for the paltry sum of five hundred dollars.’

  ‘Yippee,’ said Tiny, ‘now this is what I call a yee-haw vacation. Sign us up for mucking out the poop shed. Say, what kind of cattle ya got?’

  ‘I have two Jersey cows. The most beautiful girls you’ve ever seen – except for my daughter, of course.’

  Tiny laughed. ‘Pardon me, ma’am, but them is sissy cows.’

  ‘They most certainly are not!’ Then the Devil got into me and urged me to be snarky. ‘I suppose that you ride bareback on a wild mustang whilst rounding up your long-horn steers?’

  Delphia snorted and stomped a foot the size of an ear of ‘baby’ corn. ‘Will you two bovine-brained blowhards just shut up already, so that a gal can hear herself think?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a new voice. It belonged to Rebecca. Who knew how long she’d been standing in the doorway to the dining room and eavesdropping? The woman certainly had a talent for it.

  ‘Rebecca, dear,’ I said patiently, ‘not now. Can’t you see that I’m busy?’

  ‘But ma’am, that man is here.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘You know, that man.’

  ‘I have no idea to whom it is that you refer. Has Little Jacob got his breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘That’s all then.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said placidly.

  I frowned disapprovingly, hoping that this alone would send her scurrying back to the kitchen. Ha! Silly me. One of the gal’s less endearing characteristics is that she is more stubborn than a team of mules. She didn’t move a muscle; except for her vaguely human features, she might have been a mule carved out of stone.