As the World Churns (26 page)

    I couldn’t help but gape as my mind was hurled back into the 1970s. The Prendergast home was a shrine to the days of bell bottoms and a bloated Elvis. Velvet paintings of the King of Rock, toward the end of his reign, adorned those walls not dedicated to velvet portraits of the King of Kings. Pots of half-dead pathos, cradled in macramé slings, hung from the ceiling at meaningless intervals. Although the coffee table was merely a laminated slice of redwood held above the shag carpet by cypress knees, it made quite a statement.

    “Well?” she demanded again. “Do you like it?”

    I flashed
her a
practiced smile. “It’s definitely something.”

    “I did it all myself, you know; I don’t believe in decorators.”

    “I hear you, sister. Decorators, shmecorators, I always say. They’d just tell you that you were caught in a time warp. Imagine anyone not liking velvet art? They’re just the kind of people who wouldn’t appreciate Captain and Tennille either.”

    
“ ‘Muskrat
Love’ is my favorite song! Would you like to hear it?”

    “I’d sooner hang from one of your macramé pot holders,” I mumbled.

    “What did you say?”

    As you can see, I was forced to lie. I said, “Tell me that interesting tidbit about my husband that you promised.”

    She pointed to a crushed velvet sofa, the color of overripe concord grapes. “Sit.”

    I did as bidden.

    “First,” she hissed, “I want an apology.”

    “Okay, I confess. I lied. But muskrats are nothing more than destructive rodents that ruin the banks of ponds and streams, and besides, they stink-that’s why they call them
musk
rats. The rat part isn’t very romantic either. Muskrat love, indeed.”

    She looked stunned. “Huh?”

    “Call the county agricultural agent if you don’t believe me.”

    “Magdalena, are you daft? Are your braids pulled too tight? None of what you just said has anything to do with the apology that I want.”

    “Oh,
that
! Yes, it really was me who told our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Wilson, that your lunch sack smelled remarkably like her husband’s breath, but at the time I didn’t know anything about alcohol, so you see, I didn’t try to get you in trouble on purpose.”

    
“Not that either, you idiot-although, I did become rather popular for a while.
Even Brian Melke asked me out. But the apology I want is for the twelve bucks I donated to your stupid Holstein competition. You said it would put Hernia on the map. Did you know that a reporter from the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
was there?”

    “He made it after all?
Terrific.”

    “Ha. You won’t say that tomorrow when you read his article. Thanks to you, he thinks we’re a bunch of losers. He said at first that he thought your husband’s performance was a joke. Then, when he realized it was for real, it really ticked him off, having come all this way just to waste his time.
Let alone gas.
Do you know what he said he was going to title his article?”

    
“Nope.”

    
“ ‘Hernia
: Even Surgery Couldn’t Save This Dump.’ He said it was going to go out on AP wires everywhere.”

    
“No way!”

    “You better believe it. We’re going to be the laughingstock of the country.”

    “I suppose one must gather one’s accolades whatever they may be.”

    “You’re crazy, Magdalena. Now apologize.”

    “Share your tidbit first.”

    “Like heck.”

    “I bet it’s really juicy.” I made slurping noises. It was disgusting and childish of me, and I should be thoroughly ashamed. No Mennonite woman in her right mind would even think of doing such a thing; but since I was ipso facto nutso, it was totally in keeping with my character.

    What mattered is that my comment primed Lyudmila’s pump-so to speak. She let her gaze wander around the room, as if making eye contact with others who had convened to hear her spiel.

    “He kept glancing at his watch, and then at one of the contes-tants-well, not one of the cows, but you
know
what I mean.”

    
“
Which
contestant?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “But you just said-”

    
“Really,
Magdalena
, use that oversized head of yours.
They were all standing in a bunch, in a roped-off area. I guess that was so they wouldn’t interfere with the judging. Anyway, there must have been at least fifty of them. How could I tell which one he was flirting with? But I guess you can’t blame him, can you? I mean, a handsome doctor married to an older woman; it would be only natural for him to have second thoughts.”

    
“Sixty-two.”

    “Yet we were in the same grade! You must have flunked more years than I thought.”

    
“Sixty-two
contestants
, dear.
And not that it’s any of your business, but I’m forty-eight and holding, which, I believe, makes me a year younger than you. My husband, by the way, is six weeks older than I.”

    “Harrumph.”

    “If you couldn’t tell which woman he was flirting with, how do you even know it was a woman?”

    “I smelled her perfume.”

    “What? You’re not making sense, dear-even for you.”

    “For your information, Miss Smarty-Pants, I made a point of saying hello to him, just before he started acting crazy. After all, if he decides to divorce you, there’s no point in letting all that manly goodness go to waste.”

    “So
you’re
that woman?”

    “Honestly, Magdalena, I don’t know what possessed me to try to copy off your history exam. I smelled the other woman on him. That’s how I knew.”

    I prayed for a Christian tongue while I thought this over. Gabe is fastidious about his
grooming,
and showers every morning. Therefore, it certainly wasn’t me she’d smelled. And since I trust the Babester with my life, I trust his fidelity as well.

    “All the cows are women. It was probably just Eau de Holstein you got a whiff of. It’s supposed to be all the rage down on the farm.”

    “I know what cows smell like, Magdalena. This was Shalimar.”

    “Is she a friend of Dr. Rashid?
Because any friend of Faya’s is a friend of mine.”

    “Shalimar is the name of a perfume, you ignoramus.”

    “No need to be rude, dear.” Since she hadn’t asked me to sit, I didn’t have to haul my patooty out of a chair before making a beeline for the door. Before turning the knob, I turned and looked her right in her bloodshot eyes, but when I opened my mouth to spit out a pithy zinger, none was forthcoming.
Zilch.
Nothing.
Nada.
“Oh Lord,” I moaned, “
why
did you have to answer my prayers now?”

    Lyudmila Prendergast beamed happily. “The rumors are true, Magdalena; not only have you lost your mind, but you’ve completely lost your edge.”

    
Words more hurtful than that have seldom been spoken to me.
One must understand, then, why my face might have been damp when I returned to my car.

    “So now this one cries,” my mother-in-law said, as if I wasn’t even present.

    Agnes, who’d been forced to sit in the backseat, set her considerable bulk into motion by leaning forward and patting the back of my shoulder. Although she meant well, I felt as if I were a piece of origami, and she was-well, King Kong. Not that I watch films about giant apes, mind you, since such things can’t possibly exist. After all, Noah took at least a pair of every sort of creature into the ark, and from the movie posters I’ve seen of this ape, just one of its kind would have sunk that wooden tub.

    As long as I’m on that subject-the ark, that is-I may as well let it all hang out, as my sister, Susannah, used to say. So here goes: Noah’s boat was big, but was it large enough to accommodate the five million species of insects that still exist in the world today? How about the ten thousand different kinds of birds? And even though there are only four thousand different mammal species, a lot of them are quite large.

    For instance, there are two kinds of elephants, the African and the Indian. It simply does not suffice to say that Noah took just one species of elephant into the ark, and that the other species evolved from it
after
the flood, since we know that evolution doesn’t exist. Besides, the two elephant species are so different that they belong to different genera, and with one notable exception in 1978, cannot interbreed. Now throw in mastodons (said to be the ancestors of elephants) and mammoths, of which there are numerous skeletons to be seen in museums, add one full-grown brontosaurus, and the ark would have sunk.

    I know about these things-and I am ashamed to say it-be-cause I check books out of the Bedford County Library that would not be approved of by my fellow church elders. I can’t seem to help it. If I am to sign off on a particular way of thinking, I need to at least familiarize myself with the other side’s point of view.
This makes me a fence-sitter on many issues, and believe
you me, the tops of most fences are not comfy places to sit-especially if they’re picket fences.

    One might legitimately ask why I just don’t pick a side, jump off, and get on with my life. The answer is: I’m a coward. I find it easier to agonize amongst the familiar symbols and rhythms of everyday life in Hernia, than to have to make a choice. Whether I stayed in the conservative Mennonite vein or left, I’d be giving up an important part of myself. Paradoxically, as long as I remain perched atop an eight-foot fence, I remain a whole woman.

    Is it any wonder, then, why my poor brain is so befuddled that at times I seem a mite disconnected? But as for the tears that streaked my face-well, there was no good explanation. I’d been on the verge of crying for the last two weeks. So far, Freni had been the only one to notice it. Now, when I arrived at the inn accompanied by Mutt and Jeff, she found a way to discreetly dry my face with a corner of her apron.

    “There was a telephone call for you,” she whispered. “They said you should call back.”

    
“Who?”

    “Barbara Westheimer.”

    “Oops, did our dear, sweet Alison get in trouble?”

    “I did not ask; the call was for you.”

    The master suite is downstairs, behind the parlor. To get to it, I had to go through the dining room. Even so, I was on my private landline in a matter of seconds. Just how Freni prevented the twin shadows from following remains a mystery, but I like to think that she did her famous rendition of a turkey on Thanksgiving Wednesday. Whatever it was, I finally had a moment of privacy.