“Now, dear,” I began, “you do realize that Susannah—aka Mother Dispirited—is wearing a cross around her neck. I know, it’s just a soap cross, and if she showers with it on, it won’t be long before it’s not a cross at all. But my point is that this mother and sisters gig is a Christian, not a Jewish, thing.”
“Oy gevalt!”
Gabe said suddenly and clapped both hands to his head. “Ma, you didn’t convert, did you?”
At that Ida tugged on a cheap chain that disappeared down the neckline of her habit and retrieved a startlingly large wooden star of David. “Dis vas supposed to be on de outside, ya? But I dress in a hurry.”
“So you’re still Jewish?” I said.
“Ya, und I see dat you are still meshugah. Of course I didn’t convert. De Sisters of Apathy dun’t care about your religion; all dey care about is dat you shouldn’t care anymore. Give up, und give in. Dat is our message. Vee vill all lose in de end, so vhy vorry?”
“But, Ma, that’s fatalistic. That’s just giving up. And what is it that makes your life so darn hard that you feel like this?”
“
Vhat
you say? Look around you, Gabeleh. Vhere are vee? In de shticks, dat’s vhere. Und I am living alone in a big house all de vay across de road. Vhat kind of life is dis, I ask you?”
“What kind of life do you want, Ma?”
“She wants to be living with you in New York City,” I said. “She wants to play mahjong every afternoon and talk about her son the doctor. Oh yes, and she’d like to keep Little Jacob with her and leave me behind.”
Sister Disaster wasn’t so apathetic that she could restrain from punching my ribs with her elbow. “I vould only play mahjong five days a veek!”
“Sorry, hon,” Gabe said, reaching around her to pat my back. “I thought that in time she’d learn to love you as much as I do.”
“Sometimes I think she does,” I said.
The Babester didn’t have the courtesy to respond to that. “Ma, why do you call yourself Sister Disaster? That’s such an awful name.”
“Because I am a disaster, yah? First, I vas unable to make you happy in New York. If I had been, vee vouldn’t be here. Dat is a fact. Und now, I am not able to fit into dis litle family dat you have made.”
“Ma, that’s simply not true; you fit in just fine. Alison utterly adores you. Even Freni has learned to tolerate you.”
“Ya? But vhat about dis von?” The cubically shaped pseudo-nun jabbed a thumb in my direction.
“Hon,” Gabe said, turning to me, “tell Ma that you love her too.”
Even though I heard the pleading in his voice, and I have been known to stretch the truth upon occasion (they were all justified occasions, I assure you), I could not bring myself to flat-out lie this time. And yes, I’m well aware that in Matthew 5:44 Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. I accept that as gospel, but at the same time, may I respectfully submit that the Lord did not have a mother-in-law? There, that’s all I have to say on the subject.
“I’m sure you love her very much, dear,” I said sweetly.
“Dere, you see?”
“Hon,” Gabe said in his most pleading of tones, “you’ve got to help me out here.”
“I love you,” I said. Okay, perhaps I mumbled the words. At any rate, what I didn’t add is that I meant those words in the spiritual, God-wants-me-to-do-it sense, not in the warm, fuzzy sort of way.
“
See
, Ma?”
Ida shook her head so vigorously that I suffered a wimple burn on my left arm. “Ha! She dun’t mean it. Anyvay, it is too litle, too late. I have decided dat de Sisters of Perpetual Apathy is de only vay for me now. I must renounce all my emotions. Or else I explode, ya?”
Sometimes the Devil, who is always standing just over my left shoulder, and who must have received the wimple burn as well, commandeers my tongue. That’s the only way I can explain what came out of my mouth next.
“Isn’t it curious,” my lips said, “that she was able to pronounce the name of this bogus religious order without the slightest trace of an accent?”
“Mags,” Gabe said sharply, “you’re only making things worse. I’d rather you didn’t say anything at all.”
“You’re telling me to shut up?”
“Your words, not mine.”
“In that case, I’ll hie my heinie out to this bus full of hopeless hinnies and rescue my little one from an imitation Mother in gray gabardine garb—pardon the alliteration.”
It was a bizarre sight to say the least. There truly was a bus full of women dressed in nun’s habits and, judging by the expressions on their faces, they were the most phlegmatic folk I’d seen in a month of Puritan Sundays. They may as well have been carved out of the same soap as their neck ornaments.
Although I don’t watch movies on principle, many years ago, when I was but an errant youth, I did drive all the way into Pittsburgh, where I sneaked into a theater and watched
The Sound of Music
(just so you know, I have long since repented of that sin). The point I am trying to make is that the pseudo-sisters aboard Susannah’s “vehicle” weren’t anything like Julie Andrews. Even the stern nuns, who disapproved of Maria running in the abbey, would have been more fun than this bunch.
I scanned their bland faces, which, for the most part, looked alike to me. Oh, there were a couple of women young enough to be sort of pretty even under these circumstances, and one was an older lady whose mannish features and coarse skin were somewhat unsettling, but on average it was hard to distinguish one woman from another. No doubt the uniforms—I mean the habits—were partly to blame. Devoid of makeup, and with their hair pulled back and hidden behind gray veils, the women of Hernia were proof positive that we were, at our core, a plain people.
After extracting the fruit of my bloomers from his aunt’s loving arms, I sorrowfully bid her good-bye. I even went so far as to hug her, taking care, of course, to keep both my baby and my bosoms from touching her surplice.
“Is the rat still in there?” I said.
“His name is Shnookums, Mags, and he has a good-bye present for you.”
I reared back like a mare with a burr under her saddle. “No thanks, dear.”
“Please, Mags. If not for him, then do it for me. It will mean so much.” Mother Dispirited was no longer speaking in a monotone, but in her little-girl voice, the one guaranteed to take me back to days when I was her guardian and primary friend.
“All right,” I said.
“Thanks.” Susannah reached under her surplice and, from the surplus room not occupied by Shnookums, removed a small framed picture.
“This is for you to remember us by.”
I stared at a snapshot that had been taken at a Christmas party. And at my sister’s house at that, even though I hadn’t been invited. Susannah was posed in front of her tree, proudly holding the mangy mongrel, which was decked out as an elf, replete with enormous velvet ears and green boots. In the background were the faces of familiar people—folks who obviously rated higher than I did on the invitation scale.
“What am I on, the B list?”
“Mags, you don’t approve of Christmas parties that don’t stick strictly to the religious theme. I was playing Mrs. Santa Claus, for Pete’s sake.”
“And who was the fat man himself?”
“Our old Sunday school teacher, Mr. Neufenbakker.”
Yup, that was him all right, half hidden by the tree. I’d recognize those splayed feet anywhere.
“You could have at least asked me if I wanted to come,” I said.
“You’ve just validated my new religion, sis,” Susannah said, sounding dangerously excited. “If you were a Sister of Perpetual Apathy, you wouldn’t care if you’d been slighted.”
“So I was
slighted
?”
“Bye, sis, I have to go!” With that, my baby sister, the one whom my parents entrusted me to take care of before they were tragically squished to death beneath a Pennsylvania mountain, climbed into the driver’s seat of an old school bus and drove away with thirty or so of our town’s most pathetic—I mean apathetic—citizens.
As sad as it was to see Susannah drive off with a bus full of nuns, at least none of them were holding babies—or headed for a cliff, for that matter. I knew from experience that my baby sister would eventually tire of this game and come slinking back to Hernia, because despite all her bravado and brazenly worldly ways, she would never be able to shake what was at her core: inbred Mennonite guilt. But there was something sinister about her departure as well. It wasn’t anything in particular; I couldn’t place a well-shaped finger on it. Then again, it felt like a cold stone at the bottom of my stomach, and few of my digits are that long.
Therefore, I was almost grateful when Gabe threw a hissy fit over his mother’s chosen vocation. At first he ranted and raved about the absurdity of a homegrown religion called the Sisters of Perpetual Apathy. Something like that could only happen in a novel, he said. Then, since Susannah couldn’t hear his diatribes, he began to vent at me.
“It
is
your fault,” he said. “Ma was right. If you’d been nicer to her, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Little Jacob could sense the angry vibes and began to squirm, so I patted him gently. “Shush,” I whispered to the wee one. I raised my voice only slightly to address Gabe. “I don’t want to fight in front of the b-a-b-y.”
“The
baby
? You have to spell it? He doesn’t understand what we’re saying!”
“I think he does.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m a doctor, hon. I know these things.”
“And I’m a mother;
that
trumps a doctor.” I said it softly, but my son could still feel the tension; he began to whimper.
“He’s saying he doesn’t agree with you.”
I rubbed my baby’s back as I twisted my torso from side to side. The fact that I said nothing at that point was the absolute most annoying thing I could have done to Gabe.
“Okay, be that way,” he said after several minutes had passed and Little Jacob was almost asleep. “But you know what? I’m not putting up with this
Huafa mischt
any longer.”
Huafa mischt?
You see what happens when you teach your Jewish husband the Amish word for horse manure?
Oy veys meer
, but one can rue the day that one strives to be linguistically inclusive. Better we should all stew in the
cholent
of our own upbringing, if you ask me.
“So what are you threatening this time?” Perhaps I was egging him on just a wee bit, but there is a lot more babe (as in
baby
) in the Babester than I had ever imagined back in the days when my reproductive clock was ticking louder than Freni’s windup oven timer.
Gabe ran perfectly manicured fingers through a head of still dark, thick hair. “No threats, just facts. I’m moving back across the road to my own farm.”
“Your
own
farm? Don’t we own everything together?”
“Apparently not. You seem to think our son is exclusively yours.”
“He’s not a possession, for goodness’ sake. All I was saying is that I think it’s harmful—”
“Tell that to my back,” Gabe said, and stalked off.
“Well
that’s
really mature,” I shouted after him.
24
“Ach!” Freni said, her dark eyes widening behind her bottle-thick lenses. “So now the divorce, yah?”
“Divorce?”
“For the English the rate is fifty percent, I think.”
“But I’m not just any old English,” I protested. “I’m a Mennonite whose ancestors were Amish for hundreds of years.”
“Yah, but Gabe is English, and he is fifty percent of your marriage.” She paused in her dough kneading and inched closer so that her flour-speckled bosoms were uncomfortably close to mine. Then she twisted what little neck she had upward and trained those beady eyes on mine. “But I think maybe your husband was already married—metamorphically speaking.”
“Uh—I’m not quite sure what you mean, dear.”
“I mean that he is married to his mama, of course. Just not in the physical way.”
“Oh! You meant
metaphorically
!”
“Yah, that is what I said. Magdalena, the Bible says that no man can serve two masters. This is the same for families; a man must choose to put his wife before his mother. That is what God wants.”
“Does this apply to your Jonathan and his wife, Barbara?”
Despite her stubby legs, Freni managed to leap back about a yard. “But that woman is from Iowa! And so tall!”
“Who happens to be a doting wife and a wonderful mother to your three grandchildren. Freni, you might wish that Barbara would go back to her family’s farm, like Gabe did to his farm, but in that case she’d take the triplets with her.”
“Ach! So now I say no more,” Freni said, and went back to punching dough.
If I didn’t believe that the Babester would calm down and see the error of his ways by suppertime, I would have followed him across the road to the other farm, the one he calls
his
, and—well, I would have come up with something. But I didn’t need to go that far with my thinking, because a doctor wouldn’t cut off his nose to spite his face. Okay, so maybe a plastic surgeon at a narcissists’ convention might do that so he could reattach it and garner some business, but then his motive wouldn’t be to spite his face. At any rate, you get my point.
Confident that my marriage would be mended by din-din, I buckled Little Jacob into his car seat, and off we headed to the Sausage Barn for my business lunch. I had yet to hear back from the Zug women, but I took them both to be the type to just show up, rather than respond courteously to my invitation. A free lunch is a free lunch, but good manners are a thing of the past.
Certainly the owner and hostess of the Sausage Barn, Wanda Hemphopple, seemed to be expecting me.
“In the future, Magdalena, kindly make reservations for a party of this size.”
“At the moment, it’s me and the baby, or did a Zug woman or two show up?”