Whistlin' Dixie in a Nor'easter (14 page)

“I have been avoiding asking about head cheese and now I know why.” I put my hand up in front of my face to try and block the grotesqueness.

“Head cheese is an old-fashion dish, one of my favorites. It es made from ze organs in a calf’s head.” When he pulled back the lips to expose the teeth, I felt the pit of my stomach start to churn.

Rolf smiled as he demonstrated. “First you clean ze teeth vif a stiff brush. Now—remove ze ears . . . ze brains . . . ze eyes . . . and ze snout . . . and most of ze fat. Soak it all about six hours in cold vater to extract ze blood.”

Watching Rolf maneuver the cow head was the last thing I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to appear rude. I kept watching, even though my belly begged for me to shut my eyes.

“Then, you wash and drain ze meat. Now put in cold vater and add onion and celery, and simmer ze meat until it falls off ze bones. Next, cut up your meat, remembering to reserve ze brains for later, and cover vith your stock. Now you are
rr
eady to season and cook a little more.” He wiped his hands first together and then on his apron. “Then pour into a mold and cover. Be sure and serve it chilled and cut into nice thick slices.” He glanced up at me before remembering one last piece of advice.

“Oh, ze most important part—cover vith a vinaigrette sauce that has ze brains that you saved all mixed in. Vedy easy and vedy good. Helga’s favorite, too. Would you like to try a piece? Have it for lunch, vhy don’t you?”

“I’m not really hungry right now. But thank you anyway.” I slightly lifted the lid to the washer and peered at him over the top. “Now I know how to make head cheese!”
It would take a five-hour make-out session with Paul McCartney or Jon Bon Jovi to even get me to consider a bite of head cheese. Maybe I’ll submit it to the next issue of the
Memphis Junior League Cookbook . . .
Head Cheese from the kitchen of Mrs. Baker Satterfield.

_______

Right after the New Year, Helga insisted it was time to hire an evening babysitter so I could start full time in the restaurant. More and more I was feeling like Helga’s punching bag, dangling from the inn’s dining room ceiling. And it seemed she felt it was her right to take a swing at me any time she passed by. The last thing I wanted to do was obey her but frankly I didn’t need the trouble my resistance to her demands might cause.

Miss Becky at the Elfin Academy had a seventeen-year-old daughter who was a junior in high school and saving for college. The first night Mandy arrived, I was dressed and ready to head into the restaurant. I had been blue all day at the thought of spending most evenings away from my daughters.

But thankfully, Sarah and Issie fell in love with Mandy on the spot. Mandy’s gentle yet playful spirit put me a little more at ease with having to abandon my daughters night after night. She told me her friends referred to her as “the bookworm” but as far as I was concerned, that was a big plus. We knew the Berenstain Bears books by heart and a week never went by that I didn’t buy the girls another book to add to our at-home library.

Back home, I would have been thrilled to have a babysitter like Mandy. Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to have her in Vermont, too, but in Memphis I only needed babysitters when I was going out for fun. Now, I had to desert my daughters six nights per week so I could apprentice under Sergeant Helga Schloygin.

My restaurant duties commenced with instruction by Helga, stationed at a makeshift service bar on top of the washing machine and dryer. Handwriting the dinner checks was my primary responsibility. Observing Helga while she mixed drinks was secondary and not a chore she was ready to pass down. Her cigarettes kept a steady burn in the ashtray right next to my allergic nose and a cloud of smoke always hovered over the light fixtures above. If her cig wasn’t in the ashtray, it was hanging out of the right side of her mouth. She’d puff while vigorously shaking her martinis over to her left side. I’d sneeze and she’d smoke. One night she told me I needed to see an allergy doctor because my sneezing was irritating her. Now that’s what I call
colossal
nerve.

Whenever Helga would allow me to make an appearance in the dining
room, to deliver drinks or show a group of guests to their table, they all had the same question. Who were we and what brought us to Vermont? Even if a customer knew nothing about me, all I had to do was open my mouth. “What brings you to Vermont?” they would ask. “You must have family here.” “Did you own a restaurant down south?” “This must be quite a change for you.”

I would go into great detail about how we wanted to give our children the best life had to offer. I rambled on about my adventurous spirit, and the fact that Baker’s job was allowing him no family flexibility. By the time I left their table, they knew my life history. But my long conversations with the customers used to bug the ever-loving fire out of Helga. That wasn’t her style, so it need not be mine. On numerous occasions she would come up to the table, interrupt me, and tell me I was wanted in the kitchen.

When it got busy, Pierre would run around frantic, afraid of making a mistake. Helga insisted he be the only one to take every order and open every bottle of wine. One night I decided to help him by delivering a bottle of wine to a four-top table. I had completed only two turns of the corkscrew when I felt a hip knock me out of place. Before I knew it, the wine bottle was yanked from my hands and Helga muttered through gritted teeth and a phony smile, “I’ll do it.”

Silence loomed among the four people at the table. I’m sure they were afraid to say a word for fear the Sergeant would reprimand them, too. I managed to give them a weak smile as I sheepishly turned and walked away. That incident made me mad, but the situation with Helga was much too tense to make any waves. Of course, I complained to Baker, but his attitude was circumspect. “Just let it go,” he said. “We need them. Let’s not rock the boat.”

Moving to Willingham, Vermont, was most definitely an avalanche of an adjustment. Topping the list for biggest adaptation was the climate. In thirty-two years of temperate Southern living, the coldest weather I had ever lived through was nineteen degrees. And on those very rare occasions in Memphis, pipes start bursting and animal safety warnings are broadcast.
Everyone keeps their faucets dripping and the department stores sell out of electric blankets. Snow rarely sticks for more than a day or two. When it does snow, the mayor might as well put an Out of Order sign on Memphis. Even the banks close. People hurry out to put chains on their tires and the schools stay closed for days, until the last little bit of snow finally melts.

Snowfall up north, I learned, meant business as usual no matter how much snow happened to stick. Before you even noticed the snow falling, the town plows were on the scene. Their bellowing engines, mixed with the sound of the scraper on the front of the truck, could be heard a mile away. There’s so much snow falling
and
sticking that it takes a monster machine with a tremendous shovel on the front to clear it out of the way. It gets pushed to the side of the road and there it sits until May. When it gets really deep, the town has to send in a backhoe. As the plows keep shoving the snow to the edges of the parking lots, the area for the cars keeps getting smaller and smaller. So it has to be removed and hauled off to a desolate area.

What the town was
not
responsible for was private driveways. In stepped the woodchuck. Every chuck living in the state of Vermont, even Jeb Duggar, attached a monster shovel to the front of his own truck in the winter. It took a total of two and a half minutes to plow our entire parking lot. (I know because I timed it once.) And for that I paid Jeb fifty-five dollars. During the heavy snowfalls, it had to be plowed two or three times in one day. Each chuck fought for his customers. It was not uncommon for one of them to take in over twelve hundred dollars within twenty-four hours. I would like to say “I’m in the wrong business.” But for obvious reasons, I don’t think I have what it takes to be a woman woodchuck.

Once, I went a week and a half without any mail deliveries. When I called the post office to find out why, the postmaster said, “Unless you keep the area in front of your mailbox free of snow, the postman will
not
stop.”

“How was I supposed to know
that
?” I asked the postmaster. They should put out a newcomer’s manual to educate poor unsuspecting souls on life in Vermont.

Ever heard of a roof rake? Me neither. People in Vermont have to
rake their roofs
! They have to clear the snow off before it turns into ice. Roof
rakes come with telescope handles that can extend to thirty feet. They fly out of the hardware stores as soon as October approaches.

Jeb raked our roof. And sometimes he’d let it go too long, and would have to get up on the slate roof wearing these metal spiked shoes and chisel away at the ice. The fear is that the weight of the ice could cause extensive damage to the slate roof. Jeb scared me to death climbing on top of all that ice but it didn’t seem to scare him in the least.

When I first arrived in Vermont, Roberta got a kick out of the contents of my suitcase. Talking about ill prepared for the elements. I had ten or twelve sundresses, four or five bathing suits, several pairs of sandals, silk cocktail dresses, shorts and T-shirts, skirts and blouses. Oh, and blue jeans, I had several pairs of blue jeans. Now, of course I had sweaters, the nice soft cotton kind. Even my nightgowns and socks were made of cotton. But I had never needed a heavy-duty wool sweater, until I moved to Vermont.

“Layer,” people would tell me, but I had no idea what they meant. I
tried
shopping for the right clothes, but I couldn’t seem to find my place in the fashion scene. In the same way that I’m not the Birkenstock type, I’m not the L.L.Bean type, either.

Consequently, I froze.

The little tiny bathroom in our apartment was the warmest room in the house because of the space heater. Each morning when I woke up I would grab my clothes out of the dresser in the hall, and head straight for the bathroom. I’d huddle in front of the space heater while I dressed; a habit that would become an everyday routine.

And I thank God for toe heaters. That extra little gift Baker added to my Christmas present. Once I discovered those, I wore them any time I ventured outdoors.

Roberta took great joy in taking on the role of my personal Vermont advisor, so I came to her with all my Northern questions.

“Black ice?” I asked, as I was getting ready to drive into Manchester for a liquor run. “What’s that?”

“You better watch out for it, Leelee. There are deadly patches of ice hiding on them roads. Them are nearly impossible to see because they’re the same color as the asphalt.”

“Thanks for warning me, I’ll be cautious,” I told her.

As my luck would have it there were patches of black ice every quarter mile of the thirty miles between the inn and Manchester. The worst part is that I was going
down
the mountain. Every few seconds I was pumping my brakes (a trick Jeb taught me) and the line of cars behind me kept getting longer and longer. I shook my head at them in disgust every time a daredevil whizzed past me. I was driving close to thirty miles per hour, and everyone else was doing at least sixty. I didn’t care what they thought about me, so I took my time and made it safely into Manchester.

Two weeks later, Baker and I were riding together and I was taking my time (moose-watching) and pumping my brakes the same way as before. He told me to either speed up or let him drive. “If you think, for one moment, I am going to be like one of those daredevils who speed over black ice, you are sadly mistaken,” I told him.

“What black ice? There’s no black ice today,” Baker said, as if I had lost my mind.

“I beg your pardon, there’s a spot right up there. Look.” I pointed at a spot as we drove right past.

“What makes you think that’s black ice?”

“Roberta told me. Black ice is dangerous and deceiving and this road is full of it.”

“Leelee, I’m telling you
that is not black ice
. Those are tar patches.”

“They are too black ice. Roberta described it to me in great detail.”

“Here, pull over if you don’t believe me and let all these cars pass us.”

I pulled the Explorer over to the side of the road and waited ’til the coast was clear to get out and touch one of the spots. It was a tar patch all right.

I stormed back to the car and opened my door. “How was I supposed to know about
black ice
?” I slid back into the seat and slammed the car door. “I’d never even heard that term before we moved here. My God, I’ve never driven in this much snow and I’ve sure never
shoveled
it.”

“Who’s making you shovel snow? Have I asked you to pick up a snow shovel one time?” Baker raised his voice and glared at me.

“No, but I’ve had to make plenty of other adjustments about this snow.
It’s pretty and all, but it sure is hard to live in.” I looked behind me and eased back out onto the road. “We can’t even run to the mailbox without bundling up. It takes a half hour to dress the girls to go outside. Every time they fall down they start crying. Then, they want to come back in ten minutes later because the snow’s too deep. And Gracie, forget Gracie! Have you seen her scratch on the door to go out
one time
?”

“This is
the North
.” He deliberately lowered his voice. Something he always does to make a point. “
Snow
is a way of life here.”

“It’s never been
my
way of life. No one ever told me any of this.” Out of frustration, I clenched the steering wheel. Since I was trying to keep my eyes on the road, I could only steal looks at him.

“You’ll be fine. Just toughen up and quit acting so helpless.” Baker looked over at me. “Even Scarlett O’Hara learned to pick her own cotton.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “That is the stupidest, meanest thing I’ve ever heard. What’s gotten into you, Baker?”