As The World Churns Part 18

I could have single-handedly dressed an octopus with rigor mortis in the time it took the tiny woman from Brooklyn to slip a muumuu over her head. Then again, I shouldn't have been surprised by her lengthy delay. By the time she told me I could peek, the suitcase was no longer in sight.

"Where did it go?"

"Vhat?"

"The suitcase, of course."

"Dere is no suitcase."

"Ida, I haven't got time for games, and neither do you. I've come to look for my husband."

"My son?"

"Something is wrong. I can feel it. If you don't tell me where he is this minute, I'm going to make every ancestor of mine for the past five hundred years spin in his or her grave, by doing something violent to your person. After that, I'll have to become a Southern Baptist, or maybe a Presbyterian-but trust me, it will be so worth it."

I doubt if she understood my words, but something must have gotten through. "Nu? Are vee just going to stand here, or are vee going to look for my Gabeleh?"

"We'll look. But if he isn't here, and he isn't at my-I mean, our-house, then where could he be?"

"Mit his girlfriend, perhaps?"

Just hearing the words was a stab to my heart. "What girlfriend?"

"How should I know? A son doesn't tell his mother deese tings."

"But are you saying that he has one?"

She clucked, sounding for all the world like my favorite hen, Pertelote. "Magdalena, look at you; you're as tin as a slice of lox, yah? And your hair-oy."

"What's wrong with my hair?"

"Da braids and da bun, you look like a bubbee already."

No doubt steam rose from my bun. It certainly spilled out of my nostrils. I pawed the floor with a size eleven, and waggled a finger at the woman who had become the bane of my existence.

"A bubbee, you say? I most certainly do not look like a grandmother. There are times when I may look like a mare that's been ridden hard and put away wet, and I know for a fact that there are grandmothers younger than I am, but I do not look like a stereotypical grandmother: I don't have many wrinkles, my hair is still its natural shade of mousy brown, and only a few of them are to be found on my chin. And as for having a figure like a slice of smoked salmon, I'll have you know that your son refers to my bosoms as bodacious, and claims to be quite happy with the junk in my trunk-to borrow a term from the vernacular."

"And crazy too."

"Your son," I cried. "Shouldn't we be concentrating on him? For all we know he could be lying in a ditch somewhere."

"Yah?"

"Double yah. Vultures could be circling overhead. The Grim Reaper could be sharpening his scythe. And meanwhile, your only son, the fruit of your Looney Tunes, is murmuring, 'Ma? Where are you, Ma? ' "

Ida galvanized before my eyes. The transformation was amazing. One minute she was a meddling mother-in-law in a muumuu, the next she became the quintessential Warrior Mother, a lioness who would fight to the death for her cub.

"Nu? Vhy are vee standing here? Let's get a move on, already."

I was in need of some real moral support, so I called my normally levelheaded friend Agnes and asked her to come along. Pal that she was, I didn't need to twist her arm more than once.

And so we did.

We began by phoning all the judges, organizers, and sponsors of what was supposed to have been the shining star in Hernia's crown. Not only had my husband not hitched a ride with any of them, but no one had seen him since the closing ceremony. However, plenty of people-okay, virtually everyone-were as mad as hornets. You'd have thought I'd knocked down their nests and stomped on them, perhaps even spraying them first with DDT.

Lyudmila Prendergast, who'd donated twelve dollars towards our expenses, was particularly livid, and insisted that I come to her house and meet with her face-to-face. Only then, she said, would she reveal an "interesting tidbit" that might explain Gabe's disappearance.

Normally, I would not agree to meet Lyudmila anywhere, except for a well-lit church that was packed to the gills with my friends and family. Lyudmila would be in the choir loft, and I would be positioned by the front door, with my brogans securely tied, just in case I needed to make a run for it.

To make a long story short, Lyudmila hates my guts. She's hated my poor innards since the tenth grade when I wouldn't let her copy my answers to an American history exam. After school that day, she called me "Goody Two-Brogans," and started spreading the rumor that I had a crush on Danny Culp. That wouldn't have been so bad had it not been the truth. The next day, to get back at her, I did what every Hernia High kid did as the ultimate act of humiliation: I sat on Lyudmila's lunch sack.

I had no way of knowing that Lyudmila packed her own lunch, giving herself only Hostess Twinkies injected with booze. Needless to say, I thoroughly mashed the little creme-filled cakes, but in the process inadvertently invented a dessert the British refer to as trifle. Sadly, to date, I have not been accorded the recognition I deserve from our good friends across the pond. Inventing such a venerable inst.i.tution is no trifling matter, and, at the very least, I think a t.i.tle would be in order. Her Ladyship, Magdalena Yoder-Rosen, Countess of Hernia, practically rolls off the tongue, don't you think?

At any rate, I was feeling only mild trepidation as I rang Lyudmila's doorbell. Agnes and Ida were still in the car, happily trading insults. If I called for their help, they most likely wouldn't hear me. On the other hand, if I plumb disappeared, they'd eventually get around to investigating. After all, I had the car keys.

Lyudmila snorted a greeting as she opened the storm door. It sounded to me like, "h.e.l.lo, Goody Two-Brogans," but, then again, I might have been listening for it. Be a.s.sured, I said something quite pleasant in return. I had no choice if I wanted to locate the Babester as soon as possible.

"Well, do you like it?" she demanded, before another second had pa.s.sed.

"Like what?"

"This!" She gestured rapidly around the room, like a museum docent who'd worked a double shift, and was facing her final visitors of the day-ones that had shown up just before closing time.

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 macrame slings, hung from the ceiling at meaningless intervals. Although the coffee table was merely a laminated slice of redwood held above the s.h.a.g 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 macrame 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 muskrats. 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 compet.i.tion. 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 t.i.tle 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?"

29.

"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 h.e.l.lo 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 k.n.o.b, 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.