Tamar Myers - Batter off Dead

“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.

“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?”

“Harrumph. And just when I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“I thought so too. Tell me, Wanda, what have I done to offend you now? And just so you know, I fully intended to retrieve that sausage link that I dropped down your beehive at the pancake breakfast, but then Minerva keeled over dead and-”

“You what?” Wanda doubled over at the waist and shook her head vigorously. Out of the volcanic cone of a hairdo fell a fork, a book of matches, three toothpicks, and a button, but no sausage link.

“I was just kidding, dear. Really, Wanda, you might want to shampoo that thing occasionally. Aren’t you afraid of rats?”

“ Magdalena, how could you? And after what you did to me in high school.” Then I really did drop a wiener down her do, and it stayed there until it got ripe enough to draw attention to itself.