Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

Daphna said farewell by leaving a brief note in each of our mail slots: Off to the Cabinet. Shalom. Probably she sensed that she had outworn our tolerance of her garrulity. And anyway she was returning to Jerusalem, where, I’m told, everybody talks at once, brags all the time.

But Sylvia was home when the note popped through her slot. It was morning; her hair was still in its bun. She opened the door. She told us later what she learned. Avner had indeed taken a ministerial post, but he could have done so several times in the past; his wisdom is valued by many parties. This time he accepted, not because of the usual parliamentary crisis but because of a domestic one.

No, he had not come home to find Sam and Daphna warm under the cracked bedroom ceiling. “We Godolphinites do our share of sinning,” Sylvia pointed out, “but we do not abuse hospitality.”

“Oh,” said the disappointed Lucienne.

Sam had fallen in love, yes — with the oldest daughter. And she with him.

“They are utterly too young,” Daphna told Sylvia. But Sylvia with her fine, marinated intelligence saw through that small truth to the larger one beyond. As enlightened as Avner and Daphna wished to seem, they could not wholeheartedly welcome an Irish cop into their bloodline.

“See how you feel when we return,” Avner advised the lovers.

“Write every day,” Daphna added. “Promise to remember each other!” What cleverness; they started forgetting each other before she finished the sentence.

Sam Flanagan never visits our dead-end street. On the corners, in their seasons, hedge clipping and snow shoveling go on undisturbed. And once every few months, Connie and her husband invite Lucienne, Sylvia, and me to dinner, served in a cool green dining room with a view of the deck. I’ll have no trouble selling that house.

“Do we miss Daphna?” Sylvia wondered on one of those occasions. She was well into the wine; a helix of gray hair fell over one shoulder.

“Yes, no,” Lucienne said. “She was too hungry.”

Connie said slowly, “She wanted to…mean so much to us. It was…inappropriate.”

“Also doomed,” I added.

“Indeed,” Sylvia said. “We mean so little to each other.”

The hiring committee — the three members of the staff and Rabbi Stahl from the board, who begged to be called Steve — were briefly taken aback by the candidate’s looks. Donna could feel a ripple of confusion. The woman’s name was Mimi. Her blunt hair was dyed the crystalline color that old-movie buffs called platinum. She had a wide lipsticked smile. As she advanced toward them across the large basement dining room, it became apparent that she was very pretty. She’d stated outright in her cover letter that she was a divorcée with three grown daughters. She must have borne them young. She wore a long suede coat and high-heeled boots. A fur pillbox rested on the platinum bob.

You are not what you wear, as the staff knew well. Some of the most crackbrained guests at Donna’s Ladle could rummage through a pile of donated rags, select a few, and with those few convert themselves into a dead ringer for a CEO or, if you want to talk really elegant, a high-priced call girl. This Mimi, so bewitchingly chic, might have a heart of gold.

The hiring committee, sitting side by side at the long table, took turns telling Mimi about the facility (“a soup kitchen for women and their children”) and the general nature of the work (“cooking, plunging toilets, bossing volunteers, hanging out”) and the sometimes strained relations with the Unitarian church whose basement they occupied.

It fell to Donna to define the particular duties of a new staff member. “When my baby comes, three months from now, I’ll go on indefinite maternity leave, though I’ll volunteer in the kitchen one day a week. Pam here”—an affectionate look—“will take over my administrative and fund-raising chores, and so her old job as resource coordinator is up for grabs.”

“Scrounging for supplies,” Pam explained. “Wheedling donations, buying food cheap. Batting eyelashes at pro bono plumbers.”

Mimi’s eyes were blue under black lashes. “Pleading with restaurants?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“Have you thought of those unopened airline meals that go begging at the end of each flight?”

No one had thought of them.

Mimi had worked as a volunteer in a children’s hospital; she could do light carpentry; she was, by her own grinning admission, a better than fair cook. Her hat was now in her lap. She asked a few questions about guests fighting with each other and workers burning out. “I’m afraid I have no cellular telephone,” she said at the end of the interview; she’d already confessed to having no car.

“You communicate through your familiars,” the rabbi said with a smile.

Mimi beamed back at him. “And travel on an old broomstick, you’ve got it.” Then she left, carrying her hat, walking away with an unhurried ease, her radiant hair dimming as her figure receded.

“I’ll bet she owns jeans,” Donna said.

“I liked her,” said the other two staff members, almost in unison.

The rabbi shrugged. “What’s not to like? Her hat reminded me of one of my grandmother’s. She was a Brooklyn hysteric, claimed that animal skins were essential to tranquility.”

“Wasn’t that thing fake mink?” asked Pam anxiously.

“It was real sable,” Donna said. “This Mimi doesn’t know about animal rights. She has no experience with people who are down and out. She has no experience with mental disorder or substance abuse.”

No. But Donna aimed to give her guests a haven from do-gooders and mental-health busybodies — people who pushed change. When a woman lunched at the Ladle she couldn’t indulge her habit but she wasn’t badgered about renouncing it. She couldn’t slug anybody but she didn’t have to listen to antiviolence yak. She couldn’t flush socks down the toilet, but she could warn her friends about the socks’ radioactivity as long as she kept her voice reasonably low. She could be herself.

Mimi’s closest rivals during the hiring process were a light-skinned black woman who sang in a church choir and whose grandchildren had made her wise in the ways of the street, and a social worker serving as adviser to a radical state senator. Either candidate would have been a breeze to justify to the board. But the staff sensed a streak of punitiveness in the first and a wearying righteousness in the second. Mimi wanted to make things better for people, but she seemed to have no wish to make people better. “Or she keeps that wish under her hat,” the rabbi sighed. “I do warm to that singing grandmother.” Then he agreed to hire Mimi.

“You are very gracious,” Donna said. “Steve,” she managed to add.

Mimi at first gave Donna no cause for regret. She was indeed a much better than fair cook. She could take a meager amount of cod donated by a fish market half an hour before it turned and make it the basis for an abundant chowder. “Toss that out,” she said to a volunteer who was refrigerating the leftover soup. “If we eat it tomorrow we’ll be dead by nightfall.” Mimi could transform a few scraps of lamb into a bountiful shepherd’s pie. “Potatoes, all you ever need is potatoes,” she explained to Donna with her gleaming smile. “I can make potatoes into a dessert. Into a shake, too, with a little whiskey. I’m part Irish, you know.”

“The other part must have studied at the Cordon Bleu,” Donna said.

“The other part — part of the other part — is Romany. I come from a long line of horse thieves.”

Maybe — she was wily enough. When the board of health decreed that kitchen workers cover their hands, Mimi teased a gross of surgical gloves from a dental-supply house. When a restaurant failed in New Hampshire, she borrowed Rabbi Steve’s car and drove north and returned with hundreds of stainless place settings, purchased very cheap. She flew to every yard sale in town and bought defective board games for a quarter each. After several weeks of collecting, she persuaded a few guests to spend a rainy Friday making whole games out of parts. By the end of the day they had three sets of Monopoly, two sets of Clue, two Connect Fours, and lots of full sets of checkers. While the women were working, Mimi knocked together a Lego holdall, a knee-high case with subdivided shelves. She fenced the compartments halfway up with nylon and labeled them: TWO-BY-EIGHT; EIGHT-BY-EIGHT; FLAT PIECES, WINDOWS…