Honeydew: Stories (15 page)

T
he 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
…

Donna, on her way out, paused to admire this construction: what a boon to kids whose only play space was the Ladle’s small children’s room. “That barrel we kept the Legos in was driving me crazy,” Mimi said. She was kneeling on the floor, still hammering. There was sawdust on her jeans, her tee, even a few yellow grains on her translucent hair. She spat out the last nail. “The kids had to turn the barrel upside down anytime they wanted to build a tower.”

As a reward for the afternoon’s labor Mimi took the women out for pizza and a bottle of Chianti. On Monday Donna offered reimbursement from petty cash.

“Oh, Donna, the wine, I shouldn’t have, you don’t want the Ladle to enable anyone…”

“It was grape juice; I have it on the best authority. Thirty-five enough?”

“A little too much. But I know where I can get some Lego wheels.”

Donna’s baby was due in December. By the beginning of November a sense of imminent maternity seemed to hang over the Ladle. Or was it imminent madness? More people than usual were touchy, defiant, in trouble with caseworkers, in trouble with parole officers. Several got picked up by the police because of threatening behavior. Donna knew she was partly responsible for the unraveling—she was providing one more desertion for souls who had been deserted too often.

Miss Valentine and O-Kay were cruelly bedeviled. Unwelcome visitors inhabited Miss Valentine’s large black body. Voices told her what to do and say, even when what she did and said caused her landlady to call the police and the police to suggest that she keep a nonactionable tongue in her mouth. Miss Valentine’s children had all been taken from her except for the ones she herself had abandoned on the island where she was born. When the voices were silent Miss Valentine muttered to herself, as if keeping the conversation up.

Pale O-Kay talked out loud to anyone who would listen. She bragged that she was in charge of innumerable children, some hers and some awarded by the state. She was the little young woman who lived in a shoe. The shoe was her old car. In fact, O-Kay’s children were illusory. She slept alone in her car. She had an unnerving tic; often her whole body shook.

Mimi talked often with Miss Valentine and O-Kay. Donna saw their three heads bent toward one another over bowls of cooling soup. She couldn’t catch the conversation, but she could see O-Kay’s shoulder quiver and Miss Valentine’s mouth move, and she could hear Mimi’s tone of priestly softness. Had the Ladle been infiltrated by a religious in drag? That legislative aide they’d thought about hiring, for all her high-flown ideas, was at least an atheist like the rest of the staff.

“Miss Valentine is possessed,” Mimi reported to Donna in her ordinary voice. “O-Kay is possessed too.”

“I suppose
I
am possessed,” Donna said lightly. Her baby stirred.

“Literally you are. And you’ll be delivered of a lovely infant. But Miss Valentine and O-Kay can’t rid themselves of their demons, not without help.”

“Miss Valentine and O-Kay have gone off their medications.”

“Not without help,” Mimi repeated with a husky intensity. “Those demons, they cling to the innards with red claws.”

“It’s our mission to meet the women where they are—”

Mimi’s blue gaze caught her like the beam of a lighthouse.

“—and not to interpose our own values,” Donna finished, blinking helplessly.

In early November, on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, a guest’s child—the middle boy of three—staggered in with his arms around a wood and mesh cage. He had won a lottery: he got to take home the class gerbils. “Home!” his mother snorted. “We ain’t got room even for the TV—had to sell it. Your aunt is having another baby—did you forget that?” She turned to Donna. “We leave these critters here, right? And you’ll visit them on Monday,” she said to her son, who was silent. He was accustomed to disappointment, and he didn’t dare appeal to Donna, since he knew that she knew that he often left the Ladle with Legos in his pockets.

The mother stormed off with her progeny. “All right,” Donna said to her retreating back. Donna herself could drop in on the weekend to feed the animals. The boy’s mother would probably decide to suffer them on Monday night.

But she didn’t. She didn’t come in on Monday or Tuesday. Then one of the volunteers got word that the whole family, pregnant sister included, had left for Mississippi. Who knew where in Mississippi? And who knew where in the Boston area they had lived? It was the Ladle’s policy not to ask questions. Who knew what third grade in which school was grieving for its lost gerbils?

At the staff meeting Mimi suggested that the gerbils be declared official mascots. Donna proposed finding them a berth elsewhere. She pointed out that deprived women first go weepy over animals and then identify with them; the Ladle would soon drown in self-pity.

This reasoning met silence. That singing grandmother would have agreed with Donna—she’d no doubt sent many a stray cat packing. Donna mentioned the wretched guest who, by carefully leaving wrapped food for the alley rats, had brought the wrath of the church upon their heads.

Mimi leaned forward. “The gerbils are entertaining,” she said calmly, “and maybe we’ll find some off-label use for them,” she added, looking first at Donna and then at Pam, who said, “Let’s give it a try,” and the management of the Ladle passed from Donna to Pam at that moment, as it was supposed to do, as Donna had meant it to do, as she had dreaded its doing since the day she noticed that her period was late.

Donna, swallowing, reminded herself of Pam’s fidelity to the Ladle’s values of nonintervention, uninquisitiveness, and tolerance.

At first the two gerbils seemed indifferent to their good fortune. They just sniffed their toys, rode their wheel, gobbled their pellets of food, chewed on cardboard toilet-paper rolls. Then one weekend Mimi built a platform for the cage, and on Monday she placed it in the middle of the dining room. “Now they are integrated into our community,” O-Kay said. To Donna they looked above the community, little high priests. Sometimes they stood up with their claws on the bars and silently orated, bits of cardboard clinging to their mouths like cigars.

“They speak in tongues,” Miss Valentine claimed.
“Français,”
she clarified.

The gerbils’ new position in the center of the room tempted guests to feed them. Pam warned that the gerbils would soon refuse their usual food. “They’ll become tyrants.” But some women couldn’t resist spoiling the animals, and on certain days the gerbils’ confused friskiness followed by torpor indicated that they had been treated to booze as well as salad. After a few overfed weeks they grew bored with their wheel. Instead of chewing the cardboard rolls they crawled inside them. “They’re shooting up,” O-Kay said.

By December, a very wet month, almost everybody was sharing lunch with the gerbils. Pam stopped urging restraint, since the animals now turned up their snouts at anything except fresh vegetables. Also, constant rain was making the whole crowd more irritable than ever; best not to notice minor infractions. In front of the church the street ran like a river. The newspapers used the word
deluge
every day. “The Almighty wants to get rid of talk radio,” Rabbi Steve explained.

The church’s subcommittee on social action, dripping, made a surprise inspection of the facility. The chairwoman, speaking for the committee, suggested that the presence of rodents so near food was unhygienic. Mimi treated the speaker to her level gaze; the chairwoman looked alarmed, as if she sensed that her own coven could be dispatched by a wink of that sapphire eye. Then Mimi lowered her lids and stood like a penitent with the rest of the staff, their hands in hastily donned surgical gloves crossed on their breasts or clasped at their waists, except for Donna’s, whose were splayed on her belly.

One of the volunteers interrupted the tense silence by suggesting coffee. Miss Valentine, talking to herself, appeared with a tray of unopened dinner packets that had just been delivered by a Sabena airline steward on his way home. The site visit turned into a party.