"What's the matter? You prejudiced against short people, doll? Oops! Watch the light fixture, doll. You nearly hit your head." He laughed.
That did it. I know, Jumbo Jim could not possibly know what it was like to be a girl and wake up one morning to find yourself five foot eight and in the sixth grade, but ignorance is no excuse. Especially in his case. So I decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. "The steaks are great here," I said sincerely, "but the shrimp are even better."
"Watch it, doll, or I'll cut you off at the knees," Jim retorted, and he didn't sound like he was kidding either.
I simply did an about-face and left the restaurant. I think Jim may have followed me for a couple of steps, but he certainly didn't make any effort to keep up. Hopefully he was flattened by the five fluffy fellows on their way back from the salad bar.
"He was a plain old jerk," said Doc sympathetically. "They come in all sizes. There's no need to feel guilty because this one is smaller than the rest."
I was taking Jim's rudeness too much to heart. "Do you think it's the makeup, Doc? Or was it my height that threatened him?"
"Tall is good," said Doc. There was admiration in his voice. The late Mrs. Shafer had been no nymphet.
"Then it is the makeup?"
Doc reached out and patted my shoulder. "Naw, those Baltimore boys are used to a lot more than that."
"Aren't you even going to say I told you so?"
"I'd rather offer you dinner."
I wiped a couple of tears from my eyes. "What are you having?"
"Let's see. Tonight it's skillet pot roast with vegetables, freshly baked oatmeal bread, stewed tomatoes, com relish, watermelon pickles, and for dessert, crazy cake. You do like my crazy cake, don't you, Magdalena?"
I love crazy cake. It's my favorite way to eat chocolate. I decided to repay Doc for his kindness by complimenting him the best way I could. Before I went home that night, sleepy and no longer quite as upset, I had eaten half of a nine-inch pan of cake. Doc, I assure you, ate the other half. If my dreams were less than pleasant that night, it was only partly because of Jim.
I was still full the next morning. At least, I didn't feel like eating breakfast. Of course, that might have been partly due to the fact that I was nervous about having lunch with the Simses. Clergymen make me nervous. Even Reverend Gingerich, our Mennonite pastor, makes me nervous, and I've been serving under him as a Sunday school teacher for almost twenty years.
"Be very careful about what you say and do, Magdalena," Mama often warned me. "God can see everything you do, and he writes it down in his book. At judgment day you'll have to answer to everything in that book, Magdalena. So keep those pages clean."
"You mean he grades me like my teacher does at school?" I once asked.
"That's right."
"Well, what if God is busy looking somewhere else when I do something bad, then he can't see what I'm doing and can't write it down, right?" Susannah wasn't even born yet at the time, but I knew plenty of other kids who sinned on a regular enough basis. Maybe they could act as a smoke screen for me.
Mama grabbed me by the shoulders and gave me a couple of hard shakes. "God sees everything. He has helpers, you know."
"You mean like spies?"
"Don't be sacrilegious, Magdalena. God isn't Khrushchev. But he has helpers, and they see things and report back to him."
"Like who? Who are his helpers, Mama? Are you one of his helpers?"
"Of course. All mothers are God's helpers. And so are pastors."
"Like our pastor at church?"
"Pastor Lantz is one of God's very special helpers," said Mama emphatically. Edmond Lantz, our pastor at the time, was a fearsome-looking man, nearing eighty, who looked just like I thought God might look. To my eight-year-old mind, not only was it possible that Pastor Lantz was God's helper, but it was conceivable that from time to time God made special in-person appearances in the pastor's body. From then on I became terribly afraid of Pastor Lantz, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when he died before I was baptized shortly after my twelfth birthday. Unfortunately, I believed that God took notice of my sigh of relief, which put a damper on the whole occasion anyway.
Of course I have since learned that Mama was no Mennonite theologian, and that many of her pronouncements were fabricated with the sole purpose of keeping me in line. This realization has been purely intellectual. My body is still held hostage by Mama's dictums, which is why I was guzzling a bottle of Pepto-Bismol when I pulled up in front of the Simses Victorian parsonage.
"Come in, come in," said Reverend Sims affably. "Martha's in the kitchen, but isn't that where Marthas usually are?" He chuckled pleasantly at his little biblical joke.
"Lunch smells delicious," I said. I didn't offer to help Martha. I believe guests should act like guests. If I had wanted to pull k.p. duty, I would have stayed home in the cozy familiarity of my own kitchen.
"Care for something to drink?" asked the reverend.
"No, thank you," I said quickly. Rumor had it that some of the Presbyterian churches allowed their members to drink alcoholic beverages, and I wasn't sure which kind Reverend Sims ran.
"Well, how is Susannah?" asked the reverend blithely. The nerve of that man.
"Susannah is the same," I said as evenly as I could. I do try not to insult my hosts.
"I hope you still don't blame me for her marriage to Maurice Entwhistle."
"He was one of your members, and you did perform the ceremony," I pointed out.
Reverend Sims spread his hands as if absolving himself of responsibility. I noticed then that he had the smallest hands I had ever seen on a man. Even Jim's hands were larger. "Maurice Entwhistle may not have been the perfect husband to your sister, but it takes two to tango, as they say."
"We Mennonites don't dance."
Just then Martha popped her head in the room and announced that lunch was ready.
I very much admired Martha's dining room decor, with its antique china hutches, and family photos on the velvet-flocked walls. As for the food she had prepared, it did nothing to improve my stomach. The most peculiar dish was a prune souffl‚, of which neither Martha nor the reverend partook. If it hadn't been for the parsley that decorated it, I would never have thought it edible. The reverend claimed that he hadn't eaten prunes in years, which I'm sure explains the state of the ingredients in that particular casserole. Undoubtedly they were left over from the time when Annie Sims, the reverend's semi-invalid mother and a deaconess herself, had ruled over the household in a reign of ecclesiastical terror. Anyway, the prune dish tasted as awful as it looked, so I nibbled at the parsley while pushing the prune mixture around my plate.
"So what's the catch?" I asked after about forty-five minutes of insipid small talk.
I thought I saw Martha pale, but it may have been a burst of sunshine through the window. "What catch? There's no catch, Magdalena. Orlando and I simply wanted to get to know you better. Isn't that right, dear?"
Frankly, the reverend seemed at a loss for words, but a stern look from Martha prompted a reply. "Ah, yes, we want to get to know you better, Magdalena. Is it all right if I call you Mags?"
"That would be fine," I said, and then, just to give Mama a Sabbath spin in her grave, I added, "Orlando."
I saw the reverend wince, but otherwise he pretty much kept his cool. "What did Reverend Gingerich preach his sermon on today?"
"The Bible."
"Touch‚," said the reverend, "but what was the text?"
"I forget exactly, but it had to do with guilt."
"Ah, a weighty subject," he mused.
"Boy, I'll say. Reverend Gingerich talked about both collective and individual guilt. When you - "
"I have nothing to feel guilty about," said Martha rather forcefully.
"Of course not, dear," said her husband. He reached across the table and grabbed one of his wife's hands between his small ones. "I already explained to Magdalena that we do hot accept responsibility for Susannah's marriage. Isn't that right, Magdalena?"
"Yes."
By then I had a headache in addition to my stomach problems, and I wanted nothing more than to go home and take a nap. But first I had to pretend to eat dessert, which turned out to be merely a rerun of the store-bought pound cake and frozen strawberries. This time there wasn't even any whipped cream.
"Bye, dear, it was so nice to see you again," said Martha as she gave me a big good-bye hug. I hate being hugged, especially by nonrelated females. In my opinion, people who are chronic huggers are that way because they were deprived of their pillows as youngsters. Normal people don't feel a need to go around wrapping their clammy flesh around others. And what really made it uncomfortable in this case was that Martha and I didn't even like each other. It all seemed very strange to me.
"Thanks again for lunch," I said politely. "It was delicious." Even Mama would have approved of a lie like that.
"Bye now, come again," said the reverend. He didn't try to hug me, but I wouldn't have minded quite so much if he had.
"Stay in touch!" Martha called gaily as I headed down the walk.
"I will," I said stupidly out of convention. I had no intention of staying in touch with a woman whose church had corrupted my sister, and who couldn't even be bothered to bake her own pound cake.
-18-
Susannah and I walked over to the Hostetler farm for Sunday night supper. There are two ways to get to where Freni and Mose live. If you take the road, Hertzler Lane, to the left, and then turn left again on Miller's Run, and then left one more time on Beechy Grove Lane, it's exactly 6.3 miles from the PennDutch. But if you simply go out the back door and head straight out between the six-seater and the chicken coop, it's only eight-tenths of a mile. Even when I have the car I seldom drive it. Susannah, on the other hand, would hitch a ride from her bedroom to the bathroom if she could.
"I don't see why we have to walk there," she grumped.
"Well, we could sprint."
"Very funny, Magdalena. Just wait until I get a car. Then I'm not walking anywhere."
"That will be fine, dear." The truth is, Susannah will never own a car, not if she has to pay for it herself. I wouldn't say that I am a wealthy woman, but the PennDutch is successful enough to keep me quite comfortable. The same cannot be said for Susannah. Whatever money comes her way makes a big splash and then simply evaporates, like water spilled on a hot griddle. Most of the time Susannah doesn't have two nickels to rub together.
Although we'd gone only a hundred yards, I let Susannah stop and rest her poor, achy, tired feet while I made a brief detour to the outhouse. Of course I didn't plan to use it; it hasn't been used for that purpose since Grandma Yoder was alive and I was still a little girl. But for some strange reason, the door, which s supposed to be closed, had come open again. I peeked inside to see if maybe a tramp had taken up residence, but of course none had. Any tramp worth his satchel would pick the barn over the six-seater any day, although all that movie equipment and confusion would be offputting. Not that tramps stop by much anymore. But during one brief period in the seventies, we had as many as eight tramps living in the barn. I have a strong suspicion, however, that most of those guys were Vietnam War draft dodgers. As Mennonites, both Mama and Papa were staunch pacifists.
After securing the outhouse door, this time with stick wedged tightly through the hasp, I retrieved Susannah. It is no small thing to walk between two corn fields and through a patch of woods with her. Stopping every few feet to disentangle yards of billowing fabric from the clutches of burrs and twigs is chore I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but I can be just as stubborn as my sister. God had given us a beautiful, cloudless day. To have ridden to the Hostetlers in a melange of metal and rubber would have been downright sacrilegious. Besides, I wanted Susannah to see just how stupid it had been of her to buy those Italian platform shoes. Just to drive the lesson home, I led us on a few detours where I knew the walking would be rough. And, of course, I walked as fast as I could.
Not that it really mattered what time we arrived at the Hostetlers. Freni and Mose eat their big Sunday meal for lunch, as most churchgoing people in Hernia do. Sunday night supper is invariably leftovers, and in the summertime they are generally served cold. Actually, food had very little to do with the supper invitation, in my opinion. I think the whole thing was Mose's idea, and that his intent was for Susannah and me - well, me, at any rate - to mediate the dispute between Freni and her daughter-in-law, Barbara. That was a very kind and loving act on Mose's part, but to be absolutely honest about it, it was rather like asking the Irish to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
The funny thing is that Freni and Barbara are spitting images of each other, except that Barbara is a good ten inches taller. They both have the same slightly beaked nose, the same mousy brown hair (although Freni's is now streaked with gray), the same watery blue eyes half hidden behind plain-rimmed glasses, and, of course, they're both stubborn enough to make a mule seem compliant. They are, in fact, distant cousins. The Amish in and around Hernia are so interrelated that it would have been impossible for John to find a local bride who was no closer than a second cousin, which is why he went packing off to one of the western communities to find a mate. If Freni and Barbara consulted their family genealogies, which I have, and which they both stubbornly refuse to do, they would find that Barbara and John are sixth cousins - but in four different ways. If you ask me, Freni not only sees herself mirrored in Barbara, but magnified. Believe me, this is enough to scare anyone. Barbara, on the other hand, sees a diminished version of herself when she looks at Freni, and for some reason this upsets her as well. Frankly, I think she should feel grateful.
