"A married man should not fool around. Under any circumstances. "
Heather decided to go for a bumper corn crop. "What if the wife is an unappreciative little bitch?"
"We don't swear here, Heather."
Instead of a part, Heather made a groove deep enough for the transatlantic cable. "What would you know about being married, Miss Yoder?"
I calmly pointed to her rather intrusive belly. "About as much as you do, sweetie."
"Arrrgh," said Heather.
"That's much better than swearing, dear. I appreciate your sensitivity, I really do."
"Brrrrgh-agh!"
"Keep up the good work, dear, but try to be a little more creative." After all, when I was only seven, and Susannah not even born, I created a whole language of my own. I even had my own alphabet, which I sometimes confused with the one I had just learned at school.
"I'm not swearing, you dweeb!" screamed Heather.
"I think I'm in labor."
"Nonsense," I said stoically. "Your water hasn't even broken yet." Not that I knew much about such things, but I had heard a little. And I had helped deliver calves several times.
"It has now," said Heather. She was beginning to grunt and pant like a loose hog being chased from a corn field.
"Are you sure, dear?"
"Aaaaaaagh!" screamed Heather, louder than any hog I'd ever heard. I took a deep breath and told myself not to panic. I had been home alone with Mama when she'd gone into labor with Susannah, and even though Freni had arrived in time, and chased me from the room before I'd had a chance to see anything, I had learned two valuable lessons-having a baby takes a lot of time, and for some inexplicable reason, water has to be boiled. Of course it wasn't until years later that I figure out Mama's making me boil water and Freni's chasing me from the room were somehow connected with Susannah's untimely arrival. The connection I pieced together in retrospect. Sometime around my thirtieth birthday.
"Geeeeeeyah!"
"I'll go boil water," I said. In my shameful haste to retreat, I ran into, or nearly ran over, Jumbo Jim.
"Slow down, doll."
"Jim! What on earth are you doing here?"
Jim grinned up at me. "I had a feeling you might not show up at Ed's Steak House, so I thought I'd buzz by here and give you a little encouragement. Nobody answered up at the house, but I heard noises coming from here. Is it milking time?"
"More so than you think."
"Well, as soon as you're done, let's go, doll. You ready?"
"Ehrrr-gaaaaahg!" bellowed Heather.
Jim jockeyed around me for a closer look at the cow. What he saw instead was Heather down on her knees, clasping her abdomen. "Hey, doll, you weren't fighting over me, were ya?"
"She's having a baby, Jim."
Jim stood stock still for a moment, and then sprang into action. "All right, doll, you run up to the house and call the paramedics. Forget about boiling water. And come back right away. Bring some clean towels and sheets with you."
"Yes, Jim." I bolted again for the door.
"And you," I heard him say to Heather, "you lie down with your head elevated, knees up - "
I dialed three times before I could get my fingers to cooperate enough to punch in the right numbers. Thank God Zelda answered the phone. She promised to relay my message to the paramedics in Bedford right away. Then I thrashed around the house looking for clean linens, but since it was Susannah's turn to do the laundry, there weren't any. In desperation, I tore the sheets off my bed, knowing they would be cleaner than Susannah's, and grabbed a couple of towels. Although at times it felt like I was moving in slow motion, I was gone only a couple of minutes.
"I made the call," I said between raw, heaving breaths.
Jumbo didn't as much as look up. "Better late than never, doll."
"What do you mean?"
"Unless the paramedics can fly like Superman, they won't make it in time."
I squatted down beside him for a closer look, but there was nothing to see. Something was wrong with this picture. Susannah tells me that in movies women are always having babies without having to take off their underpants or pantyhose first. In real life, however, shedding one's undergarments is probably advisable. "Shouldn't she at least take off her underpants?" I asked.
"Not in front of a man!" Heather gasped.
"You did once before," I reminded her sternly.
The next time Heather screamed, which was a second or two later, Jim and I pulled her wet underpants off. There was the baby's head.
"Push," said Jim.
Heather grunted. I said nothing.
"Push!" he commanded.
I shoved him uncertainly.
"Not you!" he shouted. "Her! Push, dammit!"
I forgave Jim his profanity and got into the act my- self, exhorting a huffing, puffing, grunting, and screaming Heather to push. In no time at all the rest of the baby came into view.
"It's a boy!" said Jim with surprising joy.
"How can you tell?" I asked.
Jim cleared the baby's mouth with his finger, and, satisfied that he was breathing normally, laid him, still attached by the cord, on Heather's stomach. Then he covered him with a towel. Jim was still wiping his hands with another towel when the paramedics arrived.
"You did good, doll," Jim told me yet again over a cobbler and coffee. We were the only customers left in Ed's.
"Thanks, Jim, you weren't so bad yourself."
"So, do you think we could date, doll, or what?" We had talked about everything under the sun except our relationship.
"How can we date, Jim? I live up here, and you live down in Baltimore."
"I don't mind driving up, doll. And if that gets to be too much, you could spell me by driving down there. Where there's a will, there's a way, they say."
"They don't single-handedly operate one of the most popular inns in America," I retorted. Admittedly, there was pride in my voice. But there must have been something else too.
"It's the height thing, isn't it?"
"What height thing?"
Jim's diminutive right fist banged on the table with surprising force. "Dammit, doll, if there's one thing that pisses me off, it's you bleeding-heart liberals refusing to call a spade a spade."
"I don't know what you mean," I said quite honestly. Papa had once lectured at me at length on the difference between a spade and a shovel, but I still get the two confused.
"Cut the crap, doll. Cut to the chase. You don't want to go out with me because I'm short."
I was momentarily taken aback. I know that this might sound hard to believe, but while we'd been supping and engaged in general chitchat,.I had ceased to pay attention to Jim's height. Of course he had been sitting on both the Bedford and Somerset county phone books. But still, I honestly had ceased to see him first and foremost as a short man, but rather just as a man. A man whom I admired but had decided I didn't quite like.
"Look, buster, it doesn't bother me that you are a little shorter than I am. Okay, make that a whole lot shorter. Even if you were a foot taller than me, Jim, I still don't think it would work out."
He stared, not believing me. "And why not, doll?"
I started to hem and haw, but Jumbo cut me off. "I said, cut the crap, doll. Give it to me straight."
I decided to do just that. "Because you're a boor, Jim."
"So, you don't like my stories?"
"You're definitely not a bore, Jim. What I meant is that you're - well, a little on the crude side. Rough around the edges."
"What are you, doll? Some kind of hifalutin snob?"
I considered that for a moment. "I am awfully picky, Jim, I'll grant you that. But I don't think I'm a snob. I just don't think you and I would work out as an item."
"An item, doll?"
"You know what I mean. Couldn't we just be friends, Jim, and see each other occasionally? I mean, we don't have to date to be friends, do we?"
"Ah, I see, I get it now," said Jim triumphantly. "You're one of those!"
"Those what?"
"A lesbian, doll. I should have known."
"Good night, Jim. I've got to be going." I left without saying anything to contradict him. And I'm sure Jim was not the first one to suppose my sexual fantasies were monomorphic. When you're forty-four and never been married, tongues are bound to wag. Especially these days, when all people can think about seems to be sex. Aunt Sadie and her roommate, Mabel, never suffered such indignities.
"You don't know what you're missing out on, doll," Jim shouted at my back. "They don't call me Jumbo for nothing."
"Grow up," I said quietly.
Jim must have razor-sharp hearing. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Take it any way you want," I said. Then I felt bad, because I had stooped to his level, which is really pretty low.
Just outside the front door of Ed's Steak House I ran into DarIa Strutt. "DarIa!" I cried. I was actually glad to see her.
DarIa started to brush past me, but I accidentally stepped on a yard or two of her flowing fabric. "As if that wasn't enough!" she snapped.
"Come again?"
"I'll sue, Magdalena. Even if you are from Pittsburgh, I'll sue." Of course she was carrying her dog. Fifi, and she waved her in my face like a tempting morsel. But since I had just eaten a steak bigger than the dog, I wasn't tempted.
"I'm not from Pittsburgh, dear. But about your dress, I'll pay to have it cleaned." I was assuming that clothes like Daria's were not meant to be washed in old-fashioned soap and water.
"Cleaning won't help!" Darla wailed. The woman was so much like Susannah, I was going to have to do a more thorough check of my family tree. It was beginning to look as if there were a Strutt or two on one of the thinner branches.
"Cheer up, dear. I'm sure it will be just fine. And, if it isn't, I'm sure my sister would be happy to lend you hers."
DarIa wailed like a banshee pup alone on the moors. By the sound of it, Fifi was alone on the moors as well. "Poor Fifi. My poor little baby! How could he do that to her?"
I was as lost as Susannah in church. "I haven't a clue what you're talking about, dear. Is this a Pittsburgh riddle?"
"Fifiiiiii!" The banshee pup had lungs like a Great Dane. Fifi's lungs were even louder.
I do my best to be a loving Christian from time to time. I reached out, albeit gingerly, to give her a comforting pat.
Darla attempted to jerk away from me. Unfortunately, I was still standing on her clothes. Anything that rips that easily should indeed be dry-cleaned.
"Try Quick-Clean. It's right up the street. They do good mending too."
"You idiot! You blithering idiot!" Darla screamed. "I don't give a flying fig about my clothes. It's Fifi, my dog, that I'm talking about!" (Actually, those were not exactly DarIa's words, but Mama would spin into a blur if I as much as quoted them.)
I might have stared stupidly at her.
"Your sister's dog - Snickems - or whatever its name is, has gone and gotten my little Fifi pregnant."
I probably continued to stare. I was trying to imagine the two pint-size pooches in flagrante delicto. They must have looked like rats fighting. Why was it that not only the birds and the bees, but dogs as well, managed to do some things so naturally, while I, Magdalena Yoder, had yet to experience my first real kiss?
I was still closing the front door behind me when my personal phone started to ring. The number for my personal line is a secret I guard even more jealously than my weight - right up there with the secret ingredient in Mama's Peanut Butter Chiffon Pie. Even Freni doesn't know that. Freni does know my telephone number, but like any good Amishwoman, she does not have a phone of her own, and calls me only in emergencies, from a pay phone. Of course, Melvin Stoltzfus knew my number, thanks to Susannah, but I doubted even he would have the nerve to call me again so quickly. In tenth grade I had arm-wrestled Melvin and won. The match would have been over several seconds earlier if I hadn't had the flu.
I sprinted to get the phone. The odds were that it was Susannah, wanting me to come pick her up from a truck stop; but barring that, it could possibly be Freni, telling me she had just killed her daughter-in-law. "Hello?"
"Hi, Magdalena, it's me."
"You don't say. Well, this is me too. Of course that shouldn't be so surprising. Last I heard there were over eight billion me's on the earth. Now, which one might you be?"
