Tea with Jam and Dread (2 page)

I
muc
h prefer to visit with my friends face-to-face, as the Good Lord intended,
not
Facebook to Facebook. Ergo, because I am the mother of two and run a bed and breakfast, my best friend Agnes Miller and I make it a point of having tea and conversation together at her house once a week if at all possible. Although I truly enjoy Agnes’s company, and profit from it emotionally, my visits to her are intended to bring her comfort and succour.

You see, Agnes recently married my oldest friend, Doc Shafer. At the time of their nuptials, Agnes was forty-nine and Doc was eighty-six. Fortunately for one of the newlyweds, and unfortunately for the other, old Doc was as randy as a billy goat. He also owned a billy goat, as he lived on a farm. At any rate, Agnes’s extremely short marriage was one during which she never had a good hair day, and to see her walk, you might have thought she was a cowgirl – if you get my drift. Old Doc died of natural causes just ten days after saying ‘I do,’ but he died an extremely happy man.

Everyone thought that Agnes would be devastated after Doc’s death and possibly even remain in seclusion, but as long as we good citizens of Hernia kept her busy by allowing her to meddle in our affairs, Agnes was as content as a cat on a warm window seat, and such was her mental state the day this saga begins. I had taken my toddler, Little Jacob, to visit his ‘Auntie’ Agnes, and to give him the opportunity to pet her many inherited animals. These, of course, included the notorious goat, who went by the name of Gruff. It was late afternoon – of a Tuesday – and we were ‘taking tea’ on one of the large farmhouse’s several sweeping verandas.

‘The British are coming,’ Agnes said, with just the hint of a smile.

‘That’s what Paul Revere shouted from his horse to warn the American colonialists some 240 years ago. Don’t you have any gossip newer than that?’

Agnes’s plump little mouth turned down. ‘I don’t gossip, Magdalena, you know that; I merely deliver facts, which I then sometimes feel free to editorialize on, but only when the individuals are truly deserving.’

‘You’re quite right, dear. And anyway, it was a good thing that Paul warned us poor hapless colonists that the mighty British were about to attack.’

‘Magdalena,’ Agnes said with growing impatience, ‘let’s leave the Revolutionary War behind for a moment. Instead, let us think about culture, for it was the British who invented culture.’

‘
Really?
’ I said.

‘Magdalena,’ my best friend said as she poured me a cup of tea, ‘as I’ve said before, it would help me a lot in deciphering your emotions if you darkened your eyebrows and plucked all those stray hairs. As it is, I can’t tell if you’re being serious, sarcastic or if you’re genuinely surprised. Which is it?’

I slowly slathered a piece of golden-brown toast with room temperature butter and then smeared globs of homemade strawberry jam over the surface. Then, of course, being an Ugly American, I took a ginormous bite and washed it down with milky tea before answering. After all, one must never comment on matters of international importance on an empty stomach.

‘Can’t it be all three emotions?’ I said. ‘What I mean to say is that I’m seriously surprised that you would restrict credit for the invention of culture to
only
the British. Even just Western Culture owes its roots to—’

‘Tut, tut,’ Agnes said primly, ‘let us not speak of King Tut, the Sumerians or even the Greeks. I mean
manners
as we know them today.’ Agnes holds her teacup with her pinkie finger so high, and at such an angle, it has been known to poke her in the forehead.

I crammed the rest of my toast into my mouth, which meant that I had to talk with my mouth full. My fourteen-month-old son was trying to climb out of his high chair and needed to be stopped. Allowing a baby to crack his head open is never good manners.

‘Agn
eth
,’ I said, spewing bits of bread and jam hither, thither, but not quite yon, ‘you’ve been watching
Downtown Abbey
again, haven’t you?’

My buddy sighed. ‘Mags, how many times have I told you that it’s Down
ton
, not Down
town
?’

‘Trust me: enough.’

‘Yeah? Well, so what if I’m using that television series as a model? The British personify honour and dignity under great duress. “Keep calm and carry on,” as Queen Elizabeth’s father said. During Queen Victoria’s reign they ruled an empire while drinking tea during the heat of the day, and then dressed to the nines for dinner. You’ve got to admire that.’

‘I
do
?’ I said. That’s all I had time to say as I plunked my squirming male child back into his seat, strapped him in tighter and cut a slice of buttered toast into teensy-weensy bites for him.

‘Since you’re being enigmatic today, I will ignore your last comment,’ Agnes said. ‘I invited you to tea today for a specific reason.’

‘Oh?’

‘Stop it, Mags.’

‘Huh?’

‘Stop being so darn taciturn. Usually you’re as garrulous as a gaggle of old men, but today you’re hardly paying attention.’

I licked my greasy fingers before wiping them on my napkin. ‘I’m sorry, dear; I didn’t get any sleep last night. The guests I have now are probably the loudest bunch yet. They communicate by shouting, and one couple shouts to each other in the hallway as if they’re on opposite ends of a field.’

‘Typical Americans,’ Agnes muttered. Now that she’d become an Anglophile, she was beginning to find her own people objectionable.

I sighed. ‘Just stop it, dear. There
are
some good Americans – like you, for instance. I can’t see you causing me any trouble if you were to be a guest at the PennDutch Inn.’

Agnes smiled. ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is because I have a little something called class.’

‘Don’t forget modesty,’ I said.

‘Oh, no, Mags, that’s
your
department,’ she said.

‘You’re quite right,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been proud of my humility. It comes with being a Mennonite of Amish descent.’

Agnes selected a variety of shortbread biscuits and arrayed them fan-shaped on her plate before chowing down on them. She has been my best friend since infancy, so what I am about to say, I say lovingly. The fact that Agnes is shaped like a beach ball atop a pair of shoes has less to do with her genes than what she puts into her jeans. For the record, our family trees are so intertwined that they resemble thickets rather than trees, which is to say that the two of us probably share more genes than a pair of conjoined twins.

‘Magdalena,’ she said at last, ‘after your parents died and you first turned your family’s farm into the PennDutch, I have to confess that I was a bit worried. After all, it’s Lancaster, Pennsylvania that is known for its Amish community, even though it is small potatoes in size compared to Ohio’s Holmes County. But Hernia, Pennsylvania? We’re a nothing place.’

I happen to be the mayor of our village – population, 2,168 and a half (Joyce Millhouse is just under five months’ pregnant) – so I may have bristled at that comment. I bade my hair to stand down so that the rest of me might better relax as well.

‘And your point
is
?’ I said.

Her claim to classiness aside, my rotund friend stuffed her mouth with goodies and chomped as she spoke. ‘Thanks to your insistence on giving your guests a genuine Amish experience – you know, making them work hard while they are at the PennDutch – it has become a huge success with the chattering class.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘The certain people who think that they’re special and feel compelled to remind everyone in the world just how special they are every moment of the day. I bet that you haven’t had to advertise for eons.’

‘Actually not since the first murder happened at the inn,’ I said.

‘Tell me, Magdalena – do you still enjoy being an innkeeper?’

I wiped Little Jacob’s face for the umpteenth time and dumped a handful of seedless raisins on his tray. ‘Sometimes. Occasionally I’ll have a guest who is both exceptionally interesting and compliant.’

Agnes crammed the better half of a blueberry muffin into her mouth. As it was already full she had to store everything in her cheeks, much like a squirrel, before she could speak. ‘By “compliant,” you mean someone who will follow your ridiculously strict rules or else risk having to pay monetary penalties.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘they know what they are getting into from the get-go. I make all my guests sign contracts and disclaimers. The PennDutch is, after all, the only inn that I know of where guests have the opportunity to pay for the privilege of working their fingers to the bone while viewing it as a cultural experience.’

‘
Those
are your American guests,’ Agnes said. ‘Am I right? Europeans are either too canny or too lazy to be bossed around by a farmwoman in a bonnet.’

‘It’s not a bonnet, for Pete’s sake; it’s a prayer covering. You know that.’

Agnes started to pop in the second half of the muffin, but I stopped her by gently grabbing her wrist. ‘Swallow first, dear. I love you like a sister, but I don’t fancy doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.’

Obediently, she swallowed. After chugging a litre of milk, my friend was ready to shift gears with renewed energy. ‘Well, here is the gist of my idea: you jettison that old business formula and you begin catering to an altogether new clientele. These new folks would never dream of working so you’ll have to soak them upfront,
but
playing hostess to this group who really are the mostest – well, that should put a whole lot of fun back into the game. Face it, Magdalena, you already have all the money that you will ever need. What you need now is something to stimulate that excessive accumulation of grey cells that you possess.’

‘I see,’ I said, although I didn’t. ‘What is this group? Is it some sort of high IQ society?’

Agnes had the temerity to laugh. ‘Hardly! No, I believe I have come up with a new vision for your PennDutch Inn.’

‘Please, dear, tell me all about it.’ Fortunately sarcasm contains very few calories, or I would have swelled on the spot to twice my size.

Agnes formed fists with her sticky hands and pumped them up and down like an ecstatic little schoolgirl. ‘It makes me so happy that you’re even willing to listen to my idea,’ she said. ‘Now, it’s your inn, so feel free to make changes, but I am envisioning the PennDutch as a place where European nobility might come to lay their silken curls upon your homespun pillow cases while japing and jeering at our backwards ways.’

‘
What?
’ Had I been wearing dentures, they would surely have landed on Agnes’s plate, and she might well have shoved them into her mouth and thence choked to death.

‘Oh, come on,’ Agnes said. ‘They all think that we’re nothing but yokels and rubes. Even the English think that, and some of them live in houses with thatch roofs, for goodness’ sakes. We’re never going to change their opinion of us. I read somewhere that the English objected more to the fact that Wallis Simpson was an American than that she was a twice-divorced woman of somewhat ambiguous gender. So, I say that we play to that strength. Let us be the dumbest, crudest, most culture-deprived Americans that we can be, and still be good, decent Christians.’

‘But Agnes,’ I wailed, ‘you know that I don’t belong to that political party!’

‘Leave politics out of it, Mags. You know that Obama is spying on you with those NRA whatchamacallits.’

‘That would be NSA, dear. Nonetheless, how do you propose that we reach this blue-blood, “to the manor born” clientele?’

‘Ha!
You
don’t reach them;
I
do, and I already have.’

‘
Excuse
me?’

‘I’ll excuse you just as soon as you say that you’d love to be the grossest hostess, far from having the mostest, to a genuine English earl and his wife, and an equally genuine countess.’

‘Would that be Earl Grey and his wife, the Countess Tea?’

‘I’m serious, Mags; he is the Earl of Grimsley-Snodgrass.’

‘Pardon my layperson’s curiosity, pal, but if he is an earl then why is she a countess? Why isn’t she an
earl
ess?’

‘Because that title would apply only to those women who’ve been the victims of
really
incompetent plastic surgeons.’

‘I see.’

‘Besides, Magdalena, and I didn’t really want this to be a factor in your decision, but assisting you with a project like this might help divert my mind from constantly thinking about my doc.’

There it was at last; she was playing the widow’s card. I should have seen it coming. Over the years Agnes had tried many times to improve my ‘shtick’ with her ‘helpful’ suggestions. Most of them involved her buying into the business as an equal partner
but
with creative control. Agnes had studied advertising for two years at the University of Pittsburgh, and she was convinced that I needed to ‘jazz’ up my approach to marketing. She wanted me to wear Amish clothing, even though I am Mennonite – not Amish. If that wasn’t a big enough deception, she wanted my Jewish husband to grow a beard and pose as an Amish man.
Oy gevalt!

I am not claiming to be able to judge the depth of someone’s grief, or their genuine desire to set their minds on other things, but my best friend might consider that I would also be missing her husband of only a few months. After all, I had loved the old geezer far more than Agnes ever could have. Despite the fact that he’d never been able to breech the fortress that was my sturdy Christian underwear, Doc and I had been extremely close ever since his wife died some twenty years prior, and we’d talked about everything – including his relationship with Agnes. Yes, I shall say it unequivocally: I loved the old goat more than Agnes loved him.

I, however, had
turned down
a myriad of proposals from Doc. Therefore, in the eyes of the world, my grief couldn’t hold a candle to the spinster Agnes, who had answered in the affirmative only once. No, siree, and Bob’s your uncle, if I had wanted to,
I
could be the ‘Widder Woman Shafer’ with a billy goat named Gruff to share my bed. Believe me, if our situations were reversed, I would do a far better sight of mourning. I would roll around in the dirt like some primitive tribeswoman I’d read about in a novel. And of course I’d do a fair amount of wailing and carrying on – just plain screeching too – since I’m already pretty good at that.