There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (12 page)

It couldn’t have worked out better if Maye had cast a spell herself.

Maye had just walked out of the bookstore with a dinner date and three new books hidden in her purse when she ran into a crowd of people chattering and laughing on the sidewalk between her car and the vegetarian salad-only restaurant, Let Us, next door. She got out her keys and wove between as many people as she could to get to her car, but it was like trying to fight your way through the crowd on a day that free rain barrels were being given out. “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me,” she chanted repeatedly, and she’d gotten as far as the driver’s side door when a round of cheers suddenly erupted and the people in front of her began to move and the people behind her began to push. She tried not to panic as she was moved along with the herd, holding on to her purse and reassuring herself that she was not going to get trampled to death outside of a bookstore and a salad-only restaurant. She might get a Teva imprint on her forehead, or tire tracks on her torso, but she told herself that she refused to die in a spontaneous lettuce stampede at the feet of Spaulding’s vegetarians.

“You look startled,” the graying older man next to her said as he took her elbow and gave her a cheery, full smile. “They did open the doors rather quickly. I’ll help you in!”

“Why are there so many people?” Maye asked him as she was jousted about and tried to follow his lead.

“Oh, it’s gonna be a big night,” he replied, and helped her through the door.

Once inside, Maye found an empty spot near a back wall and hovered there for a bit, curious as to what the commotion was all about. The crowd settled into the chairs around the dining tables, and the friendly man who had helped her in stood at the front of the room and called for everyone’s attention.

“Here,” a woman at a table not far from Maye whispered. “There’s a chair over here! Come sit with us!”

That’s awfully nice, Maye thought to herself as she smiled back and took the seat.

“Welcome, everyone, welcome,” the friendly man said. “I heard we have some new members among us tonight, so I will introduce myself; I’m Bob, your Vegging Out facilitator. I’d like to open tonight’s meeting with a joke. How many vegans does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Two,” the audience responded en chorus. “One to change it and one to check for animal ingredients!”

They all laughed.

“Okay,” Bob conceded, laughing heartily. “How ’bout this one: How many vegetarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

The crowd was quiet except for some murmuring. The man looked pleased.

“I don’t know!” he shouted. “But where do you get your protein?”

The audience bubbled over with hearty laughter. Even Maye cracked a smile.

Vegetarians, she thought. Hmmmm. They seem nice and welcoming, pretty normal except for the sandal-sock combo in the winter. Vegetarians would be kind and gentle. No one here wants to bathe me. So far. They have a sense of humor about themselves—that’s always a very good sign. You don’t have to pick a vegetarian name, like Patty Pea or Tommy Tomato. This could be good. This is good. This could work.

Aside from the fact that Maye was not a vegetarian. Not that she didn’t want to be, not that she didn’t find it admirable, she just found the menu rather…limiting. For Maye, cabbage parmesan really couldn’t take the place of chicken parmesan. A zucchini strip couldn’t really compare to a New York strip. Mashed potatoes and gravy just wouldn’t team up with buttermilk-fried tomatoes as it would with buttermilk-fried chicken. On Thanksgiving, she didn’t want a slice of preformed soybean loaf snuggled up next to her cranberry sauce. And tofu balls would never be the same as meatballs, no matter what anybody said. Maye had attempted to eat a vegetarian hot dog once, and it was akin to biting into a rolled-out tube of Play-Doh. She frankly did not care that it was intestine casing that gave real hot dogs a little
pop
! on the bite; the limp, flaccid tofu dog seemed much more deceased that any Nathan’s dog she had ever gobbled up.

Could she give up meat? she asked herself silently. Could she, if it meant gaining friends? She didn’t eat meat every day anyway, maybe only every other day. She loved macaroni and cheese. Could she do it? Plus, cows are pretty, she reminded herself.

“Let me remind you all that the potluck dinner is next weekend, so please sign up for the vegetable that you are going to honor in your dish so that all of our vegetable friends may be represented,” Bob continued.

Maye tried very hard to ignore that.

Then someone read a poem about a cucumber (Maye tried to ignore that, too), people discussed how they were going to celebrate National Soup Month, which was in January (ignore), the treasurer announced that the Vegging Out cookbooks were at the printers and would be delivered by the next meeting.

“And now,” Bob announced, “is the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Thank you all for being so patient. After a count and recount, it is officially announced that the…drumroll, please…” Someone at one of the front tables, most likely one of Bonnie’s dueling drum-circling neighbors, strummed his hands on the table to accelerate the excitement. “The vegetable of the month IS…”—he smiled as he tore open the envelope—“a BEET! It’s a BEET!”

Half of the club clapped and cheered, while the other half scowled and grumbled.

“Why does the beet get it?” a woman with waist-length gray hair said as she stubbornly crossed her arms. “Beets are the unsexiest vegetable you can find! They’re hairy, bumpy, and dirty, like my ex-husband!”

“Beets are beautiful,” a woman in a poncho said. “They come in purple, pink, and white. How can anything purple and pink be ugly?”

“Well, there was Boris Yeltsin’s nose…” a man from the back tossed in. He received a collective chuckle.

“And the inside of a sweet potato is the color of a tequila sunrise,” the first woman bickered. “I was really campaigning for the sweet potato. I just don’t feel like it’s gotten its due respect. You can bake it, mash it, fry it, it’s the chameleon of the winter, and it gets confused with its evil twin, the yam. It’s versatile, it’s fresh; the sweet potato is the new asparagus. I’m telling you. I read it in
Herbivore Today
. I just want to be ahead of the curve before everyone starts doing the sweet potato. We need to jump on this NOW.”

“Maybe the sweet potato’s time will come next month,” Bob offered. “I see some new faces here. If we have potential new members, I’ll leave the Vegging Out info sheets on this table right here. And now, the meeting is closed.”

Maye sat back in her chair as the rest of the group stood up and milled about, socializing. She watched as they laughed, chatted, and exchanged earnest pleasantries like they were all old war buddies or school friends. I want that, Maye said to herself. Although there are benefits to having no one in town who knows you, like being able to go to the grocery store in the purple sweat suit with old rice clinging to the zipper, I want friends. I want to invite people over for dinner, even if it is only for a bunch of side dishes. I want to bump into people I know at the store instead of stalking them. I just want to be a part of something.

I want to know people. And these people seem so nice, except for the sweet potato advocate, who is apparently one beet away from staging her own sweet potato coup.

And just like that, Maye stood up, walked to the front of the room, and picked up a Vegging Out info sheet.

“Hmmmm,” she heard a voice say from behind her. “Do we have another convert, or are you a beet hater, too?”

“Oh, no, I love beets,” Maye said, laughing, as she turned around and faced Bob. “Roasted with goat cheese, olive oil, and a pinch of sea salt. Now
that
is sexy food.”

“Whaddya think?” Bob said, flashing a bright, white smile. “Are you ready to join up?”

“I don’t see why not,” she decided, and nodded once.

“Okay then!” Bob cheered. “We have a short questionnaire to fill out. Ready?”

“Sure,” Maye said.

“Why are you a vegetarian?” Bob asked.

“I think it’s something I need to do right now,” she answered, then suddenly added, “and cows are pretty.”

“They
are
pretty,” Bob agreed, still smiling. “Now, what kind of vegetarian are you?”

Maye was stumped. There were different kinds? Did he mean a sweet potato person or a beet lover? Did she have to profess an allegiance to a fruit and a vegetable? Or maybe there was a Greenpeace kind or a PETA kind? She was lost. She had no idea what kind of vegetarian she should lie to be. Vegetarians would know what kind they were. She had to answer—the danger of exposure was so close it was dancing on her fingertips. “Um,” she stumbled. “The nice kind?”

“Well, it needs to be more specific than that,” Bob said, laughing. “Are you demi/semi, pesco, lacto-ovo, ovo, lacto, vegan, macrobiotic, fruitarian, or not sure?”

Maye was stunned. She knew what vegan was, but everything else was a meatless mystery.
Ovo
made Maye think of ovaries, and although she wanted friends, that terrain was a little too personal. She knew
lacto
had something to do with milk, and if breast-feeding was involved here, especially on a community level, she was going to run faster than she did from the witch’s house.
Lacto-ovo
sounded like it bordered on pornography, and
macrobiotic
seemed like it had something to do with a combination of economics and science, an emphasis Maye found even more distressing than the community breast-feeding.

“Not sure,” Maye replied, figuring that being noncommittal was the best option. No one likes to be pigeonholed. Or beet-holed, in a vegetarian’s case.

“Does it bother you to watch others eat meat?” Bob asked, and Maye was thankful he’d moved on to the next question.

She bit her lip. She really wanted to say, “Oh, certainly, if the person can’t close their mouth when they chew like my Uncle Ray since the accident,” but instead she replied, “Absolutely. Like I said, cows are pretty.”

“I feel that way, too,” Bob said softly. “Last one. How long have you been a vegetarian?”

Maye thought for a moment. What was today? Tuesday? She hadn’t had dinner yet, had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch, and couldn’t for the life of her remember what she’d eaten the day before.

“Seems like quite a while,” she lied honestly.

“Well, congratulations, you’re now a Vegging Outer,” Bob said as he handed her a schedule of the month’s club events and looked over her sheet of personal contact information. “We are happy to have you…Maye, is it?”

“Maye Roberts,” she answered.

“Welcome, Maye Roberts,” Bob said. “There’s nothing in the world that makes me happier than finding another vegetarian.”

“Thanks, Bob.” Maye smiled and nodded, wondering if this was the sort of thing that a person might wind up going to hell for.

Cucumber, cucumber,
Green, long and round,
Emerald of my garden,
Sleeping gemstone on the ground.
Cucumber, cucumber,
A versatile fruit is thee;
Brave and rugged in a salad
Or dainty sandwiches fit for tea.
Cucumber, cucumber,
Far too fine for the likes of smut
As any doctor will tell you
It doesn’t belong in a butt.

Maye giggled as she recited the poem for Bonnie over a glass of wine.

“You are kidding,” Bonnie replied with a grin on her face, then took the last sip from her wineglass. “Someone stood up and actually read that?”

“I couldn’t make that up,” Maye replied. “There was almost a fistfight over whether a beet or a sweet potato was more worthy of Vegetable of the Month!”

“Oh, sweet potato, definitely,” Bonnie said as she falsely furrowed her brow. “Everyone knows it’s the new asparagus!”

“Most of them were very nice, though,” Maye added. “You should come with me to the next meeting. I think it’s going to be a great way to meet people.”

So far, on Maye and Bonnie’s friend date, everything was going swimmingly at La Vaca Bonita, the Spanish restaurant Bonnie had heard about. Maye had gotten the A-OK from her plumber, who not only said he’d drink an open soda from the place but also strongly suggested the
filete poblano
, what he considered the strongest dish on the menu. “The layering of flavors is impeccable,” he declared. “You’ll dream about it for three days afterward.”

So Maye followed his advice and ordered it, as did Bonnie. Over their second glass of wine, they talked about their former careers at newspapers, and Bonnie told Maye how she’d followed her TV-reporter boyfriend to town when he was offered an anchor position, only to have the relationship disintegrate within months.

“Wow, that must have been really hard for you,” Maye said. “You didn’t know anyone else in town?”

“Not a soul,” Bonnie replied. “And not only do I have to see him on the news every night, but also the
whore
he left me for!”

Maye winced slightly. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she offered.

“Yeah.” Bonnie nodded, taking another swig from her glass. “Doesn’t get any more predictable than that. I was dumped for the weather girl. Fake boobs, bleached hair, nose job, you name it. The only original thing on that girl is her belly button, and I’m sure she has something shiny and cute dangling from
it
.”

That would be horrible, Maye thought, if Charlie brought me up here and then dumped me for another professor, or worse, a grad student. What would she do then? Drink all the wine I could get my hands on and use the word
whore
as much as possible, she concluded.

Suddenly, Maye smelled something wonderful, and she looked up to see their server set before each of them a dish of a steaming poblano-wrapped filet with roasted garlic mashed potatoes and last season’s “it” vegetable, asparagus.

“I need another glass of wine,” Bonnie said, with a somewhat curt flip of her hand toward the waiter. “This looks so good. I haven’t eaten a thing all day. I’m starving!”

“Well, let’s dig in,” Maye said, her fork and knife poised to cut into the filet, which indeed looked incredible.

“Aw, I’m going to wait for my wine,” Bonnie said. “I can’t stand to eat without a drink.”