The Death of Pie (6 page)

‘Stuff and
nun
sense,' I said. ‘I am, in fact, the de facto investigator in the murder of Ramat Sreym, the
nebbish
novelist who
plotzed
in a pie.'

Ida yanked her fat, fumbling fingers out of her habit and pointed one at me. Given the meatiness of said digits, it looked like all five were aimed in my direction.

‘
Vhat?
' she rasped. ‘I dun't understand a verd you are saying, Magdalena. Not a verd, but eet eez lies, all lies.'

I patted my empty holster again, and displayed a little attitude in the way I cocked my bony left hip. ‘Hmm, if you ask me, this place is just begging for a few citations. When is the last time you've had your kitchen inspected? You have any illegals working here? How about you? Your accent sounds funny to me.'

My mother-in-law ripped off her wimple, and I could see that her face was the color of boiled rice. ‘It vas only one rat,' she said. ‘A small von – OK, so maybe not so small. Who knew dat dey make business like chocolate sprinkle? You know dis ting, Magdalena? So vhen Sister Distemper put dis sprinkle on zee cake zat I bring over for my Gabeleh's birzday—'

‘Stop!' I shouted. ‘That cake was delicious.'

Her oversized face regained some color as she nodded her head vigorously. ‘Yah, like see cupcakes zat vee donated to zee school bake sale, no?'

‘No!'

‘Vaht you mean “no? ” You dun't remember?'

‘Of course, you ninny – I mean, you nunny. Can I please come in, so that I can get to the purpose of my visit?'

‘Yah, sure. But first you tell me, did you see zat beautiful chocolate pie zat Sister Distemper enter in zee pie contest last veek? Such an artist, zat von!'

‘Pie, schmie,' I said and swept past her. Then with all the authority bestowed upon me vis-à-vis the status of a pretend police woman, a counterfeit cop and an invertebrate investigator (I have been called spineless, mind you), I pushed through a pair of sagging wrought-iron gates and up the steps of the two-hundred-year-old wooden farmhouse.

There was no point in ringing the bell, as it had not been working for a dozen years. Knocking soon proved futile as well, so with Mother Superior, aka Mother Malaise, aka Ida Rosen, aka the Great Horned Owl, flapping at my rear, I merely opened the door and stepped into the empty main room. The farmhouse, otherwise known as the convent, had been added on to by the cult in a higgledy-piggledy fashion. Sister Disheartened, who had once been an architect, had eventually succeeded in connecting several outbuildings with the main house. It had been Mother Superior's desire to have a space where apathetic postulates could wander listlessly about, contemplate their
pupiks
(Yiddish for navels), and perhaps occasionally even pray. The end result was a large courtyard with a whitewashed tractor tyre as its centerpiece. The tyre had originally been intended as a flower bed, but since no one had the energy or the inclination to plant real flowers, I'd taken it upon myself to stick some rather lovely silk flowers in it when I changed the old silk flowers from my parents' graves last spring and replaced them with new ones.

Mother Superior, aka Mother Malaise, aka Ida Rosen, aka the mother-in-law
not
from Heaven soon caught up with me, and since the weather was pleasant we sat outside in the courtyard on a pair of rickety wooden folding chairs. I had a perfect view of the white tyre, and I was pleased to see that the good sisters had also lacked the oomph to remove the price tag on the bouquet from Mama's grave. I usually remove Papa's price tag, but Mama was so tight when it came to money that she could pinch a penny so that not only could it scream, it could sing a Lady Gaga song – in four-part harmony, no less. Once, when I was thirteen, and I
needed
fifty cents so I could buy you-know-what in an emergency situation from that dispenser in the girls' lavatory at school, she refused to let me have it; I had to sit on my book bag all the way home. So now I leave the tag on Mama's bouquet just to make her spin a couple of times. Besides, given all the electricity that she generates, I see it as a way to reduce my carbon footprint – maybe even that of my entire family.

At any rate, no sooner had my bony butt hit the seat of that rickety chair than Ida was all over me like butter on popcorn. ‘Now vee talk,' she said.

‘Yes, now you will talk. Ida, it is no secret that you found Ramat Sreym's depiction of you in her book to be insulting.'

The massive head recoiled. ‘Vhat? Are you meshuggeneh? Zat voman vas a terrific vriter. Von of zee best, eef you ask me – like Tolstoy or Pushkin, mebbe.'

‘Uh—'

‘Vhat? You never hear of deez men?'

‘Yes, I hear of deez men – I mean,
these
men. Look, Ida, you moved here from Brooklyn two years ago, but sometimes your Yiddish accent is worse than when you arrived. Then, on other days, you have hardly any accent. How can this be?'

My nemesis shrugged and smiled just enough to display her gold tooth. Why had I even bothered to ask? Ida Rosen might be old, but she was far from helpless. Like every female, everywhere, she had been born knowing how to manipulate her father. (Surely this is the reason why the word ‘manipulate' begins with the word man.) However, Ida had progressed to become a master manipulator, bar none, and her fluctuating accent was just one of her many tools. Unfortunately the Babester was her most frequent victim.

‘Nu, Magdalena, do you vant to discuss accents wiz me, or do you vant dat vee should put our kophs togedder and find zee man who killed zat vonderful voman, my dear friend, Ramat Sreym?'

‘Your friend?' I gasped in disbelief. ‘You didn't like her one little bit.' Gabe's mother was an all-too-frequent visitor at my establishment, and the two women often ran into each other—sometimes quite literally.

‘I din't?'

‘You din't! She constantly made fun of you. She described you as being shaped like a triangle standing on a point. She said that you had enormous bosoms and a humongous head. She had you speaking in an atrocious accent and mollycoddling your son. She even had you cutting his meat, for crying out loud!'

Ida beamed. ‘Yah, eez all true.'

‘Yes, but don't you see how emasculating that description of Gabriel is to him? Do you really want your son, a prominent, retired cardiologist, to be seen as a Mama's boy?'

‘Eez nozzing wrong wiz dat. You vill see, Magdalena. Und anyvay, zees voman, she had zee hots for my Gabeleh, und she said zat eef you vood haf set him free, zen she vood haf converted und moved back to Brooklyn wif us.'

‘Converted?'

‘She vood haf become Jewish.' So saying, Ida crossed her paddle-like hands, on account of her bosom being so bountiful that her stubby arms couldn't reach any further.

‘Why, that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. People aren't supposed to convert
away
from Christianity; if anything, Gabe should become a Christian!'

‘What? And turn his back on four thousand years of Judaism?'

It was a good thing we were sitting, because my jaw dropped into my lap. Ida Rosen had suddenly lost
all
trace of her Eastern European accent. In fact, she sounded more Milwaukee than New York.

I slapped my jaw back into place. ‘Golda Meir!' I cried. ‘Have you reincarnated?'

‘Vhat?'

‘Don't “vhat” me, Ida. A second ago you sounded like a native-born Midwesterner. I've always suspected that there was something fishy about your accent. Now it's time to fess up; just who is the real Ida Rosen and where are you from?'

Ida jumped to her feet. This was not an easy maneuver, due to her monstrous bosoms and oversized head. Yes, I know, I could have let her land face down, but then I would have missed yet another opportunity to feel self-righteous. That said, I jumped spritely to my boat-sized feet and pulled her upright before her noggin could hit the pavement of the garden path, taking great care to stay out of the trajectory of that enormous bobbing head.

‘S-s-spy?' she finally sputtered. ‘Eez dat vaht you tink I am?'

‘I didn't say that – well, not exactly.'

‘Yah, but dat is vaht you deferred, no?'

‘Hmm. Out of deference to you, I'll leave that one alone.'

‘Riddles! Always mit zee riddles wiz you, Magdalena. You come here casting precisions on my friends und me, und den you start talking in deez riddles like some crazy voman. Nu, how can I be happy wiz my leetle Jacob, my bubbeleh, growing up wiz a meshuggeneh voman for his mama? Tell me, already, vaht vill happen to my poor grandson now dat his future stepmother eez dead?'

‘
Oy gvalt
,' I growled, having picked up those Yiddish words a long time ago from this very
kvetching
grandmother herself. ‘Look, dear, before I skedaddle, let me make myself perfectly clear: Little Jacob is the fruit of my looms, so to speak. I'm the one who endured the thirty-six hours of agonizing labor—'

‘Eez dat so? From vaht I hear, you shoot him out on zee floor of a grocery store een feefteen minutes.'

‘Maybe so, but they were fifteen minutes of agonizing pain. Although let's not forget the three agonizing minutes it took to get him in there in the first place.'

Am I ever glad that I don't believe in karma! How I would hate for it to turn around and bite me. I can only imagine the pain that a mother must feel to hear her daughter-in-law reference sex with her son. Oh, how cruel I had been to poor little Ida! This time I had definitely gone too far. I'd intentionally tried to pluck the oedipal strings that bound her to my husband, knowing full well that whatever I said on that score would crush her.

‘Ach,' I said, settling back hard onto my rickety wooden chair. ‘I went too far that time; sometimes the most unchristian things just slip out of my mouth.'

‘Plez,' my mother-in-law said, smiling like a Cheshire cat, ‘eez nahsing to vory about. Be-leaf me; I hear eet all before. My Gabeleh steel complains about his vedding night. Mama, he says—'

The worse thing about rickety wooden chairs is that they sometimes come with peeling plywood seats. The seat that I'd been directed to sit on was a virtual nest of splinters. Unfortunately I happened to be wearing a very inexpensive skirt, which was a cotton-poly blend with an open weave. The resulting combination was not unlike Velcro, so that when I leapt to my feet a second time, the chair seat broke loose from its moorings and came with me. Thus it was that as I strode angrily out of the courtyard and back through the main hall of the Convent of Perpetual Apathy, a roughly square piece of manmade wood flapped against my bottom, rudely spanking me with each step.

W
here does one go after being bested by the empress of platitudes, the nun of everything
nun
sensical, she who is the antithesis of apathy? Why, if one is Magdalena Portulacca Yoder Rosen, then one would drive straight into charming little Hernia then out again on Corkscrew Mountain Road. One would then drive another four miles on a bumpy gravel road with so many tight turns that it is sure to remind one of a horse's colon. Perhaps it is best just to trust me on that.

The point of the aforementioned travelogue is to demonstrate how great my affection was for Agnes Miller, who I was about to visit, and who, coincidentally, was also on Chief Toy's list. We had been best friends our entire lives, and after college our bond was strengthened by the shared knowledge that the two of us would inevitably remain lifelong spinsters. Then when the unbelievable happened and I married a bigamist, Agnes stuck by me, like a tigress to her cub. She never, ever judged me. Agnes never waivered in her faithfulness to me, not even when all of Hernia called me a Jezebel for marrying outside my faith.

The only negative thing I can say about Agnes really doesn't have as much to do with her as it does her septuagenarian uncles. Agnes belongs to a very liberal branch of the Mennonite Church, but these two loony uncles of hers became Presbyterians, then Unitarians, before quitting religion altogether. This, then, explains their total lack of shame and their unfettered delight in parading around in the altogether, which is ‘American' for stark naked. It is bad enough to catch a glimpse of the brothers on a chilly day in, say, autumn or spring, but woe to the woman who finds herself staring face-to-face (actually down-in-front) with either of them on a warm September morning, as I was now.

We Americans are fanatics about equality. We even have it in our constitution that ‘all men are created equal.' Although the Miller brothers were the only nude men I've ever seen standing side by side, if I were to extrapolate from this one example, I would have to conclude that the Good Lord did indeed play favourites. Either that, or God has a bizarre sense of humour. On this particular morning the brothers were standing in the middle of the road, shoulder-to-shoulder, facing oncoming traffic. Since I have a scientific bent (well, I did ace biology in high school) I thought it my duty to at least observe the situation in front of me carefully before tooting my horn. After a rather thorough study, and some photos on my cell phone, I concluded that a pony and a chipmunk were the two images that came to mind.

‘I say there, Magdalena,' called the brother of equine proportions as he approached on the driver's side, ‘you're supposed to try and pass.'

I shut my eyes tightly. ‘I do, dear; believe it, or not, pass for sane. The two of you, however, might need to have your meds readjusted. I'll be sending those pictures on to your caseworker in Bedford. Does she know that the two of you are still running around like Adam before the Fall?'

That's when the poor brother with the rodent-sized equipment ran around to the passenger window and commenced banging on the glass. With my eyes closed, the pounding took me by surprise. I felt violated, and then suddenly very angry. Stupidly I lowered both front windows so that I could better confront the pair of senile old men.