Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  Okay, so maybe she was exaggerating just a tad. Her parents didn’t ask all that much of her. It’s not like they made her earn her keep by mucking the leaves out of the eavestroughs or flipping the mattresses. In fact, chore-wise, her contribution to the household was minimal. The real rub with this living arrangement was that her mum and dad clung like dog hair.

  Helicopter parenting was the fashionable new name for the phenomenon, but why not call a spade a spade, Evie thought. It was Jewish parents who had trowelled the concept out of the grudging soil of their old-country gardens when their right-thinking gentile neighbours spurned it as a weed; Jewish parents who had spiced it and flavoured it over generations of shtetl cooking fires; Jewish parents who had distilled it and casked it, elevating it to its current state of perfection, until finally the sociologists, casting frantically about for an untapped area of scholarly inquiry seized it for their own, spaying the Yiddishkeit out of it and proclaiming its universality.

  Evie’s first apartment after she left home had been a disaster. So frequently did her parents drop by unannounced to check up on her that she should by rights have stuck them for half the rent. She’d chosen the spot strategically, settling deep in the bowels of a French Canadian quartier, way the hell out in the east end, a neighbourhood as remote and forbidding to her mother and father as the far side of the moon. But she’d miscalculated the extent and power of the umbilical lasso. Turns out her mother hadn’t the least trouble parallel parking her Beemer SUV outside Evie’s Québécois working-class digs.

  The experience was instructive at least. When her lease on the dump was up, she combed every corner of Montreal to scope out the perfect building, one where her parents would feel so viscerally repelled they would never dare to pop in, lodgings that to them were so odious, so redolent of menace that her privacy would be assured forevermore. It took months of assiduous scouting until Evie hit pay dirt, a pert condo in one of the converted convents scattered around town. Too pricy maybe, but the hole in her wallet would rebound in time. There were hundreds of condofied church properties out there to choose from now that so many parishes had gone bust, former presbyteries, chapels, even cathedrals divvied up into trendy housing units. Any one of those rockpiles of religious patrimony might have done the trick, but Evie was taking no chances this time around. She opted for the structure that had been renovated with the lightest hand. Its ex-choirboy architect had taken care not to mess with the arched windows, the vaulted ceilings or the monastic corridors. He’d even preserved the chute in the convent’s front wall that had allowed generations of unwed mothers to discreetly unload their newborns like an overdue novel in a library book drop. In short, he’d kept all the papal chazzerei that lent the ecclesiastical real estate its special je ne sais quoi, deconsecrated or no. It was the kayo Evie’d been striving for.

  To look at them, you’d figure her parents were sophisticated, enlightened even. But she knew that if you scratched the surface of their tanning-bed biceps, it released their inner peasant who resided just beneath the skin like the Borrowers under the floorboards. Evie’s mother and father were suckled on ancient taboos and superstitions. An instinctive fear of other religions and their voodoo rituals coursed through their bloodstream, doing the breaststroke alongside the globs of cholesterol. Her parents’ unease in houses of worship outside the fold was acute and debilitating. Mere proximity to spires, domes, or cupolas could unleash the transmogrifying effect they’d described to her time and again in an effort to justify their blatant unecumenicalism.

  First, her mother would feel a faint psoriasis itch in her scalp, right up top. Next thing she knew, a pair of horns would periscope up from her curls. A few minutes later, she experienced the feathery tickle that preceded a sneeze, and then boom, the historic curve of her rhinoplastied shnoz reasserted itself, arcing like a dolphin on re-entry. Her father’s symptoms were necessarily different, the nibbled-off baguette of his shlong rising up and announcing Heb as if with a bullhorn. And it wasn’t just the brick and mortar of cathedral or mosque that tripped the wire. Exposure to just about anything that reeked of foreign-ness, of otherness was liable to kick-start their Bruce Banner metamorphosis. Even a simple curry harboured within its tidal pool of sauce, specimen yellow, the microbial cocktail that could knock their DNA temporarily out of whack. Better to steer clear; that was their motto. Evie was safe now, impervious, cloaked in her clerical lead blanket that carried a lifetime guarantee, proud of the originality that graced her solution.

  Except that it wasn’t so original after all. Evie’s convent-condo neighbours, a youngish crowd, all claimed to have chosen the building on the strength of its heritage architecture. Publicly, they spun their new address as a safe-ish first dalliance with the residential real estate market, but in almost every case the decision to live in a nun’s cell with en suite amounted to some sort of settling of accounts parent-wise. It had more spit-in-your-eye payback than any tactic they’d tried before; more than the keffiyah they wore home on Rosh Hashanah, the shiksa they dangled in front of bubbe, the threat of an uncircumcised shmeckel on their future sons, or, God forbid, vocational school. It was the master-zetz. Evie fit right in.

  Chapter 2

  “SHOOT THE TOFU kreplach down this way, Evie. Would you please?”

  “Okay, but only if you’ll send the cholent back over here in exchange, s’il te plaît.”

  “Mosh, slice me off another piece of your challah. It’s to die for.”

  “I tried the kamut this time. You don’t find it too heavy?”

  “No, very airy. Just right.”

  “It’s a bit resistant to braiding, though. It keeps wanting to come unsprung.” Moshe glowered at his challah as if faced with a brassy teenaged daughter challenging his parental authority. The challah’s cleavage had come out more daring than he’d ever intended, exposing altogether too much virginal white between the sun-tanned mounds. With every loaf of bread he shaped, Moshe felt a Jean Valjean bond.

  “I’ll have to fiddle with the recipe. Or maybe I’ll just go back to the spelt, like I used last week. Now that’s an obedient dough. Once you separate it into ropes, you can do anything you want with it.”

  “Try it out sometime instead of those handcuffs you keep by your bed, why don’t you?”

  “Comedian. But you know the plaited rope shape is interesting, not strictly Jewish in origin at all. It goes back to…”

  “Spare us your baker-shpiel for once Moshe. Have a heart.” Normand took the floor. “In the beginning, there was…”

  “YEAST.” The assembly responded in perfect unison under his baton.

  “It fermented and burbled and grew until it created the world. The earth as we know it is nothing but a giant pumpernickel.”

  “You laugh,” Moshe broke in, honour bound to defend the dignity of the brotherhood of bakers against those who would mock, “but carbon-dated samples prove that flatbreads existed in Neolithic times.”

  “Yeah, we know, we know. An archaeologist dug up the remains of an ancient matzo from the site of a caveman seder.”

  “And he bit off a corner and it tasted just like fresh.”

  It all started out as a loosey-goosey Friday night potluck, an anarchic agglomeration of baguettes, spaghetti, uninspired potato salads, and cakes, store-bought; a dinner so over-starched all it was missing was a cummerbund and black tie. Evie, as hostess, took in the gaps nutritional and embarked on a personal mission to see to it that the offerings were fleshed out. She masterminded an assignment roster, and thanks to her manoeuvring the meal pulled up its socks. Now she could count on her guests from the building arriving at her door every Friday bearing on white Ikea porcelain their most audacious culinary experiments; dishes that pegged every chamber of the Canadian Food Pyramid.

  It was meant to be an end of the week wind-down. That was the genesis. The fact that it was on Shabbos a mere quirk of the calendar, of no significance to the
minyan of young Jews gathered round the table. But somehow, over time, the menu took a turn. The Friday night schmaltz herring of their childhood morphed into sushi, the chicken soup segued into miso, and the brisket transubstantiated into seitan. Their intention had been to set out a secular meal, one with no tip of the hat to their common heritage, but some things just can’t be forced. The overall effect of a sabbath spread was too glaring to deny, so instead they ran with it, revelling in the messy signals sent out by what came to be known as their Anti-Shabbos meal.

  Dr. Spock could probably have explained the schizoid need of these twenty and thirty-somethings to simultaneously repudiate their parents and emulate them, a development that should have manifested itself back when they were thirteen years old. Such a tight cluster of late-onset cases was surely one for the textbooks, but in the end, what did it matter? Here they were, settled cozily into their ex-nunnery with rules and rituals of their own devising, the Anatevka farm team on the banks of the Saint Lawrence.

  “Evie, you’re hogging the roast kasha. Nobody at our end of the table has even seen it up close, let alone had a chance to taste it.”

  “If you’re plugged up, nothing beats kasha,” Dizzy pointed out with authority. “An hour after eating it and everything will shoot right out of you like cannon balls.” Dizzy was blessed. She had a knack for documenting a food’s healing properties in such a way that removed all desire to consume it.

  “Hel-lo, did you happen to notice we’re eating here? Enough with the scatological talk if you don’t mind,” Evie said. “I’m trying to run a classy establishment here.”

  “A salon she thinks this is. Like she’s Mme. de Staël.”

  “Or Oprah.”

  “Just a little decorum is all I’m asking. Is that so hard? I swear sometimes you vulgarians are too much to put up with.”

  “Excuse me O Ms. Defender of the English Language, but don’t you mean to say ‘you vulgarians are too much up with which to put?’”

  “Remind me again, would you, why I open my door to you lowlifes every week?”

  It was a while before they noticed him standing by the table. “I knocked but no one answered. The door was open so I took the liberty of coming in. This package got dropped through the slot at my place by mistake. I thought it might be important so I brought it up. I’m sorry to have barged in. I didn’t realize you had a party going on.”

  He was a small man, trimly turned out, of an age difficult to pin down, somewhere on that sliding scale of decline between their fathers and grandfathers. His scalp, with a light cinnamon shake of liver spots, had managed to extrude a spindly ponytail of the type favoured by older men hoping to flash the signal that if their follicles were still in working order, by implication so was all their other equipment.

  Everyone round the table recognized the intruder, though if pressed, none would have been able to attach a name to the face. He lived in the ground floor apartment that looked out over the street. His front door was just inside the complex’s main entryway. The unit he called home was the dinkiest in the joint; that they all knew. In the days not so long past when they were staking out their respective spots in the about-to-open complex, the realtor had placed the double-rolled blueprints on her bima and unscrolled them for her clients to peruse. They uniformly pooh-poohed unit 101A, and why not? It was no more than a glorified pencil case. Back in its holy days it had probably been the domain of the convent doorkeeper. By positioning that flat should have devolved to the condo’s concierge, but Mme. Côté put up an almighty flap over its beggarly dimensions and jockeyed the developer into roomier, though less practically situated quarters down the corridor. Eventually the poor little rebuffed apartment found its soulmate in the gentleman now standing tableside, holding out a parcel. He never spoke much, just a simple bonjour in passing. His speech to Evie represented the longest string of words any of them had ever heard emerge from his mouth.

  Evie stood up and relieved him of the box. “Thank you so much for the special delivery. I’m sorry to have been a nuisance. I’m Evie Troy, like the box label says.” They shook hands. “And it’s not a party actually, just a little get-together we have every Friday night for some of us in the building.” She belatedly remembered her manners. “Please sit down. Join us.”

  “No, no, I don’t want to disturb. I’ll leave you to your company. Au revoir. It was nice meeting you.”

  “Wait, I insist. You’re more than welcome. Really. It’s no trouble, and there’s plenty of food to go around as you can see.” She swept her arm over a table so chock-a-block with platters that every shift required a Rubik’s Cube remanipulation of the entire array. She yelled over her shoulder, “ManU, go get another folding chair out of the bedroom, would you please? Dany, Judy, scootch down and make room for Monsieur...?”

  “Médéry. Jean-Gabriel Médéry.”

  “No kidding. That’s an easy name to remember. Ever meet your namesake?”

  “We move in different circles.”

  “Well, you’re in our circle now.” Evie set the empty chair beside her own place and gently pulled her conscript down to occupy it. She gave Jean-Gabriel a guided tour of the table, matching every dish up with its contributor by way of introduction.

  “Over here we have kugel, Désirée’s specialty.”

  “Kugel?”

  “Noodle pudding.” Dizzy deconstructed her casserole for the gringo’s edification. “It’s non-dairy. If that’s important to you I mean, and gluten free too. Certified.”

  “They certify such things?” he asked her.

  “Absolutely, there’s a governing body.”

  “Tiens, who would have thought?”

  “Here’s a challah, baked by our own Moshe over there.” Moshe wiggled his fingers in greeting. “He’s a professional baker, at the Fromentier over on Laurier.”

  “Apprentice.” Moshe clarified. These gradations mattered to him. Only once his master-baker’s diploma was conferred upon him would he allow himself to be addressed with the unqualified title. Let lowly interns refer to themselves as Dr.; let sessional lecturers sign off as Professor; Moshe refused to take the liberty pre-sheepskin. His principles forbade it. One had to respect the dignity of the appellation.

  “Over there is tempeh brisket, Emmanuel’s signature dish, spicy though, so watch out. It packs a real kick. ManU, take a bow. Then there’s seitan chopped liver, from Zach in the corner, my arugula salad, and Diane’s faux prune chicken.”

  “Faux prunes or faux chicken?”

  “It’s the chicken. Soya.”

  “So you’re all vegetarian.” Jean-Gabriel drew the natural conclusion.

  “No, actually, we’re not, at least not all of us, although I guess it does look that way,” Evie said. “See, it all started out as a least common denominator potluck. Very egalitarian.”

  “It was Evie’s brainchild,” Judy informed their visitor.

  “One of her wackier innovations,” Dany chipped in, “and that’s saying something.”

  “Thanks for that, you.” Evie turned back to the newcomer and read the puzzlement behind his gaze. Clearly he was trying to figure out exactly where in the taxonomy of smorgasbords their aberrant salad bar ought logically to be classed. She undertook to explain the rules of the game. “See, Judy wouldn’t eat meat, so we eliminated it from the menu, sliced it right off the top. Zach has a thing about fish, the result of some childhood malentendu with an overbony piece of smoked sable, so we axed that too, in deference to him.”

  “And then nuts were verboten on account of Evie.” Normand added.

  “You’re allergic, then.”

  “No, although I might as well be. My father runs a nut-free catering firm. Sannoix. Maybe you’ve heard of it? He supplies Air Canada with guaranteed nutless snacks for all their flights. The only carrier in the country to take the pledge and he snagged the contract. It turned him int
o a fanatic. My mother too. For them, the prohibition against nuts was total and it didn’t stop at the plant. Even at our house it was considered sacrilege to serve any. If either of us kids had ever asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch they would have taken it like a knife to the heart. To them nuts were the enemy. They had to be kept out at all costs. Like polio germs. Anyway, it turned me into a lifelong nut-o-phobe.” Evie kept to herself all the other assorted phobes she’d picked up growing up in the bosom of that family; it was still early days.

  She shrugged her shoulders at the familial alimentary quirk and resumed her explanation. “Dizzy eats nothing but organic. For Diane it’s no mushrooms. Shira there’s a vegan. Her we just toss a banana once in a while. But you get the picture. All those exclusions for this one and that one practically brought us down to bread and water. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call festive. So we worked our way back up the food chain with dishes that most of us would eat.”

  “No meat or poultry, though.” Dizzy, who ran a natural foods store on St. Viateur provided this emendation. “There’s a level beneath which we won’t sink.”

  A pause ensued while their visitor checked out the groaning board. “I don’t eat anything that’s green,” Jean-Gabriel volunteered, suddenly feeling a kinship, however stretched, with his building’s young stable of quasi-herbivores.

  “All right. A food grudge. This we like.” Evie grabbed a plate and piled it high with every entrée that lacked chlorophyll, and set it before her new acquaintance who dug right in.

  Evie settled herself into her cubicle Monday morning and checked her inbox for the day’s assignment of stiffs. Uninspiring as usual, a washed-up Expos player and a Liberal Party bag man. A light day. She checked their names against the newspaper’s database for previous coverage and collated the high points of their lukewarm careers. After only two hours at the keyboard she’d compacted their lives into the veal pens of her assigned word limits and it wasn’t even lunch time.