Evie, the Baby and the Wife

by Phyllis Rudin

  “It’s our goal to wipe section 251 off the books. And we’re damn well gonna do it.”

  Marilyn eyeballed the pattern a second time. She plucked a pair of jumbo demo needles out of the bin beside her, found a half-ball of variegated afghan wool and set to work. In no time at all her customer could see the womb taking shape. This girl might be a bit of an airhead, but she was as proficient with needles as any heroine addict. She continued talking while Marilyn knit; she knit as if there were no tomorrow. “We’re planning a protest in Ottawa.” She could sense Marilyn’s ears pricking up. Ottawa wasn’t that far away, three hours max by Voyageur. “But we’re starting out from Vancouver. That’s where I’m from. I’m only here in Montreal for a few days, doing some advance work. I’m flying back home tonight. Do you think you can give me a quick lesson before I take off?”

  “I can do better than that,” she said. And Marilyn, who until that moment had been the very model of filial obedience, reached into the till and cleared it of the week’s takings. Surely it was enough to cover her plane ticket to Vancouver and then some. She hesitated at the door as if she were entertaining second thoughts and then walked back into the store. She ducked behind the counter and from the second shelf down pulled out some extra large shopping bags imprinted with her father’s beloved logo, Abie’s Knitterie, written out in looping stitches using a simple knit one purl two repeat. Marilyn stuffed them with enough needles and skeins of heavy worsted to supply a regiment preparing for training exercises in the high arctic. The two weightier bags she carried herself. The other two she presented to her liege, bobbing her head slightly. This time when Marilyn reached the door she flipped the sign to closed, locked up as usual, and dropped her keys through the mail slot, the mantle of her future to assume.

  Chapter 4

  IT WAS A DOUBLE WHAMMY TONIGHT. Shabbos and the first Passover seder duking it out on the same cramped calendar square. Evie had taken the day off work to prepare for the extravaganza. Any ingrates who had the gall to die today and expect a prompt write-up would just have to lump it. They could loll around in the cooler drawer a few extra days. It wouldn’t kill them. She’d check out their toe tags first thing Monday.

  The Anti-Shabbos regulars were all in attendance. For most of them this was their first seder as séparatistes, the first one where they would lead the charge in the total absence of the elder generation. They discounted Jean-Gabriel, of course, whom Evie had included on the strength of his position as the group’s Shabbos Goy Honoris Causa. Since he was totally ignorant of the proceedings he didn’t really enter into the generational tally, not being in a position to correct their halting Hebrew or to grab their Haggadahs and flip showily forward through the pages to get them in sync with the speed readers who were already on page sixteen while they were busy faking it on page eight. For this seder no parent would shoo them off to the card table diaspora, refugees from the hard-core end of the table. At Evie’s topsy-turvy seder, it was the young people who owned the night.

  As kids they’d cursed the cosmic forces that connived every few years to plunk one of the seders down on Friday night, extending what was already an interminable and soporific affair with all the dreaded parentheticals, but tonight the crowd was pumped. They all arrived dressed to the nines, decked out in second-hand hot couture culled from the racks of the friperies on Saint Denis Street.

  Evie’d been in the kitchen since breakfast. She had every burner on the go. Eggs and potatoes and carrots were boiling, and the broth was burbling impatiently away, wondering when she’d ever get around to dumping in its payload of matzo balls. Despite the light spring snow falling outside, she had the window cracked open for air. Dizzy was on hand to help with the prep, and Josh, ambassador plenipotentiary of the larger Troy clan, had presented his credentials at ten a.m. as head kibitzer and dogsbody. They worked flat out all day.

  By the time Dany arrived at six-thirty the condo was already buzzing with guests. Evie answered the door to his kick, resplendent in her caftan, her cheeks rouged from the kitchen steam. In honour of the occasion Dany had pillaged his mother’s cedar closet for his Bar Mitzvah suit, though why exactly she’d kept it for all these years wasn’t quite clear to him. Was she thinking to bury him in it? The jacket was straining dangerously around his spare tire and skimpy at the wrists and shoulders, but was spiffed up with a new-to-him bow tie and pocket square. “The pants, they didn’t fit at all any more. I couldn’t squeeze into them to save my life,” he explained, accounting for the Black Watch kilt he wore on the bottom, making him look like a cross between Woody Allen and Prince Philip. “I had to make some last minute adjustments to the ensemble. What do you think?” He twirled around to show off the pleats to best advantage and Evie applauded her approval.

  “Maybe tonight I’ll finally learn the secret of what’s cooking under a kilt.”

  “That all depends on how much of a shikker I make of myself. Hold that thought.” Dany handed over to his hostess two eight-packs of matzos and a plastic container of horseradish, homemade. “You should empty it out into a serving dish right now,” he cautioned her. “It’s starting to gnaw its way through the Tupperware.”

  “Beep-beep. Coming through.” Moshe arrived on Dany’s tail and kneed his neighbour into the apartment from the hallway where he was still doing pirouettes.

  “So they were out of tutus, Dany?”

  “They don’t come in extra-large for some reason.”

  Moshe was balancing an epic sponge cake in his arms. Evie directed him to set the monster down on her bed. Her counters were already Pesadik packed, and besides, she didn’t have any other surfaces vast enough to accommodate its girth. Even when he baked at home, Moshe worked in industrial quantities. With his experience and training, he found it easier to bake for nine hundred than for nine. And he was equipped for it. Moshe had visions of opening his own establishment some day and was gradually acquiring pre-owned professional cookware as it came on the market at a reasonable price. Moshe’s cake moulds could sub for backyard kiddie pools, and as for his mixing bowls, in a pinch NASA could borrow one to stand in for a faulty satellite dish. His knee-high whisk and metal rolling pin surpassed the posted height limits on his kitchen cupboards so they took up residence in the living room, leaning against the wall by the fireplace like a pair of Betty Crocker andirons. By the looks of his place Moshe might have been the personal chef to Gargantua and Pantagruel.

  The baker’s sponge cake technique was flawless. Evie’d seen Moshe in action earlier in the day when she stopped by his apartment to pick up the cases of wine she’d stored there. He whipped his egg whites by hand. Though he owned a turbocharged mixer, he spurned it for this particular task. Nothing beat a copper bowl, he told Evie while he worked. Copper. She didn’t get it. But now wasn’t the time to sidetrack Moshe with a discussion of the periodic table; he was in the zone. How, she wondered, could the same element both soothe arthritis and make egg whites stand up and salute? It was one of those ditsy substances whose alchemical properties spun off in twenty different directions. Like baking soda. She’d never understood how you could cook with it, douche with it, and scrub the scuzz off the shower door with it. Chemistry wasn’t Evie’s strong suit.

  Moshe’s rotations with the whisk were cyclonic, his arm whizzing round like the propeller on a Piper Cub. He kept his eyes fixed on the mounting foam. At the precise second he adjudged it at the perfect soft-peak stage, Moshe folded the cumulus fluff into his beaten yolks with a spatula that had previously seen action as an oar on a Viking ship. He downloaded the batter into a tube pan and slipped it into the pre-heated oven. This finished cake he now set down tenderly on Evie’s white duvet. With its trail of strawberry coulis that edged the platter, it lay on her bed like a deflowered bride.

  Back in her kitchen, Evie peered despairingly into the depths of her soup pot. Moshe’s food channel demo cum science experiment proved to her that plain old air could metamorphose in
to helium if manipulated by an expert, which she clearly was not. She realized too late that she should have imposed on him, the Académie Culinaire alum, to take on the matzo balls for the soup, a task she’d arrogated to herself. Maybe the problem was that her pictureless cookbook advised its readers to make walnut-sized balls, a designation of which her mind had no grasp, considering her history. Instead she’d given them the circumference of a portly falafel, thinking to use an alternate food touchstone. As she spooned the balls into the soup they nosedived to the bottom of the pot where they were now wedged shoulder to shoulder like the Andrews sisters. At no stage in the cooking process did they show the least inclination to float to the top as Joan Nathan had assured her they would. No, her disobedient knaidels were earthbound. Moshe came into the kitchen and joined her stoveside, looking into the briny deep. They could just make out the skyline of the submerged knaidels, as if they were the domes of Atlantis.

  “I tried talking to them,” she said. “I heard it works with house plants.”

  “Maybe it was something you said.”

  “All I did was flatter them. I’m always a sucker for that approach,” but apparently Evie’s knaidels were immune to sweet talk. “Maybe I should have offered them a bribe,” she said.

  “I’ve been known to sing to my croissants while they’re in the oven.” For Evie alone Moshe bared his soul.

  “Once you hear me sing tonight, you’ll understand why I didn’t go that route.”

  “You know it doesn’t matter,” Moshe told her. “I’m sure they’ll still taste great.”

  “It does so matter. To me. I guess I’m more my mother’s daughter than I like to admit.” For her, on Pesach, the single solitary thing that counted was that the knaidels should be light and fluffy. It was her measure of success of the whole night. Everything else, the gefilte fish, the charoses, it was all just window dressing. I know I should forget all that my mother-myself business for tonight, but it just won’t let go.”

  “Personally, I’ve always preferred the al dente version.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “I kid you not, the zaftig ones that you could really sink your teeth into. There are other people out there who think like me, I’m sure. You just grew up in the wrong house.”

  “Don’t I know it.”

  “Evie, come on, you don’t have to think your mum’s always hovering out there in the ether somewhere, disapproving. You’ve made something of yourself. There’s no reason for you to be cowering in her shadow anymore. Leesen to Herr Doktor Moshe. He knows vot he’s talking about.”

  “Mosh, I appreciate your trying, but you didn’t live through it so you can’t know what it was like. You can’t even imagine. I’m telling you, not one thing I ever did was satisfactory. Nothing. Nada. She was always looking down on me.” She pointed into her soup pot. “This is only a symptom.”

  “It’s not a symptom. It’s just a knaidel.”

  “Same difference.”

  “Evie, you’re the hostess with the mostess. You know we all think that. The Friday nights at your place are legendary.”

  “That’s just because you guys have such low standards.”

  “Give us a little credit for taste why don’t you? None of us could do what you do.”

  “Yeah,” Evie came back. “Because I’m the only one out of all of us whose table has two leaves.” She could be resourceful when she was wallowing. Evie was slipping into the quicksand of another mother-funk. Moshe had seen it before. He knew the drill. Though generally string-beanish in build, his arms, after years of carting about flour sacks, had acquired the respectable silhouette of a snake that had swallowed its charmer. They had the requisite strength to come to Evie’s rescue. Moshe locked onto her flailing hands and wrested her from the matriarchal ooze with a satisfying thwunk. Usually the sound alone was enough to snap her out of it, restoring her to her more confident self.

  The front doorbell rang. “Come on,” he said. “Leave all this to simmer. You don’t want to keep whoever it is waiting in the hall.” Moshe started out the kitchen door thinking a restored Evie was on his heels, but when he glanced back she was still glued to the soup pot, her posture limp with failure. He caught her giving her eyes a surreptitious dab with her sleeve. They looked to be producing supplementary salt water to the amount required for the ceremonial seder dipping. Moshe returned to her side at the stove.

  “Take it from a chief cook and bottle washer. It’ll work out. Guaranteed.” Moshe reached behind her and dared to encircle her shoulders with his arm, gentling her out of the kitchen where the bogeys of mothers and matzo balls feared to tread.

  It was Jean-Gabriel at the door, his face barely visible behind a spray of peacock feathers. “I talked to one of my friends who pretends to know about such things and he said that feathers are one of the symbols you use for la Pâque juive. Maybe these will come in handy.”

  The offering didn’t impress Moshe. It looked to him like JGM had nicked the clump of plumage from Montezuma’s corpse, but he took note that Evie accepted the iridescent bouquet with a degree of syrupy gratitude most women reserve for roses, not bird pluckings. Evie fanned herself demurely with her chichi feather duster like she’d just stepped off the boat from Titipu. She was too gracious to point out that Jean-Gabriel had signed on with a bunko ethnicity counsellor, one with farshtunkeneh expertise on the lifestyle and habitat of the Chosen People. His friend had completely mangled the timing. The feather was meant to be deployed in advance of the Passover seder to flick from the kitchen cupboards any last defiling remnants of bread, not that Evie even subscribed to that medieval practice. She was a modern gal, of the J-cloth school. But for her it was the thought that counted. She latched on to Jean-Gabriel’s hand and escorted him into the living room. Except for Josh, the writer had met them all before. They were used to his anglepoise posture, a davening stance that made him look as if he were considering with utmost seriousness everything they had to say. Though normally he mixed easily, tonight he allowed himself to be steered by Evie from one cluster of guests to the next.

  Rightly or wrongly, Moshe had the sensation of being third-wheeled and peeled off from Evie and Jean-Gabriel towards the more welcoming embrace of the kitchen. He poked his nose into all the pots, then jiggled and stirred them with chefly savoir-faire. Only the soup pot failed to respond to his ministrations. Evie’s slacker knaidels didn’t snap-to under his toque of authority. Desperate measures were called for. He reached into his baker’s bag of tricks for a bit of restorative botox and injected the traitorous matzo balls. In no time flat they puffed up and rose to the surface of the soup where they bounced about joyfully like boobs unbound at a Côte d’Azur beach. His job was done. He went back out to join the others.

  At dusk Evie invited her guests to take their seats even though technically it was too early to get the show on the road. Seders were scripted to commence at dark, but the disobliging sun was taking its own sweet time in setting, or so it seemed to the first-timer Passover hostess. She was too antsy to hang on until the sanctioned hour so she called the seder to order while a few delinquent rays of light were still filtering through the curtains. Jean-Gabriel she placed at her right hand, while the others found their own spots, sticking for the most part to their usual Friday night positions around the table. For Haggadahs, Evie had finally settled, after considerable existential angst, on the unshowy version from her youth with its red, black, and yellow cover, Hebrew and English on opposing pages. They sold it shrink-wrapped by the dozen. She had never really appreciated back when she was younger, or cared when you came right down to it, how all the lines were numbered lest a hesitant Hebrew reader lose his way. But now, with a mature eye, she was duly thankful for the public service rendered by the marginal numbers. They were like matzo crumbs cast by Hansel and Gretel in the desert. With their friendly guidance wanderers could always find their way back to civilization.

&nb
sp; At first Evie had figured on buying some sort of nouvelle vague Haggadah while she was browsing through the racks at Rodal’s; one of those anarchist, animist, modernist, humanist, liberationist, bundist, cubist, out-there versions. What she sought was a non-discriminatory Haggadah, one that could speak to Jews of all orientations, locales, colours, and shoe sizes; a world music version of the exodus from Egypt. But when push came to shove she’d cleaved to her roots. She surprised herself by rejecting the Haggadahs that cast modern villains in Pharaoh’s stead or moved the whole kit and caboodle plumb out of the desert. Even the all-English versions, though practical in so many ways, offended her sensibilities as a Quebecer where bilingualism was its own religion. Her decision appeared to be a popular one, allowing her to untense a bit. As she passed the booklets out, her guests lit up to see the cozy familiar cover from their childhood, the Goodnight Moon of Haggadahs.

  “It’s like your little black dress,” Shira said. “Never goes out of style.”

  “And they’re fresh out of the package. Not even stained.”

  “At our house, we each had a different Haggadah, with different translations and different page numbers. What a mess. Nobody ever knew where they were. It probably added a good hour to the whole business.”

  Jean-Gabriel opened up his Haggadah from the back end and riffled through it. “My mother always taught us not to read at the table.”

  “Well tonight you can feel free to disobey her. I’m sure you never crossed her before, good little boy that you were,” Evie said.

  “I was a model child. It was only later that I turned sour. Once I was out of the house. That’s what comes of hanging out in bad company.”

  Evie reached over and flipped him to the front of the Haggadah. He stared at the serifed letters with their subterranean Morse code of dots and dashes. “I was up North once. They were putting on one of my plays there. The writing in here looks to me just like Inuktitut.”