Lizz Lund - Mina Kitchen 01 - Kitchen Addiction!

by Lizz Lund

  Aunt Muriel set her car’s air-conditioning to freezing. A few minutes later, we pulled into her driveway and scraped frost off the windows. “What time’s the polo thingy?” I asked, getting out of her car. Auntie’s borrowed sunglasses fogged up: I tripped and fell flat on the driveway.

  “Two-thirty, dear,” she said, picking me up and leading me by the elbow into her kitchen. I took off the fogged sunglasses and looked at her kitchen clock. It was two o’clock.

  “Shouldn’t we just go straight there?” I asked.

  “Oh no, dear! Not without our tailgate!” Aunt Muriel said, shocked. Tailgate? I thought. We’d just finished a three course brunch. Where does she put it? Aunt Muriel weighs about 98-lbs. soaking wet and has never had to diet. My dieting sensibilities are pretty much subdued by my catering disorder. Let’s just say it’s a good thing I’m not height challenged.

  Aunt Muriel opened a cooler waiting by the fridge and carefully placed containers of cheese, crackers, nuts and crab spread inside, along with assorted pretty plates and silver utensils. Then she pulled out a painted box with a latch on it, and inserted a bottle each of red and white wine into it. I wondered if catering disorders were normal for polo? Maybe I’d fit in.

  Auntie handed me a small boutique bag holding a rolled up cloth. “Careful with this, dear,” she instructed. “Our wine glasses are in here, wrapped inside the table cloth and napkins.”

  “Are you allowed to bring wine to polo thingies?” I asked. Aunt Muriel stopped dead in her tracks and stared at me. Well.

  We stashed the party loot in her car and took off up Route 30. Happily for me, this avoided Fruitville Pike altogether, so I could honestly not think about burnt Buy-A-Lots or EEJIT.

  We wound up in the middle of a small farmers’ town. Just a small main street; a few residences and the odd shop. Some dogs barked. “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course. I’ve held a season pass since I’ve moved here,” Aunt Muriel smiled.

  “Oh,” I said. Since Auntie had lived here for over a decade, this must be a pretty established outing.

  We turned onto the exit for Route 772. Before I knew it, we saw a smallish lawn sign low to the ground at the corner on Church Street, next to the ‘Alla Famiglia Italian Ristorante’. The sign read: ‘Polo – This Way!’

  Aunt Muriel made a left onto Church Street, then turned right onto a gravel road. We drove up to a woman wearing gold jewelry and collecting cash. Aunt Muriel slowed down and swooshed her electric car window open. “How are you?” Aunt Muriel beamed at the blonde behind the Elton John pink sunglasses.

  “Lovely day for this, isn’t it?” she beamed back.

  “Oh yes!” Aunt Muriel tinkled some laughter her way, and we continued on. I shot her a sideways glance. Clearly she was out of her mind. Aunt Muriel’s usual idea of an outdoor event was peering at it from behind a large window, preferably in a stadium box. I shrugged. Maybe we were going to watch the polo thingy from inside her Lexus.

  We drove along, and I saw a large party tent set up. Next to it was an announcer’s booth. I peered around but for the life of me couldn’t see one building, much less a building large enough to fit a swimming pool. “Well, we’re here!” she sang out brightly. I looked beyond her and saw Porta-potties and furrowed.

  Aunt Muriel led the way toward the pseudo-wedding tent while I limped behind like Quasimodo, dragging the tailgate supplies between my hands and teeth. Tables and chairs were set up, and a bunch of people sat around enjoying their snacks. They seemed pretty friendly. Or well lubricated. Or both. Aunt Muriel directed me to a table, and I put our stuff down while she flitted from table to table. She lit on her last party: a table complete with silver champagne bucket, roses, crystal stemware, numerous hors d’oeuvre trays and a large Martini pitcher. It was impressive. There, she accepted a hug from a tall guy who chose to conceal his receding hairline by shaving his head altogether. But sitting right next to him was – ohmygosh-ohmygosh-ohmygosh – Mr. Perfect!! I pushed Auntie’s borrowed sunglasses way back up my nose.

  Aunt Muriel returned to our table and smiled brightly at me. “Sorry, Mina. I didn’t mean to be away for long,” she said.

  “Not a problem,” I said, waiting to pump her for an introduction to Mr. Perfect and Crew.

  Then, all of a sudden, coming directly up to the tent, was a gal riding a horse! And then a guy riding a horse! In helmets! Aunt Muriel waved to them, and they waved back. I looked at her, puzzled. “The polo players, dear,” she clarified in an obvious sounding tone.

  “Polo?” I asked.

  “Yes, dear. Those are players from our team.”

  “But where’s the pool?”

  “What pool?”

  “For polo. Water polo, right? Like Marco Polo?”

  Aunt Muriel slapped her hand to her forehead. “White,” she said.

  “Right?”

  “White!”

  “Right?”

  “POUR THE WHITE WINE PLEASE, DEAR,” Aunt Muriel shouted affectionately. I opened the bottle of wine, while Aunt Muriel explained through clenched teeth. “This is a polo match, Mina. As in polo pony,” she grimaced.

  “Oh,” I said. I still didn’t get it.

  Aunt Muriel hissed kindly at me. “Polo is a field sport, like soccer, with horses.”

  OH! I thought. I GET IT! “Horse hockey?” I asked. Aunt Muriel sighed.

  “Here’s a paper that will help explain… and I’m sure the announcer will give some sort of an overview,” she said, patting me on my head.

  She poured me a glass of wine, and we watched as the match began. Amidst my casting furtive glances toward Mr. Perfect. A sort of half-time came and the announcer invited us to ‘stomp the divots’. We got up with the crowd, and commenced to go a-stomping.

  There in the middle of the field was Mr. Perfect, stomping contentedly with his pals. I stood stomped in my tracks, wine glass in mid-air. Aunt Muriel hissed at me. “Who are you staring at?” she asked.

  “Ummm… I think that guy over there might be my neighbor.”

  Aunt Muriel shielded her eyes with her hand, looking across the field. Unfortunately, it was with her wine glass hand, which she dumped right next to her left foot. “Hmmm,” she said thoughtfully, ignoring the fact that she’d imbibed under-age field growth. “I might have seen him before. Maybe at a benefit. I’ll ask Marshal tomorrow,” she said finally. I furrowed. So much for a timely introduction.

  We managed to avoid the ‘steaming divots’ as directed by the announcer. Instead we sat back down, poured more wine and settled in to watch the rest of the game. The referee threw the polo ball down the middle of the field and both teams thwacked their mallets.

  And then everything went black.

  I woke up flat on my back with a scrambled head. Or at least it felt like that. But, I realized by comparison, my foot didn’t hurt so much. So maybe things were getting better after all. I opened my eyes and saw flashes of light.

  “Hope you don’t mind! We like to scrapbook everything!” the bleach blonde polo maven said while clicking some pictures of me.

  I blinked. Above me stood a cigar-puffing patron. I looked around and saw Aunt Muriel looming up from behind him like Godzilla v. Mothra. She pinched his cigar with lightning speed and extinguished it in a pitcher of water, screaming politely at him about my needing air. Well, at least Auntie thought it was a pitcher of water. Unfortunately it was Marshal’s very large pitcher of martinis.

  After the fire was put out, I sat clasping a sandwich baggie full of ice chips to my forehead. Or at least what used to be my forehead. Now it felt like it was about to give birth, evidenced by the egg on it that was becoming the size of the polo ball what bonked me.

  A guy with a helmet and a numbered Jersey ran over to me. “Are you okay? Do you want an ambulance? We’ve got a doctor here…” he trailed off, gazing around and signaling said doctor.

  Oddly enough, said doc
tor was also sporting a helmet and numbered Jersey. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked kindly.

  I smiled stupidly and said, “Yes.” Geesh. Was this embarrassing, or what?

  “You might want to get that looked at,” he said, producing a business card while addressing Auntie, who giggled uncharacteristically and took his card all too enthusiastically. Gack. I might have been bonked by my next uncle.

  “It’s no biggie,” I said, crawling around on the tent floor on all fours, struggling to get up. “I’ll just have them check my head when they amputate my foot.”

  I staggered up onto somebody’s arm and let myself get led to a seat. Everyone was being very, very nice to me. But then again, they were all from Lancaster. I felt around my pocket for a stray Tylenol and munched on one. I still felt the Somebody’s hands on my shoulders, and hunched around to take a gander.

  OH-MY-GOSH-IT-WAS-MR.-PERFECT!!! Wow. And all it took was a little brain damage for a proper introduction! I struggled to look up at him, attempting a demure gaze. What I think I pulled off resembled more of a facial tick. Which was probably why he stared at me. I gulped. Well, now or never I thought.

  “Hi, I’m Mina. I think we’re neighbors,” I stammered. Great. Maybe I could attribute stammering to having my brains used for Shake ‘N Bake.

  “Of course! I thought I recognized you!” Mr. Perfect beamed. “I’m your neighbor! Bruce! I walk David by your house every day! I live at the other end of the lane, opposite your dead end. Reg, Marshal, come here, look – a neighbor! At polo!”

  Several painful feelings registered all at once, besides the ones banging my head and my foot. One: I prefer to think of my house on Clovernook Lane as being in a cul-de-sac, not a ‘dead end’. Two: I thought it a bit callous to begin introductions to strangers while my forehead was still pregnant. Three: Bruce? Reg? Marshal? Arghhhh. It was all perfectly queer to me now. No wonder he looked perfect. He probably has longer morning ablutions than Aunt Muriel or Ma. And certainly more than me.

  Reg and Marshal came over dutifully and feigned attentiveness at me. Which at least didn’t hurt. Reg refreshed my ice cube baggie so my forehead wouldn’t hatch prematurely, and Marshal shucked up an Appeltini. Not my all-time favorite drink, but desperate times require desperate drinking. Especially since the remaining wine was warm. Which was mostly because all the ice cubes were on my forehead.

  “So you’re Bruce,” I repeated stupidly.

  “And his Goliath is David!” creened Marshal.

  “You should have brought him, Bruce,” chided Reg.

  “Well,” Bruce began, “I would have, but he’s so afraid of air horns.” Air horns? Oh. That’s what the large blasts of noise were. “They use them here to mark the end of the chukker.”

  So Bruce and Reg and Marshal told me what they knew about polo, and how they all worked in different restaurants, which explained why I usually see Bruce walking his Goliath – sorry, David – at lunchtime. “We haven’t come up here in ages,” Marshal confided, “but it’s Bruce’s birthday, and this is what the birthday boy wanted!” he sang happily.

  I sighed. Well, it was nice to make some new friends. Even if they couldn’t scratch a dent in my love life. Well, at least K. would be thrilled when I tell him about his expanded social circle. I looked around for Aunt Muriel.

  Aunt Muriel spotted me – or, more precisely, my Appeltini – and good ol’ Reg drudged up one for her, too. I looked over at Auntie and saw she’d pushed her hair way up past her forehead. This was odd. I looked closer and realized her bangs were singed right off. All that was left was a charred fringe. Well, I guess putting out cigars in pitchers of martinis is a bad thing. Luckily she was unaware. So I figured this was a good time to leave. “Uh, Aunt Muriel, I think I’ve had enough party, okay?” I hinted.

  “Of course! Our poor lamb!” she gushed, petting the top of my head and peering intently toward the polo playing physician on the field. Luckily, Reg, Marshal and Bruce were close by, and offered to pack up and carry Auntie’s tailgate party. I gratefully accepted for her.

  We left the field and entered the climate cooled calm of Aunt Muriel’s Lexus. This of course was when acute nausea set in. “Aunt Muriel, pull over,” I spat calmly, prepping to toss my cookies.

  “Nonsense, dear, there’s nothing here but fields!” Aunt Muriel sang brightly.

  “I’m going to puke!!”

  “Here? But you can’t! There are no rest rooms!” she said.

  “IF YOU DON’T PULL OVER I’M PUKING ON YOUR LEATHER SEATS!”

  Auntie pulled over onto the edge of a cow field in a cloud of dust and pebbles. If the combination of wine, Appeltini, konk on the noggin and EEJIT neurosis wasn’t going to make me puke, the stench of Amish fertilizer would. I lost my offending contents at lightning speed hurl. A pack of tissues immediately appeared in front of my face. “Here,” Aunt Muriel offered. “Wipe,” she commanded. I pawed at my mouth. “Here,” she said again, producing a baby-size bottle of spring water. “Rinse, spit,” she instructed. I rinsed, spat, and felt a little better. So did the several cows who’d lumbered up to the fence to see what all the ruckus was about.

  “Come along, Mina. We’re being stared at,” Auntie sniffed. Stared at? There wasn’t a soul in sight. Who was staring at us? Amish pot roasts?

  I kept my eyes closed until we climbed up my driveway. We pulled up to see Vito standing in the middle of his garden, happily deadheading his overgrown Shasta daisies. Vito smiled at us, bridge and all, waving. I shot back what I hoped was a smile but felt more like a grimace.

  I started to unbuckle my seatbelt when Aunt Muriel put a hand on my shoulder. “Stay right here, Mina,” she ordered. The way I felt, not a problem.

  Auntie got out of the car and she actually went over and talked to Vito voluntarily. I saw Vito nod his head up and down and pull out a bunch of keys. He fingered one and handed it to Aunt Muriel. Aunt Muriel took it and started for my front door, nodding over to the car, and me.

  Vito lumbered over to my side of Auntie’s car as fast as his fat feet could carry him. “Heya, Toots. How about I give yous a hand?” He frowned at me. “Heard you got a good shot to your noggin,” he said, escorting me up my own front walk. Aunt Muriel waited for us, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Vito was performing the chores she’d assigned him. She had just put the key in the lock, when I realized Vinnie was out and about the house and I was afraid he’d scoot out the front door. But Vito was ahead of me. “Hey, Muriel, hold on to Tootsie here,” he said, smiling. “Sometimes her Vinnie boy gets a little enthusiastic about open doors,” he explained.

  Vito went inside. Aunt Muriel helped me follow. Standing in my hallway I saw my back door standing firmly wide open. This was about when Marie shrieked from the curtain rod and dive-bombed into Aunt Muriel’s hair.

  Have I mentioned that Aunt Muriel has an inordinate fear of birds? Actually, she’s mostly afraid of them nesting in her hair. This became pretty obvious as I dislodged Marie’s feet from Aunt Muriel’s well hair sprayed doo. “C’mere, Marie,” I screamed affectionately to the crazed cockatiel. I managed to get her on my finger and hastily went upstairs to put her back inside her cage. I wondered how she’d got out – but my thinking was kinda slow at the time, which was understandable what with the Tylenol and Appletinis and konkings and such.

  I came right back down, and Vito shushed me. “Hold on, Toots,” he whispered. “Muriel, close the back door,” he directed. Vito, directing? Go figure.

  Vito moved silently and agilely downstairs to the basement. It was then I dimly grasped that maybe Marie hadn’t let herself out of her cage. Maybe someone was in my house. And maybe that someone was still in my house.

  After what seemed like forever, Vito came back upstairs. He looked a little pale. “No one’s down there, Toots,” he said.

  “Well, that’s a relief!” I breathed.

  “No, Toots. No one’s there. Including Vinnie.”

&nbs
p; I ran to the back door, opened it and screamed, “VINNIEEEEE!” a few hundred times.

  Dusk set. So did my hopes of ever seeing my cat again. It was bad enough my house had been broken into. Stealing my pet was a whole other realm of horrible. I sat down on the deck steps to think. Which was why I cried. Vito lumbered over through the shrubs. “I looked alls over by my place, Toots. I don’t see him nowhere,” he apologized.

  “Thanks,” I sniffed.

  Auntie came up behind me. “Mina, I’ve been in every closet and under the beds,” she said. I sighed. If Vinnie hadn’t been missing, a huge wave of housekeeping paranoia would have swept over me. “I couldn’t find Vinnie inside anywhere, dear.”

  Vinnie was gone. Really gone. “Uh huh,” I said, wiping another puddle of salt water from my cheek. I looked at Vito. “You think someone took him?”

  “Chrissakes, no, Mina,” he said. “There’d be a note,” he added nicely. I shot a worried look at him. “Aw, Vinnie would’ve bit them on the nose,” he said. This was true.

  “Mina, dear, we do need to call the police,” said Aunt Muriel.

  “Police?” I asked dumbly.

  “Mina, your home has been broken into. Anyone can see that,” she said.

  “Well, uh, Muriel, do you, uh, think that’s a smart move? For Vinnie’s sake, I mean?” asked Vito.

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Alls I’m saying is what with patrol guys and all, crawlin’ all around, dontcha think that might scare the kitty off?”

  “He’s not here, Vito. Mina, we have to report this.”

  “Maybe Vito’s got a point,” I said.

  “Mina!” Aunt Muriel warned.

  “Girls, girls,” Vito said, holding up his hands and waving settle-down motions at us. “Look,” he said, “why don’t Muriel and I go through the rest of the house, just to see if anything major is missing? You know, like jewelry? Or cash?”