Isn't It Romantic? (7 page)

Natalie lagged behind to gaze at the “Weird Animals” exhibit where there was a pet spider monkey and a sign that read: “Howdy! My name is Stinky! I will clap my hands if you show me food!” And there was a thoroughly ordinary Afghan dog, quivering with embarrassment in a beret and a striped French sailor's suit. A marmalade cat with a Captain Video helmet was trapped inside a space suit made from aluminum foil. The owner was holding its front paws in the air, so the cat stood on its hind legs, its tail lashing. Zapping noises were piped in as ray guns feebly strafed the air. The sign around the cat's neck read:
MARTIAN
.

Mrs. Christiansen shoved her tricycle in reverse and swerved snakily back, a horn beeping, until Natalie caught up again. Mrs. Christiansen said, “The ladies were so pleased when they heard a cordon bleu from Paris was here to judge their cooking.”

Natalie cautioned, “Madame, I am not a chef.”

But Marvyl wasn't listening. “Carl Bacon did it once,” she said, “but he's a tad persnickety. Last year we settled on a fry cook from Ogallala whose Oldsmobile was being fixed.” She turned the tricycle toward a tent and motored inside. At once there were high-pitched cheers and thunderous applause from the many women at folding tables on which a wild assortment of foods were arrayed. Mrs. Christiansen stood up from her vehicle and put a finger to her lips in a teacherly way. Women quieted. “I have the honor of presenting to you the Queen of the Revels, Mademoiselle Natalie Clairvaux,” she said. “Our guest taster. Now remember, she'll be judging both flavor and presentation. And you're not allowed to tell her what she's eating.”

There were a few faint groans and protests.

Mrs. Christiansen shushed them with a hand and formally turned. “Natalie?”

Natalie walked uncertainly toward the first table of pies and pastries. She lifted a smidgen of lemon meringue pie with a plastic fork, put it in her mouth, and evaluated it. “
Très bien
,” she said.

She shifted sideways and tilted forward to taste a Boston cream pie. She was getting into it, becoming a regular Julia Child. “
Intéressant
,” she said, “
mais . . . agressif
.”

“Was it good?” the cook asked Mrs. Christiansen.

She got a pat of condolence on the forearm as they went on.

Lois Tetlow, a full-figured gal, was spilling out of a skimpy French maid's outfit as she presented a tray of muffins.

Mrs. Christiansen chided, “Lois!”

“Well, last year the judge was a man,” Lois said.

Natalie nibbled some muffin and grew concerned. “Are they raisins?”

“Blueberries,” Lois said, “but they mighta turned.”

Natalie shifted over to Owen's Aunt Opal, who was humble to the point of unctuousness as she held up a faintly green rhubarb pie. Natalie hesitated with the dab on her fork. She took a full breath and tried the pie. She could not hide a wince.

Opal explained, “What's the point of a food competition if you don't get to experiment and be creative?”

Natalie was still masticating while seeking a place to spit.

Opal told Marvyl, “It just occurred to me that a little chili powder and Worcestershire sauce might put a sleepy old pie up on its hind legs.”

“I'm sure it's unique,” Mrs. Christiansen said, and then she looked ahead. “Oh no. Mrs. Zebrun made her Candied Tree Bark Surprise.”

13

N
atalie avoided food poisoning and rewarded herself with an afternoon nap at Mrs. Christiansen's rooming house. She woke at three to the sounds of cooking in the kitchen and took it upon herself to help out, cracking farm eggs into a great big bowl of cake mix as Opal and Mrs. Christiansen chopped and washed vegetables. Mrs. Christiansen announced, “We'll have a Waldorf salad first off on Saturday.”

“Oh, I like that idea,” Opal said.

“And then I thought a Châteaubriand would be nice for the main course.”

“Uh huh. Kind of make her feel more at home.”

“With onions and carrots
à brun
.”

“You know what I think I'd like to try, Marvyl? Potatoes Lyonnaise.”

Mrs. Christiansen frowned. “From a freezer package or from scratch?”

“The grocery freezer.”

Mrs. Christiansen smiled. “Aren't you a dear?”

Opal whispered, “You don't think she had her heart set on French fries?”

And Marvyl whispered, “She hasn't
planned
a thing.”

“'Cause if she does, those frozen kind you get in cartons are just so quick and easy . . .”

Mrs. Christiansen asked Natalie, “
Voulez-vous des pommes frites?
” (Would you like fried potatoes?)

She dumped egg shells into the trash compactor and slammed it closed. “Whatever you wish,” she said.

Mrs. Christiansen spun back to Opal. “She's got a great deal on her mind, if you get my meaning.”

“Oh, I do.”

All three heard a faint rapping on the front screen door and tilted out toward the hallway. Reverend Dante Picarazzi was on the front porch in his black clerics and white Roman collar, his blue Yankees baseball cap in one hand as he shaded his eyes with the other and peered in through the screen. “Afternoon,” he offered.

Opal jumped to the conclusion that he was there for her, though it would have been without precedent. She held a hand with a paring knife to her chest and said, “My word! It's the Reverend!”

Mrs. Christiansen smiled in a tut-tut way and said with innuendo, “Dante needs to iron out details with Mademoiselle Clairvaux.”

Slowly the meaning dawned upon Opal. “Oh, I see. Oh yes, they really
have
to talk.”

“Details?” Natalie asked.

Mrs. Christiansen looked to the front porch and called, “Wait there, Reverend. She'll be right out.”

“Surely you could bend the house rules for a priest,” Opal said.

And Mrs. Christiansen haughtily said, “That would be breaking the rules, not bending them.”

Worriedly, Natalie went out to the front porch, full of mystery about the priest's visit, and found him swinging his legs like a kid on the glider that hung from the porch ceiling. His Yankees cap was jauntily cocked on his head, his running shoes dangled off the floor, and he was petting a mustache that was still twisted and waxed. With his characteristic torrent of words, the priest said, “Played Toulouse-Lautrec at The Revels. Nailed it.” The Reverend patted a space beside him and as Natalie sat, he rushed on, saying, “I heard the whole megillah from Marvyl.”

And Natalie, whose English, she'd thought, was good, had trouble with his Brooklynese and understood only “heard” and “from Marvyl.”

“Sorry about the royal snafu.
Mea culpa.
Snail-mail you sent me? Tipping me off? Like a knucklehead I musta lost it.”

She understood “Sorry,” “snail,” “lost.”

“Oy, my desk,” he said. He lifted a hand as high as his ear. “Stacked to here with bubkes.”

With an excess of politeness she said, “I have never heard anyone speak so fast.”

“Well that's me.” The priest raised his right knee to tie a running shoe that must have been bought in the boy's department. She wondered if others also had the urge to tousle his hair. “Informed His Eminence about the glitch. Hemmed and hawed, but he's a mensch; plus he owed me. We got it locked in for Saturday. You cool with that?”

She watched him staring at her and she construed he'd asked a question that required an answer. She nodded her head.

“Right. You shlep up the aisle, deliriously happy, blushing right and left. I greet you and I do the booga-booga. We endure with smiles the fumbling for rings. I say this, I say that; you parrot it back. You know the routine. We need a rehearsal?”

She'd understood hardly a word. She shook her head no.

“Hiya, Dick,” he said.

She glanced out to the front yard and saw Dick diffidently standing on the sidewalk in his cattleman's hat and boots. Shy as a suitor. “Wondered if Mademoiselle Clairvaux would like to go on a horseback ride.”

“Well, that seems highly irregular to me,” Opal said from inside the house.

Natalie tilted and saw that Mrs. Christiansen and Owen's Aunt Opal were hunched at the front screen door, overhearing.

“Oh, Opal,” Mrs. Christiansen said. “She'll enjoy it! And he's a perfect gentleman. Aren't you, Dick Tupper.”

“Oh, yes, ma'am.”

She turned to Natalie. “You go ahead, dear. We'll manage the cooking.”

With irritation, Opal reminded the widow, “Many hands make light work.”

Mrs. Christiansen softly flicked at her friend's wrist and said to Dick, “She'll be right out.”

The Reverend jumped down from the glider. “You go change. I have to schmooze with the lucky guy.”

She thought,
What is schmooze?
But she told him, “I have enjoyed talking with you.”

And Dante was already skipping down the steps as he said, “Natch.”

She went upstairs to get into bluejeans, sneakers, and a soft white shirt. When she came out the cattleman was beaming at the foot of the front porch stairs, and she blushed at his happiness.

“What'd the Reverend have to say?” Dick asked.

“I have no idea.”

“He's a New Yorker,” Dick said, as if much, in such a manner, was explained. Warily looking into the house, he confessed, “I get real skittish around Mrs. Christiansen. She puts me back into high school whenever I'm around her.”

On cue Mrs. Christiansen called, “You be careful with her, Dick Tupper!”

And he was no more than fourteen years old when he called, “Yes, ma'am!”

14

H
olding onto the horses' bridles, Dick escorted a saddled paint-colored mare and sorrel stallion from the cool darkness of his red stables and into the stark August sunshine. Natalie was standing up on the first white board of the paddock fence and was scanning his groomed and handsome ranch property with fascination. Dick just stared at Natalie's beauty until she turned.

“You can ride Ida and I'll ride Shep,” he told her. “Shep's got strict opinions about things.”

She smiled and hopped down to the earth and he helped her fit a sneaker into the saddle's iron stirrup.

“I'll just give you a little boost,” he said, but his hand accidentally wound up on her fine behind and he blushed, just as she did. “Oops,” he said, and smiled bashfully for a few seconds before he got serious again. “Don't let go of Ida's reins or she just might take ya shopping.”

She hunted the irregular verb in her memory before saying, “I have
ridden
a horse before.”

“Oh, I could tell. You have that equestrian poise.”

They rode out into the countryside through high rustling foxtail weeds that almost reached the cinches. Angus cattle were tearing up hanks of grass and blandly chewing in the sunshine, and some were full enough to lie down on their bellies and ruminate and stare.

Dick glanced over his shoulder. “You about got the hang of that horse?”

“Yes. She is very . . .
docile
.”

“Placid too,” he said. He considered the shifting herd. “You know what we call those cows?”

“Angus?”

“And here I took you for a greenhorn.”

“I have read all about the West.”

“I used to read about the Count of Monte Cristo. Joan of Arc was my heart-throb when I was a boy.”

“Have you ever been to France?”

“My dad was. 1944. Summertime.”

She was pleased by the coincidence. “My mother, she is from Bayeux, in Normandy. We have visited Omaha Beach many times. My grandmother owns a hotel in Port-en-Bessin. On the shore of the English Channel.”

“What was her first name?”

“Sophie.”

“Don't recall him mentioning a Sophie. But then my dad had his head ducked too much to see a whole lot of the population. Did say your people were real cultured and friendly and happy to see him. He always appreciated that. S'pose your mother wasn't even born then.”

“No.”

“I wasn't either.” He stared at her seriously. “In case you're wondering, I'm fifty-two.” She said nothing. “So I guess that'd make you half my age.”

She smiled. “And so I am a ‘trophy' for you?”

“Well, no; you're a pleasant companion.”

The horses wove around cottonwood trees and through shaded green timothy grass and ferns as Dick guided them alongside Frenchman's Creek. Wild deer feeding on the sapling leaves that they could reach had created a flat browse line on the underside of some young box elders and Dick educated Natalie on it. “Whole terrain hereabouts used to have so much wildlife an Eastern fella once called it ‘the paradise of hunters.'” Admiring it, he said, “Pretty country, isn't it?”

Natalie was enchanted. “Yes! Like a cigarette ad!”

“Well, I s'pose I would've compared it to Eden, but each to her own vista.”

She told him she'd visited America the first time as a junior in high school. She was an exchange student and was sent to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the guest of husband and wife mathematics professors and their two appalling children. She could not believe how boring their lives were. Clavichord music. Algebra problems at the dinner table. Wine only on holidays. And no television—

Dick interrupted, “No
television?
Sheese. Was there
plumbing?
”

“We are talking ten years ago. Rules may have changed.”

“No television,” he repeated.

Shep furiously shook his head and horseflies twined in the air.

“And they were strict vegetarians,” Natalie said.

The cattleman reached out and touched her hand in consolation. “You poor child.”