Mennonites Don't Dance (16 page)

When she rolled the dough out and cut it into pockets to fill with cottage cheese, the seams kept coming apart. She wet them with water and tried to press them back together, but the dough became thin and gluey at the edges and, when she dropped them into boiling water, the
varenyky
opened and escaped curds churned in the pot until all there was to scoop onto a plate were soggy flags of empty dough and rubbery, boiled cheese. Trembling, and with the sound of Magda still crying behind her, Lizbeth covered the dough with lumps of floury cream gravy and ate bent over the countertop until she felt sick and empty at the same time. She crammed the dirty pots into the sink, picked up Magda and carried her to bed, ignoring the smell of her soiled diaper. Lizbeth lay down with Magda stinking and crying beside her. In the middle of the night, when it was darkest, Lizbeth picked up the phone.

“I don't need — ” Lizbeth said when she heard her mother's voice. “I just — ” Her mother said something Lizbeth couldn't remember later. After a little while she fumbled the phone back onto its cradle and fell asleep.

Lizbeth woke the next day, not knowing what time it was. Someone had opened her curtains and she could tell that the sun was already above the house. She reached beside her, pressed her hand into the spot where Magda had been and was dimly aware that a good mother should be worried. But instead of getting up she turned onto her back and tented her knees. She rubbed her face and stared at the ceiling until, from the kitchen, Lizbeth heard the sound of Magda laughing.

Magda doesn't laugh, Lizbeth thought.

Still in the same clothes from the day before, Lizbeth got up slowly and walked down the hallway, thinking Ben must have come home, even though the house smelled clean and he never helped with the housework. Or with Magda.

The house was tidy. The washer and dryer hummed in the basement and the windows had all been opened to let in fresh air. The smell of bleach wafted crisply from the bathroom and, in the kitchen, where Lizbeth found her mother bouncing Magda on her hip, clean dishes were stacked, drip-drying in a rack next to the sink, ready to be wiped and put away.

Relief flooded over Lizbeth as she stood just outside the kitchen watching as her mother moved easily from the sink to the stove, where there was a pot on the boil, its lid rattling with the steam of chokecherries being made into syrup. Her mother's shoulders were round and relaxed, as though she was as familiar with Lizbeth's kitchen as her own, as though they'd never had to carry any weight for very long.

“Mom, I didn't expect you to come,” Lizbeth said. Her voice was dry and cracked when she spoke, and she stiffened a little when her mother turned towards her. “When I called last night. It was late. I didn't mean for you to — ” She stopped and thought. “How did you get here?”

“Wouldn't you know it, there's a bus that comes right from Swift Current to Calgary,” her mother said. “I could hardly believe how easy it was. All I had to do was sit and listen for the driver to tell me we were here. And there were taxis right there outside the front doors of the depot. I gave them your address and, next thing I knew, I was here. You should keep your door locked in the city.”

Lizbeth looked around and noticed a large suitcase balanced on the seats of two chairs in front of the table. She had never known her parents to own a suitcase, but there it was, flung open to reveal a nest of different-sized bowls, a flour sifter and a bundle of wooden spoons and other tools. Taking up one whole side was an open Styrofoam box containing a raw chicken and an ice cream pail of frozen Saskatoon berries.

“I brought a few things. I didn't know what you'd have,” Lizbeth's mother said.

“Mom, I'm fine. Really. I said I didn't need anything.” Lizbeth became silent.

“I've already made the noodles for the soup and the chicken is ready to go in the pot,” her mother said.

The chicken, with its neck tucked into its breast and feet still attached, was still dimpled from when its feathers had been plucked, probably a day or two ago. It was so fresh it looked as though it had had a sudden chill.

“I can't believe you brought a chicken on the bus, Mom. We have chickens here, you know.”

“Yes, but this one's from home.” Lizbeth's mother came up to her and lifted Magda off her own hip and into Lizbeth's arms.

“She's beautiful.”

“She looks like you, Mom. Every time I look at her, I see you.”

“I noticed that. Cries like you used to, though.” She was quiet for a moment as she unscrewed the cap of Lizbeth's salt shaker and poured some into the chicken pot. “I'll tell you a secret if you like. A dropper of brandy does the same trick for her as it did with all my babies.”

“Brandy,” Lizbeth said. “You can't be serious.”

“Your dad always had to go to the French village down the road to get it. It was the only thing that calmed you down enough to see that things weren't as bad as they seemed.”

“Maybe that's my problem. I should drink.”

“Well, nobody ever said it was a long-term solution. At some point, there has to be something else. Now, why don't you go have a bath? My granddaughter and I will take care of things in here,” she said, taking Magda back.

When Lizbeth returned to the kitchen after a long shower that left her skin hot and tingling, she found Magda asleep in her baby seat on the table. The chicken was floating in a pot on the stove, along with slices of onions, chopped carrots and whole anise seeds. Lazy bubbles rose up to the surface from the bottom of the pot.

Lizbeth picked up one of her mother's spoons and tried to push the chicken's scaly yellow feet under the water. They bobbed back up, refusing to stay down. Even when she pressed the lid down on top, they toed their way out.

“You and John always fought over those silly feet,” Lizbeth's mother said. She pulled a large metal bowl from her suitcase, set it on the counter and broke eggs, one in each hand, against the side. The sound to Lizbeth, as the eggs rang against the bowl, was like a call to worship. Lizbeth watched as her mother poured in cream and blended it together with the flour until the dough started to come into a ball.

“
Rollkuchen
,” her mother said simply when Lizbeth peered into the bowl. “It was always your favourite, wasn't it.”

“You always made everything look so easy. I've never been able to figure out how you do that.”

“You just let go and let it happen.” Her mother scraped the contents of the bowl onto the counter and dusted it with a puff of flour. She took Lizbeth's hands in hers and showed her how to knead the dough until it was soft and elastic — by pushing it away from her with the heels of her hands, turning it a quarter turn, and pulling it back towards her with her fingertips. “I never had much time to teach you when you were growing up,” she said. “Not like I did with my first girls.” She showed Lizbeth how to pinch the dough to see whether it was ready, before setting it aside to rest.

“Knowing how to rest is what makes us different from the Germans,” her mother said, laughing as Lizbeth stood in front of the sink, trying to rub the stippling of dough from her hands.

For a moment, her mother was quiet, watching Lizbeth as though deciding whether to step in.

“All you need is just a little more flour,” she finally said and took a pinch from the open bag on the floor and sprinkled it into the cup of Lizbeth's hands. Slowly at first, and then more deeply, her mother rubbed them between her own. Gradually, as Lizbeth watched, the beads of sticky dough began to fall away.

D
ANDELION
W
INE

S
TEEP DANDELION BLOSSOMS IN HOT WATER
. Let stand 24 hours. Strain. Heat infusion, add sugar and lemons and pour into stone jars to ferment. Skim daily for 6 to 7 weeks before bottling.

The creek was low, a meandering slug trail through a withered garden. Drawn by habit, Joely squatted next to it, dredged up doomed minnows from the muck, and tossed them to a fat tabby that had followed her.

After a month of drought she was bored with the heat, the listlessness that kept everyone doing no more than necessary. Even the chickens laid eggs only in the morning, after which they left the henhouse to doze in the shade.

Joely had hoped her sister would want to help her investigate the hayloft for a new litter of kittens. She knew by the wagging belly of the mother cat that they were up there, but when she crept into Hayley's room in the drape-darkened morning Hayley mumbled something about having only two more weeks to catch up on sleep before heading back to college. Joely climbed up into the loft by herself, but it wasn't the same without someone to help reach shoulder-deep into the scratchy, dark hollows between bales and listen for the faint squeaks of kittens mewing to be fed. After a few attempts, Joely gave up, defeated by the heat, and lowered herself down the wall ladder to the floor of the barn.

The creek smelled of decaying water plants. Only recently, wildflowers, clumps of bluebells and pink asters, black-eyed Susans and wild purple tulips had covered the fields. With summer came mosquitoes and grasshoppers, and only the sturdy yellow dandelions remained, now competing with tenacious wild grasses and prickly weeds to draw up what water there was from the soil. Joely knew plenty of people like that. Resolute, like her mother. But Joely could only ever seem to imitate their resilience.

Inside, she felt dormant, waiting for gentler weather to coax her from the dry husk of too many days like this.

Inside the house Joely found her mother basted in sweat, a weekday dress clinging to her skin as she banded and wiped clean a table full of glass jars filled with the overripe apricots she'd cooked down to jam that morning.

Over three sticky days spent in the summer kitchen adjacent to the house, she and Joely had canned preserves, filling rows of sterile jars with the peaches, apricots, and plums they'd bought by the crate from B.C. fresh-fruit trucks. There were still raspberries and cherries to be mashed into sugary red jam, and grapes boiled and strained for jelly.

“Do you think we could go into town today?” Joely said, even though she knew the raspberries probably wouldn't keep another day.

“You can help me with the rest of this fruit is what you can do. Your sister seems to think she doesn't live here anymore,” her mother said as she sleeved sweat from her forehead. “She expects me to take jam and crumpets up to her in bed like I'm running some sort of hotel.”

Joely hated listening to her mother's complaints, as though it was she who'd asked for buttered brioche and strawberry freezer jam. Joely adored her sister, but that didn't make it any easier to be stuck between her and their mother.

“Our dean makes it for us every second Sunday,” Hayley had said one morning, shortly after she'd come home for summer break.

Lately, their mother's mouth tightened whenever Hayley opened hers. “She says there's more to life than white bread and peanut butter.”

“Yes, but I don't suppose your dean has a husband, two daughters, and a farm to take care of,” their mother said. The girls were eating toast on the porch while she splashed one of two buckets of milk into the separator so they would later have cream for coffee and baking, and butter for bread.

Hayley crushed a grasshopper under the toe of her flip flop.

“Oh, Mother.”

That was a month ago.

“I guess I'll get the sugar from the pantry,” Joely said, estimating how much they'd need to sweeten the eight pails of raspberries picked yesterday from their own overgrown thicket of canes.

“Your dad already brought it to the summer kitchen this morning. If you want, just start sorting the berries and I'll be there in a few minutes. But change your clothes first. And put on an old apron. I'm sure I don't need to spend all night scrubbing berry juice out of good clothes.”

Upstairs, Joely found Hayley brushing her teeth. She leaned drowsily against the sink as though being awake was just one of life's inconveniences.

“Hey, babe,” Hayley said through a lather of toothpaste when she spotted her sister's reflection in the bathroom mirror.

“Morning,” Joely said. She paused in the doorway and admired her sister's figure in crushed cotton boxers and a tank top. There were blanket creases etched into her sister's thighs like pink tattoos.

Everything looked beautiful on Hayley, even sleep, and Joely secretly hoped she'd turn out to look like her sister in a few years, with boyish hips and high, full breasts that filled out sweaters. It was hard to imagine, especially since everyone always said that Hayley matched the women in their father's family, who were tall and lovely and confident. Joely, they said, was more like her mother — built for work.

“We're making jam today,” Joely said, hoping she wouldn't have to make another excuse for Hayley.

“What kind?” Hayley lifted a long leg into the bathroom sink and began to smooth thick, white foam up to her knee, flicking it from her fingers onto the counter and mirror before beginning to shave in easy strokes. Joely would end up cleaning the foam later.

“Raspberry, for sure,” she said, hoping the mention of her sister's favourite jam would bring her around to feeling helpful. “Mom's already done the apricot with the box that got too ripe for canning. There should be enough to send some with you to school.” Joely didn't mention the cherries and grapes. She'd probably already said too much.