Pilgrims Don't Wear Pink (4 page)

I held it up. It was enormous. “Do you, um, have a small?”

“That is the small.”

“Fan-tastic.” Now I had an attractive shirtdress. Okay, that's a lie—I had a shirtdress.

“Let's get you kitted up.” The costume lady started bustling around, simultaneously stripping me and collecting garments: wool stockings that tied above my knees; a loose-fitting shift, which looked like a linen nightgown; a not-so-loose set of stays, which was like a pointy-ended tube top with boning and made my torso look like an ice cream cone with two scoops on top; and three different petticoats. I had on more clothes in my underwear in the eighteenth century than I did fully dressed in the twenty-first.

I took an experimental breath. My lungs pushed against the stiff boning of the stays, but I could breathe. Sort of. I was actually lucky, because for American women, late eighteenth-century stays were more like bras than nineteenth-century corsets—their primary purpose was support, not waist minimization. Stays encouraged good posture (definitely no slouching in my future), and supported and lifted the bosom. And my stays were succeeding a bit too well on that front. With each breath, I was half afraid my boobs would just break free—because the stays were flattening out my torso, my boobs had nowhere to go but up. And up they went. I tugged my shift to make sure it was extra secure.

“And the dress . . . How's this?” She held up what looked like a brown burlap sack.

“Do you have anything a little more . . . saucy?” Saucy enough to seduce a Squaddie, maybe.

“I'll . . . check.” She raised an eyebrow. “Honey, you know you're gonna be scrubbing pots, not doing the minuet.”

“I know,” I agreed, “but they're just so beautiful.” I looked longingly at the rows of dresses above my head.

That did the trick. I'd somehow flipped a switch and turned her from a troll into my new best friend. “Let me rustle up some options.” She beamed.

She returned with a linsey-woolsey sapphire-blue day dress, another in striped sky-blue poplin, and my favorite, a pink confection with little white flowers that had an underskirt in contrasting colors that peeked through. I clapped in delight.

“I love them!” I squealed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“You are so very welcome, dear,” she replied. “If you want, even though we're not supposed to do this, you can come in anytime and switch them out for new ones.” She winked conspiratorially.

“No!” I gasped in joyous disbelief.

“Shhh!” She shushed me merrily. “Now, you'll want to keep these in the linen press upstairs at the Bromleigh Homestead. Wear your Camden Harbor uniform over in the mornings and change in the homestead. The dresses will be waiting in the linen press for you tomorrow morning.”

“Got it.”

Tomorrow was looking better and better. I whistled as I made my way home from the costume shack. I knew, once back at the house, I had to face two of my least favorite things: unpacking and dealing with Ashling. Both of these activities required my full attention, so at the end of an evening full of both, I was more than happy to collapse into bed and read. I hadn't brought that many books, which after seeing the “library” in the living room, I was beginning to think was a fatal error. I picked up my well-read copy of
Northanger Abbey,
happily turning its familiar pages. I'd always thought Henry Tilney was one of Austen's most underappreciated heroes. So witty and intelligent and funny, and he and Catherine are so perfect for each other, and—

“I go to sleep at ten,” Ashling said, then abruptly turned out the lights, plunging the room into darkness.

“Actually, um, I was gonna read for a bit, and—”

“Good night.”

Well, if nothing else, come August—if I survived—I'd sure be well rested.

I really was wearing pants, but no one believed me. On the walk to the museum grounds, four cars rolled down their windows to whistle, two different mothers covered their sons' eyes, and Ashling kept huffing something that sounded suspiciously like “skank.” I really wasn't pantsless. I only looked like it. My standard-issue blue polo shirt just happened to be longer than the only pair of khaki shorts I owned. Ah, the perils of being short.

I had never thought I'd be so relieved to don something that reached down to my ankles, but after my pants-free walk of shame, I wriggled gratefully into my layers of petticoats and the blue linsey-woolsey dress. There was an apron in there too, which I tied on—who knew how messy things were going to get.

Downstairs, a capable-looking woman in her early sixties was waiting for me in the kitchen. She looked like she could help a cow give birth. Or had maybe worked as a park ranger.

“I'm Ruth,” she said as she grasped my hand firmly. “We've got a lot of work to do, kid.”

Ruth wasn't kidding. Back before kitchen stoves became widespread in the nineteenth century, Americans cooked on an open hearth, either hanging things above the flames to roast or heating things by burying them in the warmth of the ashes. The one here looked a bit like something out of a brick-oven pizza restaurant. We swept the ashes into the center of the hearth and built up the fire using wood stacked by the back door. Ruth selected different cast-iron pots, nestling two lidded ones into the ashes, hanging another from one of many hooks dangling above the fire, and setting a frying pan on a trivet. All of the pots were ridiculously heavy and left midnight black streaks on my hands. As the fire heated up, Ruth led me down a narrow staircase into the cellar.

“No one comes down here but you. You hear? No one,” she said seriously. “This”—she gestured to a refrigerator—“is the only modern appliance in the house. Here's where you'll get all the cooking supplies that don't come from the garden and aren't upstairs in jars, like flour, sugar, molasses, et cetera.”

And those supplies turned out to be . . . lard. Ruth opened the refrigerator to reveal a solid wall of boxed snow-capped lard. More lard than I had thought existed in the continental United States.

“Eggs are on the side”—she flipped open the egg holder—“and milk is on the bottom inside the door. All the meat's in the freezer.” She closed the refrigerator door and opened the freezer on top, which was packed with freezer-burned bloody carcasses. It looked like someone had hacked up a human corpse and stashed the evidence. I tried not to gag.

“You ever rendered pork fat before?”

“N-no,” I stammered.

“First time for everything.”

Ruth loaded my arms with a frozen roast and a lifetime supply of lard, and we headed upstairs. Lard, it turns out, is not so gross. It's really not that different from butter. Raw meat, however . . . like really raw meat—drawing in horseflies from the barn, dripping globules of yellow fat onto the counter as it defrosts—is another story. I stopped breathing through my nose as I hacked up Babe the pig and transferred him to the frying pan under Ruth's watchful eye. It bubbled merrily away in a sea of lard, as I seriously considered a vegan lifestyle.

It got better once I'd conquered the beast. Ruth took me out back to show me around the kitchen garden. In addition to the flowers there for purely decorative purposes, there was an herb patch, a vegetable section dominated almost entirely by beets, some sprawling blueberry bushes, and a mostly empty apple barrel. Except for the little signs indicating what was what for the visitors, it was exactly like what a colonial woman would have had for everyday use. We headed back in to steam some beet greens in one cast-iron pot and boil the beets in another. Looking at my hands stained red with beet juice, an idea occurred to me . . . hmm. When Ruth wasn't looking, I used a pewter plate as a mirror and blended some beet juice into my cheeks as impromptu blush. Not bad! I rubbed some on my lips. It actually looked like a shade of Burt's Bees lip-gloss I'd lost last summer. I wasn't going to break the modern makeup rule, and I certainly wasn't going to crush beetles into red lip stain like actual colonial women had done in the pre-Revlon era, but in the immortal words of Tim Gunn on
Project Runway,
I was going to make it work. I swiped some soot from the top of the bread oven (we weren't using it) and streaked it on my eyelids. Easy, breezy, beautiful, ColonialGirl.

Baking I actually have a bit of a knack for. Last year I took first place at the Minnesota State Fair Bake-Off with my caramel apple pie recipe. I practically learned to read on my mom's
Martha Stewart Living
magazines. Martha may not be super into lard and molasses, but I think even she would have been impressed with the perfectly steamed Indian pudding I produced an hour later. Ruth explained that open-hearth baking was like using a Dutch oven when you go camping. I don't camp, so this analogy was lost on me. But it wasn't so bad. You stuck your baked good in a cast-iron lidded pot, put the pot in the ashes, and used a pair of tongs to give the pot a quarter turn every fifteen minutes, to ensure it baked evenly. It was a lot riskier and less precise than modern baking, because if you opened the lid to check on it, you put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. Plus, back then cookbooks weren't widely used. No Martha giving you step-by-step instructions on how to blanch your marcona almonds or create aromatic herb bundles for parchment-baked perch. Thankfully, the homestead had its own special book of handwritten recipes on the shelf in between the jar of Brer Rabbit Molasses and a honey pot that functioned largely as a bee cemetery.

 

By the end of the day, I had fashioned a feast of pork fat, beet greens, and Indian pudding, none of which I was remotely interested in eating. I was sweaty, sooty, smelly, and my arms ached from lugging around those insanely heavy pots. Tired and gross as I was, it was actually strangely satisfying. Sure, I'd only produced four tons of pork-infused lard, but I felt like I'd really accomplished something. More so than, say, writing a five-paragraph essay. Or nailing the smoky-eye look.

Ruth sent me out back to scrub the pots under the water pump. The lard was . . . crusty. As I pumped water and rubbed my hands raw trying to get out globs of stuck-on pork fat, contemplating the irony that the tallow soap I was using was also made out of animal fat, I fought down the urge to vomit for the millionth time that day. I was surrounded by animal fat. Even the cleaning products felt dirty! Greasy, gritty water soaked the hem of my skirts and little black cast-iron flecks came loose, settling in my clothes, my hair, my everywhere. Suddenly, I had a flash of the cute, clean girl who'd arrived in her canvas ballet flats, innocent, naive, and a stranger to lard. It was all just too much. I put down the last of the mostly clean pots.

So, yes, I'll admit it, I'd broken the cell phone rule. I'd stuck it in my bra before I left the house to smuggle it into the museum. We were allowed to wear modern underwear under our costumes, but I had a horrible feeling that Ashling was going full-on commando in the name of historical accuracy. Not me—I love history, but I love personal hygiene more. I like a little something on under my petticoats, thank you very much. So I had a pink lacy bra that doubled as a stealth cell phone holder under my stays. I know, it was bad that I'd brought the phone. But I'd thought that Dev might have needed me. Turned out, I needed him. I looked around—Ruth was busy in the house, and none of the museum visitors on the road could see around to the garden, but . . . Bingo! I spied the almost-empty apple barrel. Perfect cover. I leaned over, stuck my head in the barrel, pulled the phone out of my boobs, and dialed.

“Dev!” I sobbed. “I smell like a slaughterhouse!”

“What? Hello?” he answered, confused. “Who is this? If this is PETA again, I don't know how you got this number, but back off. We are running the ‘Fun Fur' piece, and there's nothing you can do about it.”

“What? No! It's not PETA—it's Libby.”

“Libby? Why would you smell like a slaughterhouse? Aren't you wearing your Burberry Brit?” It was hard to hear him.

“Nobody ever mentioned how much lard was involved in the good old days.” I sniffled.

“You did not just say ‘lard' to me.” Static. “I'm on a no-fat, no-carb diet. Don't even think ‘lard' in my general direction.”

“Where are you?” I asked. “There's a lot of background noise.”

“Starbucks,” Dev replied briskly. “I'm trying to construct a carry-able tower out of four nonfat half-caf lattes, two Cinnamon Dolce Light Frappuccinos, three shots of espresso, and a reduced-fat strawberry scone, and it is
not
going well.” Shuffling noises. “How are things with you? Aside from the L-word. How're the other nerds?”

“They hate me,” I moaned miserably. “It's like
Legally Blonde.
”

“Really?” he asked. “That's weird. You're not even that blond. You use the honey-to-caramel shade of Sheer Blonde shampoo.”

“I know,” I whined, “but they're treating me like Elle Woods's sluttier, stupider younger sister.” Okay, fine, really it was only one of them, but I was in a self-pitying mood and felt like the whole world was out to get me. And I wanted to whine.

“You? Really. Really? You have way too many freckles and sometimes your hair frizzes. I mean you're cute, but you're no Reese Witherspoon . . .”

“Exactly!”

“I mean, they should have
seen
you when I first met you in that tragic pink turtleneck you thought was so chic.”

“It
was
chic three years ago!” I protested.

“You were a well-meaning mess. I made you what you are!”

“I'd be offended, if I didn't sort of agree. They're totally misjudging me. I'm not a dumb blonde! I'm just a dork who likes shoes.”

“Too true,” he agreed, a little more readily than I was comfortable with. “Well,” he asked, amid more rustling sounds, “is there anything good in the Clamhole?”