Top O' the Mournin' (15 page)

“You’re too extreme with that diet of yours,” warned Ethel. “One of these days someone’s going to find you dead from malnutrition.”

I regarded the five different kinds of potatoes on my plate. “What’s wrong with potatoes?” I asked Ira.

“They don’t allow the body to achieve a harmonious and dynamic state with the natural environment.”

I wondered if that was worse than eating too many calories. It kind of sounded like it. I pushed my potatoes to one side of my plate.

“So what do you eat if you don’t eat potatoes?” Jackie asked Ira.

“I eat what every macrobiotic eats.” He ticked off a litany on his fingers. “Bok choy, burdock carrots, daikon radishes, azuki beans, and your common sea vegetables like nori, wakame, hiziki, and agar-agar.”

The man ate prickly carrots and questionable produce that sounded like creatures who’d tangled with Godzilla.
Hmm.
Disharmony with the natural environment was looking pretty good about now. I nudged my potatoes back toward the center of my plate.

“Are you on the same diet as your husband?” Jackie asked Gladys Kuppelman.

I figured the answer to that was no since the food on Gladys’s plate was divided evenly between lettuce and broccoli.

“I’m a fruitarian/raw-foodist,” said Gladys. “And let me tell you, it’s not easy sticking to your diet when you’re on vacation. The fruits are overripe. The vegetables are over-cooked. And just
try
asking for condiments or beverages. Watch this.” She motioned a server to our table. “I’d like to order something to drink. Do you have roasted bancha twig tea?”

“I’m sorry?” the girl asked, looking confused.

“How about roasted brown rice tea?”

“We have green tea.”

“Do you have any sesame seaweed powder?”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Gladys motioned her away. “You see what I mean? The tour company promises that all your dietary needs will be met, but once you arrive at your destination, they serve you the same old slop that everyone else is eating.” Her eyes dipped to my plate. “I bet you don’t even know what half that swill in front of you is.”

This was authentic Irish cuisine! How gauche of her to call it swill. I skewered some food on the end of my fork and held it up for her perusal. “Boiled potato.” I stuffed it into my mouth and flashed a satisfied smile.

“I know what’s she’s eating,” said Ethel Minch. “I got a book.” She whipped it off her lap for us to see. “It lists every kind of Irish dish there is and shows a color photograph. You see that mound of mashed potatoes on her plate there with the crab claw sticking out of it? That’s called Seafood Pie and it’s a real delicacy.”

A delicacy, was it? Nice choice, Emily. I dug into the seafood pie.

“You better have all your business in order,” Ira Kuppelman warned me, “because that food is poisoning your system. Wait and see. It’ll end up killing you. You young people treat your bodies like refuse dumps. You’ll never live as long as Gladys and me.”

All the tables in this place and I had to pick the one patrolled by the food police. Brilliant idea I’d had to socialize outside my immediate circle.

“How old are you?” Jackie asked Ira as I forked a whole mushroom cap into my mouth.

“Take a guess,” Ira said proudly.

Jackie shrugged. “Sixty-one?”

“Here’s a picture of that little nibble you just put in your mouth,” said Ethel, pointing out the photo to me with her brightly lacquered nail. “It’s a stuffed heart.”

“I’m ninety-two,” bragged Ira, “and Gladys is ninety.”

EH! My eyes froze open in shock, but I was unsure what freaked me out more: learning Ira Kuppelman’s age or discovering what I’d just sunk my teeth into. I tried to remain calm as I mumbled around the pulp in my mouth, “Wot kind of hart?”

“It says here they use any kind of fowl or small game heart. What kind of heart do you think she’s eating, Ernie?”

“Gotta be a chicken,” he replied. “Or a turkey.”

Ira shook his head. “I bet it’s a duck.”

Oh, God!

“Could it be a Cornish hen?” asked Jackie. “They look like they’d have bite-size organs.”

“Maybe it was a capon heart,” said Gladys.

Jackie looked confused. “What’s a capon?”

“A capon is your standard male chicken with one basic difference,” said Ernie. He scissored his fingers in the air. “He’s been castrated.”

Jackie clutched her throat and sucked in her breath. Uh-oh. I hoped she wasn’t having a flashback.

“How can they castrate a chicken?” asked Ethel. “I thought all chickens were female.”

Ernie rolled his eyes. “There’s girl chickens and boy chickens. The girls are called hens. The boys are called cocks. When there’s too many boys, Farmer Brown snips off their stones and—zap!—they can forget about knocking up Clucky Lucky anytime soon.”

Aha! A perfect example of the incredible strides the feminist movement had made in the poultry industry.

“I thought the boy chickens were called roosters,” said Gladys.

“Clucky Lucky was not a hen,” Jackie corrected Ernie. “He might have acted like a hen, but I think it’s obvious he was a cock…with gender-identification issues.”

“Would that make him a dyke?” asked Ira.

Gladys shook her head. “It makes him a capon.”

“You know what I think? I think you people are all talking
bull,”
wailed Ernie.

Why was this discussion sounding so familiar? I swallowed the half-chewed mush in my mouth and sat straight up in my chair, stricken.

“Tasted pretty bad, huh?” asked Ethel.

I shook my head. “It’s not that. I just realized I’ve had this conversation before. In Switzerland.” The topic had been bovines instead of fowl, but the level of confusion had been exactly the same. I studied the remaining food on my plate with apprehension.

“You want me to find pictures of the other stuff you got there so you know what you’re eating?” Ethel asked helpfully.

“That would be
so
sweet of you,” I said with relief. I snatched the water pitcher from the middle of the table, filled my glass, and chugalugged the whole thing in one gulp to get rid of the aftertaste in my mouth.

“I hope that’s well water,” said Ira. “Or spring water. Those are the only kinds of water you should ever drink. And never with ice.”

Sounded like advice Ponce de Leon might have given his men during their search for the mythical fountain of youth. Of course, ice hadn’t been an option back in the 1500s. Especially in Florida. But it seemed the Kuppelmans had discovered the elixir of youth that had eluded Ponce. I regarded their smooth, tanned complexions. Their taut flesh. Their full heads of hair. Their athletically trim bodies. The superior muscle definition beneath their matching jerseys. “Are you really ninety-two?” I asked Ira.

“Born April second, 1908. You do the math.”

“That fluffy casserole you got there,” Ethel said, referring to her book. “That’s tripe and onions.”

I scooped a portion of the casserole onto my fork for a better look. “What’s tripe? Some kind of fish?”

“It’s cow stomach,” said Gladys. “Or sheep. Or goat. They sell it at our corner market. Some people make handbags out of it.”

Not the Irish. They made casseroles. I dumped it off my fork and scooted it to a remote section of my plate.

“How come you don’t have any wrinkles?” Jackie marveled at the Kupplemans. “Most people who look as good as you do have had a ton of face-lifts.”

Ira gestured toward his plate. “Anyone who follows our diet can look just like we do. They won’t develop wrinkles. Ever.”

I guess my mom had actually been on to something when she’d told me to eat my vegetables. But was it worth living to the age of ninety-two, wrinkle-free, if I could never eat another potato chip or doughnut hole? I mean, what was the point?

“That concoction in the middle of your plate with the onions and mushrooms and carrots,” said Ethel. “That’s rabbit stew.”

Rabbit stew. Finally. Something both recognizable and tasty. I poised my fork over a mound of mushrooms, meat, and carrots only to have Jackie seize my hand.

“You can’t possibly eat that.”

“Not until you let go of my hand, I can’t.”

“How can you stoop so low?”

“Because I’m hungry!”

“That’s no excuse! You could be about to eat Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. How can you live with that on your conscience?”

I gave her a long, hard look. She couldn’t be your average, run-of-the-mill transsexual.
Noooo.
She had to be a
vegetarian
transsexual.

“Is that ‘the look’?” she cried. “Oh. My. God. You’re giving me ‘the look.’ Don’t deny it. I remember it quite vividly from when we were in New York together. Go ahead then.” She released my hand and crossed her arms over her chest, her lips puffed out in an exaggerated pout. “Eat the baby bunny. And to think that’s the mouth I used to kiss!”

Gladys did something with her face that might have been a failed attempt at a frown. Ira and Ernie exchanged curious glances. I smiled stiffly and kicked Jackie under the table.

“OW!”

“We played the theater circuit together on Broadway,” I explained. “And you know modern theater. It can be very avant-garde. One of the plays actually required us to kiss.”

“Cruibins,” said Ethel.

“You saw these two acting together on Broadway?” Gladys gasped in astonishment. “Was that the name of the play?”

“It’s the name of that gunk on her plate next to the rabbit stew. Says here it’s a mixture of carrots, onions, and pickled pigs’ trotters. What are trotters?”

Gladys’s complexion turned chalky. “Pigs’ feet.” She covered her mouth in horror. “You’re going to eat pigs’ feet?”

Pigs’ feet or Benjamin Bunny. Some choice.

“I got a lot of sympathy for pigs,” said Ethel, closing her book. “They’re the size of Sherman tanks, but they have to tiptoe around on these little tiny feet. They must develop some major foot problems. I’ve had foot problems all my life, and believe me, it’s no fun.”

Oh, my God! She was admitting to foot problems? This was perfect! Here was my opening. “What kind of foot problems do you have?” I asked in a voice that I hoped expressed concern and interest without sounding too eager.

“What problems
don’t
I have? You name it, I got it. Good thing I married a shoe salesman. Would have cost me a fortune for footwear otherwise.”

“You sell shoes?” Jackie perked up beside me, obviously more concerned with her own feet than pigs’ feet. “Do you happen to carry…large sizes?”

“So, Ethel,” I continued, cutting Jackie off, “what are you struggling with? Bunions? Calluses? Corns?”

“I got deformed bones in my feet. Not much I could do about it though. My podiatrist says deformities like mine are usually hereditary.”

My anticipation started to build. “So your relatives all have the same foot problems?”

“Only on my mother’s side of the family. The Quigley side. My father’s side never had so much as an ingrown toenail.”

“‘Quigley’ is Irish, isn’t it?” Gladys asked.

Ethel nodded. “It used to be O’Quigley, but when my great-grandfather arrived on Ellis Island, the
O
got lost somewhere in the paperwork.”

“Did your relatives emigrate during one of the potato famines?” I asked, growing more excited. I had only deformed feet and Ethel’s Irish heritage to go on, but I could smell a connection. Was it possible the O’Quigleys had been involved with the castle in some bygone era? I tried to suppress the trill of emotion in my voice. “Do you know if your relatives were originally from this area?”

Ethel threw me an annoyed look. “How the hell should I know? And why would I care? Haven’t you ever heard that proverb? ‘He who boasts of his descent is like the potato; the best part of him is underground.’ If you ask me, all that genealogy stuff is a waste of time. What’s the sense? It’s all ancient history. What good’s it gonna do me to know I was related to some spud farmer in Ireland two hundred years ago? Is that gonna make me any richer? I don’t think so.”

This was the second time she’d expressed her apathy toward all things historical. Could her disinterest be genuine? Or was this a deliberate tactic to shift attention away from herself and her family?

“That’s the right attitude!” Ira tapped his fist on the edge of the table. “I said the same thing to Gladys, but she had an inkling there was
royalty
in her family’s past, so we had to spend thousands finding out who all her ancestors were. Let me tell you, there are some things better left buried, but Gladys
had
to know. Didn’t you, Gladys? Go ahead. Why don’t you tell your friends who you’re related to?”

Gladys’s eyes became daggers as she pivoted her head around to glare at her husband. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Goose bumps crawled up my arms. Geez. What had she found out?

“I’m not even sure why she wanted to visit Ireland after—”

“So help me, Ira, if you say one more word, I’ll make the rest of your vacation a living
hell!”