The Almost Sisters(7)

For me summer began with the taste of catfish rolled in cornmeal and coarse salt, served up crisp and smoking hot on paper plates with sweet tea in Dixie Cups. Iceberg and cherry-tomato salad drenched in homemade ranch dressing. Cheese grits. Fried okra. Huge wedges of icebox pie for after. That meal was still the very taste of freedom to me.

This year it was drizzling outside, a thing Miss Birchie’s prayers had not allowed to happen on Fish Fry Sunday for decades. Probably God weighing in on Pastor Rick. But there was no canceling or postponing the Fry. The youth-group boys simply crowded the tables into the fellowship hall. As Miss Birchie and Miss Wattie came in, arm in arm, Pastor Rick was there to greet them.

“Now, there’s no need for you ladies to wait in line. Come have a seat. We’ll bring you plates.”

This was one thing he got right. No grandmother-aged lady or pregnant woman had ever had to stand in line at a church social. Pastor Rick walked Birchie and Miss Wattie over to his own table, already packed with deacons and Associate Pastor Campbell and his wife, Myrtle. Birchie took the seat across from Frank Darian, her lawyer, who lived and worked out of the big blue house two doors down from Birchie’s. He was the only man at the table who wasn’t part of church leadership, but his wife, Jeannie Anne, was the children’s minister. It was a part-time job involving hand puppets, and therefore open to women.

Pastor Rick came back and set paper plates down in front of each of them, saying, “Here we go! Here we go!” His wife was right behind him with their drinks and napkins.

The plates were wrong, though. No catfish. No fried okra. No iceberg salad. Instead there was what looked to Miss Birchie like something ready to be mailed—a rectangle of parchment paper, tied up in a string.

“Well, now, what’s this?” Miss Wattie asked.

“It’s salmon. It’s wrapped and steamed with fresh herbs and spring vegetables,” Pastor Rick said.

A moment of silence. Wattie turned to whisper something, her lips almost touching Birchie’s ear. A lot of Birchie’s conversations happened with Miss Wattie whispering to her in full profile, Wattie’s breath stirring the snowy fluff of tendrils that had escaped Birchie’s bun. It was so common a sight these days that no one thought anything of it. Not right then.

“But this is the Fish Fry,” Miss Birchie said, emphasis on “Fry.”

“It’s called salmon en papillote,” Pastor Rick said.

“That sounds French,” said Birchie darkly, but poor Rick missed the tone.

“Yes! Yes, it is French,” he warbled happily. “And so much healthier.”

Birchie looked like she might say more, but Wattie stayed close, her voice a breathy background noise, soothing Birchie down. After a moment Birchie’s sparse lashes dropped, and she said, “Well, let’s try it, then.”

Miss Wattie turned to face her own packet. Her full lips compressed into a wide, flat line. She’d calmed Birchie, but she made no move to try this wrongful food herself.

Birchie peeled back the wrapping to reveal a pile of bright green asparagus and a few cherry tomatoes, their skins wrinkled from the steam. Her mouth pursed and pruned into a dot, the exact opposite shape of Wattie’s but expressing the same feeling.

Pastor Rick turned to Jeannie Anne Darian. “Did you find your last two volunteers for nursery duty at VBS?”

Jeannie Anne started to chirp an answer, but Birchie talked over her.

“Is there no cornbread?”

“Well, no . . . we thought . . . Carbs are . . .” Pastor Rick began unhappily, and Birchie overspoke him, too.

“And still and yet no biscuits?”

“There might be crackers in the pantry,” he offered.

“This is nonsense,” Miss Birchie said, and Miss Wattie leaned in again to whisper. Wattie had prevented more than one hyperpolite evisceration in her time. But no biscuits was too much, and Birchie turned to her and said, “No, Wattie, it won’t do.”

In the wake of this soft-spoken utterance, the table quieted. Pastor Rick was new, but even he understood the power of these words, spoken by the reigning Birch in Birchville. He was almost cringing with propitiation.

“You should try a bite before you judge! It’s so healthful. And delicious. I know you’ll like it if you try a bite.”

Birchie inclined her head away from Wattie’s calming whispers. She pushed aside the vegetables with her plastic fork, digging to find the salmon. It was shiny with olive oil and tomato juice, dotted with bits of black pepper and herbs.

“Oh, dear, no, I can’t possibly eat that,” she said, her voice gone dangerously sweet. Sweet as icebox pie. Sweet as sugar tea. Wattie leaned in closer, her whispers urgent now, but Birchie talked over her, blue eyes bright in her powdered face. “It looks like Pastor Campbell’s penis, all pink and freckled.”

The delivery was so prim and cheerful that it took several seconds for the words she’d said to register. Deacon Lester choked. He stifled himself, trying to asphyxiate quietly in the dawning shocked silence. Anna Gentry spilled her icy sweet tea down her blouse and didn’t so much as squeak. Jeannie Anne Darian paused with her bite of fish halfway to her lips, her eyes bugging in her pretty, pug-dog face.

It didn’t seem possible that Emily Birch Briggs would say the word “penis” or acknowledge the existence of such a thing. Had a six-foot penis gone running across the church lawn on legs, everyone would have expected Miss Birchie to go completely blind in a six-foot-penis-shaped blotch, right at the center of her field of vision. Lovely sunset, she might remark, peering through it to God’s glorious vistas. But now she had acknowledged the existence of genitalia in the fellowship hall; worse, she’d said out loud that associate Pastor Campbell had a set. She’d described it in such great detail that it seemed likely she had met the member in question, which was purely, purely unthinkable. Sweat popped on Pastor Rick’s forehead, and all the deacons were gaping. Pastor Campbell, hearing his essential self so maligned, opened and shut his mouth several times, with no words or even breath coming out.