A Year on Ladybug Farm #1 (29 page)

Ida Mae poured cream into a pitcher and set it onto a small tray beside the sugar bowl. She carried the tray to the counter and set it down deliberately in front of Bridget. “In my kitchen,” she told her, “you put the cream and the sugar on the table when you serve the coffee.”

Bridget drew in a breath to respond, but this time it was Cici who elbowed her in the ribs. “Just like in a restaurant,” she said cheerily. “Grits, Bridget?”

The breakfast was delicious, but how could it not be, when the main course featured sausage? When the ladies got up to clear the table and load the dishwasher, Ida Mae shooed them away in no uncertain terms. She didn’t trust “that damn dishwashing contraption” and preferred to do the dishes by hand. Furthermore, she didn’t want anyone—not even Bridget—hovering around in the kitchen while she did.

On the way out of the kitchen, Lindsay grinned and gave Bridget a high-five. “Looks like you’ve got the day off,” she said. “Good deal.”

Bridget said, “I just hope she doesn’t wear herself out.” She looked back over her shoulder, her expression unhappy and concerned. But her words seemed almost an afterthought as she added, “Poor thing.”

Lunch was a rich beef stew, which Ida Mae refused to allow Bridget to help her prepare. By the time Bridget was ready to start dinner, a pork loin was already roasting in the oven and Ida Mae was shelling pecans for a pie. No, she didn’t need any help with the pecans. No, there was nothing Bridget could do.

Cici located the underground gas tank, and by mid-afternoon had the gas company out to fill it, and to inspect and light all the heaters in the house. Within an hour the big old house was as toasty as any modern apartment.

“All the heaters are on thermostats,” Cici reported, practically chortling with delight. “We can just set them once and never worry about them again. Of course, we’ll still want to keep the wood furnace going to save on gas, but no more hauling in wood four times a day. Do you know what this means? We can live like normal people! We can be warm in any room we want to—even the sunroom! Why in the world didn’t Ida Mae show up before now?”

Dinner was served in the formal dining room, where the huge walnut table had been spread with a white linen cloth, and the sconces on the wall, now served by propane gas flames, glowed with freshly polished brass and brilliantly cleaned glass globes. The chairs, which Lindsay had spent the afternoon rescuing from the dairy loft, gleamed with lemon oil and beeswax. The napkins were ironed, and the pork loin was served on a bed of fresh rosemary and parsley cut from the garden.

“I feel like I should leave a tip,” Lindsay whispered, self-consciously pressing out the wrinkles in her jeans.

“She’s auditioning,” Cici pointed out. “She wants us to see what she can do.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, she’s got the part,” said Lindsay, scooping out a generous portion of horseradish mashed potatoes.

Bridget smiled stiffly and said nothing.

 

 

Three days later, Bridget had plenty to say.

Ida Mae did laundry, Ida Mae washed windows, Ida Mae dug a silver candelabra out of a box in the attic, polished it until it looked like a museum piece, and placed it in the center of the dining room table where she insisted they dine every night. She stripped the sheets off the beds every morning—often before the women who were sleeping on them were even dressed—and replaced them with freshly washed and ironed ones. Yes, she ironed sheets. She also ironed tablecloths, napkins, and dish towels. She polished the banister and waxed the stairs to a dangerous sheen. Using an ingenious mechanism none of the women had suspected before, she lowered the chandelier over the staircase, removed all the prisms, washed them in soapy water, and rehung the whole. The light that was thus refracted sparkled over the entire first floor.

On the other hand, she never lost an opportunity to criticize the ladies’ taste, decor, or personal habits. She insisted on breakfast at dawn, lunch at noon, and dinner at seven. At first this was a novelty, like being on a cruise ship, but no one really expected to keep to the schedule permanently. She didn’t like the way Cici dressed or the way Lindsay wore her hair, and worst of all, Bridget was banned from her own kitchen.

“The woman,” Bridget muttered, flinging herself into her front porch rocker a little after five on a cloudy, cold afternoon, “is making me crazy. We’ve got to do something.” She thrust out a half-empty wineglass for a refill. “Hit me, Lindsay. You know the worst part? I hate eating at seven. By seven I want to be soaking in the tub, up to my neck in bubbles. Why do we have to be on her schedule?”

“I feel like I should put on a dress to go to dinner,” admitted Lindsay, filling Bridget’s glass.

“We used to eat at seven back in the suburbs,” Cici pointed out.

“That’s not the point. We don’t do that anymore. We eat when we’re hungry and we drink when the sun goes down and then we go to bed. This is what we
do
.”

Cici gave a half shrug, and sipped her wine. “She’s a good cook.”

“Obviously, she’s never heard of cholesterol,” added Lindsay.

“I kind of like living in a world where the cook doesn’t know about heart disease.”

Bridget bristled visibly. “I never heard any complaints before.”

“Oh, Bridget, come on—”

“I didn’t mean—”

“When we bought this place,” Bridget said, her voice stiff with hurt, “I thought it was clear I was going to do the cooking. If you don’t like the way I do it . . .”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Bridget, you can’t be serious!”

“Hold on.” Cici held up a hand for peace. “Bridget, I don’t think there’s any argument that Lindsay and I both love your cooking and appreciate the fact that you’ve been willing to take it on.” Lindsay nodded vigorously. “And even though it has been nice being waited on these last few days, I for one am not all that interested in learning to live like a nineteenth-century woman of leisure. And I definitely can’t keep eating like this three meals a day.”

Lindsay murmured her reluctant agreement. “But come on, Bridge. Hasn’t it been kind of nice, having help in the kitchen? When I think of all the peeling and slicing and blanching and preserving we did this summer—”

“Help?” exclaimed Bridget. “I’m not even allowed to set the table!”

Cici nodded and held out her glass for a refill, which Lindsay obliged. “She is a bossy old woman,” she agreed. “And set in her ways.”

“With way too much energy for a person of her age,” added Lindsay. “Could someone clue her in to the fact that no one irons anymore? Maybe she should take up golf.”

“Well, she’s worked all her life,” Cici said. “I know how I’d feel if someone told me one day I just wasn’t needed anymore.”

Bridget thought about that for a moment, and sighed. “Yeah, me, too, I guess.”

“What she needs to understand,” said Cici, “is that you’re the chef. She’s just the sous chef.”

Bridget brightened a little. “Right. Sous chef.”

“Of course,” added Cici, “it’s not like she’s going to be here forever. As soon as we find her relatives . . .”

“No one I’ve talked to ever heard of her relatives,” Lindsay said, “not even Maggie. Besides, what are we going to do if we find them? It’s not like she’s sick, or incompetent. We can’t just call them up to come and get her.”

Cici sighed. “I’d just feel better if she had some place to go, that’s all.”

“If she had some place to go,” Bridget pointed out, “she wouldn’t have been living in our attic.”

“I wonder how old she is, anyway,” mused Lindsay. “She’s got to have some terrific stories about this place, but every time I try to draw her out, she brushes me off.”

“The worst part is,” Bridget said, shivering in the wool throw she had tossed around her shoulders, “it’s forty-five degrees out here and we’re sitting on the front porch because this is the only place we have to talk.”

“It does feel weird, having someone else live here. I liked it better when it was our house,” admitted Lindsay.

Cici said, “It’s
still
our house. We own this place. That means you, too, Bridget. And if she’s making you unhappy, then she’s got to go. It’s that simple.”

“Go where?” asked Lindsay. “We’re back to that again.”

They were silent for a while, rocking.

“She’s a good housekeeper,” Cici admitted at last. “After all these years, I guess she’s got the routine down. And with everything else we have to do trying to put this place back together, it’s nice not to have to worry about mopping and dusting.”

No one could argue with that.

“To tell the truth,” Lindsay said after a moment, “I kind of like having ironed sheets. It reminds me of when I was a little girl, staying at my grandma’s house.”

“And the price is right,” added Cici.

“But she’s making me crazy,” Bridget said.

Lindsay sighed. “Managing servants is an art.” When the other two stared at her, she added, “So I hear.”

Cici said, “We’ll have a meeting, lay down the ground rules for her. If she can’t abide by them, she’ll have to find another job. It happens all the time.”

Lindsay said, “Not when you’re a hundred and five.”

“Stop saying that, Lindsay,” Bridget said. “She can’t be more than . . . well, seventy or eighty.”

“Right,” agreed Lindsay. “That makes a huge difference.”

Bridget said, “Anyway, I’ll talk to her. We’ll work something out.”

“Sous chef,” Cici reminded her.

Bridget said, “Right.”

At that moment the front door opened, and the screen door creaked. Three heads swiveled to see Ida Mae standing there, scowling at them. “Supper’s in half an hour,” she said. “I ain’t calling you again.”

She started to close the door, but Bridget spoke quickly. “Will you join us for a glass of wine, Ida Mae?”

Ida Mae looked from one to the other of them, her fierce expression unaltered. “My mama always said,” she replied archly, “that a sip of sherry at Christmas, or on the birth of a child, is all a lady requires.”

She turned to go inside, while Lindsay mouthed, eyebrows raised,
Sherry?
And then they heard her mutter, just before the screen door slammed, “Bunch of damn alkies.”

Cici looked at Bridget. “Are you sure you don’t want us to talk to her?”

Bridget sighed. “No. She’s my problem. I’ll handle it. Really.”

Lindsay raised her glass to Bridget. “You’ve got your work cut out for you,” she said, and Bridget sighed as three glasses clinked together.

“Cheers.”

Bridget talked to Ida Mae.

“Breakfast was delicious,” she said, “but we really can’t have you getting up before dawn to cook for us. We can make our own breakfast, really.”

And: “Really, Ida Mae, you work much too hard. We can change our own beds.”

And, firmly, “We’re really not accustomed to sitting down to three formal meals a day. We’re all watching our figures, you know. From now on I think it would be better if you let me take care of the cooking.”

None of it made one bit of difference.

“You’re too nice,” Cici told her. “You can’t be sweet to somebody like that. You have to speak up. Let me talk to her.”

To which Bridget replied irritably, “For heaven’s sake, Cici, you can’t fix everything. I’ll take care of it.”

But clearly she could not. If Bridget got up at six a.m. to make muffins, she would find cinnamon rolls already baking. If she chopped chicken breast for a salad, she would find Ida Mae had already used it for a casserole by the time she returned. If she wanted to spend the afternoon making banana bread, Ida Mae would choose that very time to bake a cake.

“Well, there
are
two ovens,” Lindsay pointed out, which only annoyed Bridget further.

“That’s not the point,” Bridget snapped in return, and Lindsay lifted her eyebrows.

“Just trying to be helpful,” she said.

Bridget apologized, Lindsay shrugged it off, and Bridget felt even worse. For as much as Cici and Lindsay tried to understand, their paths hardly ever crossed that of Ida Mae. It was Bridget who was constantly tripping over her, and now she was even causing Bridget to be short with her friends. And of course, the more irritable Bridget became over the whole situation, the guiltier she felt, and the harder she tried
not
to take it out on Ida Mae.

So when Ida Mae tossed out the pecans Bridget was toasting for salad, calling them “burnt,” Bridget smiled and held her tongue. After all, it had been Ida Mae who had shelled the entire bushel of pecans, bagged, and frozen them. When Ida Mae went behind her, salting the stew, Bridget pretended not to notice, and when Lindsay and Cici raved over Ida Mae’s chicken and dressing with cracked cranberries, thinking Bridget had prepared it, Bridget just smiled and gave Ida Mae all the credit. But it was the matter of the draperies that broke the camel’s back.

“They’re gonna fade,” stated Ida Mae flatly as Bridget, after two hours spent hand-pleating and hanging twenty-five yards of lined brocade damask, stepped down from the ladder and regarded her handiwork proudly.

Bridget turned slowly to stare at Ida Mae. Ida Mae flipped back a corner of the drapery to examine the lining, and sniffed. “Too flimsy,” she pronounced. “Sun sets through this window all summer long. Won’t last a season.”

Bridget said, “I had this fabric special-ordered from New York to match a swatch I found stored in the dairy loft.”

Ida Mae turned down one corner of her mouth derisively. “I don’t know what you found, but there ain’t never been anything like this hanging here. Miss Emily weren’t no fool, you know. You should’ve asked me before you spent your money.” She shrugged and flicked the corner of drapery away. “You need to call them others if you want to eat. I’m making broccoli quiche and it won’t keep.”