Strung along the Pennsylvania Turnpike like a strip of discarded Christmas tree garland, Bedford is a bustling city of four thousand or more. The downtown area, which snakes through the valley, is fairly cohesive, but the residential neighborhoods cling to the hills in disjointed patches. Actually, we call these hills “mountains” hereabouts, a fact that elicits hoots of derision from West Coast visitors (who have apparently left their manners behind).
At any rate, Pernicious Yoder III, being a wealthy bank manager, lived east of town high atop Evitts Mountain, in what I’ve heard described as a pseudo- Tudor mansion. Stone columns flanked the quarter-circle drive, and flickering gas lanterns illuminated a massive front door beneath the portico. It was an imposing residence, but a trifle cliché if you ask me. Now, a replica of the Taj Mahal, or a mini-Versailles, that would have been interesting.
“Wow,” Agnes said in a hushed tone. One would have thought she’d never been anywhere-which she hadn’t.
“Good grief,” Dorothy said, “we’re not stopping here, are we?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m going to pull over next to the woods up there, and we’ll walk back.”
“But we can’t!”
“Yes, we can. Your legs work perfectly well now, and I know for a fact that Agnes is as healthy as a horse-no offense, Agnes, dear.”
“Neeeiiigh.”
“You see? She even has a sense of humor about it. So come, ladies, times a-wasting.”
Dorothy’s fingers dug into my shoulder like the claws of a giant prehistoric elephant eagle-had such a thing really existed, which, of course, it didn’t. “You’re not hearing me, Yoder. I can’t be seen near that house.”
Since she’d spit her words out like nails from a gun, I spit some back to her. “Pray tell, why not?”
“Because Perni and I-uh-well, were intimate for a while and we sort of used his house as a rendezvous place while his wife was out of town visiting her sister. Even if he doesn’t see me, his neighbors might.”
One woman gasping for breath in a closed automobile can use up a significant amount of oxygen, but two of them-gaping and rasping like a pair of giant banked fish-present a life-threatening situation. Heroically, I managed to lower three of the four automatic windows. Even then I had to wait until the initial shock wave passed before I could speak.
“You what?”
“Oh, get over it, Magdalena. You know I had a difficult period of adjustment, and you better than anyone should know that the Bible commands us not to judge, unless we ourselves be judged.”
“But I was an inadvertent adulteress. I didn’t have a clue that Aaron Miller was married.”
“Did you ever ask him?”
“What? Of course not! Why would I have done that? He moved back to the family farm across from me, he was obviously single, he-Well, I certainly didn’t know he had a wife who was out of town.”
“I didn’t know Pernicious did either,” Dorothy hissed, “until after the fact.”
“That may be so,” Agnes said, “but you knew that you were married, and to his cousin to boot.”
“Fourth cousin, twice removed, and only on his father ’s side,” Dorothy said, but she’d suddenly lost some of her steam.
Good old Agnes. I could always count on her loyalty, and she on mine. We were sisters joined at the hip-metaphorically, at least. Yes, I had a real flesh-and-blood sister, but she languished in the state penitentiary, having been convicted of aiding and abetting the escape of an accused murderer, the diabolical Melvin Stoltzfus (who, I’d just learned, was my biological brother).
“Whatever the case may be,” I said in my best conciliatory tone, “you can put your time as a two- timing trollop to good use and tell us the layout of the house. It will make our reconnaissance mission so much easier.”
“Reconnaissance?” Agnes squawked.
“Perhaps that was an echo I just heard,” I said, not unpleasantly. “But if not, you might want to speak up, Agnes; there’s a woman in Altoona who couldn’t make out what you said.”
Agnes put her right index finger to her lips. “Shhh. But I just want to go on record, Magdalena, as saying this might be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had, and you’ve had some doozies.”
I smiled happily. “I have, haven’t I?” I turned to the floozy in the backseat. “You’re our lookout. My cell number is 555-3289. I’ve got it on buzzer. Now come on, ladies, let’s rock and roll.”
“ Magdalena, you’ve never rocked and rolled in your life.”
We were crouched on all fours in the shadow of a large rhododendron, but still only inches from the house and a large picture window. This was no time to be having a conversation, much less a highly charged, emotional one like this.
“I have so,” I hissed.
“Oh, yeah? A good Mennonite girl like you? You once told me that premarital sex was wrong because it might lead to dancing.”
“I did not! I said that having sex while standing up could lead to dancing.”
There followed a minute of blessed silence-well, relatively speaking. Agnes is a heavy breather under the best of circumstances, and we’d had to make a mad dash across a patch of well-lit yard to get to our current position. But, like I said, it was only a minute.
“Do you mean,” she said “that it is possible to have sex while standing up? I thought that was only a myth.”
“A myth? Where does one hear such myths?”
“Well, if you must know, at my VALID meetings.”
Agnes belongs to a support group of like-minded spinsters who call themselves the Virgin Awesome Ladies of Impeccable Demeanor. However, since I am her very best friend in the entire world, I have been known to tease her, and may have even hinted that the acronym stood for Vapid Avaricious Lounge-lizards of Intense Desire.
I sighed. “Yes-theoretically it is possible to have sex in a standing position, not that I’m speaking from personal experience, you understand. But trust me, don’t believe those stories about honeymooners swinging from chandeliers. A moving target is indeed hard to hit, and when the bough breaks-well, in this case, the chandelier chain-down will come Magda-I mean baby, crystals and all.”
“You didn’t!”
It was time to change subjects. “Do you want to hear about my dancing or not?”
“Yeah, sure.”
I knew she didn’t believe me, but it was true. And although it may seem very strange to some people that I should take the time to share such a shocking, and personal, experience whilst sniffing around in another Yoder’s bush, this was one sin I had yet to come to grips with, and I needed to get it off my bony chest.
“Remember Alice Gillespie’s sweet sixteen party?”
“Of course, I do. Even we liberal Mennonites didn’t have those back then, but Alice was a Methodist; they got to do everything.”
“Did you go?”
“You bet. The Gillespies rented the Holderman barn and fixed it up to look like the high school gym. Then they brought in this rock band from Pittsburgh, and-Oh, wait a minute. You being an Old Order Mennonite-you didn’t go, did you?”
I let the Devil take over and gave her a wicked grin as I recalled my shameful behavior that night. “That’s what you think. I told my parents I was going to an all- night Bible study over in Summerville with Judy Bontrager, except that I didn’t. You see, Judy had just gotten her license. Anyway, we went to the party as well, only we hung out by the henhouse with the rest of the kids who wanted to come, but who weren’t supposed to be there.”
“You didn’t!” I heard admiration in Agnes’s voice like I’d never heard before.
“There must have been fifteen or twenty of us by the henhouse-hiding in the shadows, like we are here. But we could still hear the music. Nice and loud too, because we were downwind from the barn. At any rate, at first we just stood around and mostly talked about how cool it was that we had all sneaked away from our parents, but then Marlene Jacobs began moving to the beat, and the next thing you knew we were all twisting the night away.”