“Yep.”
“Have you thought of those unopened airline meals that go begging at the end of each flight?”
No one had thought of them.
Mimi had worked as a volunteer in a children’s hospital; she could do light carpentry; she was, by her own grinning admission, a better than fair cook. Her hat was now in her lap. She asked a few questions about guests fighting with each other and workers burning out. “I’m afraid I have no cellular telephone,” she said at the end of the interview; she’d already confessed to having no car.
“You communicate through your familiars,” the rabbi said with a smile.
Mimi beamed back at him. “And travel on an old broomstick, you’ve got it.” Then she left, carrying her hat, walking away with an unhurried ease, her radiant hair dimming as her figure receded.
“I’ll bet she owns jeans,” Donna said.
“I liked her,” said the other two staff members, almost in unison.
The rabbi shrugged. “What’s not to like? Her hat reminded me of one of my grandmother’s. She was a Brooklyn hysteric, claimed that animal skins were essential to tranquility.”
“Wasn’t that thing fake mink?” asked Pam anxiously.
“It was real sable,” Donna said. “This Mimi doesn’t know about animal rights. She has no experience with people who are down and out. She has no experience with mental disorder or substance abuse.”
No. But Donna aimed to give her guests a haven from do-gooders and mental-health busybodies — people who pushed change. When a woman lunched at the Ladle she couldn’t indulge her habit but she wasn’t badgered about renouncing it. She couldn’t slug anybody but she didn’t have to listen to antiviolence yak. She couldn’t flush socks down the toilet, but she could warn her friends about the socks’ radioactivity as long as she kept her voice reasonably low. She could be herself.
Mimi’s closest rivals during the hiring process were a light-skinned black woman who sang in a church choir and whose grandchildren had made her wise in the ways of the street, and a social worker serving as adviser to a radical state senator. Either candidate would have been a breeze to justify to the board. But the staff sensed a streak of punitiveness in the first and a wearying righteousness in the second. Mimi wanted to make things better for people, but she seemed to have no wish to make people better. “Or she keeps that wish under her hat,” the rabbi sighed. “I do warm to that singing grandmother.” Then he agreed to hire Mimi.
“You are very gracious,” Donna said. “Steve,” she managed to add.
Mimi at first gave Donna no cause for regret. She was indeed a much better than fair cook. She could take a meager amount of cod donated by a fish market half an hour before it turned and make it the basis for an abundant chowder. “Toss that out,” she said to a volunteer who was refrigerating the leftover soup. “If we eat it tomorrow we’ll be dead by nightfall.” Mimi could transform a few scraps of lamb into a bountiful shepherd’s pie. “Potatoes, all you ever need is potatoes,” she explained to Donna with her gleaming smile. “I can make potatoes into a dessert. Into a shake, too, with a little whiskey. I’m part Irish, you know.”
“The other part must have studied at the Cordon Bleu,” Donna said.
“The other part — part of the other part — is Romany. I come from a long line of horse thieves.”
Maybe — she was wily enough. When the board of health decreed that kitchen workers cover their hands, Mimi teased a gross of surgical gloves from a dental-supply house. When a restaurant failed in New Hampshire, she borrowed Rabbi Steve’s car and drove north and returned with hundreds of stainless place settings, purchased very cheap. She flew to every yard sale in town and bought defective board games for a quarter each. After several weeks of collecting, she persuaded a few guests to spend a rainy Friday making whole games out of parts. By the end of the day they had three sets of Monopoly, two sets of Clue, two Connect Fours, and lots of full sets of checkers. While the women were working, Mimi knocked together a Lego holdall, a knee-high case with subdivided shelves. She fenced the compartments halfway up with nylon and labeled them: TWO-BY-EIGHT; EIGHT-BY-EIGHT; FLAT PIECES, WINDOWS…
Donna, on her way out, paused to admire this construction: what a boon to kids whose only play space was the Ladle’s small children’s room. “That barrel we kept the Legos in was driving me crazy,” Mimi said. She was kneeling on the floor, still hammering. There was sawdust on her jeans, her tee, even a few yellow grains on her translucent hair. She spat out the last nail. “The kids had to turn the barrel upside down anytime they wanted to build a tower.”
As a reward for the afternoon’s labor Mimi took the women out for pizza and a bottle of Chianti. On Monday Donna offered reimbursement from petty cash.
“Oh, Donna, the wine, I shouldn’t have, you don’t want the Ladle to enable anyone…”
“It was grape juice; I have it on the best authority. Thirty-five enough?”
“A little too much. But I know where I can get some Lego wheels.”
Donna’s baby was due in December. By the beginning of November a sense of imminent maternity seemed to hang over the Ladle. Or was it imminent madness? More people than usual were touchy, defiant, in trouble with caseworkers, in trouble with parole officers. Several got picked up by the police because of threatening behavior. Donna knew she was partly responsible for the unraveling — she was providing one more desertion for souls who had been deserted too often.
Miss Valentine and O-Kay were cruelly bedeviled. Unwelcome visitors inhabited Miss Valentine’s large black body. Voices told her what to do and say, even when what she did and said caused her landlady to call the police and the police to suggest that she keep a nonactionable tongue in her mouth. Miss Valentine’s children had all been taken from her except for the ones she herself had abandoned on the island where she was born. When the voices were silent Miss Valentine muttered to herself, as if keeping the conversation up.
Pale O-Kay talked out loud to anyone who would listen. She bragged that she was in charge of innumerable children, some hers and some awarded by the state. She was the little young woman who lived in a shoe. The shoe was her old car. In fact, O-Kay’s children were illusory. She slept alone in her car. She had an unnerving tic; often her whole body shook.
Mimi talked often with Miss Valentine and O-Kay. Donna saw their three heads bent toward one another over bowls of cooling soup. She couldn’t catch the conversation, but she could see O-Kay’s shoulder quiver and Miss Valentine’s mouth move, and she could hear Mimi’s tone of priestly softness. Had the Ladle been infiltrated by a religious in drag? That legislative aide they’d thought about hiring, for all her high-flown ideas, was at least an atheist like the rest of the staff.
“Miss Valentine is possessed,” Mimi reported to Donna in her ordinary voice. “O-Kay is possessed too.”
“I suppose I am possessed,” Donna said lightly. Her baby stirred.
“Literally you are. And you’ll be delivered of a lovely infant. But Miss Valentine and O-Kay can’t rid themselves of their demons, not without help.”
“Miss Valentine and O-Kay have gone off their medications.”
“Not without help,” Mimi repeated with a husky intensity. “Those demons, they cling to the innards with red claws.”
“It’s our mission to meet the women where they are—”
Mimi’s blue gaze caught her like the beam of a lighthouse.
“—and not to interpose our own values,” Donna finished, blinking helplessly.
In early November, on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, a guest’s child — the middle boy of three — staggered in with his arms around a wood and mesh cage. He had won a lottery: he got to take home the class gerbils. “Home!” his mother snorted. “We ain’t got room even for the TV — had to sell it. Your aunt is having another baby — did you forget that?” She turned to Donna. “We leave these critters here, right? And you’ll visit them on Monday,” she said to her son, who was silent. He was accustomed to disappointment, and he didn’t dare appeal to Donna, since he knew that she knew that he often left the Ladle with Legos in his pockets.