Tea with Jam and Dread by Tamar Myers Page B

religious tenet broken into three parts: despair in all things; despair at all times; despair everywhere. The adherents to this whackadoodle concept have the chutzpah to refer to themselves as Trinitarians, although clearly three sandwiches shy of a picnic hamper is what they really are.
    ‘Shtop!’ Mother Malaise barked. ‘Eets me, your mudder-in-law und a duck of some kind.’
    ‘I am an earl,’ Peregrine said, ‘not a duke, and most certainly
not
a duck.’
    ‘Yah? Und I’m zee Queen of Sheba.’ Mother Malaise laughed; something which certainly wasn’t in her favour. That woman has been the bane of my existence, starting with the day that Gabriel told her that we were engaged. There was room for only one Mrs Rosen in her world, a fact which she soon made very clear by sending her son a one-way airline ticket from Pittsburgh – our nearest airport – back to New York City, where she lived at the time.
    When Gabriel returned the ticket, unused of course, his precious ‘mama-leh’ moved to Hernia; lock, stock and barrel. Hernia is not New York City; it has no public lodgings. Guess who had to move in with
me
for a while, because you-know-who couldn’t bear the embarrassment of being a bachelor living with his mom? So what if it was the other way around? Many was the time I’d find them both in their pyjamas, and she happily cutting his toenails, or combing his hair like he was a little kid, which I guess makes perfect sense, since she still cuts his meat for him! And him a heart surgeon! Oh, well, who am I to tell tales out of school?
    I have learned from my younger sister Susannah and my daughter Alison how to emit world-class sighs. That said, I gave birth to the mother of all sighs, one that raised the tides along the coasts of Cornwall and Devon.
    ‘All right then, come in if you must,’ I said, stepping aside. ‘But not you, dear.’ I meant, of course, that ‘none dressed as a nun’ should enter my inn at that late hour. In the event that she did, it would raise my hackles so high that I would have to sleep clinging to the ceiling in order to keep my blood pressure company.
    ‘Vhat you say?’
    Trust me; Mother Malaise was anything but apathetic.
    ‘I want you to go home, Ida. Go back to your misguided Sisters of Apoplexy or whatever you call yourselves. There is no more room at this inn.’
    I could smell my sweetheart’s earthy manliness before I heard his voice. ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’
    ‘Your vife!’ his mother said. ‘Like alvays, yah?’
    ‘Peregrine!’ my darling husband said, for once ignoring his mother. ‘There you are.’
    And for once, as he eschews public scenes, the man who shares my bed dared to slip his arm around an
English-English
man’s shoulders, as if he were a regular person, and lead him to the dining room. This left his precious ‘host womb’ in the most hostile of moods. Ida Rosen, aka Mother Malaise, may be built like a badger on steroids with a gym addiction, but when properly riled she is virtually unstoppable. Or, as she would say: ‘unshtoppable.’
    ‘Out of my vay!’ she roared, sounding like a jet engine.
    The next thing that I remember I was lying flat on my back. I could hear Ida’s Yiddish-Russian-Ukrainian, and sometimes just plain what-have-you accent, assaulting my ears all the way from
my
dining room.
    Perhaps I should explain that when the Good Lord created me, he implanted within my brain a fertile imagination. I have always threatened to write a book one day, but as anyone who has ever said that knows, who on earth has the time to actually sit down and do that? Oh, and don’t give me that hogwash about discipline and talent. Writing skills can be taught in any number of venues, and as for discipline, that wouldn’t be an issue for me, just as long as I had the time.
    My point is: my fertile imagination sometimes leads me to think up scenarios that are more likely to take place on the so-called silver screen than within my