In the midst of all this, he heard the door swing open, and Teresa's father's voice rang out in the kitchen. "Well, well, this looks scrumptious," he said. "Trina, dear, you mind if I…"
"Don't you touch a thing, Clarence," Mrs. Sickles called, and turned to Toloth. "Teresa, honey, could you go and set the table? I think your father would have less temptation if someone were in there with him, even if it was just to fetch silverware."
"Sure," said Toloth. "Nana, where do you want to sit?"
"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Mrs. Chiodini. "Just find me a place, and I'll squeeze into it. Not at the head, though; I'm not out to usurp your parents."
"Mama, the dining table's round," said Mrs. Sickles.
"Well, all the more reason not to fuss about places, then," said Mrs. Chiodini.
«I'd put her across from Dad,» Teresa said as Toloth left the living room. «Mom and I would both want to sit next to her.»
«I am well aware what you would do, Teresa,» said Toloth sharply.
There was a momentary silence inside Teresa's brain; then its owner said, sullenly but nonetheless sincerely, «Sorry.»
Toloth didn't respond. He had actually wanted to say a good deal more – all about how Teresa's favored courses of action were not currently the issue, and how presumptuous it was of her to assume that someone who could read all her thoughts with perfect ease still needed her to tell him anything. But it had seemed to him that there was no way to say this without sounding, in his own ears, like Malcar Seven-Four-Five. So he had contented himself with the one sentence, which seemed to suffice to put Teresa in her place.
He did use her proposed seating arrangement, though. After all, it was what she would have done.
"Bless us, O Lord," Mr. Sickles declaimed, "in these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord."
Toloth duly added Teresa's voice to the chorus of Amens that followed, though he wasn't at all clear on what the word meant. Indeed, he was rather mystified by the whole notion of begging favors from one's God every time one sat down to table; did humans consider eating such a momentous event as to invariably attract the attention of the Almighty?
Perhaps. Considering what they seemed able to make of it, Toloth was almost inclined to grant them the point. In all his lifetime of Kandrona, pond-weed, and unseasoned tree bark, he had never dreamed of anything like Catherine Sickles's cooking; here was food that appealed not only to the brute needs of the body, but also to the longing for order, for the harmonizing of diverse parts into a triumphant whole, that was the hallmark of the sentient mind. It was like the Andalite mating dance, or the breaching ritual of the Kaza'haa: the humans had taken one of the great intractable appetites of the animal nature, and made something out of it that could almost be called an art form.
Or, as Teresa put it, «More calories than you can shake a stick at, but it's worth every one of them.»
Nor, it seemed, was a human feeding period devoted solely to mere feeding. Perhaps they wanted to linger over their triumph (in contrast to host-bearing Yeerks, who equated feeding with vulnerability), or perhaps it was simply the principle that all the arts are of a spawn; in any event, Toloth had barely tasted the lamb before the table turned into a conversational forum.
It was Teresa's grandmother who set the thing in motion – unsurprisingly to Toloth, who had already gathered, from her previous conversation and from Teresa's memories, that Agnes Chiodini rarely lacked for things to say. After tasting the gravy-slathered gnocchi and pronouncing it superior to anything that John Chiodini's poor wife knew how to make ("not that Lucy isn't a fine person in other ways"), she addressed herself to her son-in-law across the table. "Now, I want you to tell me something honestly, Clarence," she said, pointing her fork at him with a no-nonsense air. "In your opinion, do I look Jewish?"
Mr. Sickles seemed momentarily stunned. It didn't take much digging into Teresa's memories for Toloth to discover why; discussing the various sub-groupings of the human race was, it seemed, the greatest taboo of the current Earthly culture, and the people known as the "Jews" had a particularly sacrosanct status in this respect. There had apparently been some lurid assault upon them in recent history by another people, and, ever since, the peculiar sympathy that humans felt for the weak had rendered anything resembling irreverence or lightness, with respect to them, more or less unthinkable.
Such, at any rate, was what Teresa seemed to believe was the cause of her father's perplexity. The matter, however, was complicated, for the mention of "Jews" called up many other thoughts in Teresa's mind besides that of social convention. It seemed that the Jews were intimately connected with the cult of Jesus – that Jesus had, in fact, been a Jew himself, and that his worshippers viewed their religion as the culmination of this people's beliefs and practices. It also seemed, however, that the Jews constituted a rival religion to that of Jesus. How both things could be true at once, he wasn't clear – nor did he see how Malcar Seven-Four-Five could believe in the supernatural strength of the Christian religion if its parent people was so weak as to need a social taboo to preserve its dignity. He yearned to penetrate deeper into Teresa's mind and solve the riddle, but he knew that he couldn't afford the distraction; he dared not seem less attentive to the others at the table than Teresa would have been.
With an effort, he returned his attention to Mr. Sickles, and caught the tail end of his reply: "…say so, no. Why?"
"Well," said Mrs. Chiodini, "the other day, I was walking down Minnesota Avenue, and there was a young man handing out brochures for… something or other, I didn't notice what. Anyway, he kept wishing everyone who passed by, 'Merry Christmas!… Merry Christmas!' – and then, as I walked past, he gave me a knowing leer and said, 'Happy holidays.'"
Mrs. Sickles burst out laughing – a laugh that ended in a choked gasp, as she had happened to take a drink of water just at that moment. Mr. Sickles chuckled, too, and Toloth, though he only vaguely saw the point of the story, felt it wise to let out a stifled giggle himself.
"Now, Heaven knows I don't mind giving off the air of an Old-Testament matriarch," Mrs. Chiodini continued, "but I looked pretty carefully in the mirror when I got home that day, and for the life of me I couldn't see anything particularly Semitic about myself. So it seems to me there's a mystery here worth solving."
"I don't know about that," said Mr. Sickles thoughtfully. "I'd say it's pretty simple, actually. The surprising thing is that it's never happened to you before."
"Oh?"
"Well, living in Sioux Falls, I mean," said Mr. Sickles. "Pretty much everyone else up there is a German or a Swede, and here you come along with the Mediterranean written all over you. The poor fellow handing out brochures doesn't know one end of the Mediterranean from the other; he has to make a quick guess, and he knows that there's a synagogue somewhere in the city, so…" He shrugged. "Hard to blame him, really."
This seemed to strike Mrs. Chiodini as plausible. She took another forkful of gnocchi and nodded thoughtfully. "It could be, yes," she said. "Of course, I shouldn't really trust your explanations, Clarence, since finding clever excuses for people is how you earn your living, but in this case it really could be."
Mr. Sickles rolled his eyes. "You know, everyone says that about defense attorneys," he said, "but when they actually need one…"
"You know what I always thought was odd?" Mrs. Sickles, who had gotten her breath back, interjected. "The Jews celebrate Hanukkah, but they don't use the books of Maccabees in their Bible. We use the books of Maccabees in our Bible, but we don't celebrate Hanukkah. Now why is that?"
Mr. Sickles blinked. "Do you know, I never thought about that before," he said. "And I don't think I'm going to lose any sleep wondering about it, even now – but you're right, it does show what a funny thing life is."
"What do you mean, the Jews don't use 1 and 2 Maccabees?" said Mrs. Chiodini. "They're Old Testament, aren't they?"
"Deutero-canonical," said Mrs. Sickles. "They're part of that chunk that the Jerusalem rabbis took out because it sounded too Christian, and then Luther took out again because it sounded too Catholic."
"Ah." Mrs. Chiodini rolled her eyes. "Say no more. I'd forgotten that the Jews did that, too."
"So did Shakespeare, apparently," said Mrs. Sickles. "That's what got me thinking about it. I was watching EWTN this morning, while I was ironing; they had this historian on who thought that Shakespeare was actually one of those closet Catholics they had back then, and he mentioned how, in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock says something about one of the other characters being 'a Daniel come to judgment'. His point was that that had to refer to the story of Susanna, because that's the only place in Scripture where Daniel appears as a judge. And the host – I can't remember whether it was Fr. Pacwa or someone else; I'm pretty sure it was a Franciscan, anyway – he mentioned how incongruous it was for Shylock, of all characters, to make that reference."
Mr. Sickles shrugged. "Probably he was thinking the same way Mom was," he said, nodding to Mrs. Chiodini. "If it's in the Old Testament, a Jew ought to know about it. After all, it's not as though he could check with the rabbi down the street – and neither could his audience, for that matter."
Mrs. Sickles nodded gravely, and then turned and glanced quizzically at her daughter. "You're very quiet tonight, Teresa," she commented.
"Am I?" said Toloth faintly, glancing up from his plate with what he hoped looked like innocent surprise. The truth was that the conversation was simply moving too fast for his limited memory-referencing skills; in the span of perhaps three minutes, he had been presumed knowledgeable about Earth's ethnography, law, religion, history, literature, popular culture, and history again. Even a trained human-Controller, being thrust into such a milieu with only an hour's preparation, would have found the density a trifle overwhelming; for Toloth, it was a tsunami.
"Yes, you are," said Mrs. Sickles. "Usually, you'd have chimed in long before now – if only to remind me that I don't have to say deutero-canonical if St. Jerome didn't mind saying apocryphal."
Toloth tried not to wince at that newest faggot on the fire, but it took some doing. "Sorry," he murmured. "Just not in the mood, I guess."
Mrs. Sickles frowned. "Do you feel sick?" she said.
Toloth considered. There would be some advantages to feigning an illness – he would be left alone to do his research in peace, for one thing – but, on the other hand, Teresa being ill meant Teresa not showing up at the Sharing fête the next day, and questions might then be asked about her in the wrong circles. He wanted as few Yeerks as possible to even think about Teresa Sickles for the next three days; ergo, changing her schedule for his own convenience's sake was out of the question.
He shook her head. "No, not really," he said. "Just tired."
"Mm." Mrs. Sickles pursed her lips. "Well, maybe you need to excuse yourself and go lie down for a while. I'm sure there are at least three people at this table who'd be glad to finish your meal for you."
"Oh, no, I'm fine," said Toloth hastily. The lamb and gnocchi lay only half-finished on the plate in front of him, and it would have taken more than mere bewilderment to dampen his appreciation of them.
Mrs. Sickles laughed. "I thought you might be able to find the strength for that," she said. "Well, after dinner, then. We'll give you an hour or so to rest before we barge in and start setting up your room for Nana to sleep in, all right?"
Toloth nodded vaguely. "So I'm sleeping in the den while she's here?" he said.
"I was assuming so," said Mrs. Sickles. "Unless you're going to insist on keeping your room to yourself, which you've never done before when she's visited."
Toloth would have liked to so insist, but it was plain that refusing to make this small self-sacrifice would be utterly uncharacteristic of Teresa, so he merely acquiesced quietly and speared another piece of lamb. «Your family is very gifted at making things difficult, do you know that, Teresa?» he said.
Teresa laughed. «Well, you know what they say about tangled webs.»
This time, Toloth did catch the reference. He was not amused.