Just Add One Hamster by J. F. Burnett

I called over to her. “I hear you’re expecting.”

“Yes. That’s right,” said Charlotte Penfield with a gracious smile, sitting upright on her heels.

“It can’t be too soon. You’re not filling out at all.”

“December third.”

“That’s only four months away. You look great.”

“Well, thank you.”

“What do you want, a little boy or a little girl?”

“Just a little baby.”

I rushed over eagerly, throwing my apron onto my front railing. Charlotte Penfield continued to gather garden snails, turning each slimy monoped over to examine it with care before placing it in the glass container.

It seemed imperative that I get a rise out of her. I told her that Ihad  breastfed my boys until they were twenty-one months old, that it was advisable to drink beer while breast-feeding, that my boys had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the TV and we had carried them to bed, but they were in our waterbed by morning. I generalized a lot. I made some half-truthful observations about how I had wanted only boys because I did not like any of the girls’ names that my husband had favored. I said that my husband found it amusing to teach our babies obscenities with which to shock old ladies in supermarkets, and that we wanted all the boys to have long hair. I told her things that would have got a horrified reaction out of any other neighbor but got only a twinkle and a couple of blinks out of her.

“That’s an unusual system of pest control,” I finally remarked.

“Yes. I read about it in a book on organic gardening.”

“Blame the French. I hear they introduced those things to the area.”

“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”

I laughed, delighted that Charlotte Penfield had a humorous side to her character. I watched her activities for a while longer in bemused silence. The pale young woman looked brittle-boned, exquisitely fragile, yet her energy was boundless.

“But isn’t that a waste of good lettuce?” I blurted at last, annoyed at having to wait so long to satisfy my curiosity.

“No. I don’t give them too much. Just enough to clean out their little systems.”

“You mean you don’t kill the snails? You keep them as pets?”

“It’s better to wait a few days until their digestive systems are clean. That way they taste better.”

“You mean you actually eat them?” I gasped before I could conceal my ignorance.

“Oh yes. With a bit of herbed butter and garlic they make a delicious appetizer. Nutritious, too, but be sure to clean out their little systems. We scoop them out, prepare them, and serve them in the shell.”

“Well, of course, if you like snails . . .”

Mrs. Penfield continued her work in rapt silence, diving under bushes and turning over leaves, but it occurred to me that I was finally getting somewhere with our neighbor. “Come to think of it, I read about that method once in the Home Ec column of the Guardian, but I didn’t take it seriously. There’s so much freaky survivalism going on these days. So I guess you don’t have to be desperate to like garden snails. That’s good to know.”

Mrs. Penfield did not appear to consider an answer necessary. After all my effort at conversation, any other neighbor might have invited me to feast on snails, but she kept on foraging under her nasturtiums. I made an observation that we all had to cut corners, that I even reused my coffee grounds every other day, though I thought my husband cheated on the re-use days and bought a coffee at Peet’s on the way to work.