From The Author:

The first time she saw the members of the Persian Pickle Club, Rita told me after I got to know her, she thought we looked just like a bunch of setting hens. She'd learned all about setting hens that very morning after she'd gone out to the henhouse to gather eggs. Rita's luck must have been under a bucket, because Agnes T. Ritter saw her checking the roosters, and in that nasty way Agnes T. Ritter has, she told Rita just why she wasn't going to find eggs under a rooster. Then she told Rita to leave the broody hens alone unless she wanted scrambled chicks for breakfast.

How would anybody expect Rita to know about hens and roosters when she'd never lived in the country before? Like most town folks, Rita never cared where eggs came from, and after she found out, why, then she didn't care if she ever ate one again. Rita was a big city girl from Denver who had more important things to study in college than chickens, like learning how to become a famous writer. I'd never known a woman who wanted to be anything more than a farmwife.

Rita was right about us looking like a coop full of biddies. We sat there at Ada June's dining room table, clucking as Rita walked in. Then our eyes bugged out, making us look dumb enough to knit with wet spaghetti. I stopped sewing, with my hand in the air, and held it there so long that Mrs. Judd told me, "Put down your needle, Queenie Bean, and don't stare."

Well, I can tell you, I wasn't the only one staring! Even Mrs. Judd was peering with watery eyes through her little gold-rimmed glasses. How could she help it? How could any of us help it? We'd all heard Tom's wife was a looker. After he met Rita at the Ritter place, Grover came right home and told me she was the nicest thing he'd seen since rain -- not that he remembered much about rain, or that Grover was a good judge of what was pretty, for that matter. He thinks Lottie, the two-year-old pie-eyed heifer we just got, is a looker, too.

Grover was right about Tom's wife, however. Rita was as pretty as pie. She had curls like fresh-churned butter, not at all like my straight brown bob, and eyes as big and round as biscuits. Rita was little. I am, too, but next to me, Rita was a regular Teenie Weenie, not much over five feet or a hundred pounds. Her hands were as plump as a baby's, smooth and soft, and the nails were polished. She smelled good, too, not just a little vanilla behind the ears the way I do it, but real perfume, the nice kind that they sell in the drugstores in Topeka. We were chickens, all right, and Rita was a hummingbird. It gave us all pleasure just to look at her.

All of us except for Agnes T. Ritter. She stood behind Rita looking sour as always, like the wind was blowing past a manure pile right in her direction. President Roosevelt could get out of his wheelchair and ask her to dance, and she'd act like she was two-stepping with the hired man. Agnes T. Ritter had turned up her little sliver of a lip at Rita's dress, which was as dainty as a hanky, made of strips of lace and red silk. I could see the strap of a red slip that she wore under it, and I meant to ask Ada June where anybody bought a red slip. Grover'd think I'd gone to town for sure if I put on red underwear. We always dressed up for Persian Pickle Club, but none of us wore anything as fancy as that, certainly not Agnes T. Ritter, who wore $1.49 housedresses from the Spiegel catalog and made her own slips. It didn't matter how she dressed, of course, because she was as knobby as a washboard. Agnes T. Ritter, you sure are jealous, I thought. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Recommended to book clubs by 3 of 3 members.