Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [9]
“Oh, did I wake you up?”
“That’s all right, hold on.” Norma got up out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen, put the light on, and plugged in her percolator. Now that she was awake, she might as well fix the coffee. She picked up the phone. “Here I am, Aunt Elner. Now what?”
“I think I may have discovered a serious error in the Bible. I don’t know why I hadn’t figured it out before.”
“What error?”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“What? That’s not in the Bible.”
“I know that, but just answer me this, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“I have no idea,” Norma said.
“Well, don’t feel bad, they say it’s the age-old question that nobody’s been able to figure out, but the answer just came to me a minute ago, just as clear as a bell and here it is…. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” Norma yawned.
“The chicken came first, no doubt about it.”
“Ahh…and how did you come up with that?”
“Simple! Where does an egg come from? A chicken; so the egg had to come after the chicken, the egg couldn’t lay itself. But then I got to thinking, if the chicken came before the egg…then how could Adam get here first, when Eve was the only one who could give birth?”
Norma reached for a cup out of the cabinet. “Aunt Elner, I think you may have forgotten that according to the Bible, nobody gave birth, God made Adam, then took a rib from Adam, and made Eve.”
“I know it says that, Norma, but the sequence is off…. It’s the hen that lays the egg with the rooster inside…the rooster doesn’t even lay eggs.”
Norma said, “Yes, honey, but there has to be a rooster to fertilize the egg.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Then Elner said, “Well, you’ve got me there. I guess I need to do some more thinking about it. Oh, shoot. Here I was thinking I’d just solved one of the great mysteries of the world, but I still think there’s a chance that Eve came first and the men who wrote the Bible changed it around at the last minute so they could be first, and if that’s so, we may have to rethink the entire Bible.”
At around seven-thirty, when Macky had come into the kitchen, he found Norma sitting at the kitchen table wide awake.
“What are you doing up so early, couldn’t you sleep?”
She looked at him. “I could have…if the phone hadn’t rung before the crack of dawn and woke me up.”
“Oh,” said Macky, getting his cup. “What did she want to know this morning?”
“Which came first, the chicken or the egg.”
Macky laughed as Norma went over to get the cream out of the refrigerator.
“You can laugh, Macky, but she was just about to call the radio station and tell them that there was a mistake in the Bible, thank God I stopped her.”
“What does she think is a mistake?”
“She’s convinced Eve was created before Adam. Can you imagine the uproar that would have caused?”
Macky smiled. “Well, at least she has an open mind, you can say that for her.”
“Oh, it’s open all right,” Norma said. “I just wish it would open a little later in the day. Last week she woke me up wanting to know if I knew how much the moon weighed.”
“Why did she want to know that?”
“Who can tell? All I know is, she can ask more questions in one day than most people do in a year.”
“Yeah, she can.”
“And you wait, once she’s off and running with this Adam and Eve thing she’s going to be calling me all day.”
As predicted, around ten AM, just as Norma had finished applying her special Merle Norman facial mask for dry sensitive skin, the phone rang for the fourth time that morning. “Norma, if Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth, then where did Cain and Abel meet their wives?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Aunt Elner…at Club Med? Don’t ask me. I don’t even know why the chicken crossed the road.”
“You don’t? Well I do!” said Aunt Elner. “Do you want me to tell you?”
Norma gave up and sat down. “Sure,” she said. “I’m just dying to know.”
“To show the possum it can be done.”
“Aunt Elner, where do you hear these silly things?”
“From Bud and Jay. Did you know that another