Tell it with confidence, she thinks. Today they made caramel apples in class! Build expectation: How she visited several sweet shops to test caramel. How she double-checked that there was a meaty apple for every child, bought specially sized paper bags to wrap each one after it hardened. How her children took up their reading hour asking questions about the apples. Do their voices, she thinks. Sarina gathers the characters in her mind. Madeleine: the nine-year-old who recently lost her mother. Denny: the entitled kid from a well-known family in the parish. She will point out contradictory traits in each kid to offset expectations and her own biases. How Madeleine can be blunt to the point of hurting other children. How Sarina spent an hour holding bawling Denny when the goldfish died. Some characters will play important roles. Some will seem unimportant until the end. If she tells it correctly, when she reaches the Crucial Moment, everyone at the table will feel sickened and satisfied. Sure, she’s back in her hometown teaching grade school and she can’t fill out the tops of most dresses, but she can tell stories, goddammit. Certainly that must mean something to Ben, she means, men, she means, the universe. Certainly she can cash in a little girl’s pain for respect at a dinner party. She will rise from the table, an eagle beating back a glorious pair of wings.
“Just today,” she begins, “one of my children got sent home with lice—”
“Lice!” Bella interrupts. “Uck!”
“Lots of children get lice,” Claudia says.
“Name one child you know that has lice.”
“Me,” says Claudia. “Me as a child had lice.”
Sarina attempts to regain control. “I can speak from someone who had personal experience as recently as today that lice is—”
Ben laughs. “Me had lice.”
Claudia thinks Ben is taunting her for the lice, not the grammar of her sentence. “It means I had thick hair,” she says.
Sarina, slipping, falling. “Madeleine has thick hair. The girl who had to be sent home today—”
The table splinters into two preoccupations. Bella asks if her school is the one on Christian with the mural of that sociopath Frank Rizzo. Ben and Michael rejoin the Joneses conversation.
Sarina speaks loudly to get everyone back. “It is a very sad story.”
“Would anyone mind if I ate the last of the potatoes?” Georgie says.
“Go right ahead, Georgie. They’re your potatoes in the first place.”
“They’re everyone’s potatoes,” says Michael.
“As long as no one thinks they’re small potatoes,” Georgie says.
The table laughs vigorously at what Sarina thinks is a dumb joke. A window closes. As if the party had only one available slot for a long story and her chance has been lost in chatter about shampoo and potatoes. She is striped with a familiar self-loathing around Georgie, left over from high school. Even though she has lived on three continents, Sarina has not progressed further than senior prom. Boys cross rooms for Georgie, who is full in the way they like. Foxy is the word for it, Sarina thinks, whereas she is foxless.
Sarina has a flicker of hope when Bella turns to her, taking in a deep breath signifying an important thought. “Isn’t teaching grade school not far off from babysitting?”
Sarina forks the last of her salad. “These greens are transcendent.”
“Arugula!” Georgie says.
“Let’s admit,” Ben says. “We keep up with the Joneses to distract us from the fact that we are all going to die!”
“Hear, hear,” says Michael.
Dinner is over.
Bella pushes herself away from the table. She has spent the meal wanting more of everything and not taking more of anything. She and Georgie carry empty plates to the kitchen.
Michael says, “I can’t keep my hands away from the piano any longer.”
Ben says, “Would anyone mind if I stepped outside to call Annie?”
Claudia receives directions to the bathroom.
The room reshuffles and when it stills, Sarina is alone. She hears Michael in the next room fumbling in the pockets of the piano bench, setting up sheet music, and then the first few measures of a splashy intro.
When she saw Ben unwinding his scarf at the front door, Sarina wanted to remove her glasses. She removes her glasses when anything wonderful or embarrassing happens, like earlier today when her principal forced her to discipline Madeleine. Which would have been the Crucial Moment of her story.
Sarina has rebuilt her life one element at a time. The apartment, the job, the easel. It might be a plain life (she occasionally worries she is hiding out in it), but at least it is forged out of what she wants.
She doesn’t know the particulars of Ben’s wife’s job, but it involves legally representing poor kids with leukemia. Showoff. She’d hoped he wouldn’t marry the cardiganed girl he brought around four years ago. She’d hoped the girl would be one of the many partners his group rotated in and out. Certainly he would notice how Annie rolled her eyes at his ideas, especially the last idea, when he decided to quit law and pursue screenwriting. Certainly the girl with a flounder’s sense of style wouldn’t be the one he’d marry on an archipelago in the Caribbean, so Sarina had heard, accessible only by duck boat. But, he did. And, she wasn’t. And, he didn’t. So, she was.
Outside, the stars have been caught in the act. Ben paces the stoop “… later than I thought. More fun than I expected. No one thought it was strange. Well, yes, they asked how you were but they didn’t follow up.”
In the kitchen, Georgie and Bella pass a joint back and forth. Bella trains her eyes on the swinging door. “Claudia doesn’t know I still smoke. I’m sorry she’s acting like a bitch tonight.”
At the piano, Michael thinks, there should be words to classical songs.
In the bathroom, Claudia reads a newspaper article about a famous chef’s third restaurant opening.
Under the stars, Ben says, “I realize it doesn’t count as a separation if we talk on the phone, but you asked me to call you.”
In the kitchen, Bella says, “She cut out drama from her life. Now she gets dramatic about people being dramatic.”
Georgie says, “It’s like ex-smokers who hate smokers.”
“Exactly!” Bella says. “Have a cigarette and get over yourself.” She shakes her head and pretends to have a new thought. “Sarina has gotten so thin. Poor girl.” She wants Georgie to agree, but Georgie has outgrown camaraderie through cattiness.
At the piano, Michael sings, The more I see you …
Upstairs, Claudia washes her hands with the no-shenanigans soap of a second bathroom. Her interest in the evening’s goings-on ranks as follows:
1. How much did Michael’s new car cost? She wants to know so she can go home and hate him.
2. She is proud her girlfriend has the ability to introduce lively topics of conversation. Who are the Joneses, indeed?
3. If Alfred Hitchcock were to direct this dinner party, he would have the camera soar in through the window over the gardened patio, through the wings of the expressive drapes, panning to each guest in a way that would convey to the audience that something is terribly wrong.
4. Food is boring. People who use it to feel better than others are worthless. Like Ben’s half-hour explanation about the wine. Did he shit the bottle of wine out? That would garner an explanation.
KITCHEN: Georgie says, “I never thought I would get divorced. Never. Divorce is for sad people.”
PIANO: Michael sings, the more I want you …
FAMILY ROOM: Sarina sits, orphaned by the dinner party. What she holds most against these people is how obvious it is that they love each other. A substantive love that caulks the cracks of their personalities; Georgie’s oblivion, Bella’s self-obsession, Michael’s namby-pamby-ness. Sarina hates the part of herself that wants inside that love. A gray, whiskered face appears by her elbow. She replaces her glasses. “Hello, Pepper.”