She’d intended to sound witty, but her words fell dully, and Biddy didn’t smile.
They left the kitchen — Biddy with Min Foo’s club soda, Rebecca with the champagne. In the dining room they passed Peter and Joey, who were seated at one end of the table. Peter was demonstrating some kind of game. “First you take a ballpoint pen and lay it flat,” he said, “with the little air hole facing up. See the little air hole? Then you hold another pen exactly a foot above it, and you aim at the air hole and stab. Like this.” He jabbed the second pen downward, rattling all the place settings. “The winner is whoever’s the first to break the pen on the table. Your turn.”
Rebecca felt slightly cheered by this scene. (Joey, four years Peter’s junior, was hanging worshipfully on Peter’s every word.) She dropped back to watch for a second, putting off joining the others.
When she arrived in the parlor, NoNo was setting out glasses while Zeb poured the champagne. Biddy was discussing her book. “Recipes for old people can be difficult,” she was saying, “because they tend not to eat much. Also they’re often arthritic, which makes peeling and chopping and stirring just about impossible. Not to mention they’ve lost all sense of taste.”
“Oh, what’s the point, then?” Rebecca burst out.
Biddy stopped speaking and looked at her.
“I mean… it must present quite a challenge,” Rebecca said after a moment.
“Exactly,” Biddy told her. “So what I’ve tried to do…” And on she went, while Barry circled the room handing each person a drink.
Poppy had the couch to himself, having stretched his cane the length of it to keep everyone else away. “Psst!” he said to Rebecca. “Come here; I saved you a seat.” He waggled his cane invitingly.
She sat down without removing the cane, perching on just the front of the cushion.
“I was thinking people might like to hear my poem,” he told her.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Shall I recite it?”
“Why not,” she said.
He hesitated.
“I can’t seem to think of the words,” he said. “Let me have a minute, will you?”
Someone pushed a glass of champagne into Rebecca’s hands. Lateesha, helping out. “Thank you, dear,” Rebecca said.
“I just need to get some kind of running start,” Poppy was saying. “Otherwise, it won’t come to me. How does it begin, again?”
“I don’t know,” she told him.
She really didn’t, she realized.
She was conscious of a lull in the conversation, and she looked up to find everybody turned in her direction, each person holding a glass, waiting for her to propose the toast. She assembled herself. She got to her feet and raised her own glass. “To Biddy,” she said, “and The White Gourmet.”
“Gray! Gray!” they corrected her. Someone gave a quick bark of a laugh.
“Sorry,” she said. She sat down.
There was a brief silence. Then everybody drank.
* * *
Not counting the baby, there were thirteen at the table. This was one more person than could comfortably be seated, but a separate children’s table with only three children — or four, if Dixon was exiled as well — would have seemed too puny. So Rebecca had everyone scrunch together, and she put Poppy next to her at the head although there wasn’t room. He was still trying to remember the words of his poem. He said, “This has never happened before.”
Rebecca patted his hand, which was practically in her plate. “Could you scoot about two inches the other way?” she asked him.
“Then I wouldn’t even be sitting at the table anymore, Beck.”
“Oh, all right.”
Biddy seemed to have taken over the serving duties. Actually, Rebecca might have let things lapse a little, there. Biddy kept coming out of the kitchen to ask things like, “Don’t you have any more butter?”
“Try the door shelf in the fridge,” Rebecca said.
“I already did. You don’t have anything! I can’t find more salt for the salt cellars, either. You don’t have any backups in the pantry!”
Barry was carving the turkey, Rebecca was glad to see. Zeb always made a mess of it. NoNo and Min Foo were passing plates around, and Hakim was jiggling a squirmy, whimpery Abdul on his shoulder. “I think this little man has gas,” he announced, and Lateesha said, “Ooh! Gross!” and crumpled into a cascade of giggles behind her fingers.
Biddy asked, “Where’s the sauerkraut? Did you not remember the sauerkraut this year?”
“Back in 1923,” Poppy began, “when folks still thought that squirrel meat was good for chronic invalids…”
Joey was eyeing Peter across the table, trying to get his attention, and Troy was discussing music with Zeb — or singing notes to him, at any rate. “Dah, dee dah-dah,” he sang, holding up one index finger instructively.
Barry said, “Oh, no!” He stopped carving, his knife halfway through a thigh joint. “I didn’t wait for the blessing!” he told Rebecca.
“Never mind,” she said.
“I just started right in on the carving! I wasn’t thinking!”
“Um, actually, we don’t normally have a blessing.”
“You don’t?”
He got that rumple-browed look that NoNo seemed to find so fetching.
“Not even a moment of silence?” he asked.
“Well, I suppose—”
“Or, I know what!” He brightened. “We could do what my college girlfriend’s family used to do. They went around the table and people each said one thing apiece that they were thankful for.”
This struck Rebecca as a terrible idea. She was relieved when Zeb gave a groan.
But Barry didn’t seem to hear him. “What do you say, you guys?” he asked. And then, when no one spoke up, “Well, I’m not shy. I’ll go first. I’m thankful as all get-out to have my beautiful NoNo.”
NoNo looked at him. She lowered the basket of rolls that she’d been about to pass to Dixon, although Dixon was still reaching for it, and, “Why, Barry,” she said softly. “I’m thankful to have you, too.”
Joey made a gagging sound, but Min Foo frowned him into silence. It was clear, from the way people started stirring in their seats and clearing their throats, that they were bracing themselves to go through with this.
Rebecca looked beseechingly at Zeb. He grinned. All very well for him; she supposed he would say he was thankful for some kind of Child Welfare Act or something. And here was Hakim, plainly intrigued by this unfamiliar American custom but putting his own stamp on it; for he rose to his feet, still jiggling Abdul, as if he were preparing to deliver a formal speech. “I personally,” he said, “am thankful for my wife, Min Foo, and for my son, Abdul. And also for my other son, Joey, and my daughter, Lateesha. In addition, I would like to take this moment to—”
“Enough!” Min Foo said. She was laughing. “Time’s up, Hakim!”
Which, for some reason, set the baby off. He let out a sudden wail, and although he might have settled down again, Rebecca recognized an opportunity when it came along. She stood up and reached for him. “I’ll take him,” she said. And the instant she had him, she made away with him, out of the dining room completely.
Out of the dining room and through the parlors, toward the stairs. But in the foyer, she paused. She hoisted the baby higher on her shoulder and opened the front door. It wasn’t raining anymore, although a thick mist still hung like veils. The air was soft and mild, a kind of non-temperature against her skin. She stepped outside and shut the door behind her.
The baby, who had been uttering chirps of protest, abruptly stopped and raised his head from her shoulder to look around.
She walked down the front walk and turned right, passing the meditation center and the blue-gable house. The mist was so dense that the baby started making small gulping sounds, as if he thought he was underwater. She figured he must be warm enough, though, because he was swaddled in a receiving blanket. His little body felt compact and solid, much heavier than the last time she had carried him, and he held himself in a more organized, more collected sort of way.