“I’ll tell you later,” commented Joe to the other guys.
I just shook my head and smiled. “You guys hungry, too?” Everyone nodded and said they were hungry. “Okay, this is my last meal as the Master Chef. Tonight we’re doing omelets. Go set a couple of tables and tell everybody to get their butts in gear and put in their orders.” I shooed my brethren out, as my family looked on mystified. I looked over at them. “I’m also one of the house cooks on Sundays, one of the better ones, if I do say so myself, and one of the house specialties is the famous Three Egg Omelet. Marilyn helps me, sometimes.”
“You cook?” exclaimed Suzie.
“The way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach,” I misquoted.
“Is that what you were doing earlier? Cooking?” she giggled. Dad snorted and Mom stewed at that.
“Never you mind what we were doing!” Marilyn and I went into the pantry and dug out the eggs, milk, and some cheese and ham. By the time I had a couple of small pans on the stove and a small mixing bowl on the counter, Joe was back.
“I got orders for six omelets, and I couldn’t find everybody, so there might be more,” he told me.
“Great. In reward for that stunt earlier, you just got elected as the dishwasher. Congratulations!”
Joe just laughed at that. “So who’s the Master Chef next year going to be?” he asked.
“Not sure, but I suspect Smitty gets the title. You have to admit, he makes a burgundy and mushroom chicken to die for! I stole his recipe.”
Dad asked what we were talking about, and the guys explained the Master Chef vote. He looked at me and said, quietly, “Fraternity president and head cook? It’s like I don’t know you at all.” What was there to say to him? He was right; he didn’t know me at all anymore. I just shrugged.
Suzie helped Marilyn, while my folks stood back and watched. They were both excellent cooks — I learned from the best! — and watched their eldest son whip up a bunch of omelets. Hamilton was hopeless in the kitchen. The cooking gene must have been recessive in his case. It was probably hiding behind the normal gene, itself damn near invisible.
The first two omelets went to Suzie and Marilyn, and the next two went to my folks. After that I ran the rest of the brothers in succession, and ended up with another eight before I got to mine. By that time, Marilyn and my family were done, so they sat while I worked on mine. Suzie was asking Marilyn about the frat house, and about where she would stay. I had the answer for that. I swallowed the bite I was working on and said, “My old room from last year.”
“It’s empty?” asked Marilyn. When I nodded, she turned back to Suzie. “Carl and Joe stayed there for two years. The owners have gone home for the summer.”
“I don’t know as I like this, you staying in a fraternity house,” commented my mother.
“Mom, she’ll be fine. I won’t let her drink and nobody’s going to run in here and ravish her in the middle of the night.”
“What? What if I want to be ravished in the middle of the night?” asked Suzie.
That got Marilyn to laughing, me to groaning, and Mom to start sputtering at my father. He settled it by simply saying, “Shirley, they’ll be fine.”
“Did you bring your swimsuit? We can use the pool?” asked Marilyn.
Suzie frowned. “No, I didn’t know there was a pool here.”
“Only frat on campus with a swimming pool,” I said. I smiled at my father. “And there’s a nursing school just a block down the road, too.”
“Let me guess, there’s an open invitation to borrow the pool.”
I gave him a pious look. “It’s our neighborly duty!”
Marilyn gave me a shot to the arm at that. “Maybe you can borrow one of mine,” she told Suzie.
I snorted. “Good luck with that. You two aren’t anywhere close to the same size.” Marilyn was at least a cup size or two larger and several inches wider, although she wasn’t fat; Suzie was simply very slender, and about as flat-chested as her mother, an ‘A’ cup with delusions of grandeur. I gave my mother a wicked grin. “Maybe she can simply swim in her bra and panties. Not much difference to a swimsuit.”
That earned me howls of outrage from all three women, although my Dad chuckled at the thought.
Afterwards, we went out to their car and brought in Suzie’s suitcase and my sleeping bag. Along the way, I pointed out to my mother some of the many redeeming features of the house. “Over there, Mom, that’s where we would worship graven images by the light of the moon, and there, at the barbecue pit, that’s where we would sacrifice freshmen every spring, to appease the demons.” I looked over at Marilyn. “Don’t you remember that, honey, all the fun we had and their screams as they were taken up to the high altar?”
“You think you’re so funny!” she replied. As expected, Suzie and Dad laughed, and Mom huffed and puffed.
“Don’t you remember the good old days, Dad, when you would sit around and roast pledges over the open fire?”
“Don’t get me involved with this,” he laughed.
I commented to Suzie, “Dad’s just afraid I’ll tell you and Mom what really happens in frat houses. Did you know Dad was in Delta Upsilon back in the Dark Ages?”
“Really?”
“Ask him about it on the trip home.”
“You really are just full of piss and vinegar, aren’t you?” he commented.
“Charlie!” protested Mom.
“Get in the car, Shirley. Let’s get out of here and go find a drink!” Dad loaded Mom in the car and waved good-bye to the three of us.
We went swimming after dinner, but Suzie wore one of my frat shirts and a pair of her regular bikini underwear. The shirts are heavy enough that you aren’t running a wet tee shirt contest, and long enough they went down past her butt.
The next morning Bruno, Joe, and I loaded ourselves into the Impala and went down to the Armory, where our commissioning ceremony was being held. Leo and Harry were going down with their parents. Marilyn and Suzie were going to wait for my parents to pick them up and then they would all go down together. I hadn’t planned on the extra guests, but I was ready for it. Every student got four tickets to graduation, and I had the two spare still sitting around. The last time I did this, I had to get an extra ticket for Marilyn. Mom sort of held up her nose at that, thinking it was for family only, but even then I would have stuck with Marilyn over them in a heartbeat.
I wasn’t the honor graduate, but I didn’t really care. The honor graduate was a supergeek with Coke bottle lenses on his glasses who was going off to some lab at Fort Meade with a perfect 4.0 GPA. I had good marks, but it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t mind. That guy was about as much of a soldier as Hamilton. I just smiled at him and rubbed my jump wings and crossed cannons in his face. I did rank high enough that I was going into the army as a Regular Army officer, not just as a Reserve Officer on Active Duty. It’s an important distinction. We listened to a speech or two and swore to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. Considering what would become of the Congress over the next two generations, I wondered if it might not be a good idea to start there.
Afterwards, I found my parents in the bleachers coming down to greet me. For the first time I was in a real officer’s uniform, in that instead of my collar insignia reading O.C. for officer candidate, now they had my gold bars, one to each shoulder, and my collar insignia had the crossed cannons of artillery. When my father came down, I snapped to attention and threw him a salute. He started for a second at this, and then returned the salute to me. He had been a Lieutenant Junior Grade, the Navy equivalent of an Army 1st Lieutenant, during the war, and outranked me.