The Oakdale Dinner Club

by Kim Moritsugu

  More Advance Praise for Oakdale Dinner Club:

  “The food in this novel had me salivating. The writing is excellent, witty, and spare. I recommend The Oakdale Dinner Club to anyone looking for a fun, lighthearted, yet quirkily introspective read.”

  — Robin Spano, author of the

  Clare Vengel Undercover novels

  Praise for The Restoration of Emily:

  “A very funny, sometimes suspenseful novel for grown-ups … Moritsugu writes with dash and irony.”

  — Quill & Quire

  “A fun, light, and adept piece of writing.”

  — Globe and Mail

  “Funny, wise and sharp, this is a character all of us can see a little bit of ourselves in.”

  — Chatelaine

  Praise for The Glenwood Treasure:

  “The Glenwood Treasure has suggestions of the late Timothy Findley and more than a hint of the old Nancy Drew mysteries. But, given the strength of this book, it seems more fitting to drop the comparisons and allow Moritsugu her own place on the literary landscape.”

  — Globe and Mail

  “Kim Moritsugu is a witty social observer and the book deftly blends a comedy of manners into the mystery.”

  — Toronto Star

  “A cozy read … Moritsugu is a good writer with an appealing central character that will awaken the inner girl in all of us.”

  — National Post

  1

  August 2010

  On the last day of summer, Mary Ann Gray sat in a lounge chair by the side of the Oakdale Country Club pool, watched the children splash and dive, half listened to the self-important jerk on her left expound to his neighbour about the current state of the financial markets, and decided to have an extramarital affair.

  It was time. She was thinner and blonder than she’d ever been since high school, a state she intended to maintain, no matter how painful the process. Not that she’d transformed herself into a babe, or anything close to it. All that the stress-induced starvation, exercising, and beautifying of recent months had accomplished was to move her physical attractiveness quotient up a few notches, from not bad to oh yeah, her.

  No amount of non-surgical work could convert Mary Ann into model-perfect neighbourhood mom Hallie Smith, who reclined on the opposite pool deck, flanked by her two young daughters. Through her sunglasses, Mary Ann checked out Hallie’s clean profile and taut bikini body — was she actually posing on that lounge chair? — and tried to imagine looking like her. What would it be like to have guys flirt with you all the time, to be the first asked to dance, to get superior service from car mechanics? What would it be like to be married to the winsome Sam Orenstein?

  Mary Ann’s best friend, Alice Maeda, emerged from the women’s locker room with her four-year-old daughter, Lavinia, in tow. Mary Ann waved them over. “No problem getting in at the front desk?”

  “It was tense at first, when they looked at me, pointed to the ‘Whites Only’ sign on the wall, and shook their heads.”

  Lavinia said, “What does whites only mean?”

  Mary Ann reached for Lavinia’s small hand and held it. “The club has a rule that people can only wear white clothes when they play tennis. And your mom was making a joke about it. A not-very-funny joke.”

  Alice grinned, and brought her index finger and thumb together in the universal sign for smallness. “Not even a little bit funny?”

  “They didn’t really give you a hard time, did they? I’ll go roll someone’s head if they did.”

  “They were fine. They didn’t even make me recite the pledge of allegiance this time.”

  “Stop it.” Mary Ann removed a towel from the lounge chair beside her. “And here: I saved you a seat.”

  “I want to go swimming,” Lavinia said.

  “Sit on your towel and let the sun make you hot first,” Alice said, “while Mommy talks to Mary Ann. Take your Barbies.” She pulled two naked Barbie dolls sporting morning-after hair from her tote bag and handed them to Lavinia.

  Mary Ann offered Alice a tube of sunscreen. “How’s your weekend been?”

  Alice made a so-so motion with her hand. “Long. I can’t wait for school to start tomorrow.”

  “Yours, or Lavinia’s?”

  “Both. The idea of lecturing to freshmen appeals at this time of year. Until I meet them.”

  Lavinia dropped the dolls on the ground and stood up beside Alice’s chair. “Now can we go swimming?”

  “Okay. Let’s put on your water wings.”

  Mary Ann waved them off and opened the book in her lap, a dense, award-winning novel she’d been trying to get through for months. She’d read two paragraphs when a burst of conversation nearby made her glance up, at Chad, the head lifeguard, he of the worked-out body, the pierced ear, and the wide shoulders.

  “Now there’s a guy who has no trouble getting laid,” muttered the jerk on her left.

  Mary Ann gave the back of the jerk’s head a dirty look and watched Chad scale the side of the lifeguard chair and say something to the girl lifeguard on duty. A humorous remark, apparently, because the girl laughed, said, “You’re crazy, Chad,” and squirted him with water from her bottle.

  Chad climbed down and strutted on to the next lifeguard station, his carriage that of a half-naked buff guy who believes every female eye in the vicinity is on him, and every female mind over the age of thirteen is fantasizing about licking his washboard abs.

  Mary Ann didn’t want to lick Chad’s stomach. At twenty-one, he was a college student and much too young for her. She might be willing to commit adultery, but she drew the line at cradle robbing. Besides, she knew Chad’s mother; the family lived on the street behind hers. A small stretch of their backyard fences touched.

  She checked on her kids’ whereabouts, spotted Griffin lined up to jump off the diving board and Kayla bouncing up and down in the shallow end. She closed the novel, pulled a food magazine out of her bag, flipped past pictures of hand-painted serving dishes, skipped the wine column and a feature on decadent desserts, and stopped to study a photo story about a Californian couple having a staged dinner party on the grounds of their vineyard estate.

  Alice appeared at her side. “I sicced Lavinia onto Kayla and her friend.”

  “Good move. That’s what older girls are for.”

  Alice sat down. “I saw Griffin. Where’s Josh?”

  “At home, refining his jump shot and pondering which act of teenage rebellion to try next.”

  Alice pointed to the open magazine. “And what’s for dinner tonight?”

  “At my house? Hot dogs and hamburgers. But listen, I’ve had an idea. What do you think about starting a dinner club?”

  “Depends what it is.”

  “Like a book club. We assemble a group of people who can cook, set up a schedule, rotate houses, meet once a month. Everyone brings food, we dress up nice, have adult conversations, feast on elaborate culinary creations we wouldn’t dream of wasting on our families.”

  “When did you come up with this?”

  “Just now.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t own matching dishes.”

  “So we skip your house.”

  “Why?”

  “Why skip your house?”

  “Why do this, period?”

  “It’s new, it’s different.”

  “It sounds like a lot of work.”

  “To break up the monotony of our humdrum lives — that’s another reason.”

  “You think I have a humdrum life?”

  “To break up the monotony of mine, then.”

  Alice waved at Lavinia. “No, you’re right. My life’s humdrum too. Count me in. Who else would join?”

  “I’d have to invite my
school mom friends Lisa and Amy. And I’d include the guys from my office. Plus a few others.”

  “It’s starting to sound like a freshman mixer, one of the reasons I left the country for college.”

  “I always hated those. There I’d be, brimming with potential, and all the boys would be gathered around my class’s version of Hallie Smith.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Sam Orenstein’s wife. The hot-for-her-age specimen in the orange bikini on the opposite deck.”

  They contemplated the figure of Hallie Smith for a moment, and Alice said, “What about your mom? She should be invited.”

  “I guess.”

  “Think of her baking.”

  “You’re right.”

  “How many is that now?”

  “Nine or ten.”

  “Double that if people bring dates.”

  “We wouldn’t allow dates.”

  “I’m getting that freshman mixer feeling again. You’re not by any chance trying to set me up, are you?”

  “Far from it. We’ll confine the guest list to people who are interested in food.”

  The girl lifeguard stood up in her chair, blew her whistle, and announced a fifteen-minute adult swim period. The children evacuated the pool and rushed over. Kayla and her friend each held one of Lavinia’s hands. Griffin hugged his thin arms to his chest. “Mom,” he said, “did you bring a deck of cards?”

  When Griffin was settled on the pool deck playing solitaire, and the girls had laid out their towels in a circle and set to work untangling the hair of Lavinia’s Barbies, Mary Ann glanced over at the jerk to her left, also known as her husband, Bob. He was deep in conversation with the man beside him. She moved her chair a few inches closer to Alice’s and half-mouthed, half-whispered, “So I’ve decided to have an affair.”

  Alice raised her eyebrows. “You have? With whom?”

  “The whom part presents a problem. I can’t quite decide.”

  Alice leaned back in her chair. “Now I get it: this dinner club is not about setting me up at all. It’s about setting you up.”

  “Gee, Alice,” Mary Ann said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d read my mind.”

  2

  October 1986

  Alice was doodling a line of Greek key symbols in her notebook and trying not to fall asleep during class at Five Oaks High when the wall phone rang.

  Her world history teacher answered it, listened a few seconds, looked straight at her, hung up, and said, “Alice Maeda, you’re wanted in the principal’s office.”

  Alice packed up her books and walked out, glad for the unexpected Get Out of Jail Free card, but a little worried about why she’d been summoned. She’d been involved in a minor incident during the first week of school, a month before, when she’d walked into English class carrying a lit cigarette. She’d forgotten where she was, forgotten smoking wasn’t allowed inside the school. Or maybe she was trying to forget where she was.

  Her English teacher, a crewcut-sporting reactionary, had commanded her, in a super-authoritarian tone, to put out the cigarette IMMEDIATELY, and Alice had got her back up and said no, why should she? Blah blah blah, she received a two-day suspension for non-compliance with school rules. To make matters worse, one of the more politically minded students wrote a fiery piece for the student newspaper that charged the school with violating Alice’s civil rights and featured the headline “Student Defies Authorities” over a picture of Alice, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, flipping the bird to the photographer. Not the best way to start off her senior year.

  She heard footsteps behind her, turned around, and saw Mary Ann MacAllister walking down the otherwise empty hallway. Mary Ann was in Alice’s math class, but they didn’t travel in the same social circles and rarely interacted outside an occasional “Can I borrow your protractor?” type of exchange. Why was Mary Ann walking the halls in the middle of the morning, when everyone else was trapped in class? It was unlikely that she was in any trouble: she was a model student, captain of the girls’ basketball team, secretary of the student council, first chair of the flute section in the school band. One of those.

  Alice pulled open the last door in their path and held it. Mary Ann ran to catch up.

  “Were you called to the office, too?” Alice said.

  “Yeah, I was.”

  “Good. That makes it less likely I’m being hauled in for another stupid rules infraction.”

  In the office, their math teacher Ms. Alexander was waiting for them with Mr. Dunston, the vice-principal. When the girls were seated and the door closed, Ms. Alexander said, in a tight voice, “I have good news and bad news.” No smile. “The good news is that you two are the only students at Five Oaks who placed in the top one hundred in the state math competition test you wrote a few weeks ago.”

  Alice looked at Mary Ann. This had to be a mistake. Alice was decent at math, and Mary Ann was maybe better than decent, but neither were math geniuses, not as far as Alice knew.

  “Aren’t you wondering what the bad news is?”

  Here it came.

  “The bad news —” Ms. Alexander’s voice cracked a little “— is that you two were also the only students who handed in identical answer sheets.”

  What?

  The interrogation began. Had they cheated? HAD THEY? They had better confess right now if so, come clean. The results were pretty damning. Did they know what the mathematical probability of getting an identical result was? DID THEY?

  Both girls denied collusion. Alice curtly, Mary Ann on the verge of tears.

  “What’s your explanation, then?” Ms. Alexander said. “How could this have happened?”

  Mary Ann said, “Great minds think alike?” and earned them another ten minutes of haranguing.

  “What about you, Alice?” Mr. Dunston said when Miss Alexander paused for breath. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I say this is a ridiculous accusation. Mary Ann and I aren’t even friends — we’ve spoken to each other maybe five times in our whole lives. How could we have cheated?”

  In the end, they were let go, told that without any concrete evidence of wrongdoing, the school had no choice but to accept the test results. But, they were warned, they would be watched closely for the remainder of the year. And they were strongly advised to avoid each other, especially in math class, and certainly during tests. Did they understand?

  Mary Ann bowed her head and said yes, meekly. Alice looked at the wall calendar behind Mr. Dunston, counted the months until she’d be free of this sorry excuse for a school, and said, “Yeah. I understand.”

  Alice spent some time at the school library that afternoon, researching her international options for college, planning her escape. She was finishing off a cigarette in the parking lot just before the late bus was due to leave when Mary Ann came out of a side door and climbed aboard.

  Alice chucked away the butt, got on the bus, sat down across the aisle from Mary Ann, and said, “Since when do you take the bus home?”

  “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,” Mary Ann said, and looked away, like she was hiding something.

  That was when Alice recalled that Mary Ann had a boyfriend she’d been with for a year or more, a jock named Mike Reynolds. Alice had seen them drive to and from school together in Mike’s Camaro, she thought. Maybe they’d broken up, and that’s why Mary Ann was reduced to taking the bus.

  Mary Ann said, “No offence, but we probably shouldn’t sit next to each other. We’re not supposed to be seen together, remember?”

  Alice made an impatient gesture, and her bracelets jangled. “To hell with that. This whole thing’s a big joke, if you ask me.”

  “A joke? Ms. Alexander seemed to take it pretty seriously. I’m glad she already wrote my letter of reference for college. Oh no. What if she tries to retract it?”

  “She won’t. And her suspicions make no sense, anyway. How were we supposed to accomplish this alleged cheating, when we weren’t s
eated near each other during the test?”

  “It is strange that our answers were exactly the same.”

  “Not that strange. I don’t buy that mathematical probability shit. We’re the exception, that’s all.” Alice was used to being the exception, having grown up the half-Asian, half-Caucasian daughter of two classical musicians — a violinist and a cellist — who had settled in suburban white-bread Oakdale. “By the way, that was a good line about great minds thinking alike.”

  “I only said that because I figured they’d freak out if they knew what I was really thinking.”

  “Which was what?”

  Mary Ann hesitated. “Promise me you won’t laugh. Promise? Okay. Don’t laugh.” She took a deep breath. “Did you ever think you might be telepathic?”

  Alice laughed — a short, derisive bark. “No.”

  “Never? Not even for a second?”

  Another no.

  “Well, I did. I went through a period when I really thought I could communicate with my mind. I tried sending my thoughts out to everyone I knew.”

  “Okay. That definitely qualifies as weird. Are you weird?”

  “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “When was this?”

  “In my sophomore year, when my family moved to Oakdale from Michigan. I was the new kid in town, all the cliques were already formed at Five Oaks, and I badly needed secret powers to help me get in with the popular crowd.”

  “Except you didn’t have any.”

  “I guess not. I couldn’t get through to anyone.”

  “And now that you’ve made it into the inner circle at Five Oaks without any powers, you think we might have communicated telepathically on the day of the test? Without our knowing?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  Not in Alice’s opinion, it wasn’t.

  The bus turned down Forest Lane, and drove past Jake Stewart’s house. Jake Stewart was a cocky, good-looking jock who played football and hockey, and was considered a school stud. Alice might have had a tiny crush on him when she was like, eleven, but she had no time anymore for him and his crowd, a crowd that included Mary Ann’s boyfriend — ex-boyfriend? — Mike. And Mary Ann herself.