The Oakdale Dinner Club

by Kim Moritsugu

  “Oh, shit, sorry. I forgot. I guess last night took more out of me than I thought.”

  Alice pulled her into a corner of the hallway. “So can you read me now?”

  “What?”

  “I said, can you read me now? I’m sending you a thought picture.”

  Mary Ann closed her eyes and opened her mind, but all she could see or hear were her own Davey-centric thoughts. “I’m not getting anything at all. But I’m pretty tired.” She yawned. “Let’s try again later, okay? After I’ve gone home and taken a nap?”

  Davey was coming down the hall toward them, smiling and holding out his arms for a hug, making Mary Ann’s heart swell with loved-up joy. “See ya, Alice,” she’d said, and dived into his embrace, little knowing that their mind-reading days were over and done.

  3

  September 2010

  The previous spring, Mary Ann had been driven to seek a job. After a ten-year stint as a stay-at-home mom, she wanted to regain a measure of independence, and make a little money. She also wanted to distract herself from Bob’s cheating ways and the implosion of her marriage. And from feeling unwanted and unloved.

  She lucked into a part-time job doing project management — her former, pre-kid, field of work — for Drew Wacyk, a thirty-year-old computer consultant with a storefront office in Oakdale.

  She was mega-nervous about the job at first. Nervous about the tables-turned aspect of working for Drew, who’d worked for her when he was in college. The plaid-shirted young man who’d taught computer skills to kids in the After Four program she’d coordinated had morphed into a plaid-shirted hunky guy with eyes the colour of pecans — how would she deal with that? She was nervous that Phoebe, the junior college student doing an internship as Drew’s admin assistant, might nurse an automatic hatred for everyone over the age of forty, or show contempt at Mary Ann’s failure to grasp the many new concepts in office procedures that had developed during her absence from the work force. And she worried about dealing with Tom Gagliardi, the New York developer who was restoring the old train station and changing the face of Oakdale, and who had hired Drew to do some systems work for him. Mary Ann found Tom completely intimidating, what with his beautifully tailored clothes, his leonine head of hair, and his ornate manner of speech.

  Six months into the job, she’d become accustomed to and fond of them all, and she thought — hoped — they liked her too. So she felt relaxed and comfortable on the Friday afternoon that she happened to be in the office reception area when Tom was on his way out. Drew and Phoebe were there too, the three of them gathered like they were olden days servants at an English country house, bidding the lord of the manor a safe journey.

  Tom said, “My drive back to the city will be long, but a reward awaits at journey’s end. I’m meeting a friend in the East Village at a Japanese noodle shop that he says is the equal of a spot where he once had a transformative gastronomic experience in Shinjuku.” He waited a beat. “Do you know Shinjuku?”

  All three shook their heads.

  “My apologies for assuming you did. It’s a colorful district in Tokyo that harbors at least one estimable noodle shop.”

  The usual stunned pause followed Tom’s words, then Mary Ann said, “Happy eating,” because someone had to speak before Tom could leave and Mary Ann could stand at the window and watch him walk to his car. All six-foot-four of him in his linen suit.

  Drew spoke from over her shoulder. “Do you think he was born that way? Spouting big words, and gliding instead of walking?”

  Mary Ann said, “He seems to come from another era.”

  “Maybe he’s a vampire,” Phoebe said.

  “But women go for his approach, don’t they?” Drew said. “That hand-kissing routine?”

  “He’s never kissed my hand,” Mary Ann said. Wistfully.

  Phoebe said, “He doesn’t do anything for me. Even if he weren’t way old, he’s too intense. I like guys who are laidback, and Tom doesn’t seem like he’d be much fun.”

  “I’m fun,” Drew said.

  Mary Ann and Phoebe both laughed.

  “What? I am.”

  Phoebe said, “When was the last time you had a pillow fight with your girlfriend?”

  “Never. I hate pillow fights.”

  “What a surprise.”

  “I don’t like horseplay, either,” Mary Ann said. “I had a boyfriend in high school who thought throwing people in swimming pools was a riot. I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”

  “Hey, Mary Ann,” Phoebe said. “If you like serious guys, why don’t you have an affair with Tom, find out what he’s really like? Drew — fifty bucks says he wears silk dressing gowns and sleeps in an antique four-poster bed. Or a coffin.”

  Mary Ann blushed. “What a suggestion!”

  Drew wagged a finger at Phoebe. “Mary Ann’s married, you know. And so is Tom.”

  “I was just joking,” Phoebe said. “What’s with you two?”

  “So this spooky thing happened at work on Friday,” Mary Ann said to Alice.

  They were in Mary Ann’s kitchen after a Sunday night dinner. The kids and Bob had dispersed to their playrooms, leaving the women to tidy up and converse in low voices.

  Alice spooned leftover broccoli into a plastic container. “Spooky like you saw a ghost, or spooky like blood started to drip down the walls?”

  “Neither. Phoebe made a joke about me having an affair with Tom, and I felt like she’d caught me in the act. When I haven’t done anything yet.”

  Alice loaded some cutlery into the dishwasher. “What happened to your dinner club idea?”

  “It’s still festering in my mind.”

  “Maybe you should leave it there. A dinner club seems like a lot of work to organize and execute, with no guarantee of achieving your objective.”

  Mary Ann said, “But I have to do something soon. I haven’t had sex in seven months.”

  “It’s been seven months already since you found out about Bob’s affair?”

  “What do you mean already? Seven months is a long time.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  “Why? How long has it been for you?”

  “Never mind. How did we get on to this topic, anyway?”

  “I was talking about Phoebe, and how I freaked out when I thought she might be reading my mind.”

  “She must have made a lucky guess. Have you been acting transparent? Breathing heavily at the sight of Tom and Drew, swooning in their presence, wearing your heart on your sleeve?”

  “Probably. It’s been so long since I’ve been attracted to anyone, I haven’t got the faintest idea how to act, how to arrange my face.”

  “You could work on developing a frown as your default facial expression. Whenever your mind wanders, slap on a frown, and repel the world. It’s a technique that’s worked wonders for me.”

  Mary Ann closed the dishwasher door, pressed the on button. “Don’t you sometimes wish we had the telepathy back, though?”

  “Not really. How long did it even last? Six weeks? Two months? Sometimes I wonder if we imagined the whole thing.”

  “Alice! How can you say that?”

  “How can you not?”

  “Because I know we were really reading each other’s minds. In detail.”

  Alice sat on a stool at the counter. “Even if we really were telepathic, who knows why, for a strange, short time, it’s over now. There’s no point dwelling in the past.”

  “I never did understand why it stopped working.”

  “I had a theory that it was caused by a unique and short-lived configuration of the stars, moon, planets, and our menstrual cycles, and it only lasted until the universe shifted.”

  “Our menstrual cycles?”

  “The tides may have been involved, too. And sun spots, possibly.”

  Mary Ann took out mugs and spoons. “Go ahead, make fun.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that the only logical explanation I can think of for what happened is that we we
nt temporarily insane. Or suffered from a case of dual simultaneous hysteria.”

  Mary Ann poured them both coffee. “I guess these days if we want to experience anything extraordinary, we have to make it happen, instead of waiting for the universe and our periods to coincide.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m barely surviving in the state of ordinary.”

  “Hand me that notepad beside the phone. Let’s get this dinner club going, change things up.”

  “Aren’t you tired right now? I’m tired.”

  Mary Ann pulled up a chair, wrote away for a minute, pushed the pad over to Alice’s side of the counter. “How’s this?”

  She had written:

  The Oakdale Dinner Club

  Founding members:

  Mary Ann

  Alice

  Amy

  Lisa

  Mom

  Phoebe

  Drew

  Tom

  Sam Orenstein

  Danielle Pringle

  Alice said, “Who’s Danielle Pringle?”

  “Her son is in Kayla’s class, and one time for a class lunch at school she brought an incredible salad made of blue potatoes and yellow cherry tomatoes and white beets. She’s a foodie if I ever saw one.”

  “I see you’ve got your three affair candidates listed, your own personal Dating Game lined up. Forgive me for raising a technicality, but are they not all currently attached to someone else?”

  “Yes, but I’m not trying to wreck any homes. I’m just looking for a fling. And besides, I recall hearing about a married man or two in your past, Alice.”

  “If I was ever involved with a married man, a) I shouldn’t have told you about him, and b) I was in my twenties, and wild and uncaring.”

  “I skipped the wild and uncaring stage when I was young, so it only seems fair that I get to have one now.”

  Alice yawned. “At least these dinner club evenings won’t be dull. If the conversation flags, I can always watch you acting like a degenerate.”

  Mary Ann’s workdays at Drew’s office started at ten o’clock. Giving her time in the morning after the kids were packed off to school to clean up the breakfast dishes, deal with her personal business, and start on her invitations, which she’d decided to do by phone — so much more gracious than sending a group email.

  She kept the dinner club papers stored in a file folder in her desk drawer marked Menus, a folder guaranteed to hold no interest for Bob. Though Mary Ann had nothing to hide — Bob knew about the dinner club. She’d told him about it that morning before he left for work, and he’d grunted in acknowledgement when she spoke, grunted again when she’d told him the first meeting would be at their house, and that he would probably want to absent himself that evening, an evening when Josh happened to have an away basketball game, in Valleyview. How about if Bob took Josh to the game? Okay? Okay.

  Her first calls were to her friends Amy and Lisa, a pair of bubbly moms who could be counted on to volunteer at school events, lived for their daily five p.m. glasses of wine, and whose roles in the dinner club would be to fill the room, and make Mary Ann’s quest for a lover less obvious. They were both out when she called — probably doing errands, power-walking together, or having their hair done. She left them each a detailed message.

  Next to call was her mother. Mary Ann would have preferred Sarah not witness her attempts at flirtation, but with Alice living in the second-floor apartment above Sarah, it would be too awkward not to ask her. And her desserts were very good.

  Sarah said, “What an enchanting idea, Mary Ann. I’d love to come. But are you sure having an old woman around won’t put a damper on your party?”

  “Sixty-eight isn’t old, Mom.”

  “Some days I feel like it is.”

  “And you know people on the list, so you’ll feel comfortable, I’m sure.”

  “I must say, I like the no-spouse idea,” Sarah said. “Women are so much easier to talk to when their husbands aren’t around.”

  “Think about what you’d like to bring — I’d recommend something in the dessert line — and let me know.”

  “I will. And thank you again.”

  Mary Ann said goodbye, looked at the clock, and pulled Kayla’s class list off her bulletin board. She had time before leaving for work for one more call.

  After dropping her two boys off at school, Danielle Pringle drove back to the farm, poured a fresh cup of coffee into her travel mug, and took it outside, carrying it around during her morning inspection. She discussed the day ahead with her two farmhands — the pumpkins were coming along nicely, the radish bed needed weeding, the latest batch of mache was ready to pick.

  She stopped by the kennels on her way back to the house, and found her husband Benny inside, kneeling next to his breeder, Daisy, who had given birth to six puppies a few days before. “See that?” he said. “See how the smallest one fights to get to her teat? Alex calls him Hero.”

  “I thought we weren’t going to let the kids name the puppies.”

  “I know, but Alex identifies with the runt. You know what he asked me this morning? If dogs can get food allergies, too.”

  “The poor sweetie.”

  Benny stood up. “Maybe we should let him keep Hero.”

  “Maybe. What time is your first appointment today?”

  “Nine-thirty. A cat needing shots. I should go open up the office.”

  “I should go to mine.”

  They walked out together and Benny said, “What’s for lunch today?”

  Danielle bit her lip and poured the dregs of her coffee on the ground. She hated when Benny asked her that question, or any question that implied the kitchen or the food that came out of it was her sole responsibility, though, to be honest, she’d cooked her own goose on that score.

  She’d developed a measure of culinary prowess as a skewed act of defiance against her mother, Adele Beauchamp, a respected food writer and fine-dining snob whose specialty was enthusing about prepared food without ever cooking any herself. And now it sometimes seemed that looking after the food Danielle’s family ate was all she did.

  Every day, after her sons Ethan and Alex came home from school, she dirtied pots and pans and dishes and washed and dirtied them again. She loaded the dishwasher and unloaded it, peeled and sliced onions, washed and dried lettuce. Her own beautiful, buttery lettuces that looked so special on her table at the Greenmarket looked like a chore at home, in her kitchen, where she hacked off the ends, separated the leaves, picked out bugs and globs of dirt, and submerged them in cold water before placing them in the spinner.

  If someone took all the lettuce leaves she’d washed and placed them end to end, they would reach China. Add on the onionskins she’d thrown on her compost heap, and the trail of vegetable matter would circle the planet.

  So sue her if she resorted to an occasional passive-aggressive tactic when Benny asked her, every single day, what there was for lunch.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What are you having?”

  “Are there any leftovers?”

  “Maybe. You should check.”

  “I’ll look later.” Benny turned to his veterinary office, on the left, and Danielle headed right, toward a ringing phone in her office. She ran in, picked it up, and said, “Pringles,” in her chirpy customer service voice.

  “Danielle, is that you? It’s Mary Ann Gray here — Kayla’s mom. From Ethan’s class?”

  “Oh hi,” Danielle said. “How are you?” And what could Mary Ann Gray possibly want from her?

  “Fine, thanks, and I know this sounds out of the blue, but I’m calling to invite you to a join a dinner club I’m starting. Let me explain.”

  Danielle listened, and thought about the first time she’d met Mary Ann, at a volunteer potluck luncheon held at the school, in Ethan’s kindergarten year. Midway through the proceedings, Mary Ann had crossed the room in her pale blue silk dress and singled Danielle out from the other mothers and nannies. “Someone told me you brought
that beautiful salad,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  Danielle introduced herself, thanked Mary Ann for the compliment, and hid her embarrassment over screwing up with her food contribution. Other mothers had supplied mini-pitas stuffed with egg salad, or a cheese tray containing the standard wedges of Brie, cheddar, and Swiss, but Danielle, foiled by her pretentious food upbringing, had brought a platter of her own baby white beets, blue fingerling potatoes, and filet beans, steamed, dressed in a herb vinaigrette, and topped with halved yellow cherry tomatoes and a chiffonade of mint and basil.

  Mary Ann said, “And it doesn’t just look good, it tastes delicious, too. Do you do parties? I’m kidding. But I’d love to serve this at my next luncheon.”

  Danielle said, “It wasn’t very difficult to prepare.”

  “But where’d you get it all? At the farmer’s market? Oh shoot, Amy is giving me the signal. It’s time to present the teacher gift. Excuse me.”

  Danielle had listened to Mary Ann give a pretty speech of thanks to the teacher, admired the artfully wrapped gift — all shiny paper and organza ribbon — and wondered if there’d be any salad left over to take home for Benny’s dinner.

  “We’d rotate houses every month,” Mary Ann said now, “and best of all: we wouldn’t invite spouses. Just cooks. Let me tell you who else is coming.”

  Danielle let Mary Ann run down the unfamiliar names on her list, but she already knew her answer: no, thanks. Danielle would never fit in with Mary Ann’s crowd from the rich part of Oakdale, she couldn’t stand the thought of any extra cooking, she didn’t own any clothes to suit the occasion, and she could just imagine Benny’s pout if she told him he could fix his own dinner for once, because she was going out for the evening, alone.

  Mary Ann said, “What do you think? A good meal, some entertaining people, adult conversation. Does this sound at all appealing?”

  “It does, and it’s so nice of you to ask me, but I’m afraid I’m not up to any extra food prep right now. Some days just the effort of putting dinner on the table for my family is more than I can manage.”