So I say, when asked, “Hey, I’m fifty, but sitting here with you lot, I feel more like sixty.” I cannot explain where the pretentious “you lot” came from, nor do I quite understand why that sour, strident tone coloured my voice, why I am so fed up with everything and everyone. What I can see is that my utterance has cast a pall over the company’s hitherto smiling faces.
Danny jumps into the gap, says, “You know what I feel like? A piece of that delectable-looking cheesecake I saw waiting for us in the butler’s pantry. May I help you clear, Suzanne?” The look he shoots me when his words set the women in motion up and away from the table tells me I can thank him later, but I’m not finished, have become dangerously out of sorts.
In the kitchen, Suzanne tells us to leave everything on the marble counters. “My girl will tidy up later,” she says, and I bite.
“Your girl?” My voice sounds awful, rheumy and thick with emotion.
“The nanny,” Suzanne says. “She’s upstairs with the kids right now.”
“Surely if she’s old enough to be looking after your children, she’s old enough to be referred to as a woman.”
There is a pause before Suzanne wrinkles her small, straight nose, smiles, and says, “You sound just like my mom. Your generation got all caught up with the semantics of feminism, but my friends and I are so past that now.”
Behind her, where only I can see him, Danny licks his index finger, and racks up a tally point in the air for Suzanne.
After a piece of pumpkin cheesecake (humble pie for me) and a drawn-out cup of coffee poured from a goddamned silver coffee pot, Danny and I say effusive thanks, make our escape, and before we get into our cars, walk around the block and talk while he smokes a cigarette.
He says, “What happened to you back there? Demonic possession?”
I inhale a drift of his cigarette smoke, which still smells tempting, sixteen years after I quit. “I don’t know. My arm hurts.”
“Your arm hurts?”
“I had a cortisone shot today for this frozen shoulder ailment I have. Maybe sudden rage is a side effect. Though that wouldn’t explain why I almost told the doctor to fuck off before she gave me the shot. Or why I had a huge fight on the phone with the cable installer on the Burrows house last week. A red-faced, furious, shaky-voiced fight. Totally brought on by the idiotic, know-nothing kid I spoke to, by the way.”
Danny butts out his cigarette on the sidewalk. “Kevin’s been angry a lot lately, too. Maybe there’s a rage virus going around.” Kevin is Danny’s life partner, a lawyer ten years older than he.
I say, “I don’t know what was worse: when Suzanne compared me to her mother, or when she said” — I mimic her little girl voice — “My friends are so past feminism, you know?”
“Look at it this way: you cracked her veneer for once. That’s some feat, right there.”
“Thanks for not attributing my behaviour to hormones, and for not saying maybe Kevin and I are turning into old farts.”
“Come on, now. Fifty’s not old, it’s the new — ”
“Please don’t.”
He pauses to light another cigarette. “So did Suzanne’s place look fabulous or what? I went over this morning and dressed it.”
“It did look fabulous. You’re a design genius and a social genius. I predict you’ll net at least two new clients from today’s lunch. Unlike me, whose reputation as the blunt bitch architect will only be enhanced.”
“You jazzed up the proceedings, though. Nothing like a little tension to make an event more talkworthy.”
I might as well have pushed back the chairs, rolled up the rug, and started to jive. Or maybe Charleston.
By the time I arrive home, the dull ache in my shot-up arm has turned into a searing, stabbing pain that made me gasp all the way there. I manage a one-handed car exit and house entry, find and swallow some extra-strength ibuprofen, and stagger to my desk to check my messages and emails over the sound of the whimpering noises my gasps have turned into. One of the messages is from my friend Sylvia, who has coerced me into agreeing to help chaperone a dance at Jesse’s school this evening.
Sylvia’s son Ben and Jesse are both out of town, an opportunity Sylvia suggested we seize, in their absence, to put in a volunteer stint at Westdale Collegiate. Ben is at a soccer tournament. Jesse is off on one of his quarterly weekend jaunts to New York, where he’ll be treated to courtside basketball tickets and trendy restaurant meals by his dad in exchange for being cordial to his stepmother, Henry’s second wife, a thirtysomething ex-journalist named (shudder with me, now) Bryony, who’s trying to use her fecundity (two squalling kids so far, born a year apart) to keep Henry committed. Normally, I take Jesse’s periodic absences as welcome solo time and have a quiet evening in, but not tonight, thanks to Sylvia.
Her message says she’ll pick me up at seven and to call back only if that’s not okay. I call her back. “I’m not sure I can make it tonight.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
I tell her about the shot in the arm, the pain, and the gasping and whimpering, but she won’t have any of it.
She says, “Have you taken serious painkillers?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“Did you wash them down with a glass of wine?”
“No.”
“Drink a glass of wine, let the drugs take effect, soak in a hot bath, eat a light dinner, and be at your door ready to go at seven. I’ll honk.”
I’m too pain-addled to argue.
At seven, I slide into Sylvia’s car and into her not-unpleasant scent of perfume and powder.
“Feeling better?” she says.
“If you call a state of chemically induced relaxation better, yeah. I hope there won’t be any heavy lifting required tonight. Or fast thinking.”
“There won’t be. The most we’ll have to do is take a few tickets and patrol the back halls on the lookout for clandestine cocaine snorting and underage sex.”
“Why are we doing this again?”
“Because it’ll be educational and we’ll collect evidence from which we can extrapolate information about how our own children behave in similar circumstances.”
“But Jesse has no interest in this sort of occasion.”The dear child of my antisocial heart has so far avoided hanging out with girls and appears to care only for rap music, basketball, and computer games.
“That’s what Ben was like six months ago, but when I drove him to the bus this morning, he complained at length about the school’s stupidity and lack of foresight in scheduling a dance for the same weekend as his soccer tournament.”
“Did he really use the phrase ‘lack of foresight’?”
“I think his exact words were ‘the administration sucks.’The point is that by observing the boys’ peer group at play, we can better understand their world and be better parents to their sensitive souls.”
“Uh-huh.” Not long ago, Jesse was a child who gave me wonderful, long-lasting, heartfelt hugs, and walked hand in hand with me in public, and kissed me goodbye in front of his friends. He was an affectionate, loving sweetheart, the light in the window at the end of a long day.
Now,