American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

the table were notes and cards upon which recipes had been typed, and a miscellany of magazine and newspaper articles, columns, and clippings on the subject of food; a yet-unread section of that morning’s New York Times; the April issue of Gourmet , in which Glynnis herself had an article. The dark-tiled kitchen floor shone; in the window opposite, several of the hanging plants, the Swedish geraniums, were in bloom; how quiet, how lovely, the house, my house, Glynnis thought, with Ian and Bianca gone. “Oh, yes,” she told Meika. “ Here .”
    And afterward thought, Why don’t Meika and I feel more comfortable with each other? We are like sisters, really.
    GLYNNIS WONDERED THEN , and wonders now, thinking ahead to the party, and to Ian’s arrival, and the guests, and the food, and the small quick deft tasks she alone will have to do, to orchestrate the evening as she wishes, whether it is a terrible sort of vanity and selfishness, her contentment with such domestic matters: her happiness in them, and in making others, by way of them, happy. Food is such a simple thing, Glynnis’s mother once said, perplexed—why is it so difficult? Yet Glynnis has never found it difficult; no more than she finds love, or at any rate lovemaking, difficult. “It helps not to think,” she said. “Just do .”
    The evening’s agenda is: Ian will remain at the Institute until his usual hour, around six o’clock, when he will drive to the Poughkeepsie airport to pick up Bianca (coming home from Connecticut for her father’s birthday, presumably a small quiet affair involving only the three of them); he will arrive home, unsuspecting, between seven and seven-thirty, well in time for their usual dinner at eight. In the meantime, arriving between six-thirty and six-forty-five, their friends will gather in the guest room at the rear of the house, having parked their cars along Pearce Drive in a way calculated not to arouse Ian’s suspicion. Bianca will lead her father into the house by a side door (the McCulloughs’ long low modern multiroomed house has a half dozen entrances), a strategically safe distance from either the kitchen or the dining room. And Glynnis, her apricot chiffon dress more or less hidden by one of her oversized aprons, will go to greet them and behave as she normally would—assuming of course that Bianca is behaving as she normally would—and trusting to intuition and improvisation, Glynnis will lead Ian back into the guest room, where their friends await him. . . . But beyond that crucial moment she doesn’t want to think; her heart beats too quickly.
    The oven timer has begun to chime; Glynnis takes out the sourdough bread in three baking pans, sets them on the butcher-block table. But the heady delicious smell does not quite placate her. She thinks, What if it is a mistake? And our friends are embarrassed for us?
    It is true, she’d given several surprise parties for Bianca when Bianca was a small child, and those parties, however meticulously planned and overseen, had not been unqualified successes: Glynnis recalls the house filled with laughing, screaming, galloping children; disappointment at the outcome of games and the inevitably “unfair” distribution of prizes; even outbursts of childish temper and tears; her own sudden fatigue, before the last of the children was taken away. Though she has long ago forgotten the woman’s name (this was in Cambridge, while Ian still taught at Harvard), she will always remember another young mother saying to her, with a look of wonder and pity, “As the Irish say, Glynnis, ‘Better you than me.’” But the good memories far outweigh the bad: a little boy pulling at Glynnis’s sleeve to whisper, “You’re pretty, Missus”; the gaiety, the high spirits, the laughter, the sheer silly fun of the children’s games, and their excitement in playing them; the