has crept into my voice or her inability to reconcile my responses to her boxed-in ideas shuts her up.
Silence may reign in my vicinity, but Danny holds up his end of the table conversation with aplomb — he exclaims over every little thing and makes entertaining insider foodie talk about a funky downtown restaurant that serves Maritime-style lobster rolls, but only on Tuesdays, and off the menu. At one point, he even moderates a panel discussion about china patterns.
When the topic of private schools comes up — all the women either have kids in private school or expect to enroll them in the near future — I tune out and try to estimate what time I’ll make it home, if I can still fit in my afternoon nap, if a good dessert will be served, or if I will eat my usual square of Belgian chocolate with my two o’clock cup of tea, though at this rate I’ll be lucky to be home in time to put the kettle on before three. And in so musing, I miss the first part of a new conversational thread.
Danny says, “To be forever twenty-nine is such a cliché. That’s why my inner age is a far more original, believable, and attractively mature thirty-six.”
Danny is in his early forties but has kept himself up and could pass for thirty-six, or thirty-eight, anyway. But how old one looks does not appear to be what we’re talking about.
The chestnut-haired woman says, “I still feel like I’m eighteen. I’m surprised every time I look in the mirror and see someone older. I read teen magazines in the supermarket checkout line, for goodness’ sake.”
Another woman says, “I’m stuck at twenty-seven, my age when I got married. I still consider myself a newlywed, and it’s been five years.”
Suzanne asks the guest on my right how old she feels, which means my turn is coming, in about thirty seconds, when I’ll be expected to say something interesting and self-revelatory about this subject because Suzanne’s social graces require her to include everyone, even the old bag.
The problem is that I feel forty, maybe forty-one — I often inadvertently describe people in their forties as being my age, having failed to internalize that I’ve passed the milestone/millstone that is fifty. I am the oldest person in the room but in denial about it, which is such a tired, leftover attitude from a previous generation of women who acted coy about aging that I can’t admit to having it.
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
