The Dinner Party
In the front seat, their mom and dad fight over whose fault it is that they are going to be late. It’s theirs, though their parents seem to have forgotten. The younger one couldn’t find his cars and the two of them had searched the upstairs while their mom called and called for them, their dad’s heavy footsteps marching in and out of the house, his voice getting angrier while their mom’s got sweeter (in the acidy way that meant that she was angry). In the backseat, they stare out the windows and watch the other cars around them, pointing out each jeep or oil tanker or tow truck in whispers to one another.
When they get to their uncle’s house, their parents slam the car doors behind them and put on their best fake smiles before their uncle answers the door. Inside it smells like sawdust and old curtains and they can hear the adults drinking and eating and talking all at once. Their uncle scoops them up and over his head one at a time and pretends to pull pennies from behind their ears. “Come say hi to everyone, and then you can go play,” their mom tells them, and they groan in protest, but stop when she gives them that look.
The kitchen is full of people who are all related to their mom, who’ve come to celebrate their great Aunt Matilda’s birthday. Their dad pushes against their shoulders to propel them through the room. They mumble their hellos and paste on their best impression of their parent’s smiles – the ones they use for each other when they are out in public and pretending that they like one another. One of them even mimics the way their dad laughs at something they know he doesn’t find funny, and the adults around them smile and hug them and pat at their heads. Aunt Matilda sits in an overstuffed leather recliner and their mom beckons them towards her, “Give her birthday hugs!” she tells them. They obey and lean in to hug her tiny body even though the way her dentures knock into one another as she speaks makes it look like she is trying to eat them.
After they’ve said their necessary helloes, the two of them duck back through the crowd and up the stairs to explore. They open cupboards and drawers and closets finding old shoes with missing laces and raincoats that are starting to wilt and even a pocketknife that must have been set down and then forgotten about. (It’s decided that the older one should carry it since he was the one who found it and can move the blade in and out without cutting himself.)
They climb underneath beds and cover the knees of their pantlegs in dust, lines of it forming down their shins and noses and chins. One of them has clumps of it in his hair that he has to keep shaking out. They find a dead cockroach with its molting body and tiny, twitching antennae. They find a marble that looks like an eye, both too afraid to touch it until the younger one accidentally bumps it with his toe and hits the baseboard of the room with the clink of something made of glass. They find pieces of dental floss that they dare one another to wrap around their fingers until they turn purple and they have to quickly scrape it off, shaking their hands around so that they can feel the tips of their fingers again.
They decide that they’re hungry and sneak back downstairs to find a snack. In the kitchen, their mom and their uncle are talking, and their mom is laughing so hard that there are tears on her cheeks. She has one hand on her brother’s arm to keep herself from falling over. She looks young and soft and the light from the windows catches in her hair. They edge in closer and their uncle bends down to repeat the story about a time when he and their mom were little like them. It sounds so much like a fairy tale that the two of them find themselves looking around, waiting for the moment when they will all be rescued.
