Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [67]
No answer.
“Kate, we’ve got six people coming for dinner at seven-thirty and I haven’t even showered or changed yet.”
“Why can’t the boys help?”
“They’re not here.”
“When I grow up, I’m not going to end up a housewife. Like you.”
“What?”
“I’ll bet they’re not even your friends coming, but his.”
“Are you going to do those berries for me, or not?”
“When I finish this chapter,” she said, quitting the kitchen.
As luck would have it, when Miriam swept into our bedroom, I was holding out the arm of my clean shirt helplessly. “I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you to switch laundries. Don’t say it. I know. Mr. Hejaz has seven children. But he mashed one of my buttons again. Could you sew it on for me, please?”
“Do it yourself.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I attempted to take her in my arms, but she braced herself against me, sniffing. “Shit,” she exclaimed, “my bread.” And she raced into the kitchen, me trailing after.
“It’s ruined,” she said, tears sliding down her cheeks.
“No, it isn’t. It’s just well baked,” I said, picking up a knife, prepared to start scraping.
“I’m certainly not serving it like this.”
“I’ll send Kate to the Bagel Factory.”
“You’ll find your daughter in her bedroom reading Middlemarch,” she said, her manner abrasive.
“Boy, are you ever in a mood. Would you rather she was reading Cosmopolitan?”
“You are not to send her out on an errand. She dislikes me enough already.”
“How could you even think such a thing?”
“Oh, Barney, you understand nothing about your own children. Mike’s sick with worry because his girlfriend is three weeks late, and Saul’s dealing in drugs.”
“Miriam, we can’t discuss this right now. It’s ten after seven and you haven’t even changed yet.”
Once Miriam had retreated back into our bedroom, I went to see Kate and found out what had happened. “Look here, Kate, your mother gave up a serious career in broadcasting to marry me and I honestly don’t know what I would have done had she turned me down. She has made I can’t say how many sacrifices for you and the boys. Furthermore, housewife or not, she is the most intelligent person I know. So you are to go into our bedroom at once and apologize.”
“You know what the kids feel? We’re always in the wrong, no matter what, because you’re always sticking up for each other.”
“You heard me,” I said, taking her book from her.
“It makes me sick the way she’s always catering to you.”
“I like to think we cater to each other.”
“She’s been cooking up a storm since early this morning and when your friends get here they’ll drink themselves stupid before they even sit down to the table, and then they’ll zip through dinner the quicker to get into the cognac and cigars, and all her effort will have been for nothing.”
“You are to go and apologize right now.”
She did, but Miriam wasn’t grateful for my intervention. “You have a remarkable gift for making matters worse, Barney. Did you take her book away from her?”
“No. Yes. I forget.”
But it was still in my hands.
“Return it to her right now, please.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit. There goes the doorbell.”
Anticipating a disaster, given Miriam’s state, I drank heavily before dinner, but once more she amazed me. Instead of graciously accommodating the most boring person at the table, as she usually did, simulating fascination with their banalities, Miriam was in one of her rare take-no-prisoners moods. Nate Gold’s wife was the first to be stung, but she brought it on herself. She shouldn’t have thrust her roast duck away from her, reached into the saddle bag slung over her chair, and fished out a bunch of green grapes from a cellophane bag. “The duck looks very tasty,” she sang out, turning her portion over with a fork, probing it for fat, “but I’m on a diet.” Nate, filling the silence that ensued, allowed that he had been to lunch with his esteemed friend, the secretary of state responsible for culture, in Ottawa earlier in the week. “And you know what,” said Nate, “he has never read a book by Northrop Frye.”
“But neither have I,” said Nate’s wife, adding