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By Root 583 0

that she had been ringed he took pride in displaying her. He said he wanted her to really get to know some of his friends, and he had been taking her around with him to cocktail parties with the more official ones and to dinners and evening get-togethers with the intimates. She had even been to lunch with some lawyers, during which she had sat the whole time silent and smiling. The friends collectively were all well dressed and on the verge of being successful, and they all had wives who were also well dressed and on the verge of being successful. They were all anxious; they were all polite to her. Marian found it difficult to connect these sleek men with the happy hunters and champion beer drinkers that lived in Peter’s memories of the past, but some of them were the same people. Ainsley referred to them as “the soap men,” because once when Peter had come to pick Marian up he brought with him a friend who worked for a soap company. Marian’s greatest apprehension about them was that she would get their names mixed up.

She wanted to be nice to them for Peter’s sake; however, she had been feeling somewhat bombarded with them, and she had decided it was time for Peter to start really getting to know some of her friends. This was why she had asked Clara and Joe to dinner. She had been guilty of neglecting them anyway; though it was curious, she thought, how married people always assumed they were being neglected when you didn’t phone them, even when they themselves had been too dug under to even think of phoning you. Peter had been recalcitrant; he had seen the inside of Clara’s living room once.

As soon as she had issued the invitations she realized that the menu would be a major problem. She couldn’t feed them milk and peanut butter and vitamin pills, or a salad with cottage cheese, she couldn’t have fish because Peter didn’t like it, but she couldn’t serve meat either – because what would they all think when they saw her not eating any of it? She couldn’t possibly explain; if she didn’t understand it herself, how could she expect them to? In the past month the few forms that had been available to her had excluded themselves from her diet: hamburger after a funny story of Peter’s about a friend of his who had got some analysed just for a joke and had discovered it contained ground-up mouse hairs; pork because Emmy during a coffee break had entertained them with an account of trichinosis and a lady she knew who got it – she mentioned the name with almost religious awe (“She ate it too pink in a restaurant, I’d never dare eat anything like that in a restaurant, just think, all those little things curled up in her muscles and they can’t ever get them out”); and mutton and lamb because Duncan had told her the etymology of the word “giddy”: it came, he said, from “gid,” which was a loss of equilibrium in sheep caused by large white worms in their brains. Even hot dogs had been ruled out; after all, her stomach reasoned, they could mash up any old thing and stick it in there. In restaurants she could always hedge by ordering a salad, but that would never do for guests, not for dinner. And she couldn’t serve them Vegetarian Baked Beans.

She had fallen back on a casserole, a mushroom-and-meatballs affair of her mother’s which would disguise things effectively. “I’ll turn off the lights and have candles,” she thought, “and get them drunk on sherry first so they won’t notice.” She could dish herself a very small helping, eat the mushrooms, and roll the meatballs under one of the lettuce leaves from the accompanying salad. It wasn’t an elegant solution but it was the best she could do.

Now, hurriedly slicing up the radishes for the salad, she was grateful for several things: that she had made the casserole the night before so all she had to do was stick it in the oven; that Clara and Joe were coming late, after they had put the children to bed; and that she could still eat salad. She was becoming more and more irritated by her body’s decision to reject certain foods. She had tried to reason with it, had accused it of having frivolous