I Remember Nothing [33]
A little over a year ago, Ruthie died. Ruthie was my best friend. She was also Maggie’s best friend and Phoebe’s best friend. We were all devastated. A month after her death, we had our traditional Christmas dinner, but it wasn’t the same without Ruthie—life wasn’t the same, Christmas dinner wasn’t the same, and Ruthie’s bread pudding (which I reproduced, from her recipe) wasn’t the same either. This year, when we opened negotiations about when our Christmas dinner would take place, I told Phoebe that I’d decided I didn’t want to make Ruthie’s bread pudding again because it made me feel even worse about her death than I already did.
Anyway, we settled on a night for the dinner. But then Ruthie’s husband, Stanley, announced that he didn’t want to be there. He said he was too sad. So Phoebe decided to invite another family instead. She asked Walter and Priscilla and their kids to join us. Walter and Priscilla are good friends of ours, but four years ago Priscilla announced that she didn’t like living in New York anymore and was moving, with the children, to England. Priscilla is English and therefore entitled to prefer England to New York; still, it was hard not to take it personally. But she and the kids were coming to Manhattan to join Walter for Christmas, and they accepted the invitation to our Christmas dinner. A few days later Phoebe called to tell me that she’d asked Priscilla to do one of the desserts. I was thunderstruck. I do the desserts. I love doing the desserts. I make excellent desserts. Priscilla hates doing desserts. The only dessert Priscilla ever makes is trifle, and when she serves it she always announces that she hates trifle and never eats it.
“But she will make her trifle,” I said.
“She won’t make her trifle,” Phoebe said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“I will tell her not to make her trifle,” Phoebe said. “Meanwhile, are you good at mashed potatoes?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Bring mashed potatoes,” Phoebe said, “because Jim and I don’t have any luck with them.”
“Fine,” I said.
Several days passed while I thought about what desserts I would bring to Christmas dinner. I read the new Martha Stewart baking book and found a recipe for cherry pie. I went on the Internet and ordered pie cherries from Wisconsin. I bought the ingredients for the plum pudding that no one eats but me. I was thinking about making a peppermint pie. And then a shocking thing happened: Phoebe e-mailed to say that since I was doing the mashed potatoes, she’d asked Priscilla to make all the desserts. I couldn’t believe it. Stripped of the desserts and downgraded to mashed potatoes? I was a legendary cook—how was this possible? It crossed my mind that Phoebe was using Ruthie’s death to get me to stop making desserts. She’d probably been trying to do this for years; it was only a matter of time before I would be reassigned to hors d’oeuvres, displacing Maggie, who would doubtless be relegated to mixed nuts.
I took a bath in order to contemplate this blow to my self-image.
I got out of the bathtub and wrote an e-mail in reply to Phoebe. It said, simply, “WHAT?” I thought it was understated and brilliant and would get her attention.
Minutes later the phone rang. It was Phoebe. She wasn’t calling