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By Root 1165 0

because she didn’t know anyone there. When they arrived, there were three couples sitting in the same kind of metal chairs on the flagstone patio—much like this one—drinking orange-colored drinks with cherries and colored umbrellas floating in them. Two of the men were dark, hairy, and bespeckled, just like she expected engineers to look, but the third man was blond and tanned like a country clubber. He was Teddy’s boss. The women were a bit harder to categorize. One wife was young, dark, and overmade-up. She was smoking a cigarette and scowling. Another wife was fat, fair, and pleased with herself. The third wife was old and wrinkly with white hair—she looked as old as a grandmother, though probably she was only fifty. It was impossible to figure out who went with whom.

The bossman stood up to shake their hands. His wife, it turned out, was the overmade-up smoking woman. She stubbed out her cigarette in a huge pink ceramic ashtray and asked them if they wanted mimosas, gesturing at a big glass pitcher on a white metal table.

Teddy asked for Coke, Marylou for lemonade. They were Baptists, after all.

“Oh, come on, drink a real drink!” cried Mrs. Boss. It appeared that Mrs. Boss had had a few mimosas already.

Teddy glanced at Marylou, then shrugged. “Guess it wouldn’t hurt none. Never had one of those things.”

Marylou felt annoyed by how quickly he gave in. “I don’t drink,” she said. “But thank you.”

Mrs. Boss poured Teddy’s drink in a tall fluted glass, dropped an umbrella and a cherry into it and handed it to him. Then she went into the house for a few minutes and returned with a clear, fizzy drink in a plastic tumbler for Marylou. No cherry or umbrella for her! “Tonic water,” Mrs. Boss said out of the side of her mouth.

Teddy sipped his mimosa and exclaimed about how good it was.

“Invented at the Ritz in Paris,” Mrs. Boss said. “Over there, we drank mimosas in the morning, but what the hell. I say they’re good anytime.”

“Buck’s fizz,” said Bossman. “That’s what the British call them.”

“A manmosa has beer instead of champagne,” added one of the hairy men. “Ever tried it that way?” he asked his boss, who shook his head.

“Uggh,” said Mrs. Boss, swinging her bare, tanned leg. “Sounds disgusting.”

Marylou, feeling swollen and pale and unsophisticated, sat in a springy metal chair, sipping her bitter, bubbly tonic water. She was plainly pregnant, wearing a ruffly flowered maternity dress, but nobody asked her about her baby. Nobody seemed interested. Instead they discussed some of the people they worked with, one of whom had just been arrested for indecent exposure at the Memphis Zoo, a scandal everyone but her seemed to know all about. So the next time around she accepted one of the mimosas. Mrs. Boss—Vivian?—poured more drinks for everyone, announcing that there was another pitcher waiting in the fridge.

Charcoal was smoking in the fireplace grill in the corner of the patio, but nobody was paying any attention to it, and there wasn’t any meat in evidence. There weren’t any finger foods or snacks available either. What kind of cookout was this? Marylou slurped down her drink, and had another and another, and by the end of the evening she and Vivian were lying in the yard sticking their stockinged legs up in the air, talking about how they were hanging off the side of the world! Wheee! Teddy had had to carry her home.

Nowadays pregnant women knew better. What kind of damage had she done to Helen that night? Maybe all those mimosas had contributed to Helen’s cancer as well.

The motion lights went dark. Play over. The end. Marylou was back in Tallahassee, trespassing in some stranger’s backyard. She crept around the side of the house, a two story with aluminum siding, and peeked around the corner. Wilson, damn him, was standing there, under the streetlight, where she’d left him. She stepped behind a prickly waist-high holly hedge and watched him, not minding the mosquitoes whining around her face. As long as she wasn’t standing on a fire ant nest, she could stand there forever.

He glanced left, then right. Somebody