“Why not?” asked Mom. “I think it’s just disgusting the way people who have so much forget about those who are less fortunate. How could you possibly object to raising money for underprivileged children in honor of your marriage? I can’t believe I have such a selfish, thoughtless son!” And Mom slammed down the phone.
She always managed to do that, always turned your arguments against you. And so there we were, 150 people invited to lunch on the lawn, a representative from Unicef and photographers promised from all the newspapers. In one of her more grandiose moments Mom wrote her old friend Bertrand Russell in Wales and asked him to come speak; fortunately he was nearing his ninetieth birthday and declined. But he did send a hundred copies of his most recent antiwar booklet, a sort of fairy tale printed on gold paper. It was called History of the World in Epitome (for use in Martian infant schools) and it was very short. The last page was a picture of a mushroom cloud.
“These will make wonderful favors!” said Mom smugly, pointing out that they were autographed. She was so pleased she sent out a few more invitations.
“What are you going to serve?” I asked.
“Do you have any ideas?” she replied.
“Yes,” I said, “hire a caterer.”
Mom laughed as if I had made a joke. But she was moved to call and rent some tables and folding chairs, so at least the guests wouldn’t be sitting on the ground. I suggested that she hire someone to help cook and serve, but she didn’t seem to think that was necessary. “We can do that ourselves,” she said blithely. “Can’t you get your friends to help?”
“No,” I said, “I can’t.” But I did call Jeanie in the city and ask her to ask her parents if she could come out for the week; she thought my mother was “exciting” and I needed moral support.
As the party approached, things got worse and worse. Mom went on cleaning binges that left the house messier when she was done than when she started, and Jeanie and I went around behind her desperately stuffing things back into closets to create some semblance of order. Mom mowed half the lawn; we mowed the other half. Meanwhile my father, looking apologetic and unhappy, conveniently came up with a big project that kept him in the city.
One morning Mom went to a wholesale food company and came back honking her horn loudly, her car filled to the brim. Jeanie and I rushed out to unload fifty pounds of frozen chicken legs, ten pounds of frozen lump crabmeat, industrial-size cans of tomato and split-pea soup, twenty-five-pound sacks of rice, and two cases of canned, spiced peaches.
“This must be the menu,” I said to Jeanie.
“What?” she asked.
“I bet she’s going to make that awful quick soup she thinks is so great. You know, it’s in all the magazines. You mix a can of tomato soup with a can of split pea soup, add a little sherry, and top it with crabmeat.”
“Yuck,” said Jeanie.
“Then I guess she’s going to cook those millions of chicken legs on top of rice, although how she thinks she’s going to cook them all in our little oven I don’t know. And the canned spiced peaches can be the vegetable; they’re easy because all you have to do is open the can and put them on the plates.”
I was surprised (and relieved) when she ordered a giant cake from the local bakery. That left only the hors d’oeuvres; I wondered what she had up her sleeve.
The next day I found out. Jeanie and I were playing croquet, but we put down our mallets when Mom’s horn started, and watched the car speed through the trees, leaving billows of dust in its wake. We ran out to see what she had dragged home.
“Horn & Hardart was having a sale!” Mom announced triumphantly, pointing to the boxes around her. They were filled with hundreds of small cartons. It looked promising. “It’s almost like getting it catered,” I said happily to Jeanie as we toted the boxes inside.
My happiness was short-lived; when I began opening the cartons I found that each contained something different.
“The Automat sells leftovers for almost nothing at the end of the day,” said Mom, “so I just took everything they had.” She was very pleased with herself.
“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.
“Why, serve it,” she said.
“In what?” I asked.
“Big bowls,” she said.
“But you don’t have anything to put in big bowls,” I pointed out. “All you have is hundreds of things to put in little bowls. Look,” I began ripping the tops off the cartons, “this one is potato salad. This one is coleslaw. This one is cold macaroni and cheese. Here’s a beet salad. Here’s some sliced ham. Nothing matches!”
“Don’t worry,” said Mom, “I’m sure we can make something out of all of this. After all, everything in it is good.”
“Yes,” I muttered to Jeanie, “and by the time it gets served everything in it will be four days old. It will be a miracle if it’s not moldy.”
“I think it would be better if it was,” said practical Jeanie. “If people see mold they won’t eat it.”
“Pray for rain,” I said.
Unfortunately, when I woke up on the day of the party there was not a cloud in the sky. I pulled the covers over my head and went back to sleep. But not for long. “Nobody sleeps today,” Mom announced, inexorably pulling back the covers. “It’s party day!”
Some of the food had acquired a thin veneer of mold, but Mom blithely scraped it off and began mixing her terrible Horn & Hardart mush. “It’s delicious!” she cried, holding out a spoonful. It wasn’t. Fortunately it looked even worse than it tasted.
I thought the chicken legs were a little dubious too; in order to get them all cooked we had started two days earlier, and the refrigerator couldn’t hold them all. But they glistened invitingly, and the oven-baked rice looked fine. We spooned the peaches into Mom’s big glass bowls, and they looked beautiful.
I wasn’t very happy about the soup. Mom had left the crabmeat out of the freezer to defrost for two days, and even she didn’t like the way it was smelling. “I think I’ll just add a little more sherry,” she kept saying as she poured in bottles of the stuff.
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