Etiquette for a Dinner Party Read online

  He would have been up at five o’clock — milking cows, feeding calves. A day’s work completed by eleven, a midday nap, then back into it in the early afternoon. This was how he had always been. Clamped to the land like a chattel. It was her earliest memory of him, coming in tired from morning milking.

  Her mother appeared from somewhere outside, a bucket full of tiny mandarins in her arms. She was looking well — a few more lines on her face, but her quick step and big smile gave the years back to her. Ruth kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘How’s things?’

  ‘Good love — I thought I’d pick these for you to take home. The tree’s just about falling over, there’s so many this year.’

  They had cups of tea in the kitchen, around the old, lemon-coloured Formica table that had been there forever.

  ‘Where are those biscuits, Trish?’ her father said. No pleases or thank yous, as Ruth’s mother got up from the table to search the pantry. She found the ones he liked and passed them to him.

  ‘They’re soft,’ he said, pushing the packet away. ‘How long have they been open?’

  Her mother returned to the pantry. She came back with a new packet and opened them in front of him.

  ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Try those.’

  Ruth said nothing. This was how love worked for them.

  ‘So,’ her father said. ‘How’s Peter? Working hard?’ Ruth could see the smirk on his face, hear the sarcasm in his voice. ‘All those business lunches … must take it out of him …’

  ‘Stop it Geoff. You do this every time …’ Trish’s voice was quiet, anxious. ‘Just stop it.’

  ‘It’s okay Mum. Don’t worry about it.’ Ruth was past caring about the goading. She just felt sorry for her mother, when he started.

  He got up from the table. No time for pleasantries — he was a busy man.

  ‘Bye love, have a good trip. Where are you going again?’

  ‘Chicago, Dad. Good to see you …’

  But he was already at the door, slippers off, gumboots in his sights. .

  There is a tiny Belgian chocolate, wrapped in gold foil, on Ruth’s pillow and another on Peter’s — the calling cards of proud and adept Hotel Adagio housemaids. Ruth unwraps hers and lets the chocolate dissolve slowly in her mouth. Then she reaches across the bed and takes Peter’s. The richness of the taste overwhelms her; it is almost too much. Almost.

  On the first morning, Ruth made the bed to the best of her ability. Starched heavy sheets smoothed, then pulled up tight and tucked in around the long edges. Two black wool blankets, with little hotel motifs embroidered on the top right corners. Then the enormous white counterpane, manoeuvred and tugged from one side of the bed to the other, until it sat just so. Mountains of pillows, stacked evenly on his side and hers. When she got back late in the day from doing Lake Michigan:The Waterfront, she saw that it had been stripped back, remade. She was insulted; it was only after two days that she understood someone’s livelihood depended on her laziness.

  She keeps finding other gifts in surprising places — potpourri sachets on the dresser, manicure kits in the tiled bathroom, a lovely thin silver pen and stationery at the work desk. All marked clearly With Our Compliments. She puts them all in her bag, discovering to her delight that they are replaced each day with new goodies. .

  Ruth was fourteen when they’d planned the big holiday. The middle of winter, 1977. Europe. Five weeks of no school, no teachers, no wind and rain.

  Trish had returned to teaching to pay for the trip. Three years, that’s how long it had taken her to save the money. Three years of preparing and freezing a week’s meals on a Sunday night, three years of late-night lesson preparation and farm work before dawn, before the school day began.

  But it would all be worth it, Ruth heard her mother say a million times. A wonderful experience, something they would share, remember, laugh about for the rest of their lives. The departure date — July the fifth — had a big red circle around it on the Wrightson’s calendar in the kitchen. On the page with High Country: Cecil Peak Farm and a photo of hills and snow that Ruth found boring. Underneath the 5, in her mother’s neat round school-teacher writing, LEAVE FOR LONDON.

  At first, Ruth had resisted the idea of the family holiday — lobbied hard, even, to stay behind. I can’t be away from school that long, she claimed, I’ll miss too much important stuff. That, of course, was not true, and eventually Ruth had come around to the idea. There’d be shopping — loads of it. And it would be summer over there, she would come back with a tan.

  Then one night, not long before they were due to leave, she’d come into the kitchen. It was after dinner and her mother was washing dishes, stacking them on the yellow plastic rack. It was Ruth’s turn to dry.

  Her mother was staring downwards, not moving, as though she was searching the soapy suds for something lost. Her hair — longer then, only just starting to turn grey — hung forward across her face.

  Her father was sitting at the table, his arms folded across his chest. His face looked as hard as a shiny rock: muscles tense around his jaw, eyes squinting with the effort of not looking at anyone.

  ‘What’s up?’ Ruth took a tea towel from the top drawer under the bench.

  ‘We’re not going, that’s what’s up.’ Apart from the barest movement of his lips, nothing about her father shifted.

  ‘What?’

  Ruth’s mother drew her hands out of the soapy water and let them rest on the side of the sink. They had been in the water too long and were bright pink. Ruth saw little bubbles sliding slowly off the side of them and popping away to nothing.

  ‘We can’t go, love. The trip is off.’ Trish looked at Ruth. Her eyes were red and ugly. Ruth had never seen her mother cry before.

  ‘Why’s it off? Why can’t we go?’

  ‘Because the relief milker has pulled out, that’s why. There’s no one to look after the farm.’ Her mother’s voice was as flat as a plain.

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Ruth shouted. ‘That’s just stupid. Why can’t we get another milker?’ She stormed around the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors shut.

  ‘Your father says there’s no one else. No one good enough to look after things properly.’ Ruth’s mother turned back to the sink and put her hands back in the water. The bubbles were gone now, the water a dull brown with a film of grease across the top. The grease formed bracelets around her wrists.

  ‘Dad. Come on.’ Ruth turned to her father. He hadn’t moved. Not one muscle.

  ‘Dad, there must be someone. Come on. You know what this means to Mum.’

  ‘Sorry love.’ That’s all he would say. And he still wouldn’t look at her.

  It blew over quickly, really, the whole business about the trip. A few weeks on, and it was as though it had never even been discussed. Ruth figured her mother must have cancelled all the arrangements. Sometime near the end of July Ruth noticed that the bright red ring around the number 5 had a thick black diagonal line through it, like one of those No Smoking posters. No 5ing, Ruth thought. How dumb.

  Entertainment is seen to in the evenings, when Peter is free. The night before they did Dining Out, gorging on fat, bloody slabs of meat at a steakhouse made famous by an overweight American actor; Ruth has forgotten his name. Tonight they will do Comedy Clubs.

  Ruth lies on the perfect smooth bed and listens to the city outside. It never stops: horns, engines, whistles and beeps. If she closes her eyes she can see the millions of people living in layers, one on top of each other, like lasagne. It is like this all the time: active, exhausting, even in the dead of night.

  She picks up the guide book. John Belushi learned how to be funny at the Second City, north of the city centre in Old Town. She wonders at the idea of learning to be funny.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Madam,’ the man at the booking office says, when she tries to reserve the tickets over the phone. ‘Second City is completely sold out tonight.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘And for the rest of the m
onth, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh well.’

  But he is doggedly helpful.

  ‘Between you and me,’ he goes on, ‘Second City ETC is where the real comedy is happening. It’s a little more avant garde, if you like that sort of thing. It’s where the up-and-coming comedians get their first show, before they hit the big time.’

  Avant garde. Ruth likes the sound of that; the idea of being brave, doing something not in the guide book. Peter will like it too.

  ‘Are there tickets available for that one? For tonight?’ she asks.

  ‘Well yes, as a matter of fact there are. Two, is it?’ .

  The stage has three big spotlights pointing inwards, and in the centre of the bright pool is a giant inflated male doll. His face has been drawn on with black marker pen, or so Ruth thinks. He is naked, but wears a checked apron with a white frill around it over his rubber genitals. Ruth cannot work out how they have done it, but the doll is standing up straight, waiting for the audience.

  The theatre is filling, row by row. Still, nothing on stage except the blow-up doll. Ruth and Peter sip their drinks, trying to make them last. Calling the waiter would disturb the silence.

  ‘Is this part of the show, do you think?’ Peter whispers into her ear, after fifteen minutes.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe this is the avant garde bit.’ Ruth prays for something to happen soon.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Peter.

  Make me laugh, Ruth thinks. Please, make us laugh.

  A young woman bounces onto the stage. She is wearing a man’s business suit and carries a blue drawing pin the size of a rolled-up umbrella.

  ‘Cook me dinner, woman,’ she shouts at the blow-up doll. ‘And watch who you’re calling a prick.’

  At half time, Peter and Ruth leave. .

  It is the last day and therefore Architecture and Shopping. Ruth walks quickly out into the morning sunshine on West Randolph Street and the city comes at her. Long slinking cars drag their bellies from lane to lane, horns toot at things she can’t see. The noise bounces high up the sides of old concrete buildings.

  It is too early for most tourists, but office workers in their long coats and impractical boots dart in and out of coffee shops. Like hummingbirds after nectar, Ruth thinks, though she has only ever seen them on wildlife programmes. The air is still fresh, no hint yet of the stench that came up out of the gratings and the pavements yesterday afternoon when the heat started rising from the city’s bowels.

  Shopping first.

  She could take the train over to North Michigan Avenue, but Things You Need To Know had a cautionary tale about bag thieves. They would, it said, come up close to you while you were standing on the train and snip the bag handle with a knife, without you noticing. Then, when the doors opened, they’d grab the bag and run. Just like that apparently. So she walks, sore feet and all.

  On she goes, past the beggars on the street corners. She does not stop and give. Not after what happened yesterday — when she’d emptied all her spare change into the dirty white polystyrene cup of an old man and then the woman with the matted grey hair came at her from nowhere, screaming for her share.

  Finally she crosses the river and sees the first shops of the Magnificent Mile. Rand McNally, with its hectares of shoes, clothes, cosmetics and who knows what else that you just can’t get in New Zealand.

  Ruth drifts through the shops, stopping to pick up a pair of beautiful Italian shoes — Prada, the label says. She puts them on the floor and bends down to undo the grubby grey laces of her sneakers. One elegant shoe: a dainty pointed toe, fine chocolate leather so soft it could be baby’s skin, a heel thinner than a pencil. And next to it, Ruth’s sneaker. Fat and shapeless, bulging to accommodate corns and calluses, scuffed and damaged through years of plodding.

  She does not try on the Prada shoes. I’ll take them, she says to a sales assistant who looks like a Barbie Doll. Shopkeeper Barbie takes her money, hands her the shoes and says have a nice day, without looking at her once.

  On she walks, further north, ducking in and out of the shops. She spends, spends, on her parents, imagining at each transaction the joy on their faces as they unwrap yet another present from America. It will be like Christmas, but much bigger than that.

  Architecture is a boat cruise along the Chicago River. Every building is an amazing feat of construction, the tour guide tells them as they crane their necks skyward. An amazing conquest of man over materials and nature.

  Yes, she can see that, and she promises herself she will buy a book about the buildings — the Chicago Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, The Carbide and Carbon Building: a champagne bottle topped with a golden foil cork.

  ‘Did you know,’ the guide gushes into his microphone, ‘did you know, folks, that the Chicago River flows backwards? Yes, before 1889 the river flowed into Lake Michigan. But the sewage contamination threatened the drinking water of this fine city, so a series of canals was built to make the water flow backwards. Away from the lake, towards the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.’ .

  At seven o’clock Peter hurries through the door and throws his suit jacket onto the dirty laundry mountain. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ he says, changing into jeans and a jersey. ‘We’re off to a jazz club.’

  ‘But we don’t like jazz,’ says Ruth, who is exhausted. ‘Neither of us. We don’t get it.’

  ‘I know we don’t,’ Peter says. ‘But how could we visit Chicago, and not go to a jazz club?’

  At the Green Mill, the overweight doorman with the leather vest and the long beard takes their money and leads them to a booth. The seat backs are high, covered in gold velvet, and the bar full of dark shadows. Ruth holds her breath. She can barely wait for him to leave with their orders before she leans into Peter’s shoulder.

  ‘This is it,’ she says. ‘This is the one.’

  She cannot understand how this has happened to them. How they have come to be seated here.

  ‘The one what?’

  ‘The booth. Al Capone’s booth.’ Her words are rushed, excited.

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘He always sat here because he could see both the doors. The main door, and the side one, straight over there.’ Ruth points in both directions. ‘He could see who was coming and going; who was coming for him. There’s only one booth where you can see both the doors. It says so in the book.’

  She sits back in the seat and takes it all in. This special thing that is happening to them.

  There are long paintings of mountains, countryside and seashores, ornate in carved wooden frames. The light shades are wooden too; heavy Art Deco shell shapes and the four poles holding up the ceiling are decorated in black, white and mirrored tiles. In the far corner a white statue of Ceres, goddess of the harvest, clutches her bounty. Ruth knows that behind the bar there is a trapdoor — the same one used for illicit booze-running during Prohibition. She searches for the green mill and finds it in one of the paintings.

  The band is some group from Canada. Featuring, the bearded doorman shouts into the microphone, someone on piano, someone on bass and someone else on drums. Ruth claps and cheers.

  The men settle into their routine of random rhythms and surprising notes, and Ruth strives to understand the music. The pianist takes centre stage with his antics; leaping from his stool to pluck the strings inside the big black piano.

  But it is the drummer that captivates Ruth. She cannot take her eyes off him. .

  She is four years old and she watches from behind the couch. The wallpaper is white, with tiny purple flowers on it. Except just where she is crouching. There is a little train track on that bit, drawn in purple crayon. She hasn’t been caught for that yet.

  She should be in bed, in the tiny back room she shares with her sister in the farm cottage. But she has sneaked back out in her warm fuzzy pyjamas to look. She knows her mum can play the piano — she plays it all the time and Ruth and her sister dance and sing. But she never knew about the drums.

 
They are grey and white, with Premier stamped across the front of the biggest one. There are two smaller drums, and golden metal cymbals sitting together on a pole, like cupped hands. Sitting on one of the chairs from the kitchen are two wooden drumsticks.

  Uncle Ron and Aunty Kath arrive; she hears the clunk of bottles and the hellos as they come in. Uncle Ron has spotted her but he’s given her a big wink, a promise not to tell. Then he takes a blue electric guitar out of a black case and puts the strap across his shoulder.

  She crouches low, hardly daring to breathe, and she watches and listens. Her feet are cold on bare floorboards. There is no money for carpet, Mum says.

  Her father picks up the drumsticks and settles into the chair. Then he starts a slow rhythm: boom tap, boom tap tap. His eyes are closed and he is smiling. Ruth stares at him.

  Her mother wears red lipstick and her favourite blue dress with the birds on it. Her hands run quickly across the piano keys and she laughs as Uncle Ron acts like a crazy man.

  ‘Ten Guitars’ is the name of this song — Ruth has heard it on the radio, heard her mother singing along to it while she gets breakfast ready. The man that sings it usually has a name she can’t say.

  Then, when they get to the bit that goes ‘and this is what you do, oh …’ her father leaps up from behind the drums and grabs her mother from behind. He drags her by the wrists out to the middle of the room.

  ‘Solo Ron, go for it,’ her father shouts to Uncle Ron and together her mother and father laugh and hug and dance, dance, dance to the ten guitars. .

  In the taxi, on the way home from the jazz club, she thinks about the boat trip. ‘You can reverse a river, Peter. A natural flowing river. Imagine that.’

  Later, she makes the call. ‘Hi Mum — it’s me, in Chicago.’