The Dinner Party Read Free

were comfortable enough, certainly miles better than the bedbug-infested flat in East Harlem where they had spent the first five years of their marriage before they gave up the struggle to raise two kids in New York, bought a stack of out-of-town papers, and eventually answered Dorothy Cromwell’s ad. That was twenty-three years ago. “Nevertheless,” MacKenzie said, coming out of the bathroom, “it gets to me. We are servants. We have spent our lives as servants. Every time I stand in front of the mirror and shave this ugly face of mine, it gets to me. I am no goddamn cotton-picking sharecropper. I am a high school graduate and a trade school graduate. I am a first-rate mechanic and machinist—”
    â€œStop it!” Ellen snapped at him. “I been hearing that sad litany too damn long. I tell myself he’s a nigger and he got the right to sing the blues. But enough is enough.”
    â€œNow don’t you ever use that word ‘nigger’ at me. Never. Never. Never.”
    â€œI will use what I want to use. Tell you something, Mac, and this is the last time I got to squeeze it into your dumb black head. We busted the system, busted it wide open. We got us a job where we could put away better than half of what we earned, and that’s the only job that could do it for us, and we got a daughter who is a pharmacist and who is married to a pharmacist, and they got their own store, and we got a son who is interning in one of the best hospitals in this state, and that, you poor dumbbell, is revenge enough to cover at least a dozen of them nigger-hating Dixie states—”
    He fell into bed and put his arms around her. “Shut up. You are too smart. I should have never married a smartass fox like you.”
    â€œI can just imagine what you would have married if I hadn’t got there first.” She pushed him away. “Just stop that. I am not going to drag my ass around all day.”
    â€œI got a date for tonight?”
    â€œNighttime is a proper time. You’re too old to be so horny.”
    â€œOh? It’s supposed to wear off?”
    â€œCome on, Mac. We got us a large day. We got that big dinner party tonight. You got to pick up her folks at the airport, and then you got to do the silver, and I still have three meals to get out. So just pick yourself up out of this bed and get dressed.”
    MacKenzie sighed, rolled out of bed, pulled off his pajama top and then peered out of the window as the two-seater drove into the garage.
    â€œWho is that at this hour?” Ellen wondered.
    â€œThe senator. Been out running, I suppose.”

THREE
    D olly,” they called her, everyone, and that was possibly because she had never liked the name Dorothy. Dolly suited her. She weighed only a hundred and twenty-two pounds, yet she gave the impression of being plump, perhaps because of her broad hips and round face. Since college, Sarah Lawrence in her case, she had worn her hair in a pageboy bob with bangs across the front. A very small nose made her face quite pretty, and her hair, which had once been black, was now at age forty-five iron gray, contrasting pleasantly with her pretty and unwrinkled face. She was one of those women who expressed authority without irritation, and who appeared usually to be poised and content.
    On this morning, Dolly had set her alarm for six forty-five, and she had already showered when the senator drove in. Her bathroom faced the front of the house, and she saw his sleek little Mercedes swoop down the driveway and around to the back. She guessed that he had been out running, and as always his energy and determination amazed her. His determination was like his ambition, boundless—as, for example, in his approach to baldness. He had begun to lose his hair in his late forties, and he immediately started the process of having patches from various hairy parts of his body surgically transferred to his scalp. It had worked quite well,