The Dinner Party: A Novel

by Brenda Janowitz

  Malika felt uncomfortable. The Gideon she knew didn’t live like this. The house was big. Too big. She could barely see it from the street, from the driveway even, where it was concealed by thirty-foot pine trees, but now, stepping into the foyer, she had the sense that everything she knew about Gideon was wrong.

  It wasn’t the Italian marble that covered the floor of the foyer, or the enormous Hermès vase sitting atop a Louis XIV table that worried Malika. The entryway was beautiful—a perfect circle encased in a subtle tone-on-tone chinoiserie pattern. And it wasn’t Gideon’s parents that bothered Malika, either. Gideon’s mother was lovely. She smiled broadly at Malika when introduced, and didn’t seem to flinch when she saw that her son was with a black woman, the way that other mothers had in the past. Her face stayed perfectly frozen, smile in place, as she gently hugged Malika and welcomed her to the family. Gideon’s father was more warm-blooded, and just as welcoming. He threw out his arms to embrace Malika, which she wasn’t expecting, so her face became buried in his dress shirt. If she’d been wearing lipstick, it would have left a stain on his navy tie.

  None of these things bothered Malika. But something was bothering her. It was that Gideon’s family was exactly like her own. She’d been trying to escape her childhood for as long as she could remember. It had begun at boarding school, where she hoped that her dark skin would help her to blend in with the scholarship kids. (It did not.) It continued at Brown, where she tried to fit in with the dreadlocked black-power bunch. (She did not.) By the time she hit medical school, she’d given up on pretending that she wasn’t a rich, privileged brat (though a rich, privileged brat who worked hard and earned everything she had gotten). That was when she discovered Doctors Without Borders. At last, she could do something meaningful with her life, something no one else was doing. Back home, her mother planned charity balls simply for the outfits she could don. Her sister was presently starring in—of all things!—a reality television show about the rich socialites of the London party scene. Malika had found her calling, had found her people, and in Gideon, had found her future.

  Or so she hoped. As she shook hands with the various party guests, she couldn’t focus. As they made their way into the living room, all Malika could think was that she hadn’t registered even one of their names.

  * * *

  Valentina fawned all over Malika, asking her if she knew Elton John, and how she’d met Gideon, and what sort of work she was doing in Sri Lanka. Sarah considered intervening, but instead chugged another glass of wine. If Valentina asked to touch Malika’s hair, she vowed to just lie down and die right there in that very house.

  “You know what this means, right?” Sarah said to Joe.

  “What what means?”

  “Malika and Gid,” she said. And then, in a barely audible whisper: “She’s black.”

  “I noticed,” he whispered back.

  “So,” Sarah whispered. “That means, we’re winning! I mean, you may not be Jewish, but Italian’s got to be preferable to black. After all, you could always pretend to be Jewish, but there’s no way a black person could possibly be Jewish.”

  “This is all sorts of offensive,” Joe said, dropping the pretense of whispering. “You do realize that, right?”

  “I’m joking!” Sarah said.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not. And I really don’t like where this conversation is headed.”

  “Wouldn’t you like it if my parents finally approved of our relationship?”

  “I don’t really care what your parents think of us,” Joe said. “But I know that you would.”

  He got up and walked to the kitchen, muttering something about needing a drink. Sarah considered chasing him, but the wine had gone to her head. She sat back down on the couch. Becca perched next to her.

  “Well, this Malika thing certainly takes the heat off my younger-unemployed-boy thing, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said, her eyes following Joe as he walked into the kitchen.

  “Chef Michael’s pretty cute,” Becca said.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to hit on other men while you’re introducing your family to your boyfriend’s family.”

  “I don’t mean for me,” she said, looking over at the kitchen. “I mean for you. Is he Jewish?”

  “I have no idea. How would I know? Anyway, I live with Joe, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “I didn’t forget,” she said.

  “What’s the deal with Henry?” Sarah asked.

  “What can I say?” she said. “We met at this bar one afternoon and we just hit it off.”

  “You were in a bar in the middle of the afternoon?”

  “It was almost evening,” Becca said.

  “What do you have in common with him?” Sarah asked. “He doesn’t go to school, he doesn’t work. You’ve spent your life going to school and then working your butt off over summers and on breaks.”

  “That reminds me, I was accepted to this research position for the summer at Yale,” she said. “So we’ll be able to hang out all the time if I take it.”

  “If you take it?” Sarah said. “I thought you already did.”

  “Yes, right, if,” she said. “So, Henry. What can I say? I really like him. He’s unlike anyone I’ve ever met before.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s more laid back,” she said.

  “He doesn’t work,” Sarah said, laughing. “He doesn’t even go to school. If I didn’t have anything to do all day, I’d be pretty laid back, too.”

  “I hate when you get judgmental like this,” she said. “Just like Mom.”

  The biggest insult a person could give Sarah was a comparison to Sylvia. Sarah would rather be accused of murdering puppies than being like her mother.

  Becca knew this.

  Thirty-Four

  Sylvia regained her composure and made her way out to the living room, Gideon following closely on her heels.

  “Let’s get back to it, shall we?” she announced. She was smiling, pretending that this whole mess wasn’t bothering her. Not the unexpected guests, not the fact that her son had come with his black fiancée, not that control of this dinner party was slowly slipping away from her.

  Becca and Sarah went into the kitchen with their mother. Three people to get two place settings.

  “Where do you want them?” Becca asked, looking at Sylvia’s seating chart.

  “Let me help you,” Chef Michael said to Sarah. Sarah was suspicious. Had Becca told him that this was a fix-up? Had he not noticed that she was here with someone? Someone who worked with metal and tools and grease for a living, not tiny potatoes and cinnamon and apples?

  “Put them across from your sister,” Sylvia said, as if Sarah were not even there.

  Sylvia walked to the stove top and stirred the matzoh ball soup. Chef Michael may have taken over cooking duties, but it was still her kitchen.

  “You need an oven mitt,” Chef Michael cautioned Sylvia, but it was too late. She hadn’t realized the ladle had been left in the pot of soup, and was roughly the same temperature as the soup. Which is to say, scalding.

  Sylvia recoiled in pain.

  “Let me put butter on that for you,” Sarah said.

  “That’s the exact opposite of what you should do,” Becca said. “Let’s get it under cold water.” She held Sylvia’s hand as they walked together to the sink. Relief washed over Sylvia’s face as the cool water from the faucet ran over her hand.

  “Thank you, Becca,” she said. She tried to remove her hand from the sink, but Becca held firm.

  “Five to ten minutes, Mom,” she said. “You’re blistering a little.”

  “I’ll get some ice,” Sarah said. “Maybe that’ll speed things up.”

  “She can’t put her hand directly onto ice,” Becca said. “It could stick to the burn and make things worse.”

  Sarah saw she was not needed; she quietly left the kitchen.

  * * *

  The seating cards were all for n
aught. Gideon and Malika had already made themselves comfortable on opposite sides of the table, each next to a Rothschild. That Gideon and Malika would sandwich themselves between the hosts and the Rothschilds, that they would completely upend her plan that her guests of honor would be seated next to their hosts in seats of honor … well, there were no words.

  “I know that you like to split the couples up to encourage conversation, Mom,” Gideon said, smiling. He was expecting his gold star now.

  “Yes, honey,” Sylvia said, and sat down in her seat. Becca had applied bacitracin to her hand and had bandaged it for her. She skipped the ibuprofen Becca had suggested in favor of another glass of wine.

  “What happened?” Alan rushed to Sylvia’s side.

  “It’s nothing, honey,” Sylvia said. “Becca came to my rescue.”

  Alan examined the gauze, turning Sylvia’s hand over, and then looked to Becca and said: “Good.”

  “I could have done that,” Gideon said. “Let me see.”

  “It’s perfectly fine,” Sylvia said, motioning him to sit back down in his chair. “Let’s just get back to the Seder, shall we?”

  * * *

  The Seder reconvened, and Alan let each person at the table read a passage.

  “In my family,” Malika said, “we usually conduct the Seders completely in Hebrew. Would you mind if I read my part in Hebrew?”

  It was Valentina who said exactly what everyone was thinking: “You can read Hebrew?”

  Gideon and Malika laughed. Oh, how funny, you country mouse! Don’t you know that black people everywhere read Hebrew?

  “What’s so funny?” Sarah asked Gideon.

  “Malika’s Jewish,” he said.

  “Oh,” Sarah said. “Of course she is. Would you please excuse me for a moment? I’m just going to use the ladies’ room. But please, continue.”

  Sarah got up from the table, ready to use one of her old tricks from middle school. When about to cry at the cafeteria table, it is much better to do so in the bathroom. You can cry in peace, and most of the time, no one will disturb you. No one even has to know.

  She closed the door to the powder room and sat down on the floor.

  Of course Gideon brought home a fiancée. And of course, she’s Jewish. So, he’s still winning. He’s got a gorgeous fiancée who is Jewish and a doctor, no less. How is this fair? He’s supposed to be across the world somewhere. Instead, he’s here. Ruining the whole night.

  Sarah hated that her brother could do this to her. She hated that this was the way he made her feel. With only Becca around, Sarah could play the role of big sister: advice giver, knowledgeable one, sibling-in-charge. But with Gideon back, it threw everything out of whack. Sarah lost her place, and with it, her equilibrium.

  There was a gentle knock on the door. Sarah opened it wide, expecting Joe. “You okay in here, kitten?” Alan asked.

  “Those ‘deconstructed’ potato pancakes disagreed with me,” Sarah said. Food poisoning was a hard sell, but it was her only play.

  “Crazy night so far, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “Crazy.”

  “Do you want me to switch the seating so you can sit next to Malika and get to know her a bit better?”

  “No.” Sarah knew that she was acting like a teenager, doling out one-word answers with a puss on her face, but she couldn’t help it. She felt like she was in high school again, with Joe by her side and Gideon dating the prom queen. Sylvia fawning all over Gid’s date like she was something special and ignoring Joe, who had been there all along.

  “Okay,” Alan said. “You wanna stay here? Or maybe you’d be more comfortable in your old room?”

  “I can’t go to my room,” Sarah said. “Everyone will know that I’m sulking. In here, I can pretend that stupid Chef Michael gave me food poisoning.”

  “Those potato pancakes were very off, weren’t they?”

  Sarah laughed. “They were a deconstruction, Dad. Don’t you know anything about elevated holiday cooking?”

  “Okay, kitten,” Alan said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

  The door shut quietly behind him and Sarah decided her father was right—she could be sick upstairs in her old room just as easily as in the powder room.

  * * *

  Sarah lay on her old bed and thought of Joe. No surprise there, since the room still had her old bulletin board full of pictures of her and Joe from the homecoming dance. Her varsity letter for tennis was tacked up on the board, along with a card that her best friends had all signed for her seventeenth birthday. And next to that, an old The O.C. poster adorned the wall, Ryan Atwood and Seth Cohen smiling broadly back at her.

  But the bed. How many hours had she spent lying on this bed with Joe? Always with the door open—Sylvia’s house rule. But there was something about those talks they used to have. The sorts of talks you just can’t have as adults. Hours upon hours to just sit around and talk. Something they almost never did anymore with their busy lives and a house to take care of and jobs. Back then, Sarah and Joe would sit around and talk about crazy big-picture things: theories on life, what they thought of the world, what they wanted their futures to look like. Their present looked a lot like what they had mapped out back then: Sarah at a magazine, his father’s shop for Joe, but still, Sarah felt incredibly nostalgic for those times when anything was possible.

  Sarah wished her life now could be as uncomplicated as it had been then. No lies, no secrets. No sneaking around. Well, there was sneaking around back then. Lots of it. But for some reason it felt more innocent. A midnight trip to the lake. A quick drive to get ice cream. A stolen kiss at the window in the middle of the night.

  Now that Sarah was older, the lies were bigger, the sneaking around more devious. Why couldn’t she just be herself around her family? She couldn’t tell them anything, it seemed. Not what she really thought of this Passover Seder. Not how she felt about the Rothschilds being invited to a holiday when Joe’s parents had never been included for all these years. Sarah couldn’t even tell them that she no longer shared a last name with them.

  That she and Joe were married.

  Thirty-Five

  “Where is Sarah?” Sylvia asked.

  “She wasn’t feeling very well,” Alan said. Sylvia knew by her husband’s tone that there was more to the story. “Anyway, it’s your turn to read, Sylvia. Top of page nineteen.”

  “Yes, of course. Where were we?” she asked. Truth was, she couldn’t see what she was reading very well since she refused to wear her reading glasses in front of the Rothschilds. But she’d been attending Seders her entire life. Surely she could remember.

  “Let my people go,” Gideon said.

  “What’s that?” Sylvia asked, thumbing through her Haggadah. She had completely lost her place.

  “Moses told Pharaoh: Let my people go! But, as you may recall, Pharaoh said no,” Gideon said.

  “I think he’s trying to tell you that we’re up to the ten plagues now,” Malika offered.

  “I’m just going to check on Sarah,” Sylvia said, excusing herself from the table. She stopped in the kitchen to check on the dinner. Gideon followed.

  “So, I guess I kind of sprung all this on you, Mom.” He opened the oven and took out a piece of brisket.

  “You could say that,” Sylvia responded. “Really, Gideon, a surprise is one thing. A bombshell, another.”

  “So Malika is a bombshell?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. It’s just that—”

  “It’s just what?”

  “Nothing, Gideon. She seems lovely,” Sylvia said. “Just lovely.” Sylvia watched Gideon stuff the entire piece of brisket into his mouth, pushing it in with his fingers. Does living in Sri Lanka force a person to lose all of his manners and behave like a wild animal?

  “Lovely?” Gideon asked, his mouth full of brisket.

  “I was just surprised, is all. I’ve never met this girl before, never heard her name even once, and now you’re engaged to her. Wouldn’t you
find that surprising if you were me?”

  Gideon continued popping food into his mouth. “Is it because she’s black?”

  At that very moment, Chef Michael lost control of the five-pound bag of ice he was handling and spilled it all over the island, all over the porcelain tile floor, and right onto Sylvia’s shoes.

  “I’m so sorry,” Chef Michael said. “I don’t know what happened.”

  Gideon bent down to help clean up, but Chef Michael insisted he had it all under control.

  “Is it because she’s black?” he asked Chef Michael. Gideon smiled at his mother. Sylvia did not smile back.

  “What?” Chef Michael asked, flustered. He gathered ice up into his chef’s apron and put it into the sink. “What do you mean? I wasn’t even listening.”

  “How dare you?” Sylvia said. “I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, I’ll have you know.”

  “Just because you participated in the civil rights movement doesn’t mean you’re not a racist.”

  “That’s exactly what it means, in fact,” Sylvia said.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve shocked you with Malika,” Gideon said.

  “Is that why you’ve brought this woman home? To shock me?”

  “I brought her home because I’m in love with her,” Gideon said. “She’s smart and she’s beautiful and she’s the only thing helping me keep my sanity over there. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

  “Then, that’s wonderful.”

  “So, the fact that she’s black doesn’t shock you?”

  “Oh for goodness’ sake, Gideon. Give me some credit. It doesn’t shock me.”

  “Good. So glad to hear that it doesn’t matter.”

  “I didn’t say it didn’t matter. It does. It’s a hard world out there and—”