“Nice meeting you,” Mr. Quigley said wanly, turning to head out into the street and get on his bike.
“No, wait — Mr. Quigley? Alida wants to be remembered to you. It’s a thank-you note from her. It ought to go okay with spaghetti Bolognese.”
“Thanks — thank Alida for me.” He took the bottle, but looked utterly humiliated by the transaction, and clearly couldn’t wait to escape Tad’s de haut en bas solicitude.
As he scuttled from the store with his string bag, pant-legs flapping free of his socks, Tad thought, Fuck! How the fuck could I have been so stupid?
It was just the sort of actorish gesture he despised, landing poor Quigley on the receiving end of such paltry, self-aggrandizing largesse. He should have found out his address and sent him a crate of the stuff with a covering note from Alida, who would have instinctively known how to handle it gracefully. Tad carried his two paper sacks, bottles clanking, out to the VW, cursing himself under his breath.
Hating himself, he felt a resurgence of hatred for the conniving band of mothers who’d brought Quigley down, and for the supine weakness of the school’s principal, who’d let him go. It had been politics, of course. Quigley had polluted his fifth-grade classroom with “left-wing opinions.” That was the festering complaint of the suburban moms, especially those from the East Side. But when Quigley made fun of “intelligent design,” the mothers saw their chance and sprang. They were technically outnumbered by the secular, liberal group of parents from the city, led by Lucy, but they had the big guns, including control of the PTA and a vociferous moral indignation that the liberals couldn’t match. Their precious beliefs were being contemptuously mocked by a dangerous atheist, a man grossly unfit to take charge of their too-easily-impressionable darlings, and when they confronted the principal, she put up about as much resistance as a sponge. When Lucy’s army tried to counterattack, the principal went into tearful meltdown: oh, of course she was on their side, really, but what could one do when the Jesus freaks were on the warpath? So she sacked him.
The worst thing was that the arch-freak, Elizabeth Tuttle, chair of the school board and a “homemaker” married to a venture capitalist, was the mother of Ali’s best friend. At the time it had felt to Tad, staying up till all hours talking with Lucy, advising her on strategy, like the War between the States.
They’d debated as to whether to remove Ali from the school in protest. But Ali was happy and settled there and hardly deserved to be a pawn in this grown-up feud.
Lucy had heard that Mr. Quigley’s wife had taken wing soon after his dismissal, and that he was now an every-other-weekend parent to their two kids. Perhaps the miserable-looking spaghetti Bolognese was meant for them. That Tad had so empty-headedly added to the luckless Mr. Quigley’s indignities made him take it out on the Beetle. Wrestling the car angrily into reverse, he came within an inch of slamming into a harmless elderly couple jointly maneuvering their shopping cart across the lot.
“WELL,” AUGIE WAS SAYING over dinner, “I suppose you’d be for the Equal Rights Amendment? Gay marriage? A woman’s right to choose?”
“Guilty on all counts,” Lucy said, digging into her pink and tender rack of lamb.
“Which is exactly why we have to fight the war on terror, don’t you see?”
“Animal rights?” Alida looked up from her untouched chop, though she was cleaning the plate of the vegetables around it.
“Sure, animal rights. We’re talking all rights here. Rights I happen to believe in, along with a whole bunch of rights I don’t. It’s what living in a democracy is all about. You have certain rights, you want others, you argue people around to your way of thinking, you vote — well, you’ll be able to vote quite soon. You make the laws — you and all the millions of other Americans who exercise their democratic freedoms. And that’s why we’re fighting now, against people who want to take away our freedoms, like our freedom to lobby for animal rights. Here, let me get you a fresh Pepsi.”
Alida, fork in the air, was looking grave. Still at the age when adults tended to talk to her in voices they used exclusively on children and dogs, she’d warmed to Augie’s grown-up-to-grown-up earnestness.
“I’m so sorry about the lamb, Alida,” Minna said. “I used to be a vegetarian once, so I totally understand. If there’s anything else…like eggs?”
“It’s okay. I really liked the potatoes and beans and carrots, thank you.”
Lucy said, “It may be short-sighted of me, but…Like if I could see grand ayatollahs in the governor’s mansion and the White House, if I could imagine the spread of sharia law across the state of Washington, and Pike Place Market filled with American women in burkas, I’d sign up for the National Guard tomorrow morning. Me and my AK-47. But I guess I’m misunderestimating the power of the enemy.”
Augie treated Lucy to a momentary, sardonic flash of cracked-china blue, and turned to Alida. “What do you think?”
“Well…” Alida said. “(A)…”
This (A) and (B) business was a new ploy she’d been practicing a lot lately on Lucy and Tad, and meant to stake out in advance a broad acreage of conversational space.
“(A) I think we’re too freaked out by the terrorists. I mean, like just about every country in the world has got terrorists blowing up stuff. You know, like it happens. Like airplanes crash, and tsunamis, and earthquakes — stuff like that. Like what if I was a kid in Africa or India? But in America all we act scared of is the terrorists — and it’s not true! And(B) I think the president spends all his time thinking about terrorists when he ought to be thinking about so much other stuff, like emissions. I’m really, really scared about emissions. We did this project once — but America won’t even sign the Kyoto proto-thing. It’s like we don’t care about the world at all, we just want to fight a bunch of stupid terrorists. It just doesn’t compute to me. It’s like two plus two equals five.”
Lucy had never heard Alida talk like this before. Did it come from Tad? From Bill Quigley’s class? Surely it didn’t come from her, though she found herself rooting for her daughter’s argument, holding her own against Augie Vanags, even as she felt an unsettling pang, half loss, half pride, at seeing Alida as this articulate stranger on the far side of the dinner table — someone whom Lucy ruefully thought she’d be glad to get to know.
“I take your point,” Augie said. “Or points, rather. But—”
To Lucy, Minna said, “It’s not too rare for you?”
“No, it’s perfect. I’m going to grab Alida’s, too, if that’s okay.”
Minna laughed, the first laugh Lucy had ever seen from her. “I’ll tell you my secret recipe for rack of lamb. If Julia Child ever caught me doing it, I’d probably get sent to cookery jail. But what I like to do is turn the oven to Self-clean, then I put the rack of lamb in, and when smoke comes out the oven door I know it’s done.”
“That’s the kind of recipe I can follow.”
“I like to cook,” Minna said. “I don’t know why. My mom used to hate it — she always thought everything tasted best if it came out of a can. I was in high school when they invented frozen TV dinners. Mother loved those. Sliced turkey, cornbread dressing, peas, sweet potatoes, and gravy. We’d have that four, five nights in a row.”
“What did your dad do?”
“He was an engineer. At Boeing.”