One Saturday in my teens, when social survival depended on our ability to dance “fast,” my younger sister Liza and I thought we’d taught ourselves, and called Daddy over to show him our rendition of the jitterbug. We were exhilarated, high-stepping and swinging each other at the ends of our outstretched arms. “Look, we can do it,” I cried. He puffed on his Benson and Hedges: “Not really,” he scoffed. “It’s more complicated than that.”

By the time I met Larry, the jitterbug was almost passé. I never did learn the twist, the swim, the frug. When at parties the time came for people to shake their booties in cool, let-it-all-hang-out, freed-up, with-it ways, my muscles underwent a total clamp down.

I never did learn the twist,
the swim, the frug. When at parties the time came for people to shake their booties in cool, let-it-all-hang-out, freed-up, with-it ways, my muscles underwent a total clamp down.

Yet dancing had once been different. When we were little, at summertime family dances at Squam Lake, Liza and I would grab hands and run out into the middle of the wood-planked playhouse floor. Oblivious to the grownups gliding around us, we hopped, skipped, twirled, and jumped, ecstatically moving — without a shred of self-consciousness — to the music.

Certainly not Mrs. Drachman’s style. Steve had endured dancing school too, though in Brooklyn. He would have been one of the shortest boys there. Like Steve Ledbetter from Rincon High.

Emerson: “Insist on yourself; never imitate.” But how were Steve and I to have a wedding that wasn’t an imitation of other weddings? What sort of script would we follow? Did we need one? Did we want dancing? And how were the two of us going to organize a party, especially when Steve reminded me regularly that he would prefer not to? And why did I want to?

A friend once quipped that in leaving the marriage to Larry and moving in with Steve, I went from a frat house to a monastery. Not quite. But for over three decades, entertaining had quickened Larry’s and my lives as regularly as — and more colorfully than — the Sunday funnies. It was one thing we did well together.

After our success with the Tombstone bash, we put our energies into small dinner parties. A few friends, two or three couples, and one of Larry’s casseroles — Tamale Pie — from his first culinary bible, the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. Beer, chips with a sour cream dip to start with, and, afterward, perked coffee and chocolate cake.

I hadn’t yet read Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but like Clarissa, I spent hours, days making arrangements for parties. I brought out our Lenox place settings, the Baccarat goblets, and cleaned the sterling flatware my parents’ friends had given us…

If the ability to find gustatory pleasure in life is a virtue, Larry was a virtuous man. He lived to eat, drink, cook, and entertain. (He had even wooed me by baking oatmeal raisin cookies the first time that, as a college sophomore, I visited him in his trailer.) Before the sixties ended, he had mastered Julia Child’s Art of French Cooking volumes, and friends lapped up helpings of Boeuf bourguignon and Potée normande. Soon I too had caught his francophilic culinary fever, whipping egg whites in our copper bowl for soufflés and setting the alarm at intervals during the night to spread softened butter on refolded dough for croissants. We subscribed to Time Life’s Foods of the World, devouring each successive volume.

I hadn’t yet read Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, but like Clarissa, I spent hours, days making arrangements for parties. I brought out our Lenox place settings, the Baccarat goblets, and cleaned the sterling flatware my parents’ friends had given us for wedding presents. I bought fresh flowers, new candles. And unlike Richard Dalloway, Larry spearheaded the planning, as we talked about seating — should Sheila sit next to Harry or John? The rhythm of the courses. What music to be playing on LP’s in the background, how to build the evening, from Schubert and Vivaldi to — by midnight — Otis Redding and Janis Joplin. A day or two of cooking beforehand, dividing up the chores. The elastic stretch of dough under the heel of the hand, the thickening of cream in the bowl, the butter and flour blending to a roux in the saucepan.

In the early seventies, I took courses from Jack Lirio in San Francisco (a bargain then, at $75 for eight classes), and learned to present a crown roast of lamb with pea purée, followed by, say, a Charlotte Malakoff made with my own freshly powdered-sugar-dusted lady fingers — or coulbiac and fresh asparagus, with crème brûlée for dessert. Once after dinner in our Oakland apartment, the six friends at our table stood up and applauded.