Our Country Friends(43)

Quiet returned to the table. This communal meal would be different from the first. Every diner except for Senderovsky had learned something new about another, and the secrets were as piquant as the habanero-laced tonnato they were now shoveling down without regard for the country plumbing. Karen stared at Senderovsky, knowing that he had tried to entomb Vinod’s novel inside a groundhog’s hole. Nat stared at Karen knowing that she would teach her Korean and then one day she would be ready to meet Jin and J-Hope and Rap Monster in Seoul. Dee and Ed glanced at each other, companions after their long walk, she aware of his desire, he trying to gauge his chances. The Actor glanced sideward at Masha, knowing the consistency, the texture, to quote her husband, of her touch. And Masha stared at her plate knowing the heat of the Actor’s sideways stare, which she feared contained both pity and derision.

    “Okay,” Ed said, “who wants lamb steaks?” They all raised their hand except for Vinod and Nat, both moralists when it came to lambs. “They’re coming in bloody unless you say otherwise.”

Soon the rosy little strips of meat attached to the bone were heaped onto plates, and the flimsy recyclable knives proved useless. The six lamb eaters brought their defenseless quarry up to their mouths with their hands and tore at the flesh like lunatics. The meat, succulent but tough, required a dedicated carnivore’s persistence, and each eater concluded their mastication with a lick of first the index finger, then the thumb. Senderovsky was particularly taken with this dish, an emblem of his bungalow colony at its finest. “Before I’m buried I want my body drizzled in olive oil and salt,” he said.

“Daddy’s not going to die for a long time,” Masha told Nat. “He was just being silly.”

“I might die before him!” Nat sang out.

“Now why would you say that?”

“Yeah, why?” Karen said.

“Because of climate change.”

Ed, pleased by his food’s reception, had just finished an extra sidecar of artisanal gin and felt his tongue loosened accordingly. “I call Nat’s generation Generation L,” he pronounced. “As in ‘last.’?”

“Ed, what the hell is wrong with you?” Karen said.

“All I’m saying is that it’s irresponsible to bring a new person into this world,” Ed said.

“Which they didn’t!” Karen said. “No one here brought anyone into this world.”

“I’m still totally fertile,” Dee said as a sidebar, “but I’m with Ed. No more children.”

Oh, the Actor thought.

“Yeah, I’m adopted,” Nat declared to Ed.

The Actor perked up, sensing his rival was about to be taken to task. A silence overtook them, filled by the mad chirping of birds sensing the first tranche of wind descending down the Berkshires. Senderovsky realized that he had not put any music on the handsome red radio.

“?‘Adopted’ means Mommy and Daddy are not my biological parents,” Nat explained. “It means I didn’t come out of Mommy’s stomach.”

    “Oh, I know, honey,” Ed said. “I didn’t mean anything. You have great parents. You’re going to live a long time.” He had never used the word “honey” before, either to a child or a grown-up, and its disbursal from his mouth made him feel even more guilty of some unspecified crime.

“Not sure about that, but thanks,” Nat said. Dee and the Actor laughed. Her mother cringed. An adult could say that sentence, but not a child. Just the other day she had said, “I don’t miss the city entirely,” and that last word saddened Masha. Was Nat even experiencing a childhood? Not entirely.

“Hey,” Nat said, “I learned the words to ‘Alouette’ in English, do you want to hear them?”

“Not right now, Nat,” Masha said.

“?‘Lark, nice lark!’?” Nat sang, her pitch perfect. “?‘Lark, I will pluck you. I will pluck your head! I will pluck your head! I will pluck your beak! I will pluck your eyes!’?”

“Okay, enough please,” Masha said. “That’s not a nice song.”

“It is a nice song!” Nat shouted. “It’s French Canadian!”

“Natasha Levin-Senderovsky! Do you want a time-out?”

“For saying it’s French Canadian?”

“Let’s all just relax,” Senderovsky said. The whole dinner was slipping away from him. And after all the money he had spent on the lamb and veal and the mayonnaise hand-whipped by a family across the river.

“You just ate a lamb,” Nat said. “Okay? It had its eyes and head plucked, too. Someone killed it. It was Generation L, too. But you didn’t care, did you?”

“You see what you did?” Karen said to Ed.

“Did what?” Ed said. “You ate the lamb, too!”

“I’m not talking about that,” Karen said. “You upset her with what you said.”

The Actor thought it was time to provide moral context and gravitas. “The bottom line,” he said, “is that Nat is really exceptional. Like that Swedish girl with the Asperger’s.”

    “Excuse me?” Masha said.

“Alouette, gentille alouette!” Nat shouted. “Alouette, je te plumerai!”