Kay rearranged the roses in the vase yet another time. She had fussed on and off for three-quarters of an hour but satisfaction still eluded her. She never fretted over the décor on any of the previous Saturdays when the regular crowd, her friends Joan, Sarah and Lucinda, joined her around her kitchen table to feast on artichokes. Today was different. Today, Lucinda would bring a guest, a woman none of them knew. Not even Lucinda, who had only the most passing of acquaintances with the stranger.
Lucinda rushed in, breathless, bear-hugging a brown paper grocery bag misshapen with odd bumps and bulges.
‘Brought loaves of special bread. Sun dried tomato, herb medley. And lots of butter – the butter’s not for us, it’s for her. Ooh, Kay, what a pretty tablecloth.’
Kay looked at the bright yellow pinwale tablecloth on the kitchen table. That’s also laid out for her, she thought. She said, ‘Well, I wanted something which offsets the green of the artichokes and the reds of these roses.’
‘You look good, too.’
Kay had knotted her smooth brown hair into a pony tail, positioning the streaks of grey at regular intervals for a chic effect, and hid the knot behind a large bow with a crimson satin ribbon.
The door flung open and swung into the wall with a judder, and Joan and Sarah fairly flew in, braking with pants and gasps.
‘Oh!’ Joan said, with a palpable sigh as she scanned the kitchen. ‘Sorry about the door. We wanted to get here before she did. We’ve brought many kinds of cheeses – Pecorino Romano, Camembert Le Châtelain – and tons of crackers to go with them.’
‘Aren’t we supposed to watch what we eat?’ Kay remonstrated gently before adding, ‘Well, I’m just as guilty. I’ve scones baking in the oven and I’d better take them out right now, the tops should be a shiny golden brown, I don’t want them deep brown. I made clotted cream to go with them. And there’s orange marmalade and raspberry and strawberry preserves.’
‘Oh, Kay, Kay, Kay. We’re going to get fat, fat, fat.’
Kay gave a faint smile at their dismay. She said lightly, ‘Well, like you, I didn’t want our guest to starve. Hospitality, you know. We don’t have to eat everything, dears.’
They sat around the kitchen table, edgy, until the doorbell rang. Kay rose, and Lucinda followed her to the door. The woman lean and wiry standing outside wore a pale beige dress and a hat to match, and dark tinted eyeglasses with gold rims so thin Kay had to focus and re-focus her eyes to make sure the rims weren’t a mere trick of the light.
‘Gretchen Richter.’ The stranger extended her hand to Kay. ‘Lucinda invited me for – oh, hi Lucinda. Didn’t see you back there.’
After the introductions, they sat uncomfortably around the kitchen table sipping iced tea. Gretchen said, ‘Well, ladies, I can’t thank you enough for including me into your circle. I’m new to this town, and it sure helps to have friends. Especially if we have common interests. In our case,’ and she pointed at the centrepiece on the table, ‘The elegant, exquisite artichoke.’
‘Doctor’s orders,’ said Joan with a nervous laugh. ‘We follow orders.’
‘So you don’t really like artichokes, do you, then?’ Gretchen pounced.
‘Oh, we love them.’ Joan, a little too quick and a tad intense, lowered her eyes under Gretchen’s steady gaze accentuated by the slow raising of one plucked eyebrow.
‘We love them. We really do.’ Joan forced the words out. ‘A nutritionist told us the artichoke is the king of vegetables for weight loss and maintaining optimum health – no cholesterol, no fats, actually helps keep them down, lots of protein, and fibre, chunks and chunks of it, and vitamins, and a heck of a lot more antioxidants than you find in red wine or black tea.’
Gretchen compressed her lips into a smile of sorts. They could not make out if it was a real smile; her eyes were still shaded by the tinted eyeglasses.
‘Weight loss?’ Gretchen’s eyes raked over the cheeses, the breads, the salted and unsalted butter, the scones, the buttermilk biscuits, the cream and the jams and preserves, and the stewed okra, before settling on the four fleshy women sitting around the table.
Kay sprang to their defence. ‘Well, Gretchen, our Saturday gatherings have rather lean fare. We put out this spread for you.’
‘I’m honoured,’ said Gretchen. ‘But I eat lean too.’
‘Let’s all of us make an exception, then. For today. I baked hot scones and made real clotted cream to go with them, like when I was growing up. I’m English, by the way.’
‘That’s obvious. You’ve hung on to your accent. Where did you get the unpasteurized milk, if I may ask?’
Kay, taken aback, stared blankly at Gretchen, and Gretchen’s impatience trickled down from her face into her voice.
‘You need unpasteurized milk to make clotted cream. Clots don’t form with pasteurized milk. And isn’t it illegal to sell unpasteurized milk in America? We’re in a city, not on a farm or a ranch, so I can’t imagine you’ve your own cow.’
‘Well, I,’ Kay stammered her way through. ‘I used a – a different method. I whisked whipping cream into whole milk and kept it on low heat till a skin grew on the surface. The clots form beneath the skin.’
‘Well, that does not count as proper clotted cream. That’s faux clotted cream.’
‘It tastes like the real thing, though,’ Sarah felt the need to stick up for Kay, who appeared shaky and troubled. She got an amused glance from Gretchen.
‘I’m sure it’s absolutely delicious.’ Gretchen reached out for a scone and smeared the cream liberally. ‘They make similar items all over the world – öröm in Mongolia, kaymak in Turkey, malai in India – but nobody calls it clotted cream or pretends it is. We have to call things by their right names.’
They received another reminder towards the middle of the meal when Joan rubbed her hands and said, ‘Now, my dears, let’s tackle the King of Vegetables.’
‘Artichokes aren’t vegetables.’
Gretchen had the triumphant air of a driver who deliberately drove her car without any lights at night, only turning them on savagely when she located a fawn or a raccoon on the road in front.
‘Not vegetables? They sure don’t look like beefsteak to me.’ Joan allowed her sarcasm to chirrup.
‘They’re flowers harvested while they are budding – those leaves are the calyx.’ Gretchen ignored Joan. ‘If you let the artichoke be, its heart will yield, sprout into a pretty purple blossom.’
‘Well, animal, vegetable or mineral, I’m going to eat it.’ Joan scooped a steamed artichoke on her plate. ‘Here’s to health. Now, ladies, shall we start the game?’
Her friends flashed annoyed glances at Joan but the words could not be withdrawn.
‘A game? Over lunch?’ Gretchen asked, looking puzzled. The others turned every which way except in her direction, and she tried again, ‘Or do you play with your food?’
‘Well, it’s like this,’ Kay said, each word dragging its feet over her tongue before lumbering out of her mouth. ‘Marilyn Monroe was crowned the first Artichoke Queen in California, right? Well, we have this thing going, to eat our artichokes just nice and steady, no dawdling, no rushing. The one who finishes first gets points. At the end of the year, the one with most points becomes the Queen of Artichoke Hearts and the rest of us will get her a nice gift.’
Gretchen bowed her head as though making amends in mid-meal for forgetting to say grace at the beginning. She swayed and shook as she prayed, smudging her cheeks with thin, watery trickles of mirth.
‘Count me out,’ she said. ‘I’m not playing this game. But I’m dying to find out which of you will be the next Marilyn Monroe.’
When Gretchen left after lunch, her three friends turned on Lucinda.
‘Luci, you’re the one that brought this carpetbagger in. And you kept your lips zipped all the time. Couldn’t you have supported us against her?’
‘Kay only said we got the idea of the Queen of Artichoke Hearts from Marilyn Monroe. See how she twisted that. Painting us as plump, aging Marilyn wannabes.’
‘Why did you ask her over without knowing what she was like?’
‘We-ell,’ Lucinda groped. ‘She impressed me big time when I first saw her by those artichokes. If you were there, you’d have known.’
Lucinda and Gretchen had been standing side by side at a grocery store examining the artichokes when an assistant moved towards them, a gangly schoolboy with his shaggy mop of hair and acne in various stages of development protruding from his face. He grinned at the ladies as he rearranged the stray artichokes that had rolled away from their companions.
‘Goofy looking veggies, eh? No wonder artists choke on them.’
He laughed at his own wisecrack but became rapidly chastened when Gretchen dished the works out to him.
‘Young man, the name has nothing to do with art or artists, or choking artistically or choking any other way. Not even a tickle in the throat. Artichokes grow in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and the Arabs called them al-kharshoff, which the Spanish changed to alcarchoffa and the Italians into articiocco. Our British friends stepped in to mangle the name further and through their bumbling ways, bless their hearts and bless ours, we got our artichoke.’
Lucinda looked at Gretchen with new interest.
‘Now that’s very interesting. I had no idea,’ she said.
And that, Lucinda told her friends, was how the two of them had begun talking.
‘I found her refreshing, very well informed. A kind professor educating a simpleton who could not get past an F or a D grade. The Queen of Artichoke Hearts. She was it, the queen. She’d only just moved into town and didn’t know many people. On impulse, I asked her if she’d like to come to one of our artichoke lunches, and to my surprise she said yes. It wouldn’t have been nice to withdraw the invite, would it? Besides, I thought you’d all enjoy her company.’
‘Where did she move from?’ Sarah asked.
‘Santa Barbara,’ Lucinda replied.
‘Oooh, she’s a barbarian. A Santa Barbarian!’
‘A barbarian who thinks she’s Santa Claus, dishing out the gift of education to the ignoramuses of the world.’
‘Well,’ Lucinda said with a deprecating wave of her hands, ‘She’s come and gone, and it’s over, and we won’t see her again. So let’s get on with our life, shall we?’
‘All right, let’s,’ Joan said. ‘And let’s all remember what our mothers drilled into us when we were young: Don’t cosy up to strangers, no matter how nice they are.’
Don’t cosy up to strangers. Lucinda mentally juggled and spun the words as she drove home. If all of them strictly followed this rule, nobody would make new friends. None of them knew each other when they signed up for an ‘All-Age-Groups’ aquatic fitness regimen held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at eight in the morning at the YMCA. Their friendship was cemented in the waters of the swimming pool.
The eleven on the roll, seven ladies and four men, were all ripened by the passing years. The men drifted away to one corner and bobbed up and down in the water chattering about money and politics or cars and basketball rather than doing the exercises their instructor asked of them. Three of the women displayed a cursory interest and their attendance was irregular. That left four ladies – Kay, Lucinda, Joan and Sarah – and a bond soon formed between them. They had much in common: each had sixty years behind her or was poised to; they were on the plump side though the uncharitable would have derided them as obese; they fought raging battles to stay trim and fit; and lived by themselves after the divorce or death of their spouse. They quickly formed a support group to help each other exercise and diet, and the artichoke became the cornerstone of their alliance.
Their instructor was a young man, lean and muscular, every part of his body well proportioned. He had clear-cut features and his face was shaven so clean it turned glossy when damp. When he dunked himself in the water, his wet blond hair clung to his head like a burnished brass helmet and the rivulets flowed easily down his smooth skin. He always spoke with a lazy drawl. Everybody called him Duke. Duke – name or nickname? It didn’t matter to the four ladies who faithfully followed his commands, revelling in his attention. None of them was seriously considering a new spouse, so a little harmless flirting with Duke became a treat, a joy, one of life’s small gifts. He was their duke and they, his duchesses.
Working out under the duke’s command, thought Lucinda, was so much better than getting worn out and sweaty and limp in the gym. She felt good in the water although her muscles often ached during the hours following the aquatic workout. High across the pool stretched out ropes with short red, yellow or white pennants, their tips pointing downwards. By the poolside were small heaps of tubes and floats of many bright colours. Lively music boomed out on a public address system, marches with rhythmic beats and sprightly melodies, while a lifeguard sat under a large umbrella, looking jaded and totally bored.
Their class took place at the shallow end of the pool while an advanced class went on simultaneously at the deep end; those participants wore floats tethered by cords to the side of the pool. They looked like giant foetuses floating around in a common womb but Lucinda knew they went through complicated calisthenics and worked out far more strenuously than her class was ever capable of.
The grand old duke made them march up and down in the water, touch their toes with the opposite hand, fence and swivel and lunge and kick and twist, and jog from one side of the pool to the other. Lucinda smiled at the memory of the first time they jogged together. There they were, strange aquatic creatures, flapping their limbs like flippers, the twisted and tortuous blue veins standing out starkly against the pale white flesh of their legs. As they commenced their first jog as a group, the public address system coyly trumpeted out Henry Mancini’s ‘Baby Elephant Walk.’
The Monday after their lunch fiasco with the Santa Barbarian, they had recovered their spirits, and they splashed around in the cool water like dolphins released into the wide blue ocean after prolonged captivity in an amusement park. Their gaiety was short-lived. Gretchen Richter, complete in a tight swimsuit that showed her trim, muscular body, stood by the pool steps, one hand lightly resting on the railing, still in her tinted glasses, exuding the confidence of an Olympic champion. She waved at Duke and at the flabbergasted women who stood rooted in the water like waxwork models, their faces blanched, their mouths agape.
‘You here for the class?’ Duke called out.
‘Yes, I joined the Y yesterday. I’m new to town, and I’ve gotten to know these ladies —’ Gretchen smiled at them while continuing, ‘and so here I am. Do we have to dip underwater at any time?’
‘Naw,’ said Duke, ‘We stay at chest level. Come on in, join your buddies.’
Gretchen eased herself into the water without removing her glasses. Her arrival energized Duke, who plunged with gusto into a group exercise with dumbbells.
‘Luci, I think Gretchen is like a dumbbell.’ Kay sidled up to Lucinda and whispered in her ear. ‘Totally deceptive at first glance.’
Lucinda nodded, remembering how they’d been fooled by the featherweight foam dumbbells, timid kittens on land transformed into tigers in the pool. Under the water, the dumbbells fought back, became a thousand fold heavier, resisting with all their might any attempt to manipulate them. Lucinda’s muscles strained and throbbed while she swished through the motions that Duke demonstrated.
‘How true. You’re spot on.’ Lucinda shot Kay a grateful glance. She had felt ostracized by the other three after the lunch and was vastly relieved at Kay’s commiseration.
‘Now now, no whispering.’ Gretchen looked straight at them. ‘Share the joke, please.’
‘We were wondering what Marilyn Monroe would have been like had she lived to be our age,’ Kay said.
‘Why, Kay, an easy one,’ Gretchen shot back. ‘She’d have been like me.’
Duke gave a loud guffaw and smacked the water hard with his palm. To the chagrin and annoyance of his four duchesses, he singled out Gretchen for special attention. Gretchen performed all the exercises as easily as she breathed, and Duke noticed. They basked in each other’s admiration.
At the end of their class, Gretchen announced she was going to check out the pool end to end. The deep water class had ended before theirs leaving that portion of the pool vacant. As the other ladies hauled out their dripping bodies, Gretchen handed her glasses to Duke and took off, cleaving the turquoise water like a barracuda after its prey, straight as an arrow, curving with verve and panache at the deep end and zooming back. Duke smiled as they had never seen him smile before, his left hand raised high in the air, waving Gretchen’s glasses as though they were an Olympic trophy.
‘How the fiddley diddley diddley did she know we’d be here?’ Joan asked her friends as she towelled herself in the locker room, the disbelief conspicuous in her voice.
‘I’m the culprit.’ Lucinda turned a bright red, avoiding everybody’s eye. ‘I let out that our little group met at these aqua classes besides our artichoke lunches.’
When Lucinda glanced around, the first stony face she saw was Kay’s. Their recent commiseration in the pool might have as well occurred in another era.
Gretchen became a regular fixture at the aquatic classes and the others eventually mustered the courage to tackle her.
‘Gretchen, you’re far better than any of us,’ Sarah began, and Joan continued, ‘We’re wondering why you aren’t in the deep water classes. You’re more than good enough for them – you can teach them a thing or two.’
‘I sure can.’ Gretchen was matter-of-fact. ‘But the thing is, I haven’t done this in a long time. So I need a high school refresher before I move on to college.’
They tried to keep a brave face as they realized that the water torture was going to continue.
On Saturday, they gathered with trepidation in Kay’s kitchen. Nobody brought any fancy foods this time, just steamed artichokes, plain wheat bread with a choice of two cheeses: American and Swiss. For beverages, it was diet soda or water.
‘The Santa Barbarian won’t show up, will she?’ Sarah voiced everybody’s unspoken thought. Lucinda replied, quickly and forcefully,
‘Well, pigheaded as I was, I only invited her for one lunch.’ Lucinda was emphatic. ‘None of us renewed the invitation, and so —’
The doorbell rang.
‘We’re doomed,’ said Joan, as Gretchen came in, breathless, carrying a large bag. She ignored the near silence that greeted her arrival.
‘Sorry, I’m late, my friends. But I hope this will make up for my tardiness.’
She dove into her bag and came out with a crystal bowl containing a yellow paste.
‘A lovely curry dip, tailored for artichokes. There’s nothing like the flavors of the Orient. Try it, my friends.’
She stripped off an artichoke petal and scooped up a generous portion of the dip. Despite themselves, the others reluctantly followed. Once they got their first taste, they dove into the bowl again, their reluctance diminishing with the level of the curry dip.
‘I made it myself.’ Gretchen beamed. ‘Rice milk, coconut milk, cardamom, chili powder, coriander seeds, cumin, turmeric – well, I won’t bore you with the rest, but I blended everything in my food processor. Great, isn’t it?’
Worse was to follow. When they had finished with the artichoke, the bread and the cheese, Gretchen dipped into her bag again and pulled out a cake, luscious, deep brown with a gooey russet topping. They groaned.
‘And I thought that a shoofly or a peach cobbler was bad,’ said Joan.
‘Gretchen, we’re on a di-et,’ Lucinda moaned. ‘The whole purpose of our meeting is to reinforce our determination to eat healthy.’
‘I know,’ Gretchen said. ‘But heck, this is a one-time thing. I don’t know how to show my appreciation to you for welcoming me into your fold. Please splurge today – it’s on me – and we can all resume our diets tomorrow. And work out in the pool for longer. We’ll work off the calories and keep Duke happy.’
The others expressed their doubts but their looks of intense longing betrayed their desire.
‘Well…’ Sarah trailed off. ‘I guess we’re not all that overweight.’
‘Aren’t you a bit confident there?’ Lucinda half-challenged.
‘Well, here’s a simple test from the experts: tilt your head down when you’re standing in the shower. No bending – that’s cheating – just a gentle downward tilt. Can you see your feet? If you can’t, you’re overweight. Well, I can’t see all of my feet but I can see my toes. The tips, anyway. Not too bad.’
‘Phooey,’ said Gretchen. ‘It’s the men who get the bulging tummies so what you’ve said applies to them, not us. Our flesh grows — well, you know where it grows. Anyway, that so-called test is unscientific. To really know where you stand, measure your BMI. Duke’ll back me up on that.’ She scanned their faces quickly, and then said, ‘But enough of that. My friends, guess the name of this cake. Come on, guess.’
They looked at her with the faces of children being punished. Then Sarah ventured, ‘Looks like Black Forest.’
‘Close. But this is not your usual chocolate cake. The name says it all.’ Gretchen lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘This is “Better than Sex” cake.’
Gretchen’s wicked smile accentuated the shock on their faces, a shock that they struggled to hide. She sliced generous chunks as she continued in a velvet tone, ‘The icing is out of this world. There’s layers of fudge and caramel and butterscotch. There’s condensed milk as well. And some of this stuff has seeped right into the cake. I let each flavour soak in before I went to the next. My friends, the most satisfying sex is one where one layer is applied over another, and every delectable little bit is savoured, enjoyed. We women know this intuitively. But men don’t. Men! They think all there’s to it is slam, bam, thank you ma’am. If men were a little more proficient, this wouldn’t be ‘Better than Sex’ cake. It just couldn’t be. But they aren’t. And so it is. Oh, the topping also has crushed toffee bars. We can add a coat of whipped cream. Yum. Do you have some whipped cream?’
Lucinda quit the aquatic classes. When Joan telephoned her to find out why, Lucinda dodged the questions at first, then admitted she felt she had to drop out because she could face the rest of them no more, having inflicted Gretchen on them.
‘Nonsense, Luci.’ Joan was brisk. ‘We have to stick together. We formed our little group to tackle health challenges. Gretchen is another of life’s challenges. We’ll sort her out eventually.’
Joan heard nothing but a choking sound and she said, in a sharp voice, ‘Luci, you got to come back. We need you on Saturday. At lunch. We’ve been at it for almost a year, and we’re close to the coronation of the Artichoke Queen. Sarah and Kay are in the lead, but you and I have good chances to overtake them.’
‘Kay Sarah Sarah,’ Lucinda muttered under her breath, barely audible. ‘Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not mine to see.’
‘What?’ Joan demanded, ‘What did you say?’
Lucinda did not repeat herself. She did not show up for the Saturday lunch. To everybody’s surprise, Gretchen did not turn up either. They had primed themselves to launch a spirited offensive, to let Gretchen know she wasn’t welcome, though they hadn’t figured out exactly how to tell her. Each, in her own way, had worked up to a passionate frenzy and when their target did not appear, they fell flat on their faces, jumping from one thread of conversation to another but never carrying any through. The three of them parted ways far more dissatisfied at the end of the lunch than they were at its beginning.
Lucinda did not show up at the pool the following week, and they discovered she had joined a walking club. Her newfound friends had no idea of the salubrious properties of artichokes; she had indoctrinated them, and hosted weekly luncheons in her house.
‘The best solution would be for the three of you to come over to my place for the lunches,’ Lucinda said when Kay telephoned her. ‘Without breathing a word to the Santa Barbarian. But unfortunately there’s no way I can accommodate all of you around the table. I’ve five of my walking buddies over for lunch, and there’s me, that’s six. We barely fit.’
‘Well, can’t you fix your walking group luncheons on other than Saturday? Then you could still join us. Get the best of both groups. We miss you terribly, dear, and Gretchen wasn’t there last Saturday. Looks like we’ve seen the last of her. Thank God.’
‘I’ll think about it, Kay.’
‘Don’t think too much, Luci, just come. We’ve got to stay four to carry the artichoke queen game to its end. That game’s the glue holding us together. We need the four of us.’
‘I’ll think about it, Kay.’
Lucinda did not turn up for their next luncheon. But Gretchen did, and she brought three bottles of chilled white wine.
‘Pineau de la Loire, from France,’ she declared. ‘It’s practically the only wine there is that truly complements artichokes.’
‘We don’t want wine. Wine solidifies into calories. Calories mean fat,’ said Joan.
‘Stick to Pura Aqua the next time. Today, enjoy the best that la belle France has to offer.’ Gretchen spoke in a no-nonsense voice. They drank long and they drank deep. They swigged the wine faster than they ate the artichokes.
‘You know, it’s as I thought on my first visit – I don’t think any of you likes artichokes, no matter how hard you pretend.’
‘Of course we like them, Gretchen. We talk about them all the time. Our meals are built round them.’
‘I hear you, Sarah. My point is – you’re enchanted by the concept of the artichoke rather than the artichoke itself. The artichoke blooming on your plate like a green lotus, the ritual of plucking the petals and dipping them in the flavour pots, the health aspect. But you don’t really like the taste, do you, honestly? It shows. You depend on this Artichoke Queen game to keep going. Frills and treats. Just like little children need to be cajoled to eat their broccoli.’
‘Well, I never!’ Joan’s face turned scarlet as did the faces of her two friends. ‘For almost a year we had plain lunches, until you came along. You brought the curry dip, the decadent cake, the wine. And you say we need to be cajoled? Get a grip on yourself, Gretchen.’
‘Plain lunches? Are sun-dried tomato bread and European cheeses and scones and clotted cream ‘plain’ in your book?’
‘Gretchen, we laid that table for you,’ Kay said. ‘We didn’t want you to go hungry. Lucinda spoke highly of you, she had specially invited you, and we wanted you to have a good time. We expected this to be a one-time thing. We never thought the cake and such like would follow.’
‘And now Duke doesn’t care about us anymore,’ Sarah cut in fast.
‘Oh.’ Gretchen’s head whipped back as though she had been slapped, and her face crumpled. ‘Oh. I thought Lucinda had asked me to join the group, seeing that I was new to these parts and had no friends. I did think your lunch was a little over the top, but I didn’t want to say anything. I was glad of the company and wanted to conform to whatever you did.’
A long silence followed. The wine had prodded the cells in each of their brains to jitterbug to wild, throbbing internal music, and the swaying cells found it tough to suddenly stop and process this new take on old events.
‘As for Duke – have you ever taught a class? No? Well, I was a school teacher at one point in my chequered life.’ Gretchen spoke softly, and they had to strain to hear her. ‘I can tell you, however much you like the students, it’s monotonous, and when a new student joins the class, the teacher’s attention is pulled there. At least for a little while, maybe for a long while, until the novelty wears off and new student becomes part of the same old same old.’
The others eyed each other. Nobody wanted to be the one to break the silence. Gretchen took off her eyeglasses and for the first time, they saw her small, weak eyes. Her left eye looked bleached, its iris a pale hazel to the solid brown of its companion eye. Now both eyes turned watery, and Gretchen dabbed at them with a crumpled handkerchief.
‘Well, let bygones be bygones, as they say.’ Kay finally found her voice. ‘Luci has left us, she’s joined another group. Gretchen, you could take her place. Couldn’t she, Sarah? Joan?’
They nodded, though their faces were drawn, their eyes reluctant.
‘As for our little contest,’ Joan said, slowly. ‘We’ll give you Luci’s points.’
‘That wouldn’t be fair,’ Gretchen said. ‘Even if Lucinda wasn’t in the first place, still, points have to be earned by each contestant in her own right.’
‘All right, let’s cancel everybody’s points and start afresh,’ Sarah said.
‘That’s not fair, either,’ said Gretchen. ‘You’ve worked so hard.’
‘Let’s scrap the game altogether and think of something new,’ Joan said. ‘The title was already conferred to Gretchen, anyways.’
‘To me?’ Gretchen had her glasses on, and was quickly regaining her poise.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Joan said. ‘Luci told us about how she first met you at the grocery store, and you educating the store boy. Like a professor, she thought. She said your wisdom made her regard you as the Queen of Artichoke Hearts.’
‘You know, well, you don’t know, but I grew up in a small town, a hick town,’ Gretchen sniffled again. ‘Really small. We could name every kid at school. Not just in our class, in the whole school. Our only entertainment was hanging out at the bars or restaurants on Main Street on Friday night, or watching a football game with a wild tailgate party where you could find just about everybody. When Wal-Mart set up store in town, we all wore this aura of sophistication. We had risen in the world. We’d become somebody. Boy, did I get a shock when I went to college in Los Angeles. I was ashamed of how little I knew. I determined never to be so ignorant again. Never. Ever since, I’ve kept reading on all the topics that interest me. And I try to make others understand they’d be better off expanding their horizons too.’
‘Good, Gretchen.’ Kay spoke without hesitation. ‘We’ll think of something else to replace our game. Everybody come with their ideas the next time.’
They smiled, and hugged, and shook hands and giggled as they parted.
Kay jumped out of bed when the day of the next luncheon, the first page of a new chapter, came around. Life was full of departures and arrivals, sudden endings and fresh beginnings; where would this one lead to?
In her kitchen cabinet stood three items she had purchased from a store that imported food: shortbread from Scotland, and real Devonshire clotted cream, and golden brown treacle. She did not intend serving them for lunch. That would not augur well for their new beginning. She planned to enjoy them at her leisure. She had not been to England in so long she wanted a reminder of what real clotted cream tasted like, and compare how her faux cream measured up. The fare was simple: steamed artichokes with a dip made of low-fat mayonnaise mixed with Dijon mustard and lemon juice and the slightest hint of garlic, crackers and slivers of Swiss cheese, and mineral water with lemon wedges. She used the same yellow pinwale tablecloth but the vase now contained lavender and white daisy chrysanthemums instead of roses.
Her excitement mounted as the minutes ticked by. At half past one she became feverish. She called Gretchen, but the phone kept ringing. Good, thought Kay, she must be on her way. She tried Joan, got the answering machine and left a message: Joan, it’s Kay – I hope you’re on your way, it’s one-thirty but nobody has shown so far. I’m all excited for our new start. Can’t wait, see you soon.
It was only when she called Sarah that she suspected something could be awry. There was no response to her repeated hellos. Then she heard a soft but distinct click, followed by the deep burr of the dial tone.
Kay held the telephone receiver in her had for a long time before letting it fall back on its cradle. She slumped at her kitchen table, her elbows on the table, her head between her hands, rocking gently every now and then.
When the clock chimed two, she broke open the protective seal on the bottle of Devonshire clotted cream. She pulled one of the artichokes toward her, an artichoke that had once been a vibrant green, its petals as tough as cactus leaves, but now tenderized by steaming, rendered limp and soggy and a dull green; petals ripe for plucking without effort though they retained a few thorns.
Kay parted the petals and jammed the cream between them, making the sorry-looking artichoke look like it had been rolled in snow. She let out a peal of laughter at the sight, then let out another. She did not care that there was nobody in her kitchen to hear her.
‘Brought loaves of special bread. Sun dried tomato, herb medley. And lots of butter – the butter’s not for us, it’s for her. Ooh, Kay, what a pretty tablecloth.’
Kay looked at the bright yellow pinwale tablecloth on the kitchen table. That’s also laid out for her, she thought. She said, ‘Well, I wanted something which offsets the green of the artichokes and the reds of these roses.’
‘You look good, too.’
Kay had knotted her smooth brown hair into a pony tail, positioning the streaks of grey at regular intervals for a chic effect, and hid the knot behind a large bow with a crimson satin ribbon.
The door flung open and swung into the wall with a judder, and Joan and Sarah fairly flew in, braking with pants and gasps.
‘Oh!’ Joan said, with a palpable sigh as she scanned the kitchen. ‘Sorry about the door. We wanted to get here before she did. We’ve brought many kinds of cheeses – Pecorino Romano, Camembert Le Châtelain – and tons of crackers to go with them.’
‘Aren’t we supposed to watch what we eat?’ Kay remonstrated gently before adding, ‘Well, I’m just as guilty. I’ve scones baking in the oven and I’d better take them out right now, the tops should be a shiny golden brown, I don’t want them deep brown. I made clotted cream to go with them. And there’s orange marmalade and raspberry and strawberry preserves.’
‘Oh, Kay, Kay, Kay. We’re going to get fat, fat, fat.’
Kay gave a faint smile at their dismay. She said lightly, ‘Well, like you, I didn’t want our guest to starve. Hospitality, you know. We don’t have to eat everything, dears.’
They sat around the kitchen table, edgy, until the doorbell rang. Kay rose, and Lucinda followed her to the door. The woman lean and wiry standing outside wore a pale beige dress and a hat to match, and dark tinted eyeglasses with gold rims so thin Kay had to focus and re-focus her eyes to make sure the rims weren’t a mere trick of the light.
‘Gretchen Richter.’ The stranger extended her hand to Kay. ‘Lucinda invited me for – oh, hi Lucinda. Didn’t see you back there.’
After the introductions, they sat uncomfortably around the kitchen table sipping iced tea. Gretchen said, ‘Well, ladies, I can’t thank you enough for including me into your circle. I’m new to this town, and it sure helps to have friends. Especially if we have common interests. In our case,’ and she pointed at the centrepiece on the table, ‘The elegant, exquisite artichoke.’
‘Doctor’s orders,’ said Joan with a nervous laugh. ‘We follow orders.’
‘So you don’t really like artichokes, do you, then?’ Gretchen pounced.
‘Oh, we love them.’ Joan, a little too quick and a tad intense, lowered her eyes under Gretchen’s steady gaze accentuated by the slow raising of one plucked eyebrow.
‘We love them. We really do.’ Joan forced the words out. ‘A nutritionist told us the artichoke is the king of vegetables for weight loss and maintaining optimum health – no cholesterol, no fats, actually helps keep them down, lots of protein, and fibre, chunks and chunks of it, and vitamins, and a heck of a lot more antioxidants than you find in red wine or black tea.’
Gretchen compressed her lips into a smile of sorts. They could not make out if it was a real smile; her eyes were still shaded by the tinted eyeglasses.
‘Weight loss?’ Gretchen’s eyes raked over the cheeses, the breads, the salted and unsalted butter, the scones, the buttermilk biscuits, the cream and the jams and preserves, and the stewed okra, before settling on the four fleshy women sitting around the table.
Kay sprang to their defence. ‘Well, Gretchen, our Saturday gatherings have rather lean fare. We put out this spread for you.’
‘I’m honoured,’ said Gretchen. ‘But I eat lean too.’
‘Let’s all of us make an exception, then. For today. I baked hot scones and made real clotted cream to go with them, like when I was growing up. I’m English, by the way.’
‘That’s obvious. You’ve hung on to your accent. Where did you get the unpasteurized milk, if I may ask?’
Kay, taken aback, stared blankly at Gretchen, and Gretchen’s impatience trickled down from her face into her voice.
‘You need unpasteurized milk to make clotted cream. Clots don’t form with pasteurized milk. And isn’t it illegal to sell unpasteurized milk in America? We’re in a city, not on a farm or a ranch, so I can’t imagine you’ve your own cow.’
‘Well, I,’ Kay stammered her way through. ‘I used a – a different method. I whisked whipping cream into whole milk and kept it on low heat till a skin grew on the surface. The clots form beneath the skin.’
‘Well, that does not count as proper clotted cream. That’s faux clotted cream.’
‘It tastes like the real thing, though,’ Sarah felt the need to stick up for Kay, who appeared shaky and troubled. She got an amused glance from Gretchen.
‘I’m sure it’s absolutely delicious.’ Gretchen reached out for a scone and smeared the cream liberally. ‘They make similar items all over the world – öröm in Mongolia, kaymak in Turkey, malai in India – but nobody calls it clotted cream or pretends it is. We have to call things by their right names.’
They received another reminder towards the middle of the meal when Joan rubbed her hands and said, ‘Now, my dears, let’s tackle the King of Vegetables.’
‘Artichokes aren’t vegetables.’
Gretchen had the triumphant air of a driver who deliberately drove her car without any lights at night, only turning them on savagely when she located a fawn or a raccoon on the road in front.
‘Not vegetables? They sure don’t look like beefsteak to me.’ Joan allowed her sarcasm to chirrup.
‘They’re flowers harvested while they are budding – those leaves are the calyx.’ Gretchen ignored Joan. ‘If you let the artichoke be, its heart will yield, sprout into a pretty purple blossom.’
‘Well, animal, vegetable or mineral, I’m going to eat it.’ Joan scooped a steamed artichoke on her plate. ‘Here’s to health. Now, ladies, shall we start the game?’
Her friends flashed annoyed glances at Joan but the words could not be withdrawn.
‘A game? Over lunch?’ Gretchen asked, looking puzzled. The others turned every which way except in her direction, and she tried again, ‘Or do you play with your food?’
‘Well, it’s like this,’ Kay said, each word dragging its feet over her tongue before lumbering out of her mouth. ‘Marilyn Monroe was crowned the first Artichoke Queen in California, right? Well, we have this thing going, to eat our artichokes just nice and steady, no dawdling, no rushing. The one who finishes first gets points. At the end of the year, the one with most points becomes the Queen of Artichoke Hearts and the rest of us will get her a nice gift.’
Gretchen bowed her head as though making amends in mid-meal for forgetting to say grace at the beginning. She swayed and shook as she prayed, smudging her cheeks with thin, watery trickles of mirth.
‘Count me out,’ she said. ‘I’m not playing this game. But I’m dying to find out which of you will be the next Marilyn Monroe.’
When Gretchen left after lunch, her three friends turned on Lucinda.
‘Luci, you’re the one that brought this carpetbagger in. And you kept your lips zipped all the time. Couldn’t you have supported us against her?’
‘Kay only said we got the idea of the Queen of Artichoke Hearts from Marilyn Monroe. See how she twisted that. Painting us as plump, aging Marilyn wannabes.’
‘Why did you ask her over without knowing what she was like?’
‘We-ell,’ Lucinda groped. ‘She impressed me big time when I first saw her by those artichokes. If you were there, you’d have known.’
Lucinda and Gretchen had been standing side by side at a grocery store examining the artichokes when an assistant moved towards them, a gangly schoolboy with his shaggy mop of hair and acne in various stages of development protruding from his face. He grinned at the ladies as he rearranged the stray artichokes that had rolled away from their companions.
‘Goofy looking veggies, eh? No wonder artists choke on them.’
He laughed at his own wisecrack but became rapidly chastened when Gretchen dished the works out to him.
‘Young man, the name has nothing to do with art or artists, or choking artistically or choking any other way. Not even a tickle in the throat. Artichokes grow in the Mediterranean and the Middle East and the Arabs called them al-kharshoff, which the Spanish changed to alcarchoffa and the Italians into articiocco. Our British friends stepped in to mangle the name further and through their bumbling ways, bless their hearts and bless ours, we got our artichoke.’
Lucinda looked at Gretchen with new interest.
‘Now that’s very interesting. I had no idea,’ she said.
And that, Lucinda told her friends, was how the two of them had begun talking.
‘I found her refreshing, very well informed. A kind professor educating a simpleton who could not get past an F or a D grade. The Queen of Artichoke Hearts. She was it, the queen. She’d only just moved into town and didn’t know many people. On impulse, I asked her if she’d like to come to one of our artichoke lunches, and to my surprise she said yes. It wouldn’t have been nice to withdraw the invite, would it? Besides, I thought you’d all enjoy her company.’
‘Where did she move from?’ Sarah asked.
‘Santa Barbara,’ Lucinda replied.
‘Oooh, she’s a barbarian. A Santa Barbarian!’
‘A barbarian who thinks she’s Santa Claus, dishing out the gift of education to the ignoramuses of the world.’
‘Well,’ Lucinda said with a deprecating wave of her hands, ‘She’s come and gone, and it’s over, and we won’t see her again. So let’s get on with our life, shall we?’
‘All right, let’s,’ Joan said. ‘And let’s all remember what our mothers drilled into us when we were young: Don’t cosy up to strangers, no matter how nice they are.’
Don’t cosy up to strangers. Lucinda mentally juggled and spun the words as she drove home. If all of them strictly followed this rule, nobody would make new friends. None of them knew each other when they signed up for an ‘All-Age-Groups’ aquatic fitness regimen held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at eight in the morning at the YMCA. Their friendship was cemented in the waters of the swimming pool.
The eleven on the roll, seven ladies and four men, were all ripened by the passing years. The men drifted away to one corner and bobbed up and down in the water chattering about money and politics or cars and basketball rather than doing the exercises their instructor asked of them. Three of the women displayed a cursory interest and their attendance was irregular. That left four ladies – Kay, Lucinda, Joan and Sarah – and a bond soon formed between them. They had much in common: each had sixty years behind her or was poised to; they were on the plump side though the uncharitable would have derided them as obese; they fought raging battles to stay trim and fit; and lived by themselves after the divorce or death of their spouse. They quickly formed a support group to help each other exercise and diet, and the artichoke became the cornerstone of their alliance.
Their instructor was a young man, lean and muscular, every part of his body well proportioned. He had clear-cut features and his face was shaven so clean it turned glossy when damp. When he dunked himself in the water, his wet blond hair clung to his head like a burnished brass helmet and the rivulets flowed easily down his smooth skin. He always spoke with a lazy drawl. Everybody called him Duke. Duke – name or nickname? It didn’t matter to the four ladies who faithfully followed his commands, revelling in his attention. None of them was seriously considering a new spouse, so a little harmless flirting with Duke became a treat, a joy, one of life’s small gifts. He was their duke and they, his duchesses.
Working out under the duke’s command, thought Lucinda, was so much better than getting worn out and sweaty and limp in the gym. She felt good in the water although her muscles often ached during the hours following the aquatic workout. High across the pool stretched out ropes with short red, yellow or white pennants, their tips pointing downwards. By the poolside were small heaps of tubes and floats of many bright colours. Lively music boomed out on a public address system, marches with rhythmic beats and sprightly melodies, while a lifeguard sat under a large umbrella, looking jaded and totally bored.
Their class took place at the shallow end of the pool while an advanced class went on simultaneously at the deep end; those participants wore floats tethered by cords to the side of the pool. They looked like giant foetuses floating around in a common womb but Lucinda knew they went through complicated calisthenics and worked out far more strenuously than her class was ever capable of.
The grand old duke made them march up and down in the water, touch their toes with the opposite hand, fence and swivel and lunge and kick and twist, and jog from one side of the pool to the other. Lucinda smiled at the memory of the first time they jogged together. There they were, strange aquatic creatures, flapping their limbs like flippers, the twisted and tortuous blue veins standing out starkly against the pale white flesh of their legs. As they commenced their first jog as a group, the public address system coyly trumpeted out Henry Mancini’s ‘Baby Elephant Walk.’
The Monday after their lunch fiasco with the Santa Barbarian, they had recovered their spirits, and they splashed around in the cool water like dolphins released into the wide blue ocean after prolonged captivity in an amusement park. Their gaiety was short-lived. Gretchen Richter, complete in a tight swimsuit that showed her trim, muscular body, stood by the pool steps, one hand lightly resting on the railing, still in her tinted glasses, exuding the confidence of an Olympic champion. She waved at Duke and at the flabbergasted women who stood rooted in the water like waxwork models, their faces blanched, their mouths agape.
‘You here for the class?’ Duke called out.
‘Yes, I joined the Y yesterday. I’m new to town, and I’ve gotten to know these ladies —’ Gretchen smiled at them while continuing, ‘and so here I am. Do we have to dip underwater at any time?’
‘Naw,’ said Duke, ‘We stay at chest level. Come on in, join your buddies.’
Gretchen eased herself into the water without removing her glasses. Her arrival energized Duke, who plunged with gusto into a group exercise with dumbbells.
‘Luci, I think Gretchen is like a dumbbell.’ Kay sidled up to Lucinda and whispered in her ear. ‘Totally deceptive at first glance.’
Lucinda nodded, remembering how they’d been fooled by the featherweight foam dumbbells, timid kittens on land transformed into tigers in the pool. Under the water, the dumbbells fought back, became a thousand fold heavier, resisting with all their might any attempt to manipulate them. Lucinda’s muscles strained and throbbed while she swished through the motions that Duke demonstrated.
‘How true. You’re spot on.’ Lucinda shot Kay a grateful glance. She had felt ostracized by the other three after the lunch and was vastly relieved at Kay’s commiseration.
‘Now now, no whispering.’ Gretchen looked straight at them. ‘Share the joke, please.’
‘We were wondering what Marilyn Monroe would have been like had she lived to be our age,’ Kay said.
‘Why, Kay, an easy one,’ Gretchen shot back. ‘She’d have been like me.’
Duke gave a loud guffaw and smacked the water hard with his palm. To the chagrin and annoyance of his four duchesses, he singled out Gretchen for special attention. Gretchen performed all the exercises as easily as she breathed, and Duke noticed. They basked in each other’s admiration.
At the end of their class, Gretchen announced she was going to check out the pool end to end. The deep water class had ended before theirs leaving that portion of the pool vacant. As the other ladies hauled out their dripping bodies, Gretchen handed her glasses to Duke and took off, cleaving the turquoise water like a barracuda after its prey, straight as an arrow, curving with verve and panache at the deep end and zooming back. Duke smiled as they had never seen him smile before, his left hand raised high in the air, waving Gretchen’s glasses as though they were an Olympic trophy.
‘How the fiddley diddley diddley did she know we’d be here?’ Joan asked her friends as she towelled herself in the locker room, the disbelief conspicuous in her voice.
‘I’m the culprit.’ Lucinda turned a bright red, avoiding everybody’s eye. ‘I let out that our little group met at these aqua classes besides our artichoke lunches.’
When Lucinda glanced around, the first stony face she saw was Kay’s. Their recent commiseration in the pool might have as well occurred in another era.
Gretchen became a regular fixture at the aquatic classes and the others eventually mustered the courage to tackle her.
‘Gretchen, you’re far better than any of us,’ Sarah began, and Joan continued, ‘We’re wondering why you aren’t in the deep water classes. You’re more than good enough for them – you can teach them a thing or two.’
‘I sure can.’ Gretchen was matter-of-fact. ‘But the thing is, I haven’t done this in a long time. So I need a high school refresher before I move on to college.’
They tried to keep a brave face as they realized that the water torture was going to continue.
On Saturday, they gathered with trepidation in Kay’s kitchen. Nobody brought any fancy foods this time, just steamed artichokes, plain wheat bread with a choice of two cheeses: American and Swiss. For beverages, it was diet soda or water.
‘The Santa Barbarian won’t show up, will she?’ Sarah voiced everybody’s unspoken thought. Lucinda replied, quickly and forcefully,
‘Well, pigheaded as I was, I only invited her for one lunch.’ Lucinda was emphatic. ‘None of us renewed the invitation, and so —’
The doorbell rang.
‘We’re doomed,’ said Joan, as Gretchen came in, breathless, carrying a large bag. She ignored the near silence that greeted her arrival.
‘Sorry, I’m late, my friends. But I hope this will make up for my tardiness.’
She dove into her bag and came out with a crystal bowl containing a yellow paste.
‘A lovely curry dip, tailored for artichokes. There’s nothing like the flavors of the Orient. Try it, my friends.’
She stripped off an artichoke petal and scooped up a generous portion of the dip. Despite themselves, the others reluctantly followed. Once they got their first taste, they dove into the bowl again, their reluctance diminishing with the level of the curry dip.
‘I made it myself.’ Gretchen beamed. ‘Rice milk, coconut milk, cardamom, chili powder, coriander seeds, cumin, turmeric – well, I won’t bore you with the rest, but I blended everything in my food processor. Great, isn’t it?’
Worse was to follow. When they had finished with the artichoke, the bread and the cheese, Gretchen dipped into her bag again and pulled out a cake, luscious, deep brown with a gooey russet topping. They groaned.
‘And I thought that a shoofly or a peach cobbler was bad,’ said Joan.
‘Gretchen, we’re on a di-et,’ Lucinda moaned. ‘The whole purpose of our meeting is to reinforce our determination to eat healthy.’
‘I know,’ Gretchen said. ‘But heck, this is a one-time thing. I don’t know how to show my appreciation to you for welcoming me into your fold. Please splurge today – it’s on me – and we can all resume our diets tomorrow. And work out in the pool for longer. We’ll work off the calories and keep Duke happy.’
The others expressed their doubts but their looks of intense longing betrayed their desire.
‘Well…’ Sarah trailed off. ‘I guess we’re not all that overweight.’
‘Aren’t you a bit confident there?’ Lucinda half-challenged.
‘Well, here’s a simple test from the experts: tilt your head down when you’re standing in the shower. No bending – that’s cheating – just a gentle downward tilt. Can you see your feet? If you can’t, you’re overweight. Well, I can’t see all of my feet but I can see my toes. The tips, anyway. Not too bad.’
‘Phooey,’ said Gretchen. ‘It’s the men who get the bulging tummies so what you’ve said applies to them, not us. Our flesh grows — well, you know where it grows. Anyway, that so-called test is unscientific. To really know where you stand, measure your BMI. Duke’ll back me up on that.’ She scanned their faces quickly, and then said, ‘But enough of that. My friends, guess the name of this cake. Come on, guess.’
They looked at her with the faces of children being punished. Then Sarah ventured, ‘Looks like Black Forest.’
‘Close. But this is not your usual chocolate cake. The name says it all.’ Gretchen lowered her voice conspiratorially. ‘This is “Better than Sex” cake.’
Gretchen’s wicked smile accentuated the shock on their faces, a shock that they struggled to hide. She sliced generous chunks as she continued in a velvet tone, ‘The icing is out of this world. There’s layers of fudge and caramel and butterscotch. There’s condensed milk as well. And some of this stuff has seeped right into the cake. I let each flavour soak in before I went to the next. My friends, the most satisfying sex is one where one layer is applied over another, and every delectable little bit is savoured, enjoyed. We women know this intuitively. But men don’t. Men! They think all there’s to it is slam, bam, thank you ma’am. If men were a little more proficient, this wouldn’t be ‘Better than Sex’ cake. It just couldn’t be. But they aren’t. And so it is. Oh, the topping also has crushed toffee bars. We can add a coat of whipped cream. Yum. Do you have some whipped cream?’
Lucinda quit the aquatic classes. When Joan telephoned her to find out why, Lucinda dodged the questions at first, then admitted she felt she had to drop out because she could face the rest of them no more, having inflicted Gretchen on them.
‘Nonsense, Luci.’ Joan was brisk. ‘We have to stick together. We formed our little group to tackle health challenges. Gretchen is another of life’s challenges. We’ll sort her out eventually.’
Joan heard nothing but a choking sound and she said, in a sharp voice, ‘Luci, you got to come back. We need you on Saturday. At lunch. We’ve been at it for almost a year, and we’re close to the coronation of the Artichoke Queen. Sarah and Kay are in the lead, but you and I have good chances to overtake them.’
‘Kay Sarah Sarah,’ Lucinda muttered under her breath, barely audible. ‘Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not mine to see.’
‘What?’ Joan demanded, ‘What did you say?’
Lucinda did not repeat herself. She did not show up for the Saturday lunch. To everybody’s surprise, Gretchen did not turn up either. They had primed themselves to launch a spirited offensive, to let Gretchen know she wasn’t welcome, though they hadn’t figured out exactly how to tell her. Each, in her own way, had worked up to a passionate frenzy and when their target did not appear, they fell flat on their faces, jumping from one thread of conversation to another but never carrying any through. The three of them parted ways far more dissatisfied at the end of the lunch than they were at its beginning.
Lucinda did not show up at the pool the following week, and they discovered she had joined a walking club. Her newfound friends had no idea of the salubrious properties of artichokes; she had indoctrinated them, and hosted weekly luncheons in her house.
‘The best solution would be for the three of you to come over to my place for the lunches,’ Lucinda said when Kay telephoned her. ‘Without breathing a word to the Santa Barbarian. But unfortunately there’s no way I can accommodate all of you around the table. I’ve five of my walking buddies over for lunch, and there’s me, that’s six. We barely fit.’
‘Well, can’t you fix your walking group luncheons on other than Saturday? Then you could still join us. Get the best of both groups. We miss you terribly, dear, and Gretchen wasn’t there last Saturday. Looks like we’ve seen the last of her. Thank God.’
‘I’ll think about it, Kay.’
‘Don’t think too much, Luci, just come. We’ve got to stay four to carry the artichoke queen game to its end. That game’s the glue holding us together. We need the four of us.’
‘I’ll think about it, Kay.’
Lucinda did not turn up for their next luncheon. But Gretchen did, and she brought three bottles of chilled white wine.
‘Pineau de la Loire, from France,’ she declared. ‘It’s practically the only wine there is that truly complements artichokes.’
‘We don’t want wine. Wine solidifies into calories. Calories mean fat,’ said Joan.
‘Stick to Pura Aqua the next time. Today, enjoy the best that la belle France has to offer.’ Gretchen spoke in a no-nonsense voice. They drank long and they drank deep. They swigged the wine faster than they ate the artichokes.
‘You know, it’s as I thought on my first visit – I don’t think any of you likes artichokes, no matter how hard you pretend.’
‘Of course we like them, Gretchen. We talk about them all the time. Our meals are built round them.’
‘I hear you, Sarah. My point is – you’re enchanted by the concept of the artichoke rather than the artichoke itself. The artichoke blooming on your plate like a green lotus, the ritual of plucking the petals and dipping them in the flavour pots, the health aspect. But you don’t really like the taste, do you, honestly? It shows. You depend on this Artichoke Queen game to keep going. Frills and treats. Just like little children need to be cajoled to eat their broccoli.’
‘Well, I never!’ Joan’s face turned scarlet as did the faces of her two friends. ‘For almost a year we had plain lunches, until you came along. You brought the curry dip, the decadent cake, the wine. And you say we need to be cajoled? Get a grip on yourself, Gretchen.’
‘Plain lunches? Are sun-dried tomato bread and European cheeses and scones and clotted cream ‘plain’ in your book?’
‘Gretchen, we laid that table for you,’ Kay said. ‘We didn’t want you to go hungry. Lucinda spoke highly of you, she had specially invited you, and we wanted you to have a good time. We expected this to be a one-time thing. We never thought the cake and such like would follow.’
‘And now Duke doesn’t care about us anymore,’ Sarah cut in fast.
‘Oh.’ Gretchen’s head whipped back as though she had been slapped, and her face crumpled. ‘Oh. I thought Lucinda had asked me to join the group, seeing that I was new to these parts and had no friends. I did think your lunch was a little over the top, but I didn’t want to say anything. I was glad of the company and wanted to conform to whatever you did.’
A long silence followed. The wine had prodded the cells in each of their brains to jitterbug to wild, throbbing internal music, and the swaying cells found it tough to suddenly stop and process this new take on old events.
‘As for Duke – have you ever taught a class? No? Well, I was a school teacher at one point in my chequered life.’ Gretchen spoke softly, and they had to strain to hear her. ‘I can tell you, however much you like the students, it’s monotonous, and when a new student joins the class, the teacher’s attention is pulled there. At least for a little while, maybe for a long while, until the novelty wears off and new student becomes part of the same old same old.’
The others eyed each other. Nobody wanted to be the one to break the silence. Gretchen took off her eyeglasses and for the first time, they saw her small, weak eyes. Her left eye looked bleached, its iris a pale hazel to the solid brown of its companion eye. Now both eyes turned watery, and Gretchen dabbed at them with a crumpled handkerchief.
‘Well, let bygones be bygones, as they say.’ Kay finally found her voice. ‘Luci has left us, she’s joined another group. Gretchen, you could take her place. Couldn’t she, Sarah? Joan?’
They nodded, though their faces were drawn, their eyes reluctant.
‘As for our little contest,’ Joan said, slowly. ‘We’ll give you Luci’s points.’
‘That wouldn’t be fair,’ Gretchen said. ‘Even if Lucinda wasn’t in the first place, still, points have to be earned by each contestant in her own right.’
‘All right, let’s cancel everybody’s points and start afresh,’ Sarah said.
‘That’s not fair, either,’ said Gretchen. ‘You’ve worked so hard.’
‘Let’s scrap the game altogether and think of something new,’ Joan said. ‘The title was already conferred to Gretchen, anyways.’
‘To me?’ Gretchen had her glasses on, and was quickly regaining her poise.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Joan said. ‘Luci told us about how she first met you at the grocery store, and you educating the store boy. Like a professor, she thought. She said your wisdom made her regard you as the Queen of Artichoke Hearts.’
‘You know, well, you don’t know, but I grew up in a small town, a hick town,’ Gretchen sniffled again. ‘Really small. We could name every kid at school. Not just in our class, in the whole school. Our only entertainment was hanging out at the bars or restaurants on Main Street on Friday night, or watching a football game with a wild tailgate party where you could find just about everybody. When Wal-Mart set up store in town, we all wore this aura of sophistication. We had risen in the world. We’d become somebody. Boy, did I get a shock when I went to college in Los Angeles. I was ashamed of how little I knew. I determined never to be so ignorant again. Never. Ever since, I’ve kept reading on all the topics that interest me. And I try to make others understand they’d be better off expanding their horizons too.’
‘Good, Gretchen.’ Kay spoke without hesitation. ‘We’ll think of something else to replace our game. Everybody come with their ideas the next time.’
They smiled, and hugged, and shook hands and giggled as they parted.
Kay jumped out of bed when the day of the next luncheon, the first page of a new chapter, came around. Life was full of departures and arrivals, sudden endings and fresh beginnings; where would this one lead to?
In her kitchen cabinet stood three items she had purchased from a store that imported food: shortbread from Scotland, and real Devonshire clotted cream, and golden brown treacle. She did not intend serving them for lunch. That would not augur well for their new beginning. She planned to enjoy them at her leisure. She had not been to England in so long she wanted a reminder of what real clotted cream tasted like, and compare how her faux cream measured up. The fare was simple: steamed artichokes with a dip made of low-fat mayonnaise mixed with Dijon mustard and lemon juice and the slightest hint of garlic, crackers and slivers of Swiss cheese, and mineral water with lemon wedges. She used the same yellow pinwale tablecloth but the vase now contained lavender and white daisy chrysanthemums instead of roses.
Her excitement mounted as the minutes ticked by. At half past one she became feverish. She called Gretchen, but the phone kept ringing. Good, thought Kay, she must be on her way. She tried Joan, got the answering machine and left a message: Joan, it’s Kay – I hope you’re on your way, it’s one-thirty but nobody has shown so far. I’m all excited for our new start. Can’t wait, see you soon.
It was only when she called Sarah that she suspected something could be awry. There was no response to her repeated hellos. Then she heard a soft but distinct click, followed by the deep burr of the dial tone.
Kay held the telephone receiver in her had for a long time before letting it fall back on its cradle. She slumped at her kitchen table, her elbows on the table, her head between her hands, rocking gently every now and then.
When the clock chimed two, she broke open the protective seal on the bottle of Devonshire clotted cream. She pulled one of the artichokes toward her, an artichoke that had once been a vibrant green, its petals as tough as cactus leaves, but now tenderized by steaming, rendered limp and soggy and a dull green; petals ripe for plucking without effort though they retained a few thorns.
Kay parted the petals and jammed the cream between them, making the sorry-looking artichoke look like it had been rolled in snow. She let out a peal of laughter at the sight, then let out another. She did not care that there was nobody in her kitchen to hear her.
Vishwas Gaitonde spent his formative years in India, has lived in Britain and now resides in the United States. He has been published in Mid-American Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Iowa Review, Santa Monica Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He was a finalist in The George Floyd Short Story Competition of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio, England, and his story appears in their anthology, Black Lives. He is on Twitter at @weareji
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