Beth followed me to the table where the seating-a.s.signment cards were. They were in alphabetical order. I picked up my envelope and, since it was close to mine, handed Beth hers.

"Did you know that these are technically called *escort cards'? Like anyone is going to a.s.sign us escorts," she said bitterly. "What do you want to bet we're at the losers' table?"

I certainly hoped I wasn't at the same table as Beth. I didn't want to spend the evening with someone so bitter. "I imagine I'm with my father." I pulled my card out of its envelope. I had been a.s.signed to table 9.

Beth was at table 9 as well. Dad hadn't picked up his card yet so I reached across the table and opened his. He was at table 2.

Within a few moments it was clear that Beth was right. If there was such a thing, table 9 was definitely the losers' table. There were two couples who knew no one-one pair was Claudia's neighbors, and I never figured out how the other couple was connected to anyone, but obviously the husband did not want to be there. The other four of us at the table were divorced women.

As soon as everyone was seated, Mike and Guy made toasts. Mike praised Cami, Guy praised Jeremy, and both of them thanked Claudia for hosting the party. I might as well have not existed.

I thought I didn't care about c.r.a.p like this. Apparently I did.

Hospitals are hierarchical places. The attending physicians are over the residents, who are over the interns. As an advanced-practice nurse, I can legally do more than an RN, a registered nurse. The RNs, in turn, have more authority and status than the LPNs, the licensed practical nurses, etc. etc.

Short of getting a PhD in nursing and a faculty appointment to teach other nurses, I am at the top of the nursing ladder. And my status at the hospital doesn't come just from my credentials. I'm really good. I know what I'm doing. Even the doctors know it. All I have to do is say "Doctor?" in a cautionary voice, and everyone in the room stops.

Once Mike started making good money, he'd asked me if I wanted to quit work. I hadn't considered it for a minute. Work was the one place where I felt completely confident, where I felt respected and valued.

But tonight was as if I had shown up at the hospital having lost my nursing license. No one would know what to say to me, what to do with me. I wouldn't fit in; I wouldn't belong. Someone else had been hired to do my job, someone with a willowy torso, a risky haircut, and a seafoam-green dress.

This party was celebrating my son's engagement. This was my family. If I didn't belong here, where did I belong?

The waiter was refilling the winegla.s.ses. Since I wasn't driving, I let him top off my gla.s.s again and again. I did wonder how the other single women at the table were getting home. They weren't stopping the waiter either, and the conversation at the table was growing sharp.

In response to a question from the neighbor, I pointed out Cami's family. Rose was sitting with Mike at one table, and Guy with Claudia at another.

Across the table, Kate Sheehan, one of the crew-team moms, spoke, directing her comment to me. "So I suppose you've heard the advice given to mothers of the groom?"

"No." I looked up interestedly. I probably needed all the advice I could get.

"Keep your mouth shut and wear beige."

"Beige?" I had never worn beige in my life. "Wouldn't I look like an unbaked oatmeal cookie?"

"Better that than ruin everything for everyone else." The woman whom I hadn't been able to place leaned forward, eager to speak. "The day after Dave and I were engaged, his mom called and said that she had bought her dress and it was royal purple. Just twenty-four hours after our engagement, she had her dress. We needed to plan everything around her wearing royal purple."

"Why did it matter what she was wearing? What difference did it make?"

"We wouldn't have wanted everything to clash with her dress. The pictures would have been awful."

"When my Liz got married," another Selwyn mom spoke with an "I can top that" air, "her mother-in-law said that she was going to wear black. She said that's what she wore, that's what she always wore, and she absolutely wouldn't budge. And that would have really ruined the pictures. She would have just stood out, like this big dark blob."

"Wouldn't a few blobby pictures be worth making her comfortable?" I asked.

"These were the pictures."

I hate this worship of photographs. It sometimes seems that people care less about what happens at an event than what the pictures look like. Guests can be drop-dead miserable, they can be ready to smash a winegla.s.s so that they have something to slash their wrists with, but if the pictures are great, who cares? "What did you do?"

"I wore a tobacco brown, my mom wore navy, my sister wore raisin, and so Marian didn't stick out as much. But it was a summer-afternoon wedding. The bridesmaids were in primrose. I had been going to wear aqua and my mom and sister were going to be in lavender and periwinkle. It would have been so pretty if Marian had been willing to wear a midtone green, a celadon or a jadeite. To this day, I can't look at some of the pictures and not get angry."

I leaned to the side as the waiter set down my dessert. It was a showy-looking thing with flying b.u.t.tresses of spun sugar. To my mind, everyone in the story was wrong-the mother of the groom for insisting on wearing black, everyone else for caring so much. "Then I'll wear beige. I can do that. But I'm going to have trouble if they tell me to wear celadon. I have no idea what that is."

"And the other thing," said yet another woman. "When the babies come, you have to let her mother go first. My mother-in-law was furious because I wanted my mother as soon as I got home. She spent the first two years of Graham's life complaining because she thought that my mother got to see him more than she did."

I had to admit that when I brought Jeremy home, I was much more interested in having my mother come help than Marge. But she was not only my mother; she was also a pediatric nurse.

Dresses and photographs didn't matter to me, but babies did. I wondered if I would play the nurse card in order to get my hands on a grandbaby as soon as possible. "Cami and Jeremy are about to start medical school," I said. "Then they have their internships and residencies. We have time to figure out the postpartum schedule."

"No, no," the neighbor lady said, now joining the conversation. "You can tell yourself that you're being cooperative, but watch out. If you set a pattern, if you let her family think you're a pushover, that's going to last. I have boys, and their mothers-in-law decide everything-which holidays my sons will be allowed to come to my house. Then it never lines up, so I never have everyone together. You know the saying, *a son's a son until he takes a wife.' You have to be realistic. You're in compet.i.tion with her parents. That's just the way it is. You both want the same thing, the kids to visit you, not the other family."

I winced. I suppose I did want to be a "fun" grandma. I couldn't bear it if the boys had to drag their families to visit me with the same dread and reluctance we had felt about visiting Marge. That would be awful.

"Don't the Zander-Browns have a big house in the Hamptons?" Beth Vindern asked. "How are you going to compete with that?"

"Darcy has a very big house herself," one of the Selwyn moms put in loyally.

"Actually, I don't anymore." I felt as if someone were sticking pins in me. And of course I was competing not only with the big house in the Hamptons; I was also competing with the premium cable-TV package of the house we were in.

How bitter, how hostile these women were. How could I keep that from happening to me? "Let's go back to talking about me wearing beige," I said brightly. "I'm going to be facing that long before the babies come."

"What about keeping your mouth shut?" Beth Vindern said. "Won't that be even a bigger problem for you?"

She had spoken with the mock-teasing air that Mike's mom specialized in. I hated that. If you tried to defend yourself, the other person would just accuse you of not being able to take a joke.

But what Beth had said wasn't fair. I'm not one of those people who insist on talking all the time, telling long, pointless stories about themselves. Furthermore, I'm a health-care professional; I am scrupulous about patient confidentiality.

Of course, when someone is being a jacka.s.s and keeping everyone else from doing anything, I do try to get the traffic moving. Beth probably hadn't forgiven me for the regatta at which I had told her that her son was absolutely not suffering from hypothermia and she needed to get out of the way of the EMTs who were trying to examine the kids who might be.

I suppose I could have gently explained to her that as a c.o.xswain, racing in a hooded waterproof jacket and long pants, her son was less vulnerable than the rowers in their thin Lycra unitards. I could have drawn her attention to the fact that Josh, although shivering, was coherent and his color was good while two of the rowers, their faces waxy, were growing disoriented.

But I hadn't. I had been quick and blunt. So now, years later, she was retaliating.

Why do people think it is okay to tease me? I hate it as much as the next person. My nice mom-type therapist said that people were trying to get a reaction and that I should call them on it, that I should hold them accountable. I'm sure that if you knew how critical that sounded, you would not have said it.

She was probably right. When I didn't react, when I just brushed people off, they kept poking and poking, trying to get a reaction, not stopping until they could tell that they had hurt me. But I couldn't make myself respond; I couldn't let them see that I was hurt. I wasn't going to let them know that they had any power over me.

But they do have power over you, my therapist said, they do hurt you.

Yeah, okay, but I didn't have to let them know.

Why don't you stand up for yourself? she asked.

She was wrong. This wasn't about standing up for myself; this was about not letting other people see me sweat. There was a difference. There had to be.

J.

eremy's Selwyn friends who had come without girlfriends were all seated at one table, and as the first course was being served, I'd noticed sudden activity at their table. The guys were on their feet, squeezing their gilt caterer's chairs closer. One lifted a chair from the younger-siblings table, carrying it overhead as he threaded his way back to their table. Another scooped up one of the place settings from that table while a third had Annie by the arm, escorting her to the newly laid place. She was laughing and protesting, a lovely sprite in a moss-green dress. You couldn't blame them for wanting her at their table.

This left Zack, although he was a year older than Annie, stuck at the younger-siblings' table, in charge of Finney. He couldn't have been happy, but he was soldiering on. He had his arm propped up on the table, the side of his wrist twisted toward Finney. Finney was trying to reinsert Zack's cufflink. At one point Zack bent sideways, his black hair brushing close to Finney's head, so that he could observe the procedure and offer advice.

I was proud of him . . . and wished there were some way to let college-admissions committees know about this moment.

Just as my table was trying to figure out how to eat our spun-sugar flying b.u.t.tresses, Guy came over to me. "Here you are," he said, kneeling so that I didn't have to crane my neck to talk to him. "I hope you're having a good time."

"Of course." What else could I say?

"Finney's about had it. I don't know where the communication breakdown occurred, but the caterer thought he had a peanut allergy, not corn."

Virtually all the dishes had been sauced or glazed. "What did he eat?"

"Salad with oil and vinegar and a fruit plate. Apparently he kept wanting to come sit with you because he was sure the food at your table had to be better."

"That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me all evening."

"I hope that's not true," Guy said gallantly. "But when you decide to write a cookbook, you need to let me represent you."

I had no interest whatsoever in writing a cookbook. "Don't hold your breath."

"I never do." Then he got down to his real business. It was long past Finney's bedtime, and the driver had arrived to take him back to the house. "We knew he would want to leave before we could, so Annie agreed to go with him. That's when we thought we would all be at the hotel. What should she do about getting into the house? And what can he eat? I'm afraid you've become the bell to his Pavlov's dog. He'll see your house and start to want to eat . . . as would I."

"The leftovers from lunch are in the refrigerator. Annie can figure out the microwave, can't she?" I glanced over to the table where Annie was sitting. Rose was talking to her, one hand on the back of her chair.

Annie didn't want to leave. Who could blame her? Eight tall college rowers were fawning over her. Even if a major bribe had been involved in Annie's agreeing to leave, Rose couldn't be having an easy time trying to get her to stick with the plan.

I dropped my napkin next to the dessert plate. Whatever sweets I had at home would almost certainly be tastier than this minicathedral. "Let Annie stay. I'll go with Finney. My father is probably ready to leave too." He had been seated next to Mike's mother. "If Finney's comfortable with us, we can put him to bed."

Guy was looking at me, his bright eyes a.s.sessing.

"I won't feel like Cinderella," I a.s.sured him.

"Then that will be great," he said. He was going to take me at my word, not wasting time on "are you sure?" polite mumbo jumbo. He went to tell Rose and get the EpiPen. I found Claudia and thanked her. For which she thanked me. We were getting good at that.

She glanced down at her wrist. Her pearl bracelet was an interesting little evening watch. She was checking the time.

If she had been anyone else, I would have told her that I liked her watch, but undoubtedly she would have thanked me, and I'd again be standing here, trying to figure out what to say. So I moved off to the younger-siblings' table and reminded Zack that he and Mike were leaving for their college visits tomorrow and they had a six a.m. flight. I was offering him an excuse in case he wanted to leave early. He nearly trampled me to get to the door.

N.

eedless to say, Zack was not happy the next morning. He didn't want to get up at four thirty. He didn't want to visit colleges. He didn't want to be with his father. But he had to do all three.

Cami and Jeremy were going back to New York with the Zander-Browns, so the car returned midmorning to pick up the kids for the return trip. Finney went dashing outside, eager to show his parents the tie around his neck. "The grandpa . . . Doctor . . . Doctor Bow-wow . . . he stood behind me, and I put my hands on his. Like this." Finney launched into a full-body, air-guitar version of a four-in-hand knot, his arms waving as if he were signaling aircraft.

Typical family chaos followed. Annie couldn't find the little bag with all her earrings. Guy's cell phone was ringing. Rose noticed that Annie's school backpack was still exactly where it had been on Sat.u.r.day; she hadn't worked on her paper. Cami hugged me, telling me that she'd known we would love Finney. I got the rest of the Kosher-for-Pa.s.sover c.o.ke and gave it to Finney. He thanked me. Then Rose thanked me. Finney tried to decide if he wanted the c.o.ke in the trunk or in the car with him. Then Guy and Annie thanked me. Finney thanked me again. Finally, Rose got them all into the car.

Dad put his arm around my shoulders as we watch the car pull away.

"That seemed like a success," he said. "Your mother would have liked them."

That was true. She would have been drawn to Guy in the way everyone was, and she would have approved of the way Rose was bringing up her kids. But what would she have thought of Claudia? That's what I wanted to know.

I.

took Dad to the airport that afternoon, and things seemed very quiet when I got home. It would, I realized, be the first night that I had slept alone in this house.

That was something I would have to get used to.

I stripped the sheets off Dad's bed, put them in the washer, and tried to figure out what to do with the leftovers that had acc.u.mulated in the refrigerator. I opened my laptop and searched on my favorite Web sites, but found no useful advice about what to do with two-day-old grilled, corn-free hamburger patties.

I was kidding myself. I wasn't online to do culinary research. I was there to check out Claudia's Web site, to see if she had written up a description of the party. I typed in her URL and clicked on the link for the blog. The most recent post was from the Thursday before the party, in which she had warned her readers that she wouldn't be posting until after the event.

I scrolled through some of the replies posted since Thursday. People were wishing her the best, saying that they were sure the party would be wonderful.

Maybe I should post: Hey, folks, I was there, and it sucked. Everyone was late because she lives so far away from everything, and she tried to poison a very sweet little boy . . . but everything was beautiful, and she had gone to a tremendous amount of work, and everyone, except for me, seemed to have a good time.

I got up and switched the sheets from the washer to the dryer. I gathered up the towels from Zack's bathroom and started those. My laptop was in the dining room. On my way to the kitchen, I hit the Refresh b.u.t.ton, but it was still Thursday in Claudia's Web site world. I threw out the hamburger patties and put the leftovers container in the dishwasher. I wrapped the buns and froze them so that I could throw them out next month. The sheets wouldn't be dry yet, so there was no point in going to the bas.e.m.e.nt. I hit Refresh again.

And there it was, a new message, posted while I was throwing out leftovers.

She thanked everyone for their kind thoughts and was sure that their good wishes were behind the party's great success. She said she was amazed at how satisfied she felt; creating an evening for others to enjoy could be as satisfying as completing a new dress from a pattern you've designed yourself. She went on about the guests, the "high-profile Washington journalists" and the "powerful K Street lawyers," people she described as "our" friends.

Our? How many of those people had she met before the night of the party? Only that one neighbor couple who had been seated at the losers' table with me.

The final paragraph was marked with the conch sh.e.l.l she used whenever talking about her trademarked Managed Perfectionism. She acknowledged that one incident had happened that could have spoiled the evening. An appropriate meal was not prepared for a guest with severe allergies.

Don't expend energy trying to a.s.sign blame, she wrote. Blaming doesn't solve the problem. Nor does dwelling on the mistake, offering endless apologies. You'll ruin the evening for everyone else. Give yourself ten minutes to fix things, but no more. Do the best you can and then send flowers in the morning.

Well, d.a.m.n. That was good advice, sensible, practical, well expressed. I didn't want Claudia to be sensible and practical. I wanted her to be shallow, superficial, and pretentious. I wanted to be able to dismiss her in the way she seemed to be dismissing me.

If she were dismissible, she wouldn't be dangerous.

Z.

ack came back from his college visits feeling worse than ever. He and Mike had gone to some big schools that Zack might have gotten into-the universities of Michigan and Wisconsin- and some smaller ones, Beloit and Kenyon, for which he didn't have a prayer. It was a toss-up which he loathed more at the moment, the schools or his father.

Travis Jackson, his school counselor, called me Wednesday afternoon. "He needs to visit a college by himself. Let him try to imagine himself being a student there." He recommended that we have Zack drive himself up to Stone-Chase College, a small liberal-arts school about sixty miles north of D.C. Travis thought we should do this right away. He would set up the appointment at Stone-Chase and make arrangements with Zack's teachers.

As close as it was, I had never heard of Stone-Chase College. It wasn't a place that D.C. private-school families send their kids.

"It's only a visit," Travis said. "It's a friendly place, and the campus is beautiful. He needs to start feeling more positive about the college experience."

So Zack spent Friday up there. "How did you like it?" I said as soon as he came home that afternoon.

"It was okay," he said.

Normally a comment like that from Zack came with a shrug, a physical disclaimer a.s.serting the unimportance of whatever was being discussing. Sure, it was okay, but what a stupid-a.s.s thing to care about. But this time he did not shrug.

"People weren't totally stressed out like they were at those other places," he continued. "They weren't all full of themselves, either."