Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes

woman in an apron who offered steaming mashed potatoes and who kissed their earlobes wasn’t shaken. Without realizing it, these guys expected their girlfriends to come home from the office, set down their pink laptop bags, slide a meat loaf in the oven, do a quick mop of the kitchen, and serve them scotch and soda after dinner, before giving them a gentle foot rub or, if they were lucky, a blow job.
    And these were the nice guys.
    The ones who would wash dishes if asked, who understood the concept of fabric softener.
    These men were caught between two wildly different generations. Ginny imagined them as time travelers, baffled by the wacky women of the future, squinting at their confidence and capability— Jeez, these girls change tires and write books!— as if the women had lasers streaming from their eyes.
    To Ginny, it felt like the Copernican Revolution: men had just learned the sun didn’t orbit the earth and weren’t taking it well.
    Certainly what Ginny had seen of her parents’ marriage hadn’t sent her sprinting to the altar.
    Disputes over napkins versus paper towels. Her mother’s lifelong complaint that she could not clean the back deck without moving her father’s telescope, which he had forbidden. Her father’s glare of disapproval as her mother, upon exiting a restaurant, pawed dinner mints into her purse. The biannual excavation of the refrigerator, her father extracting the half-and-half, the cream cheese, the Zabar’s egg salad, incredulously announcing the months-old expiration dates. “September ’04! Eleanor, you are trying to poison me.”
    Her mother would sniff each one, insisting that any vaguely sane person could intuit when the cottage cheese had gone bad. Expiration dates were for the weak and the profligate. They were the work of lawyers, to prevent frivolous food-poisoning lawsuits, and sentperfectly good food down the disposal. Three hundred years ago, Ginny, did the pioneers churn butter and put a date on it?
    Growing up, Ginny couldn’t understand why they’d married. Until she found a photo of their wedding day. Posed on the steps of city hall in Columbus, Georgia, her father clasped one of her mother’s hands and braced her back in a mock dip so that the sunlight caught their faces in profile, as though they had no interest in anyone but each other. At twenty and twenty-one they were great physical specimens. Her father’s broad shoulders beautifully complemented her mother’s elegant neck. They were young, attractive, healthy, horny, and—from the date on the picture—her father was about to go to Vietnam.
    Ginny was looking for something that might endure.
    And a couple of times, she thought she had found it.
    After her book of poetry came out, she was invited to teach in NYU’s graduate writing program. Her seminar, Poetic Histories, met in the afternoons every spring, and as the weather got warmer, the first few minutes of class were consumed by the inevitable debate over whether to open the windows and spend the hour discussing poetry to the sound of jackhammers, or to listen unhindered to one another’s insightful observations on the poetic process, and die of heatstroke.
    Ratu always made his way to the window, either to rattle it open or to bring it thudding closed, the self-appointed climate controller. He was from Fiji, and wrote poems about his fisherman father.
    All the girls flirted with him. He wore his long dark hair in a ponytail. He carried exactly four pencils and sharpened them to a lethal point before class and set them beside his notebook. When anyone spoke, he blew on the tip of his pencil and intensely took notes.
    He was twenty-three, and it never occurred to Ginny that he might harbor romantic interest in her. But they were seated in her office late one afternoon, the light outside darkening, going over his poem “Bird of an Ancient Land” when the fire alarm blared. Shewas ready to shrug it off and keep working—the alarms were always being