More Cheerleaders?

I wrote this piece after I missed 20 words in the February 4, 2024, NYT Spelling Bee puzzle. All 20 words are included in bold type. The missed words, in alphabetical order, are as follows: Acetic, Ante, Cantata, Cantina, Cayenne, Cetacean, Cyan, Eaten, Initiate, Natant, Neaten, Tacet, Tactician, Taint, Tannic, Tannin, Tatty, Teat, Titanic, and Yenta.  

Imperial Republic: 3 (Margaret)

Margaret Thomas had yet to find her people at Imperial Republic. It was highly doubtful she would locate any tonight. Yet here she stood, at a Cinco de Mayo Fiesta, advertised on a photocopied flier, shoved under her door the previous day. She had promised her two daughters, Elaine and Brooke, that she would make the effort.

In the Bacchus lounge on the ground floor, custom pinatas from a Chicago shop on Clark Street hung from the ceiling. The pinatas were walkers in primary colors of magenta, cyan, and crossing-guard yellow. “Funny as a crutch,” flashed through Margaret’s brain; she couldn’t help it.  From the speakers, mariachi music was not blaring. Instead, the melodies streamed by at a comfortably restrained decibel level, as though this were a dentist’s office. No one would have cause to turn down a hearing aid and miss a moment of the riotous fun. A huge, brightly colored serape was draped over the bar, which had been renamed Connie’s Cantina  for the evening. Drinks included mezcal margaritas in glasses rimmed with cayenne. Or, for the less intrepid, a pink, nonalcoholic punch with natant plastic sombreros, pineapple chunks and melting ice cubes. Cocktail napkins were printed with burros and cacti. The usual peanut bowls on the tabletops had been refilled with tropical-flavored Tums, possibly intended as a humorous gesture, like the pinatas. But maybe the Tums were contemplated simply as a necessary countermeasure for the spicy drinks, Margaret thought.

Over at the large circular table in the corner, a lively poker game was underway, with a ten-peso ante, all proceeds to benefit the holiday bonus fund for Imperial Republic employees. The table center was piled high with crumpled pesos, which one of the margarita drinkers was threatening to smoke, though to do so, he would have had to shuffle outside with his rollator, which might have spoiled his swaggering hijinks.   

For Margaret, all these wretched themed parties carried the taint of her godawful high school years, a mere what? Sixty-five years ago? It was as if the cheerleader darlings from Evanston Township High, class of ’60, had reassembled the squad and now called themselves the social committee. Each month, they concocted a new excuse to gather together and wear silly outfits. Tonight, they were garbed in bright green aprons made of oilcloth smeared with garish strawberries and hibiscus flowers. Periodically, Connie (the squad captain?) and her girls giggled in unison but apart from that, the cheerleaders appeared to have no prepared routines with which to entertain the partygoers. Margaret was ashamed of herself. How could she begrudge the cheerleaders their fun after all these decades? Fresh evidence of wrongdoing was her only possible legitimate defense. Alas, she had seen none.

Margaret had moved three months earlier to the senior living complex, really just a pricey old folks home, located in an upscale area of Evanston just a few blocks from the elegant stone house she and her husband, Paul, had shared for 35 years until he died from a stroke. She had not wanted to leave her home, but she wanted even less to spend all her time, however little remained, caring for a house and a garden.  She was 82. Better, she thought, to live simply someplace new. When she became truly decrepit, she wouldn’t have to fret over diminished surroundings in addition to the incapacity of her body or mind or both. (Now there’s a hideous both/and, she thought.) Margaret made the sensible decision. At the moment, however, that choice held all the allure of switching to sensible shoes when she turned 50.

Margaret had always thought of herself as a clever tactician at cocktail parties, able to shimmy into conversations with interesting people and back her way out of exchanges with the duds. But she hadn’t escaped tonight from the yenta in the purple dress bedazzled in crystals that she must have applied herself with a hot glue gun from Michael’s. Who truly knows or cares if the resident tending bar, the “swarthy” man in a concededly tatty sport jacket, who lives on the third floor in Ostia, the dentist whose wife died just two months ago, is shtupping the head nurse over in Appian Way? (Can that be right? Didn’t the Romans crucify slaves on that route? It can’t be named Appian Way, Margaret cringed.)

It wasn’t just the yenta. Margaret herself was the one foolish enough to initiate a conversation with the woman standing alone who turned out to be an embittered piano teacher. Margaret had been suckered in by the white-haired woman’s stunning Mexican earrings – intricate silver candelabras with amethysts and turquoise – like something from a Frida Kahlo painting. But Eunice was no fan of Mexican art and wore the earrings just once a year, she explained, when she attended this Cinco de Mayo gathering. What fascinated Eunice, it appeared, were the “lackluster” free concerts performed once a month by students from local colleges and high schools in the lecture hall. (Was that the room they called the Colosseum?) In reverse chronological order, Eunice had worked her way backward in outraged detail all the way to the December performance of a Bach Christmas cantata during which the cellos began playing when they were supposed to remain tacet. “Truly, it was not to be borne,” Eunice shuddered. Exactly, Margaret was thinking about Eunice just as Margaret’s daughter, Elaine, uncharacteristically phoned rather than texted to ensure that she made good on her promise to attend the party.

After assuring Elaine that she was indeed present, if not enjoying herself, at the “fiesta,” Margaret stepped up to the bar, where she met the bartender in the tatty jacket, whose name was George Romano. She ordered a glass of Malbec. While George located and then opened a fresh bottle, Margaret reflexively began to neaten the bar, which had become littered with lime wedges and damp cocktail napkins. She was trying to remember the latest proclamation on tannic wines like Malbec. Good for your heart, but maybe excessive tannin intake is bad for the digestive tract? No matter, George set a too-generous glass in front of her. George and his wife, Irma, had moved to Imperial Republic four years earlier after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and he could no longer care for her properly on his own. When Irma died six months ago, he decided to stay and live with the “old farts.” As George and Margaret were chatting, the exuberant poker player approached the bar for another ill-advised margarita. Margaret watched as George mixed the drink with apple juice instead of mezcal and said, “Here you go, Sir. I made it a double.” “Good man,” Mr. Poker chortled, somehow managing not to spill the drink as he placed it on the seat of his rollator and headed back to the poker table. Margaret decided George Romano was not half-bad.

This was quite a turnaround from her days on the bench, when cocktail parties were a breeze, except for the time she was forced to spend attending them. At those gatherings, she and her fellow judges, even the ones she didn’t know, always had interests in common and stories to share. And the lawyers were completely deferential, wanting to meet her or keep her good favor. She was free to move among them as she chose. Even if there were an insensitive barnacle clinging on here or there, someone else was always at the ready to dislodge him. (And the barnacle was usually a him.) Here, in contrast, she felt as though the only thing she shared with other residents was excessive age. For the first time in decades, she was dogged by the shy girl in the mirror who wore the wrong outfit to every single high school party. What was worse, the shy girl now shared the mirror with a wrinkled old lady. The “Your Honor” parties were over. Margaret sighed.

These days, cocktail parties were just a real-life version of a video game her grandson had been fixated on, in which you’re in a hotel trying to avoid monsters lurking behind one door after another. And that left no time for silent self-reflection, Margaret thought. Indeed, she had been so engrossed in her own glory days that she almost missed the steady high-pitched whine approaching slowly from the left. It was that four-eyed blood-sucking mosquito, about five foot nine, a hundred eight-five pounds, pale blue LL Bean sweater purchased 30 years ago, into which was tucked the flip-phone dangling from the gargantuan insect’s neck. Professor Arnie Wallace. Margaret quietly set down her half-drunk glass of Malbec and moved surprisingly nimbly to her right. She would not be bitten. The retired biology professor was lecturing tonight on dolphins. He had alighted upon the proctologist from Florida, who obviously had opted for too many spicy margaritas instead of the punch. The idiot! Mosquitoes are attracted to people who’ve been drinking. Margaret’s grandson wrote a class report on it in sixth grade.

“Dolphins, of course, are strict carnivores that belong to the Cetacean infraorder of aquatic mammals …” the professor pontificated.

“Do dolphins have tits?” interrupted the proctologist.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve never seen tits on a dolphin.”

Without cracking a smile, Professor Wallace explained, “It is true that dolphins, as mammals who live underwater, do not have teats as other mammals do. Instead, they have mammary slits that allow the calves to access the nipple for feeding.”

“That’s not very sexy, is it?” the proctologist asked. “No legs. No tits. Guess dolphins are all into tail.”

Margaret heard him laugh loudly, then cough, and then belch before he headed back to the bar.

Just as she was ready to call the evening a titanic failure, the wife of the other professor – was it Chemistry? – walked over to the table at which Margaret was then hiding in the corner by the back exit. You couldn’t mistake her; she was the one with the flaming red hair. Medium height, slender-ish, attractive (for a woman way past a certain age), and nicely dressed, with a boho slant. The redhead reached for some peanuts, saw the Tums in their place, and sighed. Nodding toward the bar, where the social committee was then posing in V formation for a photo, she smiled, “I see the drill team is out in fine force tonight.” Now it was Margaret’s turn to giggle.

The redhead extended her hand, “Doris Rosen.”

She took Doris’s hand and shook it. “Margaret Thomas.”

“Margaret? As in Atwood?” Doris asked.

Margaret nodded, “But neither as clever nor as rich. You’re married to the Chemistry professor from Northwestern?” Margaret asked for confirmation.

“Roger. He’s over there talking cooking with Suzy Smith. Our daughter, Mindy, gave him Lessons in Chemistry last Hanukkah, I think as a gag gift. But he read it and now he’s as obsessed with cooking as he is with conspiracies. When I escaped to meet you, he and Suzy were Googling away to discover which vinegar has the highest acetic acid content.”

“I think my younger daughter, Brooke, had a talking doll called Suzy, but she was Suzy Smart,” Margaret mused out loud.

“Oh yes, that’s her now with Roger.” Doris smiled, winking.

The two women looked at each other and laughed out loud.

“Have you eaten? I think I’ll text Roger and tell him we’re headed to dinner, if you’ll join me. Maybe I’ll take one of these Tums,” Doris said, reaching toward the peanut bowl, “and then do something crazy, like have onions on my salad.”

“I can’t wait to call Elaine,” Margaret thought, as the two women walked across the hall to the Forum for dinner.