Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

made cookies and hung them on the tree as she had seen in a magazine. It was a European custom.
    She wanted to have a party, but she didn’t know who to ask. There were the Greek people, and Stan had a couple of friends. Then she got the idea of asking his students.
    I still couldn’t get used to her saying “Stan.” It wasn’t just the reminder of her intimacy with Mr. Vorguilla. It was that, of course. But it was also the feeling it gave, that she had made him up from scratch. A new person. Stan. As if there had never been a Mr. Vorguilla that we had known together—let alone a Mrs. Vorguilla—in the first place.
    Stan’s students were all adults now—he really preferred adults to schoolchildren—so they didn’t have to worry about the sort of games and entertainment you plan for children. They held the party on a Sunday evening, because all the other evenings were taken up with Stan’s work at the restaurant and Queenie’s at the theater.
    The Greeks brought wine they had made and some of the students brought eggnog mix and rum and sherry. And some brought records you could dance to. They had thought that Stan wouldn’t have any records of that kind of music, and they were right.
    Queenie made sausage rolls and gingerbread and the Greek woman brought her own kind of cookies. Everything was good. The party was a success. Queenie danced with a Chinese boy named Andrew, who had brought a record she loved.
    “Turn, turn, turn,” she said, and I moved my head as directed. She laughed and said, “No, no, I didn’t mean you. That’s the record. That’s the song. It’s by the Byrds.”
    “Turn, turn, turn,” she sang. “To everything, there is a season—”
    Andrew was a dentistry student. But he wanted to learn to play the Moonlight Sonata . Stan said that was going to take him a long time. Andrew was patient. He told Queenie that he could not afford to go home to Northern Ontario for Christmas.
    “I thought he was from China,” I said.
    “No, not Chinese Chinese. From here.”
    They did play one children’s game. They played musical chairs. Everybody was boisterous by that time. Even Stan. He pulled Queenie down into his lap when she was running past, and he wouldn’t let her go. And then when everybody had gone he wouldn’t let her clean up. He just wanted her to come to bed.
    “You know the way men are,” Queenie said. “Do you have a boyfriend yet, or anything?”
    I said no. The last man my father had hired as a driver was always coming to the house to deliver some unimportant message, and my father said, “He just wants a chance to talk to Chrissy.” I was cool to him, however, and so far he hadn’t got up the nerve to ask me out.
    “So you don’t really know about that stuff yet?” said Queenie.
    I said, “Sure I do.”
    “Hmmhmm,” she said.
    The guests at the party had eaten up nearly everything but the cake. They did not eat much of that, but Queenie wasn’t offended. It was very rich, and by the time they got to it they were filled up with sausage rolls and other things. Also, it had not had time to ripen the way the book said it should, so she was just as glad to have some left over. She was thinking, before Stan pulled her away, that she should get the cake wrapped up in a wine-soaked cloth and put it in a cool place. She was either thinking of doing that or she was actually doing it, and in the morning she saw that the cake was not on the table, so she thought she had done it. She thought, Good, the cake was put away.
    A day or so later Stan said, “Let’s have a piece of that cake.” She said, Oh, let it ripen a bit more, but he insisted. She went to the cupboard and then to the refrigerator, but it was not there. She looked high and low and she could not find it. She thought back to seeing it on the table. And a memory came to her, of getting a clean cloth and soaking it in wine and wrapping it carefully around the leftover cake. And then of wrapping waxed paper around the outside of the cloth. But when had she done that? Had she done it at all or only dreamed about it? Where had she put the cake when she finished wrapping it? She tried to see herself putting it away, but her mind went blank.
    She looked all through the cupboard, but she knew the cake was too big to be hidden there. Then she looked in the oven and even in insane places like her dresser drawers and under the bed and on the closet shelf. It was nowhere.
    “If you put it somewhere, then it must