The Risk Pool

restaurant, against F. William Peterson’s recommendation.
    She looked quite wonderful, actually, very much like the girl who had done battle with my father twenty years earlier. She had on a black dress with a simple string of pearls, and she took a pill right before we left. That, in concert with a martini she termed “indifferent,” made her confident and loudly talkative in the dining room. From the moment we entered the restaurant, nothing escaped her notice and comment, from the rather cool reception of the hostess to the colloquial friendliness of our young waitress, who had smiled as if she were actually delighted to see us and squeaked, “Hi, folks!”
    “Folks,” my mother stage-whispered when the girl was gone. “Honestly.”
    “She seems a pleasant enough girl,” F. William Peterson ventured. He had warned my mother earlier that The Elms had gone downhill since the new ownership, but seemed now intent on making the best of the situation.
    “You know what you are?” my mother said.
    F. William Peterson winked at me with more good humor than I could have mustered in the face of such a direct and potentially malicious question.
    “A midwesterner,” she said. “And a midwesterner you will be until the day you die.”
    Actually, F. William Peterson was from Pennsylvania, but this fact did not, to her mind, invalidate my mother’s point. He was from the western half of Pennsylvania, “practically Ohio,” and you couldn’t grow up that close to Ohio without
being
Ohio. Ohiowas that pervasive. Next to Iowa, she couldn’t think of a worse influence. And only a midwesterner wouldn’t object to the term “folks” so loosely applied.
    “Do you think we can trust this midwesterner with our secret?” my mother said.
    “Yes, certainly,” I said, trying to imagine what this secret might be. I’d been telling her lies all afternoon and there was no way to know which one she’d fastened on as “our secret.” Whichever, it was clearly her intention to use “our secret” to make certain that F. William Peterson understood his role as official outsider at our table. We were confidants, conspirators, she and I, and we might bring him partly up to speed if he behaved himself.
    “With all the important research he’s involved with at the university, you must be wondering what Ned is
doing
here in Mohawk,” she said. “Even midwesterners have curiosities.”
    In fact, F. William Peterson
did
look curious to discover what absurdity I had concocted to explain my sudden appearance in the middle of the spring term. So, there was nothing to do but repeat what I’d told her—that I was doing research in the concept of social hierarchy among primitive societies for my postthesis in cultural anthropology. For this reason I had arranged to become a bartender in backwater upstate New York, where I would take notes and interview the denizens of local gin mills without their knowledge. Later, the whole thing would be written up and published by a university press. I hadn’t decided which, yet, but we were leaning toward Stanford, where my major professor had friends. Actually, I only began this absurd story. After a few sentences my mother took it up, embellished its already pure fantasy, embraced it as purest truth. The designation of Mohawk as a primitive society she accepted without hesitation, having always believed this to be the case.
    F. William Peterson nodded seriously. I think he may even have appreciated that the tale was not more absurd than it needed to be to explain my sudden appearance, my new employment, come Monday. When she was finished, F. William Peterson said, “Jesus,” almost reverentially.
    When it came time to order, my mother said, “I know what
we’re
having,” as if to suggest that tradition, telepathy, and geography had put us in perfect synch, our nearly seven-year separation no reason to presume changes in taste. “A filet mignon,” she told our young waitress. “Need I say, medium rare?”
    Not being telepathic, the girl looked grateful for this intelligence and even wrote it down. Then, mistaking our pecking order, she went the wrong way around and stood at the elbow of F. William Peterson. When he ordered the crab legs, my mother said, “Really?,” her voice rich with astonishment, as if he’d ordered a diet plate of cottage cheese and peaches. “Well, I suppose,” she went on, “if you actually
like
frozen fish.”
    “I like crab legs,” F. William