The Risk Pool

Peterson said.
    Then the girl made her third mistake. “They’re frozen by law, ma’am,” she said.
    My mother pointedly ignored her. “Oh, why not get something
good
,” she urged F. William Peterson. “This is a
special
evening. Don’t spoil it by trying to save a dollar.”
    “I hadn’t meant to,” F. William Peterson said, and he then changed his order. A filet mignon, medium rare would be fine.
    It made my mother happy. She took his hand and said, “There, Mr. Ohio, you’ll have a good dinner despite yourself.”
    “Sir?” said the waitress, at my elbow now.
    “Crab legs,” I told her. “I’ll have the frozen crab legs.” Then I added, to a mortified F. William Peterson, “We can share.”
    My mother’s face registered nothing at first. Then it came apart, and the hand holding her second martini began to shake perceptibly. Finally, she too became aware of it. “If you two fine gentlemen will excuse me,” she said, pushing her chair back.
    F. William Peterson jumped up to aid her, but she would have none of it. “Sit
down
, for heaven’s sake. You’d think we were at the Ritz,” she said, all too audibly. Then she spun on her heel.
    She got halfway to the bar, then stopped in the geometric center of the dining room, where it must have occurred to her that she did not know where the ladies’ room was, that it could be anywhere, that she hadn’t a clue.
    “Wouldn’t it be just scrumptious if tonight could last forever?” she said, less than forty-five minutes later.
    We were drinking liqueurs and coffee. She had ordered an Amaretto and I’d said that sounded good to me, and F. William Peterson said him too, and we were a loving trio again. I’d ended up sharing my crabs legs with both F. William Peterson and my mother when her steak came well done. Normally, she’d have sent it back, but in the ladies’ room she’d rearranged things in hermind and returned defiantly good-natured, claiming that the company of two such charming gentlemen was far more important than the way some old dead cow was prepared. She’d even admitted that she’d never eaten crab legs, that they had always seemed a lot of trouble, and that they tasted wonderful. Her newly discovered goodwill did not extend to our waitress, however, and she refused to believe there was such a thing as a law governing crab legs.
    Sitting there sipping Amaretto, I remembered something I’d forgotten out in the desert—that things always worked better when my mother got her way. After all, there was nothing wrong with filet mignon. And there was nothing wrong with Amaretto. And if you thought you were going to enjoy something else even more, you were wrong, because she’d see to it that you didn’t. I hadn’t even tasted the crab legs. “There’s only one thing in life your mother wants,” my father had often remarked, “her own way.” And somehow now, I realized, I’d suddenly come to share his perverse unwillingness to
give
her her own way if it could possibly be avoided. I’d probably been doing it in little ways since I could remember, thwarting the will of this woman who derived so little pleasure out of life and seldom wanted more than the occasional public demonstration of loyalty and love, a small enough gift, since the gallery she was playing to was primarily in her own imagination.
    And you had to admire her resiliency. Somewhere, probably in a private stall in the ladies’ room, she’d not only composed herself, convinced herself that things were not as bad as they’d seemed, refused my betrayal tragic significance, but actually talked herself into believing that the evening was everything she’d hoped it would be. Because by the time she told F. William Peterson that she wished our special evening would never end, she was telling simple, literal truth, her eyes so glazed over with emotion that it was impossible for her to see our slack-jawed amazement. The whole bloody mess could not have concluded soon enough to suit either of her charming male companions, but my mother had found peace, and she didn’t even object when F. William Peterson tipped the waitress as if he had recognized in her nervous demeanor his own long-lost illegitimate child.
    My mother, who seldom left the house, and never drank at home, was none too steady by the time we returned to the flat, but she seemed to think that with my help she could negotiate theback stairs, and she dismissed F. William Peterson at the curb with a