I put my hand over my mouth so people can’t see how hard I am smiling.

Aha! My niece’s eyes flash and she laughs her brittle, scary laugh and says in a loud voice that makes everyone stop and look: “My dear, wherever did you get the notion that rarebit has anything to do with rabbits? For heaven’s sake! Is it because they both start with R? Please don’t tell me that’s what you think!”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—oh, I’m so sorry—”

But that is that. What’s done is done. The dish is withdrawn, and Wendy sweeps away, shaking her head. People turn back to their conversations. Wendy the Wronged. Kids today. No manners at all.

And where is Noah, Marnie’s savior and protector, during this little scene? I crane my neck to see. Ah yes, he’s gone off with Simon Whipple, his best friend, of course. I see him laughing at something Whipple is saying, in the adjacent poolroom, two colts stamping their hooves in delight over some incomprehensible, meaningless joke.

So I get to my feet and go fetch her. Marnie has two bright spots of color on her cheeks, and without the beret now, her blonde hair is loose and possibly the slightest bit tangled, and might have already been deemed beyond redemption by Wendy. Beach hair. Not society hair. Definitely not hair that the movers and shakers of Fairlane, Virginia, should have to see at their annual post-Christmas tea.

I bring her over to where I had camped out, and I pat the love seat next to me, and she sits down, pressing her fingertips into her temples. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m such an idiot, aren’t I?”

“Please,” I say. “No more apologies, my love.”

I can see in her eyes that it’s dawning on her precisely how many things she’s already done wrong. Not counting the rarebit, she’s also wearing the wrong kind of clothing for this little soiree. Black skinny pants! A tunic top! In the sea of the de rigueur red cashmere sweaters and coiffed, sprayed hairdos and Santa Claus earrings, Marnie MacGraw with her lanky, bangs-in-the-eyes, tangled yellow hair dares to wear a gray shirt—without even one sparkly piece of jewelry to acknowledge that Christmas is the holiest of holidays and the post-Christmas tea is the best part of Christmas! And her shoes: turquoise leather cowboy boots! Fantastic, of course. But not high-society boots.

I take her hand in mine to soothe her and also to surreptitiously check her lifeline. When you’re an old woman, you can reach over and touch people since you’re harmless and invisible most of the time.

“Pay no attention to Wendy,” I whisper to her. “She missed the class on manners because she was attending two extra courses on personal intimidation.”

Marnie looks down at her hands. “No, I was the awful one. I should have just taken the rarebit.”

“The fuck you were,” I whisper back, and that makes her laugh. People find it hilarious when an old woman says fuck; it must break every law of nature when we swear. “You were trying to politely decline eating a cute, furry animal and got embarrassed for your trouble.”

She looks at me. “But—but it’s not made of rabbits. I guess.”

“Well, it sounds like it is. Some people still call it Welsh rabbit. And what? You’re supposed to research all the dishes of Northern Europe in preparation for coming to a Christmas tea? Give me a break!”

“I should have known.”

“Look, whose side are you on? Yours or Our Lady of the Hoity-Toity Mansion?”

“What?”

I pat her hand. “You’re delightful,” I say. “And the truth is that my niece is a bit of a stick. In fact, look around at this whole crowd. Normally I don’t like to bring down the forces of evil on myself by being critical, but just look at all the fake smiles and sour faces around here. I’m going to have to take a bath with a wire brush to get all this negativity off me when I leave. And I suggest you do the same. Bunch of damn hypocrites eating the Welsh rarebit whether they like it or not. And you know what else?”

“What?”

I lean toward her and stage-whisper, “It could be made of Welsh rabbit turds and they would still eat it. Because Wendy Spinnaker is their overlord and leader.”

She laughs. I love her laugh. We sit in a companionable silence—to anyone else’s eye, we’re nothing more than two strangers who find themselves making polite small talk because they’ll soon be related. But I am bursting with the need to tell her everything. Of course I begin badly because I am so out of practice when it comes to small talk.

“So, tell me about you,” I say in a rush. “Are you doing everything you want as an unmarried person before you hook your life up to this guy’s life?”

She raises her eyebrows slightly. “Well, yes, I have a good job, and I’ve . . . done stuff. Gone places. You know. I’m nearly thirty, so it’s time I got ready to be a real adult. Somebody who is settled down.”

“Settled down. That sounds god-awful, doesn’t it?”

“I think it sounds . . . rather nice. I mean, if you’re in love with the person, then it’s a good thing that you get to stop all the running around and make a home together.” She looks around the room, probably searching for anything else we could talk about, and then her eyes land back on me. “By the way, I love what you’re wearing tonight.”

What I’m wearing is a purple velvet vintage evening gown that I bought at a thrift shop in Brooklyn. It has little glass beads sewn in circles all over it, and it shows actual, certifiable, measurable cleavage. Not that my cleavage is anything great; truthfully, it looks like a sack of peach pits.

“It’s my showstopper dress,” I tell her, and then I lean over and whisper, “I am ridiculously proud of the girls tonight. The fact is, I had to tie them up in this wired-up bra to get them to stand up enough for this, but I figure they could give me a last hurrah. After this—no more bras ever. I promised them.”

“I love the colors. I didn’t know what to wear, so I put on this gray shirt that I thought would go with anything, but it looks so boring compared to everybody else.” She leans over and laughs. “I do not think I’ve ever seen so many red sweaters in one room.”

“It’s the Christmas uniform here in Fairlane, Virginia. I’m surprised they didn’t issue you one at the town line.”

Just then a high school student bearing a tray of drinks comes by, and Marnie and I both select a red concoction. It’s my fourth, but who’s counting? I clink my glass into hers, and she smiles. I can’t stop looking at her eyes, which seem so much like my own that it’s disconcerting. My hairline is tingling just a little.

“So,” I say, “when you get married, do you think you’ll get to keep on being your wonderful free-spirit self?”

Her eyes widen. “My free-spirit self?” she says and laughs. “No, no, no. You’ve got me all wrong. I’m actually looking forward to settling down. Buying a house, having kids.” She smiles. “I think a person needs to have a life plan.”

I take a moment, sigh a bit, and reach into my neckline to give the girls a gentle readjustment. “Maybe that’s where I went wrong. I don’t think I ever followed a life plan for even one minute. Tell me this: Is it worth giving up your own free spirit for?”

“A life plan is just security. Commitment.”

“Ah,” I say. “That stuff. Now I see why I didn’t go in for it. Anytime anybody mentions security like it’s a good thing, I get the willies. And commitment. Ugh!”

“Huh. Well, did you ever get married?”

“Oh God yes. Twice. Almost three times, actually. First time was to a professor with the illustrious name of Wallace Elderberry, if you please.” I bend over closer to Marnie and put my hand on hers and smile. “He spent his one wild, precious life on Earth researching the life cycle of a certain kind of green-headed insect, and we traveled to Africa and collected specimens of hard-shelled things so bizarre you wouldn’t even want to think about them for longer than twenty seconds. Can you imagine? And when we got home, I realized I’d had enough of bugs to last me my whole life.” I drop my voice to a whisper. “And, if you want to know the truth of it, Wallace Elderberry himself was starting to look like a big cockroach to me. So we got a divorce.”

“Wow. Husband turned into a cockroach. Sounds like Kafka.”

“God, don’t you just love it when people manage to bring up Kafka in a routine post-Christmas conversation?”

“Well, you started it,” she says. “What happened to the second husband? What did he turn into?”

“The second time I got married against my better judgment—which you should never, ever do, by the way, just in case you’re contemplating it—”

“I’m not,” she says.

“Of course you’re not, but it’s an easy mistake a lot of people make. Anyway, that marriage was to Rufus Halloran, a legal aid lawyer, and we set up shop in Brooklyn in a little storefront office in the 1970s. Brooklyn was a mess then. So we did a lot of work for runaways and homeless people. That sort of thing.”