Dyan Sheldon - Away for the Weekend

“You think I should go back and change?” whispers Beth. She doesn’t want to stand out. Ooh, who’s the girl who didn’t dress for dinner? “Maybe I’m too casual.”

“Too casual?” Delila gives her a you-really-take-the-last-piece-of-cake look out of the corner of her eyes. “You look like a pilgrim. All you need’s a white handkerchief on your head.”

“I have a skirt and blazer my mom got me for my grandmother’s funeral.” That might be better. It almost looks like a suit. “I cou—”

“Listen,” says Delila. “You have got to stop worrying like you do. It’s not really conducive to your mental health – or mine.” She shakes her head. “Man, I’m surprised you ever leave the house in case an air conditioner lands on your head.”

It’s falling pianos that Beth usually worries about.

“Here’s the rule,” Delila tells her. “You don’t worry about nothing until it happens. After you break your leg – that’s when you start worrying about how you’re going to climb Mount Everest on crutches. Not before.”

“I can’t help it if I have a sensitive nature.”

“Sensitive nature, my Aunt Winnie’s goitre,” says Delila, eloquent as only a poet can be. “What you have is a sensitive mother.”

Beth’s phone makes the grunting sound that means it’s getting another message from her sensitive mother.

“And as for that instrument of torture…” Delila glares at the small, black rectangle in her room-mate’s hand. If Delila had magical powers, Beth would be holding a handful of ash. “You don’t want to be rude, do you? Sitting there texting your mom in the middle of supper.”

The last thing Beth wants is to be rude.

“Right,” says Delila. “So put it on vibrate and put it away.”

Born to take orders, Beth does as she’s told.

They’ve been seated at table 4, with Professor Cybelline Gryck, a leading authority on the Norse sagas. Professor Gryck is the chief organizer of both the competition and the weekend.

At the sight of the group at table 4, Beth’s temperature drops and her stomach clenches tighter than a miser’s fist around a nugget of gold. “I’m getting a bad feeling,” she whispers to Delila. One of the reasons for this bad feeling is Professor Gryck herself, of course. She is a tall, large-boned woman whose stern and rather formal appearance intimidates Beth, suggesting as it does that she’d take off points if you forgot to cross a “t” or dot an “i”. Another reason is the three girls with her, all of whom, even from across the room, exude the confidence of dictators. Forget the interviews, they all look as if they’re already at Harvard and are attending a sorority mixer. They certainly don’t look as if they go to high schools – not like the one that Beth attends anyway.

Delila continues to pull her forward. “ You have a bad feeling? So what else is new? The stars come out at night?”

Professor Gryck and the girls are in earnest conversation – nodding and gesticulating and no doubt reinventing postmodern literary theory – but, as if they’re not just brilliant but psychic as well, all four heads turn to look at Beth and Delila while they are still several yards away. Professor Gryck waves graciously, but the girls look Beth up and down with smiles as thin as piano wire and noses pointed towards the ceiling – as if they can tell that her mother is a cleaner; that Beth has never read Proust; that she has deodorizers in her shoes.

If she were alone, Beth would probably apologize and excuse herself to go the ladies’ room, to deep breathe and try to think of a few really clever things to say before she returned to the table. (Either that or simply sob and throw up.) But she is not alone, of course. She is with Delila Greaves. Delila doesn’t care how thin the smiles are or how high the noses. Henry VIII couldn’t intimidate Delila. As her grandfather Johnson would say, those girls are going to be just as dead as Delila when the time comes, so what’s to be so arrogant about? She gives them a big you-can-have-the-leftovers grin. She repeats everybody’s name in her let’s-make-sure-they-hear-me-in-Bel-Air voice – Esmeralda … Aricely … Jayne – asks them where they’re from and what they write, and shakes their hands as if she’s glad to meet them. Somehow, when they’re ready to take their seats, Beth is sitting between Delila and Professor Gryck.

Beth doesn’t want to sit next to Professor Gryck, who makes her feel even more nervous than people in authority usually do. She’d rather take her chances with Jayne, the playwright, Aricely the poet, or Esmeralda the non-fiction writer. She’s going to have to go to the restroom. And very quickly. She pushes back her chair, and knocks her fork to the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Beth mumbles to no one in particular, and bends down to retrieve it at the same moment as Professor Gryck. “I’m so sorry.” There doesn’t seem to be any blood on the professor, but she touches her own forehead just to make sure. “I really am sorry. I—”

“So you’re Beth Beeby,” says Professor Gryck. “I was hoping I’d bump into you – though not, perhaps, literally.” Even her smile looks serious. “I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your story.”

The phone in Beth’s pocket starts to vibrate as the bad feeling starts to go away. “You did?”

“Immensely. I couldn’t help thinking of Don Delillo. Would he happen to be an influence?”

And that’s how the evening begins. They talk about writers they admire, novels they love, poems that have inspired them, their favourite books when they were children. Beth’s love of writing being greater than her fear of failure or falling short, she manages to hold her own against Aricely, Esmeralda and Jayne, all of whom seem to have swallowed whole libraries and committed them to memory. The only person who mentions names that Beth has never heard of is Delila, but that’s all right because none of the others have heard of the names she mentions either.

“Diane di Prima?” says Aricely. “John Trudell? Are you sure they’re poets?”

“Sure as I am that you’re sitting there telling me that they aren’t,” says Delila.

It happens that Professor Gryck, too, suffers from allergies and agrees that if there is even the slightest chance that Beth’s meal has been contaminated with nuts it should be sent back. When Beth has a sneezing fit (probably because of something the napkins were washed in), Professor Gryck asks the waiter to bring her paper napkins from the bar. When Beth feels a twinge over her right eye, Professor Gryck fishes a box of painkillers from her bag.

After the meal, Professor Gryck gives a welcoming speech and introduces the men who have come on behalf of the sponsors – a company that makes sports clothes, a soda company and a company that has made cheap hamburgers more globally accessible than water. “There was a time,” says Professor Gryck, “when international corporations wanted to teach the world to sing, but now they’re far more interested in getting it to read and write.” Everyone claps.

By the time the evening ends, Beth has enjoyed herself so much that it isn’t until they’re walking to the elevators that she remembers Lillian Beeby, sitting at home thinking of things that might be going wrong.

“I’d better call my mother.” Beth slows down to get out her phone. “Tell her what a good time I had.”

“What did I say?” says Delila. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

But this, unfortunately, isn’t quite true.

It’s late. In many parts of the world, this is the hour when people who are out go home, and people who are at home go to bed. But not in Los Angeles, of course. Here, the night is bright not with a million stars but a million lights, most of them in colours never seen on a rainbow, the streets busy and the roads busier. Which means that there are plenty of heads to turn as the candy-apple-red sports car weaves almost miraculously through traffic at a speed that should (but doesn’t) have several patrol cars behind it, sirens screaming. Not only is it a vintage model rarely seen even in Hollywood, but although it isn’t raining its wipers sweep back and forth (because no one knows how to turn them off) and something that once grew in someone’s front yard is caught in the grill.