Diane Davidson - The Cereal Murders

The wind swept sudden, white torrents between the pine trees near the house. During the college advisory dinner we’d gotten at least another four inches. Late October in the Colorado high country often brought these heavy snowfalls, much to the delight of early-season skiers. Early snow, like a winning season for the Broncos, also helped yours truly. Wealthy skiers and football fans needed large-scale catered events to fuel them on the slopes or in front of their wide-screen TV s.

The coffeepots on the counters gurgled and hissed. Headmaster Perkins had given me a dire warning about the old house: any sudden electrical drain would bring the wrath of blown fuses down on us all. For safety, I had brought six drip pots instead of two large ones, then had spent forty minutes before the cocktail hour snaking extension cords around the kitchen and down the halls to various outlets. The parents had found the old house – with its Oriental rugs, antique furnishings, and higgledy-piggledy remodeling – charming. Clearly they had never had to prepare a meal for eighty in its kitchen.

After the cord caper, my next problem was finding room for salad plates and platters of roast beef as they teetered, askew, on buckled linoleum counters. But the real challenge had come in making Yorkshire puddings in ovens with no thermostats and no windows through which to check the dishes’ progress. When the puddings emerged moistly browned and puffed, I knew the true meaning of the word miracle.

From the dining room came the ponderous throat-clearing again. I nipped around the corner with the last row of dumplings as the headmaster began to speak.

“Now, as we prepare these youngsters to set forth into the fecund wilderness of university life, where survival depends on the ability to discover dandelions as well as gold.

Spare me. Headmaster Perkins, who wore tweeds no matter what the weather, was smitten with the extended metaphor. I knew. I had already had to listen to a slew of them at parent orientation. Arch’s sixth-grade year in public school had started badly and ended worse. But he had survived Elk Park Prep’s summer school to become a new student in the school’s seventh grade. To my great delight, a judge had ordered my wealthy ex-husband to pay the tuition. But as Audrey Coopersmith would soon discover and add to her list of complaints, like most single mothers, I was the one duty-bound to attend parent meetings. Already I had heard about “our trajectory toward the stars” and “harvesting our efforts” whenever things went well, or when they didn’t, “This is a drought.”

Now Headmaster Perkins intoned, “And in this wilderness, you will all feel as if you are navigating through asteroid fields,” and held a pretend telescope up to his eye. I sighed. Galileo meets Euell Gibbons.

I finished serving the desserts, returned to the kitchen and with Egon Schlichtmaier, one of my faculty helpers, poured the first eight cups of regular coffee into black and gold china cups. German-born and bred, olive-skinned Egon possessed a boyishly handsome face and a muscular physique that threatened to burst out of his clothes. The school newsletter had stated that the newly hired Herr Schlichtmaier was also highly educated, having just finished his doctoral dissertation, “Form, Folly, and Furor in Faust.” How that was going to help him teach American history to high school seniors was beyond me, but never mind. I told the muscle-bound Herr Doktor that cream, sugar, and artificial sweetener were on the tables, and he whisked out with his tray held high like a barbell. Without missing a beat I poured eight cups of decaffeinated coffee into white and gold china cups. I hoisted my tray and marched back out to the dining room in time to hear the headmaster direct his audience to “… galaxies in a universe of opportunities.”

I came up to the table where my other usual paid helper, Julian Teller, sat looking terribly uncomfortable. Julian, who was a senior at Elk Park Prep, was a vegetarian health-food enthusiast. He was also a distance swimmer, and sported the blond whipsawed haircut to match. Living with Arch and me the past four months, Julian earned his rent by cooking and serving for my business. Julian was, like Greer Dawson, exempt from service tonight because of the importance of the meeting. I had tried to sneak supportive smiles to him during the dinner. Each time, though, Julian had been involved in what looked like agonizing one-way conversations. Just as I was about to ask him if he wanted coffee, he extricated himself from the woman who had been chatting to him and half stood.

“Did you change your mind? Do you need help?”

I shook my head. It was nice to hear his concern, though. Faced with platters of roast beef, Julian hadn’t had much to eat. I had offered to bring some tofu bourguignon that he had left in the refrigerator the night before, but he had refused.

Julian sat back down and shifted his compact body around in the double-breasted gray suit he had bought from Aspen Meadow’s secondhand store. While helping me pack up for the dinner, he had recited the ranking of the thirty seniors in the class. Most small schools didn’t rank, he assured me, but most schools were not Elk Park Prep. They all laughed about it, he said, but the seniors still had one another’s academic statistics memorized. Julian was second in his class. But even as salutatorian, he would need bucks in addition to smarts to get a bachelor’s degree, as the threadbare suit made plain enough.

“Thanks for offering,” I whispered back. “The other pots are almost ready and – “

Loud hrr-hrrs rattled from the throats of two irritated parents.

“Do you have regular coffee?” demanded Rhoda Marensky, shaking her head of uniformly chestnut hair dyed to conceal the gray. She still hadn’t forgiven me for the Columbia comment.

I nodded and plunked a black and gold cup down by her spoon. I dislike giving caffeine to people who are already irritable.

Julian raised one eyebrow at me. I worried instinctively about how his close-clipped haircut would fare, or rather how quickly the scalp underneath would freeze, in the blizzard raging outside.

“Are you serving that coffee or are you just thinking about serving it?” The harsh whisper came from Caroline Dawson, Greer Dawson’s mother. Fifty-five years old and pear-shaped, Caroline wore a burgundy watered-silk suit in the same style as her daughter’s. While the style favored athletic Greer, it didn’t look to advantage on Caroline. When she spoke sharply to me, her husband gave me a meek, sympathetic smile. Don’t worry, I have to live with her. I placed a white cup at Caroline’s side with the reluctant realization that all too soon I would be catering to this same group of people again. Maybe the decaf would mellow her out a little.

“Students moving from high school to college are like – ” The headmaster paused. We waited. I stood holding the tray’s last coffee cup suspended in mid-descent to the table. ” – sea bass… swimming from the bay into the ocean … .”

Uh-oh, I thought as I put the cup down and raced back to the kitchen to pour the rest of the coffees. Here we go with the fish jokes.

“In fact” boomed the headmaster with a self-deprecating chuckle into the microphone that came out as an electronic burp, “that’s why they’re called schools. right?”

Nobody laughed. I pressed my lips together. Get used to it. Two more college advisory dinners plus six years until Arch’s graduation. A mountain of metaphors. A sea of similes. A boxful of earplugs.

When I came back out to the dining room, Julian was looking more uncomfortable than ever. Headmaster Perkins had moved into the distasteful topic of financial aid. Distasteful for the rich folks, because they knew if you made over seventy thou, you didn’t have a prayer of getting help. The headmaster had squarely told me before the dinner that such talk was as much fun as scheduling an ACLU fund-raiser at the Republican convention. Tonight the only adult not wincing at the word need was the senior college advisor herself. Miss Suzanne Ferrell was a petite, enthusiastic teacher who was also advisor to the French Club and a new acquaintance of Arch’s. I checked Julian’s face. Lines of anxiety pinched at the sides of his eyes. At Elk Park Prep he was on a scholarship that had been set up on his behalf. But the free ride ended after this year, salutatorian or no.