Today we had one of Iris's friends over after school. "Can I tell you the story of how my mom met my dad?" asked Iris's friend as they ate pizza left over from Lola's birthday party.
"Let me tell you the story of how Carole met Anton!" (Iris is rather domineering with this friend).
"Okay."
"Well, Anton went to this thing called the Burning Man Festival. He went with friends and with couches. He drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to get there. And there was Carole from San Francisco! She drove across the Golden Gate Bridge! And she was camping with her brothers.* And Anton and his friends forgot to bring any food. So Carole went over, and she took a bag of pretzels."
I really wanted to hear the rest of this, but alas, the phone rang at this point.
* I have no brothers, just one sister. I have no idea why Iris would refer to mysterious "brothers" of mine. In reality, I was camped with my first husband, my erstwhile law partner, my ex-husband's best friend, the semi-autistic coworker my first husband may or may not have been cheating on me with, the ex-h's best friend's German journalist friend, who wrote an article about me published in some big German newspaper but refused to give me a copy of it, and a woman the ex-h's best friend was hoping to screw. This colorful encampment was full of outsize personalities and veiled hostilities. Although, come to think of it, maybe it's not so bad if she continues to think I was camping with some "brothers" I dug up somewhere for the occasion; that's a lot less weird.
The person who really "forgot" to bring any food was the Evil Coworker. When we stopped at the grocery store in Reno so my law partner and I could pick up some last minute perishables, the E.C. chose to stay in the parking lot, flirting with my then-husband. It transpired that she had come out for a Labor Day camp-out bringing only a bag of low-fat biscotti and a partially eaten bag of low-fat tortilla chips. Nothing else. I refused to cook for her, as I had laid the law down to this entire assembly ahead of time that I was going on my frigging vacation and I was not going to be anyone's servant and that the normal attitude of "oh, Carole will feed us; she's always cooking" was NOT going to apply. So for meals, I would whip up some gourmet fabulosity over a camping stove (no one cooks like me in the wild; I usually pack sundried tomatoes, Kalamatas olives, etc..). My law partner and I would eat this, sitting in camp chairs like human beings. My then-husband, furious with me for not offering any to his wretched Evil Coworker whom HE invited without my permission, would skulk around, eating his without sitting down and joining us, shooting me black looks and being agitated. The husband's best friend and his German sidekick would eat those terrible dehydrated, just-add-water camping foods. Then they would offer the Evil Coworker their left-overs, and she would clean their plates, "like a dog" I observed cattily. Talk about a restful, peaceful vacation. I filed for divorce three months later.
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