“Oh. Well, I'll have the apple cobbler then.”
None of the rest of us wanted any apple cobbler and definitely not any zabaglione. The waiter went away. Wanda talked. Eberhardt lusted. I fidgeted. Kerry drank. The waiter came back and put a dish of something in front of Wanda and went away again. Eberhardt took his eyes off Wanda's chest long enough to look at the dish.
“Say,” he said, “isn't cobbler supposed to have crust?”
“It's got crust,” Wanda said.
“Where?”
“There. See? Right there.”
Eberhardt looked. I looked too. What she was pointing at was a little piece of something floating upside down in a brownish goop, like the corpse of some small creature floating on its back in a bog. Then Wanda, the ghoul, proceeded to eat it.
When she was finished she fired up another Tareyton, covered us all with a haze of smoke, and told us about her sister in Minneapolis who was a hairdresser and who worked with “a bunch of faggots, they even got 'em back there.” Then she gave us her opinion of homosexuality, which was not very high. “You ask me,” she said, “that Anita Bryant had the right idea. There oughta be laws against fruits. I mean, the whole idea of them sticking their things into each other—”
“Wanda,” Kerry said.
Wanda looked at her. So did I. It was the first word she'd spoken in twenty minutes.
“Why don't you shut up, Wanda,” Kerry said.
Wanda said incredulously, “What?”
“Shut up. You know, put your fat lips together so no sound comes out.”
Eberhardt said incredulously, “What?”
“You've got diarrhea of the mouth, Wanda.”
I said incredulously, “What?”
Everything stopped for a few seconds, like a freeze frame in a movie. We all sat there staring at Kerry. She was sitting stiff and straight, very calm and self-possessed, but her eyes said she was crocked. I also knew her well enough to understand that she was seething inside. Her kettle, as the saying goes, had finally boiled over.
Wanda made a wounded noise, shuffled around in her chair to break the tableau, and said like a siren going off, “You can't talk to me like that! Ebbie, tell her she can't talk to me like that!”
Eberhardt glowered at Kerry. “What's the idea? What's the matter with you?”
“Nothing's the matter with me. The matter is with your fiancée and her big mouth.”
“Listen, I don't like that kind of talk—”
“Oh, why don't you shut up too, Ebbie.”
I tried kicking her under the table, but she squirmed her legs out of the way. “Come on, folks,” I said like a cheerful idiot, “why don't we all just relax? Kerry didn't mean what she said. She's just—”
“Fed up,” Kerry said, “That's what I'm just. And the hell I didn't mean it. I meant every word of it.”
Wanda pointed a trembly finger at her. “You never liked me. I knew you never liked me right from the first.”
“Bingo,” Kerry said.
“Well, I never liked you either. You're nothing but a … a … cold fish. A scrawny cold fish.”
Kerry's face took on a mottled hue. “Cold fish?” she said. “Scrawny?” she said.
“That's right—scrawny!”
“I'd rather be scrawny than a top-heavy blimp like you.”
“Oh, so I'm a blimp, am I? Well, men like big boobs on a woman, not a couple of fried eggs like you got.”
Kerry sat absolutely still for maybe three seconds. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up. The rest of us popped up too, like a bunch of jack-in-the-boxes, but Kerry was already moving by then, out away from the table. My first thought was that she was about to stalk off in a huff, but I should have known better; Kerry isn't the type of woman who stalks off in a huff. When I realized what she was really going to do I yelled her name and lunged at her. Too late.
She caught up the bowl of soggy spaghetti from the sideboard and dumped it over Wanda's head.
Wanda let out a screech that rattled the windows. Then she scrunched up her face and segued into wailing hysterics. A strand of spaghetti slid off her nose like a fat red and white worm, dropped onto one enormous breast, and wriggled down its ski-run length, gathering momentum as it went. Some more strands dangled off her ears and around her neck like so much art-deco jewelry. All that spaghetti and all that dripping sauce and all those tears gave her the look of a comic foil in an old Marx Brothers movie. I managed, just barely, to repress an insane urge to giggle.
Eberhardt was pawing at her with a napkin and his hands, trying to clean her off; all he succeeded in doing was pushing some of the spaghetti down inside her blouse, which only made her yowl the louder. He murdered Kerry with his eyes. Then he murdered me with his eyes. Then he smeared some more marinara sauce into Wanda's chest.