Free White People by Allan Gurganus

suspected—before any other living creature in this murmurous house—that something was about to give.
    He sauntered to a halt, stood under her table, stared—proprietary and enraptured—up at the area (dare I go through with this grisly sequence and its raunchy aftermath, my life?) between the young Helen’s barely opened knees.
    Mikado’s flat face was mostly nose, very wet, chill as the jellyish aspic now gleaming on a kitchen counter. Cataracts had silvered over both his popping goldfish eyes. Smell, swollen to exciting new dimensions, remained the one great jolt and consolation left him. He nuzzled near enough and quite almost against the silk to get a better sample scent of something rich and decidedly awry here. The placing of his wide cool snout upon her shinbone made Helen, who’d just spread her cards, shudder with a little flinch. The subtlest sort of pelvic twist, then a serene smile of recognition: “Oh, Mikado,” she whispered to her geisha fan of cards. For this was a society where ladies knew the names of other ladies’ gardeners and maids and lapdogs.
    Next … into this party cubicle of china shop small talk and play-it-safe decor, Nature lunged fairly bullishly. Intent on clobbering mere taste, it went right for a trigger spot and let loose one deep-seated wallop. It happened Now.
    The Peke got hit by falling waters, about a bucket’s worth. He yelped and scrambled down the hallway through a grove of table legs and female feet, skidding to safety under a favorite sideboard’s shadow. Once there, Mikado collapsed and was panting when Helen, mouth a perfect O, bellowed forth in some voice totally unladylike and three full octaves deeper then her usual musical lilt, “Oh my Gawd, I’ve stawrted!”
    Cards scattered atop the table, some teetered onto her steep lap, fell to dampened Persians. Her three tablemates stood, overturned the Samsonite. With it went a coaster full of lipsticked butts. Table to table, downstairs then up, news darted at the speed of sound. Three women moved to help Helen stand but she’d stretched out all her limbs. She was less seated on the chair than propped against it, semi-rigid as a starfish, muttering some Latin from her convent days.
    First they dragged her toward the velvet chair. But Chloe, who’d just spent a fortune having that piece reupholstered, dissuaded them by backing, beckoning, through the kitchen’s swinging portholed door. The cluster veered in there and, for want of a better spot, laidHelen on the central counter, under a panel of humming fluorescent tubes. Her shoulder bumped a wooden salad bowl filled with party mix (pretzel sticks, nuts, crackers, sprinkled salts, and Worcestershire sauce) and sent this shooting across linoleum’s fake brick. Other dishes toppled, too. Pink and green mints rattled everywhere, the silver compote clanged toward a corner. One red aspic fell, splitting to sheeny smithereens before the Spicer twins took charge and set the other party foods along shelves or on the floor around the waist-high counter where Helen lay, distended.
    Friends bustled to hold her hands, trying to dry her skirt with paper toweling. Pat Smiley quickly phoned the hospital for advice, forgetting to request an ambulance. Others listened in on two upstairs extensions, scolding her when she hung up. Then someone just as flustered dialed the fire department. Irma, my godmother, the movie reviewer, a short sensible woman who’d seen more films more times than practically anyone, now did what they would do in movies at such moments, on sea voyages, at Western waystations: she put water on to boil and fetched some string plus a bottle of Jack Daniel’s (still in last year’s Christmas gift box). She spread what seemed to be a sheet under my poor mother, rocking her from side to side. Helen, chewing knuckles, apologized to Chloe. “Really ruined your party. If I’d only guessed … Richard will be absolutely livid. Oh, this is