Free Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie

night and does the math.
    “Ignore my husband,” said the Democrat wife. “He’s a right-wing maniac.”
    “And you, my lovely wife, are a knee-jerk liberal.”
    “You keep talking like that, and it’s going to be a long time before you stick your right wing in my knee jerk.”
    We laughed.
    “I guess this dinner is officially off the record,” I said.
    “Here’s to brutal honesty,” the single white woman said and raised her glass of red. As she drank, she looked at me. She regarded me. In three seconds, she examined me, asked herself questions about me, answered them, and defined me. She smiled. She thought good things.
    “And who are you brutally honest for?” I asked her.
    “Pro-choice, all day, all the way,” she said.
    Yet another pretty liberal from Seattle! Her black business suit probably converted into a rainproof tent. She wore eyeliner, lipstick, and three-inch pumps at dinner, but she likely wore stupid T-shirts ( George can’t spell W! ), blue jeans, and huge scuffed boots at the office. She’d probably run twenty-three marathons and climbed Mount Rainier sixteen times, and had great calves and extraordinary upper-body strength, and most certainly had scored 1545 on her SATs and earned some highly challenging and profoundly useless degree from an Ivy League chop shop. She probably still had a cassette of the Smiths stuck in her car stereo: “Meat is murder! Meat is murder! Meat is murder!” I wanted her to fall in love with me.
    “I fight for the Second Amendment on weekdays,” said the Republican wife, “and the First Amendment on weekends.”
    “Boeing and Microsoft,” said her Republican husband.
    “Boise Cascade,” said the other Republican husband.
    “Sierra Club,” said his Democrat wife.
    “Wait, wait,” I said. “So one of you fights for trees and the other fights against trees?”
    “No, no,” he said. “We make the paper she writes on to file lawsuits against the paper we make.”
    A well-rehearsed joke, but funny nonetheless.
    “You know,” the single white woman said, “I’ve never understood politically mixed marriages.”
    “Oh, Lord,” the Republican husband said. “Here we go again.”
    “No, I’ve never understood. Tell me about your marriage.”
    “It’s a good marriage,” the Democrat wife said. “We fight forty-nine percent of the time and hump-and-bump the other fifty-one.”
    Funny and crass! How much had she drunk before she came to dinner? How many alcoholic Democratic women can you fit into a lightbulb? I don’t know, go ask Teddy Kennedy.
    “No, really,” said the single white woman. “I mean, don’t you ever wonder how a hard-core Republican like Mary Matalin can be successfully married to a hard-core Democrat like James Carville?”
    “Oh, don’t bring those cannibals up,” said the husband. “We always have to talk about those headhunters.”
    “Aren’t you two cute?” said the wife. She mimicked the idiots she’d heard so often before: “‘You’re, like, the Mary Matalin and James Carville of Seattle! Come on, argue for us, argue for us!’”
    “Sometimes it feels more like theater than marriage,” said the husband.
    “Well, you guys made that choice when you married each other, right?” said the single white woman. “You were Democrat and Republican when you met, right?”
    “I didn’t mean our marriage was theater.”
    “All right, but what is your marriage? What does it mean?”
    She wasn’t going to let it go. She was a storm maker! I wanted her to rain down on me!
    “You know what I love about this restaurant,” said the other Republican husband, trying to change the subject. “I love that you can smoke. What good is French food without a cigarette?”
    “Oui, oui,” said his wife. “I’ve got an unfiltered Camel in one hand and a fork in the other.”
    “But is it the correct fork?” asked the Democrat wife.
    “Let’s see, I have my salad fork, first-course fork, second-course fork, dessert