Free Moo by Jane Smiley

passersby were carrying what weapons. Not being safe was very time-consuming, more so in that she felt less safe than she was, which meant she gave it more attention than she needed to, which meantthat her sense of danger was accompanied by a nagging sense of wasting time that could be used for better things. Friction, a drag on her energy, something she had to work herself up to, whether she felt like it or not.
    Conditions at the university were not precisely the same, but anytime you went among whites all day long, you couldn’t help feeling exposed to looks, attitudes, even sometimes gestures, and if you went around with the other black students, there were longer, more speculative, more aggressive looks from the white students, often met by the equally aggressive looks of your companions. Keri was never taxed in this way. Probably, given statistics that Mary was well aware of, Keri was not as safe as she felt, but it was hard not to envy the natural joy of the safety that she did feel, the freedom it allowed her to throw back her head and laugh, kick up her leg, look square into the eyes of the nearest guy, to abandon herself to the good time that came to her as a beautiful white blond woman, a good time that she didn’t have to seek, like Sherri, or probe, like Diane, or resist, like Mary herself. There was reason to envy her, and standing off by herself, more unexposed than usual, Mary could admit that she did envy her.

10

Same Night, Different Party
    H ELEN L EVY GAVE a dinner party every weekend. She had big copper pots with silver lids hanging above the six-burner range, and large brightly colored bowls and stacks of big platters and two soup kettles, four-gallon and eight-gallon, and a table with three leaves that could seat up to twenty, and she had windows all along the length of the tiled kitchen counters that looked out upon her herb garden and her vegetable garden and her edible-flower garden. Instead of her former husband, who had cost her a lot of money, she had a man who helped in the garden who cost much less. She had a desk in the kitchen. She had cookbooks in French and Italian, including Vietnamese and Moroccan cookbooks in French and Ethiopian cookbooks in Italian. She had written one book in the old days, when one book was enough for a full professorship and since then she had confined herself to gustatorial research into recipes, kitchen techniques, and cooking equipment. She would never publish again, but most assuredly, given her root cellar, freezer, and food dryer, neither would she perish.
    Guest lists came to her in dreams, and this week she had dreamed up seven possibilities—Cecelia Sanchez, who needed to be introduced around; Timothy Monahan, who seemingly did not need to be introduced to Cecelia; Ivar Harstad, whose relationship with Helen was as discreet as it was long-standing; Dean Jellinek, who lived next door and worked in Animal Science; his girlfriend, Joy, who was about five feet tall and as big around as a baseball bat (Equine Management); Margaret Bell, whom Helen was growing more and more fond of the longer they sat on that horrible tenure committee; and Dr. Bo Jones, whose relationship with Helen had ended fourteen years earlier, but who loved the bouillabaisse Helen was serving, and whose wife, Carla, Helen’s good friend, was away visiting their daughter and her new baby. Only Dean and Joy formed an actual pair, so only they were having trouble getting along. One of Helen’s principles was never to invite more than one couple for every six singles, ever sincethe birthday party she had given for her former husband where each of the four couples invited had squabbled on the road and turned back, leaving Helen and Howard to eat all of the osso buco and the chocolate fondue by themselves, an extended interaction that had led them into a fight, as well.
    Helen didn’t mind if a dinner party wasn’t successful. There were so many of them, after all, and the food was always