After Club

Last night was my turn to have club at our house.

That's what my mother always called it, whether it was her women's study club, the educational philanthropic club, or the music club. And when she said she was having club at our house, hooo-boy! My siblings and I needed to be ready to work hard without talking back.

We vacuumed and dusted and washed windows and hid everything that made the house look like actual people lived there, while Mom whipped up cream puffs and petit fours and all manner of delectable desserts. The dessert plates (with the special indentation for a coffee cup with a uselessly tiny handle) were pulled down from storage and washed.

Then we either disappeared upstairs when the ladies arrived, or (when we were old enough) we served desserts and refilled those ridiculous coffee cups.

These days hosting club is much less formal. When groups meet at the House on the Corner, I try to beat back some of the dust but there's no deep cleaning or window washing involved. Most of the time my friends get their dessert on a paper plate, and likely as not the dessert is purchased from the local coffee shop.

Last night, though, I tried a new recipe (justification for buying a springform pan) and served it on antique plates. I started collecting this pattern shortly after we got married, but my habit of buying a piece here and a piece there when I had an extra $15 for a goblet meant I had never accumulated enough to actually use them. Then a couple of weeks ago Husband and I were roaming around an antique store when I stumbled on a cabinet full of plates, tumblers, dozens of pieces I didn't even know existed. I carried a couple to the front counter.

"You know, there's no call at all these days for that pattern," the store owner said genially. "I'll give you as much as you want for a dollar a piece."*

At that price, even knowing that in the not-too-distant future an auctioneer will be yelling "SOLD" to a bid of pennies per piece, we came home with two boxes of the special dishware. It felt like a moment of elegance to serve club dessert to my friends on these plates, even though the coffee was served in regular mugs because we may be elegant but we are not idiots.

This morning I'm feeling a bit like the alstroemeria on the dessert table that suddenly and inexplicably folded halfway through the meeting. Tired, but still blooming in the lingering echo of laughter from a house full of delightful women.

My mom would know just what I mean.



*To my delightful women who were here last night: Yes, I know I told you they were a quarter a piece. In my self-congratulatory memory of the purchase they were, but when Husband asked me (in a slightly horrified tone) if I had admitted they were only a dollar a piece, my memory almost audibly corrected itself. And I informed him that women are much more impressed by a bargain than by the actual purchase.