Arrayed on the Ladies' Day banquet table were yellow-green avocado pear halves stuffed with crabmeat and
mayonnaise, and platters of rare roast beef and cold chicken, and every so often a cut-glass bowl heaped with black
caviar. I hadn't had time to eat any breakfast at the hotel cafeteria that morning, except for a cup of over-stewed coffee so
bitter it made my nose curl, and I was starving.
Before I came to New York I'd never eaten out in a proper restaurant. I don't count Howard Johnson's, where I only
had French fries and cheeseburgers and vanilla frappes with people like Buddy Willard. I'm not sure why it is, but I love
food more than just about anything else. No matter how much I eat, I never put on weight. With one exception I've been
the same weight for ten years.
My favourite dishes are full of butter and cheese and sour cream. In New York we had so many free luncheons with
people on the magazine and various visiting celebrities I developed the habit of running my eye down those huge,
handwritten menus, where a tiny side-dish of peas costs fifty or sixty cents, until I'd picked the richest, most expensive
dishes and ordered a string of them.
We were always taken out on expense accounts, so I never felt guilty. I made a point of eating so fast I never kept
the other people waiting who generally ordered only chef's salad and grapefruit juice because they were trying to reduce.
Almost everybody I met in New York was trying to reduce.
'I want to welcome the prettiest, smartest bunch of young ladies our staff has yet had the good luck to meet,' the
plump, bald master-of-ceremonies wheezed into his lapel microphone. 'This banquet is just a small sample of the
hospitality our Food Testing Kitchens here on Ladies' Day would like to offer in appreciation for your visit.'
A delicate, ladylike spatter of applause, and we all sat down at the enormous linen-draped table.
There were eleven of us girls from the magazine, together with most of our supervising editors, and the whole staff
of the Ladies' Day Food Testing Kitchens in hygienic white smocks, neat hair-nets and flawless make-up of a uniform
peach-pie colour.
There were only eleven of us, because Doreen was missing. They had set her place next to mine for some reason,
and the chair stayed empty. I saved her place-card for her—a pocket mirror with 'Doreen' painted along the top of it in
lacy script and a wreath of frosted daisies around the edge, framing the silver hole where her face would show.
Doreen was spending the day with Lenny Shepherd. She spent most of her free time with Lenny Shepherd now.
In the hour before our luncheon at Ladies' Day—the big women's magazine that features lush double-page spreads
of technicolour meals, with a different theme and locale each month—we had been shown around the endless glossy
kitchens and seen how difficult it is to photograph apple pie à la mode under bright lights because the ice-cream keeps
melting and has to be propped up from behind with toothpicks and changed every time it starts looking too soppy.
The sight of all the food stacked in those kitchens made me dizzy. It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's
just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat-loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute
you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, 'I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound,' which always made me
feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.
While we were standing up behind our chairs listening to the welcome speech, I had bowed my head and secretly
eyed the position of the bowls of caviar. One bowl was set strategically between me and Doreen's empty chair.
I figured the girl across from me couldn't reach it because of the mountainous centrepiece of marzipan fruit, and
Betsy, on my right, would be too nice to ask me to share it with her if I just kept it out of the way at my elbow by my
bread-and-butter plate. Besides, another bowl of caviar sat a little way to the right of the girl next to Betsy, and she
could eat that.