Dinner Party
“Hello, welcome! You can put your shoes by the door. Just throw your coat anywhere.”
A gray cat walks quickly past you towards the office, as if hurrying to an important meeting.
“This is Laika. She’ll probably join us later.”
“Do you want some wine? We also have millennial water.”
It smells like fried mushrooms and soy sauce in the kitchen. The room is lit in red, orange, and pink hues from a pair of lights hanging over the wooden table, an IKEA orb on top of the refrigerator and a warm gradient strip that runs the length of the top cabinets. It’s a little hot, so you take off your sweater as you settle onto one of the tall stools. The Jai Paul cover of Crush is playing. You accept a glass of Pinot Grigio.
You introduce yourself to the others at the table, they congratulate you for having made it in just before the rain. You look towards the window where you can hear it driving against the glass, past an enormous slightly unstable looking plant with thin leaves the size of your palm.
“Oh yeah, that’s our avocado! It’s like, what, five years old at this point?”
“It’s been raining so much this spring, I’m tired of it.”
“This is normal though, it only ever gets nice at the end of May.”
There’s a dark blue plate on the table, arranged with egg halves filled with a pale yellow yolk mixture and a red oily sauce that you recognize to be Lao Gan Ma. You reach to pick one up and immediately the oil spills over your fingers. Someone hands you a paper towel which you take gratefully, wiping your fingers a little and using it to hold the messy egg. When you bite into it, the umami hits you first, along with a whiff of that very specific Lao Gan Ma smell, then your teeth sink through the creamy layer and into the slippery white part of the egg. You eat two halves, quickly, and then try to restrain yourself from taking another.
The conversation is about whatever Elon Musk was up to recently. You saw some tweets but didn’t know what they were referencing.
You pour yourself another glass of wine from the bottle near you and then dinner is ready. The table is crowded with blue Chinese rice bowls filled with different condiments: chopped scallions, crushed peanuts, a thick brownish-orange sauce, cooked bok choy and crumbled pieces of something that looks like meat but you figure probably isn’t. There are three jars of different types of chili oil as well. Non-matching bowls are being passed around filled halfway with steaming noodles floating in a little water. You’re encouraged to serve yourself, so you add some of the sauce first, swirling it around so that your noodles sit in a creamy orange broth. Then you add some of the meat-like mixture (now you recognize it to be bits of mushrooms), a few of the green stalks, some scallions and peanuts. You decide to taste it that point, mixing everything together with your chopsticks, which is good because it’s pretty spicy for you. You add only the smallest spoonful of Fly by Jing.
“Cheers!”, people are saying and you raise your glass. “To getting everyone together.” “To the summer!” “To chili oil!”
You notice that the cat has appeared suddenly, sitting like a statue at the center of another stool like yours, watching the meal silently but with great attention.
Everyone eats, dressing their bowls further between bites, passing the condiments around. The sauce is a little tangy and slightly bitter, but mostly spicy in a mouth-numbing way and rich with sesame paste. Your lips tingle so you gulp down water, which doesn’t seem to help. You eat a piece of plain bok choy. You decide to enjoy the tingling. You tip the bowl toward you to sip the rest of the broth and the bits of peanut and mushroom that have collected at the bottom.
“This is really good.” “Thank you!” “Yeah, this is great.” “I feel very spicy inside.” “Can you pass the scallions?” “Would you mind grabbing me a La Croix? Thanks.”
The cat has managed to squeeze herself between two people on the bench closest to her food bowl and now periodically reaches a paw up with claws half-extended, pulling on their clothes.
“Laika, stop it! Be nice to guests!” “Has she had dry?” “Yeah, but not wet.”
The cat’s eyes go wide as the refrigerator door is open. She jumps off the bench and stands on her back legs leaning against the counter, reaching one arm as high as possible toward the countertop and meowing dramatically. When the food is placed in her bowl, she makes audible licking and smacking noises as she devours it.
“Should we go to the softer area?”
People begin to move out of the kitchen, some take their half-finished glasses with them. You stack a couple of plates on top of each other and put them into the sink.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, we’ll do it later.” “Close the door though or Laika will do them all for us.”
In the living room, the couches are mostly full, so you sit on a sheepskin on the floor, leaning against a couple firm meditation cushions. The lights are low and Planet Earth is being projected onto the wall. You start to watch but you’re pretty tired and at some point notice that you’ve been lightly nodding off. What time is it? You stand up and stretch as you find your things.
“Thanks for coming!” “Of course, everything was so good, I had a really nice time.” “Get home safe.”
Outside, the rain has stopped. You head home.