“You gonna’ help him?” I asked my daughter as my husband set up the ironing board and iron beside the heap of wrinkled cloth napkins.
She watched him speculatively as he sprinkled them with water. “Naw. They’re for the Women’s Appreciation Banquet. He has to do it.”
She laid back in the lounge chair and opened her book.
“That’s right,” he tested the iron with is finger. “And I didn’t ask you to help.”
Saturday he left at 6 a.m. to pick flowers for the banquet tables. I shopped, read books and slept. He spread tables with linen tablecloths, laid out salad and dinner forks on crisply ironed napkins, arranged bud vases and decorated the walls with vintage clothes from the local shop. At 6 p.m. he came home long enough to change into a white shirt and dark pants.
I yawned leisurely, “Guess I better get ready, too.”
On the street outside the activity center, a doorman flagged down the women, “Drive up to the door, and go on in. We’ll park your car for you.”
As the maitre d’ of the evening escorted a friend to her table, she stopped, stared across the banquet room and sputtered, “That’s not a taped music playing! It’s live.” She stared at the trio of women dressed in concert black playing classical music on string instruments.
Our waiter seated us and presented the evening’s menu with a flourish found only in expensive restaurants — the kind where they want folks to wear not only shoes, but also a coat and tie. Fathers and sons, alias waiters in black cummerbund, brought goblets of lemonade to each woman.
“I love this. I can’t believe it,” the single mother of two sons kept repeating. She grinned and signaled for another drink. A four-course dinner of strawberry fluff salad, broccoli soup, Parmesan chicken and sorbet with mint were set before us, using gold edged plates and bowls.
A former Miss Arkansas played the piano and sang. Her mother shared nine rules for raising children. When she finished my daughter leaned over and whispered an astonished, “Mom those are the rules at our house.”
Two-and-a-half hours later, the magical evening came to a close – for the women. The men stayed to take down the decorations, strip tables of linens and wash china. I overheard one woman asking another, “Please, take your camera into the kitchen. I want a picture of my husband washing dishes.”
A usually busy women walked out in disbelief saying, “I didn’t have to do a thing before I came. I don’t have to help clean up. And now I’m leaving without carrying a dish.”
One wife pulled my husband aside, “You don’t know that this has done for our marriage – to have my husband plan, arrange and frustrate his way through the preparations for tonight and then serve my table tonight. Thank you.”
“That’s what this was all about,” he said.
At 10 p.m. he came home, collapsed into the lounge chair and left his white shirt in the hamper for me wash and iron.