Open House Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons and the Search for a Room of My Own

Excerpt fromOpen House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Ownby Patricia J. Williams. Copyright 2004 by Patricia J. Williams. Published in November, 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. I The Fourth Wall It was the dinner from hell, I'm not sure why I went; I was trying to be polite, I think. I wanted to be open-minded, to show myself an engaged citizen, a lover of the debating arts. Besides, it began so innocently. "My wife and I like the kind of trouble you've been stirring, Miss Williams," he said, with a smile and a challenge. He had an avuncular, wizardy twinkle, very Albus Dumbledore. It made me feel feisty and smart like Hermione Granger. Theylikedmy kind of trouble. But let this be a lesson: When a woman of my great dignity and years loses her sanity and starts imagining she's one of Harry Potter's magical little friends, you can be sure that the cosmic gyroscope is wobbling off its center . . . It was only after I'd accepted the invitation that the host, a courtly old-school conservative, added that he wanted me to come because he thought it would be interesting to have me "take on" his friend J.B., an aggressive, much-published neoconservative with a reputation for sheer meanness. I should have pleaded my dead grandmother right then. But instead I got dressed up, bought a bottle of overpriced but understated red wine, and presented myself at their doorstep, feeling vaguely penitent. My host and his wife were rich old conservatives, no middlebrow barbecue-throwing conservatives they, and so the dinner was more of a dinnerparty, small and formal, with four staid couples in tasteful attire. I came uncoupled, unhitched, free-floating as a dandelion puff, but they had thought ahead. They paired me with the head of the local Federalist Society a states' rights organization whose positions on legal issues fly as far to the opposite extreme of everything I believe in as is possible under the cosmos. He was young; passionately Confederate; energetic; sharp of mind, tooth, and tonguethe kind whom no one would mistake for a vegetarian. He stapled himself to my side and proceeded to grind me down over drinks: Had I ever heard of the great legal philosopher J. L. Austin? (It was a very condescending question. It's rather hard to graduate from law school without having heard of J. L. Austin.) Was I a Christian? (God knows . . . ) Explain why liberals hate everyone. (Huh?) Over the first course, a delicate chilled soup of pureed apple and watercress, my host started gnawing at me from the other side. What year had I graduated from law school? 1975? Ah, yes, he was teaching at Yale back then and never did he encounter a worse group of students. The affirmative action students were not just badly prepared, they really didn't have the ability, you know . . . He used to readThe Nation. When did I start writing columns for them? 1997. Ah, well, then, no wonder he hadn't read me; that was the year he canceled his subscription. More potage? The main course was veal, pale and pink as a baby's bottom. "J.B. likes his meat," laughed his champagne-suited, champagne-colored wife. J.B. himself was all glistening knives as he slashed into he innocent flesh. He was a tall, hearty man, very much the gruff colonial administrator, straight-talking and speed-talking right on past the stop signs of ordinary conversational exchange. He was full of plans for the world; he knew just what was what. Head Start was a complete waste of tax dollars. Affirmative action was corrupt. If civil rights activists were so keen on integrating they'd stop trying to glad-back hand their way into jobs they weren't qualified for and go back to the ghetto where the real problems were. Genes were everything, you either had it or you didn't. Environmentalists were fanatics. Young black meWilliams, Patricia J. is the author of 'Open House Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons and the Search for a Room of My Own', published 2004 under ISBN 9780374114077 and ISBN 0374114072.