The UPS truck was loaded down with saute pans, salmon poachers, vegetable mills, asparagus steamers, tarte pans, whisks, garlic presses, stock pots, mortars and pestles, demitasse cups.

In the little town where I lived so unhappily and happily for so many years, the town I call Coraville, a day came when everyone “went gourmet.” People had subscribed to Gourmet for years.

The glossy magazine slid through slots in perhaps a dozen doors.

Few of us who subscribed did much more than look at the photographs of hams glaceed with chaud-froid sauce or tartes aux this-or-that fruit—pommes or figues or framboises. The magazine intimidated us. Not only did the recipes demand unfamiliar techniques and ingredients, but the appointments —the china and porcelain, silver, the august flower arrangements, crystal, napery — were beyond us. None of us owned tureens shaped like pheasants or tongs for sugar cubes (none of us had sugar cubes!) or Baccarat crystal. When luscious taffy-blond Mandy, one of the Tolliver girls (the Tollivers were among Coraville’s oldest families) married Knox, whose father’s father founded Coraville’s bank, they got so many wedding presents that packages had to be trucked in two moving vans from the church hall to their new house on the hill. Photographs of Knox, his father, grandfather, uncles and great-uncles — showing rodentine teeth slightly bucked and retrograde chins — hung on the bank’s walls. Anyway, Mandy did rather conspicuously own and use a Reed & Barton silver tea and coffee service, complete with sugar bowl and adorable round-bellied cream pitcher. We all wanted one. But you couldn’t get it with Green Stamps, so I, at least, gave up longing.

I can’t tell you precisely when we went gourmet. Certainly, by the bicentennial year, Mandy and my neighbor Marilyn, she of the dark eyebrows that grew almost together over her nose, had been taken up by a bachelor college professor who “cooked gourmet.” But when —1974? 1975? — the professor began inroads into Mandy’s and Marilyn’s proud all-electric kitchens, I’m not sure. I do know that in 1976 a “gourmet” couple, driving a foreign car, moved to town from Boston and planted radicchio and arugula, neither of which we’d ever heard of or tasted. I know that on the hot August Saturday night in 1977 when poor bloated Elvis had been dead only a few days, culinary progress had been such that our set was eating a meal that tasted as much of the names of dishes — ala this-and-that — as of food itself.

But back before that, through the early to mid-’70s, calendars in our little town might as well have been flipped to 1952. In Coraville, we were living lives the way lives were lived in the ’50s; we were still eating ’50s food.

Out beyond our valley, women read Mastering the Art of French Cooking; we enrolled in cake-decorating classes in a room at the back of the more successful of the town’s two hardware stores. We pumped out colored frostings onto vast sheet cakes made from Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker mixes. I could write pages describing sheet cake landscapes, George Washington and Abe Lincoln portraits, the Easter Bunnies, Mickey and Minnie Mouses, Santas and sleighs pulled by reindeer that we painted.

We clipped Women’s Day and Family Circle recipes and reverentially followed directions for meatloaf gussied up with Campbell’s tomato soup and Lipton dehydrated onion soup mix. If we felt like gilding the old lily, we might concoct “Poor Man’s Beef Wellington.” When the meatloaf was done, we’d take the loaf from the oven, upend it onto a meat platter, and plaster the loaf — on top and along its steaming, fat-dripping sides—with rehydrated Ore-Ida instant mashed potato flakes. Accoutered with bright-green frozen peas, carrot coins, and gravy made with the meatloaf drippings boosted with Gravy Master, this was an attractive weekday meal. Your kids and husband ate it, no complaints.

Our notion of a foreign meal was La Choy chicken chow mein. We thought canned black olives exotic; if almond slivers were poked into the olives’ hollows, we’d likely say, “What will they think of next?” Garlicky food was exotic (with the exception of garlic bread), as were wines other than Gallo. Game hens were exotic. Eggs Benedict was exotic. And “exotic” was simply another way of saying “hi-falutin’ ” or “gilding the lily” or “making silk purses from sows’ ears,” all terms of opprobrium. And it wasn’t that we weren’t dazzled by what we saw when we turned Gourmet’s heavy pages, we just never wanted to be seen as taking on airs.

We gave dinner parties. These parties tended to have themes. Terrilyn Jo, a stocky bottle blonde with piggy blue eyes and a heart of gold, one year went all out with a dinner that celebrated football season’s opening. For place cards she bought toy footballs. She took toothpicks, construction paper, and Elmer’s glue and made tiny pennants on which she wrote our names. That done, she stuck the pennants into the toy footballs. Terrilyn Jo’s husband. Bud, Jr., a wide-shouldered ex-college lineman and our up-and-coming real estate magnate, mixed drinks at his four-stool bar, complete with refrigerator and sink, the whole setup ordered all the way from High Point, North Carolina. To go with drinks, Terrilyn Jo whirred up cream and cheddar cheeses in her Waring blender (we were nuts over blenders). She shaped the cheeses into a life-size football and coated the football with paprika for color. Dessert was devil’s food sheet cake frosted green for grass and white for yard lines. Toothpicks made goal posts.

Food focused on a grand piece of meat — a baron of beef, canned hams stuck with pineapple rings and cloves, a bronzed turkey tufted ’round with parsley sprigs. Fancy desserts were standard. A favorite was “Black Forest Cherry Cake” — three-layer chocolate pudding cake cemented with canned cherry pie filling and frosted over with chocolate and stemmed maraschino cherries.

These dinners gave us ladies opportunity to wear party dress. We didn’t have many chances to show off our decolletage or creamy shoulders and pale arms with their oval vaccination scars or the watered silks and brocades and beaded velvet dresses we bought, usually on sale, in the nearest city. We made our men wear suits, and sometimes we got together and ordered them boutonnieres.

Maybe little romantic affairs took place. Certainly, at these parties, gazes across tables were sought out and met. Footsie was played. Marilyn said these events reminded her of all-girl summer camp, when on Saturday nights, boys from the boys’ camp came across the glittering lake to dances. “I used to kiss a kid nicknamed Snap,” she whispered, “until my teeth ached.”

I can still see in my mind’s eye Bud, Jr., grasping the fragile wrist of the wife of the owner of the hardware store where we took our cake-decorating classes. The store owner’s name was John, and he was a plain-faced, tall and stooped, soft-spoken, hardworking fellow with whom my husband, Jack, had fished since they were boys.

John’s wife, Sally, was tiny and anorectic. The biggest thing on her was her big brown eyes. We knew, because she told us, that she hated fat on anybody’s arms or legs and that when she ate too much, she put her finger down her throat. Even though she was 30 and had two children, she didn’t look older than 12.1 remember seeing her naked in the dressing room at the pool and being shocked that she had pubic hair and such a wide, flowering bush at that.

Now, looking back to that evening when Bud, Jr., off the back of whose hands vigorous black hairs grew, grasped Sally’s pencil wrist, I guess that wasn’t the first time he touched her. I guess, now, they’d already made love, probably when Jack and John were out on the river. I guess that Bud had lifted up Sally’s childlike legs to go deeper in her, that he’d kissed her belly with the same avidity that overcame him when he chewed rare roast beef and juices rolled down through the cleft in his strong chin.

After dinner, the host turned on the stereo (and because the hostess sent out her children to spend the night with grandparents or children of another guest, we didn’t worry about waking babies). We stacked the turntable with the Stones’ Beggars Banquet and Sticky Fingers and James Brown’s “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine” and prepubescent Michael Jackson crooning “Ben.” Carole King’s Tapestry went on, as did Marvin Gaye’s “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” Simon and Garfunkel, Sam Cooke, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, and always Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Polk Salad Annie,” and for slow-dancing, “Love Me Tender.”

Among men, my husband, Jack, was the best dancer. Put on the Doors’ “Light My Fire” or the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” or anything by James Brown and his wide, size-eight feet enacted intricate tattoos and his arms pumped fast as a busy oil rig. Pelvis pushed up against his partner, he danced oozingly slow to the likes of the Sam Cooke tune “You Send Me.” He mouthed Sam’s “You-ooo-oo.” His big popping frog eyes closed, as if in sleep, and his hand wandered soothingly along the knob on his partner’s spine.

Winter, when temperatures fell below zero, we kept windows shut. What with this food and dancing, the men tended to let gas. We pretended we didn’t smell what we smelled. Marilyn said, “That’s just life, isn’t it? Farting.”

Marilyn was what, then, you called a “big drink of water.” Five ten and built big — big breasts, wide hips, long legs — when Marilyn got a few drinks in her she got to doing what she described as the “boogaloo” and the rest of us called “the dirty boogie,” an arrhythmic bump-and-grind of such an athletic quality that you expected to hear her tendons whine. Sweat poured down her rapt face. Some nights, Marilyn got so hot she pulled off whatever beaded or sequined or velvet garment that was gripping her body and danced in nothing but her half-slip and the industrial-strength bra whose straps cut her shoulders.

Jack, who’d gone through school, from kindergarten on, with Marilyn, had at least minor hots for her. You could tell by the way they danced to Marilyn’s favorite, Creedence Clearwater doing “Proud Mary.” Jack’s buggy frog eyes fastened onto Marilyn’s gold-flecked irises. Their mouths slackened, tongue tips flickered. Their pelvises enacted ravenous intercourse. Jack thrust toward Marilyn for a few bars, Marilyn, taking each thrust as if it were a boxer’s blow to the gut. Then they reversed, and Marilyn thrust toward Jack and Jack, lids demurely fluttering, mouth puckered, appeared to take Marilyn’s thrusts deep into his bowels. In those ’70s Coraville living rooms, carpets rolled against walls, overstuffed couches pushed back, Marilyn and Jack — who was a good three, four inches shorter than Marilyn — put on quite a little show.

I recall, during the Watergate hearings, when Jack was drunk on vodka Terrilyn Jo froze in her deep freeze, that in mid-dance, he stopped, grabbed Marilyn’s naked shoulders and dug his face into the deep pool between Marilyn’s breasts and lapped up her sweat. I wasn’t amused, and you’d have thought Marilyn’s husband, Bennett, a shy eye-ear-nose-and-throat man, would have put a stop to Marilyn’s antics. If he had any responses to her dancing, his long horsy face didn’t betray them. He never danced, except on one unforgettable evening.

Bennett was immune to music, dull beyond conversational burnishing. He leaned against walls along with the rolled-up carpets, nursed a drink, and inveigled men into conversations about furniture refinishing. Jack, who went to school with Bennett too, said that Bennett, at 30, was precisely as he was in first grade. But Bennett wasn’t unkind, and he asked us ladies about our children, and when we said, “Well, Sarah fell off her bike and banged up her knees,” he inclined his head in a listening posture. Next time you saw him, he’d ask, “How’s Sarah’s knees?”

That night Bennett did dance was the night of one of our annual Halloween parties. Bennett came dressed in Marilyn’s spaghetti-strapped silver lame sheath; a flamingo-pink feather boa; wobbly, overrun high-heeled pumps (spray-painted silver by Bennett); and a wig of loose blond curls that he and Marilyn bought, used, at a Goodwill in the nearest city. Marilyn made up Bennett’s face, even gluing in black false eyelashes along his upper and lower lids. No way did he make a plausible woman. Thick, rough black chest hair rose out of the silver sheath. Muscles bulged along his arms, and a blue tattooed anchor from Bennett’s Navy days was fading along his right biceps. Not even the lashes, crimson lipstick, turquoise eye shadow could transform his long face and strong chin into feminine mien. But while most straight men of Bennett’s type, when they wore women’s clothing, made fun of themselves as women, Bennett was grave, solemn, almost respectful about his gender change. He walked gracefully from living to dining room, carefully took his seat at the dinner table. He picked at the Halloween carrot-and-raisin salad. He chatted quietly with the women.

Marilyn came as a dance hall girl — fishnet stockings, red satin miniskirt, black bustier. Mandy and Knox came as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Pinky. Mandy sewed on the outfits for weeks. She got the idea from her playing cards, the backs of which had Old Master paintings. Sally was Peter Pan, a perfect green-suited replica of the peanut butter jar label’s Peter Pan; Sally’s husband, John, came in a tall black hat and old black suit and said he was a chimney sweep, a service he was thinking of adding to the hardware store. Bud was his usual cowboy, holstered with real guns, and Terrilyn Jo a cowgirl. Jack and I wore bunny outfits — long johns, big tail made from yarn, and long ears Jack constructed by bending wire and stretching white flannel over the wire. We attached the ears to flannel hats I sewed up. We tied the hats under our chins, and we marked black whiskers on our cheeks with eyebrow pencil.

When the three-layer chocolate cake with orange frosting overlaid with white-icing spider web was eaten and rugs rolled back and Diana Ross put on, needle dropped onto “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Bennett walked right up to Jack, put out his big hand, and looking down into Jack’s bunny face, huskily asked, “Shall we dance?” Jack acceded with an obvious blush. Diana wasn’t even into “to keep me from getting to you” before you could see Bennett had learned something from Marilyn. He stood his ground and pumped his pelvis. Jack, bunny ears askew, pumped right back.

I hurried into the kitchen. So did Marilyn and Terrilyn Jo. Even with the dishwasher surging, you heard Diana. Marilyn and Terrilyn Jo and I stood next to stacked dirty dessert plates, Marilyn’s big breasts pushed up out of black satin and me in my bunny suit. “I just don’t know what gets into Bennett,” Marilyn sighed and dabbed her finger into orange frosting left on the cake stand.

Terrilyn Jo, who from where we stood could see Sally in her Peter Pan outfit, wrapped up in Bud, Jr.’s cowboy arms, added, not unpleasantly, “Men.”

I loved the dancing. I remember one winter evening, shuffling pelvis-to-pelvis on a four-tile spot in my dark kitchen with Bud, Jr., to Elvis ululating through “Crying in the Chapel.” The moonlight, outside, struck white snow heaped outside along the side yard. I rested my cheek against Bud, Jr.’s wash-and-wear shirt and pressed against his flinty erection while Elvis sang that his tears were tears of joy, he knew the meaning of contentment now, he was happy with the Lord. The evening’s dances had broken through Bud, Jr.’s deodorant and left him smelling the way chicken noodle soup smells in school cafeterias, and from somewhere in the dining room, I figured Terrilyn Jo was watching with a broken heart. 1 didn’t care.

Our set tried enlarging itself by inviting new couples. Most of these couples came to town when the husband acquired a job at our local state college. A cluster of turn-of-the-century, white-pillared brick buildings at Coraville’s north edge, the college started out in the late 1800s as a female seminary. During the 1910s, after Coraville’s great destructive fire, the state turned the seminary into a teacher’s training school. Only after World War II, when the GI Bill began filling classrooms, did the college offer a full liberal arts curriculum. The college, alas, attracted only students and teachers wanted by no other institutions. It brought to town a series of academic waifs and strays, misfits, malcontents, and miscreants. Among professors, some were dumbly grateful for a job and others resented their stay with us.

We began including a sculptor and his wife from California. They were among the grateful and almost at once bought, near the college, a clapboard house that needed paint. The sculptor, Brett, taught art education. His wife, Evangeline, wrote poetry. They were new parents, and Brett, I remember, modeled a series of clay heads of his owl-faced baby son. They were a quiet, kindly couple. She wore no makeup; he dressed in work shirts and jeans and had a clean-shaven open face. Brett and Evangeline came to several Saturday night dinners before offering to host their own.

The moment Brett opened the door, which he’d painted red, I sensed trouble. The overwhelming aroma was that of garlic and a meaty hot wind of what I took, correctly, to be lamb. From a stereo, an unfamiliar music played. Brett smiled. “From Zorba the Greek, the bouzouki. ”

Dark hair flying behind her, Evangeline offered dolmas, a heap of wrinkled brown olives, feta, and round loaves of still-warm bread. I venture that none of us had ever seen a dolma. A terrible silence fell, making louder the frenetic bouzouki player’s efforts. Jack, who always said that having grown up on his mother’s cooking, no food frightened him, popped a dolma into his.mouth and urged Bennett and John to try one. So we got through the drinks hour, eating salty, wrinkled olives and harsh, salty cheese, sipping retsina, which tasted, Marilyn whispered, “like roofing tar smells.”

Evangeline led us through dinner. Avgolemono — the lemony-scented chicken soup adrift with rice; Greek salad with lettuce, red onion rings, cucumbers, more feta, and more wrinkled brown olives; and the entree — two Pyrex baking dishes of moussaka. “Eggplant,” Evangeline said, when asked what was in the moussaka, and “ground lamb and cinnamon and garlic.” Not one of us could so much as pronounce moussaka, and as I looked fearfully around the dining table, lengthened by adding card tables, I noted that our set — faces still unlined, hairs ungray, marriages intact, affairs few:— looked baffled.

Evangeline served baklava for dessert and ouzo and dark, bitter coffee. The needle went back again on the bouzouki tunes.

Even before we sat down to dinner, I noted shelves stacked with poetry volumes. I was thrilled, because I read poetry but never dared say so. At most, women in our set read new novels, Book of the Month Club offerings, bestsellers like Deliverance or Love Story, although I cannot recall once, among our crowd, ever any discussion of any book. So while 1 ate moussaka and forked in lemony, green spinach, I imagined winter afternoons when Evangeline and I, line by line, would eviscerate Lowell’s “Skunk Hour.” I returned to my fantasy of the silver tea service, saw my fingers reach out for the teapot’s silver handle. After dinner, while Evangeline moodily wrapped herself in a flowered challis shawl, I said that I too read poetry. Evangeline looked me over. I saw myself as she must have seen me — fingernails bitten to the quick and feta cheese dribbled on my taffeta skirt. So I didn’t, as I’d intended, invite her to bring her baby for an afternoon.

Not long after the fall of Saigon, a dark-bearded bachelor philosophy college professor scuttled about town tacking up hand-lettered signs: GOURMETCOOKING CLASS! WOMEN ONLY! Pierre his name was, and he claimed to be French. “But Huguenot, Huguenot, not Catholic,” Pierre said, placing his damp white palm in yours. Then he tossed back his head of dark, oily hair and giggled. Sweat dribbled down his high forehead and spit flew when he talked. He grew up in South Carolina, but to hear him speak, his accents, reminiscent of public television British, you’d never know he’d lived a day in the old Confederacy. When he wasn’t chattering, he stood alone at rooms’ far reaches; he drew down his mouth into a dreary, sour expression and watched us.

I often saw Pierre evenings when I did my grocery shopping.

He bounded about Safeway, polished licorice-black oxfords tapping. The black wool Johnny Cash-like coat that he wore well into June flapped and flew behind him. Pierre stopped by meat counters, almost empty by evening of hamburger, pork chops, picnic hams, T-bones and chuck roasts and chicken. He rang the bell for the butcher, a Missouri Synod Lutheran who lost his left index finger while dressing out an elk. Typically, Pierre asked the digitless Lutheran for brains, livers, testicles, and gizzards of lambs, calves, and chickens. One night the Lutheran asked me, “Is that guy queer?” 1 said I didn t know. Then the Lutheran rolled his toothpick between his lips, said, “He sure makes himself overfamiliar with the box boys is all I know.”

Charitable folk said Pierre was a lost soul. Not me. I said to Jack that Pierre was a pretentious jerk. He sensed I didn t like him. At a party, one of the New Year’s Eve gatherings to which everyone was invited, he stood so near I felt his breathing in and breathing out and smelled his musty body and the bergamot he used to oil his hair. He whispered, “You’re a burnt-out case, aren’t you?” Then he walked away.

I wasn’t all that happy. But I was getting by.

Marilyn and Mandy kept waiting for someone else to join Pierre’s cooking class, but no one did. Pierre agreed to teach them anyway. Pierre soon insinuated himself into our monthly dinner parties. And on evenings when Mandy and Marilyn were hostess, Pierre planned their dinners, shopped with them for the groceries, even had them drive him (he didn’t drive) to the nearest large town to acquire wines and cheeses.

By the bicentennial year, when town fathers ordered the planting out along Main Street of red and white petunias bedded with blue ageratum, Pierre had commandeered Marilyn’s and Mandy’s dinners. During cocktail hour, Pierre supervised serving hard breads that he baked and antipasti. “The anti-,” Pierre hissed as he proffered platters arranged with pickled cauliflower, white beans, marinated asparagus, salami and pepperoni and cheeses, “is from Italian for ‘before’ and the -pasto from Latin pastus, past participle of scere, to feed.” Also served before dinner were Pierre’s pates, aged by wrapping in tea towels drenched with ports and brandies. Pierre’s bread was rock hard and looked, my husband said, “like roofing tiles.

I never tasted the pates, so fearful was I of getting sick.

Pierre favored Italian. He guided Marilyn and Mandy in preparation of pastas and gummy risottos. We had sauces littered with bitter artichoke and unfamiliar, dangerous-looking mushrooms and rabbit. These rabbits were aged, Pierre told us, by hanging in his back bedroom. American meats, he said, lacked sufficient aging to soften muscle and acquire flavor.

As Marilyn or Mandy brought dishes to the table, Pierre ascended from his chair, lifted his wine glass, and, spittle airborne as he spoke, screeched, “Piece de resistance! Salutto our chef! Salut! Salut!" Strange new wines showed up. Pierre lectured. “An abstemious little white,” he’d say, pursing his lips. Or, “So robust, round, full-hipped this red is.” I was reminded of the occasional program at the city library to which I took Rebecca and Sarah. Our local travel agency owner turned library lights low and showed films of foreign countries and spoke, from notes, about “Chartres, Gothic Glory” or “Wild Alaska, Our 49th State.” Not even we ladies were interested in Pierre’s discourses, and the men sat glumly silent, longing, I suspect, for bloody beef, canned ham, Tom turkey, and talk of real estate and fishing.

Pierre passed demitasse “Espresso!” he warned us. “Not ex-presso.” The espresso was made in a hissing, temperamental contraption that the hostess’s husband lugged from Pierre’s house to his. Bennett didn’t mind, but Mandy’s husband, Knox, sucking on his rattish teeth, grumbled about having to load up “this little fairy’s Mr. Coffee.”

The oddest of these Pierre-influenced dinners was the meal Pierre hosted at his boxy rental. The night was chilly late-spring weather when you laid out old sheets over sprouting lettuces. Pierre greeted us, dressed in his customary black vest over white shirt. Fine sprays of blood crisscrossed the filthy white apron he’d tied around him. I’ve got quite a sniffer—my nose detects distant gas leaks, grass fires, a woman’s perfume on a male lapel, a hard-boiled egg that’s been in the refrigerator too long. My nose went nuts when Jack and I walked through Pierre’s front door. The most intense smell was that of lavender, lamb, and garlic. Pierre’s oven held two legs of lamb, marinated, he told us, in wine, garlic, and lavender, the latter acquired from Provence, where lavender, he assured us, was a crop hovered over by elderly crones.

Before our meal, Pierre served his roof tile bread and rank pate and treated us to Callas singing “Un bel di, vedremo” and the terrifying Turandot aria, “In questa reggia. ” Pierre let the record play all evening.

I sought out Pierre’s bathroom. I wanted to be alone. To get to the bathroom, I had to pass through a lightless, bedless bedroom. At the room’s far end, I saw a garment rack of the type pushed through New York’s garment district. From that rack hung three small bodies that I recognized as rabbit and a ham, from which slices had been cut, and a half-dozen long sausages. Exercise mats covered the floor, and atop the mats, I saw barbells and a jockstrap.

Roll around in your mouth, if you will, English Lavender aftershave and meat more mutton than lamb, and you guess why I didn’t easily fork in Pierre’s lamb. I sat stiffly and swigged red wine so sour my sinuses ached. I don’t recall dessert. Next day I kept an ice bag on my forehead and huddled in bed. I wept to Jack that I’d never go back to Pierre’s house, and I never did. I said 1 was sick of this gourmet carrying-on, and I was.

But in fact our gourmet revolution had only begun. During that bicentennial year, the aforementioned couple from Boston — Carter and Belva — moved to town. They came because Belva accepted a job in our little college’s anthropology department. In no time, they bought a house near the college and had a hot tub built where the back porch had been. They hacked out evergreen foundation plantings and planted decorative kale. They had a gas stove installed. They ordered from back East something they called “recycling bins” and showed us how they separated out cans and bottles and newspapers, each into its own container.

Belva was tall as Marilyn and pounds thinner, her figure rubber-band stretchy and small-breasted. She pinned her fiery auburn hair atop her head with tortoiseshell chopsticks. Not only was she the family breadwinner, but she did the yard work and could be seen that bicentennial summer, skin pale in skimpy halter and shorts, stacking a wood-sided trailer bed with branches she lopped from trees.

Carter, tall and slender too, with long sandy-blond hair caught up in a rawhide tie, didn’t work. “Never,” he said, pleasantly, “have I worked. At least not at a job. I am more interested in becoming than in doing.” Carter did shopping, cooking, washing, and ironing, and what he called “child care” and we called “baby-sitting.” When you saw Carter at the store, the couple’s two redheaded sons were with him. He kissed and petted them, as if they were girls and he were their mother.

Carter read books that we did not yet know to describe as “new age” (he touted a book titled Living Simply Through the Day), he meditated before a burning white candle, and he wrote daily in what he called a “spiritual journal.” An Egyptian ankh on a heavy silver chain dangled in his chest hair. Carter played no sports, knew nothing about football, and expressed horror at our husbands’ tales of hooking bass and winging mallards. Rather than the faded blue jeans our husbands wore about the house, Carter dressed in dashikis and muslin smocks that hung over baggy shorts or, in cold weather, woolen Army trousers (although he’d not served in any armed force). On his feet, he wore Earth Shoes and Swedish clogs. He eschewed underwear, noting that Jockey shorts lowered the sperm count.

Carter and Belva’s mutual passion, “other,” they said, “than sex,” was gastronomy. In no time, Pierre was practically living at Carter and Belva’s house, and their sons were calling him “Uncle Pierre.”

So socially ascendant did Carter and Belva prove themselves that they instantly became a seventh couple in our six-plus-Pierre. Seated tailor-fashion on our carpets, they sighed at the loss of Boston and said how happy they were to have found us. They led conversation to recycling and ecology, Tantric yoga, European youth hostels, and open marriage, which, they assured us, their marriage was. They tsk-tsked us for use of insecticides on our gardens and power lawn mowers for mowing grass.

Belva exerted her charms upon Bennett, leaning forward to listen to his drawled tales of oils used for rubbing down old tables. She took Jack out on the dance floor and outdid his pelvic thrustings. Carter turned to us women; he praised our glittering dress and our skin. He asked what sign we were and read our palms. He ran his hands through Terrilyn Jo’s stiff, peroxided hair and had the gall to say, “You’re far more attractive than Sally. You’re so womanly.” When we danced, Carter closed his eyes and swayed and rubbed his body with his fingertips. “First,” he cooed, “you have to love yourself.”

Carter and Belva sent out invitations to our dozen. “Casual dress,” they wrote. So we wore jeans and stretch pants on that first Saturday after Elvis had died and already been buried, next to Gladys, his mother. When Carter — wearing a white smock over white shorts and his hair out of its rawhide and hanging about his shoulders — greeted us at the door, he said, “We ask guests to remove shoes.”

Bud, Jr., frowned, flopped down on one of the plump pillows arrayed on the waxed living room floor, and grunted as he tugged at his cowboy boots. Knox snarled but complied. Jack, pulling off his tennis shoes, grumped, “My feet will stink you right out of here.”

“No matter, no matter,” Carter assured. “What’s that?” Jack asked, indicating the drone emerging from tall KLH speakers.

“Ravi Shankar,” Carter replied. “Sitar. Ragas. My meditation music.”

Belva wore a poppy-printed sundress. “Marimekko,” she said, when we complimented her. She touched her long fingers to the tops of her lightly freckled and bra-less pale breasts and tilted her head demurely to the side. She kissed us, one by one, first one cheek, then the other.

Swathed in a clean apron and holding aloft a long-handled wooden spoon, Pierre bustled from the kitchen to add his embraces. “Welcome,” he burbled, “to our happy home.”

Carter, Belva, and Pierre set us down on the fat pillows. “Marimekko,” Carter said when Margaret admired the pillows’ print covers.

Belva and Pierre bore trays from the kitchen. “Aperitif time,” Carter said, although I’d guess none of us knew the word aperitif. And with the aperitif— white wine — we were offered crudites—baby carrots, assorted radishes, anise sticks, cauliflowerettes and urged to dip them in the alioli prepared by Carter from what we were assured was “special garlic.”

The trio directed us to the table and placed us in our chairs. Then, as if we were fat little goslings near-naked under our first down, the trio, like huge hissing geese, herded us through soup, fish, entree, sherbet palate freshener, roast and entremets, salad, cheeses, dessert, and demitasse. I don’t recall what we ate. I remember the soup was an algaeic green topped with fiddlehead fern. I remember that Belva and Pierre had organized the menu and that Carter praised their “analytic palates.” His palate, he said, drawing a long face, “lacked acuity.”

Carter, Belva, and Pierre, enunciating carefully, instructed us as to the name of each dish, translating French to English. I recall many a la-this’s and an en papillote-thats. We received instruction from Pierre on tying of a proper bouquet garni and from Belva, who spoke, without pause, in paragraphs, on the reduction of sauces. Bennett choked on a fish bone and threw up a gobbet of fish into his plate. Bud, Jr., and tiny, starving Sally pouted beautifully because they weren’t allowed to smoke. Studying our feces. Carter and Belva and Pierre spoke vivaciously of each dish’s provenance and steps of preparation. Mandy and Marilyn nodded newly educated assent to all this.

An extraordinary number of wines were poured. I grew dizzy with drink while Pierre and Belva discussed various valleys from where the wine came, talked exuberantly of oaken kegs and natural tannins, and Belva spouted a phrase I shan’t ever forget—“the masturbatory eroticism of a true Merlot.”

If there was talk of Elvis and his funeral, I do not remember it. I know the night was hot, that Bud, Jr., and Sally went outside to smoke and didn’t come back for ages. I remember thinking that Marilyn was getting so deep into this gourmet crap that I hardly could stand being with her anymore. I remember that a mosquito bit me and left a nasty red swelling on my arm and that there was no dancing and that the next morning, lack and I played our old Elvis albums, and I felt I’d died and gone to hell.

All that winter, spring, and summer, the brown UPS truck stopped at doors. The delivery man teetered up front sidewalks; poor fellow was loaded down under boxes packed with saute pans, salmon poachers, vegetable mills, asparagus steamers, tarte pans, whisks, garlic presses, stock pots, mortars and pestles, demitasse cups. Mandy had her electric stove pulled out and gas put in (“That Tolliver money,” my mother-in-law clucked, “watch it go down the drain”). Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the Larousse Gastronomique, the two hefty maroon-bound volumes of the Gourmet cookbook, and Richard Olney’s lovely French Menu Cookbook, and various Elizabeth David titles were delivered from the nearest big city’s bookstore.

Our dinners continued, month by month turning more “gourmet” and more frequent, with at least one meal each month at Belva and Carter’s long table. Belva, Carter, and Pierre’s gastronomic zealotry took what I felt was a hysteric pitch. As we bit into aux-this and a Za-that, the trio watched us without reserve. They studied our expressions. They queried us closely as to our responses.

I felt like a farm animal on whom ag college grad students experiment. With our crowd serving as chorus, the trio, through long evenings, tsk-tsked over unforgivable treatments of eggplant or strategies toward chicken so unthinking as to be almost wicked. So I also came to feel indoctrinated, an ignorant catechumen under instruction on the secret rites of a cult. I felt like screaming and throwing my plate.

Dinner party talk rarely strayed from food. Bennett reported improvements in his beamaise and subtleties imparted by various vinegars he whisked into it. Elizabeth David on basil was discussed. Margaret was deep into puff pastries and showing a tendency of which Pierre disapproved, to encase “every bird and beast in pate a choux. ” Mandy bought a pasta maker; her kitchen hung with so many drying strands that she had to lock her Siamese cats in the garage. Jack purchased the Kitchen Aid attachment for sausage-making. Even Bud, Jr., produced opinions on cuisine— “Adding dill to the court bouillon for the salmon seemed a bit of a cliche.” Only little Sally, bony and big-eyed as ever, remained immune.

And whereas in the old days, parties ended with our set’s dancing together in drunken bear hugs, now evenings ended with Belva’s and Pierre’s demands that we contribute to a kitty for an upcoming meal; the money went for the likes of white truffle oil, candied angelica, wheels of Brie, and sourdough starter sold by a gentleman in Vermont.

Pudding cakes were long gone, as were Philadelphia Cream Cheese footballs. All dancing ended, as did dressing up. Late at night, when Jack and I stretched out under covers and talked in the dark, I complained that Carter and Belva dealt with us as missionaries deal with primitive tribes. I said that the unspoken question in Carter’s and Belva’s prattle seemed to be, “What did you do all these years, without us?” I said that it wasn’t just the talk about food, food, food and the extraordinary culinary competition that had begun to make couples within our crowd testy with each other. I said I also sensed all kinds of funny business in Carter and Belva’s hot tub, whose glass enclosure glowed with candlelight far into the night, like a tiny Taj Mahal. Bennett, I told Jack, spent entire evenings with Carter and Belva. Margaret confessed that Bennett had demanded they “open” their marriage and “share” with Carter and Belva. Knox, according to Margaret, was buzzing her with faintly dirty phone calls from the bank; and she and Mandy, who’d been tying up her taffy-blond hair and meditating, early mornings, with Carter, were hardly speaking.

Jack, who’d lived in Coraville all his life, said, “It’s just a phase. It’ll pass,” and went off to sleep.

There is a coda to this. At Carter’s, Belva’s, and Pierre’s urging, our crowd began once a month to have Friday afternoon salons. The notion was that we’d have wine-tastings arid hors d’oeuvres. Each couple was to bring two dishes. Carter, Belva, and Pierre chose and purchased the wines, for which effort and expense we reimbursed them. We took turns hosting the salon, which began at 5:30. As months progressed, the salon grew in size and the dishes in complexity.

That year, Reginald, an old friend of mine, was spending a lot of time around our house. Along in midaftemoon, he would bring over fresh crabs and crack them. Then he’d put two Revere Ware pans on the stove, a pan for him and a pan for me, and melt us each up a quarter-pound of butter. We’d stand there and dip crab legs in hot butter and eat crab and talk. He thought Coraville gourmet madness funny and always wanted to hear about the latest dishes.

One day one of us said to the other that if you gave it a French name, people happily would eat dog food. No sooner was this thought spoken than Reginald and I were throwing on coats and heading to Safeway. As we took can after can of dog foods off the shelves and dropped them into our cart, we admired the beagles and poodles and Labradors on the cans’ labels. We laughed so hard we had to push our cart to the back of the store where bathrooms were. We bought onions, garlic, thick-sliced bacon, shelled pistachios, bread crumbs, and parsley. We rushed home and fixed dinner for Jack and the girls. After dinner we asked Jack if he thought dog food would make anyone sick, and he said he didn’t.

Once the girls got to sleep, Reginald and I opened the dog foods and sniffed. Immediately, we realized that some smelled too strong. The most acceptable, for texture and odor, were Mighty Dog and a Safeway house brand. Reginald set me to chopping onion and mincing parsley and pressing garlic, while in the big mixing bowl he, by hand, mushed bread crumbs, pistachios, instant potato flakes, and a bit of oatmeal to stiffen up the dog food. We tossed in the onion, parsley, and garlic. Reginald lined two meatloaf pans with bacon and pressed in our mixture. We slid the pans into the oven. By midnight, the pate— or “pet-te,” as we were calling it — felt firm. The kitchen smelled not disagreeably of bacon and Mighty Dog. We agreed we’d let the “pate” cool and next day, a Thursday, check it for odor. It smelled fine.

Friday afternoon, Reginald and Jack and I showed up at the salon held that afternoon at Knox and Mandy’s house on the hill. We carried in our platter. The pate, swathed in bacon and arrayed ’round with fresh watercress and cornichons, looked pretty.

Right up to the last minute, I felt torn. I loved Marilyn and Bennett, Terrilyn Jo and little Sally and John, and wasn’t unfond of Bud, Jr. Any moment I could have said, “No, let’s not put the pate out on the buffet table,” and I said nothing.

Not a soul, other than Sally, didn’t spread thick smudges of Mighty Dog on the fresh bread we’d brought Not a soul, including our trio of gastronomic leaders, didn’t compliment Mighty Dog’s richness and the just-rightness of pistachios.

The more Mighty Dog my old friends ate, the dirtier a betraying Judas I felt. As I watched them chew, I noted that we were looking older, sadder, our flesh slacker, our hair beginning to take on gray. So I felt even worse a sinner.

Almost 20 years, now, down the road, I still feel bad I did this and wish now I hadn’t. I wish we were still 30, that Elvis were alive and singing in Vegas. I wish I could shuffle around my kitchen with my nose in Bud, Jr.’s smelly wash-and-wear shirt while Elvis sings that the tears he cries are tears of joy.