Hunters and Gatherers by Francine Prose

Diana’s an expert at using her eating disorder to make mincemeat out of Joy.”
    Martha said, “I was just telling my friend about that at lunch the other day.”
    Isis’s delicate wince made it clear that she didn’t want to know about this friend to whom Martha gossiped about the Goddess women’s dietary neuroses.
    “Meanwhile,” Isis went on, “Titania’s convinced that if she’d spent less time on her megabuck cosmetics business and more time making nutritious home-cooked meals for her daughter, the kid wouldn’t have joined the Moonies and run away to Korea.”
    “How awful for Titania!” said Martha. “I knew she had trouble with her daughter, but I didn’t know what it was.”
    “Awful?” Isis said. “I suppose…You know, it’s hard for me to think of her as Titania. I still think of her as Maxine. Oh, gosh. Is the food here already?”
    “Stress Reduction Technique Number One,” said the waitress. “We try to feed you before you get cranky.” Did she mean customers in general or Isis in particular?
    “Cranky…” Isis eyed Martha’s plate. “It would make me cranky to wonder when that chicken was roasted. Presumably not in the blink of an eye since we placed our order.” Isis had ordered something with mustard greens or kale, slimier and more seaweedlike than one would have expected from a restaurant so solidly geared to a picky ten-year-old’s food tastes.
    Martha’s first mouthful of mashed potatoes felt like a soothing hand on her brow. It was stunning, the power of food to comfort and console, even though, like so much else, it was ultimately unreliable. When things were going seriously wrong, even food could turn nasty.
    The last time Martha had dinner with Dennis, she had ordered gnocchi, a dish she would never have considered had she known what the evening would bring. They were in the neighborhood Italian place they’d frequented when they’d first fallen in love, when the romantic dimness made for a smoother transition, going there straight from bed. They’d continued to eat there when they couldn’t think of anywhere else, long after it became irritating to be unable to read the menu. By then Martha was looking for things to be irritated by, particularly things about Dennis: the officious way he ordered pasta, the way he seemed to think that his good looks gave him carte blanche to let his hair get greasy.
    If she’d known what he had to say that night, she wouldn’t have gotten gnocchi, gummy little pillows that would turn to glue in her mouth and make the task of swallowing seem suddenly Herculean. Though perhaps she did know. Why else would she have started off talking about a piece they were doing at Mode about the former girlfriends of convicted serial killers.
    Martha said, “There was one killer whose modus operandi was to empty the joint checking account and then ask his girlfriend to dinner. Twelve of his fourteen girlfriends were never heard from again.”
    Dennis took a sip of wine. The flickering candlelight slalomed down the planes of his handsome face.
    “Well,” he said, “compared to that, I guess this isn’t so bad.”
    “What do you mean this ?” said Martha.
    Dennis gulped the rest of his wine. He seemed genuinely distraught, though with an actor one never knew. He took a deep soap-operatic breath.
    “It’s not working out,” he said.
    “What do you mean it ?” Martha said.
    “I mean us,” said Dennis.
    No wonder Dennis had asked her to meet him at Nino’s! Didn’t one always hear that tense conversations with volatile lovers should occur in restaurants and other public venues so the presence of other people would have a calming or shaming effect in case he or she began to scream or make menacing jabs with a steak knife?
    “I’m not hungry,” Martha said. “Do you think I can send back my dinner?”
    “No,” Dennis said. “It’s too late for that, too.”
    Why couldn’t Dennis have told her before she ordered dinner? No matter