Mrs. Bridge. Evan S. Connell

      14 • LATE FOR DINNER

      Not long after the battle of the guest towels he came in late for dinner, and when asked for a suitable explanation he announced with no apparent concern, yet with a faint note of apology discernible in his tone as though he had let himself be tricked, “I got depantsed.”

      “You what?” Mrs. Bridge exclaimed, clutching her napkin. She and the girls were halfway through dinner, having decided not to wait on him any longer. Mr. Bridge was not yet home from the office.

      Douglas stepped over the seat of his chair as if it were a hurdle and sat down astraddle. This was a habit that exasperated his mother; he knew it and she knew he knew it.

      “Why must you do that?” she asked. She was relieved he had come home, but she could not help scolding now that she knew he was safe.

      “Do what?”

      “You know perfectly well what.”

      Every time they argued about the way he got into his chair he proceeded to explain that he did it in order to save wear and tear on the carpet. It was his theory that if he pulled out the chair every time, it would soon wear a groove in the carpet, and he was only trying to save things from wearing out because she was always telling him not to be so hard on the furniture. This was the way the argument went; it was quite familiar to everyone.

      “Now,” said Mrs. Bridge, settling the napkin in her lap and beginning to butter a hot biscuit, “let’s start all over again.” As soon as she said this she regretted it.

      “They depantsed me,” Douglas repeated cheerfully.

      “What are you talking about?”

      “They took my pants and threw them up on top of Goldfarb’s garage.”

      “Who did?” she said, putting down the biscuit.

      Carolyn, who often imitated her mother, also stopped eating and assumed a severe expression. Ruth quietly went on with dinner.

      “Oh,” said Douglas, “the guys. You know. Tim and Louie and those guys.”

      “But why?”

      “I don’t know.” He was not greatly interested in the conversation. He began to help himself to everything on the table, building a mound of food just high enough to exceed the limits of good manners but not quite high enough to draw fire from his mother. He was quite conscious, however, that she was observing the size of the helpings.

      “Well, for heaven’s sake, they must have had a reason. Hadn’t you done something to provoke them?”

      “Nope. We were just wrestling in the vacant lot—sort of gang piling, you know—and I was on the bottom and then just all of a sudden they decided to depants me, that’s all.” He was ladling gravy onto his plate; he had built a semi-circular dam out of mashed potatoes and was making the lake with gravy.

      “Now that’s enough, do you hear?”

      With a pained expression he put down the gravy and began looking around for something else.

      “I simply can’t understand why they would do a thing like that,” she went on, half to herself.

      “They just felt like depantsing somebody, I guess,” Douglas went on obligingly, “and I was on the bottom, that’s all. We depantsed Eliot Hoff a couple of weeks ago and he yelled bloody murder and cried all over the place.”

      “All right, all right, that’ll do,” said Mrs. Bridge. “I think we’ve covered the situation.”

      “How did you get them back?” asked Carolyn.

      “Oh, I just climbed the telephone pole and there’s a big cable that leads over to Shafer’s garage, so after I got there I just took a run and jumped across to Goldfarb’s garage.” He was becoming voluble now. “Those garages look pretty close together from this side of the fence, but when you get up there, why, they’re not, because I didn’t think I was going to make it. I was just up there like the man on the flying trapeze without any pants and—”

      “That will do!” Mrs. Bridge interrupted, looking him firmly in the eye.

      “Well, gee whiz—”

      “The subject is closed.”

      “Okay, okay,” he muttered, and reached suddenly for the gravy.