Larry's Party by Carol Shields

about being famous, especially not the kind of fame that comes boiling out of ignorance, and haunts you for the rest of your life. Dumb Dot. Careless Dot. Dot the murderer. Of course, that was a long time ago.
    When Larry was a little kid his mother warned him about the dangers of public drinking fountains. “No one ever, ever puts their mouth right on the spout,” she said, “because they can pickup other people’s germs, and who knows what kind of disease you’ll get.”
    This was bad news for Larry. At that age he liked to stand on tiptoe and press his lips directly on the cool silvery water spout, rather than trying to catch the spray in his mouth as it looped unpredictably upward. Besides, his mother’s caution didn’t make sense, since if no one ever touched the spout, how could there be any germs? He recalls — he must have been six or seven at the time — that he presented this piece of logic to his mother, but she only shook her headful of squashed curls and said sadly, wisely, “There will always be people in this world who don’t know any better.”
    He pictured these people - the people who didn’t know any better - as a race of clumsy unfortunates, and according to his mother there were plenty of them living right here on Ella Street in Winnipeg’s West End: those people who mowed their lawns but failed to rake up the clippings, for instance. People who didn’t know any better stored cake flour and other staples in their original paper bags so that their cupboards swarmed with ants and beetles. They never got around to replacing the crumbling rubber-backed placemats from the Lake of the Woods with “The Story of Wood Pulp” stamped in the middle. That was the problem with people who didn’t know any better: they never threw things away, not even their stained tea-towels, not even their oven mitts with holes burnt right through the fingers.
    People who didn’t know any better actually ate the coleslaw that came with their hamburgers, poking it out of those miniature pleated paper cups with their stabbing forks. Someone, their well-meaning mothers probably, told them they should eat any and all green vegetables that were put in front of them, not that there’s anything very green about coleslaw, especially when it’s been sitting in a puddle of wet salad dressing and improperly refrigerated for heaven only knows how many days. These people have never heard of the word salmonella, or if they have, they probably can’t pronounce it.
    Whereas Dot (Dorothy) Woolsey Weller, wife of Stu Weller, mother of Larry and Midge, grandmother of Ryan, knows about food poisoning intimately, tragically. She was, early in her life, an ignorant and careless person, one of those very people who didn’t know any better and who will never be allowed, now, to forget her lack of knowledge. She’s obliged to remember every day, either for a fleeting moment - her good days - or for long suffering afternoons of gloom. “Your mother’s got a nip of the blues today,” Stu Weller used to tell his kids while they were growing up in the Ella Street house, and they knew what that meant. There sat their mother at the kitchen table, again, still in her chenille robe, again, when they got home from school, her hands rubbing back and forth across her face, and her eyes blank and glassy, reliving her single terrifying act of infamy.
     
    Even today, August 17th, her son’s thirtieth birthday, she’s remembering. Larry knows the signs. It’s five-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, and there she is, high-rumped and perspiring in her creased cotton sundress, busying herself in the kitchen, setting the dinner plates on top of the stove to warm, as if they weren’t already hot from being in a hot kitchen. She’s peering into the oven at the bubbling casserole, and she’s floating back and forth, fridge to counter, counter to sink. Her large airy gestures seem to have sprung not from her life as wife and mother, but from a sunny,