The Salad Dressing and Other Disasters

The Salad Dressing

Reader, it was suicide. 

What I'm about to tell you was a social suicide; one that resulted in my disappearance from all good society forever. Like the ward of Colonel Brandon or Lydia Bennet after her elopement with Mr Wickham.

It couldn't have been worse, really, and I'll just come right out and say that I made a fatal error. A horrible, miscalculated mistake.... 

with a salad dressing.

In my defense, I'd like to say, haven't we all? But unfortunately I cannot say that.  

I'd seen one before. 

A salad. 

Yes, and even more pertinent to the events that follow - I had seen a salad dressing. 

I was familiar. I'd seen one made. By my posh friend. With my own blue eyes. 

More than one. 

Four, I'd seen her make. 

Four salad dressings. 

We'd had four nice salads, all with the rich, dark brown hue. 

'It was', she informed me as she was making it, 'the sort of (she says 'sort of' all the time; it sounds like 'sod-dov' and gives an air of being not quite sure, when really she's completely sure all of the time). French dressing you simply throw together from your balsamic vinaigrette, your extra virgin olive oil and your herbs hanging from your (thirteenth century) kitchen beam that came over in the ship with William the Conqueror. Now she would be the type who could just lift and pour all over the salad at a posh dinner party, when feeling a bit awkward. Though she would never feel awkward. 

She had elegant and aristocratic hands that she always found things to do with, and which sported a neat signet ring of the family crest on her little finger like an after thought. As if her family was not centuries deep in castles and incest. I mean had she been at this dinner party, she would have possibly been able to save me. She definitely wouldn't have completely ignored me in my moment of need whilst among her own species.

We were getting ready to tuck into the smoked salmon caviar blini starter. I noted the salad was very ...  'there'. Probably it had been put on display in advance for aesthetic reasons. It was a full garden: green leaves, bright little tomatoes, orange and lilac flowers of edible acclaim, fresh crisp cucumber, walnuts and things. Things I didn't know. A new language of a salad. I was very impressed.

We sat reverently around the candle lit dinner table. Hereditary peers looked down on us. Stiff backed and disparaging. There was a grand art nouveau fireplace. The air was expensive with musk. Fake laughter rang in my ears. It was a scene from a classic novel. Everything was hushed and perfect. 

I sat for a while, laughing delicately when someone told an unfunny joke. I examined the posture of the women and copied them (I rested my cheek on one hand and leant slightly forwards, with a non committal smile playing on my lips, trying to make my eyes bigger like the girl sitting across from me. I noticed she had slender bare arms and I immediately needed to have slender bare arms too so I took off my Primark  cardigan.)  

On and on waltzed the conversation. I didn't have a scoobies what they were talking about.  Literally no idea. They were speaking another language. 

All this time the salad kept eye balling me. Rich and glorious. 

And I noticed something else: quite near to my hand sat the dressing. A rich, deep brown-red affair like the four salad dressings of my posh friend.  

I'd lost track of the St Tropez meeting being reported in the New York Times. And before I knew what I was doing, I saw I had my hand on the salad dressing. And I was pouring it all over the salad. Recklessly pouring, pouring. Swirling. Looping! Looping it about, all over the leaves and the small frightened tomatoes and the edible flowers.