If we caught one another doing so, we pretended that we hadn’t. We cleared plates between courses and some of us might have drawn our fingers through ribbons of decorative sauce or nudged unbitten nibbles into the palms of our hands.
While we poured tart cherry mead, fetched fresh cloth napkins, procured new spoons for ones that had fallen, we observed them: a walrus tipping back raw oysters a big-eyed cow knifing marmalade onto toast a peacock shimmering in a gold dress, sloshing pink champagne onto the floor. Once a month, the members gathered in the night, wearing elaborate half-face masks in the likenesses of pigs and dogs and cats that hid their eyes but left their mouths free. We didn’t ask for much, much less than the members themselves, only that we might afford to be human, and in this way, the pay, cash in hand, was hard to beat. Our children wanted and we desired they be allowed their want, that they sometimes have it satisfied.
We were citizens with citizens’ needs: food and housing and medical care.
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