The problem with having people over was that
Tom’s place was always a mess. He tried to keep it clean; to make it look like
someone responsible lived there, but it was impossible for him to keep that
façade up. He had to confront the fact that he was not the most organized
person in the world and that he shouldn’t have said “Yes” when asked if he
could have his friends over for their weekly gathering. They had that tradition
since they started having their own places. It was an excuse for seeing each other
more often because if it weren’t for that dinner, they wouldn’t know anything.
Marina had almost always hosted the dinner.
She had the most beautiful apartment of the group and her husband was very
relaxed about them meeting up so often. Sometimes they only met every two weeks
because she had something else to do or her husband needed his space so they
just didn’t get together. If it wasn’t her house, they sometimes used Greg’s
place but the problem with his house was the fact that it was too far away from
anyone else’s and that he had a baby so they had to keep it silent and very
short.
So Tom had a lot to do before his friends came
over. By his request, the dinner was changed fro mthe usual Friday to Saturday.
He knew that if he needed time to plan the whole thing and it was going to be
an important meeting because the New Year holidays had just ended and it hadn’t
seen each other in weeks. They would normally call for a pizza or something
like that but he really wanted to impress them as he had always been the loser
of the group, the one that never did anything too impressive, the one that was
still single and working a menial job.
Yes, Tom wanted them to see another side of
him, a side that he would hopefully actually have. As he started planning, he
realized he was really as dull and simple as anyone would think. His job was
really not interesting so they never spoke about that but he always got so
tired from it that he had almost no time to actually read or hear about other
things in the world. He didn’t have any real knowledge about the interesting
things of life. He only knew about the boring corner he occupied in the world
and that was it. So he really had to make an effort.
The first thing was actually planning the
dinner. Even in the New Year’s Eve dinner with his family, he had his old timey
notepad and a pencil with which he would write ideas for things to eat. His
brother insisted he should just order a pizza and garlic bread but they always
did that and he wanted to impress them with something they couldn’t see coming.
The garlic bread was a nice idea, so he wrote it down and his mother told him a
good salad is always welcome so he wrote that down too. The idea was to have
many simple things around.
The days before the meeting, he decided to buy
most of the things he needed for his dinner in order to do them first and see
if he could do it all by himself or if it really was a better idea to just ask
for a pizza. He used the oven and borrowed a bunch of kitchen equipment from
his mother, as he didn’t have anything to do proper things at his place. He
didn’t even have a blender, just a couple of pans, a cooking pot and the
microwave. Tom had to borrow his father’s car too to be able to take all of
that back to his place. They thought he was going crazy.
The first thing he decided to do was the
salad, which he thought was the simplest of the dishes he had wrote down. He
decided to do one mixing vegetables and fruits. It was supposed to be something
refreshing and filled with flavors. He did everything the recipe called for but
at the end, he doubted the result was the same as in the recipe. Apparently,
the fruits and veggies he had chosen weren’t in their best moment. Some of them
were too “green” and others were too ripe. It wasn’t to be surprised, as he had
never picked up so many things from the supermarket.
He put the salad on the side and decided it
would be nice if he kept it on the refrigerator. Then, Tom decided to make the
garlic bread. It was a rather simple thing to do. His trial test was going to
be with cheap bread he had found in the supermarket. Again, he had made the
wrong choice, as the bread was much too hard, like a rock. It was almost
impossible to cut it. But once he did, he smeared some garlic paste on it and
put it in the oven. The thing was he forgot about it when doing another recipe,
so the bread got burned and his second attempt another disaster.
What he was doing in the meantime was mixing
the ingredients to make nice thick waffles. He had found a website that advised
against the mix they sold in a box and encouraged people to do the mix
themselves. The whole kitchen got covered in flour and a couple of eggshells
ended up in the mix. He let it harden a bit when he got the garlic bread out of
the oven so when he mixed it again, it had a very rough texture, not very
similar to the one in the pictures of the website. When he tried it in the pan,
it just got stuck there and burned like the bread.
And all of that happened in a single day, the
Monday previous to his gathering with friends. He wasn’t ready at all and he
was even more of a disaster than he had thought. Tom had never cooked anything
for himself and had no idea about entertaining people. He was a shy person, the
kind that would always be asked last about a subject, if asked at all. He knew
they had put that burden on him because no one else could do it and that
thought made him realized he didn’t want to be that person.
So early Tuesday, he grabbed the phone and
called every single was one of his so-called friends and told them that he had
decided against organizing their little event. He didn’t explain why or
anything like that. He thought it was best not to say anything that they could
use against him, although he knew they were going to talk anyway. After making
all the appropriate calls, he decided to go to bed and rest because he hadn’t
been able to sleep properly just because of that stupid meeting being in his
brain for weeks and weeks.
A surprise came in Wednesday, after having
been able to sleep for ten straight hours. A girl from college called Alicia
had come to his door to visit, out of the blue. When he buzzed her in, he
didn’t really realize what he had done. But then he did and he started picking
up the trash from the floor but then stopped and realized that didn’t make any
sense. If Alicia was there, it was because the others had told her about the
cancelled reunion. She wanted to know more and he shouldn’t just fake that
everything was perfect when it wasn’t.
At
the end of the day, that mess in his house was what made him Tom. He was that
mess and it was the most original version of his own self. Nothing more could
be as perfect to describe him as that pile of things all around, ranging from
papers and notebooks to all the ingredients that he hadn’t used and wasn’t
going to use for anything, never again. He even had some clothes on the floor,
mainly the ones he would pick up and put in bag to take to washing machines in
the basement of the building. It was one of those places.
When Alicia arrived, he greeted her on the
door and didn’t ask her to come in. He just wanted to know what she was doing
there. She said that a bunch of people, including her, were worried about him
because he had cancelled out of the blue. She reminded him that he was always
so worried about arriving on time to their other meetings and often gave money
for more pizza, so it was weird that he would just cancel the gathering that he
was in charge of. So Alicia was just there to receive an explanation and she
really got one.
Tom said he was tired of being the last person
they always thought of, except when they needed money or some idiot to do shit
for them. He told Alicia to told every other person in their so-called “friend
group” that he wasn’t going to be the same idiot that he had been since
college. Maybe he wasn’t brilliant or successful or anything, but he still
deserved some respect. He closed the door on her face and decided it was a nice
time to order a pizza, all for himself.
