A Catered Christmas. Isis Crawford

look. “Funny. Did you know the word bagel comes from the German word beugel, which means ring or bracelet. Some people have suggested that the bagel’s shape, a circle, is symbolic of the continuity of life. Don’t you think that’s cool?” Bernie asked.

      “Fascinating,” Libby said dr yly.

      “Did you also know that bagels are the only bread that is boiled before baking? When they were first made in New York City, they used to be small, dense, and chewy. In fact, if you didn’t eat them that day, you could use them as missiles. Of course, their shape made them popular because they were easy to sell.

      “Peddlers stacked them on wooden dowels and walked through the streets. But as they got more popular, they morphed into the big pillowlike things we have today. Cranberry-orange bagels? Blueberry bagels? Apple cinnamon?” Bernie shuddered. “Awful. What was wrong with sesame and poppy seed? Or how about cream cheese? You know it was first developed in 1872. By law it has to contain thirty-three percent milk fat and—”

      Libby held up her hand.

      “What?” Bernie said.

      “Enough.”

      “Aren’t you interested?”

      “Not at this moment, no.”

      “Fair enough. But I did distract you,” Bernie said.

      Libby laughed. “Yes. You did do that.” She shook her head and turned and surveyed the other people in the green room. She noticed that none of them were eating anything either. “I just thought that Hortense Calabash would do better,” she said, returning to the thought she’d had before Bernie had started talking.

      After all, Hortense was the woman who advocated making your own butter, the woman who had intimated on her last month’s show that knowing the pedigree of the chicken you were getting your eggs from would be, in Hortense’s words, “a highly beneficial thing, because when it comes to food you can never be too picky.”

      “She’s all show,” Bernie said.

      Libby shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

      “There’s nothing to get,” her sister replied. “If Hortense doesn’t have to impress someone, she doesn’t make the effort. In her mind, she’s doing us a favor having us here; we’re not doing her a favor by being here. The buffet is strictly a pro forma gesture. Everything she does is guaranteed to advance her career.”

      Libby thought about how the set was decorated versus how the green room was decked out. Her sister was right, she decided.

      She’d seen furniture in the Salvation Army that looked better than the couch and chairs in here did. She was thinking about the disparity when a little blond woman with thinning hair muscled her way past her and began rearranging the bagels on the bagel platter.

      “Don’t mind me,” she told Libby. “I just like everything to be neat.”

      As Libby watched, the woman gathered up all the bagels, sorted them into piles of plain, sesame, and cinnamon raisin, then carefully arranged them by type on the platter.

      “There. Don’t you think that’s better?” she asked Libby.

      “Absolutely,” Libby agreed. What else could she say?

      The woman nodded her head vigorously and began on the muffins.

      “By the way, I’m Pearl Wilde,” she told Libby and Bernie as she repositioned the muffins so that each one was exactly a quarter inch apart from the others.

      “You own Top Table, right?” Bernie said.

      Pearl nodded while she contemplated the containers of grape jelly. “We’re known for our comfort food.”

      Expensive comfort food, Libby almost said. Mediocre, expensive comfort food. She’d been in the store once with Bernie. Top Table was located on the corner of Lexington and Seventy-fifth Street and catered to the Park Avenue crowd. The rice pudding had been twelve dollars a serving. Then there’d been the meat loaf for twenty dollars a pound, and the mashed potatoes for fifteen. She’d bought the smallest serving size possible of chocolate pudding and had thrown it in the trash after one taste. The stuff they sold in the vending machines was better.

      “I have OCD,” Pearl chirped.

      “Overly compensating divorcée?” Bernie asked. “Or is it operational communications disorder? I forget.”

      “She’s kidding,” Libby said as Pearl drew herself up. “I’m a little obsessive-compulsive myself.”

      “Most people in this business are,” Pearl observed before she went back to rearranging the jelly containers into a perfect pyramid.

      Watching her, Libby decided that Pearl should probably be on medication. She might be bad, but Pearl had definitely crossed over the line.

      “I just think it’s important for presentations to be geometrical, don’t you?” Pearl commented as she moved on to the donuts.

      “Personally, I try and arrange everything in circles,” Bernie was saying as the door opened and a very large man waddled into the room. “It makes more sense feng shui wise.”

      He looks like a ball, Libby thought, albeit a ball dressed in black. His skin was so pink and shiny it practically glowed. Libby noticed he had tiny feet, or maybe, she reflected, they just looked tiny because of his girth.

      Bernie leaned over. “That’s Joe Estes, the producer,” she whispered in Libby’s ear.

      “How much do you think he weighs?” Libby whispered back.

      “Four hundred pounds. I heard that he got his start producing porn. You know, Angels and the Devil?”

      “No.”

      Bernie gave her an incredulous look. “You’ve never seen it?”

      “No.” Why did Bernie make her feel totally clueless? “I don’t watch that kind of thing.” She was about to add something to the effect that she never had when Estes clapped his hands.

      “People, let’s get this show on the road.”

      Everyone in the room stopped talking.

      “Better. Much better.” Estes rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “Now, the first thing I’d like to do is have you people sit down at the table over there"—he pointed to an oblong table on the other side of the room—"and have everyone introduce themselves, not that you’re not familiar with each other. But I always like to observe the formalities.”

      “This is what they call a meet and greet,” Bernie explained to Libby.

      Libby didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to meet anyone; she didn’t want to greet anyone; she just wanted to get back to the store so she could finish making her mincemeat pies and start on her butternut squash and apple bisque. As she looked at the people around her, she cursed Bree again. Why was she here? What was the point? There wasn’t any as far as she could see, except that Bree wanted her to do this.

      Even the twenty-thousand-dollar prize didn’t seem like a good enough reason to participate in this. It wasn’t as if they were going to be getting the money. They were going to be donating it to their favorite charity. Then Libby felt guilty about that thought. That was a good thing. But still. As far as she was concerned, A Little Taste of Heaven had a lot to lose and very little to gain by participating in the contest.

      Estes clapped his hands again. “All right, chickees, gather round,” he said.

      “Chickees,” Libby muttered under her breath to Bernie. “Give me a break.”

      “That means you three,” Estes said as he pointed to Libby, Bernie, and Pearl.

      Bernie and Pearl moved forward with Libby trailing.

      “Very good,” Estes said. “That wasn’t