I became a party aide when I rented the tiny apartment in one corner of a palatial southern mansion, where local history buffs archived their records and held their meetings. I monitored the security system, took in the Historical Society’s mail and watered the outdoor potted plants. My living quarters were so small that I joked that I could clean the place by turning around once with a dust rag in each hand.

Shortly after I moved in, the administrator of the society decided to offer the house and its lovely gardens as a venue for weddings, teas, and other elegant affairs. A Historical Society member was paid a small honorarium to be present, helpful, and watchful at each event. I filled that role. I contributed my small fee back to the organization and relished having the run of the entire home and a unique vantage point for people watching.

I sat at a centrally located desk, looking pleasantly available. When, for example, a bridesmaid spilled punch on her dress, I offered soap, my hair dryer, and seclusion in my private bathroom as she repaired the damage. I kept the plumber’s number handy, because the old pipes were not crowd-worthy. Such light trouble shooting occupied me, but often I just sat and observed.

My role changed depending on the party guests and hosts. My first visitors were members of a traditionally black women’s organization devoted to friendship and community service. They had planned their annual potluck supper for the membership, family and friends.

An advance guard arrived for set up, and from my seat, I could see a woman in an elegant suit and tennis shoes take a broom from her car and sweep the garden’s brick walkways. She and her committee of helpers buffed and polished the facility, then changed into dressier shoes.

As club members and their guests passed me at that central desk, they greeted me and sometimes chatted briefly.  When the food was ready, someone invited me to fill a plate, or if I preferred, they offered to serve me. When the evening ended, the guests cleaned up and bid me a cheery good-bye before departing. Friendship and community were evidently their mission, even at a hired venue.

Next came a wedding reception where everybody spoke Spanish. The group was mostly young, and the warmth with which they chatted and gestured and nodded to me as they passed my station felt like respect for the elderly.  Again, though I never accepted the offer of food, I was urged to partake. 

This group had engaged a catering service, and the briskness with which everybody moved, servers, guests and all, was balletic. Nobody groused when the plumbing backed up and I summoned our trusty plumber with his metal snake. At my post, I might have been at the center of a bright, genial galaxy.

At some late-night signal, guests traded party shoes for running shoes, donned aprons, and joined the caterers in dismantling the celebration.  In a twinkling, everything was back to normal and the guests disappeared.

Originally the history center had housed a prominent family. One descendant had lived in my little apartment when he was younger. As a much older man, he became a master gardener and worked hard and thoughtfully in the yards and gardens most weekends. He treasured the house and would tell me stories of its past. I was curious when I learned that someone from another branch of his family had chosen the pillared mansion for their wedding reception.

At this illustrious gathering, I might have been invisible. I failed to catch the eye of any passer-by, and my greetings and smiles went unreturned. People ate and drank inches away from me, with never an offer of so much as a cracker. The mystique of Southern hospitality had never impressed me, so I interpreted their indifference as further evidence that it was mostly hype.

Far greater disappointment met my eyes the next morning, when I looked out my kitchen window and saw the fellow who loved the place patrolling the lawn, filling garbage bags. The swards of green were liberally peppered with paper plates and cups and napkins and plastic utensils, bits of food, cans and bottles, and the conscientious grandson of the original owner, our master gardener, was picking up trash. I rushed outside.

“How could they do this?” I asked.  He shrugged.  “But they are your relatives!  Is this what they do?”

“This is what happens when you rent a place out to the public,” he answered, as if to justify his distant cousins’ leftover debris. I didn’t remind him of the earlier parties, where guests left things in even spiffier shape than they had found them.  Could it be that some people simply opened their hands whenever they finished using something, assuming that whatever they no longer needed would be carried away or disappear entirely? Mostly I was disgusted, but some part of me envied their blithe overconfidence.

I should have mistrusted my tendency to generalize based on so little data, but the first three parties I oversaw at the Historical Society seemed like a trio of ready-made stanzas of the same poem.  Life presented them to me serially, and I was enticed to see them as related and emblematic. The theme I discerned was not just presence or lack of the behavior we call “entitled” but confidence—a confidence to which I could never aspire. I wouldn’t have wanted to act so thoughtlessly as the third group of guests, but I envied them the license to do so.

Preparing for yet another of the wedding receptions at the site, I watched a florist deliver arrangements of pink lilies.  Soon after that, the wedding cake arrived, attended by the baker herself, who was a middle-aged woman, and a young couple of were probably members of her family.

The three layers of cake did not rest solidly on each other like a tower or a mountain.  Instead, they were separated, balancing on what appeared to be thin, white plastic columns. The baker spotted a small end table among the pieces of furniture.  There she set the cake and tinkered with it.

 She attacked the floral arrangements with scissors and took some lily blossoms. She inserted their stems into the cake’s icing.  Silently, I hoped lily sap was edible.

I couldn’t help mentioning, gently, that the cake seemed to be tilting.  I feared if I kept that worry to myself, the elegant pastry might tumble.

The baker never looked my way as she answered, “My cakes don’t tilt.”  One of her helpers found a matchbook and inserted it under the cardboard circle that supported the lowest layer of cake, and the other scampered back to appraise the situation from a distance. The young assistants adjusted the sweet edifice with its purloined lilies, while the baker repeated firmly, “My cakes don’t tilt.”

I remember that baker sometimes when confidence fails me or when I long to be among those who feel entitled even to something I don’t really want to do or to have. There we all were that day, temporarily renting space in a showy but shabby structure, while the cake balanced on a wobbling table on a slanty, old floor, as the stolen lilies wilted, oozing who knew what poison into icing that warmed to slickness on a hot June day. Still, she maintained, “My cakes don’t tilt.”

– Ann Birch