It never fails: you move into the sub-posh suburb and eventually summer rolls around, and before you can establish the pecking order in your neighbourhood that you are indeed a whiskey-swilling loner eccentric who is better left alone, you receive a computer-generated invitation with fancy calligraphy and flowery icons asking you to attend a nearby neighbour's garden party. If neighbourhood diplomacy is an issue for you, then it will simply not do to snub the invitation or threaten to pour bags of salt and lime all over their blooming petunias. You will indeed have to manage this carefully.
People throw garden parties for all sorts of reasons, and none of them good. It takes an especial kind of deep-seated psychological or cerebral deficiency to entertain the very idea that garden parties are swell things to either throw or attend. Legions of Martha Stewart clones and Oprah fanatics of the lukewarmly bored housewifery stripe take it upon themselves to believe that this will improve their social cachet. It is an opportunity for such people to flaunt the gardens they sadly obsess over to fill the void in their lives that their loveless marriages, lackluster children and failed dreams have left in their stead. Garden parties are designed to be politely awkward social affairs where people speak of inconsequential things while sipping at tea, nipping at the buffet, eating peach cobblers, and paying tepidly fatuous comments about how lovely the Wal-Martian backyard décor is.
Your neighbours obviously do not know you. They have not yet developed the fear someone like you instills. Excuses run the gamut of "we want to welcome all our new neighbours", "Paulie caught a big fish at the lake", "our nightshades are blooming", "marvel with envy at our new patio", to "we want to outdo the Jacksons' garden party of last month". What is important here is how to be a no-show without alienating the same people who may be of some begrudging utility if your house catches on fire or is being jacked by the local hoodlums. Some suggestions:
- Be difficult. One of the sure-fire ways of not being able to show, or to be invited again, is to declare that you have a series of several fatal allergies. Be allergic to all sorts of things such as a long list of plant life and common food items so that you become too much of a hassle and liability.
- Shift the blame. Your neighbours probably have no idea what you do for a living, so it is rather easy to proclaim that you have a tyrant for a boss who is running you into the ground with overtime projects that force you to sacrifice your vacation time to complete. Mumble something about IT and this should solicit the understanding of your neighbours and will explain why you are curiously capable of working from home.
- Lie and say that you are throwing your own garden party on the exact same day.
Let us assume that there is no possible way to bail on this most mundane of Sunday afternoon events. The chief thing here is to devise ways never to be invited again so that this tragedy need not be repeated for the subsequent summers that you will be trapped in that neighbourhood. You arrive and everything is awkward precisely because you have nothing in common with the hosts, the invitees, and the whole scenario feels artificial and full of unnerving moments of silence (or, worse yet, the kind of idle banter that tries to talk over awkward silences). You will notice the bistro table laden with fruits, unbearably cutesy-poo triangle sandwiches, paper plates, napkins, a pitcher of lemonade, a few flowery pieces of table-weight bric-a-brac. The tablecloth will most likely have a flowery motif that will inspire vertigo and nausea if stared at for too long. Folding chairs will encircle the homemaker's buffet (within view of the "prettily manicured" backyard) in uncomfortably intimate and close arrangement. This is to facilitate conversation, the very thing you wish to avoid. And, since the quantity of food is not so abundant, one can only keep one's mouth busy for so long before one is called upon to respond to some exasperatingly pointless conversation item issued forth by one of your exasperatingly pointless neighbours. Expect mild curiousity about who you are, a thinly veiled interrogation session designed to quell their suspicions that you are a ruthless child rapist or a screeching midnight Satanist. In essence, certain questions will be posed that have direct bearing on their own interests about neighbourhood safety and property values. Also expect some passive aggressive strategies among the slightly more bold: "I noticed that your lawn has gotten a bit long; Bill just bought a new mower if you'd like to borrow it" or "You must be an artist. We've noticed the car you have up on blocks in your front yard. How long do you figure on exhibiting it as a trailer chic installation piece before taking it away?" or "This area would be much nicer if people didn't play their jazz records so late; Patsy and me get to bed like most folk around eleven or so. Not that we're music-haters by any stretch, but it's about the kids…". Isn't it always.
There are several dos and don'ts. Cultivate a stable of stock phrases to respond to their generic questions. Do not offer up anything too intriguing or that requires much conversational follow-up (you want to keep that to a minimum). If you say you are a writer, for example, they will invariably ask what it is that you write. Say instead that you are a software engineer - their fear of you going at length about such a specialized and mediocre topic will stay their tongues from inquiring further.
Try to employ diversion at all costs. When confronted with why so many "fallen women" are lurking around your house at all hours every night, or the fact that your recycling box is crammed with empty whiskey bottles, point to some monotonous flower and ask (at your peril) what kind of watering schedule it requires. Trading off between intrigue and boredom is important if you don't want to be driven out by a neighbourhood militia of concerned mothers.
Let us now assume that you do wish to tempt fate and guarantee never to be invited to one of these mid-afternoon tea-sopped social failures. There are a number of options at your disposal that range from the simple to the excessively deranged:
- Never respond to questions. Be awkward. Stare intently at a guest or the host without saying a word. Alternatively, always speak: take issue with everything anyone says without allowing them to finish.
- Suddenly lapse into speaking in tongues. If there are children about, be sure to throw in some heavy expletives. Alternatively, break out into unprovoked fits of crying, screaming, or laughing.
- Tell crude jokes about women's breasts, or explain a gruesome surgical operation with some measure of morbid glee.
- Randomly take knife in hand and stab the bistro table several times, ensuring that the whole buffet is ruined.
- Come completely sloppy drunk. Be sure to vomit openly in the presence of others and without warning.
- Hoard all the food and drink and retreat to the furthest corner of the backyard. When anyone approaches, snarl.
- Invite a large gang of social undesirables to attend with you. Gather all the bikers, prostitutes, crack addicts, and street rubbies and turn them all loose.
- Make a pass at the dog.
- Place an anonymous call to the police that the garden party is merely a front for a marijuana grow-op.
- Crash your car right into the midst of the party, preferably with the wheels atop the buffet after having done donuts on their back lawn.
So, as one can see, the solutions for enduring or avoiding entirely the social catastrophe of garden parties are legion. With a little bit of creativity and luck, you can be freed from any future invitation or spend the rest of your days in jail where garden parties are considerably less popular.
Kane X. Faucher is a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism in London, Canada. He has published in several academic and literary journals both online and in print. He also has published three novels, Urdoxa (2004), Codex Obscura (2005), and Fort & Da (2006). His web page is at http://www.geocities.com/codex1977.