The Dinner Party
I opened my eyes and immediately realized I forgot to defrost the salmon. I had a blistering headache but was too lazy to get up and take some Advil, so I tried to stay as still as possible. If I didn’t move, maybe it would just go away on its own. That evening we were having a dinner party.
It was cloudy. We had planned to host the party outside, but it would probably be too chilly now. I don’t like cloudy days. I had just come back from a year living in Paris, where it’s often grey and downcast –so much for the “city of light.” I grew up in a desert town in northern Mexico — an ugly industrial place endowed with zero grand boulevards but 365 days of sunshine. The sun in my hometown is vicious with red-hot main character energy: “I went to the grocery store, and the sun was out to get me, so I yelled at him, ' Leave me alone, pinche sol!’ But he just looked at me, all fiery and shit, and he was like ‘hahaha, I’m going to bake you now’.”
My headache got a little better, so I got up and took the salmon out of the freezer. I made coffee and sat down to read the “Ojai Valley News.” Here in Ojai, where we are currently living, they deliver an actual paper that you can touch and smell. Ink smells nice. The front page had a story about this guy who’s lived an entire year on foraged food and medicine. I wonder what he smells like. He is giving a talk on Friday, and I think I will go.
After finishing the Ojai Valley News, I called my sister and spent an hour chatting about our week. I then called my other sister, and the three of us jumped on a Zoom call to talk about buying tickets for the Rod Stewart concert at the Hollywood Bowl. This guy must be 100 years old, but “Some Guys Have All the Luck” brings up warm, fuzzy memories of my mom and the three of us singing and driving around town in her station wagon.
Get Lucrecia Santibañez’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
It was already time for lunch, and I made myself a tuna sandwich. Groceries and dining out are expensive as hell here, and I need to economize. I read in the paper (not the Ojai Valley News) that people are switching from beef to pork at Costco, and that this is a sure sign of a coming recession. I wonder what tuna cans mean for the larger macroeconomic outlook. I’m sure the foraging guy is not losing sleep over this.
After lunch, I worked for four hours and finished a paper I had been working on for over a year (my initial draft, before my Paper-FINAL-FINAL-FINAL.doc draft, was from March 2025). After I was done, I uploaded the paper to a journal and hit “submit.” This kind of finiteness to my work only happens about twice a year, so it felt especially good today. I felt like celebrating.
It was time to face The Dinner Party. I got a text from one of the guests saying she was “looking forward to it.” Ugh. No way to back out now. I looked for the vacuum cleaner. The guests were parents (and one kid) from my daughter’s school. Five people total. Will we have anything to talk about? Will people like each other? Most people at my kids’ schools turn out to be lovely, and can small-talk their way out of the most uncomfortable silences, but social anxieties can’t be rationalized. It’s like fear of flying. Every time I meet new people, I fear the airplane will crash.
This dinner party was a bit more stressful than usual because all the guests were homegrown. I am originally from Mexico, and English is not my first language. I’ve met many moms from my kids’ various schools, and I even made it into a couple of group chats. At some point, I realize that they socialize a lot more with each other than they do with me. It’s ok. I don’t take it personally — objectively, I am an easy person to be around. I tend to think they don’t quite know how to relate to me — we don’t have a ton of cultural or social intersections. Also, my name doesn’t help. It’s hard for Americans to pronounce. I can always sense fear after I’ve told them my name is “Lucrecia.” I sometimes get the “oh! that’s a beautiful name…” comment, which is people’s way of buying time. They know they’re going to screw this up badly. Panic morphs into detachment. Figuring out the Spanish “e” and the rolled “r” is already too much investment in someone you may or may not even end up liking.
These kinds of dinner parties feel like tests. Tests take effort, and I expend too much of it already in my non-social life. My friend K once said to me that no matter what I did or how white I looked, people would always see me as “Mexican.” It took me a minute to understand this was not a compliment. Despite having lived here for over 25 years, I have accepted that I am an in-between. I live in a space where Spanish, English, whiteness, Latin-ness, class privilege, and the immigrant experience coexist. I am personally offended when people say the tap water in Mexico is polluted, but I never drink it either. I love how lunches in Mexico stretch into dinnertime, but I am grateful that American gatherings have start and end times. When Mexican superstar singer-songwriter and cultural icon Juan Gabriel died, NPR did a story on him that lasted a couple of minutes and moved on. Nobody stopped the clocks! Spanish radio came to my rescue. They played his songs for hours, and I sang along to all of them. I felt seen. My little Venn diagram of belonging can get really small sometimes, but hey, my guests are here.
