He laughed. "Yeah, we get that all the time. No, they like it too."
When they finished their meal, they sat back and started a conversation over steaming cups of tea. "I can't believe all this is happening. It's like a dream," Linda said. She wanted to tell Stephen all about her experience with lucid dreaming in college and she'd continued to have a relationship with one of her best friends that way and…how she'd met their future daughter. But it was best to break it to him piece by piece. Realistic, practical people like Stephen sometimes did not take well to the world of the unseen.
"Oh yes, a dream," Stephen said. "Speaking of dreams, we can see those pictures of modern art at the Museum of Modern Art. They have lots of stuff there that looks like it came out of a nightmare. "
"I heard they have a big museum where they have world famous paintings that are two and three hundred years old," she said.
Stephen shook his head. "That's the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It's right near Central Park. We can go there, too, if you want."
"That sounds nice." Linda envisioned a long, lazy picnic lunch under an elm tree in the park. What better way for two people with hectic jobs to spend the afternoon? While they had a lull in their conversation during which the hostess seated a young couple just like them, she remembered something she always wanted to ask Stephen. "Can I ask you something personal?How did you come to want to learn to dance?"
Stephen smiled, blushing a little bit, also. "My mom said I should try it."
"Your mom?"
He nodded. "She taught at a dance studio, way back in the fifties, before she met my father. She said that I'd meet a higher class of woman there, among the dance students, than I would through church groups or reading clubs."
"Well, did you?" Linda asked.
"Yeah," he said, sniffing.
Linda met his mother once, at a Memorial Day celebration in Stephen's hometown. She still carried herself like a dancer, although she had completely committed to becoming the best homemaker for Stephen and the rest of the kids in the family. Since then, they'd spoke on the phone many times about the arrangements for the September wedding.
There would actually be two wedding celebrations: one would be the traditional ceremony with a mass back in Illinois, for Linda and her whole family, aunts, uncles, and cousins included. The other would take place in Cincinnati, and be more like a reception for their friends from the studio and all the other people in Stephen's family who were unable to make the trip to Linda's hometown.