Despite Chatty’s success with the long-gone Centennial Garden, she says she can’t bring herself to spend any time in this one. Warren said, “It could be argued that you do not get the full measure of the experience here if you don’t take advantage of the garden,” and Chatty told him, “We’re what’s going on here, so by having dinner with you, I’m taking in the attractions.” She took a small pouch out of the pocket of her smock and emptied it onto the tablecloth. “Coquilles sucre,” she said, sliding one at a time across the cloth to my place with her finger. Sugar shells, hard as rocks, in scuffed colors of coral, white, and blue, like pieces of sea glass, their shine tumbled off in salt water.

“One of the attendants gets them for me in town,” Chatty said.

Other people bring their own food to the table, as long as it has been approved ahead of time. Chatty told me a woman had gagged when she tried to swallow but instead inhaled a dry spoonful of Spirulina, a faddish powdered supplement that was meant to be stirred in fruit juice and would turn it an evil green.

Karen swallows Gore Vidal. Then she swallows Donald Trump. She takes a blue capsule and a gold capsule—a B-complex and an E—and puts them on the tablecloth a few inches apart. She points the one at the other. “Martha Stewart,” she says, “meet Oprah Winfrey.” She swallows them both without water.

My first night, unsolicited, Warren leaned across the table and confided, “The way to keep an ice-cream cone from dripping on your shirt? Before you put ice cream into one of those pointed cones, put in a miniature marshmallow to plug up any leaks. You can eat it at the end,” he pointed out.

I don’t really care what is on the table, as long as it isn’t raisins. Tonight we ordered in pizza, and the pizza-with-everything looked like a bad neighborhood. It is after dinner that I think about home. Across the way there are beer bottles lined up alongside the grave of the young man whose motorcycle stalled on the tracks. Not empties, but full bottles of Budweiser, capped. The malevolent twins steal in and drink them warm, hiding behind a towering hedge that encircles a trio of well-tended graves—the doctor who took two wives, sisters. The twins drink their bottles of stolen beer and think no one hears them snorting at dusk, then they put on wigs—black Afros from the sixties—and pretend to have sex in the hammock back of their house.

A woman on horseback walks the gravel paths. She is someone the twins have spied on, watching from the woods as she mucked stalls dressed in a string bikini, muttering “Perverts” at the yardmen who stared. In summer, in the cemetery, she climbs down and clips the white French lilacs that grow in one spot, spliced by rotting cedar. In the fall, she helps herself to dried hydrangea clusters, voluptuous, no doubt, on her dining room table. Her horse lifts its tail, and unleashed dogs escape nearby yards to come and feast, snapping, the way they scramble for clippings from hooves in her stable.