My Mother-in-Law Demanded a Million-Ruble Banquet. I Suggested She Choose a Menu Her Own Wallet Could Afford
“Altogether, Lidochka, including the hall rental, the chairs draped in French silk, and an ice sculpture shaped like a swan, it comes to seven hundred and fifty thousand rubles. But that, of course, doesn’t include premium alcohol. We’ll buy that separately.”
Raisa Georgievna sat enthroned in a velvet armchair upholstered in something suspiciously resembling plush leopard skin and looked at her daughter-in-law with the grandeur of an Egyptian pharaoh announcing taxes for the next five years. She was turning seventy. A respectable age, one that apparently required grandeur and a demonstration of lifelong success before distant relatives, many of whom had last seen Raisa Georgievna back when she still wore a perm.
Lidia, a fifty-year-old administrator at the municipal cultural center with twenty years of experience, a Nordic temperament, and immunity to every known form of hysteria, calmly took a sip of mineral water. Water in this pretentious establishment cost as though it had been extracted from unicorn tears, but Lidia was in no hurry.
She carefully took the gold-embossed printed menu from her mother-in-law’s hands and scanned the items.
“Venison medallions with berry coulis… Canapés with black caviar on rye crisps… Raisa Georgievna, are you sure Aunt Galya from Syzran will appreciate venison? If I remember correctly, the bridge on her upper jaw has been loose since your last anniversary.”
“Don’t pick at details, Lidia!” her mother-in-law said, sweeping her hand majestically and nearly striking a waiter. “It’s about status! People need to understand that retirement hasn’t reduced me to scraping cabbage soup out of a pot. Thank God, I have tenants, I rent out my apartment, and I’ve saved enough for a dignified old age.”
“Wonderful.” Lidia returned the menu to the table and dabbed her lips with a napkin. “Since you have savings, why did the restaurant administrator just ask me whose name the contract should be in and who is going to pay the two-hundred-thousand-ruble deposit right now?”
Raisa Georgievna adjusted the massive gold brooch on her chest, which had always served as her shield during difficult negotiations, and lowered her voice slightly, giving it a confidential tone.
“Oh, Lidochka, we’re family! My savings are sacred. They’re sitting in a deposit account earning good interest. Taking them out now would mean losing money. You and Igor both have stable salaries. You wouldn’t abandon your mother on such an important day, would you? Besides, I’ve already sent invitations to all eighty guests for this restaurant. I wrote that the celebration was a gift from my beloved children. You should be happy!”
Lidia looked at her mother-in-law with a faint, almost imperceptible smirk. She felt neither anger nor resentment. After twenty-five years of marriage to Igor, she had studied Raisa Georgievna the way she would study the complicated but predictable budget of a loss-making event.
Her mother-in-law had spent her entire life showing off at other people’s expense, skillfully disguising her phenomenal stinginess as concern for the family’s prestige.
“So, you’ve already sent the invitations,” Lidia said evenly. “And you decided to present us with the bill afterward. An original marketing strategy.”
“Lidia, don’t start!” A metallic note entered her mother-in-law’s voice. “It’s my anniversary! I devoted my whole life to your Igor!”
“And we appreciate that very much.” Lidia opened her handbag and took out her wallet. “That’s why Igor and I discussed your gift in advance. We’re giving you thirty thousand rubles. You can buy yourself something memorable with it. Or, say, pay for one-tenth of your luxurious banquet.”
Raisa Georgievna went pale so quickly that uneven blotches of rouge appeared on her cheeks.
“How much? Thirty thousand? The stuffed sturgeon alone costs twelve! Do you want to humiliate me in front of the entire family?!”
“I don’t see any sturgeon on the estimate, but I do see ‘baked tilapia with cheese sauce’ at a four-hundred-percent markup.” Lidia tapped the line on the menu with one fingernail like a professional. “Raisa Georgievna, I’ve worked in cultural events for twenty years. I read banquet estimates like an open book. The hot dish portion here is one hundred and fifty grams per person. At these prices, they should be serving you marbled-beef steaks, not frozen fish. They’re simply ripping you off, and you’re trying to make us pay for the privilege.”
Her mother-in-law gasped in outrage.
“In our day, the younger generation was supposed to invest in the status of their elders! It’s a family law, respect for gray hair! Smart children understand that family prestige is shared capital!”
“Raisa Georgievna, people invest in real estate or stocks,” Lidia replied calmly. “Financing a banquet where eighty people we barely know will chew venison while making toasts to your greatness at our expense is not an investment. It’s charity. And Igor and I are not a relief fund for ambitious pensioners.”
“You’re just a jealous, mercenary little philistine who begrudges the mother of her own husband every last kopeck!” her mother-in-law hissed.
Lidia slowly rose from the table and buttoned her light jacket.
“You’re making noise like a blown muffler on an old Lada—plenty of sound, but you’ll still have to run on your own fuel.”
Leaving a banknote on the table to pay for her water, Lidia turned and left the establishment, abandoning Raisa Georgievna alone with the ice swan, which somehow seemed to be looking at her with mild disapproval too.
That evening, the house smelled of freshly brewed thyme tea and rosin. Igor, Lidia’s husband, an electrical substation technician with the appearance of a good-natured bear, sat at the kitchen table, carefully soldering some complicated circuit board under a bright desk lamp.
After changing into comfortable house clothes, Lidia sat down opposite him and recounted the restaurant meeting in detail. Igor listened attentively without interrupting, only occasionally furrowing his thick eyebrows.
“Eighty people, then,” he summarized, setting down the soldering iron. “And seven hundred and fifty thousand. Interesting arithmetic.”
“Plus alcohol, Igorek. Don’t forget the alcohol. Aunt Galya from Syzran isn’t going to chew dry venison without anything to wash it down.”
Igor grinned, cleaned his glasses, and looked at his wife.
“You know, Lida, the electrical grid operates according to very simple laws. There’s such a thing as an ‘allowable load.’ If you put a washing machine, kettle, heater, and the neighbor’s welding machine all on one phase, the breaker simply trips. The phase doesn’t cry, negotiate, or suffer. It just cuts the power so the whole system doesn’t burn to hell. My mother is currently trying to connect her personal welding machine to our family budget.”
Lidia smiled at her husband. That was one of the reasons she loved him: he had no sentimental illusions and knew how to call things exactly what they were.
Igor picked up his phone, opened his banking app, and entered the amount.
Thirty thousand rubles.
“That’s it,” he said, pressing the transfer button. “The breaker has tripped. I wrote in the comment: ‘Mom, happy upcoming anniversary. A gift from Lida and me.’ We’re not giving another kopeck toward this madness.”
Lidia’s phone rang the next morning at precisely the moment she was reviewing the September events schedule at work.
The screen displayed: “Raisa Georgievna.”
Lidia waited, allowing the ringtone to play halfway through, and only then answered calmly.
“I’m listening.”
“Lidia!” Her mother-in-law’s voice trembled with righteous anger mixed with mild panic. “Igor transferred some pathetic thirty thousand to me! I called him, but he said you’re the finance minister in your family and that the budget has already been approved and closed!”
“That’s correct. We understand each other perfectly.” Lidia made a note in her work calendar.
“Do you realize the restaurant called me?! They’re demanding the prepayment! I didn’t sleep all night! I’ve made concessions. I crossed Uncle Misha and his drinking wife off the guest list, along with my second cousin from Vologda. There will only be sixty of us! The bill went down by a hundred thousand. Transfer the rest. I’m waiting.”
Lidia put down her pen.
“Raisa Georgievna, I believe we settled everything yesterday. We are not paying for your banquet. Not for eighty people, not for sixty, not even for twenty.”
A heavy silence hung on the line. Her mother-in-law was clearly trying to change tactics on the spot.
“Fine,” she said through clenched teeth, so sweetly that Lidia nearly felt her ears sticking together. “If you insist on being so principled… I’ll withdraw money from my deposit. But since you don’t want to help financially, you can help with labor. I’ll rent only the hall, without their kitchen. You and Igor can go to the wholesale market on the weekend and buy the groceries on my list. And you, Lidochka, as a good housewife, can cook for sixty people. What is there to do, really? Three or four kinds of salad in big tubs, some French-style baked meat in trays for the main course, cold cuts… You can start Friday after work, and you’ll easily be finished by Saturday evening.”
Lidia laughed quietly.
The absurdity of the situation had reached its peak.
“Cook salads and hot food for sixty people by myself, in a home kitchen, in one day? Raisa Georgievna, haven’t you confused me with the field kitchen of a motorized infantry division?”
“What’s so difficult about it?! In our day, women knew how to work instead of sitting around in restaurants at other people’s expense! In the old days, entire villages cooked for weddings and nobody complained! It’s a normal woman’s duty to help the family organize a celebration!”
“In our day, Raisa Georgievna, if you want to feed a company of soldiers, you hire cooks,” Lidia said slowly, clearly articulating every word. “I’m an administrator, not free catering. My duty as a woman on the weekend is to sleep until nine, drink coffee with my husband, and rest after the workweek. There will be no tubs of Olivier salad.”
“Selfish woman! Lazy woman! How does Igor even put up with you?! You’re going to leave his own mother high and dry on a day like this!” her mother-in-law shrieked.
“Raisa Georgievna, you’ve latched onto this anniversary like a tick on a pedigree dog,” Lidia replied evenly. “Except you’re the dog yourself, and you’re drinking your own blood. Goodbye.”
She hung up and put the number on silent.
The following week passed in tense silence.
Raisa Georgievna did not call again. However, fragments of information reached Lidia through mutual acquaintances, gradually forming a very colorful picture.
Raisa Georgievna’s tenants, a young couple, had suddenly moved out without paying for the final month, citing force majeure.
That meant her mother-in-law had been forced to break into her untouchable “emergency fund”—the very bank deposit she had guarded like a miserly knight protecting his treasure.
When Raisa Georgievna realized that she would have to pay for the pretentious restaurant entirely with her own hard-earned, carefully saved rubles, her love of prestige instantly evaporated and was replaced by her natural thriftiness.
The ice swan melted away in her imagination before it ever had the chance to exist.
The restaurant was canceled.
Three days before the celebration, Lidia received a dry message:
“The anniversary will be celebrated at my apartment. Saturday at 5:00 p.m. Don’t be late.”
On Saturday, Lidia prepared carefully. She put on an elegant emerald dress that complemented her figure, styled her hair lightly, and applied fresh makeup.
She looked exactly like someone going to a celebration to relax, not to work.
Igor put on a nice shirt and trousers.
As they approached Raisa Georgievna’s apartment, they could hear the dull chopping of knives, the clatter of dishes, and the birthday woman’s irritated voice from behind the door.
Igor rang the bell.
The door flew open.
Raisa Georgievna stood in the doorway.
The sight was truly cinematic.
She was wearing a burgundy evening dress that had clearly been bought sometime in the early 2000s, but over it she had carelessly tied an old apron splattered with beet juice and mayonnaise.
Her hairstyle, normally arranged with every hair in place, now resembled the nest of an alarmed bird: several strands had escaped and stuck to her damp, sweaty forehead.
The apartment was filled with the heavy, stuffy smell of boiled eggs, fried onions, and Red Moscow perfume.
“You finally made it,” her mother-in-law exhaled instead of greeting them, leaning heavily against the doorframe. “Come in. Just don’t wander around the living room. The tables are already pushed together.”
Lidia entered the apartment with a radiant, polite smile.
“Raisa Georgievna, you look stunning. Happy birthday!”
She gracefully held out a small bouquet of chrysanthemums.
The monetary gift, as the reader will remember, had already been transferred.
The living room was packed with three mismatched tables covered with equally mismatched tablecloths.
Instead of sixty people, barely twenty were squeezed into the room—the most persistent and closest relatives, people who apparently had nowhere else to escape.
There was no venison.
There was no caviar.
Instead, the tables held deep crystal bowls filled with traditional Olivier salad, herring under a fur coat, lonely plates of inexpensive sliced sausage and cheese, and, in the center, an enormous platter piled with baked chicken and potatoes.
The menu that Raisa Georgievna had so desperately tried to force her daughter-in-law to pay for had ultimately been reduced to an ordinary, heavy homemade feast.
Lidia sat in the seat offered to her and carefully smoothed the hem of her dress.
The next two hours became an endurance test for Raisa Georgievna.
She did not sit down for a single minute.
She ran to the kitchen for clean forks, brought bread, carried away dirty plates, and served more hot food to the guests.
Her face became redder and redder, and fresh stains appeared across her apron.
She was the cook, waitress, and dishwasher at her own birthday party.
Aunt Galya from Syzran, loudly chewing on a chicken leg, announced to the whole table:
“Oh, Raya, look at you! You cooked everything yourself! Remember how you told me you were taking us to a restaurant and promised us all kinds of fancy foreign delicacies? I thought I might not live long enough to see something like that. And now look—potatoes and chicken! Just like normal people eat. No showing off!”
Raisa Georgievna, who happened to be holding a stack of dirty plates at that moment, froze.
Her lips compressed into a thin line.
She cast a quick glance at her daughter-in-law, full of concealed fury and helplessness.
Lidia sat with her back perfectly straight, slowly sipping apple juice from a tall glass and having a relaxed, pleasant conversation with Igor’s cousin about autumn pruning at the country house.
She looked fresh, calm, and completely uninvolved in the chaos her mother-in-law had created for herself.
At one point, Raisa Georgievna approached the table to collect the empty breadbasket.
Leaning toward Lidia, she hissed viciously into her ear:
“Happy now? Sitting here like some grand lady, relaxing while your husband’s mother can barely stay on her feet?”
Lidia turned her head slightly, looked into her mother-in-law’s exhausted, angry eyes, and replied in a quiet but crystal-clear voice:
“Absolutely, Raisa Georgievna. I’m attending a celebration that fully corresponds to your budget and your desire to work for the sake of status. You wanted a party at someone else’s expense? It didn’t happen. Now you’re paying for it and cooking for it yourself. I’m not the grand lady here. It’s simply the laws of physics: the breaker tripped, and the system returned to normal.”
Her mother-in-law opened her mouth, apparently ready to unleash another round of insults, but at that moment Igor’s booming voice sounded from the other end of the table:
“Mom, bring some more pickles! And we’re running out of napkins!”
Raisa Georgievna jerked as though she had received an electric shock.
Without saying a word, she turned around and trudged back toward the kitchen, her dress shoes scraping heavily across the floor.
The celebration continued.
Lidia took a bite of homemade pie and smiled.
Justice had arrived quietly, without shouting or scandal, and there was no appeal.
