Lydia's Party: A Novel (2 page)

Two days before, Lydia had ordered the largest available version of a fancy French enameled iron casserole, for tonight’s chicken stew. She’d bought it for the color, an orangey flame red she’d never wear but thought she’d like to have around. She felt a little guilty. The cost, including overnight shipping, could have fed a family of four for a week. Every other year, Lydia had made the stew in her grandmother’s grease-stained cast-iron pot, the one she’d brought to Chicago from Massachusetts in 1908, and it had worked perfectly well. Lydia hadn’t needed a new pot. She’d just wanted one. Or not even. She just liked the color. But if this was what people did to enjoy their lives, Lydia thought, clanging the thing down on the stove when it arrived, then so be it.

Lydia was doing some of the cooking tonight. She always did, though officially the party was potluck. Lydia did like a nice potluck supper. People liked to bring things, and she liked surprises, to a point. Though this precipitous decline of hers was one surprise she could have done without.

•   •   •

Lydia had already begun shifting to the use-it-up approach to aging even before these other, darker developments got under way, about a year before, when it occurred to her that even if she started counting from age twenty and lived to the full extent of what actuaries predicted was her probable life span, she was already halfway through her productive life. She could see that things had tilted out of proportion. She’d saved. She’d waited. She’d been patient, and all of a sudden she felt overdue for something good to happen. She began to feel afraid she’d die—just a theoretical possibility at that point—with too much of everything left. She’d lived her life under the assumption that if she waited her turn, her turn would come, though for what, she no longer knew.

She saw now, she’d been too patient. That too-expensive hiking trip to Nepal she’d wanted to take, that she’d let Barry, who was her boyfriend then, talk her out of—she should have done it, she thought. It was too late now. Even a year ago it would have been. Not absolutely, but enjoyably—something to do with her feet, a result of cramming her toes into those fuck-me pumps all those years ago, the red ones. She’d worn them to work, of all places. Maybe she had lived a little, she thought. But she could have lived more. She saw now that the impatient ones were the ones that did it right. Now, at this late date, she was trying to change her ways.

•   •   •

Ice cubes, she thought, noticing, out the bathroom window, icicles hanging from the gutter. That’s what she’d forgotten. She’d e-mail Jayne to pick up a bag on the way over. So many details. She remembered when the idea of giving a party was simply a terror, an impossibility, one of the things on her List of Fears.

Don’t tell me you don’t have one
, she imagined saying to someone, Celia probably. At least she supposed everyone had some version of one, a chute of impossibilities that bumpered their lives. How could you not? Fear ruled the world, didn’t it? It had ruled hers.

Lydia had made her first list of fears when she was fifteen, in curly cursive handwriting, on lined notebook paper in romantic blue ink. The school psychologist she’d been sent to for turning in a particularly gruesome art project had told her to make a list of everything she was afraid of, and she’d taken to the task with alacrity, discovering she had a talent for fear. She’d lost track of the many-times-folded sheet of notebook paper, which she’d moved from hiding place to hiding place, but that hardly mattered now—she could recite the list from memory.

Lydia’s List of Fears—her own private catechism. Her fears then had numbered twenty-nine, the same as the number of lines on the page. She’d wondered sometimes, over the years, if her life would have turned out differently if she’d had a smaller notebook that day. But too late now. The count came to twenty-nine. She’d liked, at least, that the number was prime.

Lydia would have liked to be able to say she’d mastered all the fears on her list before she died, or at least that she planned to die trying, but it wouldn’t be true. The fact was she’d mastered a few, and some went away. As for the rest, she’d built her life around them.

Not that she would admit it, or even what was on the list. Or not anymore. She had, once. She’d recited the entire list to an old boyfriend, not Barry, a different one, the carpe diem guy, on a road trip, for something to talk about in the forced intimacy of a car plummeting unobstructed through the Badlands and across the hot brown prairie on the way back from Rapid City, South Dakota. They’d gone so he could photograph the big carved faces in the mountain. It was supposed to be funny, an ironic adventure, though the land was unexpectedly beautiful and the people open and kind. He’d made her list into a song, sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”—he’d called it “These Are a Few of My Terrible Things”—and sang it all the way back to Chicago.

Even now she could hear it, in his voice:

big black dogs

singing in public

going to parties

giving parties

driving

diving (especially scuba)

marriage

dentists and doctors and

Mean as it was, Lydia had to admit it was funny, how well he’d made it fit with that lovely old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, with the addition of a few
and
s and a little bounce and by throwing in a line ending in
Cuba
, though that part was purely made up. Lydia couldn’t have cared less about Cuba as a girl.

She’d come a long way since then, she thought, glancing at dear Maxine, an aging Rottweiler shepherd mix of exceptional beauty who gazed knowingly at her from her shearling-lined bed. Maxine sighed, her orange eyebrow-like markings furrowing with concern.

Lydia was moisturizing her face now with the antiaging upward strokes recommended by beauty experts and wondering who among her circle of friends had had plastic surgery. She regretted not getting that eye tuck she’d considered a few years before. She’d planned to pay for it with the unexpected tax refund she got that year but felt guilty and ended up donating the money to an animal shelter instead. Elaine had breast reconstruction after her mastectomy—she’d had both of them done so they’d match—but that didn’t count. Maybe Jayne? She had that perfect little nose, but some people just did. Lydia would never ask.

Lydia: The Guest List

Lydia made a mental list of who was coming tonight: Elaine, Celia, Maura, Jayne, and Betsy. Them, plus her, made the usual six. Seven, if Norris showed up.

Usually she didn’t. Though every year Lydia invited her, and suggested that Norris stay at the house, to make it clear it was a sincere invitation. Norris had never taken her up on it. Chicago bungalows were not her style, not anymore. Lydia knew for a fact that when Norris did come into town she stayed at a hotel.

Lydia no longer expected Norris to come to the party. Lydia’s friends weren’t really Norris’s friends and Norris spent most of her time in Michigan now. The years she’d shown up, she’d only stayed for an hour or two, on her way to somewhere else. So Lydia was surprised this year when Norris e-mailed to say she had business in the city and planned to stop by.

•   •   •

They’d all met twenty years before, at the godforsaken suburban community college that still employed Lydia, an association that Lydia supposed Norris wanted to shed.

The first year she’d given the party, Lydia had just been hired, adding the school to the roster of small colleges where she already taught part-time—a course here, a course there. They’d given her three classes the first semester and implied there might be a real job in the offing. The possibility had made her feel hopeful and expansive, more open to making friends than usual, in these often transient posts.

She taught a little of everything in those days—drawing, painting, art appreciation. The art department had shared office space with English and Humanities then, and that’s how most of them met. They’d hung out together in the faculty lounge, a smelly, windowless room outfitted with a minifridge, a filthy microwave oven, and two leatherette sofas. They’d brought their lunches to save money and gathered there to gripe. They graded papers and shared food. Bonds were forged.

•   •   •

Elaine had been Lydia’s first friend there. Elaine was older than Lydia. She’d worn boxy suits in an era of blue jeans and had taught English composition; she was the only one of them with tenure. Lydia got it later, but back then the place was a boys’ club. Most of them weren’t even full-time. They were paid per course, a fraction of what the full-time faculty got, and worked multiple jobs, hoping something would happen to change their lives. They’d felt abused and scared, buried alive, commuting into the arid and airy suburbs from their dark city apartments in broken-down cars, their trunks crammed with books and papers. It had been an uneasy time, though looking back, Lydia could see that being an outsider had had its advantages. She’d had impetus to paint, then. Teaching was a sideline, she’d thought, a way to pay the bills.

Of course, it hadn’t worked out that way. Teaching, not art, became her career. Eventually she found she was good at it, and when they offered her a real job she’d grabbed it, for dental insurance and a retirement package that now she might never use.

Mental note, she thought—reread the packet on short-term disability insurance.

Much later, Lydia found out they’d offered the job to Norris first, for better pay, and that Norris, two years out of grad school and twelve years younger, had turned it down. Norris had gotten a better offer, at a real college, the same week, from someone she’d met at the residency she’d gotten Lydia bumped from. Now Norris didn’t have to teach. She was that rarest of all creatures, an artist who lived—and well—off her art.

More water under the bridge, Lydia told herself, counting out cloth napkins. Her policy was to have plenty of extras. After the first few bottles of wine they tended to slip off laps and onto the floor.

Still, it had stung, she thought, Norris getting that good job so easily and so young, all those years ago. It had hurt to be surpassed that way, by a friend. Briefly, they’d been colleagues, fellow artists. Lydia had wanted to mentor Norris, show her the ropes, bring her along. But Norris had flashed past while Lydia stood still. Lydia had kept in touch, to prove there were no hard feelings, but of course there were. Norris reminded Lydia of what she’d had and lost. Promise.

Though Lydia had to admit that Norris had something else, too. Not more talent exactly, but more certainty. More belief, less doubt. She’d expected to succeed. Now it was hard to believe she was ever one of them. Lydia had looked up her website. She didn’t even put their little school on her CV.

Lydia banged the iron down hard on the linen napkin she was ironing. Steam sizzled. She tried to let all that go. That’s what they’d said to do in the one session of disease management counseling she’d attended, free of charge. They’d been given bumper stickers that said
Holding on to hurts, hurts!
Letting things go was good for your health, they said. And she had tried. But the things she let go of came back, and she’d have to let them go again. It got tiring, Lydia thought.

She hadn’t known the whole story until much later, years later, recently in fact, when she’d found out at some faculty party. Someone brought it up as if it were old news, a joke by now since Lydia appeared to be way past it, and she’d pretended not to be surprised.

Cruelty is as common as the common cold
,
Lydia remembered her tough old grandma
saying, brushing off her apron with excessive force.
Get a hankie and get used to it
,
she’d say. She didn’t put up with crying over playground slights.

Lucky she hadn’t found out sooner, Lydia thought. Too late now to take up a grudge. She’d have to let go not only of Norris but also of this idea, that they’d been friends all these years. It was too much to give up. She’d have to stop inviting Norris to the party, and at this late date, she’d be embarrassed to explain why. Everyone thought she’d already forgiven her.

•   •   •

Lydia went back to her mental guest list: Elaine, Celia, Maura, Jayne, and Betsy. Maybe Norris. Lydia was the only one of them still teaching. Or she had been, until this happened. Now she was on medical leave and probably wouldn’t go back, if her doctor was to be believed. Elaine, that cagey devil, had gotten out fifteen years earlier, saved up to pay off her mortgage and gave notice the day she wrote the last check. She said she couldn’t stand teaching anymore, couldn’t stand the tedium of hearing her own voice repeating itself semester after semester, telling the same jokes and the same stories, acting out the same rehearsed epiphanies, year after year, and Lydia knew what she meant, felt the same way about her own tired performances. Though Lydia thought that in Elaine’s case it was grading papers that finally did her in. Four sections of English composition every semester—she’d felt she had to correct every superfluous comma.

Elaine had invited a few of them over on a Saturday morning, after her last exam, for what she called an office cleaning brunch. She’d set out a box of doughnuts and a carton of orange juice and someone had dug out a bottle of single malt Scotch and they’d spent the morning dragging bins mounded with old blue books into the parking lot, heaving armloads of term papers into a Dumpster. As the day, and the effects of spiked orange juice, wore on, their aim worsened and by mid-afternoon student papers, blurred by May drizzle, littered the pavement. Two months later, Elaine took a part-time job as a fact checker at an in-flight magazine and quit the day she qualified for social security.

Lydia had wondered at the time if Elaine had been hasty. What about her career? Now Lydia understood and wished she’d done the same. Elaine had been the bellwether, the one who went first through this difficult terrain—the shucking off of (what little remained of) status, the scaling back of expenses, the sexless clothes, the lopping off of body parts, the living will, the going gray. She had a snow-white buzz cut now, cute and efficient.

Then there was Celia. Celia had started teaching at the community college one year after Lydia and they’d instantly become friends, but she’d quit as soon as she married Peter. Her plan—Peter agreed to it, Celia claimed—was to become a full-time, subsidized artist. Later, quietly, she’d gone back to school and started taking courses toward a degree in library science. A few years after that, Griffin was born. He was a somber, wrinkled infant who seemed to know he was Plan B. Lydia thought he resembled a baked apple.

For a while after Griffin was born, Celia worked part-time at a suburban weekly, as its arts critic.
They have an art critic?
Lydia had said, meaning to be supportive.
Arts
, Celia had corrected her. She covered community theater, craft shows.
It’s fun!
Celia had said. After a year they cut her hours and six months after that they let her go, then gave her what they called a column. For a few years after that she wrote a bullet-point list—“Shows to See”—every other week and was paid slightly less than it would have cost them to reimburse her for gas. Celia claimed not to mind—it gave her more time for her business, she said, building birdhouses in their spare bedroom. Lydia couldn’t remember what she was doing now.

Maura had been Lydia’s student, though they were around the same age. She worked near the college in an industrial park, as an administrative assistant at an insurance company, and had turned up in Lydia’s evening art appreciation class. She was by far Lydia’s brightest student that semester and Lydia had encouraged her to take more classes. Go on to a four-year college, she’d told her, part-time, if you need to, but finish your degree. Though Lydia came to know, because Maura eventually told her, that school had been a way to distract herself, occupy her evenings when Roy wasn’t free. Roy in fact wasn’t free most evenings, occupied as he was with dinner, with his wife and children.

Roy was Maura’s boss.

The first year Maura came to the party, everyone acted strange around her, in her shiny hose and big hair and nervous eagerness to not seem different that made her seem so different. But the next year she’d toned down her look and eventually Lydia’s friends got used to her. When Maura and Elaine got close, Lydia was surprised but mostly just relieved. Let Elaine take on the problem of Roy, Lydia thought, and Elaine had, with a vengeance that continued even after he died.

Jayne had taught art history, until she finished law school and got a better job. They all said
go, girl
to that.

And Betsy—they’d met her through Ted. He’d been thin then, cute, really, with that big head of wavy orange hair. Ted had taught music theory in those days and hung out with them in the lounge, one of the girls, almost. He’d begged an invitation to the party the second year and brought along Betsy—this was before they were married—and they’d all become friends. Later, he’d sulked when Lydia told him she’d decided the party should just be for women. Now Betsy was Lydia’s friend. It was good to have someone in the group who was so different from the rest of them, a former social worker with a successful private psychotherapy practice. When they got down to gossip, Betsy took a harder line than anyone.

•   •   •

There’d been others Lydia had invited the first few years. June, an oboist, came once but she moved to Maine and later they heard she died in a car wreck. And there was Marcie, the performance artist who’d been hired to teach one section of art appreciation, who got fired when she used her guest speaker stipend to bring in a friend to talk about body art and he’d taken the opportunity to show the class his tattooed penis. Lydia had always liked her. She was fearless. She’d brought her partner Kate to the party one year and they showed up in tuxedos and top hats and did magic tricks. But they broke up, and Marcie’s new girlfriend didn’t like her friends and that was the last Lydia saw of either of them.

In the beginning Lydia had invited everyone—husbands, partners, dates, visiting houseguests, even children, but that didn’t last. The women hadn’t felt free to talk.

Now it was just the six of them, and Norris if she showed. A slightly unstable group, Lydia thought, more volatile than couples. She’d been part of a group like that, back when she and Spence were still married. Four couples had met four times a year for dinner, like clockwork. They’d each taken a season—theirs had been fall. One October, Lydia had made lamb stew she served from a hollowed-out, roasted pumpkin, before Spence went vegan. Instead of a tablecloth that year, Lydia had covered the table with rubbery yellow leaves from their oak tree. For dessert she’d served pumpkin pie with marshmallows they’d roasted on sticks over a fire pit in the backyard.

It had gone on like that for three or four years, every dinner party more imaginative and ambitious than the last. She missed it sometimes. If the privacy of marriage had tended to blunt whatever female friendships the women might otherwise have formed, the arrangement had a certain stately symmetry to it, too, like dancing the Virginia reel. At the very least, it had made for some lovely evenings. She’d tried to stay in touch with the women after her divorce as the group dispersed—she and Spence weren’t the only ones—but without their spouses they were like crabs without shells and they lost touch.

These friendships were messier, Lydia thought. Without cover of men they had fewer secrets, weaker boundaries.