Lydia's Party: A Novel (10 page)

I don’t plan to list my sins of commission here. I’m more concerned with my sins of omission, or not even sins, failures. My failure to act. So here’s my list of regrets.

My first regret is that I didn’t do more with my painting. I became discouraged. I lost my nerve. I stopped when I should have kept going.

My second regret is that I didn’t go places I wanted to go.

•   •   •

It pained her. Lydia had thought she’d travel more later, when she had time. Now it was too late. Not that she hadn’t already taken wonderful trips—she had! Or some had been wonderful; the others made good stories. But now she wished she’d taken more. More, more, more! She felt greedy in retrospect, for what she might have had. It was a strategic error she wanted to advise them not to make. She’d wanted to ride a bathing train in Japan. She’d wanted to see Alaska.
Don’t bother,
people told her,
it’s boring
, but she didn’t care. She’d wanted to see the Globe Theatre, the northern lights, the Hermitage. Whales, bears in the wild.

And never mind exotic locales. She’d wanted to attend a full season of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and always assumed she would, one day. Her parents had taken her when she was a child, and that enveloping world of refinement had been a revelation. The velvet-covered seats, the subdued dissonance of the orchestra tuning up, the excited silence punctuated by a few nervous coughs, and then, that first sweet note, so full of promise, not only for music but also for the lull in her parents’ lifelong argument.

The first time, that first note, had been a defining moment. Art lulled them, she saw. Harmony begat harmony. It’s why she’d signed up for cello, though she’d dropped it when she realized she’d never be good. It was why she’d become an artist, or tried to. She could have afforded season tickets—why hadn’t she?

She’d wanted to have lunch with her mother at the Walnut Room, at Marshall Fields, on State Street. Her mother had always said she’d take them. Lydia didn’t figure out until after she died that it was she who should have initiated the lunch. It wouldn’t have been hard at all. Now, Marshall Fields didn’t even exist. It was Macy’s now. Lydia regretted that, all of it.

Once you opened these gates, Lydia thought, every petty thing came flooding through. It was a mistake, but now she couldn’t stop. She’d wanted to eat at a fondue restaurant—silly, but true. Early on, Spence hadn’t been interested. Later he gave up dairy out of sympathy for cows. But she could have gone with someone else. Celia would have been happy to go, if only to make Spence look bad. Though she would have made too much of it, Lydia thought, dragging along Peter and Griffin, to show Lydia what she was missing.

Lydia knew what Spence would say about all this—
dissatisfaction increases in proportion to available choice
. He called it the BCAD, the breakfast cereal aisle dilemma.

Lydia supposed most of her regrets were laughable, but the point wasn’t her idiotic whims. The point was all this wanting and wishing but never acting. She meant to tell her friends that if they had desires, however trivial, perhaps they should consider fulfilling them now, while they still could, so they could check them off their lists and get back to living their lives.

My third regret is that I wasn’t more kind.

Lydia preferred not to go into detail here but she knew some of them remembered the thing with Dennis. That was terrible. The police had assured her it was an accident, that he’d just run off the road. Happens all the time, they said. Still. She regretted that.

My fourth regret is that I didn’t sing more.

My fifth regret is that I wasted so much time worrying about men.

And why? Why had she done that? Why hadn’t she spent more time alone, simply enjoying her life? Or better yet, with her friends? Lydia set the letter down. She felt a little sick.

•   •   •

She’d go lay the fire, she decided. That always cleared her mind. Her father had taught her how, and she remembered his instructions exactly.
Leave room for oxygen
, she heard him hector when she piled the wood too tight. He was unimpressed with enthusiasm. He wanted results.
If you build it right, one match should do
, he said, always a genius of thrift. He’d boasted that his scoutmaster had called him One-Match Dick.

Lydia knelt on the ashy hearth. First she set crumpled newspaper on the floor of the fireplace, then more in the grate along with the last of the dry evergreen boughs from the mantle, left over from Christmas. This was her innovation. Her father would have considered it cheating. Over those she lay kindling, small sticks she’d collected from the yard, arranged in a teepee over the paper and the evergreens, then added larger sticks to that and small logs leaning strategically on the skeletal teepee. Then a couple of big dry logs balanced against that. When she was done she hauled more wood in from the porch and set logs to lean against the fireplace to dry.

Lydia sat back on her heels and brushed off her hands. Even a chore as simple as this exhausted her now, but it was satisfying work and she didn’t get to do it much. These days, Spence made their fires, when he was around, and when he wasn’t she mostly didn’t bother. He’d taken over the fireplace when he moved back and now he left his brown paper vegan potato chip bags and dirty paper towels in the grate and called it recycling. When it got to overflowing he’d ignite the pile with one blast from the butane torch he’d bought for caramelizing desserts, before he gave up sugar. He kept it on the hearth now, next to the fireplace tools.
Please don’t do that
, Lydia said when he blasted flame across the room. She said it in the quiet voice a parent used on a volatile child. She meant for her politeness to overrule his angry love of fire but it only incited him.
What’s the problem?
he’d say, lobbing an empty pasta box onto the pile from across the room, to make the fire flare higher.

What was the problem? Where should she begin? For one thing, there was the unsightliness of his garbage, piled in the living room, and for another there was the flame shooter. Then there was the fact that he was there at all, living in the basement. The idea had been that it would be temporary. She thought they’d agreed. Then there were the other, more immediate problems, for instance that when she got down on the floor to check the flue she had trouble getting up. Which might be related to that other little thing, cancer.

Be grateful for small pleasures, Lydia told herself. At least she’d laid a perfect fire. Her father would be proud—Lydia felt sure it would ignite with a single match.

•   •   •

Just then Maxine, who’d watched the fire-building proceedings quietly, walked to the fireplace, stuck her nose into Lydia’s carefully constructed pile of combustibles and extracted a big, chewy stick, causing the teepee to collapse. The bang of the hard oak logs on the cold stone hearth startled the dog. She jumped back, into the end table that held the wilted tulips, knocking them to the floor.

Maxine glanced guiltily at Lydia.
Bad dog
, Lydia said, not meaning it.

She scraped the soggy tulips off the floor and tossed them into the fireplace. She wasn’t any more effective in getting Maxine to cooperate than she was in getting Spence to. It was another thing Lydia regretted, this failure of hers to make her desires known.

While Lydia wiped up the spilled water, the dog stood just out of reach, waving the stick, the stub of her tail and the stick going in opposite directions, like some weird arthritic metronome. Lydia knew Maxine was trying to start a game of tug of war, her old favorite, but Lydia didn’t have the energy. She was weighed down by dark thoughts, her bitter attention now focused on Spence’s bad fireplace manners.

It was yet another thing to regret, this unforgivingness of hers. Better to let it go, she told herself. Focus on the party.

Upstairs, Lydia made another attempt at finishing the letter. She’d keep the ending short, she decided.

I’ll close, dear friends, with a plea concerning dogs. Indulge them. Cook them eggs on Sunday. Take them on road trips, unless of course it makes them vomit. And comb them often. It gives them so much pleasure that to deny this just seems cruel. Also it keeps shedding down. Finally, just love them. Their lives are so short.

Norris

Norris had left Jay in bed, pretending to be asleep. She knew he was pouting, the little fool. His feelings were hurt. He’d wanted to come along, like a dog. He should know by now, Norris thought. She didn’t like dogs.

His little tantrum had made her late, and when she finally got out of the house it was snowing again. She’d had to reshovel the driveway, and by the time she got on the highway it was getting dark.

Norris almost called Lydia, to cancel. She would have, if she could have been sure Jay was gone, but the possibility that he was still there, and that she’d have to throw him out, made her keep going.
Take charge and take advantage
, she told herself, as she did a dozen times a day. She clicked on cruise control, put her
Speak Like a Native (Italian)
CD in, and steered into the snow, dreaming of Venice. Her plan was to be fluent by the next Biennale.

•   •   •

The weather made the drive even longer than usual. Norris stopped only once, at Calumet Fisheries, the little one-room shack and adjacent smokehouse that clung to the banks of the Calumet River, on the far south side of Chicago. She stopped there sometimes when she drove around the lake. With no tables and no bathroom—you took the food home or ate in your car or, in hot weather, sitting on the curb—the place was a throwback, Norris’s one concession to nostalgia.

It was a south side thing. Her family had gone when Norris was little. Her uncle Jack took all the cousins every year, the day after Thanksgiving, for fried smelts. He’d been a school janitor, his vacations were the same as theirs. It seemed pathetic and kind of funny to Norris now, that smelts—oily little fried fish with bones—was her family’s idea of what to give a child for a treat, but she still craved the taste.

Norris’s plan was to pick up fish for Lydia’s party but, now, standing in line, absorbing the stench, she wanted to flee. The place reeked—of smoke and fish and grease and the smell of the river in the cold. Norris wasn’t used to waiting in line. She didn’t even want to go to this party, she thought. She surely didn’t need to take anything. The rest of them would show up with enough food to last a week.

This ceremonial eating of theirs seemed more repulsive to Norris every year. She hadn’t actually been to Lydia’s party in at least three years but she saw the e-mails. Not to mention that it was a colossal waste of time—the planning, the shopping, the cooking, the endless negotiating over e-mail about who was taking what, then the setting up, the trading of recipes, and afterward, the cleaning, the storing, the dividing of leftovers. You’d think they were a bunch of Amish housewives. And all that gooey food, mounds of cooked flesh, mayonnaise, butter, cheese—it made Norris queasy just to think of it.

Except for Lydia’s party, Norris made a point of avoiding occasions like this. If she had to eat at someone’s house—a collector, say—she brought her own food. Rice cakes, almonds, blueberries. A Ziploc bag of spinach she’d empty onto her plate and eat raw. She had some with her right now. She used to say she had food allergies, but now she didn’t bother to lie. She didn’t care if they were insulted. The way most people ate was disgusting, she thought. They were better off knowing that. Norris had a soft spot for Lydia, but she had the feeling this would be the last time she’d go to this party.

Lydia: 5:15
P.M.

The letter, Lydia decided, was ridiculous. She crumpled it, and, late as it was, started over.

Dear Friends,

I had planned to write a searingly honest letter that would shock us all into living more intensely, with individualized private endings for each of you. I thought it would be my legacy, in case I die, something I could leave to the world in the absence of exceptional children or good paintings. And I did try to write such a letter, but it ran long and rang false.

So here is something more succinct and true: I have stage-four cancer and maybe I’ll die soon. Probably I will. You are my best friends and I want to give you something, in thanks.

It was too dramatic, probably, Lydia thought. But wasn’t that what the proximity of death was supposed to do? Shock you into appreciating life? Though so far, she thought, it had only seemed to stall her. Onward, then.

But now I can’t think of much to say other than thank you. And carry on. Your lives look brave and beautiful to me. Also—be kind, to animals and to one another. What else? Enjoy your lives. There’s nothing new here. What I mean to say is that I regret I haven’t done these things or haven’t done them enough. If I get a chance I’m going to change my ways.

There are questions you probably want to ask. Cel wants to know if I regret not having children—she assumes I do but the answer is not really—and whether I regret that I didn’t remarry. Also, and more firmly, no. You all probably wonder if I’m afraid—a little, yes—and if I have regrets. That’s the point, really. I do. I wish I’d done more of what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. I wish I hadn’t said no so often.

•   •   •

There, Lydia thought. That at least was something true. The effort of having made herself confront it made her tired. She looked longingly toward the daybed across from her desk. Would succumbing to another nap, just a little one, be so bad? Would it be another
no
—to consciousness, to life itself? Or was it a
yes
—to the pleasure of sleep?

Whichever, there wasn’t time. They’d want examples, of course, of what she’d said no to, but Lydia didn’t have the heart to list them. She knew they’d sound trivial, pathetic even. How could she tell them she wished she’d gone to the Valentine Ball in high school, when she was invited by Bill Strong—twice!—instead of staying home, claiming she wanted to finish her encaustic painting of skulls in time for the art fair when really she’d been afraid to go, afraid she’d have to dance. And it would just seem odd to admit after all this time that she wished she’d gone to New Orleans on the bus with Elise Neuberger that time, when Elise had suggested it, when they were eighteen. Lydia remembered why she hadn’t. Elise had been bossy and she could be tiresome, but the real reason was some boy Lydia had hoped to see that weekend. She hadn’t wanted to miss out by being away. Now Lydia wished she’d said yes more, to all sorts of things.

•   •   •

Lydia could hear Celia, only pretending to be joking, say,
More? Didn’t you say yes entirely enough?
Celia would mean men, but Lydia meant everything. She wished now she’d taken more from what was available, or at least paid more attention to what she did take. Maybe that was all it was, she thought. Maybe she’d had plenty—trips, men, friends,
life
—if only she’d paid more attention to what she’d had.

Though couldn’t attention be retroactive? Lydia wondered. Wasn’t that what memory was?

Lydia tried to test the idea, tried to remember something important, relive it right then, to appreciate it after the fact, but the only things that came to mind were inconsequential, not the orchestrated events, but their unphotographable edges. The way Spence’s hands had looked one night, polishing his boots before a show. A tuna sandwich in a train station. A song heard with particular intensity in a hospital waiting room. Lydia suspected these edges were where she’d lived her real life. Now she wished she’d paid more attention to those.

Lydia felt a warm weight on her feet and looked down. Maxine lay across Lydia’s socks, and had rolled her head back, to stare up at her. Now, there was attention. Maybe love and attention were the same, Lydia thought, reaching down to rub Maxine’s pink belly. Maybe she remembered loving things simply because she remembered them.

Much of what now seemed worthwhile, more than Lydia would have thought, was of the body. The obvious, of course—food, sex, music—but other, plainer things, too. Just running, as a child, pretending to fly, arms out, legs pumping, throat and chest burning with air, was a pleasure she’d rarely equaled since. Or weather, the wild smell of it, every day something different—that alone was enough to live for. Or so she thought now. She wished she’d thought of it sooner.

Maybe smell, or the memory of it, was love itself. Lydia remembered how her father’s suits smelled, giving off clues to the mysterious masculine world outside the house, newsprint and pipe tobacco and something vaguely medicinal—gin? On summer weekends his brimmed felt hat, which he wore to cut the lawn, smelled of sweat and sweet mowed grass. Her mother’s scent was subtler—domestic and intimate, with notes of bacon grease and blood and stale face powder mixing with the fine, feminine smell of Jergens hand lotion. She’d kept a glass bottle of it beside the kitchen sink and smoothed it on her hands after washing the dishes. Much later, Lydia learned the name of the fragrance—Cherry-Almond. She’d happened on it once in a discount drugstore—in a plastic tube now, no longer in a pink glass bottle with an elegant black pump. Lydia had squirted some on her shaking hands right there in the store and her mother had appeared as if summoned, younger than Lydia by decades and pretty in her shirtwaist dress.

Now that Lydia had opened the gates of smell, the memories wouldn’t stop. Bingo, her childhood dog, smelled of his own oily fur, a zesty, outdoorsy, insouciant, slightly ammoniac scent, the thought of which made her choke back tears of longing for the sheer huggable corporeality of him, his thick chest around his fast-beating heart. She smelled the old wood and furniture polish of her grandmother’s quiet house, and the hard, thick bars of lavender soap she kept in her upstairs bathroom. The feel of a porcelain handle on a bathroom fixture in an old building somewhere could activate the memory of that smell, which was the smell of being four and standing on a box to wash her hands before Sunday dinner.

Maybe memory is where everyone really lived, Lydia thought, not the present, or not only the present. Never only the present. Or at least it was where she lived. She didn’t even know what she felt until after it was over.

Did it all come down to the body? Lydia wondered. She tried to remember loftier pleasures, moments of platonic love or intellectual insight, but she couldn’t get away from the senses. She was back riding at eighty miles an hour in the passenger seat of Spence’s green Camaro, through the Smoky Mountains, listening to Bob Seeger on the radio and drinking cold beer out of a bottle while a certain piney forest smell rushed through the open car windows. They’d been to the beach. Lydia had unhooked her wet bikini top and held it out the window like a flag, to dry it. Or this—early-morning hot summer smell and walking Arlo, a curly-haired foundling, past the open window of a collapsing paint-peeling house at dawn, some fifteen years before. She’d heard a woman singing scales in an operatic soprano, and it made up for a lot that was painful that summer, at least for a minute. Or this—a certain moment sitting in the kitchen of a third-floor apartment, on the top floor of a Victorian house where she’d lived alone with almost no furniture for two years. It was early, 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, and she couldn’t sleep. She was sitting at her one battered table smoking a cigarette, naked under a cotton robe, boiling water for tea. She remembered that when the kettle whistled she stood up to turn it off and turned toward the window and saw the sun just rising over the tree line, dark and red. Her robe had fallen open and she looked down then, just to pull it closed, and there was her body on fire. Her body was red. It was orange and gold. Like she’d swallowed fire. Like she was fire. And for just a moment Lydia had thought she was in flames or that she’d changed in some unimaginable way and was seeing herself, resplendent, in that split second before pain or explosion, and she’d waited for it and when it didn’t come she realized it was the sun on her skin.

She was happy then. That feeling that minute that morning—that’s what Lydia wished she’d had more of.

•   •   •

She heard a soft lapping sound. Malcolm the cat had arrived on her desk to drink from her water glass. Maybe the whole world was encompassed in the present, she thought. Maybe that morning and her thinking of that morning and that light then and this indifferent light now and Maxine lying across her feet and Malcolm lapping water from her glass were all one.

Lydia didn’t know and it was too late to figure it out now. She had a party to get ready for.