Lydia's Party: A Novel (19 page)

Norris was about to say no, but something in Lydia’s face stopped her.

“For just a little bit,” Norris said. “Then I have to go.”

“Great,” Lydia said. “I have something I want to give you.”

Everyone was assembled at the table, which was covered once again with food, bottles, pitchers, and plates. The house smelled of coffee and bacon. There were ten around the table now. Peter had shown up with freshly baked bread, to help dig out their cars. Spence had been back for hours and had vacuumed, then shoveled the neighbors’ sidewalk. Extra chairs were crowded together, plates were held in laps. Betsy, hearing that an announcement was about to be made, had opened the last two bottles of champagne, before Celia had a chance to stop her. Glasses were filled.

The party had resumed, with all the women, and Ted, wearing some version of what they’d slept in, except for Norris, who’d brought her overnight bag in from the car. She’d been up since six, run three miles in the newly plowed streets, washed her hair, and put on clean clothes. Norris looked at her watch.

Jayne tapped her fork against her glass. Betsy was yelling,
Toast, toast
, and Ted was saying,
I was going to make French toast but Jayne used all the eggs
, and Spence was raising his glass and saying
To all my friends
in his best Mickey Rourke, although these were not his friends. Maxine, who knew too much, lay sideways across Lydia’s feet.

“Quiet, please,” Celia said. “Lydia has something she wants to tell us.”

Sunday: 11:30
A.M.

The men were in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and putting away food. The women sat around the apothecary cabinet, dividing up the jewelry. All ninety-nine drawers had been distributed and now they were trading. Elaine, who did not have pierced ears, had gotten an earring drawer and traded the whole thing with Betsy, who’d gotten pins but favored chandelier earrings and a retro hippie look.

“I love this.” Maura was holding a long string of freshwater pearls against her chest.

“Spence bought those for me, at an outdoor café,” Lydia said. “Some guy came to the table with them strung over his arm.”

“Wow,” Maura said, looping the pearls around her neck, thinking of Roy. “I’ve never had pearls.”

“What about this?” Norris said. She held up a sterling silver pin in the shape of a dragonfly. She’d gotten a drawer full of funky miscellany, not her style. Usually all she wore was a man’s diving watch and, for formal occasions, diamond ear studs, but she’d found the little pin among the Bakelite bracelets and it was the one thing she didn’t hate.

“Isn’t it nice?” Lydia said. “It was my mother’s. Art Nouveau, I think.” Norris pinned it near the shoulder of her black turtleneck.

“What’s this?” Elaine said, untangling something heavy from a mess of knotted-together chains. She held up an oversized oval locket with a tarnished filigree cover.

“My grandmother’s locket!” Lydia reached for it. So that’s where the thing had been all these years. She’d given it up for lost. “I wonder if anything’s in there,” she said, reaching for the locket again. She’d kept things in it, in high school.

Elaine ran her fingers over the side, looking for the release. She found a little bump and pressed. The cover popped open. Out fell the stub of a joint.

A cry went up, false hilarity. Celia took the roach between two fingertips and held it to her lips, pretending to inhale. Someone went for matches. Meanwhile, Elaine held the open locket in her palm, plucking at something still stuck inside. After a couple of tries she extracted the thing and held it up.

All they could see was that it was a piece of tightly folded paper, crushed to fit. Elaine shook it a little and the paper began to relax. They saw blue ink, girlish handwriting, the ruffled edge of a page torn from a spiral notebook. Lydia’s list of fears.

•   •   •

So that’s where it went, Lydia thought. She had no memory of having put it there, or anywhere—though it made sense, the locket had been a hiding place—and no memory of having put the locket in the apothecary cabinet decades after that. For a second, before anyone knew what it was, she thought of grabbing for it. It was bound to be embarrassing. Under almost any other circumstances she would have grabbed for it, but to do that required getting up. She felt too tired.

Besides, she thought, why bother? It was ancient history, and if the doctor was to be believed, she was weeks away from death. Maybe, she thought, at this late date it might be amusing for once to let her friends see her without trying to control what they saw. Too little, too late, maybe, but really, where was the harm? At the very least, she thought, this could provide a bit of entertainment, fulfilling her duty as a hostess by taking the edge off the morning’s grim mood.

•   •   •

Elaine unfolded the paper, rattled it. Bits crumbled off and fell to the rug. She looked around to make sure she had everyone’s attention before she began to read.

“‘Things I Fear,’ by Lydia Fallows.”

A little murmur went up. Elaine looked at Lydia, realizing that what she was about to do might not be as funny as she’d thought. She felt kinder this morning, after a surprisingly good night’s sleep, and Lydia’s announcement had put her foul mood in perspective. Elaine raised her eyebrows, asking permission.

Lydia shrugged.

Elaine adjusted her glasses and began to read. Lydia mouthed the words along with her.

“Things I Fear,” by Lydia Fallows

1. Dancing (in public)

2. Going to parties

3. Giving a party . . .

The group had been silent but now a little cry went up. Maura reached over and gave Lydia’s shoulder a sideways hug. “But your parties are so nice,” she said.

“They’re very nice,” Celia said.

“Do you want me to stop?” Elaine said. “Maybe I should.” Lydia shook her head.

“Is it OK if we laugh?” Jayne said.

Lydia nodded. “Please,” she said. Maybe it would help, she thought. Things had gone from bad to awful.

Elaine resumed. Now every item elicited some kind of noisy response—hoots, boos, gasps.

4. Diving, especially scuba

5. Driving

6. Being buried alive

7. Getting married

8. Having a baby (a. giving birth, b. taking care of it)

9. Tarantulas, snakes, some worms, large beetles, centipedes

10. Big black dogs

11. Being seen naked

12. Getting fat

13. Going to hell

14. “This one’s crossed out,” Elaine said, looking at Lydia over her reading glasses. Lydia shook her head.

15. Being abducted by aliens

16. Being forced to sing in public

17. Bad LSD trip

18. Drowning

19. Throwing up or any kind of seizure in public

20. Going to doctor, dentist, etc.

21. “Crossed out.”

22. Going crazy and being put in a straitjacket

23. “Crossed out.”

24. Measuring out my life in coffee spoons

25. Ballroom dancing—gym

26. “Also crossed out.”

Elaine looked up. “Are you sure you wouldn’t care to illuminate us?”

“I don’t remember that one,” Lydia said, though it wasn’t true.

27. Competition

28. Dying without accomplishing anything

29. Somebody reading this list

Celia

It was late Sunday afternoon now, already dark, and everyone except Celia had gone home. Spence was outside, shoveling again—another three inches of snow had fallen—and Lydia had gone back to bed. Celia was vacuuming.

What was it that made people crave disaster, she wondered, banging the vacuum wand under chairs, sucking up dog hair and food crumbs from under the couch. Boredom? Or impatience, the wish to hurry the world to the end they knew was coming, just to get it over with? Or was it the cleansing effect of destruction that people craved, she wondered, the possibility it offered for change? Everyone had stories—the house fire that unburdened, the bankruptcy that freed, the divorce that allowed the broken parties to walk away from the unbearable complications of love. Sometimes loss was a relief.

Something rattled up the wand—more jewelry, probably, a thin gold necklace, maybe, or a charm bracelet. But who cared, now?

At the very least, Celia supposed, disaster took people’s minds off their pettier concerns, made them put aside their schemes and grudges, at least for a while. Many a minor grievance had been forgotten as people stood on street corners with strangers, on 9/11, Celia thought. She doubted many perfect dinners had been cooked that night. She’d gone to the pantry and found a can of mushroom soup and felt grateful for it.

Yesterday morning there had appeared again a headline on her home page that had been there for days—
Hard Times Make for Shabby Hair
. It had made her feel guilty. She needed a haircut and had been putting it off. It wasn’t cheap. And she was terrified of Victor, her hairdresser. He didn’t listen. Usually he did something awful. Paying him, then tipping him, afterward, felt like humiliation. She’d go home and look in the mirror and cry, then wait a few months and go back and he’d do it again. Why do you go back, Peter had said when she’d told him. Celia had said she didn’t know, but she did. It was like marriage. Starting over with someone else would just be too hard.

•   •   •

Vacuuming made Celia’s back hurt. She dragged a heavy chair from a corner and sucked up a little stash of cat toys. She didn’t feel like bending over to pick them up. She knew her hair was the pettiest of concerns. “I acknowledge that,” she said, out loud, over the roar of the vacuum. Who cared if someone heard? She was sucking dust off the drapes now with the bare wand. She’d removed the attachment to get into the corner and hadn’t replaced it and now she’d sucked fabric into the roaring hole. She yanked it out—it felt like a rescue.

Here’s what bothered her—for three days running she’d avoided opening the story on shabby hair in hope, yes,
hope
,
there would be some newsworthy disaster to take its place. She wanted to feel virtuous in postponing her haircut. She wanted to not get a haircut because she was thinking of more important things, not because she was afraid of another one of Victor’s expensive hack jobs. She wanted to invoke that selfish bromide of her grandmother’s that was supposed to sound charitable but wasn’t—
Look around and be grateful, young lady. Somebody else has got it worse.
Her hair was bad, yes, but it was nothing compared with
that
.

Celia had been thinking this just yesterday morning. Now everything had changed. Lydia had given her two Ziploc bags of costume jewelry, and a velvet pouch containing her grandmother’s marcasite bumblebee brooch, which, she said, Celia had once admired, although Celia didn’t remember having done so. Lydia had told them she was going to die any day.

Celia jabbed at a cobweb that hung from the ceiling.

She should have noticed something was wrong. She could have helped, gotten Lydia to the doctor sooner. Though Lydia had been distant lately, it was true. Celia had assumed it was another of her dramatic reinventions—Lydia being nervous, Lydia being mysterious, Lydia on a diet, Lydia having another semisecret affair, which caused her to change shape, color, even. Though yellow should have been a clue.

Now Lydia was giving away her things and Celia didn’t know how to tell her that she didn’t need her family silver, that she didn’t want it, that she would not polish it, that her era of dinner parties, which Lydia remembered so fondly, had been over for years. The silver was beautiful—her response had been sincere—but truly, she didn’t want it. Now she had to decide whether to tell her she was going to sell it or just wait and do it after.

And the jewelry—it was too sad. They were just going to put it in drawers and feel bad when they came across it, looking for the same old hoop earrings. Maybe not Betsy, but the rest of them. And just when it seemed like the morning couldn’t get any worse, Elaine had to read that list. That, as Celia’s eighty-one-year-old mother would have said, was the living end.

Celia had had no idea. She remembered some story about a high school counselor and then the road trip with the guy who turned it into a song. But Lydia had made it sound funny, not sad. Celia had no idea she’d been going around reciting some list in her head for forty years. Or that she felt so strongly about such, well, such strange things. That she was suffering from all these absurd fears.

Why didn’t she tell me?
Celia wondered, angry now, stabbing the vacuum wand in the direction of something shiny and sucking it up on purpose this time, not caring what she committed to oblivion. Why didn’t she tell me any of this sooner? Celia thought. She could have helped. Couldn’t she?