Lydia's Party: A Novel (20 page)

Norris

Celia was organizing Lydia’s care and e-mailed Norris to ask if she’d help. Norris e-mailed back to say it was a busy time for her but that she’d come if Celia couldn’t find anyone else. Then she wrote back and said her schedule had changed and yes, she could come.

Jay could keep track of the house, she thought. She needed to go in for the show anyway, to supervise the installation. She’d get a hotel room, to have somewhere to go when she needed a break. She’d told Celia that, that she’d need a break, that she wasn’t one of those people that could just move in and be there 24/7. She said she hadn’t even spent that much time with Sam when he was a baby.

She could dig up the raspberries when she was there, she thought. Lydia had said she wanted her to.
It’s two degrees out
, Norris had said when Lydia told her.
After
, Lydia had said.
In the spring—get Spence to help. OK
, Norris had said. What else could she say?

Lydia’s dying changed everything. Norris never would have guessed it would affect her this way. They hadn’t been close in years, but now the thought of losing her, of Lydia being gone from the planet, had thrown her off. The strangest thing, Norris thought, is that this effect, of Lydia’s imminent death, had begun to set in before Lydia even told them. Norris had felt something coming toward them that night—change—without knowing what it was.

When she got home that Sunday—she’d canceled her plans and just drove back—she’d gone to her computer and sat in the dark, Googling people she remembered from the old neighborhood, from high school, grade school, even.

Except for an obituary for Larry Kulick, though, who’d died in a boating accident seventeen years earlier, and one mention of Claudia Puddeliwitz, who’d shown up on a long list of donors to some political candidate, no one was there. Not one. All those children she’d loathed, who’d so loathed her, weren’t anywhere to be found. It was like waking from a nightmare and realizing the ghoul in the closet was an old coat.

She’d stayed up half the night, that night, sitting there at her computer in the dark, drinking one glass of very good red wine after another, admiring the ice on the pond and listening to the hooting of what she’d come to think of as her private pair of owls. She’d wanted to feel safe and satisfied with the beauty and serenity she’d achieved, all she’d earned and accomplished, but she didn’t.

It bothered her, that there was no trace of any of them—her rivals, her enemies, those mean little brats. How could they have been so vividly awful as children and then just disappear into ordinariness like that? They should have put up a better fight, Norris thought. She still would have won. But she would have felt better, knowing they knew she’d bested them.

She supposed they were leading the kind of lives that didn’t register on the Internet. Like her family, Norris thought, cops, teachers.
What is your problem
, she could hear someone say. Andy, she supposed—same old argument.
Why do you always have to be such a bitch?
But why did that make her a bitch?
They’d
terrorized
me
, she thought, even the “nice” ones
,
and then had the nerve to disappear into nothing before she could show them the tables had turned. They wouldn’t know the Venice Biennale if it bit them in the ass.

It made her feel the way she’d felt playing tug-of-war with her brother, the time he let go and she’d landed on the sidewalk and cracked her tailbone.
You try too hard
, he’d said, and walked away. He’d laughed, smug bully. Who’s laughing now?

Norris didn’t regret a thing, she told herself. Or maybe a few things, maybe the thing with Lydia. She was a little sorry about that, how at the end, in the interview with the director, when he asked who she wanted to invite to the mentors’ panel, Norris had caught her breath, hesitated—she was good, she could have been an actor, too—then hinted, as if it were painful to say so, that she thought Lydia wasn’t really up to the company.

She almost seems jealous
,
Norris had said, pretending confusion, surprise that someone she’d looked up to could be so petty, though it wasn’t true. If anything, Norris thought, she’d been the one who was jealous. People liked Lydia.

The least she could do, Norris supposed now, was sit by her side while she died.

The Funeral

Lydia died the second week of March. She died in the hospital bed Spence had set at an angle in the living room of their octagon bungalow, with a view of the fireplace, the television, and the bay window, which gave on to the muddy mess of the front yard, not that she could see any of it at the end. Spence had aimed the bed toward the window, hoping she’d live long enough to see the tulips he’d planted, but she didn’t make it to April.

She died around five on a Tuesday afternoon at that grayest of gray hours in the Chicago winter when time seems to stop between day and night and the edges of things blur into nothingness, when objects formerly known to be solid seem to dissolve in a haze. Maybe it’s easier for the soul to slip away then or maybe Lydia just wanted to die when Celia wasn’t there.

Maybe it was a contest of wills. Celia had planned to be present when Lydia died. She wanted to hold her hand and tell her it was OK and witness her last breath. She had wanted to sit with her, alone, after it was over, postponing the inevitable phone calls until she felt ready and, when she was, she wanted to be the one to make them. She had planned to be. She had been there through everything else. She had helped Spence move furniture to make a place for the bed and stayed every night for nine days after that, getting the hospice nurses to show her how to administer drugs and subsisting on daily food drops from Peter, also from Maura and Elaine and Ted and the neighbors, with practical help from a rotating staff of hired caregivers and Spence intermittently and visits from a stream of friends Celia had only heard of in addition to all the women from the party except for Norris at first and then later Norris, too, who showed up with a duffel full of T-shirts and sketchbooks and a five-pound bag of raw almonds and moved in.

Norris took over then. She told Celia to get some rest, and after that they traded off. Sometimes Celia, in the kitchen making coffee, heard Norris talking to Lydia in a low voice. Sometimes Celia thought she heard Lydia reply, though that wasn’t possible—she was unconscious by then, wasn’t she?

Elaine came almost every day. Jayne, Maura, and Betsy worked out a schedule and visited in the evening. Ted, who was working the night shift that month, showed up in the afternoon, with casseroles or little bouquets—violets, once—and moped about miserably, in the fading light, sighing and dabbing at his eyes until someone reminded him not to be late for work. The last week, Lydia’s sister-in-law moved from their remote suburb into a nearby hotel and later was joined by Lydia’s brother. They came and went with relatives Celia had never heard of, and toward the end a hospice chaplain showed up. He invited Lydia’s friends to sit in a circle around her bed and talk to her by-now silent form about their beautiful memories of her but everyone felt embarrassed and sad and made up excuses to leave. A prayer group arrived from Ted’s church.

Through all this Celia was Lydia’s keeper, not Spence, partly because she seemed to know what to do but also by force of the not-so-subtle assumption she imposed on Spence that he didn’t, that she was better suited to the job than he was. She sent him on errands, made him feel unwelcome, though it was his home, not to mention also his house, which, by then, he knew, having read Lydia’s will, which Jayne had written. He sat by when no one else was available, but when Celia returned she urged him to leave and, not knowing what else to do, he did, holing up in the basement or going for yet another long walk.

One weekend they were joined in this mostly comfortable gloom by Lydia’s nieces. Awed by their first proximity to death and thrilled to escape the frivolities of college life for something real and useful, they’d insisted on flying in to help.

Celia put them to work. They were too energetic to sit still for long by Lydia’s bedside, but they excelled at singing a cappella and giving deep-tissue shoulder massages and taking Maxine on walks, when she could be pried from Lydia’s side. They made grilled-cheese-and-tomato sandwiches and did endless loads of laundry and ran the vacuum cleaner twice a day with such vigor that Celia had to ask them to stop. The noise drove her crazy, though she was pretty sure Lydia was beyond hearing a thing.

Immediately preceding Lydia’s death, Celia had been at the house for fifty-two consecutive hours, but when the hospice nurse assured her that death was not imminent, she went home to take a shower and change clothes and eat a frozen pizza with Griffin at her own kitchen table and read e-mail at her own desk, although she couldn’t bring herself to answer any of it. She left Norris in charge, with a list of phone numbers and a little bottle of liquid morphine, and told her to call her if anything changed. Celia then lay down for what she intended to be a ten-minute nap and didn’t wake up until the phone rang five hours later.

So it was Norris who was there at the end. Norris and of course Maxine, who, Norris said, let out a long low howl when Lydia took her last breath and then set her head down on her paws and died in her sleep an hour later. Everyone was relieved about that. Maxine’s grief would have been too much to bear.

Malcolm, who’d disappeared the day Lydia died, reappeared on the front porch the morning of the funeral, holding in his jaws a perfectly intact dead mouse. Spence, not wanting to get cat hair on the new black suit Celia had told him to buy, watched from the front window as Malcolm set the mouse on the welcome mat, perhaps as a tribute. The gift, and its ceremonious placement, lent an elegiac tone to the day.

Lydia’s brother and sister-in-law planned the service, with help from Spence and Celia, who was still furious she’d missed Lydia’s last breath. At first, Spence had suggested a memorial at the house, but Lydia’s brother didn’t think it was appropriate, since they were no longer married. And he wanted a real funeral, at his church, since Lydia didn’t have one. Spence understood—the arrangements weren’t really his call. Though it would be far for people to drive, those who even had cars. No public transportation went there.

•   •   •

Everyone agreed the funeral was beautiful, tasteful. Celia and Spence gave dueling eulogies, and Ted, who’d arrived at the house as soon as he’d gotten word of the death and waited until Celia was in the bathroom to volunteer his musical services to Lydia’s brother, sang “Amazing Grace,” his voice cracking only once.

After the service, light refreshments were served in the church basement.

•   •   •

Celia and Elaine stood under an exit sign, sharing cookies from a paper plate. They were waiting for Maura to come out of the ladies’ room, where she’d gone to repair her eye makeup. They planned to ride together. Lydia’s brother was hosting lunch at a nearby restaurant and Peter had gone to get the car.

Celia and Elaine scanned the crowd for familiar faces, deconstructing the funeral.

“It was nice of Trish to come all this way.”

“And Garrett’s here,” Celia said. “I don’t see him now.”

Elaine nodded.

“There’s that girl who’s getting the scholarship. Nice that she came.”

“Lydia would have liked the music, I think,” Elaine said.

“I hope so,” Celia said. “She picked it.” She had pressed Lydia to express her preferences in all things funereal, though Lydia, at the end, lost interest even in that. “Did you see that young guy in the back?” Celia said. “Who do you suppose that was?”

“You mean the handsome one? The prince of good posture?” Elaine gestured with the paper plate. “Black guy? Shaved head?”

“Maybe part Hispanic.”

“One of her students, I assume.”

“A student? You think so?”

“You know Lydia. She brought out the best in the boys.”

“But in that suit?” Celia said. “With that posture? I don’t recall my students looking like that.”

“True,” Elaine said, not caring. She was studying the plate, trying to decide which cookie to eat next.

“Look!” Celia said, looking over Elaine’s shoulder. “There he is—with Norris!”

“Trolling for cougars, probably,” Elaine said, not looking up. “If you combed your hair you might have a chance.” She selected a pecan sandie and took a big bite. Powdered sugar fell onto her bosom.

“Look,” Celia whispered.

Elaine grudgingly turned in the direction Celia was staring. Sure enough, there was skinny little Norris, with her spiky short hair, in a tight black sheath and opaque black tights, deep in conversation with an enormous, square-shouldered, gleamingly well-groomed young man.

“Looks like FBI to me,” Elaine said.

“Maybe,” Celia said. “Maybe he’s investigating a double homicide and is going to take her out in the parking lot and shoot her right now.”

“We can only hope,” Elaine said, brushing crumbs from the front of her black pantsuit.