Lydia's Party: A Novel (5 page)

Norris

Norris was taking a break from the painting she’d been working on all morning, zipping through her e-mail, looking for messages from her dealer and deleting everything else. Probably she shouldn’t have forwarded that announcement to Lydia, Norris thought. Lydia would misconstrue. Norris hadn’t meant to make fun of the girl, exactly, though she deserved it. She’d just thought it was funny. It
was
funny. Petaluma indeed. It was something they would have laughed about fifteen years ago. Besides, Norris thought, she wanted Lydia to see that she helped young people, too, that she also gave back.

Norris knew that Lydia’s friends all thought she was a witch. What they didn’t know, Norris thought, was that she was nicer to them, or at least to Lydia, than she was to almost anyone else. She was going to this party, wasn’t she? Although, Norris thought, this might have to be the last time.

Lydia: Noon

Lydia was mixing Parmesan cheese into the dumpling batter now. She liked the gummy elastic pull of the dough on the spoon, the way the grit of the cornmeal roughed it up, added resistance. She was adding cheese a little at a time, the way the recipe said you were supposed to, but her mind was elsewhere and she’d lost track of how much she’d added. Perhaps a lot already—cheese was spilling over the edge of the bowl and onto the floor.

Maxine licked it up, which caused Lydia to feel guilty about the house, not cleaning it more thoroughly for the party, and this in turn made her wonder if her inability to thoroughly and energetically clean her house was medically excusable or just a failure of will. Or if—here was her new thought—maybe it really was all in her DNA, as new research suggested. She supposed that’s what Norris thought. Maybe she’d been born to be this way, to be someone who didn’t mind dog spit and cobwebs and teaching at a community college.

That’s what they said now, that character was an outdated notion. Everything was genetically predetermined, they said, right down to what kind of beer you preferred. There was a pair of identical twins, somewhere in Oklahoma, Lydia remembered reading, named Dottie and Lottie, who’d been separated at birth. When they were reunited, at age fifty-eight, they found out they drank the same brand of beer. They’d quit smoking the same brand of cigarettes on exactly the same day. They were both divorced from pharmaceutical salesmen named Russ.

In a way it was comforting, Lydia thought, not to be responsible for these things, for one’s bad choices and shortcomings. (She thought again of her question: What do you regret? What if your answer were “
Nothing
”!) But it was a disappointment, too, to think that everything, even the good, was the result of chromosomes, not character or taste. At the very least, she thought, it changed the game. Lydia had grown up thinking everything was a moral choice.
For the wages of sin is death.
That’s what she’d been taught—hadn’t everyone?
Make your own luck
is what she’d been told
. You’ve made your own bed, now lie in it.
The idea that faults or even talents were inborn seemed like lazy thinking, or worse. Girls played with dolls because they’d learned to, Lydia had wanted to believe. Now people of science were saying otherwise and it made her nervous. It opened the door for every venal gender, not to mention ethnic, stereotype to rush back in.

However. She had to admit it was freeing, at this stage of life, to consider the possibility that she couldn’t have helped any of it, what she’d turned out to be, and to think that Norris couldn’t have either, that her success had been predetermined, hardwired. Too freeing, maybe. Her father would have scowled and shook his finger in her face and said,
It lets you off the hook
.

This train was getting her nowhere, Lydia thought, tilting a metal measuring cup full of grated Parmesan cheese over the dough, which was by now too stiff to stir. And what was she doing? Wasn’t there already too much food? Who cared if she made Parmesan dumplings? And how much cheese had she already put in? Two cups? Three? Four? She had no idea. She dumped the rest on the floor, for Maxine, who had been standing by, waiting for spillage.

Lydia began to form the dough into little oblongs and set them on a plate. She felt hot breath on her leg and looked down. Maxine was sitting next to her, still as a statue, her intelligent eyes following the movement of Lydia’s hands from the bowl to the plate, watching the dough in its progress away from her. She had already forgotten the gift of cheese and now she wanted dough. She was patient, strategic. She knew the formed dumplings on the plate were not for her but she also knew that Lydia was genetically predestined to be a patsy and that her best chance lay in what was left in the bowl, an amount that was steadily decreasing.

Lydia knew that Maxine knew this because Lydia could read her mind, her eyes, her body, the anxious tilt of her shoulders, her tense ears as she calculated what she might get of what was left. Lydia sensed the dog’s increasing anxiety as the bowl emptied. Spence called it the torture of the diminishing treat, laughing, as if there were anything funny about torturing Maxine. Lydia would never laugh at her, but she knew Spence was right. The thought of it made her toss the dog a little pinch of dough, as an apology for having even thought of laughing. Maxine caught the dough in her mouth like a first baseman fielding an easy out, then returned to her watchful pose.

When Lydia finished putting all the dumplings on the plate she selected a particularly choice one off the top and fed it to Maxine whole, from her hand. Maxine accepted it softly, gently absorbing it into her mouth in two precise bites, then swallowed neatly and looked back into Lydia’s eyes as if she hadn’t eaten a thing.
More
, she said, with her eyes. A dusting of cornmeal decorated her graying muzzle.

Lydia set the bowl on the kitchen floor and when Maxine stuck her big blunt nose into it and began to lick, Lydia bent to rest her face in the bristly, oily fur on the top of the dog’s head.
We’ll get through this, Maxine
,
she told her.

Celia

Celia was shopping for Lydia’s party on her way home from work—wine, goat’s cheese, vegetables for crudités, dip. Maybe she’d stop at the bakery, too. A polite argument had erupted online yesterday about who would bring dessert and she’d lost, but who could object to a few cupcakes?

She didn’t have to shop now. She could go home and try to nap, shop later, on the way, except that she wouldn’t be able to nap, in her house, in the middle of a Saturday, and she didn’t want to go home yet. Griffin would have some pregame crisis he’d expect her to sort out for him. And Peter would have some project going that she’d feel obliged to help with. She and Peter spent so much time together now, now that he was working at home. Too much time. Between her job and Peter and Griffin, Celia was never alone. Weekends, especially, were claustrophobic.

She never could have guessed that being happily married would be so stressful, she thought, almost sideswiping the car in the next lane as she made a wide left turn into the liquor store parking lot. She’d had no idea all this togetherness would come to feel so grating. Not that she had any right to complain, she knew. After all, this was what she’d wanted. She couldn’t wait to marry Peter. She’d been desperate for a baby, eventually at least, when she’d seen it was almost too late. But as much as she loved her family—she did! she knew she was lucky—spending actual time with them was not as enjoyable as she’d expected.

For one thing, she hadn’t expected family life to be so noisy. It hadn’t been that way when she and her sister were children. Everything had been quiet then—house rules. Now children were encouraged to speak up, to weigh in on every blessed thing, but not then. She didn’t remember her opinion being tolerated, let alone solicited. They’d been told to pipe down. Even when they were good, they’d been sent to bed early, made to take naps. It was hard to imagine now, trying to make a child nap.
You’d be reported to the authorities
, Celia imagined saying, to Lydia. Now, whenever Griffin was home, there was an ongoing soundtrack—complaint, commentary, cell phone conversation, doorbells, television, video games, the staccato of Griffin’s basketball being dribbled up and down the hardwood floors.

And always, always some urgent request—a different kind of breakfast cereal, an article of clothing that needed immediate laundering, a ride. Celia looked forward to going to work, just to get some quiet.

Celia walked up and down the aisles of the liquor store, cruising the wines, wondering for the thousandth time if it would have been easier if Griffin had been a girl.
Oh, you wouldn’t want that
, people told her. Girls were argumentative, emotional, complicated. They triangulated the marriage, then broke their mothers’ hearts. Maybe, Celia thought. But it would have been someone to talk to, at least, and a girl might have taken charge of herself by now. Griffin, at fourteen, still seemed incapable of making a sandwich. Or not incapable, just disinclined. He preferred that Celia do it, and his standards weren’t low. He seemed to relish mealtime as much for the opportunity for judgment as for the chance to eat, appearing at the table three times a day looking mournful, expecting to be disappointed. He almost seemed to want the food to be the wrong temperature or too spicy or too bland, Celia thought, so he’d have an excuse to complain, to her, his slightly dimwitted valet.

Celia tossed a bag of chips in her cart. Not that she begrudged him. She didn’t! She understood, teenagers were moody. Taking care of him was a pleasure, she reminded herself daily. And on the days she wanted to smack him across the face with the vacuum-packed bag of special deli ham he had to have, she reminded herself that when he was a baby she couldn’t get enough of him. Handling his smooth, sweet-smelling, surprisingly springy little body had been a drug, then. The talcum way he smelled, the feel of his velvety skin, those pink creased knees, the orange fuzz on top of his spongy skull—it was easy to forget that taking care of him, then, had drenched her with pleasure that was almost sexual.

One day she’d look back on this and miss it, too, she told herself, steering her cart toward the cashier, bottles clinking.

Still, she’d thought motherhood would be more
fun
, somehow, more tender. Not so much like being a waitress. Sometimes, on weekends, she had to invent an errand and leave the house, if only for an hour, just to think, to get herself back. Simply driving, alone, was a vacation.

•   •   •

Privacy is a vacation.
This insight came to her in the liquor store parking lot, where she sat eating potato chips, with the engine running and the heater on high. She was collecting her thoughts, pretending to be waiting for someone in the store.

She’d bought three bottles of reasonably priced Shiraz but she shouldn’t even have spent that much, she knew. Lydia would have plenty, and they were on a budget, and politeness demanded that she bring only one. Still, her little crime felt good. Now she was taking her time before the next stop, enjoying the privacy of the mobile peace chamber that was the interior of her car. She’d been gone from work for only twenty minutes but her mind already had begun to clear and the four words seemed like a revelation that she wanted to hold on to.

Celia reached for one of the index cards she kept in the glove compartment and wrote it down—
privacy is a vacation—
then felt embarrassed and stuffed the card back, between the owner’s manual and a badly refolded map of Michigan. She wondered if she should consider how Peter would feel if he found it, if he’d feel hurt or insulted by this apparently hostile sentiment, if he came across it, say, while fumbling for a screwdriver to fix something that probably she had broken.

She began to wonder if maybe she’d written it because she
wanted
him to find it. It might be good for a change for him to encounter an idea like this, Celia thought. Then she wondered if that was passive-aggressive, although it was a moot point. Even if Peter did read the card, which was doubtful, it would never occur to him that this idea had anything to do with him. If he thought of it at all he would think of it as an abstract and arguable premise, one that had appeared there only coincidentally, in her car, in her handwriting, mildly interesting but unrelated to him or his life. Probably, he’d put the card back, neatly, where he’d found it, and then, noticing the mess she’d made, refold the map.

Celia stuffed another handful of chips in her mouth. It was disappointing somehow. How could men be so incurious? Celia wondered. Griffin was the same. Sometimes Celia thought she should combat it, this lack of interest they had in her inner life, be more assertive in her communications with them, but the thought always passed. Besides, she thought, in another burst of clarity, it was this very lack of curiosity that afforded her the little privacy she had.

•   •   •

Celia was driving from the strip mall where the liquor store was to the strip mall where the inexpensive grocery store was. She loved to drive. She turned on the radio, then turned it up, loud, to listen to music Peter hated.

She played the oldies station now when she was alone in the car and didn’t care who saw her singing, or crying, even. She used to be too ashamed. She hadn’t allowed herself to listen to any music in the car, not even classical, which was where Peter always left the dial, when he even listened to the radio. Usually he just played CDs he’d checked out of the library. He was deep into Mahler these days. For years Celia had viewed the radio as one more opportunity for self-improvement, studiously following every public radio story as if there’d be a test at the end of the month. She’d listened to oldies stations only when she rented a car, when she went to visit her sister in Cincinnati, and then only when she was alone. If someone had noticed and asked why, she would have said it was only because she couldn’t find the local NPR station on the dial.

Now she didn’t care. What good had all that self-improvement done, anyway? Now she had the button programmed—Peter must notice, she thought, but they’d never discussed it—and when she was in the mood to sing along, she went right there. “A Groovy Kind of Love.” “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” “Dancing in the Street.” “Do You Wanna Dance?”
Yes, Celia did want to dance. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d danced.

The songs they played weren’t even old, at least Celia didn’t think so. Last week they’d played Elvis Costello, “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” What indeed? And how could that be? It seemed like only yesterday that Elvis Costello was new. New Wave. Back then, only hip people had heard of him, let alone knew his real name was Declan MacManus. Now he was a sing-along act for drunken businessmen at karaoke pickup bars. How did that happen?

Life is so short, Celia thought. Or rather the part you enjoy is. If she’d had any idea it was going to be over so soon she would have stayed up later.

Snap out of it
, she told herself, out loud, almost rolling through a stop sign. She sounded to herself like her eighty-one-year-old mother. But she couldn’t snap out of it. Ever since she’d turned fifty, everything made her sad.

Celia made herself do the gratitude litany: She was alive. She had all her body parts. Her car still ran. She had a beautiful healthy child, a more or less loving husband, wonderful friends, health insurance, a partially—at least—restored nineteenth-century farmhouse, even if it was mouse-ridden and cramped and mortgaged to the hilt. And she got to sing along with the Ramones. Celia turned up the volume.
Lo-bot-o-my!
It was all you could hope for, really, and more than most people got. People get old, was all. It was just a fact, and that’s if they were lucky. I’m not even old, Celia thought, just pale. Pale people only seemed to age faster.

•   •   •

She was sitting at a stoplight now, looking at herself in the rearview mirror, wondering if she should dye her eyebrows. Someone behind her was honking. Apparently the light had changed to green. She looked past her reflection to see who it was—some dark, handsome young jerk with a shaved head, enthroned in an enormous vehicle better suited for the Australian outback.
Hold your horses
, she said.

Everyone young was so impatient now. And they were all so dark and good-looking, of no discernible ethnicity, with such beautiful, slow-aging skin. Asian Spanish African Semitic, who knew what was in the mix, maybe even some Northern European, though not enough to blunt the beauty. Celia had just read that Jackie Kennedy of all people was descended from a Moor. It just goes to show, she thought. Hybrid vigor was improving the face of the nation.

The brat in the tank was honking again. He was twenty, at most, barely old enough to think, let alone drive. It was a scientific fact that his brain wouldn’t gel for another four years. She crept into the intersection and he zoomed past, giving her the finger.

Celia pretended not to notice. She remembered a time when a guy like that would be slowing down, not speeding up. Hanging out the window, flicking his tongue, following her home and parking outside her building to do God knows what out there under his coat in full view of her back window while she hid inside and called Lydia. Celia was not making this up, it had happened. They’d screamed with laughter. Choked.
Gross!
Lydia had said, laughing until she snorted.
Call the cops
,
she’d said. But Celia didn’t. They both knew it was more complicated than that. She’d liked it, too. Not him, exactly, just the thrill of it, the desire she’d inspired.

Celia had read recently that some researcher—a woman—did an intensive study over many years that involved hooking people’s private parts up to sensors and determined, after all that, that women’s sexual desire was sparked by men’s—and other women’s!—desire for them. The much-pondered secret behind what women wanted, the doctor had concluded, was
narcissism.
Women wanted to be adored.

Celia could have told her that. What a disappointment, though, to see it in black and white, in
The
New York Times
. To hear it quantified like that by a woman of science. Women had been demystified at last and by one of their own. Celia had felt a little ashamed, reading it, knowing it was true. What a bunch of low-minded, self-absorbed characters we turned out to be, she thought. She’d wanted to talk to someone about it, and not Peter. In the old days she would have called Lydia. Maybe she’d bring it up tonight.

•   •   •

Celia pulled into the strip mall parking lot and waited for a crowd of teenagers to pass in front of her car. All these tightly swathed, sure-footed young people—in high-heeled boots, on this ice!—demoralized her. It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t still nineteen. Aging is
natural
, she told herself. She didn’t even look that bad—did she? Though sometimes she thought if only she’d managed her life differently things wouldn’t have turned out this way. She’d be a different kind of middle-aged person, she thought, pale maybe, but one of those
fulfilled
pale people.

She saw them everywhere around town. She saw them at the pharmacy, stocking up on midwinter sunscreen for jaunts to exotic locales or, in the summer, extended stays with their large happy families at handed-down-through-generations lake houses, where they probably worked jigsaw puzzles and played board games while sipping drinks, but not too many. Not a mean drunk among them, or so you’d think, they were so avid to go back and do it again.