Lydia's Party: A Novel (6 page)

Celia was personally acquainted with people like this. She knew for a fact that they cooked together.
Can you imagine?
Celia wanted to say, to Lydia. And they enjoyed it, or claimed to. Everyone had families, everyone cooked, but the Fulfilled People got along. Or so Celia imagined. She imagined if you shook out the maps in
their
glove compartments no index cards that said
privacy is a vacation
would come slipping out to spoil the day.

Celia saw them all over the place, out here in the suburbs, where she was marooned. She couldn’t remember seeing them in the city, though she’d been younger then, and single, not so sensitive to this sort of thing. It had been a mistake to move out here, she saw that now. Peter had wanted trees, and she’d liked the idea, too, but these people were all around them here. Celia saw—heard!—them at the library, certain the
Quiet, please
signs didn’t apply to them. She saw them at the hardware store buying fancy replacement knobs for their kitchen cabinets, in the specialty aisles at the grocery store, shopping for obscure condiments.
But do we have nori on the boat?
she’d overheard a khaki-clad woman say recently.
Nori!

•   •   •

Celia, who’d been cruising up and down the parking lot lanes looking for a space, had stopped to wait for another troop of teenagers to pass when she felt the idling car shudder, then shut off. A little red light in the shape of a battery flashed on her dashboard. Now the teenagers were past and cars were backing up behind her. Someone honked. She turned the key, attempting to rev the engine. There was a trick to it, Peter had shown her. Finally the engine turned over.

What relief. The last thing she wanted was to have to call him, and if the car died completely she’d have no way to get to the party. Never mind what it would cost to get the thing towed, then fixed.

•   •   •

Celia wondered if it was only money that made the fulfilled-looking people so smooth-skinned and sure of themselves or if it was more than that, if they were intrinsically different, a different species, maybe, that could mate only with its own kind, and if you or I mated with them (she imagined saying to Lydia) the spawn would be sterile, like the spawn of a horse and a donkey. Maybe it wasn’t the result of money at all, Celia thought. Maybe it was the opposite, money was the result of it, whatever it was—self-satisfaction, the belief you looked good in your khakis.

Her car shuddered when she turned it off. Please make it to Lydia’s safely tonight, she prayed, to the car. After that, if it didn’t start, it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

•   •   •

Celia pushed a shopping cart up and down the produce aisle in the big discount grocery store. Even with her coat on, it was cold. And the store was too brightly lit, and the floor was wet and dirty—everyone was tracking in snow, which promptly turned to mud. Celia wheeled her cart past seventeen varieties of cabbage, imagining the beautiful tray of raw vegetables she’d take to Lydia’s, trying to decide whether to buy parsley or kale to garnish it and deciding on kale because it was tough and she could rinse if off and cook it later. She wondered whether to splurge on baby carrots or just buy whole big ones and cut them into sticks. She was admiring the purple gloss on the eggplants and the white sheen on the parsnips and feeling better and better and staring at the lemons in their beautiful pyramid of yellowness when a feeling of pure joy washed over her and she realized why. Bruce Springsteen was blasting all around her. They were playing “Glory Days.” In the grocery store!

Now, woven together into meaningful oneness by music, the cheap vegetables and deeply discounted bruised fruit and bins of frozen rabbits all seemed different, connected and beautiful, even in the harsh fluorescent light. Celia knew how deceptive music could be, full of cheap harmonic tricks that told you how to feel, taking you somewhere soft and melting and then dropping you flat when it was over. She knew they only played it to relax the customers, make them buy more, and usually she hated it. But this was different. This was Bruce.

Celia looked around at the other shoppers, in their shapeless winter coats, their grimy scarves trailing in the slosh on the floor, to see if anyone else was getting the Bruce vibe. But the playful Fulfilled People, who might have, and who might have even—a few of them—been moving semi-ironically in time to the music, were all across town, at the high-priced grocery store. Here, shopping for bargain lettuce was no laughing matter.

Celia stood still. Around her, elderly, parchment-skinned women in bright lipstick and high-heeled boots tottered behind shopping carts, trying not to slip on the wet floor while they pawed for coupons in their cavernous purses. An adrift-looking man with long greasy hair stared morosely at a frozen pizza display. No one seemed to notice Bruce.

Here we are, Celia thought, stocking up on our briskets and chicken-drumstick economy packs, our septic-safe toilet paper and fig preserves, while, all around us, Bruce and Clarence—redemptive, raucous, rollicking Bruce and Clarence—were rocking out, offering heaven for the mere price of attention. She searched for someone, anyone, to share it with, but no one, not even the sweet-faced stock boys, would even look at her. What a waste, she thought, feeling vibrant and sexy, at one with the produce. She wished Peter were there, though he wasn’t a Springsteen fan.

Suddenly, Celia couldn’t wait to get home. For starters, she’d wash her hair. Then, right in front of her, like a sign from God, she saw Peter’s absolute favorite—ripe raspberries, shipped all the way from Chile.

She grabbed two pints, then two more, and put them in her cart without even looking at the price. She had a wonderful thought then, almost an epiphany. Maybe, despite appearances,
everyone
here felt this way! Maybe, underneath
all
their tired, badly lit surfaces, their coarse bodily skins and fearful, dull eyes, there dwelled beautiful bright ageless spirits, just like hers.

Celia remembered something she’d heard on public radio. An autistic woman, who’d written a book about animals’ emotions, claimed that cats were not as cool as everyone thought. Cats had emotions, too, this woman said, exactly like dogs and people, only you couldn’t tell,
because they didn’t have eyebrows to express them
.

Now Celia was stunned with the profundity of it. Maybe the convergence of these two facts was the secret of universal love: 1. On the outside they all had dried mucus crusted to the ends of their noses and were wearing sweatpants and unbecoming hats. Soon all their bodies would die, but/and 2. None of them was what he or she appeared to be! Inside they were all wild and alive! Like her! Cats had emotions, too! Then, just as Celia felt drenched with oxytocin, her spirit growing so large it was about to burst out of her body and ascend to a plane of Christ-like empathy and perfect beauty, the song ended.

The glow around the fruit vanished.

Celia stood, disoriented, in mid-fondle, holding an Asian pear. Fluorescent light illuminated brown spots on the pear that matched the ones on her hand. Someone bumped her cart and didn’t apologize.

Celia caught a glimpse of her reflection in the dairy case—a tall, pale, middle-aged woman with strange hair and bad posture, wearing an overcoat with a drooping hem, blocking the aisle with a cart that contained four tiny plastic cartons of overpriced raspberries.

She put the raspberries back. They weren’t locally grown; Peter would disapprove.

An ugly new song began to play.

The autistic woman was right, Celia thought, later, driving home. Appearances were deceiving, but it went both ways. She wanted to talk to someone about this, though she couldn’t imagine whom. She couldn’t think of a single person who would listen all the way to the end, and not turn it into a joke (her sister) or end up feeling sorry for her and giving her advice (Lydia). Not Peter, that’s for sure, not anymore, maybe not ever.

Though at least he was polite enough to sit quietly while she talked, Celia reminded herself. She appreciated that.

People thought women only wanted to talk about sex and love, and, when they branched out, shoes and children and gluten-free diets. They thought women only thought of their bodies and their tender little hearts. But you could talk with anyone about those things, Celia thought. It was having someone to talk to about these other things that women craved. Or she did, at least.

Celia missed Lydia, though she’d see her tonight.

Lydia: 1:30
P.M.

Lydia was setting out dishes, a mismatched assortment left over from multiple aborted flights into domesticity. She
liked
things that didn’t match, she told herself. At least she thought she had. Now that this might be the last party she wondered if her sunny spin on all this old junk had been another accommodation to good-enough that she shouldn’t have made. Whatever, tonight nothing would match: the food, the chairs, the plates, the silver—partial sets of which had been handed down through death by various female relatives from a time when anyone who could afford silver had it, and polished it regularly. Her guests wouldn’t care, she knew, but maybe she should. Or should have. Too late now.

She didn’t set a place for Spence. He was going out for the evening, by agreement, and if he showed up later they’d fit him in. Though he never would fit, really. These women were her friends, not his. Of course they’d sided with her after the divorce, and when he moved back, when he had nowhere else to go, they’d disapproved.

Though most of them had softened since.
As has much else, ha
, she imagined saying to someone, to Celia.

Mostly she didn’t mind it, this softening. She liked the blunting effect of aging, the way things that once seemed so important had revealed themselves not to be, or not to be any longer. She liked knowing that so much difficult terrain was behind her, in the rearview mirror and shrinking fast. And she liked these accumulations—things, traditions, people, contrasting layers of friends and routines. She told herself it was just a particular version of her body that she missed, though she knew it was more than that. What she really missed was the feeling she used to have that anything was still possible.

Do not wallow
, she told herself.

Again, Lydia reminded herself to let go. Everyone said, forget the bad and move on, simple as that. Even the Bible: “. . . forget those things which are behind, and reach forth unto what is before.” Something like that. (Even as a child it had seemed funny to her, being made to memorize a verse about the value of forgetting.) Forgetfulness was the secret to happiness, people said now, in magazine articles.

Lydia wasn’t sure about happiness, but she knew that, sometimes, willed amnesia was the most you could pay toward a debt of forgiveness.

•   •   •

She cleared a counter, put out empty bowls and platters for the food her friends would bring. She set out ladles, wide serving spoons, big serrated knives for cutting bread, little blunt knives for spreading soft cheese, tiny pickle forks. It was more than they’d need but she enjoyed handling these things. It felt good to have too much; they always brought more than they promised. She set out a stack of plates, what was left of her wedding china mixed with the chipped remains of her grandmother’s Haviland porcelain mixed with garage sale treasures mixed with some cheap terra-cotta she’d bought in Mexico on a whim between relationships when she was yet again redefining herself. Thank God that was all over now, she thought. It was another thing to add to the column of good things about aging.

Impulsively, and because she felt weak, Lydia sat down at the kitchen table and began to make a list on the yellow tablet there. “Good Things About Aging,” she wrote at the top of the page. She kept a yellow tablet on most flat surfaces, and now she reminded herself to collect them and put them away before the party, so no one would happen upon an especially embarrassing list, although at this point there was probably little left to shock her friends.

That was a good item number one, she thought, and wrote it down on the first line.

1. There’s little left that shocks your friends. They know the worst and don’t seem to care (as much as they used to).

On the next line she wrote:

2. Friends (women).

On the line after that she wrote:

3. No more waiting until a relationship ends to redefine yourself.

On the following line she wrote:

4. You don’t feel (as) embarrassed going to the movies alone. No one notices anyway.

On the next line she wrote:

5. Men leave you alone.
She crossed it out.

The kitchen timer went off. Lydia abandoned the list and went to the stove. She had forgotten she was boiling potatoes. At the last minute she’d decided to make potato salad, though she couldn’t remember why. It was hard to judge how much food you’d need when you no longer had an appetite.