Lydia's Party: A Novel (8 page)

Elaine: Mid-Afternoon

Elaine was cleaning the kitchen, as she did every Saturday afternoon.
When in doubt, throw it out
was her policy.

She knew exactly how the party would go. Sometime between the second and third glass of wine someone would want to talk about politics. Then they’d start to argue. They, not Elaine but the others, felt it was important to be
passionate.
What a load, she thought, tossing that day’s newspaper into the recycling bin without even taking it out of its plastic sleeve.

The one item Elaine most wanted to throw out, she couldn’t. She averted her eyes from the glossy real estate brochure, the one for the Florida retirement “village” where her sister lived and into which she was trying to install Elaine. Now that their mother was dead, her sister pointed out, there was no reason for Elaine to stay in Chicago. Elaine didn’t know how to tell her sister that even if she had wanted to leave her whole life behind to move into some sweltering swamp of a country club where she was expected to learn how to play cards, which she most certainly did not want, that she couldn’t. She couldn’t move to a place where they didn’t allow pets. Someday she might want another dog. Besides, how could she move away from here and leave their mother alone in that snow-covered cemetery? But Elaine couldn’t throw the brochure out until she’d composed some kind of placating reply.

Paradise
, it said on the cover, in thick, loopy orange type that Elaine knew was intended to subliminally suggest a sunset. Sunset Village. The note her sister had stuck to it said “three still left with causeway views!” Elaine slipped the glossy thing out of sight, between the well-thumbed pages of her old paperback copy of
Middlemarch
, which she’d been rereading at breakfast, and went back to tidying up.

It happened every year, these political arguments. That’s when she used to volunteer to walk the dogs, though she didn’t dare now, in her state, on this ice. Maybe tonight she’d take the opportunity to load the dishwasher instead. The running water should drown them out nicely.

She didn’t want to hear about it, their politics. Didn’t believe in it anymore. She’d come to think of it as a man sham—that’s what she called it in her imagined conversations with her mother.
It’s no choice at all,
Mom,
she imagined saying to her.
It’s just a bunch of suited-up men of the fortunate class, flapping their silk neckties at each other.

Elaine had supported Hillary, when she ran in the primaries, in 2008, though her younger friends had laughed at her. Gender was a red herring, they’d told her. Hillary would be more of the same. Elaine wasn’t so sure. At least she would have liked the chance to find out.

•   •   •

Fact was, all that interested Elaine anymore was women.

She couldn’t remember when it started. Without even noticing, she’d let her friendships with men lapse—or maybe the men had. She’d never married. As for romance, she hadn’t been on a date in eighteen years. Even in politics, it was only women that interested her now and not even the politicians, usually, that bunch of pantsuits. She was more interested in watching the dragged-along wives, with their sly lipsticked smiles. She wondered what they were thinking, standing there looking so pretty and so stifled. She suspected them of the same subversive thoughts she would have been having, though she never would have been there in the first place. Not nearly pretty enough.

Elaine imagined saying this to her mother, who wouldn’t disagree, but would take a big slurp of coffee and nod. Facts were facts as far as she was concerned. She was just as happy Elaine hadn’t been a hit with the boys.
Look where pretty got her
, she’d said once, to Elaine, pointing out some sad-faced former homecoming queen at the grocery store, pushing a cartful of squalling kids.

None of the others who’d be there tonight had any patience for this sort of thinking, Elaine knew.
That’s not politics, that’s gossip
,
Jayne would say, whenever Elaine wondered about the wives. Elaine didn’t care, though sometimes even she wondered why she was so interested, never having been a wife herself. She liked to read about women bureaucrats, too, the anonymous workers who once in a blue moon showed up in the news, looking like opossums when you turned on the porch light. It was the sort of job that would have suited her, Elaine thought, if her father hadn’t railroaded her into becoming a teacher. She’d ended up an English teacher, of all things, as if she cared whether the great unwashed ever learned how to punctuate a sentence. Truly, she didn’t.

She would have liked to work for the government, she thought. She would have worn a navy blue suit and a white blouse every single day. Brooksley Born—now there was an interesting woman. If she’d been a man they might have listened to her; there might not have been a mortgage crisis. Though if there hadn’t been, Elaine thought, she wouldn’t have an excuse to not move to Florida. As it was, she could always claim she couldn’t move until she sold her condo.

Of course, the one who interested Elaine most was Hillary.

But she
is
a suit
, everyone had yelled, back when Elaine still bothered to voice an opinion.

Elaine didn’t care. She’d voted for her. She’d even, in her one and only moment of political activism, campaigned for her. True, she’d been younger then. Walking door-to-door wasn’t the ordeal it would become, even two years later. At the very least, she’d thought, trudging along with her briefcase full of pamphlets, she was burning calories. But it had been a commitment, too, making enemies like that. People had slammed doors. The difference between doing it and not doing it was everything, she’d realized, then. It changed you, and when you lost, that changed you again. She was too old to lose now. She didn’t recover, didn’t forgive. And now she didn’t care.

She kept her mouth shut about all that now. Everyone under a certain age looked at you sideways if you admitted you’d voted for Hillary, young women especially, like Norris. They thought there was something off about you, like tainted milk, that you were past your expiration date.

What Elaine didn’t tell anyone was that she’d cried the night Hillary suspended her campaign. Silly, she thought—some old bag in bed all alone, crying over an election. She’d surprised herself. Who cried anymore about anything, at this age? Why bother? It only made things worse.

That night, Elaine dreamed about her mother. They’d been stranded together at O’Hare. Their plane couldn’t take off. Elaine had woken up in a sweat thinking,
We can’t get off the ground
, then felt relief—it was just a dream—and fell back to sleep. But there she was again, back in the airport, and there was her mother, still waiting for her on the other side of sleep, in one those plastic airport chairs with her little zippered fake leather suitcase on her lap and her knee-high stockings drooping around her ankles, trusting Elaine to get her on a plane and off the ground. But Elaine couldn’t do it. It made her sick to think of all the ways she’d failed her mother.

Hillary had grown up in a Republican suburb north of Chicago, not that far from Evanston, where Elaine lived now. Elaine had driven out of her way, more than once, to pass the house, back when it looked like Hil could win. Once she’d parked outside. She’d taken a road map out of the glove compartment and sat across the street with the map in her lap, like she was lost, in case she looked suspicious, if that were even possible in a Subaru. She’d sat there under the special street sign that said Rodham Corner—posted up high so it wouldn’t get stolen—trying to imagine the young Hillary carrying her schoolbooks up the front steps. After a while she’d driven around the block, twice, hoping for a glimpse into the backyard, but the yard was fenced and there wasn’t much to see. She’d driven into the little suburban downtown, then parked her car and took a walk.

Not much there, either, just the usual banks and chain restaurants, boutiques selling expensive, useless stuff. Most of the shops looked new, like they wouldn’t have been there when Hillary was. Elaine peeked in the window of the oldest-looking place she could find, a coffee shop connected to an old movie theater. She wasn’t hungry exactly, but she wanted something, some excuse to stay and soak up whatever Hillary essence she could. Hillaressence.

The place was empty, but there it was, the Sign of Hillary, behind the cash register—a framed photograph of her with Barbara Walters, both of them coiffed and beaming, in pantsuits, posing with the restaurant staff. There’d been a television interview there, according to a plaque posted beneath the photo.

Elaine had taken a seat in a cracked vinyl booth by the window, in view of the photo, and waited. After a while a man came out of the kitchen and looked at her, then went back into the kitchen. Then a girl came out and walked to her table and set a greasy water glass down in front of her and handed her a huge plastic menu.

Elaine had ordered the Hillary Burger. The thing that made it different from a regular burger, according to the menu, was the topping—a little mound of chopped green olives.
I wouldn’t call it tapenade
, Elaine imagined saying to her mother, imagining that she was sitting across from her. Her mother would have grunted and scraped the olives off.

The burger was all right, a little dry. Elaine thought they should have made more of an effort, a special sauce, maybe, tangy mayonnaise at least. According to a blurb in the menu the place had been Hillary’s “favorite haunt” when she was a girl, and the olive burger her “favorite treat.” She liked to go there after a double feature at the movie house next door, the menu said. It seemed unlikely to Elaine, Hillary wasting her time that way, but you never knew.

Elaine ate three-quarters of her Hillary Burger and more French fries than she’d intended, waiting for her coffee, which never came. Finally she put money on the table—even the cashier had disappeared—and left for the movie theater next door, looking for something more.

•   •   •

The place had once been fancy, she could tell. It had a newly restored Art Deco marquee, a jewel box ticket booth. Inside the booth a girl with purple hair and an eyebrow ring sat talking on a cell phone. Elaine glanced at her. When the girl didn’t respond, Elaine opened the big heavy door.

Not much happening there at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon. The restoration project that had spiffed up the marquee hadn’t yet made it to the overlit lobby. High-wattage bulbs illuminated dirty stucco and ancient stained carpeting. Elaine tried to imagine the teenaged Hillary, standing on that very carpeting, in line at the refreshment counter, waiting to buy an Orange Crush and a box of Jordan almonds, or Raisinets maybe. She’d be wearing an expectant expression and a turquoise plaid A-line skirt, snug over her girdle.

Elaine felt sure on this point, that she’d worn one. Everyone had. Hillary was younger than Elaine, right at the cusp, at the end of the age of the girdle, but in those days, it’s what girls still did, wore girdles, so their undulant bottoms wouldn’t roll around and excite the boys. Elaine’s mother had explained it to her. At least, nice girls wore them, Elaine thought, girls like her and Hillary.

Elaine opened another door, peeked into the dark, empty theater. It smelled of sweat and salt and disappointment, also that fattening butter-like concoction they put on popcorn. She couldn’t picture Hillary sitting there any better than she could see her eating an olive burger next door. When she imagined Hillary at fourteen or fifteen, she saw her already dazed with optimism and ambition, eager to move on, her sense of destiny propelling her away from places like this, telling her to stay out of the dark, to not get blindsided by fantasy and false dreams, the way other girls did.
You go, girl
, Elaine telegraphed to her, back through time. Though she felt a little envious, too, wishing she’d been even half that driven.

•   •   •

The place was empty except for a couple of kids in greasy polyester uniforms getting ready for the first show—vacuuming, making popcorn. Elaine walked around, trying to look like she had some business there. She read the movie posters in the lobby—the coming attraction was something called
He’s Not That Into You
. Elaine recognized the title, taken from a how-to book for women.