Lydia’s Party Read online

  Celia knew she should tell her about the job, put a positive spin on it. It’s interesting! she’d say. It was interesting, Celia thought. Maybe tonight she would. It was nothing to be ashamed of. Lydia would be supportive. Sounds like fun, she’d say, or something like that. Some parts were fun, sort of, in a mindless way. Celia didn’t mind walking around, delivering things. It left her free to think. And she loved libraries. So what if she had to ask permission to go to lunch?

  Celia had been looking for a real job for years. Just this past fall, she’d written to sixty-two libraries within a seventy-five-mile radius of her house—she figured a ninety-minute commute each way was her limit—including school and corporate libraries, but there were no openings for art librarians. When this came up, library assistant at the local teaching hospital, she’d grabbed it.

  Though she’d thought she’d be working more with actual books. Mostly she photocopied journal articles for medical students and—her specialty—walked up and down hallways delivering books and what she thought of as AV equipment, though that’s not what they called it. Occasionally she had to wheel around an old cart with an ancient film projector on it, but mostly Celia delivered laptops to meetings or DVD players to birthing classes.

  She’d show up at some room full of shiny-faced, big-bellied, giddy girls, almost every one young enough to be her daughter, pop the DVD in, and stay just long enough to make sure everything was working properly. She tried to get out as soon as she could after that, before it got gory. It was easy enough. The truth was they didn’t even see her.

  Lydia: The Food

  Lydia was serving her spicy chicken stew tonight, the one she made every year. This year she’d added cannellini beans along with the usual mashed potatoes, to thicken it. Also vegetables, stewed tomatoes, hot sauce, rice. A can of corn, a glass or two of sherry. She used to add andouille, which she’d ordered online from a little boudin place outside Jeanerette, Louisiana, but she’d given up red meat this year and put in turkey sausage instead. She wasn’t convinced it quite did the job. She’d made the stew the day before and when she’d tasted it, then, it wasn’t bad, but she hoped a night in the fridge had improved it. She planned to make Parmesan cheese dumplings, too, which she’d drop in the stew at the last minute.

  Lydia did the inventory in her head.

  Wine—she’d gotten a case, mixed red and white. That should more than cover it, since most of them would bring a bottle, too. Jayne always brought champagne.

  Appetizers—Celia and Jayne were handling that. And Betsy, who didn’t cook, would bring Ted’s Famous Meatballs, which is what he called them, and a jar of his special soy sauce and sambal barbeque concoction, which he made every year especially for the party and which was his way of letting Lydia know he wanted to be invited back. The thought of the meatballs reminded Lydia to put out toothpicks.

  Bread—Peter would send some with Celia, as he did every year. He claimed it was no trouble, since he baked every Saturday. Lydia knew he’d like to be invited, too. She loved Peter, everybody did, and after all these years of enjoying his donations, wonderful coarse, crusty, fragrant loaves of bread and sometimes also a pie or tarte tatin, she would have liked to invite him, but if she did that she’d have to invite Ted, and that was out of the question.

  Salad—Elaine.

  Side dishes—Jayne and Maura, though Lydia knew from past experience that Maura considered baked ham a side dish. Lydia was counting on Jayne for vegetables.

  Dessert—Lydia had bought it this year. Usually she baked, but this year she hadn’t had the energy, though either way, it was superfluous, really. Everyone brought dessert—she couldn’t have stopped them if she’d tried. Still, Lydia had made a special trip and picked up two dozen cannoli at D’Amato’s.

  That should be plenty, she thought. She liked to send them home with leftovers. She’d even bought expensive little baskets this year, with hinged lids, woven in the shape of animals, to pack the leftovers in. Lydia knew no one needed baskets. This was part of her spending campaign. Lydia knew that Norris, if she even came, would pitch hers out the car window the minute she hit the highway—food and basket both. With any luck some homeless person would find it, or at least a raccoon. Lydia reminded herself to wrap Norris’s portion loosely. At least then, if an animal found it, he could get at it easily, without having to chew through wax paper and foil.

  Elaine

  Elaine had been looking forward to the party all week but now the day had arrived and she didn’t want to go. She would, of course—if she didn’t show up they’d probably send the police—but she dreaded it. She didn’t feel like talking to people tonight. And not just tonight. Lately. She’d considered calling to say she’d be late, to skip all the preprandial chitchat, maybe show up in the middle of dinner, except that she was supposed to bring the salad and didn’t want to mess things up for Lydia. Or she could get there early, she supposed, drop off the food, and leave. She still had a sick person’s prerogative, though it had been two years.

  At least she’d already made the apple crumble. It was good, too, her mother’s recipe. She was nothing if not reliable in that department, though what was the point, she thought. By the time they got to dessert everyone was too drunk to taste it. She’d even, in a dark moment, considered taking a store-bought pie this year. She knew if she put it in her pie carrier, no one would even notice. She’d already compromised by buying canned whipped cream this year. She’d tasted it—not bad, maybe a little too sweet. Usually she whipped the cream herself, there at the party, with a whisk, after dinner while everyone marveled at what a perfectionist she was, but she didn’t feel like it tonight.

  Ever since her mother died, Elaine had felt listless. Then Boswell—it was too much, one after the other like that, on top of her surgery. People said it’s only a dog, buck up, but they had no idea. In six months her hair had turned white. Then she’d gotten fat, from shock, she supposed, although the death of the old was hardly a shock. Her mother had been ninety-two. Grief, then.

  Now she had to figure out what to wear tonight, another small agony. Nothing fit. Grief was supposed to make you waste away, she thought, but no such luck. It didn’t help that all her friends were younger. She’d been waiting for Lydia to stop being so svelte, but every time Elaine saw her she was thinner, not fatter. Norris, too, but she was young. She could be expected to hold up another ten years. But Lydia, enough.

  Here was a question: When could they all give up and wear elastic-waist jeans? Thank God at least for stretch denim, Elaine thought. That’s what she’d be wearing tonight—flannel-lined, elastic-waist stretch jeans that made her look like a two-car garage. Though she’d prefer pajamas.

  Lydia: The Dogs

  Lydia wove a red ribbon around Maxine’s collar and brushed her coat so she’d be shiny and soft for later. Standing upright, too fast, Lydia felt her head swim, and she almost fell. She leaned on the big dog for support.

  Maxine’s presence at the party—under the table, lying sideways across at least two pairs of feet during dinner, confident that food would be passed her way at regular intervals—had become part of the tradition, and one year Lydia invited everyone to bring their dogs. Betsy had taken Lydia up on the offer and brought Pudding, her and Ted’s eight-pound Yorkie. He and Maxine got along so well that she continued to bring him, every year.

  Betsy called him Pud. Rhymes with hood, she told people. Out of Betsy’s earshot, Celia and Elaine called him Pudenda. Jayne always reminded them the word was Latin for shame, which always inspired someone else to say Can you believe the word for female genitalia means shame, which in turn inspired someone else, usually Elaine, to say Yes. Then everyone laughed. The party had taken on a ritual quality, like some scripted high church pageant that played out every year. Lydia found this both comforting and maddeningly repetitive, often at the same time.

  Ted usually dressed Pud in some version of a coat—the
year before it was a red plaid fleece wrapper with a Velcro closure—and carried him from the car to the house in his pocket when he dropped Betsy off. He insisted on it, and on picking them up at midnight. Lydia knew exactly how it would go. Ted would carry his meatballs into the house in a chafing dish, with his special sauce in a quart Ball jar in one overcoat pocket and Pud in the other. He would set the chafing dish in the dining room and the Ball jar on the kitchen counter and Pud on a kitchen chair, then lean down to kiss Lydia on the cheek and proceed to snoop around the kitchen and comment on her cooking.

  Do I detect a tad of cumin in the stew this year? he’d say—or oregano or sumac—squinting like Columbo. Finally, after enough of the women had reminded him to drive safely, he’d leave. They’d hear him as he made his way out the door, onto the front porch, singing something Broadway in his velvety tenor. Don’t throw bouquets at me. Anyone who bothered to watch him recede in the dark would see him shuffle off a few dance steps in the snow and be newly surprised at how graceful he was, for such a big man.

  He does have a nice voice, someone always said, after shouldering the front door closed behind him, against a gust of wind. Sometimes Lydia felt tempted to let bygones be bygones and invite him to stay for dinner, but there were too many reasons not to and she knew if she did no one else would get a word in edgewise. Besides, the rule they’d decided on was no men, a rule they’d made largely to keep Ted out. Not that there was any keeping him out for long. He was always back by midnight to collect Betsy and Pud and his grandmother’s chafing dish. There were lots of pumpkin and Cinderella jokes then.

  “It’s creepy,” Celia always said, to Lydia, after they left. “It’s like he’s her father.” She said it every year. “More like her mother,” Lydia had said once. Celia didn’t know the half of it, Lydia thought but couldn’t say; she was bound to silence.

  The truth was, Lydia would have liked him to stay, if he could have just behaved. She would have liked to know how he was. He seemed better now, Lydia thought, after he and Betsy decided to get back together, though she wasn’t so sure about Betsy. Ted was all promises and recipe cards now, proving how devoted he was, though Lydia was sure he still saw Raymond. Or someone like him. Who knew if Betsy knew. Probably she did, and kept it to herself.

  • • •

  Lydia had not asked to know any of this. Ted had told her. He’d called her six months ago to tell her that he and Raymond had lunch, after he saw Lydia walk by the restaurant. “And that’s all we had,” he said.

  She’d told him for the hundredth time she didn’t want to hear about it.

  “You have to hear about it,” he’d said. “You’re my best friend.”

  “Come on.”

  “You are,” he’d said. “Talk to me. I’m struggling with this.”

  Lydia had kept quiet, resisting the urge to tell him to cut the crap.

  “I do,” he’d said, reading her mind. “I struggle. I struggle with these . . .” Here he’d paused, sighed. Lydia heard rattling and wondered if he’d had an EKG lately. He just kept getting bigger. “These unnatural impulses. I need someone to talk to.”

  Lydia cringed when Ted talked this way. He didn’t used to. He used to count all his impulses—toward food, men, women, in approximately that order—as natural. Or he’d at least conveyed that impression. Now that he’d gone back to church, Ted had started to talk about sin.

  • • •

  Ted rediscovered religion shortly after he was fired from his job as a junior high school music teacher, details of which dismissal he would not divulge, even to Lydia. His return to faith had been precipitated by what he called a “particularly dark night of the soul.” Despair had beset him, he said, late one Thursday when the mashed potato machine broke down during the 3–11 shift, in his first week at his new job as an assistant manager at a fried chicken franchise, a job Betsy had insisted he take. He realized then, he needed to go back to church.

  Or rather to the Church, as Ted put it, the church of his youth. He’d told Lydia then that he considered himself a prodigal son, a man returned to his god. She’d told him she thought the real reason he’d gone back to church was for the choir. Maybe he just missed singing, she said.

  “Liberal churches have choirs, too,” she’d pointed out, meaning to be helpful. He’d laughed, but she’d meant it.

  Really, though, who cared where he went to church. Her problem was Betsy. Ted thought he was being virtuous, that he’d done her a good deed, going back. He saw it as a cleansing sacrifice. “What about her?” Lydia had said.

  “She’s fine!” Ted said.

  Lydia told him to find a new church. “Become a Unitarian,” she’d said. “Give yourself a happy ending.”

  But Ted said she didn’t understand. Lydia told him she thought she did, that she thought he loved his guilt more than he loved his mean old god. Then she’d told him she thought he was a phony and that Betsy would be happier without him.

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “We have kids.”

  “They’re almost grown,” Lydia said.

  This time Ted went silent, and when Lydia said she thought he was being selfish he started to make sounds like he was going to cry. She held the phone, listening to him sniff. She heard a sob, then more sniffling, and after a while the sound of a fat man breathing raggedly and hard. Just when Lydia couldn’t stand it anymore and was about to apologize, he burst into song.

  “Call me irresponsible . . .”

  “Jerk,” she said. “Faker.”

  “Call me unreliable . . .”

  “Stop it, or I’m hanging up.”

  “Gotcha!” he said, back to his jolly old self.

  “And stop telling me these things,” Lydia said. “You don’t follow my advice.”

  “I like to tell you things,” he said. “You’re the only person I can talk to.”

  “It’s compromising,” she said. “I’m supposed to be Betsy’s friend.”

  “No,” he said. “Mine. You were my friend first.”

  “Ted, one of these days I’m going to wring your neck” is how Lydia usually ended their conversations.

  • • •

  Lydia went back to thinking about dogs. It would be the first year without Boswell, Elaine’s fat yellow Lab, who, with his soulful brown eyes, was more of a person than a dog. Elaine had brought him every year since the first dog year and every year he’d lie on the couch with his head in someone’s lap. He’d died last August, at fourteen.

  That had been hard. They all still felt bad about it. Not Norris, but everyone else. Elaine was talking about getting another one, something smaller this time—a min pin, maybe, easier to walk, she said—but Lydia could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

  Elaine

  At the last party, Celia—who’d had too much to drink and was making a show of sticking up for Maura after Elaine had just made that one little joke about Roy, who was dead by then anyway—had called Elaine a sexually confused crabby old grouch.

  “So?” Elaine had said. “It doesn’t mean I’m not right.”

  Elaine had expected Celia to agree, that Roy had been a disaster.

  • • •

  Romantics thought she was bitter, but Elaine thought of herself as a realist. She didn’t expect love to save her. She didn’t expect anything to save her. She’d learned a long time ago not to rely on that kind of thinking. It was a drug, a palliative for the powerless, entertainment for the ignorant, and if you insisted on poisoning your brain you were better off taking drugs, in Elaine’s opinion. Consider Maura and her darling dead married Roy, she thought. Or even Lydia. Where had all that drama, that overvaluation of the male member, gotten her, really? Exactly nowhere, as far as Elaine could tell.

  God save us, Elaine thought, from Lydia’s pink-lit fantasies, even of Norris.

  Lydia: The Questions

  Lydi
a set out the shoes she planned to wear tonight—boots, really, warm and low-heeled (so there’s no falling down after a few drinks was her usual joke, though now she couldn’t drink). Out of habit, she composed her annual mental list of questions.

  Every year, from almost the beginning, there’d been a theme to the party, some project that made it feel useful, or some order of business that needed to be conducted. One year it was to adopt out a cat that had been left with Lydia by a neighbor. She’d meant to keep him but he and Malcolm didn’t get along, so the women had spent the night compiling lists of cat lovers and making increasingly drunken phone calls to likely owners. Other years it was a book exchange. Once, Maura got everyone to bring warm clothes to donate to the homeless shelter where she volunteered. Elaine had brought her grandmother’s mink, a tiny coat for a tiny woman, with a tattered red satin lining, and when Betsy tried it on and it fit perfectly she decided to keep it and wrote a nice check to the shelter. They’d ended up trading all the clothes, donating money instead. This year it was Lydia’s little agenda item, although no one knew about that yet.

  For a while they’d done the Questions, too. It had started with a truth-telling session where everyone was supposed to sit in a circle and tell something personal they didn’t think anyone knew about them. It had been Betsy’s idea—she’d just opened her family therapy practice and had gotten very bossy and said it would be good for them to share—but no one cooperated, so the next year she came up with an amended version, a game she called the Questions. They were supposed to bring one anonymous question, typed so no one could guess the handwriting and sealed in a blank white envelope, and put it in a bowl. Then everyone picked one and read it out loud.

  The rule was you had to tell the truth or pass.