Lydia’s Party Read online

  The questions had ranged from easy to impossible. What’s your favorite book? Do you love one of your parents more? Would you rather be happily married or rich? How will you die? After the first year, Lydia added extra questions, to make it harder to guess who’d asked what.

  They’d done it only a few times—the year Elaine refused to play, they dropped it. But Lydia still thought of the party in terms of questions she wanted answered. She had two this year. Her first was: Do you know anyone who is truly happy and if so who? It was a trick question, a skill she’d perfected over years of exam writing. It was a sneaky way of asking if they were happy. Her second was even better: What do you regret?

  She supposed—if they were still playing the game—that she could throw in Have you ever had plastic surgery and if so for what? but she wouldn’t want to put anyone on the spot. They’d backed away from the ultrapersonal. They were past confession and mean-spirited truth telling, had moved on to acceptance, kindness, letting go. Or most of them had. The rest of them should, Lydia thought. Though sometimes she missed the drama of the old days. There used to be sex questions. She remembered one about removing stains from a silk scarf.

  What a tedious party, Lydia imagined someone saying, Spence probably. Parties shouldn’t have agendas, he’d say, already had said, in fact. Who had time to even eat?

  Lydia had to admit, it was a lot to cover in one night. For years they’d talked about going away, meeting someplace, but they couldn’t agree on where. An island someplace warm was one idea, a cruise was another. But the cold is part of it, someone always said. It wouldn’t be the same without a fire.

  It has to be a place that welcomes dogs. Lydia remembered she’d been the one who said that. Someone knew someone who had a derelict cottage on Washington Island they could probably rent for next to nothing.

  Norris’s suggestion—her recently built house in the Michigan woods, with its art and its guesthouse, its hot tub and heated floors, glossy pictures of which they’d all seen in Chicago magazine—was out of the question. As Elaine said later, after Norris left, it didn’t look like them.

  Maura

  I hope this doesn’t turn into another one of Lydia’s man bashing parties, Maura thought, on her way to pick up the ham. Elaine was the worst. Maura loved her but sometimes she could be so unattractively bitter. And why? Elaine had had a real career. She’d traveled! But she said the meanest things sometimes. And she got so angry. She said things to Maura like Maybe if you were more pissed off I wouldn’t have to be. Maura usually just said Let it go. Or Who do you think you are, my mother?

  They argued about Roy. Elaine had even met him once—Maura had introduced them. What a mistake. Elaine had called him Uncle Roy to his face. Elaine was her best friend but some things were hard to forgive. Like that crack she’d made about sitting next to his wife at the funeral. Elaine knew Maura hadn’t gone.

  Still, Maura looked forward to seeing everyone tonight, some more than others. She always looked forward to seeing Lydia. Though Lydia was usually too busy to talk much at these things. The last time Maura had seen her at school, where she still took the occasional class, Lydia hadn’t looked well. Maura almost said Are you OK? But then she didn’t. Cafeteria lighting could make anyone look terrible, even Lydia.

  Maura had offered to bring the main dish this year, so Lydia wouldn’t have to cook. She’d told her she had a new chili recipe she wanted to try out at the shelter and said she could double it and bring half to the party, but Lydia had said no. She’d bought some expensive pot online, she’d said, and wanted to use that. Maura had even offered to come early and dump her chili into the pot—no one would know—but Lydia said no, people would wonder why she’d changed the menu. Besides, she wanted to cook.

  Lydia: 10:30 A.M.

  Lydia could hear Spence downstairs, whirring something healthy in the blender. She hoped he’d clean up the inevitable green mess before he left. At least there was no danger he’d snack on party food. He was single-mindedly devoted to nutrition these days.

  Lydia was back upstairs, rooting through her closet, looking for the tablecloth she hadn’t been able to find in the pantry, where she thought she’d last stashed it. Already she was tired. Maybe a quick rest, she thought, check her e-mail.

  She shuffled the few steps to the tiny room under the eaves that she called her office, formerly her studio. There, among quarter-hourly news updates from Ted about the progress of his meatballs and a lengthy correspondence between Jayne and Maura about who was bringing which side dishes, was a message from Norris. Lydia supposed it meant she wasn’t coming after all but when she clicked it open she saw that Norris had forwarded her a gallery announcement for some show she was in, with a note that said, thought you’d find this amusing don’t bother to go I don’t plan to. see u tonight.

  Norris was the most successful artist Lydia knew, and Lydia wasn’t sure why she felt the need to keep her informed of her increasingly eventful career. Not that Lydia wasn’t happy for Norris—she was! It was just that the arrival of these announcements could still, on a bad day, arouse in Lydia an uncomfortable mix of gratitude, for being remembered at all, and its bitter aftertaste, envy.

  It was a lot to accept—the rave reviews, the awards, the museum shows, and in all the right places. The way she’d just waltzed away from that job offer that had meant so much to Lydia the way you’d leave a restaurant you didn’t like the looks of, assuming there’d be something better down the street. Of course, for Norris, there always was. She’d stayed at their little school three semesters. Lydia saw now that even then, she’d felt it was beneath her.

  Lydia reread the message, trying to be glad rather than just flattered that Norris was coming tonight. It would take some diplomacy, though—she knew her other guests would prefer that Norris didn’t.

  • • •

  The emerging artist residency that Lydia had recommended Norris for had launched her, really. Though anything would have, Lydia recognized now. Norris had been poised to be launched. You could even say she launched herself, Lydia supposed, though the contacts she’d made there, which Lydia had made possible, couldn’t have hurt.

  Lydia had been honored when Norris asked her to write the recommendation, and she’d had to pretend not to be disappointed, later, when she wasn’t invited to speak on the mentors’ panel. That was how it usually worked. You sponsored someone and if she got in they invited you to come speak, at the end. There was a cocktail party, dinner at the lodge. The artists and their so-called mentors—usually a bunch of old careerists, but still—hobnobbed. Drinks were swilled, connections made. Sometimes you got invited back for a residency of your own.

  Or so Lydia had heard. She’d never been invited. People who had, said it was dreary, another petty honor in the petty land of academe, though Lydia had looked forward to it.

  Looking back, it was obvious what had happened. She could see that Norris had been ashamed of their friendship, the community college connection. She’d already erased it from her official past. And of course Norris never asked Lydia for another recommendation, hadn’t needed to. If anything, Lydia thought, she should ask Norris for a recommendation, if she’d felt comfortable applying for that sort of thing, which she didn’t.

  The thing about Norris, Lydia thought, almost deleting the gallery announcement without reading it, because she knew she was too tired to reply with the right mix of nonchalance and enthusiasm, but then deciding not to because she was curious, was that she always knew exactly what to do. She never questioned that rolling over other people was the right thing. And maybe it was, Lydia thought. After all, Norris should know. She was a nature painter. She believed in natural selection, survival of the fittest.

  Her paintings were glorious, no doubt about that. Someone had described them as “acts of inspired realism, what God would have done if he’d used a paintbrush.” Certainly they were technically excellent, no one w
ould dispute that—dense views into forests, prairies, ponds. Not landscapes—no sky, no foreground. Some waggish critic had once said she’d made a career out of seeing the trees for the forest. Mostly, though, they loved her.

  Norris was famous for this larger-than-life realism. Someone had called it her “masculine sense of pageantry,” probably because her paintings were so big, although privately, Lydia wondered. She associated pageantry with a human presence and Norris was not big on that. One reviewer cited her “almost intolerably penetrating insights”—Lydia wasn’t sure she’d go that far—and her gift for “hauntingly expressive light effects,” which, he’d said, “invite spiraling meditations on the sacredness of all life.”

  Lydia would never have said it out loud, but sometimes she wondered if Norris’s work wasn’t getting a bit . . . automatic. Weren’t the paintings starting to look a little rote, like copies of photographs? Lydia wondered if anyone would ever call Norris on it. Lydia wondered, also, if Norris noticed.

  Lydia scrolled down to the text of the gallery announcement. It was hard to tell from the purple prose just what the show was. She’d tried to keep up to date on her reading but this didn’t seem to make sense. The show appeared to have something to do with animals, or their parts—midway through the e-mail there appeared a fuzzy picture of something identified as a candied guinea pig heart—but the image of Norris’s work was the same as everything she’d done for the past ten years.

  Lydia scanned the announcement. It seemed that Norris had been included in the show because she painted animals’ habitats. I get it, Lydia thought, a force fit, anything to include her eminence. Still, why would Norris agree? Especially to a group show at an upstart gallery like this? For explanation there was only a picture of the gallerist, a starved-looking girl with a smudgy tattoo, staring combatively into the camera in front of a wall covered with thousands of pushpins arranged in the shape of what appeared to be a lemur.

  String of Pearls Gallery in collaboration with Molotovia Cottontail presents Animus Animalia, with works by twelve selected artists including internationally acclaimed painter M. Norris Heaney and String of Pearls director Tiny Fabulous.

  This groundbreaking exhibition of meta-narrative features utopian and dystopian projects that balance militant discipline with casual eroticism and always honor animals and their habitats by not overtly depicting them. Ectoplasmic projections of research society will include applied incubation environments conducive to agricultural science and sex rites.

  Wine and light snacks will be served.

  On closing night, Miss Fabulous will perform a ritual burial of her late pet rabbit, Petaluma.

  For more information contact: Tiny Fabulous, Director

  Norris was represented in galleries on four continents—why would she involve herself in this?

  Then Lydia felt a tiny prick of recognition. Of course—the girl. Lydia remembered now. She was the daughter of a famous art dealer, slumming incognito in Chicago. Tiny Fabulous was her witty nom de pushpin, her arch alias. Norris, as usual, was politicking.

  Well, good for her, Lydia thought, for knowing how. Though why send it to her? Unless she was trying to prove something, show Lydia she’d changed, make it seem like she was helping people now.

  Determined to get this over with, Lydia clicked on reply and typed ha! Then she deleted it. It didn’t offer the supportive tone she usually strove for. She hesitated, unable to think of anything else and then, giving up, typed way to go. She knew it was exactly the wrong response, laughably, painfully earnest, and that it would confirm Norris’s opinion of her as a provincial and a weakling and make her snort, but, unable to think of anything better, Lydia sent it off into the ether.

  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?