Lydia’s Party Read online

  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.

  The book, she happened to know, told women how to distinguish between men who were truly interested in their unique and lovely souls and men who weren’t, who only wanted sex, if that. Elaine imagined explaining this to her mother, making it sound like she’d only heard about it, maybe in a brief synopsis on the radio, on the same AM show her mother had listened to every morning of her adult life. Apparently the book was so popular they made it into a romantic comedy, she pictured herself saying. In reply, she imagined her mother making a little barfing sound, for laughs.

  Actually, although Elaine never would have admitted it, she’d sped-read the book in a bookstore, and it confirmed what she already knew. Every man she’d ever considered herself close to, including her high school prom date, her amorous history professor, and her two erstwhile fiancés, had not been that into her, as the common parlance went.

  The gist of the book, she explained to her mother, was that you were supposed to move on from anyone who was not that into you and keep moving until you met that inevitable someone who was, deeply. In other words, you were supposed to wait for your prince. She imagined her mother’s response to this idea would be to pat her dry hand with her own even dryer one.

  • • •

  Elaine found this conversation deeply satisfying, even if it was one-sided. It was especially bolstering on the day of her Hillary pilgrimage, her Hillgrimage, as she thought of it. She even allowed herself to imagine Hillary there with them, all three of them laughing together over the movie poster and eating freshly popped popcorn with real butter.

  I love your mom! Hillary would say, smiling and showing her teeth, giving her mother a little shoulder squeeze. It would be just the right kind of hug—respectful, not too chummy.

  That night Elaine dreamed she took her mother to the movies. They arrived late and sat down in the dark next to Hillary, and when the movie started Hillary leaned over to them and said, in a loud whisper, “He’s not that into . . .” but the pronoun was garbled and then Elaine woke up.

  As she got older Elaine had grown more interested in this sort of thing—presidential history, that is, first ladies. When the Lincoln Museum opened in Springfield a few years earlier, she’d talked Maura into going with her to the opening. It was a four-hour drive but it had seemed important, both to go and to take Maura. To break up the drive, they’d stopped at Steak and Shake, for lunch. The milkshakes there were excellent.

  Of course, the museum was inspirational; everything about Lincoln was. He’d freed the slaves. There was really no single thing in American history better than that, and why didn’t matter. But what Elaine could not help thinking about on the drive back, pretending to sleep as Maura drove, was the hall of Mary Lincoln’s dresses.

  They’d seemed embarrassingly out of place, condescending somehow, as if the curator had been asked to find something good about the wife, too, and this was the best he could do. In the midst of all that somber history—the underground railroad, the gruesome facts of the Civil War, the re-creation of the death scene of eleven-year-old Willie—there was that roomful of big, hoop-skirted dresses. Posted text described how hurt Mary Lincoln felt when Washington society snubbed her, despite her pretty dresses, which they found provincial.

  On the drive home Elaine couldn’t stop thinking about it—Mary Lincoln, sidelined then snubbed, her husband murdered in front of her, three of her four children dead, then committed to a mental hospital by her only surviving son. She was crazy, people said. She had hallucinations. Others claimed it was migraine headaches that made her act that way. Elaine had read that some historian had posthumously diagnosed her with narcissism. Narcissism!

  At her lowest, she’d tried to kill herself but eventually managed to get out of the asylum, that cagey gal, after only four months. Her sister ended up with her. As sisters often did if you weren’t careful, Elaine thought, picturing herself her sister’s captive at Sunset Village. Still, what a life. Elaine had nothing against Abe—quite the contrary—but she guessed that part of Mary Lincoln’s problem was being married to a great man.

  She hoped Maura had taken note.

  • • •

  Bellevue Place, the sanitarium where they’d put her, was in Batavia, Illinois, in the Fox River Valley, not so far from Hillary’s childhood home. Elaine remembered going there with her parents once, on a Sunday drive, some fifty years before. They’d taken a picnic, spread a blanket on the riverbank, and eaten ham salad sandwiches out of a basket. For dessert they’d split a Hershey bar three ways, just the three of them—who knows where her sister was that day. Later they’d rented a rowboat.

  The memory made Elaine ache with nostalgia and regret. She remembered the day clearly. Frankly, she’d been a pill. She remembered complaining about the flies and refusing to eat her mother’s potato salad because she’d put mustard in it. That was fun, Mom, she wanted to say, now. I loved that ham salad you used to get at Gerhardt’s.

  • • •

  After the trip to the Lincoln Museum, Elaine looked up Batavia on a map and the next Sunday she and Maura drove there to see the building Mary Lincoln had lived in. (Maura had wanted to go the movies; Elaine had had to talk her into it.) The place was an apartment house now, surprisingly pretty. They’d bought hamburgers at Culver’s on the way into town and parked across the street, ate in the car. If anyone asked what they were doing, Elaine planned to tell them they were researching a book on first ladies and that the
chapter on Mary Todd Lincoln was going to be called “From the White House to the Nut House,” but no one asked or even seemed to notice they were there.

  • • •

  Elaine was sweeping the kitchen floor, imagining her mother sitting at the table, dumping sugar into her coffee. What if there were two presidents? she’d say to her. A woman president and a man president, and to get anything done they’d have to agree?

  Her mother stirred and nodded.

  Certainly it would slow things down. Elaine understood that. But it might be better in the long run, for women at least. And they’d have to wear robes, she thought, so there’d be no sniping about clothes and figures.

  She wouldn’t bring it up tonight, though. People always laughed at her ideas. They thought she was kidding.

  Lydia: 4:15 P.M.

  Lydia took Maxine for a walk around the block. Neither of them wanted to go far, in this cold. The walk was a preparty routine, started when the dog was young and rambunctious, to settle her. Now it was to energize her, though she just looked exhausted. A neighbor they’d met on the street the other day had said, Poor Maxine, she’s getting so feeble. How old is she? Lydia had wanted to kick the woman. People had no idea how much that hurt. Lydia wanted them to see how beautiful she was, how dignified, wanted them to remark that she was aging gracefully.

  When they got back, Maxine plodded up the stairs behind Lydia, her legs shaking a little at each step. The dog sprawled on the floor while Lydia checked her e-mail, for the seventeenth time that day. Now Celia and Maura were discussing whether they needed more bread. Celia was bringing Peter’s bread and thought Maura’s offer of store-bought bread was superfluous. Celia also reported that Peter had made chutney and said she’d bring that, too, if there was anything to put it on. Elaine said to remind her what chutney was and Maura, who actually liked chutney and thought it would be good on the ham but was offended that her offer of bread had been rebuffed, said she didn’t care for it. Betsy said chutney might be good on Ted’s meatballs, and Jayne replied to the earlier e-mail about ice. Norris was absent from the conversation. She was probably on the road by now, Lydia thought.

  Lydia clicked out of her e-mail and checked the news. The world was falling apart, as usual. Fat people were being barred from adopting Chinese orphans. Heroin was cheaper than beer. Tomatoes had lost their flavor. Signs of cannibalism had been discovered in a basement in Detroit.

  She was about to log out when a headline caught her eye: Are You Depressed or Just Disappointed?

  Good question, she thought. She was tempted to read further, but why bother? The headline said it all.

  Lydia: The Letters

  Lydia thought she would have heard from the doctor by now. He’d said he’d call as soon as he knew something, maybe Friday, but certainly by Saturday afternoon. Lydia was waiting to revise the letters, depending on what he said. She hoped she’d left enough time, though what she really hoped was that she could throw them out.

  She supposed now that’s why she hadn’t bought fancy stationery and matching envelopes, made from pulpy paper flecked with rose petals and butterfly wings. Preparing that well would have made it too real. All she had was cheap printer paper and #10 business envelopes. Not a very splashy way to say good-bye, she thought, but it would have to do.

  She still needed to double-check to be sure each letter was in the right envelope. There would be a plot twist, she thought. She could imagine the headline now—Wrong Letter Changes Woman’s Life. Not that there were any secrets exactly, but each letter was different.

  She’d written them last week but they needed revision. Not the plan, just the language.

  The first part was the same to everyone.

  Dear (insert friend’s name here),

  As the great Warren Zevon, who died at fifty-six, once observed, life’ll kill ya.

  I guess we all knew that but unfortunately my time has come sooner than I expected. After fifty-four years of more or less perfect health and a few months of troubling symptoms, the details of which I won’t impose even on you, my tolerant and sympathetic friends, I finally went to see a doctor and was informed that I am in the final stage of pancreatic cancer, which either has or has not spread—update on that to follow. Hence my newly sleek silhouette. Unless he’s wrong, or a cure is discovered in the next few weeks, I’m probably a goner, which makes this the last Bleak Midwinter Bash I’ll throw. I hope someone carries on the tradition. It’s a good time of year for a party.

  That being said, I want to take the opportunity to clear up a few questions, ask a few favors, and disperse some things.

  First, I want to tell you all that your friendship has been the great boon of what I thought was my midlife. I’d like to express my love and gratitude to each of you. I know I wasn’t always great at being close. I’ve often been preoccupied, with men, frankly. That may have been a mistake and I know some of you agree. But that’s the point. That’s why you all have meant so much to me. You’ve allowed me to be your friend on my own awkward terms. Enough sentiment.

  Second, I’d like to share with you my recipe for chicken stew, the one I serve every year, which, over the years, most of you (not Norris) have said you wanted. I didn’t mean to be mysterious. I never gave it out because I never wrote it down because it changes every year because I never got it right. I thought I’d wait and write it down when I perfected it, but it looks like I won’t get the chance. So I’m enclosing that, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out what it lacks. The so-called secret ingredient is not okra as many of you thought although that’s in there and does ooze that viscousy goop. The ingredient that supplies the creamy binder everyone wondered about is simply mashed potatoes, gobs of them, made with as much cream and butter as you please. Now you know. Carbophobes, beware.

  The next thing I want to tell you is that, unlike Edith Piaf and her ilk, the ones either valiant or brazen enough to claim they have no regrets, I do. I have regrets aplenty. Some are best left unspoken—trust me—but others I’d like to get off my still ample chest, which, I might note, is—are?—still hanging in there, the last vestige of my formerly voluptuous self. Maybe you will figure out a way to avoid making the same mistakes. If not, c’est la vie, as the little sparrow would have said.

  I will attempt to be transparent, a new thing for me. I see now that I’ve led my life too privately and now I want things to be known. You might even say that I want to be known. Please indulge me as I plan to ramble.

  It seems to me, now that I’m contemplating regret, that there are two kinds—regret for things we did and wish we hadn’t and regret for things we didn’t do and wish we had. Had done. Would have done. Did do. I’m tangled in tenses already—it proves how slippery time can be. Or is. Which, I guess, is the point of regret. Was it Nabokov who said the prison of time is a spiral? Or did he say the spiral of time is a prison?

  Lydia wondered if she should stop and look it up but decided not to. She liked not knowing.

  Now that I’m dying, I find myself dwelling on these things, on what I did and didn’t do, and wondering which is worse.

  I used to think it was worse to regret something you’d done—something stupid, something cruel or destructive—but I’m beginning to think the opposite. I’m beginning to think that leaving something good undone is worse than doing something bad. Something regrettable is still something, an act, a scrap of energetic material that can be sewn into something else, an action the momentum of which can be harnessed and redirected. Reversed, possibly, in some kind of existential judo. A thing not done is nothing, no thing at all.

  Lydia wondered if the bit about judo was too much but decided to leave it in.

  • • •

  She set the paper down. If this weren’t a letter but a lecture, Lydia thought, say, for Art 101, that wonderful old chestnut of an art appreciation course she used to teach, she would now click on a slide of an Ivan
Albright painting, the one of the funeral wreath hanging on a door. She’d tell them the title and they’d write it down: That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door). Date: 1941. Style: Magic realism—Gothic, scary, obsessively detailed, theatrical. This is a painting about regret, she’d say, and the studious ones would write about regret in their notebooks. After a suitable pause and, she hoped, some awed silence, she would click again, and there on the screen would appear Into the World Came a Soul Called Ida. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear a gasp or two.

  She’d give them time to take it in, the faded beauty with her bare legs exposed, legs that no doubt were once quite shapely and smooth but now are chunked with fat, pitted and pocked with cellulite, and sickly pale under unforgiving overhead light. They’d all look at Ida, looking at herself in a hand mirror, seemingly unfazed by her own ravaged appearance.

  Then, to set the horror, Lydia would click again and up would come Flesh (Smaller Than Tears Are the Little Blue Flowers). She would watch as they gazed in subdued silence at this new expanse of creased and corrugated female flesh, another of Albright’s studies in female beauty gone to ruin. Then she’d go back to Ida. Really, she thought, it didn’t get much worse than that.

  • • •

  Aren’t you curious to know what she sees in that mirror? Lydia would ask the darkened classroom. Don’t you wonder if she sees what we see? And wouldn’t you like to know who the model was and how she felt when she saw this painting? If so, you may be interested to know that she was twenty years old when she sat for this. Here Lydia would pause for dramatic effect. Your age, she’d say, looking into the dark at the students, sensing she’d gotten their attention now. It wasn’t time that did this to her. It was the artist’s imagination that ruined her looks. She’d lower her voice. Don’t you wonder why? Why, when he looked at this young woman, he imagined all this broken-down flesh? Was this fatalism? Some harsh kind of realism? Was it an antidote to lust? Or was this the artist’s apology for it, after the fact?