Lydia’s Party

by Margaret Hawkins

  She didn’t have to shop now. She could go home and try to nap, shop later, on the way, except that she wouldn’t be able to nap, in her house, in the middle of a Saturday, and she didn’t want to go home yet. Griffin would have some pregame crisis he’d expect her to sort out for him. And Peter would have some project going that she’d feel obliged to help with. She and Peter spent so much time together now, now that he was working at home. Too much time. Between her job and Peter and Griffin, Celia was never alone. Weekends, especially, were claustrophobic.

  She never could have guessed that being happily married would be so stressful, she thought, almost sideswiping the car in the next lane as she made a wide left turn into the liquor store parking lot. She’d had no idea all this togetherness would come to feel so grating. Not that she had any right to complain, she knew. After all, this was what she’d wanted. She couldn’t wait to marry Peter. She’d been desperate for a baby, eventually at least, when she’d seen it was almost too late. But as much as she loved her family—she did! she knew she was lucky—spending actual time with them was not as enjoyable as she’d expected.

  For one thing, she hadn’t expected family life to be so noisy. It hadn’t been that way when she and her sister were children. Everything had been quiet then—house rules. Now children were encouraged to speak up, to weigh in on every blessed thing, but not then. She didn’t remember her opinion being tolerated, let alone solicited. They’d been told to pipe down. Even when they were good, they’d been sent to bed early, made to take naps. It was hard to imagine now, trying to make a child nap. You’d be reported to the authorities, Celia imagined saying, to Lydia. Now, whenever Griffin was home, there was an ongoing soundtrack—complaint, commentary, cell phone conversation, doorbells, television, video games, the staccato of Griffin’s basketball being dribbled up and down the hardwood floors.

  And always, always some urgent request—a different kind of breakfast cereal, an article of clothing that needed immediate laundering, a ride. Celia looked forward to going to work, just to get some quiet.

  Celia walked up and down the aisles of the liquor store, cruising the wines, wondering for the thousandth time if it would have been easier if Griffin had been a girl. Oh, you wouldn’t want that, people told her. Girls were argumentative, emotional, complicated. They triangulated the marriage, then broke their mothers’ hearts. Maybe, Celia thought. But it would have been someone to talk to, at least, and a girl might have taken charge of herself by now. Griffin, at fourteen, still seemed incapable of making a sandwich. Or not incapable, just disinclined. He preferred that Celia do it, and his standards weren’t low. He seemed to relish mealtime as much for the opportunity for judgment as for the chance to eat, appearing at the table three times a day looking mournful, expecting to be disappointed. He almost seemed to want the food to be the wrong temperature or too spicy or too bland, Celia thought, so he’d have an excuse to complain, to her, his slightly dimwitted valet.

  Celia tossed a bag of chips in her cart. Not that she begrudged him. She didn’t! She understood, teenagers were moody. Taking care of him was a pleasure, she reminded herself daily. And on the days she wanted to smack him across the face with the vacuum-packed bag of special deli ham he had to have, she reminded herself that when he was a baby she couldn’t get enough of him. Handling his smooth, sweet-smelling, surprisingly springy little body had been a drug, then. The talcum way he smelled, the feel of his velvety skin, those pink creased knees, the orange fuzz on top of his spongy skull—it was easy to forget that taking care of him, then, had drenched her with pleasure that was almost sexual.

  One day she’d look back on this and miss it, too, she told herself, steering her cart toward the cashier, bottles clinking.

  Still, she’d thought motherhood would be more fun, somehow, more tender. Not so much like being a waitress. Sometimes, on weekends, she had to invent an errand and leave the house, if only for an hour, just to think, to get herself back. Simply driving, alone, was a vacation.

  • • •

  Privacy is a vacation. This insight came to her in the liquor store parking lot, where she sat eating potato chips, with the engine running and the heater on high. She was collecting her thoughts, pretending to be waiting for someone in the store.

  She’d bought three bottles of reasonably priced Shiraz but she shouldn’t even have spent that much, she knew. Lydia would have plenty, and they were on a budget, and politeness demanded that she bring only one. Still, her little crime felt good. Now she was taking her time before the next stop, enjoying the privacy of the mobile peace chamber that was the interior of her car. She’d been gone from work for only twenty minutes but her mind already had begun to clear and the four words seemed like a revelation that she wanted to hold on to.

  Celia reached for one of the index cards she kept in the glove compartment and wrote it down—privacy is a vacation—then felt embarrassed and stuffed the card back, between the owner’s manual and a badly refolded map of Michigan. She wondered if she should consider how Peter would feel if he found it, if he’d feel hurt or insulted by this apparently hostile sentiment, if he came across it, say, while fumbling for a screwdriver to fix something that probably she had broken.

  She began to wonder if maybe she’d written it because she wanted him to find it. It might be good for a change for him to encounter an idea like this, Celia thought. Then she wondered if that was passive-aggressive, although it was a moot point. Even if Peter did read the card, which was doubtful, it would never occur to him that this idea had anything to do with him. If he thought of it at all he would think of it as an abstract and arguable premise, one that had appeared there only coincidentally, in her car, in her handwriting, mildly interesting but unrelated to him or his life. Probably, he’d put the card back, neatly, where he’d found it, and then, noticing the mess she’d made, refold the map.

  Celia stuffed another handful of chips in her mouth. It was disappointing somehow. How could men be so incurious? Celia wondered. Griffin was the same. Sometimes Celia thought she should combat it, this lack of interest they had in her inner life, be more assertive in her communications with them, but the thought always passed. Besides, she thought, in another burst of clarity, it was this very lack of curiosity that afforded her the little privacy she had.

  • • •

  Celia was driving from the strip mall where the liquor store was to the strip mall where the inexpensive grocery store was. She loved to drive. She turned on the radio, then turned it up, loud, to listen to music Peter hated.

  She played the oldies station now when she was alone in the car and didn’t care who saw her singing, or crying, even. She used to be too ashamed. She hadn’t allowed herself to listen to any music in the car, not even classical, which was where Peter always left the dial, when he even listened to the radio. Usually he just played CDs he’d checked out of the library. He was deep into Mahler these days. For years Celia had viewed the radio as one more opportunity for self-improvement, studiously following every public radio story as if there’d be a test at the end of the month. She’d listened to oldies stations only when she rented a car, when she went to visit her sister in Cincinnati, and then only when she was alone. If someone had noticed and asked why, she would have said it was only because she couldn’t find the local NPR station on the dial.

  Now she didn’t care. What good had all that self-improvement done, anyway? Now she had the button programmed—Peter must notice, she thought, but they’d never discussed it—and when she was in the mood to sing along, she went right there. “A Groovy Kind of Love.” “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” “Dancing in the Street.” “Do You Wanna Dance?” Yes, Celia did want to dance. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d danced.

  The songs they played weren’t even old, at least Celia didn’t think so. Last week they’d played Elvis Costello, “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” What indeed? And how could
that be? It seemed like only yesterday that Elvis Costello was new. New Wave. Back then, only hip people had heard of him, let alone knew his real name was Declan MacManus. Now he was a sing-along act for drunken businessmen at karaoke pickup bars. How did that happen?

  Life is so short, Celia thought. Or rather the part you enjoy is. If she’d had any idea it was going to be over so soon she would have stayed up later.

  Snap out of it, she told herself, out loud, almost rolling through a stop sign. She sounded to herself like her eighty-one-year-old mother. But she couldn’t snap out of it. Ever since she’d turned fifty, everything made her sad.

  Celia made herself do the gratitude litany: She was alive. She had all her body parts. Her car still ran. She had a beautiful healthy child, a more or less loving husband, wonderful friends, health insurance, a partially—at least—restored nineteenth-century farmhouse, even if it was mouse-ridden and cramped and mortgaged to the hilt. And she got to sing along with the Ramones. Celia turned up the volume. Lo-bot-o-my! It was all you could hope for, really, and more than most people got. People get old, was all. It was just a fact, and that’s if they were lucky. I’m not even old, Celia thought, just pale. Pale people only seemed to age faster.

  • • •

  She was sitting at a stoplight now, looking at herself in the rearview mirror, wondering if she should dye her eyebrows. Someone behind her was honking. Apparently the light had changed to green. She looked past her reflection to see who it was—some dark, handsome young jerk with a shaved head, enthroned in an enormous vehicle better suited for the Australian outback. Hold your horses, she said.

  Everyone young was so impatient now. And they were all so dark and good-looking, of no discernible ethnicity, with such beautiful, slow-aging skin. Asian Spanish African Semitic, who knew what was in the mix, maybe even some Northern European, though not enough to blunt the beauty. Celia had just read that Jackie Kennedy of all people was descended from a Moor. It just goes to show, she thought. Hybrid vigor was improving the face of the nation.

  The brat in the tank was honking again. He was twenty, at most, barely old enough to think, let alone drive. It was a scientific fact that his brain wouldn’t gel for another four years. She crept into the intersection and he zoomed past, giving her the finger.

  Celia pretended not to notice. She remembered a time when a guy like that would be slowing down, not speeding up. Hanging out the window, flicking his tongue, following her home and parking outside her building to do God knows what out there under his coat in full view of her back window while she hid inside and called Lydia. Celia was not making this up, it had happened. They’d screamed with laughter. Choked. Gross! Lydia had said, laughing until she snorted. Call the cops, she’d said. But Celia didn’t. They both knew it was more complicated than that. She’d liked it, too. Not him, exactly, just the thrill of it, the desire she’d inspired.

  Celia had read recently that some researcher—a woman—did an intensive study over many years that involved hooking people’s private parts up to sensors and determined, after all that, that women’s sexual desire was sparked by men’s—and other women’s!—desire for them. The much-pondered secret behind what women wanted, the doctor had concluded, was narcissism. Women wanted to be adored.

  Celia could have told her that. What a disappointment, though, to see it in black and white, in The New York Times. To hear it quantified like that by a woman of science. Women had been demystified at last and by one of their own. Celia had felt a little ashamed, reading it, knowing it was true. What a bunch of low-minded, self-absorbed characters we turned out to be, she thought. She’d wanted to talk to someone about it, and not Peter. In the old days she would have called Lydia. Maybe she’d bring it up tonight.

  • • •

  Celia pulled into the strip mall parking lot and waited for a crowd of teenagers to pass in front of her car. All these tightly swathed, sure-footed young people—in high-heeled boots, on this ice!—demoralized her. It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t still nineteen. Aging is natural, she told herself. She didn’t even look that bad—did she? Though sometimes she thought if only she’d managed her life differently things wouldn’t have turned out this way. She’d be a different kind of middle-aged person, she thought, pale maybe, but one of those fulfilled pale people.

  She saw them everywhere around town. She saw them at the pharmacy, stocking up on midwinter sunscreen for jaunts to exotic locales or, in the summer, extended stays with their large happy families at handed-down-through-generations lake houses, where they probably worked jigsaw puzzles and played board games while sipping drinks, but not too many. Not a mean drunk among them, or so you’d think, they were so avid to go back and do it again.

  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.