Lydia’s Party

by Margaret Hawkins

  There are questions you probably want to ask. Cel wants to know if I regret not having children—she assumes I do but the answer is not really—and whether I regret that I didn’t remarry. Also, and more firmly, no. You all probably wonder if I’m afraid—a little, yes—and if I have regrets. That’s the point, really. I do. I wish I’d done more of what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. I wish I hadn’t said no so often.

  • • •

  There, Lydia thought. That at least was something true. The effort of having made herself confront it made her tired. She looked longingly toward the daybed across from her desk. Would succumbing to another nap, just a little one, be so bad? Would it be another no—to consciousness, to life itself? Or was it a yes—to the pleasure of sleep?

  Whichever, there wasn’t time. They’d want examples, of course, of what she’d said no to, but Lydia didn’t have the heart to list them. She knew they’d sound trivial, pathetic even. How could she tell them she wished she’d gone to the Valentine Ball in high school, when she was invited by Bill Strong—twice!—instead of staying home, claiming she wanted to finish her encaustic painting of skulls in time for the art fair when really she’d been afraid to go, afraid she’d have to dance. And it would just seem odd to admit after all this time that she wished she’d gone to New Orleans on the bus with Elise Neuberger that time, when Elise had suggested it, when they were eighteen. Lydia remembered why she hadn’t. Elise had been bossy and she could be tiresome, but the real reason was some boy Lydia had hoped to see that weekend. She hadn’t wanted to miss out by being away. Now Lydia wished she’d said yes more, to all sorts of things.

  • • •

  Lydia could hear Celia, only pretending to be joking, say, More? Didn’t you say yes entirely enough? Celia would mean men, but Lydia meant everything. She wished now she’d taken more from what was available, or at least paid more attention to what she did take. Maybe that was all it was, she thought. Maybe she’d had plenty—trips, men, friends, life—if only she’d paid more attention to what she’d had.

  Though couldn’t attention be retroactive? Lydia wondered. Wasn’t that what memory was?

  Lydia tried to test the idea, tried to remember something important, relive it right then, to appreciate it after the fact, but the only things that came to mind were inconsequential, not the orchestrated events, but their unphotographable edges. The way Spence’s hands had looked one night, polishing his boots before a show. A tuna sandwich in a train station. A song heard with particular intensity in a hospital waiting room. Lydia suspected these edges were where she’d lived her real life. Now she wished she’d paid more attention to those.

  Lydia felt a warm weight on her feet and looked down. Maxine lay across Lydia’s socks, and had rolled her head back, to stare up at her. Now, there was attention. Maybe love and attention were the same, Lydia thought, reaching down to rub Maxine’s pink belly. Maybe she remembered loving things simply because she remembered them.

  Much of what now seemed worthwhile, more than Lydia would have thought, was of the body. The obvious, of course—food, sex, music—but other, plainer things, too. Just running, as a child, pretending to fly, arms out, legs pumping, throat and chest burning with air, was a pleasure she’d rarely equaled since. Or weather, the wild smell of it, every day something different—that alone was enough to live for. Or so she thought now. She wished she’d thought of it sooner.

  Maybe smell, or the memory of it, was love itself. Lydia remembered how her father’s suits smelled, giving off clues to the mysterious masculine world outside the house, newsprint and pipe tobacco and something vaguely medicinal—gin? On summer weekends his brimmed felt hat, which he wore to cut the lawn, smelled of sweat and sweet mowed grass. Her mother’s scent was subtler—domestic and intimate, with notes of bacon grease and blood and stale face powder mixing with the fine, feminine smell of Jergens hand lotion. She’d kept a glass bottle of it beside the kitchen sink and smoothed it on her hands after washing the dishes. Much later, Lydia learned the name of the fragrance—Cherry-Almond. She’d happened on it once in a discount drugstore—in a plastic tube now, no longer in a pink glass bottle with an elegant black pump. Lydia had squirted some on her shaking hands right there in the store and her mother had appeared as if summoned, younger than Lydia by decades and pretty in her shirtwaist dress.

  Now that Lydia had opened the gates of smell, the memories wouldn’t stop. Bingo, her childhood dog, smelled of his own oily fur, a zesty, outdoorsy, insouciant, slightly ammoniac scent, the thought of which made her choke back tears of longing for the sheer huggable corporeality of him, his thick chest around his fast-beating heart. She smelled the old wood and furniture polish of her grandmother’s quiet house, and the hard, thick bars of lavender soap she kept in her upstairs bathroom. The feel of a porcelain handle on a bathroom fixture in an old building somewhere could activate the memory of that smell, which was the smell of being four and standing on a box to wash her hands before Sunday dinner.

  Maybe memory is where everyone really lived, Lydia thought, not the present, or not only the present. Never only the present. Or at least it was where she lived. She didn’t even know what she felt until after it was over.

  Did it all come down to the body? Lydia wondered. She tried to remember loftier pleasures, moments of platonic love or intellectual insight, but she couldn’t get away from the senses. She was back riding at eighty miles an hour in the passenger seat of Spence’s green Camaro, through the Smoky Mountains, listening to Bob Seeger on the radio and drinking cold beer out of a bottle while a certain piney forest smell rushed through the open car windows. They’d been to the beach. Lydia had unhooked her wet bikini top and held it out the window like a flag, to dry it. Or this—early-morning hot summer smell and walking Arlo, a curly-haired foundling, past the open window of a collapsing paint-peeling house at dawn, some fifteen years before. She’d heard a woman singing scales in an operatic soprano, and it made up for a lot that was painful that summer, at least for a minute. Or this—a certain moment sitting in the kitchen of a third-floor apartment, on the top floor of a Victorian house where she’d lived alone with almost no furniture for two years. It was early, 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, and she couldn’t sleep. She was sitting at her one battered table smoking a cigarette, naked under a cotton robe, boiling water for tea. She remembered that when the kettle whistled she stood up to turn it off and turned toward the window and saw the sun just rising over the tree line, dark and red. Her robe had fallen open and she looked down then, just to pull it closed, and there was her body on fire. Her body was red. It was orange and gold. Like she’d swallowed fire. Like she was fire. And for just a moment Lydia had thought she was in flames or that she’d changed in some unimaginable way and was seeing herself, resplendent, in that split second before pain or explosion, and she’d waited for it and when it didn’t come she realized it was the sun on her skin.

  She was happy then. That feeling that minute that morning—that’s what Lydia wished she’d had more of.

  • • •

  She heard a soft lapping sound. Malcolm the cat had arrived on her desk to drink from her water glass. Maybe the whole world was encompassed in the present, she thought. Maybe that morning and her thinking of that morning and that light then and this indifferent light now and Maxine lying across her feet and Malcolm lapping water from her glass were all one.

  Lydia didn’t know and it was too late to figure it out now. She had a party to get ready for.

  Norris

  Now Norris’s clothes, and the inside of her car, reeked of smoke and fish. At least the smell would cover any trace of last-minute sex, she thought. She’d been trying to get out the door when Jay pulled her down.

  “Now you’ve made me late,” she’d said, after, pulling layers of black clothes back on.

  He’d been sitting in the middle of her bed with one of her Hudson Bay blankets wrapped around his
bony, boyish shoulders, smoking a joint. He smiled then, as if he’d been complimented, glad to have had an effect.

  • • •

  “What happens when I’m left sitting in a cold puddle halfway to Chicago?” She’d said this to the top of his head, standing over him with her boot in his lap. He was dawdling—if she wouldn’t take him along he’d do what he could to make her even later. He’d offered to tie her boots, then pulled out the laces. Now he was relacing them.

  She’d nudged him under the chin, poking his soft neck with her hard toe. “Huh? What then?”

  He’d dodged the boot, snaking his supple neck to move his head out of the way. “Then you’ll think of me,” he’d said, keeping his eyes on the elaborate knot he’d begun to tie.

  • • •

  Only a boy can be so cocky and so sentimental at the same time, she thought. It was scandalous, she supposed, what she was doing, robbing the cradle this way. Though no one would think twice if it were reversed, if she were a man. And Jay was of age, old enough to make his own choices.

  It was his big boy choice. That’s what they’d called it with Sam, when he was little, when she and Andy were trying to trick him into doing something he didn’t want to do. He’d learned early on it was flattery, not a real choice. He’d stand there trying not to cry, torn between what he really wanted and his big boy choice, the lousy grown-up alternative they were pushing on him, usually for reasons that had nothing to do with him. Jay’s big boy choice wasn’t so bad, Norris thought, not by comparison.

  She kept it quiet, though, for Sammy’s sake mostly, not that he’d ever find out. Jay and Sam might as well have lived on different planets. Sam, safely tucked away in his fraternity house in Ann Arbor, was as insulated from Jay’s world as if he were still in kindergarten. People like Jay existed for Sam only on television, or in the movies, as colorful outlaws, and Norris planned to keep it that way. Though they were so close in age that Norris sometimes felt in danger of conflating them, of confusing Sam’s baby sweetness with this tougher almost-boy, especially now that Norris could see how young he really was. She’d thought he was older at first, but now that he’d dropped his act she could see he was almost as young as her son.

  He’d started hinting lately about taking her to some kind of family function, his cousin’s wedding. As his date.

  “Oh, sweetie,” she’d said, trying to be nice for a change. “I don’t do weddings. I barely made it to my own.” She’d made a joke of it though it was true. She hated weddings.

  He said he wanted her to meet his family.

  Norris couldn’t help laughing. Then he’d looked hurt, so she said, “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Darling, I could be your mother.”

  “No, you couldn’t.” He’d said it automatically, a child’s defense. But it was true. He was from some town out in the sticks where they got knocked up in high school. She was probably older than his mother. Norris supposed it was time to end it.

  • • •

  She was driving up LSD now, as the natives called it. Lake Shore Drive. Old joke: How did you get here? I took LSD. Her car stunk of fish. She didn’t mind—that old fish shack was one of the few things she missed about the city. People said, Don’t you miss the culture? Please, she thought. If she wanted culture, which she didn’t, she’d go to New York. The only reason she was here, in January, was to check out the space for her show. At the last minute she’d decided to leave a day early, stop in at Lydia’s party. And not for the party, which was tedious, to put it mildly. For Lydia.

  Norris could see the lake on her right, a big black nothing except for where the moonlight glinted a weird silvery color off the ice. The sky was that awful orange streetlight color the city had adopted in the seventies. It looked like poison gas now, caught in the mist.

  Norris missed Michigan already. It was too cold to be in the city. It wasn’t any warmer there, but cold in the woods was different, less sinister. There she had her big stone fireplace. She liked to power walk the path around the pond, listening to the crunch of her boots breaking rhythmically through the frozen snow and leaves and cracking sticks, hearing her own breath, panting inside her scarf. When she got back to the house she, or they, when she let Jay come along, went inside and at first the house seemed oppressively hot, cloyingly domestic after the wildness and danger of the fresh, clean cold. The house always seemed to smell of old soup and toast and coffee then, no matter what she’d eaten that day, and she’d feel a jolt of revulsion. But then she’d get used to it and they’d take off their coats. Jay, when she let him, would pile oak logs in the fireplace that were so hard and cold they banged almost like metal when he dropped them on the hearth. Then she’d light a fire and they’d take off their boots and sit. Jay wanted to talk then but Norris discouraged it.

  Somehow the cold there, while Norris knew it was dangerous, felt less ugly. Cold there seemed like part of some larger order. It seemed necessary, meaningful. The woods needed to rest, things needed to die. Here it just seemed cruel.

  Norris drove past a man with no gloves holding a sign that said, “HELP mE I’m Homeless and Hungry GOD BleSS yoU.” For the briefest moment she considered slowing down, handing the guy a package of smoked fish, along with her gloves. She had a small fortune in food sitting next to her on the passenger seat, each type of fish packaged separately and wrapped in white paper. All she had to do was roll down the window and hand one out. She could give him two and still arrive with too much—she knew at the end of the night most of it would be thrown out, or fed to pets that were already overfed.

  But what was the point, Norris decided, speeding up. He was probably just some alcoholic who’d puke it all up. It was best not to encourage them.

  Goddamn everything, Norris thought. She hated the city. Except for setting up this show, she had no reason to come back, not even to see her dealer, Natalie. They handled everything by e-mail. Norris skipped the openings, usually, shipped the art. She paid Jay to drive in the small work, the drawings she didn’t trust to shippers. That’s how she’d met him. He’d answered an ad she placed for an art courier. Later he claimed he thought it was a euphemism for gigolo. Not that he’d used that word, euphemism. Secret babe code, he’d called it.

  What a child, Norris thought. And what a cad he’d grow up to be when she was done with him.

  • • •

  Except for Lydia and Natalie, everything was in Michigan now. Norris’s parents were gone, and the less she saw of her brothers and their wives and their hordes of children, the better. The only thing that had kept her in the city was Sam, and now he was in Michigan, too. Even Andy’s parents were there, still in the old house outside Traverse City. Sweet little white-haired Betty and Hank, who’d retired from the post office sixteen years ago. It had never occurred to them to move away, go someplace warm, or even to stop working. Hank ran a lawn mower repair business in his garage now. In the winter he worked on snow blowers. Norris supposed Sam had inherited his sweetness from them.

  Betty had cried when Norris told her about the divorce—Norris had made sure she got to them first. Betty had said she and Hank would always think of her as their daughter. Andy never did tell them what happened. He didn’t want to turn them against her, he’d said. He thought she was coming back, Norris realized, later. He didn’t tell them later, either—too embarrassed, she supposed. Now they were closer to her than they were to him.

  Her doing, that, partly at least. You subverted their affections, Andy had yelled at her, almost crying, back during the worst of it, when they still bothered to fight. She’d alienated them from him, he said. It seemed like an ugly thing to say at first but she saw he was right. She hadn’t even realized she was doing it and then, after she thought about it, she thought, yes, exactly, and kept doing it, on purpose. Though they were easily enough bought off, she thought, with adorable grandchild visits. When he wa
s younger Sam had spent a month with them every summer and Norris had made sure she was the one who ferried him back and forth, as if he were her personal gift to them.

  • • •

  Norris was making good time now. She knew she should slow down, on this ice, though she doubted she’d crash—her reflexes were excellent. If a cop stopped her she’d be tempted to tell him that. Laws were for people who lacked sense, or self-control, she’d want to say. She knew what she was doing.

  Most people couldn’t help failing, Norris thought, passing some idiot with his flashers on, doing forty in a broken-down car. They were so sorry, they always said, after they’d made some colossal mess. They had tried to do better, but they just couldn’t. It seemed like whining to Norris, but maybe it was true. Maybe most people couldn’t help being weak and stupid. Who knew why? All she knew was she was the opposite.

  Certain people, people like her, Norris thought, should be licensed to drive faster. They were better at it, and they really did need to get where they were going sooner than everyone else. It would be like diplomatic immunity, she thought, except this would be immunity for people who were smarter. Superior. It was just a fact. Some people, like her, were, and in a few years, she was pretty sure, they’d figure out a way to read it in someone’s DNA and be able to issue a special driver’s license that granted privileges. She didn’t plan to roll over people, Norris thought. They just lay down in front of her. What was she supposed to do—stop? Slow down? She didn’t think so.

  Sometimes Norris thought she’d wasted herself on art. Maybe she should have done more, gone to law school and become a prosecutor or a judge, run for office, not because she wanted to but because she’d be so good at it. She had the temperament—ruthless, she was told. Most people weren’t. Even people whose job it was to be ruthless usually didn’t have the stomach for it, though it was what the world needed more of. Balls. Someone had to be strong. The job fell to whomever was able, and willing.