“CFSJ? No. It might seem like it,” Betsy said, stabbing her omelet with a fork. “But not really, not in the full-bodied, self-actualized way that makes for real sharing. His joy’s all in his lungs. His stomach. Not his heart. Or, you know. Elsewhere.” So that was it, Lydia thought. She hadn’t argued.
• • •
Now Lydia pulled on one of the sweaters she’d set out on the bed—it would have to do—and went back to her office. She picked up the yellow tablet. Write something true, she told herself. She wrote, My real regret is that I have lived a small, fearful life.
Lydia picked up the letter. Even that was tentative and small, she saw now. Rewriting it would take hours, weeks, possibly the rest of her life. She crumpled the paper.
She’d make an announcement, she decided. She’d speak in the simplest terms and tell the truth, with an optimistic spin. She’d say she hoped to recover but, whatever happened, she was grateful. Now she wanted to lighten her life and planned to go the rest of the way without baggage. She wouldn’t say she wished she’d done it long ago.
• • •
Lydia felt relieved. The close call, of having almost distributed this maudlin letter, energized her. She crumpled all the copies and made a little pyramid and counted the crumpled balls to make sure she had them all and then gathered them up in her sweater, like apples in an apron, and walked them down to the fireplace, where she deposited them one by one in the midst of the collapsed pile of logs. Then she rebuilt the little firewood teepee over them. They’d make excellent fire starter.
Back upstairs to deal with her hair, Lydia felt another list coming on. Just one more, she thought, to calm her nerves. She wanted to write down what she’d leave to whom. She pushed aside the pile of books she’d meant to bequeath, meaningfully, with a note inside each. There wasn’t time.
She’d have them take books tonight, then. She’d give them shopping bags and let them help themselves. If they refused, she’d tell them anything they didn’t take would be grabbed by her two cheerfully avaricious nieces, though it wasn’t really true. The girls wouldn’t want her books any more than they’d want her jewelry, which was the other thing she planned to give away tonight.
• • •
She hoped it wouldn’t seem pathetic. There wasn’t much. Or rather there was much, just not much of any worth, but Lydia hoped that once they got over the awkwardness it would be fun. She’d get someone to help her bring the apothecary cabinet, which she used as a jewelry box, downstairs. She’d bought it years ago, on a whim, in a hopeful mood when jewelry seemed like a good idea. Its ninety-nine small drawers were crammed with who knew what. Her plan was for everyone to take turns choosing drawers, sixteen apiece, contents sight unseen. The other three they could divide up however they pleased.
Lydia had taken out a few things for her nieces. Her mother’s pearls, Ariel might like those, and her mother’s engagement ring, though the diamond was tiny. Liv might have to explain its value to whichever one of them got it, that it was a symbol. One of them might like her grandmother’s locket, Lydia thought, if she could ever find the thing. But mostly not, they already had so much. Privilege had been poured over them like water over a full sponge. Lydia wanted to capture the runoff and give it away. Not that her friends needed these things, either, but they might enjoy them. At least they would appreciate the gesture.
The girls wouldn’t, and they wouldn’t want her stuff. They’d been taught to Accept Only the Best, Get the Most Out of Life, Hold High Standards. Their education so far had cost twice what Lydia had spent on her house, and they were far from done. They’d scoff at her dingy trinkets.
Lydia was not a mean-spirited aunt, she told herself. When the girls were small she’d embraced the job. She’d had them over for tea parties and marshmallow roasts, sleepovers and Easter egg hunts. She’d observed their birthdays and graduations with carefully chosen gifts and whimsical parties—Spence had once dressed as a rabbit—albeit not on the scale to which they’d already become accustomed. Her observances, she saw now, must have only seemed small.
Lydia’s brother’s girls, adorable as they were, had turned into Amazons of entitlement. The time she’d taken them on vacation was a disaster. She’d thought a road trip would be fun—they’d take the Circle Tour, spend a week and drive around the lake, stay in knotty pine lodges and rent canoes. They were younger then, still malleable, or so Lydia had thought. But she’d brought them home early, at the girls’ request. The motel pillows were synthetic, they said. The sheets were scratchy. They’d expected her to fix it somehow. The food wasn’t right. Auntie Liddie, we aren’t allowed to eat fried food, they’d said, politely but with an edge. They seemed to expect her to scold the waitress. They wanted sushi. Organic ketchup. Girls, she’d said, this is Wisconsin. Fish fry is considered a delicacy here. She took them to a bowling alley and they complained that people were smoking. The younger one cried.
“Of course people are smoking, honey,” Lydia had said, kneeling in front of her, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. “We’re in a different kind of place now. A place where people smoke! Isn’t it fun? Let’s try to have fun and be tolerant. OK?”
“But smoking’s bad!” the older one said, coming to her sister’s defense, her exquisite little face trembling with outrage. As if she’d taken them to a cockfight, Lydia thought.
Their righteousness was exhausting; their perfectionism made Lydia feel shabby. She took them to a thrift store in Ludington, though by then she should have known better. She thought it would be madcap—they’d try on hats, buy costumes. “My grandma—your dad’s grandma!—took me to a thrift store once,” she told them, outside the store, knowing her brother had inculcated family pride in them. They had to like this, Lydia meant. It was a family tradition. “That was your great-grandma,” she’d said, to remind them that, odd as it seemed, she, their aunt Lydia, was in fact their blood relation. The older one had smiled indulgently, so Lydia forged on, pretending she believed the child’s pretend interest. “I was eight years old,” she said. “She bought me a charm bracelet and a used ouija board and a green sweater. Because I needed one!” Lydia threw that last part in as a little hint, about how different their lives were from most people’s, how lucky they were, but Lydia could tell they didn’t care, that they were hoping she wasn’t going to buy them any used green sweaters.
They’d followed Lydia through the store, their faces screwed into sad little moues of forbearance, hands tight at their sides, careful not to touch anything. She kept them too long, but she’d been trying to show them it was fun. “Look—want a hat?” she’d said, plopping a sombrero on Amelia’s head.
“No, thank you,” she said.
They wouldn’t let Lydia buy them a thing. Clunky jewelry? No thanks. A Hawaiian shirt? No. Afterward she agreed to take them for pedicures but they couldn’t find a nail shop so they just went to lunch. Hot dogs were out of the question. Hamburgers were as low as they’d go.
Not that they weren’t wonderful girls. They were! They’d grown up to be principled, talented, confident, strong. They were athletic and smart and graceful, with bouncing gaits and long, effortless strides and powerful tennis arms and the posture of well-trained dancers, which they were. Well-spoken, well-read, and well-traveled. Between them they knew five languages and, thanks to Lydia’s brother’s good job and his wife’s inheritance and the elite education that naturally ensued, the girls had traveled six continents. They’d herded goats in the Andes, taught English to blind children in China, restored frescoes in Florence, sung in traveling choirs across the Ukraine. And they were gorgeous, of course, each nearly six feet tall now, with thick ropes of long, swinging gold hair and flat bellies and rosy skin and necks like columns and thick, muscular legs. You wouldn’t want to be kicked by one of these girls.
How did they get this way? Lydia wondered sometimes. They’d had Barbie dolls, like everyone else. Though sh
e recalled Amelia once using hers, dressed in an evening gown and sparkly mules, to drive a nail into a picture frame she’d made that summer at outsider art camp. Sometimes they seemed like mutant representatives from the future, forerunners of some conquering female race, destined to figure out a way to reproduce without men. At the very least, they were a new breed of girl.
• • •
Lydia had to admit, she felt a little envious. She was proud to belong to the same gene pool, but she wished she’d been given so much, encouraged to be so bold.
And never mind me, Lydia thought. She was envious of her nieces on her students’ behalf—the tentative, hulking boys who hadn’t a clue where they belonged in the world, half in love with any female who’d look them in the eye, the closed-faced girls, trooping off to their multiple part-time jobs. Most of all, she worried about the returning students—veterans just back from Afghanistan, old before their time. The single mothers who left class early, to pick up children, in broken-down cars. They worked night shifts and lived with their parents, their grandparents, had no money for books or supplies. They bought them at the end of the semester, when it was too late. Lydia gave away her desk copies but there were never enough. Every semester now, she lost students when their financial aid ran out. At first, she’d told them to come to class anyway. Just come, she’d say, I don’t care. But they didn’t. They were embarrassed. And what was the point, if they wouldn’t get credit.
It wasn’t fair, Lydia thought. They worked so hard for a fraction of what her brother’s girls so thoughtlessly took. Lydia wished her nieces well but they’d been given enough for one hundred lifetimes. Her things and her money went elsewhere.
• • •
Lydia made a list of what she was giving away, and to whom.
M—Elaine?
It pained her, but Lydia was thinking about asking Elaine to take Maxine. They might be good for each other, Lydia thought, though Maxine wouldn’t live much longer and Lydia hated to impose that sorrow on Elaine again so soon. And Lydia wasn’t sure Elaine could walk her, even as far as Maxine was willing to go now. The truth was, there was no right person to give her to, really. Spence would keep her, if it came to that, but Lydia didn’t trust him to adore her in her old age the way she deserved. She’d need someone to nurse her through her grief, then through her final days, make the inevitable decision not too soon, not too late.
Malcolm would stay with Spence.
Silver—Celia.
It was a mismatched jumble, but she and Peter gave dinners, or used to, and Celia didn’t have her own. Lydia had thought about giving it to Liv, for the girls, but Liv already had some, and her mother’s, and her grandmother’s. The girls would get that, though Lydia couldn’t imagine they’d ever use it. When the time came, their guests would eat with chopsticks, or spears.
Art supplies—Celia.
The tubes of paint were dry and cracked and most of the brushes were stiff, but there was a closet full of other perfectly good stuff—watercolor paper and canvas, boxes of chalks and colored pencils. Celia should get back to work, Lydia thought. What she didn’t want she could donate.
What Lydia really wondered was whether she should give Celia part of her investment account, the one she’d expected would carry her comfortably through retirement. If so, she’d need to do the paperwork soon, before this thing went any further. She was running out of energy.
• • •
Lydia had decided to set it up so that when she died, whatever funds were left would go into a scholarship fund for returning students. She’d been musing about the idea for years. Only recently, belatedly, had she acknowledged to herself that it was time to make an actual plan. “Call abt. fund,” Lydia wrote on a Post-it. She stuck it on her computer. She’d had one exploratory meeting with the dean already, but now, to make it happen, she’d have to come clean about her circumstances. And she needed to hurry, before the kid she had in mind for the first award gave up and dropped out.
Though the student Lydia was thinking of—Rochelle Smith—was a little older, not really a kid. She’d been in Lydia’s art appreciation class, and the next semester she’d signed up for drawing. Lydia knew from her first paper that she was bright.
Lydia always started the semester by getting them to make a list of ten beautiful things—not to be graded, just to make them think. Rochelle had begun her list with “My son Bryan.” Numbers 2 through 4 were “sunsets,” “Twinkles our cat,” and “Gale Jordan my mother.” But then it got interesting. Number 7 was “the sound of a bee.” The list ended with Untitled by Mark Rothko.
Lydia had to go back and read the paper again to be sure. At first she couldn’t account for the leap, but then remembered: the painting appeared as a color plate, in the textbook. Rochelle had actually bought the textbook, and had been boning up, or at least paging through, before the semester even started! In the section where they were supposed to say why each thing was beautiful, about number 10 Rochelle had written, “I like how it makes me feel peaceful and also dizzy.” Affixed to the paper was a photograph of Bryan in a Santa hat, tightly holding Twinkles. The boy’s eyes, behind thick glasses, didn’t quite focus.
Rochelle had started hanging around after class. Lydia learned she lived with her mother, and worked as a dancer at a place called the Pony Club out by the airport. (Her stage name was Amber.) She wanted to be an art therapist, she’d told Lydia, or if that didn’t work out, a dental hygienist.
Lydia planned to make sure Rochelle got the money, and got to keep it, no matter what they found out about her. The dean wanted to make it a contest, set up criteria. Grades, conduct, letters of recommendation. Qualifying essays. After that, progress reports. Bullshit, Lydia wanted to say. Then she remembered it was her money and just said no. But the fact the dean had even brought it up made her sick. That was exactly the sort of filter designed to keep someone like Rochelle out, the fork in the road that would shunt her finally and forever into the won’t-get-any lane. This had to vault over all that, be a gift, out of the blue, with no sucking up or showing off required.
There were only two criteria, in Lydia’s mind: need and desire. Plus that other little thing, whatever it was, that Rochelle had that Lydia could sense. Lydia wished she could survive, just so she could stay around to keep an eye out for that. She couldn’t think of a single person at the college she could trust to do it for her, after she was gone.
Lydia remembered the time Rochelle, wearing jeans and gym shoes, had come to her office to talk about an assignment. She’d been on her way to catch the bus, to work. “Oops,” she’d said, on the way out, grabbing the nylon tote bag she’d set down for a minute. “Better not forget my uniform.” She’d allowed herself a little one-sided smile then. Lydia had pictured the contents of the small bag—a wisp of lace spandex, maybe, a pair of platform heels. Probably a wig, too, given the usual state of Rochelle’s hair. She’d heard soft clinking coming from the bag when Rochelle turned to leave—cosmetics jars knocking against the shoes, Lydia guessed.
But probably Celia could use an infusion of cash, too, Lydia decided. There were signs that they were worse off than she let on, though Lydia didn’t want to insult her by asking. Peter’s business was doing fine, Celia always claimed. And she’d gotten that library job, whatever that was. That was good, wasn’t it? Lydia had been too distracted lately to really pay attention to the details.
Best just to rearrange it and add her. She wrote “Add Celia” to her “Call guy abt. finances” list. What a pain, though, to have to think about money at a time like this.
Cookbooks—Maura, Peter.
Raspberries—Norris.
It was the only thing of hers Lydia could think of that Norris might want—Norris had admired them once. She’d have to dig them up herself next spring. Lydia would put Spence on notice to expect her. He wouldn’t mind—they needed to be thinned, and Norris was the only one of her frien
ds he liked.
Lydia hoped she’d replant them in Michigan. Roots were what Norris needed, if she was going to stay. She should have some of Chicago with her there in the soil, whether she liked it or not, a reminder of this place and the raspberry cobbler Lydia used to make. Not that Norris ever ate any.
Car—sign over to Spence.
Organs.
At least that was in order. She’d already signed the form. At the bottom she’d written, Help yourself.
Art—Jayne, Betsy, Celia.
Jayne might like the paint-by-numbers German shepherd, Lydia thought. She’d bought it at a thrift store in East Los Angeles and now it hung, in an enormous gilt frame, in the downstairs bathroom. Jayne collected what she still called outsider art, though the term had been debunked. Betsy might want the photos, for her office. Lydia thought she’d give the signed Kandinsky drawing to Celia.
Lydia had never liked it. It reminded her of Garrett, who she’d watched haggle for it, in French, at a flea market outside Paris. She’d been in love, and she’d been impressed. Afterward he’d given it to her, then taken her to some adorable bistro where dogs were eating from their own plates. He’d spent the whole lunch staring at some girl at the next table.
• • •
“You sure have known some assholes,” Celia said when Lydia told her this, years after it happened. They’d been sitting at Lydia’s kitchen table, drinking beer and munching on Cheetos, when the subject of Garrett had come up. Celia was married by then. She’d felt qualified to dis Lydia’s ex-boyfriends.
“The things we do for love,” Lydia had said, quoting that awful song, thinking it was clear she was being sarcastic, meaning that it was OK, funny even, and that Celia should back off. It was during a bad patch with Spence. Lydia felt proud somehow, that she’d survived him and Garrett and all the others, the rough-and-tumble of love, and that they’d mostly survived her, stayed friends, even. She was proud she hadn’t caved to something tame and sweet and painstakingly negotiated, the way Celia had. Celia had gotten so complacent.
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