Lydia’s Party

by Margaret Hawkins

  He’d closed his mouth. “So what’s it for?”

  “Scaring off little hicks like you,” she’d said, grabbing it.

  Thinking about it now, she was sorry she’d hurt his feelings—a little sorry, at least—but it was true. He was a hick.

  • • •

  Norris checked her light meter, thinking that posing them in water would allow them some privacy. It might even be a collaboration, she was thinking now. Let them choose their pose, how far underwater they wanted to be. It already was a collaboration—Betsy, Maura, Jayne, and Celia had each picked up a corner of the table, still covered with food and bottles, and carried it back to its rightful position so she could set up. She’d moved the big leather armchair to face the fireplace and had thrown more wood on the fire to make it blaze. She wanted to capture the flush she saw on them now.

  Collaboration wasn’t her usual mode but here was an opportunity to try it. She thought of the art dealer’s daughter, that ridiculous name. Tiny Fabulous. It was some joke about art world vanity, she supposed, about people like her, some hipster parody of artists who held themselves apart. Who cared? Who said she was unwilling to experiment?

  “OK, Betsy,” Norris said. “Sit up straight, more toward the front of the chair.” At the last minute Norris had shoved the big leather armchair out of the way and replaced it with a straight-backed kitchen chair. Better not to let them get too comfortable.

  Betsy was sitting nervously, fluffing her hair around her shoulders and practice-smiling in her tight little way. She’d already been to the bathroom to primp, put lipstick on, some goopy crap around her eyes. Less is more, Norris wanted to tell her but Betsy wouldn’t have understood.

  “This is not a yearbook photo, Betsy. Relax.”

  She didn’t want to direct them too much, though. Self-presentation would be part of it. If Betsy wanted the world to see her in blue eye shadow then so be it. Norris could change it later, tone it down or better yet heighten the color to truly grotesque levels. Besides, these were just studies, reference. The important thing, she thought, looking through the lens, the thing to preserve was this awkwardness, this edge between the fake self Betsy was trying to project and the other Betsy that Norris saw beneath it. Norris let her pose and mug, flashing her big, gummy high school smile, with the cute eye crinkle and shoulder roll. Norris kept shooting, waiting for Betsy to tire, trying to time her clicks to catch the uncertainty that came between the smiles.

  “Do you suppose you could take off a few layers, around your neck? I need to see where it attaches.” Betsy frowned but went to the bathroom and emerged wrapped in a scarf, her pale sternum exposed.

  “That’s it.” Norris said. “Now try not smiling. Think about something sad. Think about Ted.”

  • • •

  Norris photographed every woman, and Maxine and Pud. Lydia posed with Maxine—the dog wouldn’t sit on the chair alone—and then by herself with the new orange pot. Norris lowered it into her lap, on a towel because it was still warm. “That’s really quite beautiful,” she said, from behind the camera. “It reflects up under your face.”

  “It’s not really my color,” Lydia said, thinking that orange reflecting off the underside of her chin didn’t sound good.

  “You look fine,” Norris lied. The truth was that Lydia looked ghastly—it occurred to Norris she’d never seen Lydia look ghastly before—but it was going to make a wonderful painting. “Just think of it as kind of an Alfred Leslie look.”

  Lydia’s face went blank and then, as memory supplied an image, changed to alarm. Norris said, “Good, do that again.” She clicked several times more and stood up. “I got you at least.”

  “Get me out from under this pot,” Lydia said. She felt weak.

  Elaine went last. She held a plate of cupcakes for several shots. Norris said, “Why are you holding that? Did you make those?”

  Elaine said, “No. I thought I was supposed to hold a plate of food.”

  Norris said, “Well hold what you made.”

  “I can’t.” Elaine said. “It’s gone, eaten.”

  “Didn’t you bring that dairy crap in a can?” Norris said. “Hold that.” So Maura, who’d been watching this exchange, wishing she had the guts to speak to Elaine this way, went to get the can of whipped cream and Elaine held that, smirking and rolling her eyes.

  “If you don’t cut it out I’m going to paint you like that, with your eyes rolled back in your head.” Norris spoke from behind the camera.

  “Go ahead,” Elaine said. “Make me look like the cadaver I feel myself to be.” Norris clicked some more, getting Elaine’s belligerence. She looked to Norris like an old bull, considering whether it was worth her trouble to charge.

  “What about you,” Lydia said to Norris as Elaine staggered up out of the low chair with a hand from Maura. “Want me to do you?”

  “I’ve got it,” Norris said, producing a cable from her pocket. She sat straight on the hard chair.

  “You need an attribute,” said Jayne, thinking of the medieval saints. Norris had already thought of it. She held up a fish skeleton. She held it in two hands, like a banner, and just before she clicked, with her foot, Malcolm, who’d smelled fish, appeared from nowhere and levitated neatly onto her lap. Norris clicked a few more times—woman, cat, fish. A portrait of two predators, she thought. Perfect.

  “Done,” she said.

  The Party: 12:30 A.M.

  Betsy had started calling Ted around 11:30 but hadn’t been able to reach him. She was worried something had happened to him but then they heard him on the front porch, stamping snow off his boots.

  Celia went to the door. “Well, here you are,” she said, sorry to see him. “What’s the problem—afraid your wife’s a flight risk?”

  Ted bowed. Snow fell off his hat onto the wood floor. “Delighted to see you, too,” he said.

  Norris patted the little chair she’d set up in front of the fireplace. “Hey, Ted, come sit. I’m doing portraits. Bring your meatballs.” She couldn’t believe her luck. She hadn’t even thought of Ted. He was the perfect counterweight.

  “Shouldn’t I comb my hair?”

  “You look fine,” Norris said, pushing him into the chair, pulling off his scarf. He was wet around the ears. There was snow in his beard. She yanked his hat off and his wavy gray hair sprang out, soft like a boy’s. Only his beard was still red.

  “I like it when you’re rough like that,” Ted said.

  “I don’t think you would.” Norris was talking from behind her camera, trying to provoke him. “Sit still. Look at me. Stop smiling. Think about meat. Meatballs, meat loaf, pot roast, roast beef, beef stew, short ribs, long ribs, tournedos of beef, beef liver, goose liver, emulsion of duck gizzard, roulade, tapenade . . .”

  “Tapenade isn’t meat,” Ted said.

  “Good,” Norris said. “Do that again.”

  The Party: 1:45 A.M.

  The women, the dogs, and Ted all stood at the bay window watching the storm. They could hear the wind through two panes of glass. Snow was blowing horizontally. Snow on snow. Someone had turned the television back on to monitor storm reports. There’d been a four-car pileup on Lake Shore Drive. Three people had been declared dead and two more were still in the wreckage.

  “Oh, the weather outside is frightful . . .”

  “Shut up, Ted.”

  • • •

  Celia and Lydia piled bedding and pajama-like garments on the couch. “You all know where the flat surfaces are,” Lydia said. “Make yourselves at home.” She looked at Celia.

  “I’ll handle it,” Celia said. “You go to bed.” Tired as she was, she was happy to take over, though she wondered what was wrong. Lydia had been acting strange all night.

  “Good night,” someone called out as Lydia headed upstairs, like a child, she thought, being sent to bed in her own house. Sh
e heard an outburst of laughter. Elaine, who’d earlier fallen asleep, sitting up on the couch, was wide awake now and retelling her therapy story, by popular demand.

  “I thought it would be like going to confession,” she was saying. “But the therapist was too, I don’t know. Involved.”

  A shriek went up, drunken laughter.

  “What’s so funny about that? Every week I’d tell her about my life and instead of telling me what to do she’d start to cry.”

  Another louder shriek. They knew the story but they loved to hear her tell it. Maura was wiping tears from her face with her napkin.

  “Did you cry?” someone said.

  “Hell, no. I went stone cold.”

  “That’s so sad,” Jayne said, her face on the table. She could hardly speak for laughing.

  Lydia slipped off to bed unnoticed, glad her guests were having a good time.

  Sunday Morning

  Before she’d gone to bed, Lydia, with Celia’s help, had brought extra bedding into the living room, along with two sleeping bags and a stack of T-shirts, sweatpants, and pajama bottoms.

  Lydia had told Celia to give Betsy and Ted her bed. She’d take the daybed in her office, she said. It was too short, even for her, but she didn’t want anyone else in there. There were plenty of other places for them to sleep, accommodations left from the days the house had been a stopover for Spence’s traveling musician friends. He’d crammed a queen-size bed into the closed-in back porch; now Lydia called the awkward space the guest room. The couch opened into a double. Spence wasn’t going to make it home tonight—anyone willing was welcome to his futon in the basement. There was a ratty couch down there, too.

  • • •

  The party wound down in a boozy haze. Ted, who hadn’t eaten a proper dinner, he said, helped himself to everything. The women wandered in and out of the kitchen to wrap food in cellophane and load the dishwasher, then lingered to pour themselves glasses of water and more wine. They opened the wrapped food to eat one more brownie or one more meatball and set plates on the floor for Maxine and Pud, then rewrapped the food and stuffed corks back into the few bottles that had anything left. By 2:30 most of them had dispersed throughout the house to various beds and sofas, and by the time Maura went off to squeeze into the still-made guest bed next to Elaine, who was flat on her back in the middle, snoring through her open mouth, Celia and Jayne were the only ones left in front of the fire. Jayne was smoking one last cigarette.

  Lydia lay on the daybed, wide awake and fully clothed under a pile of blankets. She’d been too tired to undress and now she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get comfortable, though she was happy to have given up her bed in return for keeping everyone out of her office. Soon she’d have to give up even that, she knew, but for now, with a houseful of guests and the recent prodding and poking of her body, this little room, with its slanted ceiling and piles of paper, felt like all the privacy she had left.

  Lydia was trying not to panic, listing in her mind everything left to do. She needed to call her brother. She couldn’t reach Spence. She supposed he’d turned off his phone. She didn’t even know what club he’d gone to. Hadn’t asked.

  Lydia stared at the cracked ceiling. The doctor had told her to put her things in order. What a joke. What did that even mean? Sign some papers, sure. But real order?

  Pray, she told herself, but all she could think of was the prayer her father had taught her—she must have been four or five. Now I lay me down to sleep / Pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I die before I wake / Pray the Lord my soul to take. The possibility of dying in her sleep had seemed thrilling to her as a child, a kind of benign kidnapping, a way to go straight to heaven and skip over all the things she’d dreaded, even then. Now she didn’t believe in heaven.

  If only she could sleep for a few hours, Lydia thought, maybe this awful queasiness would go away. Maybe then she’d be able to think. None of her usual tricks were working, even her favorite alphabet list.

  Apiphobia: fear of bees.

  Brontophobia: fear of thunder and lightning.

  Chronophobia: fear of time. That was a good one. She’d even memorized the symptoms and she enumerated them now, noting that she exhibited all nine.

  Useless, though. Usually she dropped off around gamophobia (fear of marriage), but tonight she’d made it all the way to zeusophobia and wasn’t even drowsy.

  • • •

  The daybed was harder and narrower than Lydia remembered, and now she’d been joined by Maxine. The dog had stayed downstairs for a while, but after Elaine let her out one last time she’d plodded upstairs—harder for her than ever but she saw it as her duty—and nudged open the office door with her nose. She was accustomed to sharing Lydia’s bed, wherever that might be. Now she was curled in a black ball at Lydia’s feet, forcing Lydia into a fetal ball of her own.

  Two strange twin embryos we are, Lydia thought, both about to be born backwards, into death. Maxine didn’t have much time left either, Lydia knew. If they died tonight they’d be discovered like this, she thought. Maybe Norris would take a picture of them, curled together in death, and make a painting of it, and when she had her next show a picture of the painting of the picture would run in some art magazine, next to a glowing review. It was an oddly comforting thought, the possibility of such an afterlife, and Lydia began to drift off but then Maxine started to scratch and Lydia was wide awake again.

  She got out of bed and lay on the rug. At least there she could stretch out. Let Maxine have the bed, Lydia thought, dragging a pile of blankets onto herself. But the floor was hard, even more uncomfortable than her half of the daybed had been, and she got up and went to her desk.

  E-mail, the great consoling companion of the sleepless, that little glowing gray rectangle of warmth, her window into the beyond, beckoned. The Internet never slept, and nothing there would ever die. Lydia logged on, hoping for what, she wasn’t sure.

  Mostly there were ads, which she deleted. Something was wrong with her spam filter, though who cared now. Lydia noticed, as she clicked one ad after another into oblivion, a weird glow of preciousness. Their promises, which on any other night would have seemed mundane, sounded almost sweet now, like overheard greetings from some quaint distant world she’d already left behind.

  Say good-bye to shoe clutter. (Good-bye, Lydia thought.)

  Eliminate toe fungus immediately. (Eliminate toes.)

  The incredible pet nail trimmer.

  It seemed to be a foot-themed evening. Or morning. Lydia could see just the slightest softening of black to gray around the edges of the window shades. Any other day, she would have enjoyed the sight, that feeling of privacy and promise early morning held.

  She’d have to tell them at breakfast. Instead of the warm, fire-lit mood she’d imagined, with everyone’s edges softened by wine, there would be bright light and bickering, hangovers and hard feelings and not an extra toothbrush in sight, let alone a change of clothes. When they heard the news they’d want to stay and help when all she’d want was sleep. She dreaded it.

  • • •

  Lydia sat cross-legged in her desk chair wrapped in a quilt, trying to conserve as much body heat as possible. She could hear Maxine in the daybed, sound asleep now, making excited little panting sounds. Lydia heard the swish of the blanket rustling around her feet. Maxine was running, in her dream. Toward what, though? Lydia wished she knew. Lydia wished she could join Maxine in her dream, and run alongside, the way they used to, along the lake.

  Lose fat while sleeping. Lose fat while dying.

  Use the Trust-O-Meter to find Dependable People. Too late now.

  Meet your perfect mate online. Delete.

  See you soon I hope? This from her boss. So this is what he did in the wee hours. She’d taken short-term disability leave and now she needed to tell him, too. She hesitated, considering whether to get the unpleasant task o
ver with now, but it didn’t seem right, to tell him before Celia, and Spence and her brother. She scrolled down.

  Trust the Marines with Loved Ones Remains. She hesitated, finger poised over the mouse. Something looked familiar about the address—KMALE. Then she remembered—Kamal, ex-marine, baby daughter. He’d been her star student for two semesters, then dropped out. “It’s OK, Professor,” he’d said, standing up even straighter than usual, when he’d stopped by her office to say good-bye. (Professor! She’d wanted to cry.) “I’ve got plans.” She hadn’t heard from him in over a year.

  She clicked the e-mail open. It was a press release. She scanned the text.

  MARINES OF BIOTRAUMA

  (DEATH SCENE REMEDIATION)

  Elite team of U.S. Marines . . . trained to perform search and recovery for fallen servicemen . . . unique mission from Day One . . . hygienic cleaning . . . sensitivity to emotional trauma . . . timeliness crucial . . . readiness at all hours of the night . . . remains recovered from the field . . . Reverence for the Deceased . . . countless ceremonies loading human remains on aircraft for transport . . . Respectful Onsite Commemorations . . . decontamination . . . remediate traumatizing Incident in the home . . . Families currently clean up 82% of all Incidents.

  Lydia scrolled down to the photo. Two clean-cut young men, boys really, stood in front of a garage. She recognized Kamal on the left. The boys wore T-shirts printed with matching slogans. One had a knapsack slung over his shoulder. The other, Kamal, held a mop and a bulging plastic garbage bag. Both appeared to wear blue latex gloves.

  Lydia squinted. Forty-eight hours earlier she’d been at her doctor’s, naked and flat on a paper-covered table. Similar gloves had encased her doctor’s cold hands when he’d unceremoniously thrust them into her body cavities.

  Lydia studied the photo. The boy holding the knapsack was shorter and huskier, still buff from his days as a marine. With his guileless toothy smile, he could have been on a fishing trip. His pack might hold night crawlers, his dad’s old reel, a brown bag of lunch.