Lydia’s Party

by Margaret Hawkins

  It was his idea, Lydia felt sure. Kamal’s expression was harder to read, his posture a little deferential despite his upright bearing. He was the one with misgivings, she could tell. But what had he wanted to do? Lydia couldn’t remember. Probably his buddy talked him into this over a few beers. C’mon, man, don’t you want to get rich?

  Lydia clicked on zoom to enlarge the photo, to read what was printed on their T-shirts. Pain is weakness leaving the body.

  • • •

  Was this someone’s ghoulish idea of a joke? Lydia wondered. Whose, though? Not Kamal’s. And why would anyone go to the trouble? Besides, no one knew she was dying except for her doctor.

  No, this wasn’t a prank. It was a business concept. Times were hard; these were enterprising boys, U.S. Marines, America’s finest. Put two and two together, her father used to say, frowning and stabbing the air in front of her face, meaning she was being obtuse. These boys had been to war, they’d looked down the jaws of death and had put two and two together and this is what they’d come up with—a suicide clean-up company.

  That’s what all that awkward language was trying to cover up. They were mainstreaming their military skills. Death is a mess, they’d learned, especially when you did it yourself.

  DIY. Do it yourself.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d thought of it. Why wait until the bitter end, until the last dog is hung, as her father used to say, with a morbid glint in his eye. Maybe it would be better to handle it while she still could, rather than wait until the doctors took over. Or some awful nursing home. This is when a husband and children would come in handy, Lydia thought. Society would require them to take care of her.

  She imagined e-mailing Kamal right now. Writing a check and pinning it to her pajamas. Telling him where to find her so by the time they arrived she’d be gone.

  She wasn’t ready, though, not nearly. And anyway, hadn’t they had enough of all that, in Iraq? They were kids, her nieces’ age. They should be eating pizza and writing term papers, not swabbing up brains.

  • • •

  Lydia heard a little rustling in the covers. Maxine. Lydia had forgotten all about her, but sensitive Maxine had woken up and intercepted these disturbing thoughts. Had been, Lydia knew, reading her mind and now was regarding her suspiciously from her post in the daybed. Maxine did not allow this sort of thinking on her watch. She rotated her ears in Lydia’s direction and growled at the danger she sensed.

  Just kidding, girl, Lydia said, climbing back into the daybed and kissing the dog between the ears, then nudging her onto the quilt she’d spread for her on the floor. She’d get back in, Lydia knew, especially after the shocking material she’d just uncovered, but before she did, maybe Lydia could catch thirty minutes of sleep with her legs not completely cramped. Thirty minutes would help a lot. She hoped when she woke up the e-mail would be gone, would turn out to have been a dream. She had half a mind to e-mail Kamal right now, tell him to let people clean up their own messes, tell him to go back to school. Although, how? The GI Bill didn’t cover child support.

  Lydia was dreaming. A young marine wearing blue latex gloves was mopping her kitchen floor. She was sitting on the counter, wearing baby doll pajamas, watching him and swinging her legs like a child. “Sign here,” she said to the man, handing him a contract. “Everything’s paid for, even a laptop. All you have to do is reenroll.” She noticed the man’s shoes were polished to a gleam. “Move over, Lyd,” the marine said. “Let me in.”

  She tried to tell him to just sign the form and reenroll but he kept telling her to move over, and as she woke up she realized the marine was still there, was now in her bed, but that he had morphed into a fuzzy, corpulent, middle-aged man who smelled of garlic and red wine and barbeque sauce. The man was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt and his long, bare, fuzzy legs felt cold folded up against her back.

  “Jesus, Ted.”

  The daybed that had been too small for Lydia and Maxine now held Lydia and the vastness of Ted, who was nearly three times Maxine’s ample Rottweiler size. Maxine was awake now, too, and on her feet, at the foot of the bed, with her nose resting on the mattress and her eyes fixed plaintively on Lydia. She was making a rumbling sound low in her throat. It was one thing to let Lydia have the bed to herself for a while, but no way was she giving up her spot to this foul-smelling interloper, whose scent she remembered well and with no particular fondness.

  Ted was trying to spoon, with half his body hanging off the edge of the bed and one thick, hairy arm around her waist.

  “What are you doing?” Lydia whispered.

  “I’m lonely,” Ted said. “We never talk anymore.”

  “You want to talk, now.”

  “I want to be friends again,” he said. “I thought it was the perfect time.”

  Lydia felt something press against her back. “Ted, stop it. I thought we agreed.”

  “You agreed. I didn’t say one way or the other. I miss you.”

  Lydia pushed backwards with her feet and the half of Ted that wasn’t already hanging off the daybed slid onto the floor with a muffled thud.

  “Oof,” Ted said, though it wasn’t much of a fall.

  “If you want to talk, stay there.”

  “Why are you always so mean to me?”

  “I’m tired,” Lydia said, curling up her legs to make space for Maxine, who heaved her big body up into the space Ted had vacated. “Make it fast. I need to sleep.”

  “Don’t be like that,” Ted said. “Tell me something. Like in the old days.”

  “What old days?”

  “You know. The good old days. Har har har.” Ted rolled onto his back so that he could more fully laugh his big silly laugh. He kept getting fatter, and lying there under the blanket like that, he looked like a mound of something to bury.

  “Quiet. You’re going to wake up the whole house.”

  Ted shot a wily glance at her profile. When she didn’t respond he began to sing, softly at first. Lydia recognized what she knew was his second-favorite song from his third-favorite musical.

  Lydia pulled the blanket over her face.

  Ted continued, louder now.

  “Please stop, Ted.”

  He paused, looked over at Lydia.

  “Please?” she said.

  “Not unless you say you’ll talk to me. If you don’t, I’m going to keep singing. I can go on all night, as you know.” When she didn’t answer, he resumed. “We’ve gabbed the whole night through! Good mornin’! Good mornin’ to . . .”

  “OK,” Lydia said. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “You!” Ted sang, finishing the line on key and rolling onto his side. “Tell me something fascinating.”

  “All right,” Lydia said. “Here’s something fascinating. I’m dying.”

  “Me, too!” Ted let out another of his big theatrical har har har laughs. “We all are! You gotta come up with something more interesting than that.”

  Lydia sighed. Reached out with her foot and poked Ted in the middle of his big belly. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “And try to be serious for a minute.”

  “Gravitas is my middle name,” Ted said. He put his finger to his head in a pantomime of puzzlement. “Or was it gravy?”

  “Do you have any regrets?” Lydia said. “I mean, if you found out you were about to die, say in a few weeks, what would you do?”

  “Hmmm.” He looked thoughtful. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Honestly? I’d buy all my favorite food and lock myself in a motel room and eat myself to death. Ho Hos, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, Roquefort cheese, barbeque potato chips, an entire rib roast from Whole Foods with horseradish mayonnaise . . .”

  Sunday: 6:30 A.M.

  “I have wasted my life.”

  Lydia was tr
ying to tell Ted everything she knew she wouldn’t have the courage to say to anyone else, before she ran out of time, but now it was getting light. She could see pink around the edge of the window shade now.

  “Frittered it away, Ted! How ignoble is that? Don’t you see what I’m saying? I’ve lived my entire life as a sloth and a coward and a misdirected fool.” She was whisper-shouting at Ted.

  They faced each other in what had been the dark, Lydia cross-legged on the daybed, wrapped in blankets, Ted lying on his side on the floor like a huge curvaceous harem girl, one fleshy arm supporting his curly head and his immense hairy belly protruding between the hem of his too-short T-shirt and the stretched-out elastic of his grayish, once-white jockey shorts. A pilled pink blanket hung off his big freckled shoulders like a too-small cape.

  “I hesitated, and I demurred, and I called it patience, and now I’m about to be dead and I haven’t done one fucking thing that matters.” Lydia dabbed a self-pitying tear from her own cheek. “As we used to say in fourth grade, what a gyp.”

  Ted rolled onto his back. “You may be overstating a little,” he said, folding his hands on his belly. “But I get the idea. Though I wouldn’t say you demurred exactly. Refused is more like it.”

  “Then I regret that, too,” Lydia said, disappointed he hadn’t disagreed more forcefully. “I regret that I refused. I regret that I lived a small refusing life. Out of inertia, Ted! I have lived a small refusing conventional life, out of fear and inertia. And consideration for others, like they gave a shit.”

  “Let’s back up here,” Ted said. “Not that conventional.”

  “Relatively,” Lydia said, avoiding Ted’s sly look. “Relative to what I imagined when I was young, relative to what’s in my head. Relative to what I could have done if I’d just, I don’t know. Done it.”

  “Oh, boo-hoo,” Ted said. “I’m sorry you’re dying and all but you don’t seem especially inert to me. Are you sure that’s it? You gave this party, didn’t you? Made that nice stew? Go back to the consideration-for-others part.”

  “OK, you’re right,” Lydia said. “Maybe excessive accommodation is more like it. But whatever, now my life is almost over and I feel like it’s made up of, I don’t know, leftovers. Scraps. Parts I didn’t have the heart or the guts to snip off and walk away from.” Lydia looked at Ted. “Do you know what I mean? My life is a heap of remnants.” She studied Ted’s face for a sign he understood. He was massaging his eyelids with his fingertips. “Did you ever sew?”

  Ted stopped massaging. “Ever sew?” His voice rose up out of the mound of him with indignant resonance. “I only made every costume for my high school production of Brigadoon.”

  “Right,” Lydia said. “I forgot. So you know what I mean. How you have to trim things off. It’s the last thing you do and if you don’t it’s a mess. And I never did. Everything I ever did is unfinished and everyone I ever knew is still hanging off me. I should have cut everything clean and started over but I didn’t and now I’m a mess.”

  “Actually, the last thing you do is to press it,” Ted said, in a tight voice. “But I know what you mean. You mean I’m one of those messy threads.” He waited, and when she didn’t disagree, he said, “That’s me, a hanging chad of love.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Actually, it was exactly what she’d meant. It was no use, Lydia thought. There was no one she could talk to. There was no one who wouldn’t be hurt by what she had to say.

  Sunday: 9:00 A.M.

  Lydia was awakened by the sound of someone saying Oh no.

  She opened her eyes to bright, cold, unforgiving light. Blue sky, sun on snow, doubly bright. The brilliant snow—she could see it through her gapped, torn window shades—made everything inside look shabby. Daylight revealed all—her paint-cracked ceiling; dust on the windowsills; messy, useless piles on her desk; dog hair on the dingy blanket; cat hair clinging to the lampshades. Lydia hated to think what it revealed on her face.

  She shielded her eyes but saw through the tunnel she’d made with her hands that more than a foot of clean, fluffy snow was piled against the windowsills, and on tree branches, and on the roof of the garage. It must have snowed all night.

  Celia was standing in the doorway, one hand clapped over her mouth, like a cartoon, and comically disarrayed—her hair flat on top and fuzzing out to form an odd shape on one side, with little pieces of lint stuck in it. Her bluish ankles and veiny feet stuck out from a pair of Lydia’s too-short plaid pajama pants.

  “Hey,” Lydia said. She lay at one end of the daybed in a cramped ball. At the other end lay Maxine in the same position. Lydia heard something that sounded like an old-fashioned coffee percolator, but louder. She and Celia looked in the direction of the sound, and there on the floor lay the source of Celia’s shock—a huge, inert mound of snoring flesh insufficiently draped with a small pink blanket.

  Another death-rattle-like snore issued from the body on the floor.

  “Oh, Lydia. How could you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Lydia said. “But let’s get him out of here.”

  “You have a crane?”

  “Good point.”

  Celia was staring at her. “Lydia, we have to talk.”

  “We do. But not about Ted.”

  “I don’t mean Ted.” Celia fumbled for something in the pocket of her pajama pants. “I mean this.” She held up a piece of crumpled paper.

  “Give that to me!” Lydia grabbed for it.

  Celia took a step back.

  Lydia flushed. “Where did you get that?”

  “It was on the floor, behind the big chair. Don’t look at me that way,” Celia said. “I was trying to pick up a little, before you came downstairs.”

  “Those were supposed to be burned! I put them in the fire.”

  Celia shrugged. “It was in a pile with Maxine’s toys.”

  They both looked at Maxine, who dropped her head onto her paws, sensing accusation but not knowing what she was supposed to feel guilty for.

  “You weren’t supposed to see that,” Lydia said. “It’s stupid. Give it back. It’s not even edited.”

  “Edited? Why didn’t you tell me?” Tears filled Celia’s eyes and balanced there, trembling.

  “Oh, stop. I was going to,” Lydia said. “Really. But it got too late. I got too tired.”

  Another rattling exhalation came from Ted. Celia looked at him, then back at Lydia. The tears that had been brimming in her eyes spilled down her cheeks. “You told him? You did! How could you tell him before you told me?”

  “I said, I was going to,” Lydia said. “But everyone was having such a good time.”

  They stared at each other, listening to Ted snore.

  “I need your help,” Lydia said.

  Sunday: 9:30 A.M.

  Broad-shouldered, long-armed, sure-footed Celia single-handedly carried the apothecary cabinet through Lydia’s bedroom, past Betsy’s small sleeping body, into the hallway, and down the stairs. The cabinet wasn’t so heavy as it was awkward, and Celia knew that if she didn’t keep it upright the ninety-nine little drawers would slide open and spill their contents, creating a rolling booby trap of a thousand little beads that would probably cause her to slip, trip, fall, and die right then and there, even before Lydia had a chance to announce that it was her intention. Where were all these goddamn needy useless men when you needed one, she thought, bumping into a wall and crushing her knuckles, trying to see over the top of the thing. Not that she would have trusted this job to Ted. Or Spence, for that matter, wherever he was. When she got the cabinet downstairs she lurched through the hall and set it with a thud next to the dining room table.

  Elaine and Jayne were in the kitchen, setting out fruit and bread and platters of last night’s leftovers for breakfast. They’d made coffee and squeezed oranges and filled pitchers with water and lemon s
lices and were setting it all on the big table along with various bottles of aspirin and other analgesics they’d found in Lydia’s bathroom cabinets. Spence had reappeared—the trains were running—and he’d already shoveled the front walk and was now building a fire with last night’s garbage. The dishwasher hummed purposefully. Maura was sweeping the kitchen floor.

  “What’s this?” Jayne said to Celia, setting a basket of stale bread on top of the cabinet. “Did you know your hand is bleeding? Are you crying?”

  “Lydia has a little ceremony planned for us,” Celia said, ignoring Jayne’s questions. “She has something she wants to tell us.”

  Lydia lay submerged in the tub of hot water and Epsom salts that Celia had drawn. “Take your time,” Celia had said. “I’ll come get you when things are ready. No one’s going anywhere. I promise.”

  Lydia didn’t believe her. It was Sunday morning, almost Sunday afternoon. Everyone had somewhere to go and now that the streets were clear—Lydia had heard the plows—they would dig out Jayne’s car and leave. But she couldn’t hurry if she tried. She wasn’t even sure how she was going to get out of this bathtub Celia had deposited her in. Not that she cared. Leave it in the hands of fate, she thought. If she died in this tub, so be it. She slid underwater and closed her eyes. Almost fell asleep.

  Drowning in the bathtub while your friends assembled in your kitchen to argue about the proper way to make waffles wasn’t so bad, she thought, when you compared it with turning some strange color and being carted off, in pain and smelling bad, to a hospital where you’d die anyway, hooked up to a machine. She wasn’t sure she could pull it off, though. How would she stay under? She had nothing to weigh herself down. Even if she fell asleep, wouldn’t she float back to the surface?

  No, she wasn’t ready to die. For one thing, she hadn’t made anything official yet. There needed to be an actual will, Celia had told her, not just these fatuous letters and lists.