Lydia’s Party

by Margaret Hawkins

  They’d been sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning, reading the newspaper and eating soft-boiled eggs on toast. She’d been testing Peter’s reaction, wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him the whole story yet. She wasn’t sure he’d take it seriously, was afraid he’d only pretend to, and that the resulting conversation would leave her feeling childish.

  Peter had looked up and glanced at Griffin, but he was oblivious, deep in the sports section. “What do you mean?” Peter had said.

  “Maybe it’s, I don’t know.” She looked down at her egg, poked it. “Porous.” She looked up. “Or gradual?”

  Peter frowned. “Sounds like wishful thinking to me,” he’d said, rattling his newspaper. Then, seeing her face, he got up and went to stand behind her chair. He put his arms around her.

  “Thanks,” she’d said, feeling a little suffocated by his pajamas, which were covering her face. He smelled like toast.

  A hug was always nice but the truth was it wasn’t what she’d wanted. She’d wanted to discuss the possibility of an afterlife. But she could see he thought she was still a little deranged. And she had been—first from the effort of the deathbed vigil, then from grief—until Lydia showed up in the kitchen one morning and asked to be taken for a drive.

  “Are you—a ghost?” Celia had said, to the fairly solid-seeming same old Lydia who sat at her kitchen table, after she’d recovered from the shock of seeing her, the first time it happened.

  “Technically, no,” Lydia had said. “I think that’s something different.” She looked thoughtful, as usual, and nearly as substantial, though substantiality had never been her strong suit. “I just thought I’d drop in to say hi,” Lydia said. “I miss this.” She gestured vaguely.

  “You don’t mean you miss this,” Celia said, making a face. She glanced around her crumb-littered kitchen, taking in the breakfast dishes in the sink, the overflowing recycling bin, Griffin’s hockey gear.

  “Yes,” Lydia said, looking around Celia’s kitchen. “I do. I miss the beauty of the physical world. I miss you.”

  Celia’s face crumbled.

  “Do you suppose we could go for a drive?” Lydia said then.

  Celia said of course and turned her back on Lydia, for just a second, to rinse her hands, but when she turned around Lydia was gone.

  The next time Lydia appeared—she showed up only when Celia was alone—they continued their conversation. “You can’t mean you miss this particular physical world,” Celia said, snatching a dirty dish towel off the counter.

  “I do,” Lydia said. “Or most of it. Not my body.” She looked down at her purple yoga T-shirt, the one that said Embrace Change in pink cursive across the front. “But I miss all this . . .” She searched for the word. “Corporeality. I miss weather, how it smells. I miss how Maxine smelled. Though most of the rest of her is here. There. Wherever.” Lydia looked sad for a minute. “I miss looking at things. You have no idea how this all looks from here, I mean from where I am.” She gazed at the kitchen counter, toward an open box of saltine crackers. “I have to tell you. I really miss food.”

  “I’ll make you something!” Celia said, feeling a little crazy but relieved to have a task. “How about a sandwich? I have some nice New Zealand cheddar. I think I even have romaine lettuce. Or wait! How about a cheese omelet?”

  “No, thanks. I couldn’t. I mean, I can’t. We don’t,” Lydia said. “What I’d really like is to go for a drive.”

  It took a few more visits before they made it all the way to the car. By then the novelty of Lydia’s appearances had begun to wear off and Celia was having a bad day. “You should have picked someone to haunt who had a better car if all you wanted was to be driven around,” she’d said, looking over her shoulder as she backed out of the garage and into a dead lilac bush. The brakes needed work. She’d thrown a towel over the split upholstery on the passenger’s seat, before they got in, but Lydia had waved her hand.

  “Really, don’t bother,” Lydia had said. “I don’t feel much. This,” she gestured at her body, “it’s mostly for your benefit. Though I feel the air a little,” she said, rolling down the window. “It’s lovely.”

  Celia drove north on Milwaukee Avenue with all the windows down so Lydia could feel the breeze even though it was 33 degrees and sleeting. Lydia hung her head out the window like a dog. They passed a strip mall. Filthy half-melted snowdrifts revealed coffee-stained foam cups and patches of bare muddy ground. Half-frozen dog turds lay along the curb. An angry woman in a flapping coat stormed out of a currency exchange. A man exploded out the door behind her, shouting insults.

  “Nice,” Lydia said.

  “Sorry,” Celia replied, assuming sarcasm. “We’ll be past all this in a few minutes.” She glanced at Lydia. “I thought we could get out of town, to the dog park, maybe. Or up into Wisconsin? If you have time.”

  Lydia smiled.

  “Or would you rather go west—Bull Valley?”

  “This is fine,” Lydia said. “Really, it’s beautiful.”

  Celia glanced over and sped up. “I’m driving you somewhere beautiful but we’re not there yet.”

  “You have no idea,” Lydia said. Then, at the next stoplight, between a Burger King and a gas station, she disappeared.

  The most recent visit had been just weeks earlier. Lydia and Maxine, who had started to come along on these visits, had shown up on an especially bleak winter afternoon. Celia had been standing at the kitchen sink, looking out the window at a bare mulberry tree, wondering what to do next. She’d been fighting the urge to go lie down when she’d seen a little movement over her shoulder.

  “Boo,” Lydia said, sitting down next to Maxine on a pile of newspapers. Between them, they hardly made a dent. Celia thought she seemed fuzzier this time.

  “Long time, no haunt,” Celia said. It had been months since Lydia’s last visit.

  “Sorry.”

  “So where do you want to go this time?” Celia said.

  “Would you mind cruising around my old neighborhood?”

  • • •

  They rode in silence for a while, Maxine on the seat between them. “You’re not going to disappear again in the middle of traffic, are you?”

  “I’ll try not to. Cel?”

  “What?” Celia was distracted, making her way down a narrow one-way street, trying to weave through an obstacle course of gaping potholes.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “OK. Should I pull over?”

  “No, keep driving. It’s about Norris.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Try to be calm about this,” Lydia said. “I want you to know that she helped me.”

  Celia was trying to fit between a double-parked delivery truck and a particularly large pothole that threatened her back left tire. It took her a few seconds to reply.

  “Helped you what?”

  “You know. Die.”

  Celia swerved toward the truck, swerved back. Her back tire dropped into the pothole with a sickening clank. She banged the steering wheel. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew. I knew it wasn’t time!”

  “Stop. Stop being so dramatic,” Lydia said. “And keep your eyes on the road.”

  “I knew it,” Celia said again, under her breath this time, racing through a stop sign. “That murderous bitch. I knew she was up to something nefarious in there.” Celia was speeding down the little side street now.

  “Would you please just slow down and listen? I’m running out of light here.”

  “Sorry. Continue.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that I asked Norris to do it.”

  “Killer bitch.”

  “She wouldn’t at first, Cel. I had to talk her into it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “What do you mean? I’m telling you that I did.”r />
  “I don’t care what you’re telling me. I don’t believe you.”

  “You think I’d come all the way back to lie to you.”

  “I think you’re protecting her. You always protected her and you’re still doing it. How could you have talked her into anything? You were out of it.” Celia sniffed. “I was there, too. Remember?”

  “Oh, Cel,” Lydia said. “Of course I remember.” Here was one thing Lydia did not miss—Celia’s histrionics, and having to console her. “You have to understand,” Lydia said. “I was in and out of it. It’s hard to describe.”

  Celia didn’t say anything. She was staring intently at the road now, pretending to watch for potholes.

  “I’m just saying, stop ganging up on her. She feels bad enough.”

  “She feels bad?” Celia was yelling again. “Can I disagree here? Or do you get to control the conversation because you’re dead?”

  “I get to control it because I’m running out of light,” Lydia said. “But what?”

  Celia didn’t answer.

  “What?”

  “For one thing, just because someone asks you to kill them doesn’t make it right.”

  “OK. What’s the other thing?”

  Celia went silent.

  “Hurry up, Cel. This corporeal thing I’ve got going is not going to last much longer.”

  Tears spilled onto the steering wheel. Celia’s voice quavered. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “Ask you what?”

  “To do it!”

  “Oh, Cel.” Lydia was losing patience. These ridiculous emotions of Celia’s were exhausting. Envy, desire, hate, love, even loyalty—Lydia had felt them all, too, intensely. Her life had been nothing but. Now they just seemed childish. “Oh, Cel,” she said. “I couldn’t have asked you. You know that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you wouldn’t have.”

  A few seconds passed before Celia replied.

  “Yes, I would. I might have.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Besides, she owed me.”

  Celia glanced over. It was the first thing Lydia had said that made any sense. Celia began to feel a little better.

  They drove in silence until Celia finally said, “Maxine, too?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Now, that’s just wrong!” Celia was slamming the steering wheel again. “She was perfectly fine.”

  “No, she wasn’t. She had a splenic tumor. She was dying, too. Her whole world was me.”

  “Elaine would have taken her. I would have. Besides, it’s all so Egyptian. Throwing everyone into the tomb with the pharaoh.”

  “Like I’m the pharaoh.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Slow down. You’re going to get a ticket. Listen, I want you to do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “I want you to talk to Norris, make her feel better.”

  Celia made a retching sound. “Why don’t you? Since you’re so out and about these days.”

  “I tried to,” Lydia said. “I can’t get her attention. Overachiever types aren’t as amenable to these kinds of visitations, apparently.”

  Celia turned to face Lydia, really hurt now. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Eyes on the road, please,” Lydia said. “Don’t argue about everything, Celia. Don’t argue with a dead person. And stop being so competitive. It’s tiresome.”

  Celia stepped on the gas.

  “Just give her a break,” Lydia said, after a minute. “I know you. You’re all going around dissing her, not inviting her to anything. I’m just saying, let up. Maybe she’s changed. For one thing, you need to go see the paintings. She made me look like something out of Burne-Jones. A wraith bound to earth by only an orange casserole.”

  “Ted’s loving that casserole,” Celia said, glad for the change of subject. Lydia had made a present of it to him the morning after the party, along with the leftover stew that was in it.

  “I know,” Lydia said. “Listen. Just try being Norris’s friend. If she invites you, go. Make the others go, too. You weren’t going to, but you should.”

  Celia didn’t answer.

  “There’s something else you should know.”

  “Oh, great.”

  “That guy you and Elaine were gossiping about? Kamal? It’s not what you think. He was my student and we got back in touch. It’s a long story, Norris can fill you in. But that’s why he came to the funeral.”

  “Wait.”

  “Let me finish. I was trying to set it up so he’d get the scholarship but he has to reenroll, which then makes him eligible for the GI Bill, which is great, but then technically he wouldn’t qualify for this but he needs it because if he quits his job to go to school how is he going to pay child support? So I asked Norris to finagle it. Be his sponsor.” Lydia was talking fast now, as if she were running out of time. “She’s the one who brought him to the funeral, so she could meet him. Anyway, I thought you should know, if you’re going up there. So you don’t jump to conclusions.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?”

  “Got to go. Thanks for the ride.”

  Maxine stood up on the seat and leaned into Lydia. They blurred into one.

  “Wait! Where are you always going off to?”

  “Aspen,” she, they, said, dissolving into a flurry of swirling snow before Celia had even stopped the car.

  Less than a month later, almost exactly two years after Lydia’s last party, Celia sat with the other women at the big steel-and-glass table in Norris’s house. The table was covered with food, an odd assortment of offerings—the usual potluck dishes—combined with an elegant spread of appetizers prepared earlier by Kamal, who’d left the premises after setting out artful platters of steamed artichokes and homemade aioli and turning down the heat on the sweet-potato-stuffed Cornish game hens in the oven.

  The conversation had moved from Betsy and Ted to Spence, who, it appeared, had stayed in the house. Someone had seen him there the previous summer, mowing the lawn.

  “I heard he’s working now, at that yoga studio.”

  “I heard he adopted a pit bull, from an animal shelter.”

  “Two, I heard.”

  “I heard he was dating,” someone said.

  Celia nodded. “Peter took Griffin to a Cubs game and they saw him in the bleachers, buying a hot dog for a woman who looked exactly like Lydia.”

  “A hot dog!” they all shouted.

  Now the women were telling Lydia stories. Celia decided to go ahead and tell her story after all, absent certain significant details about Norris. When she got to the part where Lydia said Aspen, Maura gasped.

  “But she never skied a day in her life,” Jayne said.

  “We’re not talking about skiing,” Celia said.

  “We’re not talking about life,” Elaine said.

  “Maybe it’s a metaphor.”

  “For elevation.”

  “Heaven!”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Snow. A clean sweep?”

  “A fresh start.”

  “Ted told me she visited him.” This from Betsy.

  “That’s not fair,” Elaine said. “Why would she visit Ted and not me?”

  “He says it has something to do with the pot,” Betsy said. “You know, that big cast-iron thing she gave him that morning? He says it has to do with spiritual essences absorbed by stone. It’s why they have so many ghosts in England, he says. All those stone houses.”

  Elaine rolled her eyes.

  “Anyway,” Betsy said, ignoring Elaine now, addressing the group. “He says he heard her voice, when he was making jambalaya.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Ted, you are too friggin’ fat,” someone sa
id, in a spooky voice.

  “That would have been his feet talking.”

  “He’s lost weight, actually,” Betsy said.

  “What did she say?”

  “Just his name. He claims he was alone in his kitchen and heard his name spoken out loud. In Lydia’s voice.”

  “That’s pretty anticlimactic.”

  “Not the way he tells it,” Betsy said. “He says he got down on his knees and prayed.”

  “To the ghost of Lydia?”

  “To the jambalaya!”

  “How should I know who Ted prays to these days,” Betsy said, annoyed now.

  Norris appeared with a fresh bottle of white wine. Elaine had asked for red but Norris didn’t trust her not to spill.

  “Let me top off everyone’s glass before we go into the studio,” Norris said.

  Full glasses in hand, they trooped through Norris’s exquisitely spare rooms. They passed her collection of Japanese erotica, shuffled shoeless across her bleached oak floors. Betsy asked for a detour through the kitchen. There, tucked behind a juicer, Elaine spotted two full bottles of cabernet. One was even open.

  Elaine was insulted and took it as a license to snoop. Celia hung back, too, and as soon as they were alone Elaine opened the refrigerator. They’d expected to find a comically unappetizing assortment of vitamins and cruciferous vegetables, but what they saw was even better. Sitting in the middle of a pristine and otherwise empty shelf sat a dinner plate that held a beeswax figure sculpted in the shape of a muscular male nude.

  They stared into the glowing interior. “I suppose this is what Norris plans to serve us for breakfast,” Elaine said.

  Celia just shook her head.

  “People!” It was Norris, rounding them up.

  Celia and Elaine hurried down the breezeway connecting the main house to the studio and joined the little group outside the closed studio door.

  “Let me say something first,” Norris said, squaring her already square shoulders. She looked from face to expectant face. “These paintings are about something I didn’t realize I needed to make paintings about, something I hadn’t thought about much, before.”