The Garden Party

by Grace Dane Mazur

  “Molasses, an egg, a stick of butter, flour. Sugar. The usual. Your everyday risers.”

  “What sugar?”

  “Brown,” he said. “From Mauritius, if you can find it. It has a bit of depth to it, a wildness.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it. That’s all there is.”

  “What makes it…splendid? What secret do you leave out when you tell me?”

  “Ah. Splendors. Take a guess.”

  “Galangal?”

  “Nope. It should be tried, but I haven’t.”

  “Lemongrass?”

  “That would be genius; but it wasn’t that.”

  “White pepper?”

  “Yes,” he said, putting his empty glass on the table and smiling. “My gingerbread had white pepper and three gingers and my God but it would always triumph. Now I lurk about in other people’s kitchens and do not cook. Mostly my arms and legs ache like branches in an ice storm. Invisible creatures hide in my joints and shoot venom into my hinges when I move. A few years ago I was bitten by a tick as small as a poppy seed, and its poison has made the slow voyage to my brain.” He paused, rubbing a large hand over his thin white hair, then added, “I was probably just as offensive before, but possibly in a different way.”

  Chhaya went to the cupboard and broke off a corner of the block of El Rey. She brought it over to him and put it in his hand. He seemed not to notice but slowly he brought it to his mouth, jabbed it toward his teeth, nibbled at it. A smile like a slow enlightenment came over his face. “Did you ever wonder,” he said, “why some places have signs in their windows saying ‘Breakfast all day,’ while no place informs you ‘We serve dinner at dawn’?”

  * * *

  —

  THE WIND RUSTLES through the birches bringing a few notes of a once-joyful trumpet. The linen tablecloth ripples for a moment as though trying to escape. Then the breeze dies down. The music is gone. The white cloth is still.

  * * *

  —

  THE YOUNG GIRL whose skin was almost too fair tugged on Philippa’s dress, but Philippa was talking to her son William, and either didn’t feel it or chose not to turn around. So the girl drifted over to Celia. “Excuse me, but do you think I could have a cup of tea?”

  “Why of course, child,” said Celia. “Who do you belong to?”

  The girl made a vague gesture toward the edge of the garden and the forest beyond, where the music had come from.

  “I see….Well, go into the kitchen and ask Chhaya.”

  Pindar’s dog followed the girl to the kitchen, where Nathan Morrill was dozing in the corner. Adannu sat by the old man and slapped his tail on the floor, keeping time. The rhythmic noise woke Morrill, who watched and kept silent.

  “May I please have a cup of tea?”

  Hearing the child’s voice, Chhaya did not look up but said, “Actually, there is a punch for children. It is outside. Would you like?”

  “Heavens, no.”

  Chhaya turned around. “Oh,” she said, putting down her chopping knife. “Oh. I’ll boil the water. What would you like, black or green?”

  “Green, please. It has an earthier taste.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Leila. It means ‘evening,’ but I would rather have a morning name. I was at the other party, but I like your party better.”

  “I see. Cup or mug?”

  “Cup, please. The best china. Gold-rimmed, no flowers. No cracks or chips. It’s okay. I don’t break things.”

  When the tea was ready, Chhaya poured it out for the girl and gave it to her. Leila walked slowly out of the kitchen toward the library.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Nat Morrill.

  Chhaya put her palms together and brought them to her forehead.

  * * *

  —

  CELIA COHEN WALKED to the driveway when she heard a car door slam. She gave one last look at the green of the garden and tried to see it all not as work that needed to be done but as the glory that it already was. She wondered if her feelings about the Barlows were too sure. She did not want to lose what she thought of as salubrious doubt about them. She knew that she was too sure she understood them and found them lacking, in depth, in delight, in their ability to surprise her or themselves. Yet doubt itself was the basis on which she judged others, though it was so fundamental that she wasn’t always conscious of it. “Has this person gotten there?” she would ask herself, meaning “Has he achieved doubt?” But now she herself had jettisoned all unsureness where the Barlows were concerned. In the face of their seeming lack of doubt she had forgotten to hold on to her own.

  Philippa Barlow’s younger sister introduced herself. “I am Charlotte Morrill, Eliza’s aunt.”

  “Of course, I remember you,” said Celia, ratcheting up her cordiality. Charlotte wrote for the newspaper and dressed for downtown. Celia threw herself into her greeting as though Charlotte were a messenger not from The Boston Globe but farther off. “We met in September, at the university library, actually. It was the reception for our poet in residence. I didn’t realize then that you were Eliza’s aunt.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said, startled. “You were wearing gray with a silver necklace. And we talked a bit about telescopes and the infinite. I don’t know why we talked about that, but I think it was something you had been reading.” She paused and gave a little laugh. “Unless it was something I had been reading. I never remember what I read.” Charlotte looked at Celia and thought that probably she remembered everything she had ever read or heard or thought. She appraised Celia’s hair, which had the texture of steel wool, and her necklace, which was lovely and uncommon—Eastern Europe, between the wars, with a complex ornament in the middle, set with emeralds. It would be nice to get a photo of it. Perhaps at the end of tonight’s dinner, after too much wine. Clearly Celia wore this necklace often—Charlotte could tell when something was being paraded for an event—but how strange to wear such a beguiling jewel when one’s own shape was that of a feather bed. Eiderdown. Oh, the lugging of the mindless flesh. Poor woman probably prayed to be reborn as a serpent.

  * * *

  —

  HALOES OF HEAT shimmer from the guests and their hosts. The candles burn brighter. The plump flies of dusk now congregate around the plates of cheese and crackers on the wooden table. From the cut glass bowl of children’s punch, sweet rosy fumes spiral up into the air.

  * * *

  —

  EIGHT-YEAR-OLD EMILY, daughter of Cameron and Amy Barlow—already the fierce lover of insects she would always be—used her finger to paint a trail of punch from the glass bowl, across the table and down one of the legs, in hopes of luring ants. Nearby, Eliza stood on one leg, leaning against a tree, as she instructed Charlotte Morrill.

  “Not the wedding tomorrow, Auntie Char. Okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “And not tonight’s dinner.”

  “Not tonight, I promise. I am here as family. Any photos I take are not for the paper. They’re for you and Adam, period.”

  Charlotte was only occasionally defensive about writing about “society” for The Boston Globe. She claimed that she went after “the borderline philanthropic,” goading them by her presence: She said she had the power to nudge and finally topple them into acts of great generosity—knowing that they would find, the next day, in her news columns, their own dowdy selves transformed by her photographs and their ordinary attributes tinseled by her sparkling and perhaps overheated prose.

  A cloud of mosquitoes and blackflies hovered above Eliza’s hair but did not bite her. She was like the patch of zinc on the hull of a motor yacht, attracting the charged particles of seawater onto itself and keeping them away from the brass propeller, where they would otherwise attach, react, and corrode.

  Now her brother Cameron’s children clust
ered around Eliza as well. Both had strawberry-blond hair. Emily with her open gaze, and seven-year-old Liam, already sultry, draped themselves against Eliza’s arms, mantling her with their bodies. Eliza’s aunt Charlotte watched them, musing at the unearned beauty of the young.

  * * *

  —

  “IT’S GETTING LATE,” said Celia to Adam. “Could you go find Naomi? See if she’ll make it to dinner.”

  Naomi had been home from Bucharest now for six weeks, and at times she seemed totally fine, Celia thought, though fragile. Her two daughters were so different. Both girls had gone to the Amazon while in college, though not with each other. While Naomi, the younger, traveled on the malaria boats throbbing their way to distant hamlets along the river, Sara was trekking in the rain forest with her then boyfriend, an ethnobotanist, gathering scorpions and sampling hallucinogens by means of blowpipes up the nostrils. Sara knew so much, knew many of the wrong things, much that was forbidden. Unusual knowledge clung to her, as though strangeness were sewn into the hem of her skirts.

  Both girls were so complicated, Celia thought, though Naomi’s mission seemed much simpler. With Naomi things were so clear. She was concerned with action, not knowledge: In South America she administered antimalarials; in Romania she took care of orphans; at home she tended to the dying. But now, for the past few days, she had taken to her room, coming out only for meals. It was not clear to Celia if Naomi would join tonight’s prenuptial dinner, but if anyone could convince her to come out of her room it was her brother. “Go, dear,” Celia told Adam again. “Persuade her.”

  * * *

  —

  “NOME, IT’S ME,” Adam said. “Can I come in?”

  “Of course. It’s not locked.” Naomi stood in the middle of the room, dressed in a camisole and panties. Her hair, which for some reason she had clipped off in Bucharest, had grown back in the six weeks she’d been home. She looked elfin now, rather than shorn, but she had not yet gained back all her weight and she seemed a bit too slender. “Oh God,” she said. “Sorry for the mess.” The floor around her was strewn with skirts and dresses; underwear littered the bed.

  “Oh, it’s not so bad,” he lied. The mess was disturbing. Naomi was usually painfully neat. “So. What’s up? Laundry?”

  “I can’t find a thing to wear.”

  “But, Nome…”

  “I’m trying to get them to fit. They’ve all gotten so loose.” She picked up a yellow sundress and slipped it over her head, then looked at herself in the mirror. She tiptoed back and forth, then curtsied in front of him, holding the skirt of her dress. “Sweet, simple, and girlish,” she said. “But I used to like the way the straps cross in back. Look,” she said. Gripping the waistband, she showed Adam how loose it was on her. “While I was gone in Romania, my clothes grew. They’ve turned into bags. I think they want to be someone else’s clothes, not mine. This ‘yellow milkmaid’ number is impossible.” She stripped down to camisole and panties again.

  “Nome?”

  Naomi inhaled, then let her breath out in a rush. “I know, I know. This is nuts.”

  “I just want…”

  “You want me to come to the wedding.”

  “Of course I do. But first there’s the rehearsal dinner. Tonight. Sort of—now. All the Barlows—”

  “Oh God. Here? Even Vicious Grandpa?”

  “He’s not vicious. He’s my favorite. At times he’s still incredibly interesting, though at other times he seems a bit addled, poor creature. But harmless, I promise. And except for my Lizzie, he’s still probably the brightest of the family.”

  “And her older brothers? The legal quartet? All four?”

  “Three,” Adam corrected. “Only three of them are lawyers.”

  “Here?”

  “In the garden. Gin in hand.”

  “So soon,” she said. “The thing is…I don’t know what to come as.”

  “It’s not a costume party.”

  “All dinner parties are,” she said. “It’s just that the costumes are usually habits. Uniforms. I have no uniform. Nothing feels at home on me. Lizzie will be in something simple but gorgeous, but she’ll be wearing funky shoes or something, to show she doesn’t take it too seriously. Her brothers will be in pastel oxford shirts and khaki pants; they’ll be wearing ties to show they do take their outfits seriously, but summery ties with frogs or squirrels to show they know they’re not at the office.” She stepped back from poking around in the closet. “Oh God, Adam.”

  “Nome?”

  “Promise me you won’t take to wearing khaki pants just because…,” she teased.

  “Not a chance,” Adam swore. “I’m only marrying Lizzie, I’m not becoming a Barlow.” He paused, then, “Nome, do you think I…?”

  Naomi went back in among her hanging clothes, still talking. “Lizzie’s dad will have even tried to rumple himself, to loosen things up a bit, but he’ll still seem all freshly pressed. They’ll each be acting out their part. Even the children will be dressed as children. I hate my part.” She backed out of the closet carrying a black dress: lace and fringes on the bodice and layers of black flounces down below.

  “Do you think…?” Adam tried again. “Am I making a mistake?”

  Naomi left his question hanging in the air as she slipped into the black dress. “I could come as a flamenco dancer.” She walked on tiptoe to the dresser and painted her lips in dark red. She angled her elbows, jutted her hips, stamped her bare heels on the floor. It was a strange little dance. The dress looked as though it wanted to be somewhere else. Naomi heel-struck across the room in a barefoot syncopation, then yanked the black costume over her head, throwing it to the floor, where it rippled and settled. “I guess you’re wondering where I got all these.”

  Adam went to the window. “I keep telling myself”—he looked out on the garden down below, which was filled with his future in-laws—“it’s not as though we’ll be living with them.”

  Naomi now tied a long piece of red batik around her waist. “Look at this one. At least I can get it tight enough.” Taking off her top, she draped a piece of orange silk around her neck, crossed it in front to cover her girlish breasts, then tied it in back. “What do you think?”

  Adam was still looking out the window. “You know, sometimes I can’t breathe. Lizzie is so much herself now, so distinct. But what if she turns into either one of her parents? I like to think that she and her twin, Hal, are foundlings, completely unrelated to the Barlows—that they were stolen from somewhere. But what if that’s not true? Could I bear it if Lizzie turned into Philippa, or Stephen, or some mixture? I don’t even know, sometimes—” Catching sight of Naomi in red and orange, Adam gave a quizzical look.

  “What?” Naomi said. “What do you think? Too ‘island princess’?” She laughed and undid the ties, tossing sarong and scarf on top of the rest of the discarded possibilities on the floor. She pulled on a black T-shirt printed with a large skull, in glossy black with a bit of silver. “You know, the first time I met Lizzie’s dad—”

  “You met Stephen Barlow?”

  “Briefly. They came over for drinks one night before I left for Romania. You were off with Lizzie somewhere, I think in New York. I came in late; I’d been working at the hospice. Anyway, when I first met him, he asked me if I was a nun. Or some kind of missionary.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told them Jews don’t really do either of those things. And that besides, I was an atheist.”

  “Nome. It’s getting—”

  “I know. Oh shit. My life is such a mess.”

  “Hey.”

  “I can’t possibly come, you know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’d be like the bad fairy.”

  “Couldn’t you just come as, well, you know…?”

  “I’d jinx the whol
e thing. All I do is hang around with dead people, or people at grave risk.” She gave a rueful smile, then said, “I feel like a mummy winder.”

  “A what?”

  “The Egyptian person who winds the strips of gauze around mummies. Maybe an embalmer. Maybe that’s what I am.”

  “Nome?”

  “Every time I come home from somewhere, I think I’ll never do it again. Then I stay home for a while and fatten up and get sane again—sort of—and work here with the dying, but I just can’t settle here. I have to keep running away again. Maybe I should learn rugby. Wrestling.”

  “You have to weigh more than a hundred pounds for either one.”

  “I could become a cop,” she joked. “I’ve seen featherweight cops. I’d have to grow my hair….They always have ponytails, the lightweights, for gravitas.”

  “This is nuts. What’s going on?”

  “I really hate what I do.”

  “You mean, ‘doing good’?”

  “Good.”

  “Why do it, then? Why not get a job like normal people? Be a poet,” he laughed. “Go to school.”

  “The problem is. Oh God, the problem, you see…Do you see the problem?”

  “Not totally clearly.”

  “It’s a question of the demons of pudding.”

  “Pudding?”

  “Pudding. Cushiony things. Think of them as huge marshmallow pillows that come and suffocate me if I’m not careful. Those are my demons. If I don’t do it, if I’m not in extremis, if I’m not in an apocalyptically unhygienic environment—trying to make things even a little better for others—I feel terminally bland. Silly and useless. Reprehensible. Without meaning.”

  “And when you are there? Surrounded by apocalypse?”

  “Oh God,” she laughed, then groaned. “It’s so selfish of me to keep doing it because I’m not good at it, not at all. I get the terrors. I get rashes in the tropics. I get mosquito bites the size of tangerines. I can’t sleep. Night noises appall me, but if the darkness is too quiet, I listen until I hyperventilate. Finally I get sick. I get so sick each time, I practically have to be medically evacuated. People end up taking care of me for longer than I was able to take care of anybody else.”