Lydia's Party: A Novel Read Free

too-expensive hiking trip to Nepal she’d wanted to take, that she’d let Barry, who was her boyfriend then, talk her out of—she should have done it, she thought. It was too late now. Even a year ago it would have been. Not absolutely, but enjoyably—something to do with her feet, a result of cramming her toes into those fuck-me pumps all those years ago, the red ones. She’d worn them to work, of all places. Maybe she had lived a little, she thought. But she could have lived more. She saw now that the impatient ones were the ones that did it right. Now, at this late date, she was trying to change her ways.
    •   •   •
    Ice cubes, she thought, noticing, out the bathroom window, icicles hanging from the gutter. That’s what she’d forgotten. She’d e-mail Jayne to pick up a bag on the way over. So many details. She remembered when the idea of giving a party was simply a terror, an impossibility, one of the things on her List of Fears.
    Don’t tell me you don’t have one
, she imagined saying to someone, Celia probably. At least she supposed everyone had some version of one, a chute of impossibilities that bumpered their lives. How could you not? Fear ruled the world, didn’t it? It had ruled hers.
    Lydia had made her first list of fears when she was fifteen, in curly cursive handwriting, on lined notebook paper in romantic blue ink. The school psychologist she’d been sent to for turning in a particularly gruesome art project had told her to make a list of everything she was afraid of, and she’d taken to the task with alacrity, discovering she had a talent for fear. She’d lost track of the many-times-folded sheet of notebook paper, which she’d moved from hiding place to hiding place, but that hardly mattered now—she could recite the list from memory.
    Lydia’s List of Fears—her own private catechism. Her fears then had numbered twenty-nine, the same as the number of lines on the page. She’d wondered sometimes, over the years, if her life would have turned out differently if she’d had a smaller notebook that day. But too late now. The count came to twenty-nine. She’d liked, at least, that the number was prime.
    Lydia would have liked to be able to say she’d mastered all the fears on her list before she died, or at least that she planned to die trying, but it wouldn’t be true. The fact was she’d mastered a few, and some went away. As for the rest, she’d built her life around them.
    Not that she would admit it, or even what was on the list. Or not anymore. She had, once. She’d recited the entire list to an old boyfriend, not Barry, a different one, the carpe diem guy, on a road trip, for something to talk about in the forced intimacy of a car plummeting unobstructed through the Badlands and across the hot brown prairie on the way back from Rapid City, South Dakota. They’d gone so he could photograph the big carved faces in the mountain. It was supposed to be funny, an ironic adventure, though the land was unexpectedly beautiful and the people open and kind. He’d made her list into a song, sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”—he’d called it “These Are a Few of My Terrible Things”—and sang it all the way back to Chicago.
    Even now she could hear it, in his voice:
    big black dogs
    singing in public
    going to parties
    giving parties
    driving
    diving (especially scuba)
    marriage
    dentists and doctors and
    Mean as it was, Lydia had to admit it was funny, how well he’d made it fit with that lovely old Rodgers and Hammerstein tune, with the addition of a few
and
s and a little bounce and by throwing in a line ending in
Cuba
, though that part was purely made up. Lydia couldn’t have cared less about Cuba as a girl.
    She’d come a long way since then, she thought, glancing at dear Maxine, an aging Rottweiler shepherd mix of exceptional beauty who gazed knowingly at her from her shearling-lined bed. Maxine sighed, her orange eyebrow-like markings furrowing with