Lydia's Party: A Novel Read Free Page B

turned it down. Norris had gotten a better offer, at a real college, the same week, from someone she’d met at the residency she’d gotten Lydia bumped from. Now Norris didn’t have to teach. She was that rarest of all creatures, an artist who lived—and well—off her art.
    More water under the bridge, Lydia told herself, counting out cloth napkins. Her policy was to have plenty of extras. After the first few bottles of wine they tended to slip off laps and onto the floor.
    Still, it had stung, she thought, Norris getting that good job so easily and so young, all those years ago. It had hurt to be surpassed that way, by a friend. Briefly, they’d been colleagues, fellow artists. Lydia had wanted to mentor Norris, show her the ropes, bring her along. But Norris had flashed past while Lydia stood still. Lydia had kept in touch, to prove there were no hard feelings, but of course there were. Norris reminded Lydia of what she’d had and lost. Promise.
    Though Lydia had to admit that Norris had something else, too. Not more talent exactly, but more certainty. More belief, less doubt. She’d expected to succeed. Now it was hard to believe she was ever one of them. Lydia had looked up her website. She didn’t even put their little school on her CV.
    Lydia banged the iron down hard on the linen napkin she was ironing. Steam sizzled. She tried to let all that go. That’s what they’d said to do in the one session of disease management counseling she’d attended, free of charge. They’d been given bumper stickers that said
Holding on to hurts, hurts!
Letting things go was good for your health, they said. And she had tried. But the things she let go of came back, and she’d have to let them go again. It got tiring, Lydia thought.
    She hadn’t known the whole story until much later, years later, recently in fact, when she’d found out at some faculty party. Someone brought it up as if it were old news, a joke by now since Lydia appeared to be way past it, and she’d pretended not to be surprised.
    Cruelty is as common as the common cold
,
Lydia remembered her tough old grandma
saying, brushing off her apron with excessive force.
Get a hankie and get used to it
,
she’d say. She didn’t put up with crying over playground slights.
    Lucky she hadn’t found out sooner, Lydia thought. Too late now to take up a grudge. She’d have to let go not only of Norris but also of this idea, that they’d been friends all these years. It was too much to give up. She’d have to stop inviting Norris to the party, and at this late date, she’d be embarrassed to explain why. Everyone thought she’d already forgiven her.
    •   •   •
    Lydia went back to her mental guest list: Elaine, Celia, Maura, Jayne, and Betsy. Maybe Norris. Lydia was the only one of them still teaching. Or she had been, until this happened. Now she was on medical leave and probably wouldn’t go back, if her doctor was to be believed. Elaine, that cagey devil, had gotten out fifteen years earlier, saved up to pay off her mortgage and gave notice the day she wrote the last check. She said she couldn’t stand teaching anymore, couldn’t stand the tedium of hearing her own voice repeating itself semester after semester, telling the same jokes and the same stories, acting out the same rehearsed epiphanies, year after year, and Lydia knew what she meant, felt the same way about her own tired performances. Though Lydia thought that in Elaine’s case it was grading papers that finally did her in. Four sections of English composition every semester—she’d felt she had to correct every superfluous comma.
    Elaine had invited a few of them over on a Saturday morning, after her last exam, for what she called an office cleaning brunch. She’d set out a box of doughnuts and a carton of orange juice and someone had dug out a bottle of single malt Scotch and they’d spent the morning dragging bins mounded with old blue books into the parking lot, heaving