Free Lydia's Party: A Novel by Margaret Hawkins

an ugly neighborhood, she thought. Jayne was actually not going directly to Lydia’s house—not yet, anyway—but was on her way to visit Wally, her father-in-law, whose nursing home was roughly in the neighborhood. Usually Douglas went on Sundays but she’d offered to relieve him this week, since she’d be in “the provinces,” as they called the neighborhoods far from the lake.
    Not that visiting Wally was a chore—Douglas was uncommonly devoted, and Jayne loved Wally, too—but the place smelled bad and the drive was unpleasant, through this dreary nonscape. Jayne preferred not to drive at all and seldom did—trains and cabs were her usual modes of transportation—but unless you transferred to a bus, which Jayne did not consider an option, there was no other way to get there from where they lived, on Lake Shore Drive. Although almost any place, compared to where they lived, was, well, unpleasant. Until his father had gotten too frail, Douglas had picked Wally up every other weekend and brought him back to their lovely home, so he could spend time with Little Walt, his grandson and namesake. He’d stay overnight, in his own room, on the twenty-sixth floor in their three-bedroom condominium, in the stunning building where they lived, where even the guest room had parquet floors and a view of the lake.
    “Now look at that,” Wally would say, sitting on the couch while they made dinner, gazing out the window at the sailboats. They had one, too, but Wally preferred dry land.
    •   •   •
    She forgot how nice their place was, sometimes. Coming out here reminded her.
    She’d brought Wally the usual bottle, plus some Hershey bars. For years she’d tried to convert him to better chocolate—expensive, dark, Belgian, with and without nuts—but one of the aides finally admitted he gave it away, to her. Hershey bars were what he longed for, she said. They reminded him of the army, K rations—a pleasant memory, apparently. As for the bottle, it was against the rules at the Baptist home, but Wally liked his midday “snort” and everyone liked Wally. As long as he didn’t flaunt it, they looked the other way.
    Jayne was dying for a smoke. Something about going to see Wally, then her old friends, whom she loved but seldom saw—Elaine, Celia, Lydia especially—put her in the mood. She supposed it was the thought of passing time, reversals of fortune, all that, that unsettled her. Jayne was anything but sentimental, but driving through these neighborhoods made her a little sad. She’d moved on, why hadn’t Lydia?
    She was thinking maybe when she got to Lydia’s she could bum a smoke from her, or from Celia, if one of them had started again. She couldn’t keep track of who was on and who was off. Lydia used to smoke like a fiend. She’d made it look so attractive they’d all wanted to do it, all that nervous turning of the head and flicking of the ash, all that picking of tobacco from her lipsticked lip. Men were crazy about it, lurching out of their seats to hold a match close to her mouth while she smiled at them, a little cross-eyed, through the flame. Or maybe men were just crazy about Lydia.
    “Don’t you think she’s attractive?” Jayne had asked Douglas, early on when they were first going out. It wasn’t exactly what Jayne had meant. Of course she was. Maybe what she’d meant was
Do you think she’s beautiful?
Women discussed it—was she, wasn’t she?
    Jayne waited to see what Douglas would say.
    •   •   •
    Thinking like an art historian, Jayne had always thought that what Lydia really was, was
intermittently
beautiful, like some painting in a dim niche in some church somewhere in Italy with one of those timed lights you could drop coins into—beautiful when lit, when attention was paid. Beauty happened to her sometimes, then flickered out. Usually it had to do with men. At the beginning, she’d lit up around Spence.
    Jayne had gone to gallery openings with them—Lydia and