Read Lydia's Party: A Novel for Free Online

now she couldn’t drink). Out of habit, she composed her annual mental list of questions.
    Every year, from almost the beginning, there’d been a theme to the party, some project that made it feel useful, or some order of business that needed to be conducted. One year it was to adopt out a cat that had been left with Lydia by a neighbor. She’d meant to keep him but he and Malcolm didn’t get along, so the women had spent the night compiling lists of cat lovers and making increasingly drunken phone calls to likely owners. Other years it was a book exchange. Once, Maura got everyone to bring warm clothes to donate to the homeless shelter where she volunteered. Elaine had brought her grandmother’s mink, a tiny coat for a tiny woman, with a tattered red satin lining, and when Betsy tried it on and it fit perfectly she decided to keep it and wrote a nice check to the shelter. They’d ended up trading all the clothes, donating money instead. This year it was Lydia’s little agenda item, although no one knew about that yet.
    For a while they’d done the Questions, too. It had started with a truth-telling session where everyone was supposed to sit in a circle and tell something personal they didn’t think anyone knew about them. It had been Betsy’s idea—she’d just opened her family therapy practice and had gotten very bossy and said it would be good for them to share—but no one cooperated, so the next year she came up with an amended version, a game she called the Questions. They were supposed to bring one anonymous question, typed so no one could guess the handwriting and sealed in a blank white envelope, and put it in a bowl. Then everyone picked one and read it out loud.
    The rule was you had to tell the truth or pass.
    The questions had ranged from easy to impossible.
What’s your favorite book? Do you love one of your parents more? Would you rather be happily married or rich? How will you die?
After the first year, Lydia added extra questions, to make it harder to guess who’d asked what.
    They’d done it only a few times—the year Elaine refused to play, they dropped it. But Lydia still thought of the party in terms of questions she wanted answered. She had two this year. Her first was:
Do you know anyone who is truly happy and if so who?
It was a trick question, a skill she’d perfected over years of exam writing. It was a sneaky way of asking if they were happy. Her second was even better:
What do you regret?
    She supposed—if they were still playing the game—that she could throw in
Have you ever had plastic surgery and if so for what?
but she wouldn’t want to put anyone on the spot. They’d backed away from the ultrapersonal. They were past confession and mean-spirited truth telling, had moved on to acceptance, kindness, letting go. Or most of them had. The rest of them should, Lydia thought. Though sometimes she missed the drama of the old days. There used to be sex questions. She remembered one about removing stains from a silk scarf.
    What a tedious party
, Lydia imagined someone saying, Spence probably. Parties shouldn’t have agendas, he’d say, already had said, in fact. Who had time to even eat?
    Lydia had to admit, it was a lot to cover in one night. For years they’d talked about going away, meeting someplace, but they couldn’t agree on where. An island someplace warm was one idea, a cruise was another.
But the cold is part of it
, someone always said.
It wouldn’t be the same without a fire.
    It has to be a place that welcomes dogs
. Lydia remembered she’d been the one who said that. Someone knew someone who had a derelict cottage on Washington Island they could probably rent for next to nothing.
    Norris’s suggestion—her recently built house in the Michigan woods, with its art and its guesthouse, its hot tub and heated floors, glossy pictures of which they’d all seen in
Chicago
magazine—was out of the question. As Elaine said later, after Norris left, it didn’t look