The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [84]
The funny thing was, after all this happened, and before we actually got married, I stopped thinking of myself as a girl. I had thought of myself that way, on and off, up until then. But after that, no. No more girl. The girl was out of me. It didn’t apply. The word sort of made me flinch from then on.
EIGHTEEN
THE LITTLE MARRIAGE EXPERIMENT with Bradley hadn’t worked out, and so here I was, doing a recently divorced debutante show.
It was Saturday. I had drifted into this summer evening party, a back yard gathering with pinprick clouds of gnats disturbing the air, in that space where the other guests were drinking and talking. Farther back, near the garage, a wasp nest was hanging from a maple branch just above the phone lines. I didn’t see any wasps, but the guests were windmilling their hands in front of their faces to keep the gnats away. “Hi, Diana,” they would say, waving as if to say good-bye. The hostess, Lydia, smiled with relief when I came in. I am rarely a disappointing guest. I tend to spice up whatever social gathering I am invited to. I create small harmless scenes.
The weather seemed untroubled. I heard birds crying out, somewhere above us.
These two people, my friends, the hosts, had constructed this back deck a few years ago, parallel gray boards nailed to a frame. Lydia’s taste was for a certain easygoing informality that thrived on summer parties but not winter ones; this marriage, the one with Don, was her third, and all sorts of children and stepchildren and semi-orphans had been dressed up and were serving condiments and hors d’oeuvres. One of them, whose name was Edgar — you don’t expect a small child to be named Edgar — was playing the piano in the den. The windows were open, and the music-beginner’s Mozart — mixed with the sounds of conversation.
People lazed around. They came and went. Coolers full of beer lay open for inspection and slow bluesy jazz arose like candle smoke out of the stereo and was combined near the house with the sound of Edgar’s Mozart, the minuets he was playing. Their house, which was stuffed with scratched-up antiques, was set back far enough away from the street for privacy, and the hedges were littered with kids’ toys, tricycles, and broken plastic battery-operated games. Walking in, you’d see this wreckage, and it was comforting, familial. Then you’d get to the back and note a treehouse falling to pieces close to the nest of wasps. And down there, in the yard, under the wasp nest, the guests had assembled. The invited guests and the more or less invited guests, people like me, our laughter mixing with the sounds of the crickets and the outcasts, the cigarette smokers, huddling in the back corner, grumpily inhaling.
Lydia is a tall, straight-lined woman with curly black hair that sweeps in a tangle down both sides of her face and her neck. She’s not beautiful, exactly, but her eager, smiling intelligence greets you at the doorway, and before very long you’re divulging your small wickednesses to her, and she’s telling you hers, and she takes on the attractiveness of anyone for whom every sub-minor detail is interesting. Interesting events cling to her. She’s a perfect hostess for a party. She’ll just pry the outrageousness out of you for the sake of a story. She wants to hear about everyone, and it’s only later that you remember that you neglected to ask her about herself.
She writes and illustrates children’s books, all of them about a family of goats who are given distinctive individual features like reading glasses, distinctive smirks, uncombed forelocks, and scowls that Lydia has picked up from her two ex-husbands and her own children. I have often wondered what her children thought about finding their own features located in these goats, but I never found the right moment to ask.
The guests were all from Burns Park, a rumpled academic-professional