Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [19]
Lisa
It was the perfect party. Okay—it was the office Christmas party, though the office (Andy’s) had had a really good year and splashed out on a pretty impressive venue. But it was perfect. Hers, the day before, had been at a ghastly Mexican restaurant down the road, and a classic example of the wrong kind of cliché office Christmas party. Where private parts were photocopied late at night, and people from accounts woke up next to the postroom guy, who they didn’t even speak to on the other 364 days of the year, unless they needed to FedEx their sister’s birthday present on company funds. She’d left really early, before the ladies’ bathrooms had begun to run with tequila sick.
This was much better. The DJ was playing the perfect music. They were with the perfect friends (also Andy’s, she realized, but they were good party companions. Not too drunk, nor too sober. Happy. Festive.). And she was wearing the perfect dress.
Lisa stood, resplendent—and only slightly wobbly, in her heels—in Barbara’s green silk Ben de Lisi dress, at the top of the Cinderella staircase, and surveyed the scene. This wasn’t her grand entrance—she was on her way back from the bathroom. And this wasn’t the beginning of the night—dinner had long been cleared away, and she had drunk enough champagne to feel giddy and sentimental. The event space had been transformed as only light and flowers could manage: the ballroom had been made magical—dressed with sparkling white fairy lights, and flickering gold candles and about a million white poinsettias. Christmas, the classy way. Not an inflated Santa or a sprig of plastic mistletoe in sight.
Lisa didn’t normally love big parties like this. Smaller things where she knew everyone were more her style. She was that noisy kind of shy. The worst kind, because no one knew that noisy could be shy. But it could, and she was. Places where she knew everyone were much easier for her. Plus, she was firmly in the “getting ready is the best part of the night” camp when it came to big “dos.” Luxuriating in a deep, fragrant bath; taking the time to paint on a smoother, prettier, more colorful version of your face; that first glass of decent wine, drunk alone—that was all much better than getting hoarse, shouting to make yourself and your inanity heard above a crowd of noisy strangers, drinking cheap alcohol and feeling the balls of your feet throb with each step you took in the high heels the dress demanded but your feet rejected wholesale.
Tonight was different. When she was dressed, earlier, before she left home, Lisa had sprayed perfume into the air in front of her and walked through its mist. Mum had taught her to do it that way. Only she called it scent. She’d walked through that fragrant piece of air, in Mum’s dress, and in some weird way, that action had been like walking through the portal in some science-fiction/fantasy book—she’d wafted into a different mood entirely. The perfume felt more than a little like armor—a shield against…who knew…whatever stopped her from liking parties like this one. Or maybe it wasn’t the perfume at all; maybe it was the dress itself.
Mum’s dress. Mum loved big parties. She loved dressing up, and champagne bubbles tickling her nose, and dancing with her arms above her head, shoes thrown to the edge of the dance floor, and shouting inane happy things at people. Lisa remembered, when she was very small, the smell of Fracas on Mum’s good night kiss. Perhaps when the dry cleaner removed the small sweat patches from the armholes, and the dots of mud on the hem, after the last big party she wore