* * *
Technically I am home free, but then I turn and see the turf on her knees. I see a neighbor kid watching from his aboveground pool, and I am embarrassed, shamed by the lazy tenor of the cul-de-sac. The gardenias and unsecured bicycles and me, breathing heavily over someone’s wife. So I walk back and take her damp hands into mine, then pull her to her feet.
“I know who you are but I don’t want to discuss it, if that’s all right with you,” she says, dusting herself off. “I just wasn’t finished looking at you. I didn’t expect you to be so young. It’s awful.”
“Awful?”
“Yes, for you,” she says, and the neighbor kid slips out of the pool and runs back into his house.
“It’s late. You should stay for dinner,” she says, thumbing a bruise that is forming on her arm, and it is an understatement to say that I would rather do anything else, but then I feel her expectation, that she is not so much asking a question as allowing me time to confirm an obvious conclusion—that in exchange for her compromise, for her coolness about what has just happened, something is owed. She directs me to a guest room with its own bathroom, looks me over, and says, Humid, isn’t it, which is an indirect way of bringing my attention to a thing I am already aware of—this glandular free-for-all happening underneath my clothes. I look in the mirror, and my face is shining. She shows me the towels and suggests that I wash up. When I emerge from the shower, a dress is laid out on the bed, cornflower blue and immediately recognizable to me as something I would likely never be able to afford, a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do to enter it, I can only think of my debt, an aggrieved Sallie Mae representative standing above me while I sleep.
As I try to put on the dress, it is the first time I suspect she is trying to humiliate me. It is so small that squeezing into it comes at the expense of 90 percent of my mobility. This potential cruelty is so specific, so much like a courtesy that has merely gone awry, that I feel obligated to be a good sport. I consider leaving through the window, but then I see there are cars gathered outside, a steady stream of guests funneling into the house. Standing within this wave of guests is Eric, home from work, greeting everyone at the door. He checks his watch and frowns. It is 7:00 p.m., and apparently this is when adult parties start. I remind myself that I wanted to demonstrate my seriousness, to show him that I will not be ignored, even as I consider the reality of confronting him and panic. Seeing him through the window, though, I find his aggressive normalcy insulting. I think: I can be normal, too.
So I hobble down the stairs, every degree of motion a threat to the integrity of the single zipper separating my breasts from everyone in the room. I wish I had known there would be this many people, and Rebecca’s omission of this information makes me wonder if she is, in fact, fucking with me. It’s clear she is a magician of some sort: in the short time it has taken me to shower and dress, the place has been transformed into a heavily creped exercise in adult merriment, the confetti and clusters of graphic foil balloons a disorienting mixture against the faint thrum of monk-heavy New Age. But the woman of the house is nowhere to be found.
* * *
I brace myself to be seen by him, prepare to appear incidental and cool, but still I search the crowd for the white of an eye. I seize the details, the deliberate—the fruity dental office artwork, the shelves of crystal, the unsmiling shot of Eric and Rebecca in the ruins of Pompeii—and everything fermenting underneath, the sagging garbage in the kitchen, a still-moist handprint on the TV. I take a crab cake from a server just for something to do with my hands. I want to eat it and give my stomach something more to do than churn around the bile steadily rising into my mouth, but otherwise I feel beyond food, beyond the vulnerabilities of my intestinal tract, and this is so unprecedented that it doesn’t even bother me that every available beverage appears to be nonalcoholic.
The guest who is standing beside me seems to come to the same realization, his face souring as he palms a Sprite. He turns and I feel him assessing me, trying to figure out how I fit, the makeup of the party so homogeneous it gives me up as a matter of course. Normally I would be unconcerned about this level of scrutiny, but I am completely sober, the dress hindering my ability to breathe.
“How do you know the couple?” he asks, and then something catches my eye across the room. A black child in a pink wig and a tummy shirt, smoking a candy cigarette.
“Who is that?”
“Because I’ve never seen you before.”
“What?” I say, scanning his muppety body for any sign of definition before I turn and see that the girl is gone.
“You didn’t go to Yale, did you?” he asks, and the phrasing of this question doesn’t escape my notice. I can’t say why I have always felt obligated to impress even men I don’t want to fuck, but I’m embarrassed by the prospect of his pity, this man I don’t know and will likely never see again. So I don’t say I dropped out of art school after sending some incoherent Comic Sans poems to the department chair. I don’t say I enrolled in an indistinct community college, threw away most of my paintings, and graduated with what is arguably a more useless degree.
“I work with Rebecca,” I say, which, out of all the available lies, is the one I can support the least. I think I see Eric on the other side of the room but it is just a lamp.
“So you raise the dead.”
“What?”
“I guess someone has to do the dirty work, right?”
“Yes, I guess.”
“I can’t believe they made it fourteen years.”
“Who?”
“Rebecca and Eric?” He points above me, and when I look, I see there is a detail I missed. A banner that reads: The Lace Anniversary. “Kind of a weird one to celebrate. Though I guess it is a feat. Do you ever look at them when they’re together? Like different species,” he says, and we look at each other as I catch up to the conversation we are really having. A conversation that always happens on the fringes of someone else’s good fortune—the murmurs of disbelief, envy. It puts me at ease. I smile at him and move into the crowd.
* * *
I am not good at parties. The music, either a squeaky-clean parade of Now That’s What I Call Music, or curated by someone who thinks they discovered Portishead, everyone waiting for the segue into late-night power balladry or self-conscious karaoke, looking around to gauge the right amount of participation, “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “Push It” underneath the inevitability of a regular colonoscopy. The too close and too wet—the shout I receive into my face, a stranger’s spit underneath my eyelid, in my drink, the wine spilling between my fingers as I try to escape the person at the party who is especially desperate not to be caught standing alone. It is a foregone conclusion I will once or twice hurt someone’s feelings deeply because of something I say or a face I make, which I will of course think about when I ride the train home, and actually, forever, even though I tried to be merry and keep the conversation light, even though I can’t sleep and I can’t shit, and someone is dying but that one song tells you to slide to the left and you have no choice.