All Is Vanity by Christina Schwarz
It occurs to me that we can’t have Marlo and her little friends circulating through the crowd with trays of mixed drinks. This is going to have to be a catered party, with the sort of caterers who won’t need to heat or refrigerate anything, since the appliances are no longer attached to energy sources. They can, however, assemble trays in the kitchen, since we do, at last, have countertops. I’ve never had a catered affair. I could ask Jeanette for advice, but then, I fear, it would become her party, a museum “event,” rather than a casual, albeit catered, low-key, albeit wonderfully tasteful, romp.
Also, Gerald, the hill man, now says he can’t go on with the construction until mid-September—something about his back, or his eyes, or his elbow—the malady changes with every conversation, perhaps it’s extensive nerve damage, so I now must figure out how to disguise the not-yet-transformed-into-a-hill pool-hole. Hunter suggested covering it with branches to make a trap. I think it may be better to erect a sort of leafy barrier with huge pots of bamboo.
Hazel says Ramon won’t do, by the way. My new drought-resistant plants are too delicate, it seems, to be nurtured by an illegal alien with a lawn mower and a pickup truck. Mr. Nakasoni starts next week.
L
In my novel, which I was now working on nearly full-time in my cubicle at In Your Dreams, Miles convinces Lexie to hire a catering company for a book party they’re throwing for someone who’s not quite a friend and for whom they nevertheless feel they must perform a significant favor, because they offered to do so in a fit of generosity brought on by a single dinner at which a bright rosé capped off by a smoky single malt conjured the illusion of intimacy. “You’re a terrific cook,” Miles tells Lexie. “But, honey, you’re not a professional. Besides, you won’t be able to enjoy the party, if you’re cooking all day and running in and out of the kitchen all night. Besides, we don’t have a functioning kitchen.” Lexie and Miles are, of course, redoing the kitchen in the house they bought. All cupboards and countertops are being covered in narrow strips of Thai bamboo, shellacked with a special substance to maintain their pale greenish hue.
“Margaret?” Simon was standing in the doorway of my cubicle. Quickly, I snapped the cover of my laptop down, eliciting a furious beeping from the machine. I reopened it and clicked the file closed. “Subscriber list,” I muttered nonsensically, and then added, equally meaninglessly, “next Tuesday.”
Simon, however, was preoccupied with the papers in his hand and oblivious to my subterfuge. “Margaret, I love this piece, but it seems familiar somehow,” he said. “Would you do some nosing around? Make sure it hasn’t been published anywhere else?”
“Sure.” I set the manuscript on the shale of paperwork layered across my desk and then turned back toward the doorway, ready for small talk. Simon, however, had already gone. Well, I was quite busy, after all. Briskly, I opened my computer and continued with Lexie’s party plans.
Dear Margaret,
“So what do you do?”
This is Duncan’s wife. She’s sipping a vodka on the rocks—thank God we went for the full bar!—and trying surreptitiously to scrape what is probably a wad of Hunter’s gum off the bottom of her exquisite sandal onto the Guadalajaran tile.
We’ve had this conversation before, at the Christmas party, but she’s forgotten that we’ve met. I, unfortunately, am not quite sure of her name. I think it may be “Holly”—but this may only be an association with said holiday shindig. (Michael and I usually review key names before these social things, but because of the last-minute flurry of preparty hosting chores—he had to run down to Westwood Village to pick up another bag of lemons; I had to assure my mother that Noah’s giraffe is an imaginary creature and she could call my father off his search of the yards between their house and the Big Juicy.)
“Oh, I’m a stay-at-home mom,” I answer. And then I add, for now.” I’ve been tacking on that qualifier with certain types of people for—what?—nine years. It’s despicable, isn’t it? I’ve always wanted to be one of those mothers who announce their stay-at-homeness with pride—“I’m raising my kids!” I would say, defiantly—or probably I would not even need to act defiant, so confident would I be in my choices. If only I could squeeze in some volunteer employment. “Of course, my duties as school board president take up a lot of time,” would be pleasant to announce. (Although perhaps less pleasant to perform.)
“I so admire that,” she says. “I’d be bored out of my skull if I spent the whole day with Kiley.”
“I’m sorry Kiley is such a dull child,” is what I’d like to say to this sort of comment.
It’s true, certainly, that “working” with one’s children can be boring. But what work isn’t boring, at least some of the time? And when did being bored become a fate worse than death?
“So what do you do? When you’re not with Kiley?”
“I’m the director,” she says, “of the Center for Democratic Change.”
“Mmm,” I say, sipping my own drink. “And what is that?” Obviously, I should know, but I’m already pretending to remember her name and there’s only so much fuzziness one conversation can take. (I always find such situations difficult. Should I look somewhat stupid and ill-informed right up front, so as to save myself possible greater embarrassment down the line, or act like I know what we’re talking about now, and risk having to feign sudden deafness later?)
“Essentially, we form a bridge between progressive political causes and the entertainment community.”
So I have revealed my ignorance but am still no wiser—the worst of both worlds. I abandon clarity in favor of enthusiasm. “That must be interesting!” I gush. I hope by the excessive politeness of my response to show her the rudeness of hers. As always in these circumstances my ploy fails.
“It is,” she agrees. Then she holds up her empty glass. “I’m going to get myself another of these,” she says, and walks away. My only consolation is that the gum is throwing her gait off.
I should consider myself lucky she wasn’t one of those who believe I am a marine biologist. Michael confessed minutes before the first guests arrived that he’d given that impression to several people lately. “Not full-time,” he assured me, “just occasional projects. I got tired of telling them you don’t do anything but take care of the kids,” he admitted. “They weren’t getting the right idea about you.”
“And now they have the right idea?”
“In a way, yes. Now they think you’re an interesting person, which is true.”
“I may,” I said, “be an interesting person. But I’m not a person who knows very much about fish.”
“You specialize in plankton,” he said. “No one knows anything about plankton. Just say it’s, you know, worrying, the way it’s disappearing, what with pollution and global warming.”
I pointed out that global warming would probably increase plankton.
“That’s good. Say that,” he said. “It really doesn’t matter what you say.”
“Just so it has nothing to do with diaper changing.”
“Letty,” he said, “you don’t talk about diaper changing anyway.”
Obviously, he’d not caught my sarcasm.
Earlier, before the caterers arrived with their trays of rolled meats and whipped cheeses, their splayed herbs and skewered vegetables, I stood looking out our French doors (so new they’re still raw around the edges) at the setting we’d created. White lights cavorted playfully among the bamboo branches, waiting for dark when they would become a backdrop of reachable stars. The lightly distressed terrace flooring evoked a nineteenth-century Mexican courtyard, and the two missing tiles where the fountain will eventually be installed were cleverly hidden by a strategically placed teak table. Ramon (of course, I didn’t fire Ramon—what kind of a person do you think I am? He comes on Thursdays; Mr. Nakasoni comes on Tuesdays) turns out to have a talent for arranging furniture. He created cunning conversation clusters with the rest of the teak pieces and the Italian chaises, leaving plenty of open flow f
Meanwhile, real life went raucously on in the house behind me. They’ve begun a stage of the master bedroom/bathroom project upstairs that apparently requires the continuous whine of a circular saw. Yesterday, I thought I needed new glasses, but it’s only the sawdust fuzzing the windowpanes. The saw whining was accompanied by the scream of nails being yanked out of the walls in the kitchen. This was the second time I’ve had to listen to this, the first being when they pulled off the old paneling. This time they were pulling off new but incorrectly installed cupboards. It seems they needed a practice round.
I cleverly positioned the club chairs and their burdens of clothing with their backs to the windows. From certain angles, guests could catch a glimpse of heaped fabric, but I hoped they would assume it was pillows. The futon I rolled into a cylinder and draped with the new Turkish carpet—well, new to us, I mean—it’s from one of those places in West Hollywood that we used to be afraid to go into because we thought someone would make us buy something against our will—or maybe even without our knowledge. The museums textile expert helped us choose it and spoke Turkish to the dealer, so I honestly think we got a great deal, and its value will appreciate, as long as not too many Tootsie Rolls are smashed into the weave. I have to say that I had hopes of coming out of that store with more than one carpet, but even the one cost more than we’d intended to spend on three. But, as Michael pointed out, this is really a work of art for us to enjoy for the rest of our lives. We can get a cheap one for the dining room—that’s where the food is really going to fall—and we’ll do cotton in the kids’ rooms.
I hid the accoutrements of the “breakfast nook” under the duvet. The trail of ants the jam jar attracted followed along nicely. Despite my efforts to tidy at least enough so that people could get by to use the bathroom, the inside of the house, I have to admit, is squalid. In the dining room, the bird’s-eye maple is invisible under the muffin pans, the plastic action figures, the boxes of files, the field trip permission slips, etc. The rest of the room is crammed with book boxes. The children’s rooms are no better. Ivy’s crib is the only space free of flotsam. The others sleep on tiny cleared patches, among toys and clothes, CDs and measuring spoons, linen napkins and beach towels; items that have been pulled from boxes and have no place yet to go.
I thought I’d weeded so much junk when we moved, but still we seem to have belts with no buckles and “important” T-shirts with ripping seams and a Monopoly game with no money and endless hair baubles and single tennis socks and flea combs with missing teeth and plastic containers without tops and pens that won’t write and a black-and-white TV that’s stuck on channel four, and boxes of broken pottery with which I’ve long intended to make a mosaic-topped table whenever we finally put in a patio. Now we have the patio and it’s far too nice for any table I could construct.
You’re scrolling forward impatiently. The party, the party, you’re muttering. Let’s hear more about the party. But the fact is nothing much happened at the party.
It was a fine party. Actually, a very good party, I think. People seemed happy with the copious mixed drinks and they consumed nearly all the pretty food. Seating the jazz combo among the fruit trees was a nice pastoral touch, and although the sod we laid last week is trampled beyond repair, it was worth it for one lush evening. A couple of errant guests—Harvey Price and an intern—managed to tumble into the pool pit—but everyone, including Justine Price, was merely amused. Yes, overall, it was definitely a success. Duncan, gesticulating with a skewer of chicken satay, told me that he wants to bring Michael in on the “big-picture planning” for the museum.
But. I thought the evening would be different somehow. I thought, first of all, that I would be different. More witty, more gracious. But I was just the same, hiding behind “Swordfish-and-mango-salsa-in-a-blue-corn-tortilla-cup?” when I could think of no conversation and feeling left out when, as it almost always is, the talk was art-world gossip. My exhaustive knowledge of important human affairs, gleaned through hours of dedicated flipping through People magazine during checkout-line waits, is useless at these affairs.
Unfortunately, the party rendered most of the patio furniture unreturnable. When Harvey and his intern fell into the pool pit, they took one of the superlight Italian chaises with them and the frame is pretty bent. We can still use it, but I doubt I could get my money back. A teak cocktail table was burned when a lantern tipped over and there’s a large greasy stain on an armchair where someone dropped his or her shrimp scampi. (Actually, I happen to know it was “her”—Duncan the director’s wife—and a director in her own right, of course. Her name, by the way, turns out to be “Hollis,” as I discovered when I rashly gave “Holly” a go as they were leaving. You don’t think my blunder will keep Michael out of the “big-picture planning,” do you?)
L
Letty
I’d wanted to go to the senior prom ever since seventh grade when I’d seen the pictures in Lottie’s high school yearbook. The king and queen, the hokey theme, the corsage pin that ruined the bodice of the dress, the photos of me with my embarrassed date in his Easter-egg-colored tuxedo standing in front of the fireplace; I wanted it all. When the time came, I also particularly wanted to wear a dress I’d been working on as an advanced home ec project, a short, shiny, even somewhat ruffly, disco-influenced shift in midnight blue silk that I was sure would make me feel like those girls who pressed their shoulders and the sole of one foot against a locker, while chatting casually with certain boys.
Margaret scoffed at the prom. By the end of sophomore year, she was merely cheerfully condescending to finish high school. She was, however, willing to coach me. When Craig Whitehead asked me to go with him, she advised me to turn him down. Not without provocation, I admit. I am ashamed to say that I cried when I told her about his offer. Craig and I had tracked along in the same math classes since freshman year, swapping pencils and test prep questions. He kept his pressed blue oxford-cloth shirts buttoned at the wrist and his hair parted and combed, never charmingly disheveled. I was not so shallow as to care overmuch about looks, but Craig wasn’t particularly handsome. He laughed at my witticisms but did not have many of his own and his undisguised diligent application to schoolwork barely earned him B’s. All in all, he had nothing to recommend him but relentless decency, a quality I didn’t value in a prom date. I was flattered but also appalled to discover that he’d secretly admired me since my braces had come off.
“It’s a waste of a prom,” Margaret agreed. “And it’s going to cost him a bundle for the tickets and the tux, not to mention the dinner before and the breakfast after. It’s really not fair to let him go through with all of that if you’re not happy to go with him.”
“And the wrist corsage,” I said. This was how I’d determined to avoid the damaging pinholes.
“Whom do you want to go with?” Margaret asked.
This was a difficult question, since by my senior year, all the boys I’d admired from afar had graduated. After much consultation and listings of pros and cons, we chose a boy in Margaret’s history class whom neither of us knew very well. He was universally liked without being wildly, and unattainably, popular, had performed in an amusing skit in the fall variety show and ran track. Some athletic skill, we agreed, was a plus, as long as he wasn’t a “jock.” Margaret could vouch for his intelligence, at least in the realm of AP U.S. history, and he wore hightop Converse All Stars, which were definitely not “in” at the time, a pleasing stylistic quirk.
“You should choose the person you want to go with,” Margaret said. “Why do boys get to do all the asking?”
He turned me down. He had a girlfriend at another school. They were going to her prom. That’s what he told me anyway, which was a lot nicer than what I’d told Craig, which was that I just couldn’t bring myself to like him “that way.”
Craig and I ended up going to a party Margaret had
“This is better anyway, isn’t it?” she said to me more than once that night.
But to me, in fact, it wasn’t. And I never did get to wear that shift.
CHAPTER 16
Margaret
“YOU WIN SOME; YOU LOSE SOME,” my father said. “That’s the game of life.” In Genslen’s third trial, overweight mice who’d been dosed with the drug began to experience patchy baldness. The stock had plummeted.
“It may come back,” my father said. “After all, you lose some; you win some.”
“That depends,” my mother said into the extension, “on what you lose. Get it, Margaret?”
I suspected they’d already rehearsed this jolly repartee several times with their friends.
“Anyway,” my mother went on, returning to her usual, practical vein, “that money was all on paper.”
“It was a nice chunk of paper, though,” my father said.
My father could afford to be wistful. As Warren had told me, only a small percentage of his portfolio had been invested in the stock.
The same could not be said for Letty. I waited a few days, but when she didn’t call me, I phoned her from my cubicle. Her answering machine advised me to try her cell phone. I’d not been aware that Letty owned a cell phone.
“J. Peabody and Associates, Letitia speaking.”
“Letty?”
“Margaret?” Her voice sounded distant, but I attributed that to the technology.
“Where are you? Who are you? Who is J. Peabody?”
“That’s Jeanette.” Her voice slipped away from the receiver. “The light is green! Drive, lady, drive!” Letty, I realized with a mild ping of alarm, had become her own enemy, the woman on the cell phone in the SUV. “Didn’t I tell you?” she said to me again. “I’m working for her now. I’m an events consultant.”