Mary Ellen considered the whole thing laughably far-fetched, but she was enjoying Justine’s attention, and she felt privileged to gain entry to her world—a place where people talked about things other than sports and real estate, and where important business was conducted at midweek parties in fringy neighborhoods.
The party where she found herself one unseasonably warm November evening was being thrown by Justine’s friend Peter, a filmmaker and naturalist, and was billed as the perfect opportunity for Mary Ellen to meet all the right people who knew people who probably knew Birgit. Peter lived in a trinity—one of those tiny Philadelphia row homes with one room on each floor, from basement kitchen to roof deck, strung together by a treacherously steep winding staircase. Perfectly fine for a single man, Mary Ellen thought as she squeezed through the front door behind Justine, but not great for a crowd; a firetrap, really. She craned her neck to see if there was a rear exit, but the lighting was dim and Justine was pulling her impatiently through the mass of bodies.
Justine stopped in front of a generously bearded man. “This is Mary Ellen,” she shouted to be heard over the other people in the room, who were also shouting. “My latest project. She’s a photographer. Mary Ellen, this is Peter.”
“Hey,” said Peter, taking Mary Ellen’s hand and holding it for a beat longer than was comfortable. “I love a good project, especially coming from Justine. You must be one to watch.”
“Oh, she’s just being nice,” Mary Ellen said with an embarrassed laugh that stopped when she caught Justine’s eye.
“Justine never does anything just to be nice,” Peter said, fondly bumping his shoulder against Justine’s forearm. “Help yourselves to drinks. They’re in the kitchen, down those stairs.”
No, of course, Mary Ellen thought, following Justine toward the stairway in the corner. Justine was anything but “nice.” Selectively generous with her time and opinions. Aggressively sociable under the right circumstances. But nice?
In fact, it was Justine’s not-just-being-nice intensity—her rigor—that had jolted Mary Ellen out of her post-college-visit malaise. Taking Justine’s class had made her feel challenged and stimulated in a way she’d only felt in college, or perhaps in the early days of her career, when she was still trying to prove herself. Her mind buzzed with movements, theory, vocabulary; she found herself questioning everything she’d always thought about art, architecture, literature, even music. It was thrilling, and a little scary, like riding in a car that someone else was driving much too fast.
When they got to the kitchen, Justine became absorbed in an urgent conversation about tenure politics, so Mary Ellen headed for the bar, where she was grateful to find a bottle of decent gin among the warm Pinot Grigios and Chardonnays. She took her time plucking softening ice cubes from the sweating bucket, squeezing a lemon wedge over them, pouring the gin, relishing the bottle’s familiar heft, wishing there was a real glass instead of the sharp-edged plastic cup.
She shook the cup, lapping the gin over and around the ice cubes for a moment, then drank. Sweet and bitter, the first sip always burned a little, alcohol rising like campfire smoke into her head while the liquid plunged into an icy pool at the bottom of her empty stomach. She stood facing the bar for a moment, pretending to examine a wine bottle. The whole idea of interacting with strangers at a party seemed like an unnecessary exertion for someone her age—like running, which she’d taken up a few years ago, when she turned forty-five, and which had resulted in severely strained Achilles tendons.
When she was in college, she’d been more supple, more motivated. She’d pushed her way boldly through crowded rooms, cheerfully accepting the keg-pumping services of whatever young man was ready to fill her red cup, smiling easily, sometimes even dancing. But parts of her had stiffened over the years, including her smile, which, when she posed for pictures, felt like a forced cracking open of her face.
She turned around; Justine was gone. The kitchen was crowded with clusters of laughing people. She studied some postcards stuck to the stainless-steel refrigerator door with tape.
“Sorry…” Peter had materialized next to her, struggling to hold three six-packs of beer in his arms. “Can you open that for me?”
“Oh. Sure.” She held the door while Peter rearranged bottles in the fridge. “So how do you know Justine?” she asked, averting her eyes from the crusty assortment of condiments inside the fridge door.
“I met her at Starbucks, which is funny, because neither of us ever goes there, but we were both waiting for the bathroom.” Peter pulled out some Tupperware containers, peered through their sides, set them on the floor. “She started interrogating me about my life. I think we talked for thirty minutes before we realized there wasn’t anybody in the john.”
“Oh, I hate that,” Mary Ellen said. “When there’s a line for the bathroom, and everyone thinks there’s someone inside, but then someone walks up and pulls extra hard on the door, and you realize you’ve all been believing in something that isn’t there.”
“Organized religion!” Peter said. “Okay, these have to go.” He stood up with the Tupperwares in his hands, looking hassled. “I don’t have time to empty these.” He went to the trash and stomped on the pedal to open the lid.
“Wait!” Mary Ellen said. “Don’t throw away all your containers. Let me empty them for you.”
“Really?”
She swallowed the rest of her gin, set down her cup, and reached for the containers. Peter shrugged and handed them to her. “Thanks, dear.”
Mary Ellen found a spoon and began scraping the food into the trash. It felt strangely intimate, interacting with the graying remains of what she supposed had been dinners for one, perhaps eaten in the glow of the television, or on the counter with a magazine held open by the edge of the plate: half a chicken breast with
