Lydia was eight years younger than I when I was thirty-eight. We met at a PTA Mother’s Day Plant Sale. I was in charge of counting money. I remember counting piles of quarters over and over again, coming up with a different total each time — finally scattering the coins across the table in frustration. She, busy organizing the rows of left-over impatiens, saw my dilemma, walked over and calmly placed her hand on my shoulder.
“Look. You go there,” she said, pointing to her right. “Line up those plants and I’ll do this.” I did and she did — counting the stacks of quarters just once and entering the amount on a swatch of paper.
She was married when we met. Her John was what some of the ladies on the board called a hunk: Six foot three, weight suited to his frame and prematurely grey at thirty. He was a Jon Voight with a Rambo physique. To those hunk remarks, Lydia would say, “Oh, yeah? You want him? He’s yours.” I thought she was kidding, until I got to know her better.
Lydia was no slouch either, five foot two, eyes of blue and of course naturally blonde which as everyone knows is a magnet for all the studs out there. They had two children (a boy and a girl, born about eighteen months of each another) one more beautiful than the other. They were well-mannered too; would never think of leaving the dinner table without a “May-I-be-excused?” This latter trait just floored me since my kids were comparative slobs, calling orders from in front of the TV. “I want a burger. Pasta! How about chicken — fried, Ma?
“What’re you nuts? A short order cook? For God’s sake!” She would say to me.
Lydia was very bright. When she got involved in the 4-H Club as a volunteer leader, she decided to get paid for her efforts and worked her way up to the regional office. Getting bored with that she just chucked the whole thing one day and became a hostess at a sports bar on the Island. But — I’m running ahead of myself.
Before she became that hostess and while we were still with the PTA, we both became involved with the local police precinct community council — I with getting speakers to attend our meetings; she with a suave detective about fifteen years her senior. Ed. Yes, his hair was thinning and his nose (at one time broken and reset), leaned toward the right — and he had false teeth. True — they were a good set, but you could still tell — they were too perfect for the rest of his face. But there was a soothing guttural tone to his voice, a certain swagger and sexiness to his gait and the way he tucked his thumbs into his belt — well let’s put it this way: a lot of women wanted to get near that gun placed firmly at his waist and Lydia was no exception.
“What can I say? I’m in love with him. Have been for a while — ” She told me one day. “And I’ve decided to go for it.”
“It? But what about John? How could you do this to him?”
“What John doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, he never guessed about the others —”
“Others?”
“Didn’t suspect then. Not that they were important. Ed’s important. I’m in love with Ed.
Look, life’s too short not to have what you want and — and anyway, Ed is brilliant and John is really dumb — Deez, dem, doze — dumb.
And Ed’s charming. Young men have no charm. Did you know that, my dear? No charm whatsoever.”
I tried: “But John’s so good, so handy around the house; does the dishes, even cooks — ”
Lydia stretched her arms cat-like over her head, grinning from ear to ear. “And Ed’s great in the sack.”
“ — and you and John and the kids — you have it all.”
“What does having it all have to do with anything? Anyway, no one has it all, and no one has to know.”
“Don’t be so naïve,” she would say to me.
“Life’s too short,” she would say.
“Life’s too short to mess it up.” I would say with a bit of envy nonetheless.
“Look, I need you to back me up. Just in case. Who else can I count on?”
And that’s how I found myself ready with lame excuses for her disappearances in the event John would call to speak with her while she was out with Ed.
“Just in case. He probably won’t call.”
And he didn’t call — not ever.
“I need you to go with me. I have to do it. How could I explain a dark-haired, brown eyed, beaky-nosed, little Ed?
And that’s how I found myself walking past the right-to-lifers picketing an abortion clinic in the Bronx, trying to ignore the huge posters of aborted fetuses. I vomited when we left the clinic; Lydia looked like she just walked out of a beauty salon. There was no remorse, nothing.
There was no remorse either after she decided to leave John.
“I’m not leaving because of Ed,” she said. “I’m just not happy. Life’s too short,” she repeated.
“Life’s too short to mess it up.” I would say with a touch of envy nonetheless.
“We’ll do lunch,” she said, coaxing me to accompany her. And that’s how I found myself walking into Family Court, avoiding John’s eyes. The man was devastated. Supposedly he knew nothing about Ed and couldn’t understand why his world was being pulled from under him. Poor thing. However, he got over it in due time though, wound up marrying a secretary in the real estate office he worked in. (That little coincidence probably is a story in itself, but I don’t know it.)
Lydia treated Ed like a king, meeting his every need. Frequent and creative sex, home-cooked meals; there were his slippers greeting him at his side of the bed, his robe hanging from the bedroom door — his perfect little sanctuary.
Ed never did leave his wife, something Lydia said over and over again, was something she did not expect anyway. He had two residences: three every-other-nights during the week with Lydia and her kids in her Bayside apartment and the remainder of the week on the Island with his other family. (How he explained his absences to his wife is probably a story unto itself, but I don’t know it.)
The relationship continued for about three years but when her children were in college, Lydia suddenly upped and moved to Staten Island. Soon she left the job with the 4-H Club and began to hostess at a sports bar. There she began an affair with a Mexican short order cook seven years her junior. Ed would accept none of this and before long there would only be occasional telephone calls between them and eventually nothing at all until many years later when Lydia was stricken with lung cancer.
She was very pragmatic about her illness. “Look, I smoked all my life; I can’t be surprised about this but I’ll fight it as hard as I can and if I lose, so — I’ll die and go to heaven.”
When I visited her at the hospital for the first time last spring, I asked if she wanted me to call Ed. Her immediate response was yes. She told me she still loved him and always would. “When I love someone, it doesn’t matter if I don’t see him again. I love for life.”
When I asked, “To what purpose would be the call?” she just shrugged and teared up.
And that’s how I found myself speaking to Ed just about a week before Lydia’s sixtieth birthday. I won’t go into the difficulty of tracking him down; let’s just say it’s not as simple to find someone on the internet as they say. (And I won’t go into my apprehension of his wife picking up the phone — she didn’t by some miracle.)
He was all charm, of course, took the time to ask about my family and life occurrences in the years past and was interested in hearing about Lydia. When I told him about her illness there was silence at his end. I suggested that it would be a nice surprise to call her for her birthday. Again there was silence and then he asked an odd question: He wondered if his call would be welcomed.
And of course it was. He called her twice during that week just before she went on a mini-cruise with her children, their spouses and her grandchildren. She was delighted with his call. She said I made her day, “Now I can die happy.” And she did just that on the cruise ship just before it returned to port.
And that’s how I found myself calling Ed once again to tell him the news. He was quiet for a second then asked where she would be buried. He said he would want to go to the cemetery somewhere down the line. A reunion of sorts, I thought.
It was on the evening of Lydia’s Wake that I learned she chose to be cremated — a recent, spontaneous decision, her brother told me.
Quite early the following morning on the day of Lydia’s funeral, I called Ed. I wanted to let him know there would be no cemetery site after all, no reunion. I recorded a message that I needed to speak with him and left my number.
I never heard from him.
Feldman is a retired NYC English High School teacher with an MFA (fiction writing) from Brooklyn College. A number of her short stories have appeared in U.S. 1 and other publications.
