Surprise Party
I’d been on my own so long that time had liquefied; it couldn’t be neatly sliced like centuries and carrots. Every now and then I’d fetch bananas, bagels, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, rice, meat, cider. I could have done with one shopping list. I wearied of movies, television; books suited the isolation I’d settled into better, deepened it as the world and I drifted apart. Every day was today. Then, one evening, as if there’d been an invitation and RSVPs, dozens of people showed up at my door and bustled in noisy and exhilarated, drunk and high, hungry and overdressed, witty and acerbic, bearing beer bottles and cocktail shakers, wireless speakers that blasted hard rock and droned techno-trance; they hauled in pizza boxes, tightly wrapped charcuterie, Scandinavian cheeses, bags of chips, tubs of dips, fired off opinions, traded endearments, come-ons, put-downs, abject supplications, and ingenious insults. Like blood through a sprinter, they circulated from attic to cellar. Some I recognized and maybe some recognized me but everyone kept moving in and out of rooms, up and down stairs, changing partners, rivals, claques, and cliques. There was Peter Gable from elementary school, nearly middle-aged but with the same dimples; my sister’s best friend Judy looking maturely sexy; that jerk from Levittown who crashed our poker games freshman year. I spotted Julia, who’d wept when she dumped me, whose backside was patted by a steel-haired, mesomorphic plutocrat. The raucous, monotonous soundtrack ran under the human cacophony like a bad road until two couples mouthing “babysitters” made their way across the living room apologizing left and right and left. The crowd, like wildebeests who’d spotted lions on the savanna, rushed for the door. A few waved, two smiled, nobody said goodbye. Then everything was back to normal, silence and no trash. Somebody must have tidied up.
And so I went to bed at the usual hour and read myself to sleep.
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