The Last Book Party(23)

In response, Alva stepped over to the A–H fiction shelves under the window. She handed me an old hardcover titled Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. I’d never heard of the book and was surprised to learn from Alva that it had been made into a movie starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.

“Just read it,” she instructed.

The book, which I read that evening, turned out to be a very funny novel from the 1940s about a successful New York advertising executive and his wife, who flee their midtown apartment for their dream house in the country that turns into a nightmarish money pit. It not only made me laugh, but helped me take a longer view of Henry and Tillie, who, despite their status as local celebrities, were technically still “wash ashores” like me.





15





The next day, when Henry got up from his typewriter and went downstairs to brew a fresh pot of coffee, I took the opportunity to look over his desk. I picked up an old maroon hardcover, surprised to see that it was Anna and the King of Siam. I opened it to a page with a Post-it note and saw Henry had sketched a miniature of King Mongkut. On another Post-it, he had scribbled Go balder—with theater wig? Or bolder … and shave! Henry still had a good amount of hair. Was he seriously considering shaving it all off for his costume? The stakes of this party were higher than I had imagined.

Tillie meanwhile kept up a running dialogue about what character to portray. On my way down to the kitchen for a cup of tea later that morning, we crossed paths. She stopped me, saying, “I’m thinking of Mrs. Malaprop—wouldn’t that be fun? I can say ridiculous things all night, and it will only get easier as the alcohol flows.” Dropping her voice to a whisper, she added, “Don’t say a word about this. Promise to forget. Illiterate it from your memory!” She chuckled at her joke as she continued up the stairs.

That afternoon, as I was getting on my bicycle to ride home, she called to me from her car. “Is Eliza Doolittle a complete waste of effort?” she asked. “So easy to guess, but the hat would be a hoot.” Before I said anything, she backed out of the driveway and sped off, her tires kicking up pieces of gravel.

Daunted by how serious Henry and Tillie were about choosing the perfect costume, I remembered why I’d always hated costume parties, and even Halloween, when more often than not my indecision would end with me in a black leotard and tights with a fur neck wrap fastened to my bottom as a tail and my mother declaring, “There! You’re a cat.”

Over dinner that night, my mother suggested I choose a character from one of my favorite books.

“Such as?”

“Oh, I don’t know … maybe Caddie Woodlawn? You must have read that one three hundred times as a girl.”

“Freckles, braids, and a calico dress?” I said. “Not the look I’m going for.”

“OK, then, how about the young woman from Pride and Prejudice?”

“Seriously, Mom? Could it be any more predictable for someone my age to dress as Elizabeth Bennet?”

She pushed her plate of pasta and clams forward on the table and folded her arms. “Jane Eyre?”

“Mom. I work for Henry.”

“So?”

“Don’t you remember that Jane worked for Mr. Rochester, in his house?”

She smiled smugly. “All the more fitting.”

“You don’t remember how that turned out?”

I waited for her to recall that Jane Eyre falls in love with and marries her much older employer. My mother looked confused for a moment, then nodded and said, “Oh, of course.”

Suddenly, her face lit up. “I’ve got it! Marjorie Morningstar. You’ll find a vintage dress with a sweetheart neck and flared skirt, and you’ll just need to add pumps, pearls, and white gloves.”

“Marjorie Morningstar is the last character I would choose,” I said.

“It would be charming!” my mother said.

The idea of dressing as a conventional upper-middle-class girl who gives up her dream of acting to become a suburban housewife didn’t interest me in the slightest. I wanted to choose something Henry and Tillie would find unpredictable and clever.

“The end of that book was deadly depressing,” I said.

“She ended up in a beautiful house in Mamaroneck!”

“Exactly.”

“I’m only trying to help,” my mother said “It’s a costume, not a prophecy.”

My father, who seemed to be only half listening, tossed an empty clamshell into the bowl in the middle of the table and said, “What was that book you spent hours reading on the beach one summer in high school? Exodus? You would make a wonderful Sabra!”

“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “More spaghetti?”

My mother shook her head and pulled the bowl farther from my father, who in defiance reached instead for another piece of garlic bread.

“You’re so indecisive. Perhaps you should go as Goldilocks,” she said, getting up and taking the breadbasket, which she put on the kitchen counter.

After my parents had gone to bed, I sat on the floor in the hall by the low bookshelf along the wall that was filled with a motley assortment of books and magazines: back issues of Gourmet magazine, paperback legal thrillers left by houseguests over the years, books my brother and I had read as kids, and volumes my mother wanted to keep but that didn’t fit the ocean, beach, and fishing themes of the books on the shelves in the living room.