warts and all.

DURING the course of our long, tortured relationship Nick gave me only two things of any real or sentimental value: an economy pack of Dr. Scholl's Plantar Warts Remover and a copy of The Story and Its Writer: an Introduction to Short Fiction. If you take a slack, indirect view of things, the warts, a grainy cluster of them on the ball of my left foot, were a gift of sorts, too. These days I try not to place too much credit on those broad shoulders of his, though.

Emily Alderson's parties tended to be hot and over- crowded. All the red plastic dixie cups would disappear in the first hour, leaving an odd assortment of coffee mugs without handles and Pyrex measuring cups for people to fill with cheap beer and even cheaper wine. There was always a lot of talk about Foucault and Derrida, lots of bad hummus and bowls of blue corn chip crumbs. At Emily's birthday party I told a man named Jacques that my favorite book was To Kill a Mockingbird; he practically patted my head and said he found it a "quaint narrative -- tolerable if you go for that sort of thing."

If you stayed at one of these parties long enough, you would hear Emily describe herself as "someone who likes to color outside the lines" at least 3 or 4 times. As far as I could tell, this simply meant that she liked to wear gauzy skirts that were forever getting caught in the chain of her bike and, that said bike was forever being stolen because she either forgot to lock it or took some communitarian stand against locking it, I'm not sure which. Sometimes she would set out HI MY NAME is__________ nametags and lead the way to hip literary irony by scrawling Sylvia or Simone on it and then slapping it across the front of her thrift store blouse. I always wanted, but thankfully could never summon the snotty pettiness necessary, to point out that Simone de Beauvoir wouldn't be caught dead at a party with such cheap booze and bad posturing. How ironic Emily, don't you think?!

I was leaning against going until Ellen showed up with my birthday present, a month and a half late. Lately, a new urge to forge ahead into more adult terrain had exerted itself. A year and 3 months out of college, heading into my second year of teaching English to 9th graders at a well-respected charter school, I wasn't quite ready to say goodbye to parties at the group homes of college acquaintances, but I was getting closer by the day. Ellen, however, was interested in Jake, the wry, handsome graduate assistant for the Masters Program she and Emily were enrolled in. She knew he would be there and knew good and well, as she handed me the box wrapped in orange tissue paper, that my company could be purchased fairly cheaply. The polka dot dress fit like a dream and she knew just the party for me to wear it to.

The late August air held tight to the heat and smog of the day, refusing to loosen its grip even though the sun was already rounding the far curve of the Atlantic, nudging people awake in London. Emily's windows were open and Ellen immediately spotted Jake as we climbed the front steps. The door was locked for some strange reason and when Emily finally opened it she tried to gather us both up into some awkward, sisters-in-arms embrace.
"Girls! I am so glad you made it. Tess! Love the dress. Oh listen to me! What a poet!" she trilled. Behind her the party was in full swing.
"Great skirt, Emily. Is it new?" Ellen asked and I managed to keep a straight face. Ellen isn't mean or smug, in fact she's extraordinarily kind. She notices and remembers quirks and details and reads people like childrens books--her brain moving just a little faster than everyone else's, spinning and storing, gathering and retrieving information. She is both exceedingly polite and terribly impish.

Inside we found the usual assortment of people and the new faces of friends of friends and people who randomly received the Evite. Jake saw Ellen while we rummaged through the cupboard searching for cups and he made a charmingly obvious bee-line for her. She introduced me, he asked some above par small talk questions and seemed genuinely smart and terrific, which really, given Ellen's finicky preference and her ability to detect affectation miles away, wasn't all that surprisng. Soon enough, though,they were laughing a chummy, private laugh--the sort that makes you happy for your friend and irritated that you have to go the rest of the evening alone.

Before Emily's party, my path crossed with Nick's only a few times. Those brief encounters featured short, non-conversations, of little value for extended analysis with Ellen. That night he was wearing his ratty old green Oakland A's baseball cap. He was the only person in the room wearing a hat, and under its brim he seemed both jocular and brainy. At that party, in this city, the combination seemed a rare, valuable find--as delicious as french fries and ice cream. I ate it up.

to be continued...