Parties

I never cut loose in high school, but in college I threw a lot of parties. My house was known for indoor softball games, food fights, and dancing on tables.

When I was twenty-eight, I returned to my hometown to go to grad school. My eighteen-year-old brother was still living at home and having trouble with drugs and school. I had spent the previous five years doing drug-rehabilitation work with at-risk youths, and I tried to tell my parents how to set boundaries for him, enforce rules, and be consistent, but they didn’t listen.

Despite my training, I did everything wrong with my brother: advised, scolded, reprimanded. Not surprisingly, he ignored me. Over the course of the next year, my brother got arrested and, for a separate offense, was kicked out of school, yet he continued to do drugs.

When my parents took a vacation, I suggested they get a housesitter to keep their home safe. They didn’t take my advice. The night before they came home, I got two phone messages. One was from my parents’ neighbor, explaining that she liked my brother, but if the three-day party didn’t end soon, she would have to call the police. The second was from the guy I was dating, saying he’d just been invited to a party at my parents’ address.

When I pulled up to the curb in front of the house, I saw garbage and beer cans fanned out across the lawn and the neighbors’ lawns on both sides. Inside, carpets were pulled up, chalk marked the floor, and everything was a mess.

I started swearing, crying, and yelling at my brother that he had no appreciation for everything our parents had done for him, that he walked all over the people who loved him most, and that he was ruining his life. My brother just sat there at the kitchen counter, too stoned even to take in what was happening. Later I’d be glad he couldn’t remember.

Six months after that, I moved across the country, and my brother came along for the ride. As we traveled over mountains and across the desert, we talked — or, rather, he talked, and I listened for a change. He asked me whether I’d ever used drugs and what my college years had been like. And, for the first time, I told him about my parties.

Leah L.
Berkeley, California

In sixth grade, pressured by my best friend, I go overnight from being a member of the girl-haters’ club to attending boy-girl parties with dancing and music. When the girls aren’t dancing with the boys, they can dance with each other, but the boys have no such luxury. So we have to either ask a girl to dance or stand in groups, tapping our feet and mouthing the words along with Elvis, Frankie Valli, and the Everly Brothers, afraid to sing in our cracking adolescent voices, trying to divine from the lyrics what it will take for a girl not just to dance with us, but to actually like us. 

At the party’s end, the host’s parents turn up the lights in the basement rec room, and I walk out in a daze, music ringing in my ears, the image of the girls in their party dresses on my mind. Even at home, as I lie in bed and my mother kisses me good night, I hear Paul Anka, Neil Sedaka, Lesley Gore, and the Beach Boys. I toss and turn, replaying every conversation and every dance, kicking myself for bungling the steps I’d practiced, for making the conversation starters my stepfather taught me sound so wooden.

Hours pass before the rock beat quiets in my head and the images fade and I drift into fitful sleep. Why is this so difficult? Why am I so tormented? And why does no one tell me that the others are lying in bed feeling exactly the same?

John Unger Zussman
Portola Valley, California

On Sundays when I was a teenager, my mother’s large extended family came to our house for a midday meal. As the years went by, the guest list expanded to include friends and my father’s family until my parents were feeding a crowd of twenty or so every week.

One Sunday my Great-Uncle Marco from Mexico City showed up unannounced. My grandmother’s youngest brother, he was the classic unmarried uncle who returns to tell tales of his exotic travels. He fascinated us not only with his stories, but with his constant innuendoes about sex.

At dinner, when someone made a toast, Marco downed his wine as if it were cold water and he’d just returned from a hike in the desert. Then, before anyone could react, he jumped onto the table. My brother, my sister, and I exchanged glances: what was he doing? Marco held his glass up to the other guests and made his own toast: “A veinte mujeres con cuarenta tetas!”

Not everyone at the table understood, but my brother and I certainly did, and we began smirking. Soon everyone began laughing, clinking glasses, and repeating the toast to “twenty women with forty breasts.”

I learned much later that Marco was gay, which made his saluting women and their breasts all the more provocative. I never saw him again and could not tell you any longer what he looked like, but the image of him standing on the table with his outstretched glass endures.

Nancy S.
Northampton, Massachusetts

I am albino, which means my skin and hair are paler than pale, and though I have partial vision, I’m legally blind. I grew up in a town where it seemed everyone worshiped at the same handful of churches and was white and voted Republican and wore the same clothes. I was white, but I was too white. I was an agnostic atheist, a bleeding heart, and I dressed like the grunge-rock musicians I admired. I didn’t even fit in with the delinquent kids, because my parents were too strict and my grades too good. I felt like the town freak.

Nothing emphasized my feelings of alienation like a school dance, where I’d sit at the back of the cafeteria and eat chips to numb myself. One time I tried to mingle, but a girl I’d ridden to the dance with told me to stop following her around like a puppy. I went back to the food table and tried to disappear.

Parties became more painful as I got older and developed crushes. I watched the boys I was attracted to dance with other girls, girls I would never resemble. I didn’t even know how to dance, and I hated the music the djs played. Often I just sat in a corner and tried not to cry.

Now twenty-six, I feel a little more comfortable in my pale skin, but parties still scare me. I don’t always know how to approach strangers, and I suspect they don’t know how to approach me. I’d rather drink champagne with the older women in my writing group than go to a party with people my own age. I still prefer heavy rock music to dance beats and deep intellectual conversation to small talk.

Every once in a while, though, I’ll go to a social gathering and find it bearable, even a little fun. Inside me the little girl who wants to be like everyone else battles with the rebel who says, “Fuck what everyone else thinks.” I hope someday the two sides of me can live comfortably together.

Chrys Buckley
Orcas Island, Washington

It’s the summer of 1966, and my friend Jane’s mother is having a party at her Greenwich Village town house. Jane and I are not exactly guests at the party, but I am sleeping over, and we brush shoulders with the real guests on our way to the kitchen to get ice cream. We have on miniskirts and sway when we walk, aware of how pretty we look. Some women at the party are wearing high plastic boots and dresses that are almost see-through. 

Jane’s mother is an artist. Her long blond hair is streaked with gray, and she is wearing a green caftan and drinking a cocktail one small sip at a time. Her paintings hang on the walls, including portraits of Jane and her older sister, Diane, who was born with one ear and only half a face; she has had many surgeries but still doesn’t look normal. Diane usually stays in her room on the second floor during parties, and most other times as well. I say hello to her when I pass her in the hallway, but I never stop to talk.

On the stereo Billie Holiday is singing a song called “Strange Fruit,” about black people being hung from trees. I know the world can be cruel and bad things can happen, but I feel insulated from all that. After the song ends, Mitch Ryder begins to sing “Devil with a Blue Dress On,” and guests gyrate to the music. Jane and I join in, watching our pretty, young reflections in the wide windows.

From somewhere in the house comes a hot, muffled bang, and Jane’s mother runs up to the second floor. Seconds later she shouts down, “Call the police!”

Diane has shot herself with a gun her mother kept in the closet. She is dead. The note she left says she was tired of being ignored because she wasn’t beautiful.

S.H.
New York, New York

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