Page 21 of The Last Book Party

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 fromPride 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 ofGourmetmagazine, paperback legal thrillers left by houseguests over the years, books my brother and I had read as kids, and volumes mymother wanted to keep but that didn’t fit the ocean, beach, and fishing themes of the books on the shelves in the living room.

I pulled out the copy ofThe Secret of the Old Clockand imagined myself in a poodle skirt as Nancy Drew, but I didn’t have the titian hair or the gumption. The more fitting choice for me would be Bess, Nancy’s timid and slightly plump sidekick, but where was the fun in that? I ran my finger over the spines of tattered old copies ofRebeccaandThe Secret GardenandSweet Savage Love, one of a series of bodice rippers I had devoured the summer I was fourteen.

It was hard enough figuring out how to look one’s best for a party, let alone choose some alter ego. Wasn’t costume selection a window into the soul, a clue to a person’s fantasy self? What else to make of those girls at costume parties at Brown who jumped at the chance to wear skimpyI Dream of Jeannieoutfits and the frat guys who dressed as devils just to hold a whip?

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