EDITH PUT UP the invitations soundlessly and happily early in the morning, despite the stairs feeling somehow longer and taller, and recurring episodic flashes of the train station in hyper-color, and waking as she had today into questions of why and how. It took her most of a minute, sometimes, after gaining consciousness, to name all the objects in her room, and she did so ritually: Bed. Tongue. Lamp. Window. Fingers, lily plant, blood pressure pills, black-and-white photograph of Jenny on a bicycle.
Armed with tobacco-yellow Scotch tape and a quiet feeling of use, Edith approached each of her tenants’ doors and eagerly pressed her thumb against the aged adhesive. She had decorated the lilac envelopes with stamps she’d found in the hall closet, a space cluttered with Declan’s tools and odd minutiae that remembered her children: Jenny’s beloved watercolor set, most ovals of color now craters that revealed white plastic bottoms; a rigid wooden archery kit, the green felt pouch and birch arrows, Owen had saved up to buy.
The inkpad had sprung back to life once she’d added a little water, which pleased her disproportionately, and the designs of the rubber appeared in clear and perfect reproduction. One, dating from the early sixties, said Friends! in a bubbly font—her daughter had pressed this on letters in middle school—and another featured a heart made of curling ribbons. This she had favored on Valentine’s Day, on which she had, for years, composed a rhyming poem for Jenny and for Owen and for Declan.
She’d been so thrilled to find them that she had stamped away to excess; Friends! appeared in no discernible pattern all over the purple trappings, and the hearts, which she’d meant to form a border around the edges, ended up glomming together and resembling an overgrown vine. Inside she had stuffed the invitations, written in her once-perfect calligraphy and angling upward as they moved across the page.
A Party!
You are formally invited
to an evening of
food, dance, and play
at Edith’s
(Landlord and Friend!)
Tomorrow
At Seven O’Clock
Edward was the first to find one, having woken uncharacteristically early and pulled on ratty, de-elasticized sweatpants in which he imagined he might exercise. He frowned at the note and left it hanging askew, but the uneasy slant of it came back to him on his jog, as he panted up hills, trying to locate some version of his body that was clear and refined. He clucked his tongue as he approached his door afterward, and realized, with the astonishment of someone recovering a long-shrouded memory, he would be attending. He remembered her arms roped around his neck, and he knew.
—
PAULIE, WHO HEARD EDWARD return and popped out to greet him, was next. He adored formal invitations of any kind and quickly attached it to his refrigerator with a saxophone-shaped magnet. He fingered the two objects, looked proudly at the life they represented, and called Claudia at work: Would she come? Did she think there would be punch? How exactly was punch made anyway—with fists or what?
Adeleine and Thomas, who had slept next to each other most nights since the first, opened her envelope together. Thomas’s expression moved from heartened to concerned, still marked as he was by the sight of Edith lost in another life’s dress. Adeleine began to feel nervous at even the prospect of a social gathering and closed her eyes.
“What is it?” he asked, then felt the patronizing potential; he knew full well what it was, could guess at how long it had been since she’d spent time outside her trinket-filled seclusion. But then she looked at him with newly scavenged poise, and bit down on her cheeks in mock anguish.
“And what will the recluse wear to her first outing in months?” she asked. “Sequins? Fur? Tinfoil?” He was touched by her humorous handling of her condition, and felt a small hope bob in his throat: if she could laugh about it, maybe the task of wrangling it was possible, and near.