A Red-Letter Day for Lydia

Ch. 6 of An Evening With God

It looked as though it might be a red-letter day for Lydia. In her Famous People’s Birthdays book, she discovered that it was the birthday of a bumper crop of celebrities, actors, a comedian, two athletes even she, who had no interest in sports, had heard of, a doctor who’d discovered a disease she hadn’t heard of, but a lot of readers might have, and a singer. Several of them were deceased, but she never let that slow her down, except when she was in the mood to append the acronym RIP to her customary Happy Birthday [Whoever]. That would keep her busy for the better part of a very enjoyable hour, without her having even opened . Today in Radio and TV History. She actually clapped her hands with delight on noting that it was one of her favorite sitcoms and a game show Mama used to enjoy watching while doing the ironing had made their debuts on this date, the game show three years before the sitcom.

She couldn’t decide if she should remind her readers of the anniversary of the cancellation of a Western series she now remembered her uncle Leo to have loved, and got up from her ancient Dell laptop to ponder the question while using the restroom. In the end, she decided that the people had the right to know, even though it might sadden some of them. And then, of course, she decided that she was in the business of informing and entertaining her readers, rather than depressing them, and that she wouldn’t note the date of the Western series’ demise after all.

It was impossible to know exactly how many readers she had. She did appreciate that she wasn’t exactly setting the Internet on fire, as that large-breasted young beauty who sang and played the guitar on YouTube did, with none of her videos having been viewed fewer than 4 million times. Lydia’s birthday greetings and anniversary announcements commonly received between eight and a dozen “likes”, depending on the celebrity’s fame.

It was something to do — something to keep her mind off having lost her job as a data input specialist at Rex “Tubby” Millar Insurance after 41 years of loyal service. She was 19 when her typing skills got her the job. Three girls had vied — Lydia loved that word! — for the position, and Lydia, whose best subject at Lehmann High had been typing, had been second fastest and most accurate, so accurate, in fact, that Mr. Millar wondered if she’d employed some sort of trickery. Of course she had not, as she’d been brought up, half a mile from Millar Insurance’s tiny office, to believe that honesty was the best policy by far.

At first, Mr. Millar had been called Tubby for the same reason that enormous men are sometimes called Tiny, because it amuses their buddies to pretend that they’re the opposites of themselves.The funny thing was that Mr. Millar — Lydia had just never felt comfortable addressing him by his first name, though in 1991 he’d invited her to — had grown into his nickname. At the time, his drinking and bowling buddies Chuck and Earle had started calling him Tubby he was so skinny as almost to disappear from view if he turned sideways. But as the years went by, he limited his exercise to shooting balled-up documents into Lydia’s waste basket the width of the office away, and simultaneously ceasing to eat anything other than deep-fried, highly caloric fast food. At 5-9, he weighed over 260 pounds. Lydia had seen his driver’s license.

Lydia secretly loved him anyway. She’d loved him when, as his buddy Chuck liked to say, he was as emaciated “as a goddamned Somalian,” and continued to love him when getting into his desk chair took some doing because he’d become too big for it. But the closest Mr. Millar had come to showing an interest in her was inviting him to be his date at a competing insurance broker’s Christmas party in 1989. Lydia had gone to the beauty salon for the third time in her life to try to make him proud, and bought a dress that cost her more than any she’d owned before or since. And the minute they got to the party, Mr. Millar devoted himself to trying to seduce the competing broker’s secretary, not saying a single word to Lydia between the moment of their arrival and that at which she slipped out of the party unnoticed, and had to spend $14 on a taxicab home because she couldn’t walk in the high heels she’d bought for the occasion.

Mr. Millar bought computers for himself and Lydia. He stopped introducing her to prospective customers who visited the office as representing the gold standard in typing accuracy. She had some health issues only she and her doctor knew about. She liked neither to complain nor for anyone to know her personal business.

The office became crowded when Mr. Millar hired a summer intern, Becca, who was pursuing an associate’s degree in business at Community College. There wasn’t that much for Becca to do except observe admiringly while Mr. Millar, with his feet up on his desk, called clients to try to persuade them to buy additional coverage.

Such calls had always been low-key in the past, at least until they concluded. Once having hung up, Mr. Millar would grumble at length about the stupidity and stubbornness of those he’d been unable to persuade. Sometimes, if it was an afternoon call, and he’d had a couple of martinis or margaritas at lunchtime, his language would get so spicy that Lydia would pretend to need to visit the building’s drafty ladies’ room.

Once Becca came aboard, as Mr. Millar put it, things changed dramatically. Mr. Millar would put his size-13 feet up on his desk, lean so far back in his chair as almost to reach Lydia’s corner, where she had her computer and her little framed photos of her cat, Mr. Fluff, and of her niece Talia. Mr. Millar would be a lot more jovial than before Becca had joined the firm, apparently for Becca’s benefit, but didn’t seem to be much more persuasive than when he was lower-key and his feet were on the floor.

Lydia was of course very jealous of Becca, who she didn’t think was all that pretty, and who she thought might be bulimic or anorexic or one of those things that made someone too skinny, but to see Mr. Millar show off for her, you’d have thought she was that Farrah Fawcett poster Lydia’s brother had had in his bedroom back in the last ‘70s come to life. Lydia was extremely relieved to learn that Becca was engaged to be married, and got a lot friendlier with her.

They even had lunch together one day, at Subway. Lydia insisted on paying. When Becca revealed that she thought Mr. Millar’s showing off obnoxiously obvious, Lydia wished she’d accepted Becca’s offer to go dutch.

She considered telling on Becca, but remembered how cruel all her classmates had been to her when, at nine, she told on the two boys who’d decided it was more fun to torment her than to play ball after they’d finished their lunches, and who got in the habit of stealing Lydia’s lunch when they discovered that Mama made her delicious sandwiches on bread she baked herself, rather than the one slice of Oscar Meyer lunchmeat between two slices of Wonder bread variety most of the kids brought in their own little brown sacks. And of course Mr. Millar’s feelings would be terribly hurt.

Lydia wasn’t heartbroken when the fall quarter at Community College began and Becca resumed being a full time student, but for about 10 days, Mr. Millar looked like a little boy whose dog had been run over.

There’d been a time, when Sofia was a pre-teen, that Lydia felt closer to her than anyone else in the world. As an attorney clawing her way to partnership in a big corporate law firm, Lydia’s elder sister Claudia had neither the time nor the energy for her daughter that Lydia did, and Lydia, though she’d never have admitted it, thought of herself as more Sofia’s mom than Claudia was. She spent at least three times as much money on Sofia than on herself, and took pride in Sofia being voted the best dressed girl in her fifth grade class. But then Sofia reached adolescence, and her and Lydia’s relationship went south — far, far south, to the tune of Sofia’s being terribly embarrassed to be seen with Lydia, and having a thousand reasons why she couldn’t accept Lydia’s various invitations.

One night Lydia admitted her disappointment about not being able to see Sofia the next day, a Saturday, and Sofia snarled, “Hey, you’re not my mom, OK? Get over it!” It felt like the worst thing that had happened to Lydia since Mr. Millar had ditched her at the Christmas party. But it got worse. After Claudia lost her battle, as everyone seemed to like to put it, with breast cancer, Sofia moved out of state with her dad, who’d shown very little interest in her after divorcing Claudia when Sofia was four.

It wasn’t as though Lydia hadn’t many times tried to make friends her own age, but it never seemed to work. After the heartbreak of the Christmas party, she enrolled in two night classes at Community, Spanish (because she was the granddaughter of Sicilian immigrants, and the two languages were kind of similar) and accounting. The latter proved a terrible mistake, as Lydia had always been terrified by and awful at math, and math turned out to be what accounting was all about.

The sole fellow student in Italian she mustered the courage to speak to turned out to be one of the boys who’d stolen her lunch and tormented her at nine. Karl. She didn’t mention how awful he’d been to her, but only that they’d been classmates. He remembered their school, but not Lydia. He wasn’t bad-looking, and co-owned an auto body shop for several years, but had a gambling problem, and lost his business, and his marriage, six years before. The meetings he attended with fellow gambling addicts had kept him on the straight and narrow.

“I didn’t know there were meetings for gambling addicts too,” Lydia said, when they met for coffee (herbal tea in her case) one evening before class. “I thought they were just for alcoholics.”

“Well, duh,” he said, sneering exactly as he had when relieving her of her lunch a million years before. “They’ve got meetings for everything under the sun now.” He made a point of not sitting beside her in class, and explained that he didn’t like anybody else knowing his business.

Two weeks before the course ended, though, he asked her out. There was a new installment in the Fast and Furious saga playing at the cineplex in the big mall.

“I love action shit,” he said. “Do you?” She affirmed that she did, though in fact she did not, at all. She bought some mascara for the occasion, and it made her so pretty that she took a selfie to send Sofia, but then Karl didn’t show up, and didn’t call. When she asked him about it after Italian on Thursday night, he said, “You know what? I forgot all about it, and I got something I have to get to.” Her feeling was that he didn’t want any of their classmates to observe them talking to each other.

He showed up at her house reeking of beer and sneering a few nights later. She of course was wearing no mascara. She always kept her door chained when she opened it because she didn’t have one of those peepholes through which she could see who’d rung the doorbell. Karl was furious about being unable to push his way in, as he wanted to have intercourse with her. She didn’t want to have it with someone who reeked of beer and had broken her heart, though, and refused to let him in. He called her some awful names, and then tried some petulant whining, but she held firm. He told her to [have sex with] herself, and stormed off, and she didn’t stop crying for 20 minutes.

She’d never had intercourse, and Sofia never acknowledged the mascara selfie.

For her sixtieth birthday, Mr. Millar took Lydia to lunch, at one of those Japanese places where the chefs throw their ingredients and knives up in the air a lot, and cook to order on a grill while diners marvel at their showmanship. It was by far the most exotic place Lydia had ever eaten. She still fit into the dress she’d bought for the Christmas party years before —indeed, it needed taking in — and still had the mascara she’d bought to go out with Karl. She ‘d barely spoken to Sofia in four years, and didn’t take a selfie, though she couldn’t remember ever having made herself as glamorous. Sofia hadn’t answered any of the last nine letters Lydia had written her. Mr. Millar had suggested Lydia get a cell phone and send her niece a text message, but after 18 years, Lydia still wasn’t entirely comfortable with her computer, and felt too old to accept another technological challenge.

Mr. Millar, on the other hand, lived through his cell phone, and at the Japanese restaurant barely spoke to the birthday girl. He was preoccupied with reading and sending text messages of his own. He had two martinis, and excused himself three times to go talk on his phone in private, leaving Lydia to suffer awful self-consciousness. Everyone around her seemed so young and attractive and self-assured. Was that a much-older Becca over there? Still plain, but with a good-looking young man — not Brad Pitt in his early 30s, certainly, but a lot better-looking than someone like Becca deserved. And would Mr. Millar ever return from his phone call? The chef had finished the Hibachi Steak Mr. Millar had ordered, and was placing it before where Mr. Millar was supposed to be. It would get cold!

The chef frowned in confusion as Lydia got up just as he placed her Hibachi Chicken before her. She dashed through the restaurant looking for Mr. Millar and finally found him right outside the front entrance, flirting up a storm with a fellow smoker as they both vaped. Would he hate her for telling him his lunch had just been served? Or would he hate her more — and wonder how he could have employed someone with so little initiative for so long — if she didn’t warn him his steak was getting cold?

She returned to her seat, and began eating her chicken more slowly than any fowl had ever been eaten. The chef, noting Mr. Millar’s ongoing absence, put his steak back on the grill’s edge, where Lydia supposed it might be less likely to be overcooked. Even at the glacial pace with which she picked at her lunch, she was halfway through it before Mr. Millar returned, grinning like the cat who’d eaten the canary, or an obese middle-aged man who’d just talked a woman out of her phone number.

He wasn’t one of the great apologizers, and didn’t say sorry. The chef gave him his steak. He cut into it, shook his head, and asked Lydia, so that the chef could hear, “Did I not say medium rare? And look what they serve me!”

Five weeks later, Mr. Millar fired her, though he denied he was doing so. The way he saw it, he was opening the door to Lydia’s golden years for her. For her decades of service, he gave her a $200 bonus, s $100 coupon book redeemable at any Kmart, and a 30-day free pass to the cineplex in the big mall, which would expire in 11 days, and the advice that she start getting her Social Security as soon as she became eligible, rather than waiting until age 66 to start collecting larger monthly payments. “You never know what’s going to happen,” he said, in the airy, self-assured baritone he used when he was trying to make his clients think he really knew his stuff. “I’ve seen too many people defer their payments and then kick the bucket before they’re eligible for the slightly bigger bucks.”

Her replacement, to her astonishment — not! — was a young woman with a horsey face but notably large breasts who’d recently attained her AA at Community. Mr. Millar seemed to think Lydia would be flattered by his asking her to train the new “girl”, Antoinette, who didn’t impress Lydia as one of the great minds of her generation. Lydia showed her how to turn on her computer, which was approximately Antoinette’s age, and then said, “You type just as usual, but instead of pushing that lever to the left for a carriage return, as you would on a typewriter, you hit the button that says RETURN on your keyboard. And of course if Mr. Millar wants coffee or something mailed, or a package picked up, you do that. And now you’re fully trained.”

“What’s a typewriter?” Antoinette said. She didn’t seem to be kidding.

Lydia’s first few weeks of unemployment were just awful. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Fluff’s companionship, she wouldn’t have made it. Sometimes three days at a time went by without her speaking to anyone but him. She cursed herself for not having any friends, and not having cultivated relationships with her few relatives. She cursed Claudia for having died, and Sofia for having come to find her an embarrassment. She resolved every day that she would go to the grocery store, for instance, and strike up a conversation with a stranger, as a psychologist on an afternoon TV talk show she took seriously had urged shy people to make themselves do.

It didn’t go well. The first time, she was determined to approach a man, because doing so was much more of a challenge, and she did — a guy of maybe 80 in a mobility scooter. The conversation didn’t exactly flow.

LYDIA I see you’re buying pasta. I love pasta myself. Do you have a favorite recipe?

MALE STRANGER What’s that again?

LYDIA Do you have a favorite pasta recipe, like for the sauce? Or a favorite shape. It comes in so many shapes these days!

MALE STRANGER Can’t hear a word you’re saying. Or are you just mouthing the words? Maybe you’re one of those smart alecs?

LYDIA My own favorite is linguine. Do you know that means little tongues?

MALE STRANGER Get the hell away from me, you. You think you’re funny or something? Is that it?

LYDIA Have a nice day.

As awful as that was, it gave Lydia an idea. She’d been brought up to believe that every good deed got you a little bit closer to heaven. She had a lot of time on her hands now, and she could use a portion of it each day going to one of those old folks’ places — a convalescent hospital or rest home or whatever — and read to the patients. Or maybe this was a better idea. She’d volunteer to read stories to hospitalized children. Oh, how wonderful that would be!

She phoned the city’s two local hospitals and was told by both that they had large backlogs of volunteer story-readers. They certainly appreciated Lydia’s interest but didn’t imagine themselves taking her up on her kind offer for 18 months in one case and probably at least two years in the other.

All right, then. Old folks. She got phone numbers out of an ancient edition of the Yellow Pages. She’d hoped to get more current information, but the phone company advised that it no longer published the Yellow Pages. The Internet had made it obsolete. Well, not for someone like Lydia, who didn’t have a home computer, it didn’t!

When she went over to the Golden Years Convalescent Hospital to read, the staff wasn’t at all friendly. Everyone, from the woman who oversaw the place, to the nurses and custodians, made her feel that she was keeping them from getting their work done. The overseer finally agreed to walk her into the place’s lounge, where the prospective beneficiaries of Lydia’s altruism would be between meals. Five of the seven patients there were asleep. One was awake, but apparently in a world she alone could see, in the distance, and muttering unintelligibly. The seventh was a guy who didn’t want anyone to read to him, but wanted to tell Lydia in detail about what an implacable swordsman he’d been, sword meaning male procreative member. He could have been 150 years old and Lydia still would have uncomfortable with such talk.

Back to the drawing board.

She returned to the supermarket, intent on starting a conversation with a stranger. It would be easier this time. The record showed she’d done her best with a male. She went to the produce section. She’d read that supermarkets typically were designed to make the shoppers enter through the produce section because the aroma of fresh produce had been found to make them more inclined to spend money. There were a couple of women in the produce section, but Lydia’s innate shyness had kicked in. She told herself she just needed a minute to work up her courage, and paused at the avocados. A voice behind her said, “Any ripe ones, or just hard green rocks?”

It was a woman not ashamed of her frizzy grey hair, in a poncho, but no makeup. What did they call such women? Earth mothers. She looked like she’d read Tarot cards and ask your sign and drink herbal tea. A former hippie. That sort of person. And she was performing the very important service of breaking the ice. All Lydia had to do was respond. She took a deep breath, smiled, and said, “They’re so fickle, avocados.”

“Tell me about it,” her new friend said, squeezing one. “Too hard one minute, and over-ripe 10 minutes later.”

Oh, God. Where to go next? Panicking, desperate to keep the newborn conversation breathing, but not at all sure how, Lydia blurted, “Do you have a favorite pasta shape, or a favorite sauce?”

“So we’re free-associating now?” her new friend said, her eyes twinkling with amusement, and then, without missing another beat, she said, “Putanesca. And fusilli. Or maybe it’s just that I really like the word fusilli.”

Look at Lydia go! Shet was having a pleasant conversation with a new friend. Lydia! And her own next contribution to the dialogue popped out of her without much deliberation. “I don’t know what putanesca is. I like bolognese.”

“It’s kind of cool, I think,” New Friend said, seemingly pleased to be chatting with Lydia. “Puttana" means "whore" or “prostitute”. The sauce was supposedly invented in a bordello in Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli. What a place, Naples! Ever been?”

It took Lydia a minute to recover from her friend’s saying “whore” so casually. She’d been to three of the 50 states in her lifetime, Connecticut, where she’d been born and always lived, Massachusetts, and New York, and no foreign countries, unless you counted Canada. “No,” she said, hoping her new friend wouldn’t think of her a stick in the mud, “but I’d sure like to.” She wasn’t sure she’d even heard of Naples.

“I like you,” New Friend said, a great deal more directly than Lydia was accustomed to. “Why don’t we have a cup of coffee after shopping?”

Lydia somehow managed not to faint with pleasure and excitement, but wouldn’t have been able to explain how.

Her new friend’s name was Daphne, and more fun to talk to than anyone in Lydia’s life had ever been. She didn’t just talk, but listened too, and seemed genuinely interested in what Lydia had to say. When had that ever happened before? By their third weekly meeting at Big Y for coffee after grocery shopping, Lydia had revealed herself as she’d never revealed herself before, recounting how Mr. Millar had broken her heart, admitting to never having had intercourse, admitting too to aching for a relationship with a gentleman.

Daphne made an incredible statement — that the situation was easily rectified, thanks to the Internet. There were a million sites and apps on which a lonely person could reach out to others in the same boat. Lydia would need to get on line, of course, but it so happened that Lydia had an old Android pad that she hadn’t used since getting her IPad, and Lydia could have it. For Lydia, words and phrases like “Android pad” and “iPad” may as well have been in Swahili, but it Daphne, delighted by her innocence, was happy to demystify them, and promised to help Lydia get started. Was there a happier, more grateful 62-year-old on the face of the earth than Lydia?

Daphne helped with every phase of Lydia’s joining the digital dating revolution. She composed Lydia’s profile. She took a photograph of Lydia with her cell phone, and then used an app to make Lydia look 40 years old, and freshly returned from an afternoon with a professional makeup artist. Lydia burst into tears when she saw it. “I’m not a tenth that pretty,” she fretted, to which Daphne replied, “Neither is anyone else on the dating sites. Nobody’s going to expect you to look very much like your profile pic. And you really do have lovely bones.” Was that the sweetest thing anyone had ever told Lydia? If not, it was certainly in the Top 5.

Young at heart. The calendar says I’m 52, but I barely feel half that. I like cats and movies and cats and books and Japanese food and cats, and am looking for a mature, responsible, decent guy who likes dogs. No, just kidding! Who shares my love of cats. One who wants to make up for a lot of foreign vacations not taken would suit me perfectly!

Japanese food! The source of that was Lydia’s recounting the disastrous birthday lunch with Mr. Millar. It was the only Japanese food she’d ever eaten, and she hadn’t really liked it that much, though that might have owed to Mr. Millar being such a so-and-so that afternoon. She couldn’t remember the last book she’d read. On the other hand, she was crazy about Mr. Fluff, and did indeed want to travel. Everyone shaved 10 years off — everyone!

The whole thing was thrilling — terrifying, of course, but also exhilarating.

Within 24 hours, Lydia received seven responses to her various ads. Daphne brought over a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Lydia couldn’t remember ever having tasted champagne, and three sips made her giddy. She felt around 13.

After extensive deliberation and a great, great deal of giggling, they discarded four of Lydia’s prospective suitors, three on the basis of spectacularly awful grammar and spelling, and one on the basis of his enthusiasm for the former president who’d made Lydia’s flesh crawl. She realized with enormous amusement that another response, accompanied by a photo that made its sender look as much like Mr. Millar as Lydia looked like Kim Kardashian, was actually from Mr. Millar. Lydia guessed that the infernal Antoinette, her replacement, had written it for him.

The respondent she was most attracted to was a middle school teacher, Aaron. She thought the two a’s really cool, but then was embarrassed when Daphne told her Aaron, Moses’ big brother in the Bible, was traditionally spelled that way. She seemed to feel terrible about having hurt Lydia’s feelings, which made Lydia feel terrible about having caused her new friend discomfort.

Lydia liked that Aaron was a high school PE and drivers ed teacher, though she’d have been even happier without the first part. She’d hated PE, which had seemed as though designed to humiliate shy, meek, ill-coordinated girls like her, but drivers ed had been one of her favorite subjects. She’d taken the test for her driver’s license three times, and each time scored 100 percent on the written part, failed the actual driving test, and been a lifetime bus-rider.

She didn’t mind in the slightest that Aaron wasn’t very good looking. He was balding, and had a double chin a lot like Mr. Millar’s. He was 62, and liked Chinese and Mexican food. His favorite color was red. It was Lydia’s too! His favorite TV program was Monday Night Football. Lydia dared to imagine herself bringing bowls of popcorn out to him as he enjoyed the game. Until giving up on the idea of ever having a man, she’d fantasized with great pleasure about spoiling her husband or even boyfriend rotten, happily fulfilling all the roles feminist types hated women being expected to assume. In his response to Lydia’s ad, Aaron had written, ‘I’m no ‘male chauvinist pig’ LOL, but my preference would be for a girl who enjoys taking care of her fellow.”

Daphne was surprised by Lydia’s choice, but didn’t give Lydia a hard time about it. She helped Lydia compose her response to Aaron’s response, on the condition that Lydia promise not to send it until Thursday night. Appearing over-eager was the worst thing a girl could do.

Dear Aaron: Thanks for your nice note. I’m sorry to have taken so long to get back to you, but you have to understand that I got so many responses I thought I’d never find the time to respond to them all. [“Don’t ever ever ever let a man think he isn’t getting the better end of the bargain,” Daphne advised.] My intuition is that we might enjoy each other’s company. Maybe we could meet for coffee at our mutual convenience.

“No matter where and when he suggests,” Daphne said, “tell him you’re busy. Don’t tell him what you’re busy with. Let him imagine the worst — that you’ve got a date with someone younger and handsomer, with a nicer car, and a sixpack, and money.” She had to explain that she didn’t mean a six-pack as in beer, but as in abdominal muscles.

Lydia had thought it important to mention that she’d loved driver’s ed, but Daphne vetoed the idea. “It sounds like you’re trying to sell him on the idea of meeting. He’s the one who has to do the selling.” That made Lydia guffaw in a combination of embarrassment and delight, as she tried to imagine a man making an effort to attract her. No such thing had ever happened.

She waited until Friday night to send her response, as Daphne had told her she must. It was almost impossible to keep from clicking the little SEND button, but a combination of her own shyness and Daphne’s calling every afternoon to say, “If you send it, I’m going to wring your neck,” did the trick.

She finally sent it, and had obviously waited too long. Aaron had obviously found somebody else. What an idiot Lydia had been to imagine he wouldn’t! Instead of apologizing, Daphne insisted that Lydia be patient. “You’ve waited 62 years,” she said. “You can probably manage 62 more hours before you go into a frenzy of depression.”

What an eye-opener. Lydia would never have told anyone she was depressed. Wasn’t depressed when you were generally happy, but then felt really hopeless? The dull ache that was her default setting had never changed.

All of Saturday her familiar was a little less dull than usual, as there was no word from Aaron, and she shouldn’t disturb Daphne, who was babysitting her two grandchildren for her son and his wife. Sunday was even worse. Lydia cried a great deal, and thought about calling Daphne and demanding to know why Daphne had dangled the possibility of happiness in front of her.

It was on the Monday after the Friday she replied to Aaron that Lydia had the idea of commemorating historic events and famous people’s birthdays on Facebook, which she’d joined at Daphne’s insistence. She started off modestly, noting the 71st birthday of a British actor who’d been in a period drama on PBS, and the anniversary of the first appearance of another actor, who went on to become a regular, on a sitcom she’d heard of but never watched. When she saw, three hours after the fact, that a perfect stranger had LIKE’d the birthday message, and commented, “I loved that show they don’t make them that good any more,” it made her so happy she nearly forgot about Aaron.

Which may have been the trick, because 15 minutes later she checked her inbox on the dating site for the millionth time since she’d sent her message, and lo and behold, Aaron had finally responded — positively! He loved Italian food, and wondered if maybe they could go dutch to Olive Garden. And here the most Lydia had hoped for was a coffee meeting.

Out came her Christmas party dress again, and the mascara. Over came Daphne, to help with her makeup, and to keep saying, “Oh, shut up,” with a smile and an encouraging shoulder squeeze every time Lydia wailed or gasped, “I can’t go through with it. Please don’t make me!”

Daphne drove her to the restaurant and said she’d wait for Lydia. Lydia said she couldn’t go through with it, and Daphne, expecting a long (with any luck) wait, took out the earbuds through which she intended to enjoy the audiobook she’d downloaded that afternoon. Lydia begged her to enter the restaurant with her. Daphne pretended already to be fascinated by her book, and said only, “Nope. Not a chance.”

Lydia told the restaurant’s hostess that she was there to meet a gentleman and the hostess smiled brightly and said, “Aaron, I’ll bet.” Lydia nearly fainted. Following the hostess to where Aaron was seated, with his back to them, Lydia was pretty sure the thunderous beating of her heart would crack other diners’ plates.

“Have a nice meal,” the hostess said, brightly again, leaving Lydia to try to understand what was going on. The guy looking at her confusion as he slid out of the booth wasn’t the guy whose photo she’d seen. This guy was probably 25 years younger, and much better looking, and saying something to her, not delightedly.

He repeated himself. “You’re Lydia?” It sounded almost as much an accusation as a question. Lydia’s mouth was too dry for her to answer. “I guess you must be,” he said, offering her his hand to shake, and what a sexy, warm hand it was.

“Well, uh, have a seat, I guess,” he said. Lydia slid into the booth. “I’ve got to admit I’m surprised,” he said. “You don’t look very much at all like your profile picture.

“Are you likely to speak to me at some point?”

That didn’t sound playful, but rather annoyed. Lydia cleared her throat, and then cleared it again, and something came out of her mouth, faintly. “Neither do you.”

“What’s that?”

“Neither do you. Look like your profile pic. You’re much younger.” She wanted to say, “…and cuter,” but the words wouldn’t come out.

He sighed and shook his head. “I know,” he said. “My idea was that it would be good if I looked a lot better than someone was expecting. That pic is of my dad a few years ago. While we’re on that subject, who was your pic of?”

How was she going to keep from bursting into tears? “It was me,” she said. “My friend, Daphne, has this app thing on her phone. I didn’t ask her to do it. She said everybody does it. She said everybody subtracts 10 years from their real age.”

“Oh, does she?” he said. “Well, I actually added seven years to my age.”

She wasn’t going to burst into tears. She wasn’t going to burst into tears. She wasn’t going to burst into tears. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “Daphne made me do it.” And now, having tattled on her best friend, she felt even worse. And it wasn’t doing a bit of good.”

Aaron shook his head again. Their conversation was over. He reached for his menu, and read it as though it were a notice evicting him from his home.

“I’m sorry,” Lydia said, making a half-hearted attempt to get a hand on her own menu. “I’m really, really sorry. I’m 62. This is what I look like.”

“You know what,” Aaron said, putting his menu down. “No. No, as in I understand that the gentlemanly thing would be for me to stay and pretend you haven’t pissed me off big time, but you don’t deserve it. You were deceptive. False advertising. I’d say it was nice meeting you, but it hasn’t been.”

He slid out of the booth again, had enough of a change of heart to mutter, “Sorry,” wrestled with himself for a minute, and then left Lydia there, breathless with shame.

She grabbed the menu. No one had ever read it with greater concentration, and less comprehension. It all looked to her as though in a foreign language. She got to the last of the desserts, and went right back to the appetizers, over and over. And over. A bright young woman with many teeth came over and introduced herself. “How you doing? I’m Galen, and it will be my pleasure to serve you tonight. You need a few more minutes?”

Lydia just stared at her, not having understood a single word. What was a Galen? And who was this toothy young woman frowning at her in…what — confusion? Repulsion? Anger? Where was the one who’d gotten Lydia into this mess, the one with the wild hair? And why was her heart beating like 100 taiko drums in unison again? And who had made it so hot in the dining room, and so hard to breathe?

Those were the last things Lydia remembered of what Daphne said had looked like a Category 3 panic attack. Out in the parking lot, Daphne had seen a lone guy exiting the restaurant breathing fire, and had guessed he must be Aaron. She’d hurried into the restaurant, and found Lydia sobbing uncontrollably under the table at which she’d been seated, gasping for breath, trembling. She’d given her a Xanax and driven her home, Lydia curled into a whimpering ball in the back seat.

Daphne nursed her back to health, with the help of a psychotherapist friend who diagnosed Lydia as suffering from PTSD, and scolded Daphne for having tried to push Lydia too far, too fast. After a week and a half, Lydia was able to feed and bathe herself, and Daphne secured her shrink friend’s blessing to return Lydia to her own apartment, overlooking the small Dollar Store parking lot on Elysium Street. At her shrink friend’s urging, Daphne didn’t invoke the folk wisdom of needing to get back as quickly as possible on a horse that’s thrown you.

Lydia found solace on Facebook. She began sending friend requests to perfect strangers who’d posted photos of their own cats, or of puppies, or of delicious-looking meals they’d cooked or been served at restaurants. Whenever a new person accepted her friend request, she glowed with delight. She would commonly lift the not-always-amenable Mr. Fluff onto her lap and show him her new friend. “Can you just imagine,” she would say to Mr. Fluff as they looked at a casserole someone had made, “how yummy that is?” Not a month after her horrible experience at Olive Garden, she had 23 friends.

In time, she worked up the courage to comment on her friends’ posts, and was always encouraging. Someone would post a photo of her flower garden, and Lydia would comment, “Beautiful!!!”, attaching three emojis suggesting delight. It felt wonderful to give others encouragement, and one of her new friends, Sally W— in Austin, Minnesota, sent her a personal message. “You seem such a lovely person.” That made Lydia’s month.

She branched out. Daphne had shown her how to photograph old photos with her cell phone, and post them on Facebook. Lydia spent a very enjoyable afternoon shooting the contents of her photo album. When she posted a photo of herself, with her family, at 14, one of her new friends commented, “So pretty!” and it was just as gratifying as Sally W—’s earlier remark. Then Lydia posted her parents’ wedding photo — she’d never realized how young they’d been when they “tied the knot”! — and yet another new friend wrote, “Well, I can see where you got your good looks.” That was her best comment yet, and maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever said to her.

On the day in Marcht she had a cold, and was too sniffly and sneezy to wish any celebrities a happy birthday, or to inform her readers of the important things that had happened on that date. Not just one, but three of her friends remarked on her silence on her timeline. She couldn’t recall anybody having missed her before.

But the best was yet to come. After having only gal friends the whole time she’d been on Facebook, she got a friend request from a guy, Jed Hovah. There were no photos of him — his cover photo was that famous Michelangelo painting of God and Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or whatever — but he had the maximum number of friends that Facebook allowed, 5000. Lydia wrote him a message regarding his friend request. “I’d love to be friends with you Jed,” and then, because she remembered Daphne’s tip about not trying too hard, she changed love to like, and added, “Cool name!” She hoped she was using “cool” correctly.

Not 15 minutes later, Jed had responded to her response. “People call me by lots of names. You can call me whatever you like. You can even call me Al! You’ve suffered enough loneliness and frustration for 10 people, and somehow not been embittered. That impresses me. Things are going to change for you soon, in a way I’m pretty sure you’re going to like. Keep the faith.”

Lydia had the feeling he meant well, but was still a little intimidated by the idea of anything changing. She related the whole thing to Daphne, who just laughed and said, “Another social media crackpot, it sounds like. Don’t stress about it, hon.” But not 12 hours later, there was a knock on Lydia’s front door. She looked through her little peephole and thought she must be hallucinating. Could it really be Aaron from Olive Garden, holding a bouquet?

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