Grown up parties are different. Shattered glass is promptly vacuummed. Creative directors arrive hurriedly, planting down Red Stripe and the day’s events. Heels, candy-coated almonds, sloshing wine. It’s exactly as I imagined when I was seven; the expensive liquid everyone is drinking is a right of passage, people get louder and happier with each bitter sip, and conversations about work remain work.
In a word: weird. This is how parties, real parties, adult parties, are. I think, inexplicably, of lipstick and sake. My mother and father at thirty. The eighties. Our green Buick and going to bed early on Thanksgiving. When Vicky and I sat on the carpeted stairs and watched them all from in between the rails, our family and their friends, their increasing crescendo, politics, topics that they said they’d “tell us when we were older”, precious and forbidden things like scotch and tobacco and jokes that didn’t seem to us to be funny in the slightest.
And then the birthday girl does a backwards somersault, narrowly missing the puppy’s “wee-wee” pad. And people start eating cake with their hands. And I am very glad that we’re not quite there and we don’t refer to anything tonight as the year it might be ushering in: the year we figure anything out.
We talk about home and we only miss it for the moment. The breeze comes in over the terrace and we can do whatever we want without reason.
And what I want, today in the heat of Friday, is just this.
In a word: weird. This is how parties, real parties, adult parties, are. I think, inexplicably, of lipstick and sake. My mother and father at thirty. The eighties. Our green Buick and going to bed early on Thanksgiving. When Vicky and I sat on the carpeted stairs and watched them all from in between the rails, our family and their friends, their increasing crescendo, politics, topics that they said they’d “tell us when we were older”, precious and forbidden things like scotch and tobacco and jokes that didn’t seem to us to be funny in the slightest.
And then the birthday girl does a backwards somersault, narrowly missing the puppy’s “wee-wee” pad. And people start eating cake with their hands. And I am very glad that we’re not quite there and we don’t refer to anything tonight as the year it might be ushering in: the year we figure anything out.
We talk about home and we only miss it for the moment. The breeze comes in over the terrace and we can do whatever we want without reason.
And what I want, today in the heat of Friday, is just this.
4 comments:
This is more of your pretty writing. I like it when you do the pretty writing.
I liked this. You're right... adult parties are exactly what they seemed they would be. Dull. Superficial.
That link at the end... lord. Had to watch it twice.
I've yet to experience a real grown-up party. I mean, dont get me wrong, I've been to plenty of parties with grown-ups, but for some reason, they dont appear very grown-up to me, what with their running around, shreiking laughter, and playing games of "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Maybe I'm just hanging with the wrong crowd.
Yeah, I've never been to a grown up party, either. They don't sound like very much fun. But in NYC, even the older folks become immature if they've had enough wine.
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