“The Woman at the Party,” by Rachel Howard (Fiction ’09)

“The Woman at the Party,” a short story by 2009 fiction alum Rachel Howard, was recently featured in StoryQuarterly. Read an excerpt below:

The Woman at the Party

Julia doesn’t remember the woman at the party, except that the woman was middle-aged (Julia would have thought: old), silk-shirted and pearl-necklaced (Julia would have thought: dowdy), and Julia remembers her gaze, because it was a puzzle. She couldn’t tell how much of the disapproval from the woman at the party was aimed at her (the very young woman at the party), and how much was aimed at him (the white-haired man at the party, who liked to muse, “You think I’m an old man,” as they lay naked Saturday mornings in his enormous white bed). Julia was twenty-two the night of the party. Twenty-two and wearing the lavender angora sweater the white-haired man had bought her, the slacks, the black heeled boots—the ensemble she had recently twirled in to the applause of the receptionist in the offices of the newspaper that did not pay her enough to move out of her mother’s bedroom, in the tourist town where Julia had just graduated college, an hour up the freeway from the party. An outfit Julia never forgot over the decades to come, because the receptionist cooed, “Oooh girl, looks like you’ve got yourself a sugar daddy!” and Julia stopped spinning, and the receptionist raised a long-fingernailed hand to her face and sputtered, “Oh, I’m sorry hon, I didn’t mean it like that, I swear hon, it was just a joke, sweetie,” and Julia dashed out of the office and down the stairs to the street, bracing hands against knees, sick enough to vomit right there in the clean sunshine. Because she knew that she had planned, all week, for the white-haired man to take her to the department store. And she had hoped he would set those five twenties on the nightstand (“Don’t be silly, you shouldn’t have to starve”) as she remained beneath the white sheets and he dressed. She remembered too well closing her eyes to the view of his toddler-like distended belly and his buttocks’ stretch-marked flesh and wishing that she and the man could be disembodied, and voiceless, for surely it was only his odd proportions and his nasal voice that confused her, and not the things he did and said, because he loved her, that was what he said again and again, and she was Pure of Heart, he said, and only scared. Like a lost cat. “Abandonment issues.” The money on the hotel nightstand, the clothes in the department store bag.
          Julia wore that lavender angora sweater as she sat across the table from the woman at the party.

Read the story in its entirety here: http://www.storyquarterly.org/the-woman-at-the-party.html