“Your name is Lydia?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why? Did you hear something about me too?”
“No, you just don’t seem like a Lydia.”
“Meaning what?”
Flighty. Gauche. Prone to ill-advised elopements.Something told me this wasn’t the right time to bring upPride and Prejudice. “You were asking about Alex Ritter.”
Lydia adjusted her headband, making it clear she was only accepting the diversion because it suited her purpose. “We’re listening.”
I took a deep breath. “A guy like that is completely wrapped up in his own drama, all the Sturm und Drang, ‘have mercy, my heart is bleeding.’ He never stops to consider the other person’s needs. If you ask me, it’s the pining he cares about, not the pine-ee.”
The pause that followed this speech gave me plenty of time to reconsider my word choices, not least because I’d made it sound like he had a thing for conifers.
“And in English this time?” said Lydia.
“Getting involved with a Vronsky is a recipe for disaster,” I replied, cutting to the chase. “You’re setting yourself up for misery.”
“What’s the deal with the train?” Arden asked in a hushed voice.
“You know—like Anna K.”
They looked at me blankly.
“How she abandons her family to carry on a torrid affair with him, and they have a baby, but slowly the weight of society’s disapproval chips away at her sanity until one day she’s at the train station and that’s it.” I walked my fingers to the edge of the table before plunging them over the side.
Lydia held up a hand. “Are you saying his baby mama offed herself?”
I endeavored to conceal my surprise. How could they forget that part of the story? It was one of the most famous endings in literature. “Yes.”
Arden shook her head. “I can’t believe I never heard about this.”
“Maybe your school readWar and Peaceinstead?” I suggested, trying to make her feel better.
“Instead of what?” Lydia asked.
“Anna Karenina.” I paused to look around the table. “The Tolstoy novel. With the famous hay-mowing scene?”
Lydia squinted her eyes into slits. “What does that have to do with Alex Ritter?”
“Or hay,” Terry put in. “Does someone get mangled by one of those big machines with the spinning blades?”
“Ah, no. The mowing part is more about ‘isn’t it great to live in the country and commune with nature.’ No one dies.” I turned to Lydia. “As for Alex, what I mean is that Vronsky is the archetype. Alex is a modern version of the same kind of bad behavior.”
“Except one of them is made up,” Lydia countered.
Arden put a hand on the other girl’s arm. “That’s not what she’s saying, Lyds. The point is we don’t want Terry to end up brokenhearted at the train station.”
“We don’t have a train station. She’d have to go Greyhound.”
“You know what I mean.” Arden smiled encouragingly at me. “Tell her, Mary.”
“It’s about certain universal truths of human nature. You can’t trust a person who never gives a second thought to the consequences of his actions because no one’s ever going to blamehimfor anything.”
Lydia pushed her empty glass to one side. “Based on what evidence?”
“She’s going to be a judge,” Arden told me, holding her hand in front of her mouth as if it were a soundproof barrier. “Not the cheesy TV kind.”
