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On spring's first calculably warm evening, sunshine gilds the hills as if to whisper: You can trust me. And a party starts at a hotel.
Its architecture evokes a giant drum next to a giant harmonica next to a giant boomerang at rest on one thin edge. Its sheer walls rising honeycomb and bisque against a confident Silicon Valley sky, it is the Crowne Plaza Cabaña Palo Alto. Built in 1962 -- the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Sammy Davis Junior stayed here -- it has been remodeled with new bedding, bathrooms, carpets, clever coffeemakers, custom furnishings, LCD flat-screen TVs in cool ice-cream-colored, I-deserve-this rooms that tempt you to stay inside watching reality-show reruns no matter how dazzlingly the sun shines.
To announce these renovations, the Cabaña's owners throw a party. Occupying several areas on several floors, its theme is history. Each party-area is staged to represent a different decade since the 1960s, with decade-appropriate decor, music, activities, and food. This is a great idea. I have seen it at other parties and the possibilities are endless. On a smaller scale, you could try it at home.
I've been invited to this party, which is great as the hotel is beautiful and I like decades just as much as anyone.
I reach the '80s first, having somehow managed to miss the '90s and '00s even as I sought them, which makes sense. The '60s and '70s are upstairs. The '80s surround the pool, and I am thinking: Turquoise, Greg Louganis, yes. Three unbearably good-looking hotel guests somersault in the deep end and dunk each other, each protesting in a different foreign accent. The music is late New Wave, proudly synthetic from that time when syntheticity was edgy, before it was all there is. Its pulse is anodyne, the bloodless bopbopbop by which dance halls in those days had much in common with hospitals. As guests line up for frozen yogurt -- the defining '80s food -- actors in legwarmers and Candies ply the crowd. One wears a purple vinyl vest with ornamental pocketflaps, and yes: What were the '80s if not women wearing purple, which I hated yet wore nonetheless?
Mom loved it. She loved purple. I know this because she said so: Your father thinks purple is a clown color, but I don't care! It flattered her piano-key complexion. She adored it. This I know because after she died five months ago I had to empty all the closets in her house and they were stuffed, all five of them, with purple clothes in '80s styles: those puffy rubber-waisted shoulderpadded polyester tops, shapeless shirt-dresses, shoot-me-now safariwear, stretch pants, most in that midrange hue of grape jam, violets, dusk and bruises. I found the culottes she favored. The straight skirts that showed how slim she had become. The tailored shirts whose shapes she spoiled by tying their unbuttoned bottoms at the waist. The shorts: those endless purple denim pairs that she stopped wearing once her disability really began to show, once it was more than just a shuffling walk. But in the '80s she still wore shorts. They shimmered and swung below the blazers and the ethnic jackets that her friends began to give her in those years: big bold purple canvas and ikat epics that she pierced with complicated '80s brooches and which warmed her shoulders as she shrank.
In her closets I found the rubber-waisted pants that in the last years of her life became her wheelchair uniform, worn in ever more hairspray-crusted squalor with loose purple sweatshirts. The shirts were compacted on the racks so tightly that their plastic hangers broke inside them. I gave the mortician a purple silk suit for her to wear. After the funeral I spent three days putting her clothes in piles. I threw away the ones she wore most often. She wore those only because they were the few she could still pull over her folded knees. You cannot call them "favorites." The rest filled sixteen Hefty bags, which a man from a charity took in his truck.
In the '80s, she managed a folk-art shop. She had friends. She was the shuffling woman who sold Day of the Dead masks, Tibetan prayer flags and Pueblo drums. Dad was a troubleshooter in the space program, traveling back and forth to Cape Canaveral. It was his last decade alive, although none of us knew that then. I was engaged. I was angry a lot. I laughed at the way Mom basked in her customers' approval and then every night went over every conversation, asking: What did I say wrong and what did I say right? I writhed when, asked a question whose answer she did not know -- Is this jade? Why is Myanmar no longer called Burma? Which goddess does this earring depict? -- she lied rather than simply smile and shrug. I hated how she asked me Are you still a virgin? whenever I came home from anywhere. I hated the way she whispered Iloveyoudoyouloveme? as if it was a trick question.
I thought she was wrong to call my friends sluts and to ask, in every phone call, whether I was getting fat. Yet what I never thought was what was almost absolutely true: that it was not her fault, that it was in her head, that she was ill.
She loved the '80s too because that was when she discovered thrift shops. In the sunny afternoons of her days off, she browsed the racks, she who loved clothes, she who had worked while young as an executive at posh New York department stores. She who loved clothes yet loathed her figure found purple Calvin Kleins, purple tapestry jackets, purple vests with faux zippers and epaulets, oystershell-buttoned blouses in slippery purple silk, all for one or two dollars each. It was on those visits that she amassed the contents of her closets, which I found and removed and had to handle in an efficient adult way while telling everyone over and over I was fine five months ago, although the owners of the Crowne Plaza Cabaña Palo Alto do not know this.
In the hotel's sleek bistro whose artisanal ceiling lamps look like spun sugar is the portion of the party staged -- with sushi, techno music and a DJ -- to invoke the '90s. Soaking up the techno through my shoes, I am anesthetized. I shut my eyes. But yes, because this was the decade of denial, in the world at large and on the phone as I urged Mom to see a doctor instead of buying canes and then walkers for herself at thrift shops. She could no longer lift her knees and I said See a doctor but she did not.
The '70s are in a circular conference room with a view of the pool. An actor wearing disco gear tries to get me to work a Rubik's Cube. The buffet table has fondue. This was the decade during which I was meant to grow up. I had the books and clothes for that. But it became instead the decade during which Mom lost almost all she had ever loved: her mother. Father. Sister. Me, although just for college. By then I was nearly invisible. Watching me pack in our suburban house with its stone garden and banana trees, she said This is your home and always will be. That house now stacked with her wedding china and her star-shaped party plates: maybe it is. That decade started on a jazzy Tijuana Brass trumpet blast but ended tender, like thin pink skin where a wound has barely healed. You wouldn't think that anyone would be happy to see the '80s start, but that was why.
The ballroom offers video games, pad thai and cupcakes to celebrate the '00s -- which came and went without actually having a name, as no one ever said the zeroes or, archaically, the oughts. This was the decade when she fell and fell, when her legs locked into L shapes which would never unbend. This was the decade when we did not take a cruise. This was the decade when it was too late. This was the decade when, at hospitals, needle-tipped tubes met skin with sticky tape. She started thinking thieves and murderers were prowling her backyard at night, and she was partly wrong and partly right. She sat up nights in her SuperSlim wheelchair in her orange-and-green living room with its glass coffee table and its abstract lamps, holding a scissors in her lap with which to stab them if they came. She stockpiled hairspray. She spent every workday of that decade at the folk-art shop, wheeling across its floor, asking customers what they did for fun and what colors they liked. At closing time, she always yearned to stay. That was the decade when everyone quietly stopped inviting her out. When my words failed to soothe, she said them back to me but in a squeaky cartoon voice or slackjaw-stupid to pinpoint how meaningless they were. We kin git you a better wheelchair! Duh, it izzunt healthy to skip lunch. And who could blame her anyhow? That was the decade during which my mother asked me many times to kill her and it was the decade in which I would not.
The '60s are upstairs. Six floors above the rest of the party, the '60s occupy a lofty suite. A Beatles song is playing because the Beatles stayed in the suite next-door. Tiny toy astronauts are being handed out. On the buffet are plump, peppery Swedish meatballs and snowy ambrosia. Born a few months before this decade began, I think this is the only kind of food I truly understand. Mom had her own parties back then. She was a stylish person striding with a baby-stroller through the mall. That's where she bought the star-shaped plates.
