Ann makes Esker a tape.
Ann is in love with Esker. At sixteen she falls in love effortlessly, frequently, at the drop of a hat. She is also in love with (a partial list) (excluding celebrities): Malcolm Choy; Nuncio from Game; a little bit her best friend, Hannah Stolarik; anyone who can whistle with two fingers; anyone who wears beaded fringe; the men who play pickup basketball on West Third Street and Sixth Avenue; Willette and Emil, who are practically her godparents; the traffic cop at Times Plaza who directs cars like a ballet dancer; her second cousin once removed who lives in Paris but spent last Thanksgiving with them; the guy with perpetual five-o’clock shadow who walks his ferret on a leash on the promenade. Her love is absolute and unidirectional, with neither consequences nor accountability, though not without rewards.
Ann spends much of Monday working on the compilation, her wheelchair pulled up to the sleek lighted panels of the stereo system. She writes the play list down in red felt-tip. She wears an old tennis visor with a green plastic bill. She chews gum and pretends she’s on the air at a radio station, making up a little patter about the songs and artists as she goes. She speaks sotto voce, in a British accent, which she thinks makes her sound like more of an expert. “This next track, Scat” (Scat is the name of the imaginary DJ on whose show she’s guesting), “is a recently rediscovered cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘What Goes On’ by a band that came to popularity in the early eighties, The Feelies. Let’s have a listen, shall we? Then we can compare the two.” She presses record, rolls back in her chair halfway across the room. Her father is in the kitchen making Indonesian curried vegetable stew for Esker. Every bowl is out.
Ann has not told her father about her mother’s call.
“Oh, hello, Alice,” she had said into the phone, aware of Denise’s banana poised midair, aware of Hannah’s hyper-stillness in the easy chair, and she’d felt the instant, corrupting power that comes with being mean. “How long has it been?”
“Ann.” Like a lemon—ripe, bright, stung—and Ann could exactly picture her mother biting the corner of her wide bottom lip, closing her wide eyes, regathering resolve. “How is your leg?”
“It’s my heels.”
“I know, sorry: your heels.”
“Fine.”
“Well, obviously not fine, but . . . Good. I’m so sorry you fell.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
A sigh. And then her mother does the thing she’s brilliant at. She’s too smart, Alice Evers, to sound hurt, to appeal to Ann via sympathy or guilt; she snares her daughter instead with wit, with non sequitur, with oddities of thought that Ann’s curiosity cannot resist. Ann doesn’t even know how she manages the transition, but there she is mid-sentence saying, “. . . know that if you dip a daisy in liquid nitrogen it freezes, and you can smash it on the table and it shatters? And it reminded me of that day, after the ice storm that time, when you were ten or eleven and we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge—remember how freezing we were?—and every girder, every wire, on the bridge was encrusted with ice, and we said it looked like a mirror somebody had shattered and that we were walking through it, like Alice? And by the time we got to Chinatown, we said we were on the other side.”
Ann remembered. She’d been twelve. They had gone into a restaurant and had hot green tea and cold sesame noodles, and a little bamboo cricket cage hanging outside the restaurant had also been entirely coated with ice, a fairy palace for a musical insect. “Vaguely,” said Ann, but in her heart the ice was breaking up and an ache, a homesickness, was trickling beneath the sheer, cracked layer.
“Well, the other reason I’m calling,” said Alice (another transitionless moment), and Ann could picture her again—all interesting cheekbones and high color infusing her freckled face, which was otherwise pale as apple flesh—“is I’m thinking of coming out there for the holidays. Or part of the holidays. I have a little break in shooting now until after the New Year.”
Alice Evers left home three years ago without putting any name to her departure—not divorce, not separation, not abandonment, not experiment, nothing—and moved to Los Angeles to act in movies. Films. She’d acted in New York, too, in people’s living rooms and loft spaces, at PS 22 and La Mama, off-off-Broadway and off-Broadway, and once, for three nights, on Broadway, and when this last venture, despite flopping onstage, was being turned into a film, she followed the camera out west and stayed there, becoming, through a series of diverse roles in four respected-but-little-seen flicks and one box-office success, something of an “indie darling,” as more than one article has dubbed her. She has in all this time managed to make it back to Brooklyn for a whopping three—count ’em, three—visits. Ann and Wally have been to L.A. once together, and Ann once solo. Currently, Ann can view her mother’s face in a grainy ad that has been running in The Village Voice these past few weeks, and on a series of identical posters glued up on construction-site barriers along a sprinkling of downtown streets: in her latest project she is the star, and the only name above the title. Critics have called her “elegantly inscrutable,” and “a cross between a gazelle and a Mack truck”; they have lauded her “unapologetic projection of desire” as well as her “fetchingly canny midnight-blue gaze.”
“Ann? Are you there?”
“Yes.” Bored-sounding.
“Well, say something, goose.”
“What?”
A pause. “Say, ‘That’s nice, Mom.’”
“That’s nice, Mom.”
“Say, ‘Gee, I sure can’t wait!’”
Ann sighed. “Yeah, whatever.” But a little smile leaked into her voice.
“Say, ‘The butter, the butter, the holy margarine—’”
“‘. . . Two black eyes and a jelly nose, and the rest all painted green,’” Ann finished the childhood rhyme: sucker. Sucker: one who is easily deceived, a dupe; one who is indiscriminately attracted to something specific. She is a sucker for Alice Evers. “When are you coming?”
“Don’t know yet, I haven’t called the airlines. I’ll see you soooon, though. Kiss your legs for me. Heels, I mean. I miss you.”
Ann had hung up and rolled her eyes for the benefit of Hannah and Denise, both of whom are a little starstruck. They have never met Alice Evers, since she left the year before Ann entered The Prospect School.
“How was that?” Hannah had asked.
“I need a smoke.” Sometimes they share covert cigarettes in the park across the street from school. Before going back to class, before dodging back inside under that iron bird-creature-thing that hovers over the entrance as though always about to snatch someone and abscond with her, they half mask their breath with green-apple Jolly Ranchers, conflicted over whether to flaunt or to hide the smell. The vile inhalation of gray-white smoke and the sweet-and-sour rush of candied saliva are inextricably linked for Ann, and she wasn’t sure what she really craved that minute except for the cold of the balcony. Denise had opened the French doors, and she wheeled herself through them. Hannah produced a pack of filtered lights; all three lent cupped palms to shelter the single match. They’d smoked vigorously, eyes and noses watering in the December breeze, and Ann had been grateful that her friends knew enough not to inquire further about her mother’s call.
They could see the promenade from the balcony, and Ann tried to picture meeting Malcolm Choy there, him with his hands in the pockets of his thrift-shop bomber jacket, eyes a little obscured by long black forelock, tilting down to speak to her in her mobile metal throne, smelling of smoke and candy, wiping her nose every other second. She lost heart. “You said he was going to call me anyway,” she pointed out when Denise tried to get her to call again.
“Debutante,” accused Denise.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“She’ll call if she wants to,” said Hannah.
“Oh go . . . go to a cotillion.”
“Wow, that’s a really clever insult.”
“Shut up.” And Denise, laughing at herself, had copied Malcolm’s number onto a scrap of paper and used a bit of spit to rub the ink off her own palm.
Now it is Monday, and the scrap of paper has languished in Ann’s underwear drawer, and Malcolm Choy has not called. For the moment, she is glad. The Alice Evers front has been quiet, too. Ann looks up from her chair at the portrait over the mantel. Implausibly, out of the jumble of oil and fabric, her face has been fully realized. Emil, the artist, the family friend who’d asked Alice to sit for it, had conveyed something not literally present in her face, something a camera would never have caught. When Ann was little, she used to pretend it was a magic mirror, a portent of her own potential, of the power she herself would someday wield, and she used to address it in whispers peppered with “thee”s and “thou”s. “How are thou doing?” she’d whisper, looking meaningfully into its eyes. Or “Oh, thee, please help me pass the spelling quiz tomorrow!” She’d heard from Catholic friends about making offerings, and went through a stage of leaving things on the mantel: pretzel sticks, silver gum-wrappers, a braid of corn silk. “I dearly hope someday I have cheekbones like thee’s.”
But today she regards the portrait irreverently, through the green pall of her tennis visor, which renders it the visage of a seasick woman, her mother, Alice, who has left and not come back. “Stay where you belong,” she tells it sternly, and after she has spoken considers that this could mean two things. “Stay in L.A.,” she clarifies. The navy eyes bore back into hers, at once dumb and knowing.
In the kitchen her father is sautéing onions and chili and garlic and ginger, a kind of olfactory plaid, and chopping up whatever comes next; Ann can hear the knife drumming deft rhythms on the cutting board. She can tell he is happy by the speed of his blade.
The song ends, and she wheels back to the stereo to press pause and cue up the next song: “It’s All Right to Cry.” Ann snaps her gum and delivers more patter in her British expert’s voice: “Now I’d like to play your listeners something from the soundtrack of Free to Be . . . You and Me, an early-seventies collaboration by Marlo Thomas and Friends. It became something of an instant classic among the politically correct set, and is still popular in the children’s-record market today. Not many people in today’s generation will recognize that the artist on this number was a pro football player, Scat. It quite adds another dimension to the song, I think you’ll agree. Let’s have a go.”
She presses play and pushes off into the room again, arcing into a wheelchair pirouette as she does. The air is interwoven with spices and the growly-earnest crooning of Rosey Grier, and the white lights on the potted grapefruit tree swarm in and out of view as Ann spins herself 360 degrees, and again, and again. She wants her father to wear his jam-colored sweater tonight. She wants to ask Esker about dipping flowers in liquid nitrogen. She wants them to sit around the table for a long, long time, linked and amused and chaste.