Alice is funny, Alice is warm. Alice is both at ease and glamorous. Alice is so happy to see them all—the teacher, who gets thanked, with a solid handshake and a wide-open but rather easily dispensed smile, for doing so much for Ann (as if Alice knows, as if she keeps in regular contact); the husband, who gets asked about work in the most specific detail (has the cook’s wife had her baby yet? have people liked the moose burgers?), who gets a hair plucked from his sweater, who gets teased, gently and cleverly, during dessert (as if she has a right to show him affection); and the daughter, of course, the daughter most of all, who barely deigns to meet the mother’s eye, who in her fury turns luminous and flickering, like a tissue-paper lantern on a windy night, and who, during dessert, sits biting her water glass so hard it breaks. There is a snap and Ann says, “Oh,” and they all look as she picks a piece of glass from her tongue and begins to bleed, slowly, from somewhere inside her mouth and down her chin, like a B-movie teen-vampire chick.
“For heaven’s sake!” says her mother.
“Are you all right?” says her father.
Esker hands her the cloth napkin from her lap and inspects the glass. “You’re not supposed to use your teeth when you drink,” she says quietly. “That’s just for eating.”
Ann breaks into wild laughter, extravagant laughter, a thing apart from mirth. She presses Esker’s napkin into her mouth; from the noises she could almost be choking, but she flaps one hand in an I’m fine gesture, and Esker rises with her plate and from this the other grown-ups take their cue (“Sit, sit, I’ve got it”) and begin to clear the table. So the dinner ends.
Now it’s later, nine or ten or something, Ann doesn’t know, she has no idea, and Esker is gone and so is Wally, having left to help her hail a cab, but that was ages ago, it seems, and Ann is on the red velvet couch and her mother is on the red velvet couch, too, sitting at the other end, with Ann’s air casts in her lap, and she’s painting the air casts with nail polish, painting snakes and birds on them with Vixen and Pink Grapefruit and Toast and French White.
Ann, whose mouth is fine, just a thin, jagged bolt of metal-tasting cut inside her lip, is telling her mother about Malcolm Choy. “He has those drum muscles,” she says. She speaks languidly, as though she has taken some sort of pill. She has become someone else, she is in a play about a girl on a red velvet couch with her mother. The smell of nail polish is like a small dense object, a figurine. “Those drummer forearms,” she is saying. “He’s part Chinese and part Trinidadian. He’s a senior. He’s going to RISD next year. His mother’s an artist. Like a real big one. She made that paper funeral procession that was on display at Grand Central last year, which you probably never saw. He plays the conga drums, and he’s also in this band, The Bernoulli Effect, with these guys from LaGuardia. He was supposed to accompany us for this dance we were doing for Winter Concert, that now I’m out of. He chews cinnamon sticks. It’s totally poignant, the way it hangs out of his mouth like a little brown cigarette.”
“A Gauloise.”
“What?”
“That’s what they’re called, those little brown French cigarettes.”
“Oh. Whatever. He asked for my phone number. His best friend is the shortest kid in the school. Perry. For a science project, they rigged a light in the lobby to flash every time someone flushed a toilet anywhere in the school. A green light. He wears mittens, not gloves. He’s always falling asleep in English.”
There isn’t time to be mad at Alice. Alice is too rare and fleeting. Ann gazes down her leg and surveys the newest denizen of the bestiary there: a sort of hummingbird, long-beaked and vertical in hovering flight.
Her mother the witch, the twisted fairy princess, gives it a Toast-colored eye. She is intent on the project, inhabits it fully. Freckles on her jaw, beside her mouth, all across the topography of her long, strong nose: they subtract a certain possibility of refinement, free her beauty up to be something more than pristine. Even in the low light and shadows of the room she comes off golden. She has not the slightest bit of discomfort in being here.
“You are a bad mother,” says Ann, letting her head lie back against the arm of the couch. “For the record.”
“Sorry.”
“How long are you staying?”
“Thursday. Friday, maybe.”
“That’s it?”
“The food is terrible, and the portions are so small.”
“What’s that, Chekhov?”
“Woody Allen, I think.”
“And then what?”
“And then back to Toronto to finish filming.”
“Any sex scenes in this one?”
“Semi.”
“Cute leading man?”
“He thinks so. So who is this Esker?”
“My math teacher,” says Ann. “I don’t really know.”
“What’s her real name?”
“You mean her first name.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.” Ann’s not sure why she lies. “It’s a secret.”
“Rumpelstiltskin.”
“Maybe. Will you see Emil while you’re here?”
“Willette and Emil, I hope so, yes.”
“Oh yes, Willette and Emil.”
“Yes. Hello? What’s with you?”
Ann’s voice has been getting smaller and slower; her eyes have closed, and several rounds of breathing come even and peaceful.
“Hello, little faker, why are you feigning sleep?”
Ann ignores her mother, and feels her bare toes kissed. It tickles, and she pulls the leg away.
“‘This sleep is sound indeed!’” declaims Alice, rapping her knuckles on Ann’s cast.
A smile asserts itself upon Ann’s unwilling lips. “Ow,” she mutters crankily, eyes still closed, as though it hurt her heel. She thinks of her father and Esker. Maybe they went walking on the promenade. Maybe they’ve gone out for a coffee. Abruptly she rouses herself, propping up on her elbows. “Hands off Wally,” she warns, pointing at Alice.
“Oh, Ann, how did you ever turn out to be so old?”
“All your fault.” She yawns; it is a false yawn that turns real halfway through, and she reclines again, and closes her eyes. “No mystery there.” She is far too awake to fall asleep, but wants so badly to sleep, with her mother at the other end of the couch, awake and watching over, and for this to happen sleep will have to come quickly. The velvet is warm against her cheek. Her feet rise and fall with her mother’s breath. She plays her tongue over the little cut inside her mouth, and she can’t help saying one more thing. “The real question is, how do you always manage to land on your feet?”