Alison is blonde and thirteen and avoids eating red meat. She once read about a man who led an art movement and demanded that his followers eat only green food because green was his favorite color. His followers complied. Alison imagines that at least these people must have gotten the recommended daily allowance of vitamin A. She has decided to name her first child, whether male or female, Andre after this man. She is glad that Andre’s favorite color was not red. She thinks with a name like Andre, the child would be bound to excel under any circumstances. There was once a large all-star wrestler with sparse teeth and layers of fatty skin that drooped over his trunks named Andre the Giant. Alison hopes others will not make this association. She tries not to think about it herself.
When Alison first meets people, she sometimes tells them her last name is Wonderland. She has seen the movie Dreamchild four times and is disappointed each time that Lewis Carroll and young Alice do not marry in the end. She knows he’s too old for Alice but feels sex with a much older man is a small price to pay for a good nonsense poem.
Alison is in class. It is a class on the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy era. It is an advanced class team-taught by Mr. Potchad and Mrs. Collins. Mr. Potchad speaks slowly and quietly and sometimes chuckles for no apparent reason, and this has earned him the nickname Mr. Pothead. Mrs. Collins has long, straight, frosted blonde hair and eats avocados every day for lunch. The class is reading The Crucible aloud. Alison’s friend Elva Jonquil Jenkins is reading the part of Elizabeth Proctor. Alison is reading the part of Tituba, which she also considers a very nice name. Alison watches her hands shake in her lap. Her heart palpitates. She feels it miss a beat and double up on the next. She imagines a bullet of blood bouncing against her aorta. She tries to see calm pulses of blood, smooth as peeled almonds, pushing their way through her veins. She sees nothing but feels her body lifting as if she were being inhaled.
* * *
Alison’s father takes her to the biofeedback clinic once a month, where she works on her visualization techniques. Her father was attracted to the clinic by a glossy brochure with a picture of an illuminated glass brain on the front. The brochure told the story of a young boy with an inoperable brain tumor. When conventional medicine gave him and his family no hope, they turned to the biofeedback clinic for guidance. It was the age of Star Wars, and the boy decided to envision his tumor as a small, round, spongy planet—Planet Meatball. Each night for fifteen minutes before he went to sleep, the boy visualized starships zooming in his brain as they destroyed Planet Meatball with their powerful lasers. One night the boy was unable to visualize this drama and could see in his mind only a tiny, white circle. The next day, the boy’s doctor was thunderstruck to discover the tumor had completely disappeared, leaving behind only a small spot of calcification. Zeke, Alison’s father, was very moved by this story and took Alison to the clinic the very day he received the brochure in the mail.
Alison’s father is in advertising, and she was surprised at how easily he was taken in by this emotional ploy. She suspects her father has been in advertising too long. Like the actor who begins to imagine he really is living life on a riverboat after his fiftieth performance as Samuel Clemens, her father, she fears, is a little too persuaded by his own shtick, his head too easily turned by his own myths. He works for a small agency with modest accounts, hawking such products as foot powder and electrolysis. She knows he dreams of the day when he will be called on to come up with catchy lyrics like “hold the pickles, hold the lettuce.” He waits for the day when he will hear people randomly humming an unshakable tune that underlies his words. Though Alison is not particularly taken with her father’s line of work, she helps him with his campaigns. She came up with the tag line “Someday my prints will come” for a one-hour photomat. She has made a point, however, never to look up the word demographics. Alison would rather her father worked at the Roe Bowl snack bar, where a wheel of shriveled hotdogs always turns.
* * *
Elva passes Alison a note. It reads: Darrin Maxwell gave me a Zotz in social studies today. So cool. When it sizzled in my mouth I pretended it was his tongue! Gawwwwwwwd! He told me he knows the Heimlich maneuver. I think he’s HOT for me!!! And with a single, tall S vertically connecting all the words, she pens the postscript Sorry So Sloppy. Alison feels heat rush up from her stomach to her cheeks.
“Tituba? Where’s our Tituba?” Mrs. Collins sings.
Alison’s cheeks feel hot and itch. Her head begins to throb. She sees tiny people stamping around her brain as though they were on a carnival moonwalk or as though they were snuffing out small fires. Alison pats her cheeks. She sees her heart as a metronome. She slows down the beat. The metal finger of the metronome rocks slower and slower. Her head hits her desk.
* * *
Alison is with Lurleen, her biofeedback counselor. Lurleen has a long, thick rope of braided, blonde hair, and pink plastic cat glasses. She wears perfumed oil called “China Rain.” She is missing the top part of her left ear; she told Alison how it blackened and fell off one winter like a seasonal antler. It had become frostbitten at a bus stop during a winter storm. In the top of her other ear, she has a tiny gold stud.
Alison is thinking about her mother, Glenda. Glenda left when Alison was seven. The day before Glenda left, she dressed Alison up. She braided her fine hair and coiled and pinned the woven pigtails to the sides of her head. “Looks like lumpy snails,” Alison had said.
“It does not,” Glenda said. “It’s nice.”
Alison raised her arms in the air, and Glenda dropped the white eyelet dress neatly over Alison’s head, as though she were covering a toaster. Glenda slipped pink anklets over Alison’s feet, small and smooth as decorative soaps. Alison stepped into black patent-leather shoes. As Glenda clipped pearl pendant earrings onto Alison’s tiny lobes, Alison rocked back and forth and sang. “Have you ever ever ever in your long-legged life …”
“Alison, hold still.”
“Call me Jot.”
“I will not. Alison is a perfectly nice name.”
Alison fingered her ears. “My teacher, Mrs. Nilsson, said that large ears like mine are a sign of good health.”
“What?”
Zeke walked into the room. “Hey, Jot. You’re not ready for Brownies,” he said.
“Her name is Alison, and she’s not going to Girl Scouts this week.”
“But they’re churning butter today, and she’s been looking forward to it all week, haven’t you, Pumpkin?”
Alison looked at her shoes. Glenda snapped the earrings from her lobes. “Go then and pick up worse habits.”
Alison held her hands over her ears. “I’m a child,” she said.
Lurleen hugs a clipboard to her chest. “So what do you think happened?”
“My blood pressure dropped, I guess, and I fainted.”
“Still not able to control those negative pictures?”
“I tried. They come from someplace outside and fly into my thoughts like, like evil birds.” Alison rubs her temples. Sacred, she is thinking.
“Now, see there. That’s a negative metaphor.” Lurleen grabs Alison’s hand.
“Simile.” Alison touches the earring in Lurleen’s ear. “Did that hurt?”
“Just cartilage,” she says. “I saw it as the final puzzle piece, and it was as if the hole was already there. The lady that did it said, ‘This can cause arthritis, you know,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, well I don’t plan on doing any heavy lifting with this ear anyway.’” Lurleen laughs and her big, yellow teeth remind Alison of kitchen tiles whose color would be called Harvest. “How are the palpitations?” Lurleen pats her own chest.
Alison feels her heart skipping. “They’re still there,” she says.
“Still there.”
* * *
Alison remembers being a small child. She felt very small. She often imagined she was something her mother had bought for a quarter out of one of those machines in the entrance of a Kmart. Something that came folded in a small, lidded, plastic ball. Something like a rain bonnet or a slender watch that said 12:15 from one angle, 6:30 from another. Glenda was nervous around her. She was afraid Alison’s childhood wasn’t going well. She would sit and watch her play, and if Alison would look up, she’d say, “What? What do you mean?” and Alison would walk over to her and pet her hand.
They frequently ate fish sticks and canned cranberry sauce that was borne into the dish in the perfect shape of the can, round and ribbed and flat on the ends. Glenda would ask, “Is this right? Is this enough?” Alison would reply, “There needs to be broccoli and chocolate cake,” or “We’ve forgotten the butter beans and the Apple Brown Betty.” At these times Glenda would look at Alison with the frozen, startled expression of a jacklighted animal.
Alison knows she cannot remember her birth and hospital stay, but sometimes she ignores what is likely and convinces herself she can. She sees a palsied body covered with light-blue skin. She feels the uncertain flow of blood through her infant veins, narrow and fragile as fiber-optic threads. She feels her head swell and shrink, her soft spot stretch and pucker. She feels her heart, no bigger than a kidney bean, pop and swallow. Warm threads of blood slip from her ears and pool near her tiny nape. A transparent dome surrounds her, as though she were the main course of an expensive meal. She sees the empty, transparent rubber gloves reaching through portholes in the dome and lying lifeless beside her. She feels her legs twitch and snap. Alison opens her eyes and sits up. She touches the blood on her pillow. She puts her fingers in her ears. She imagines herself recounting this experience to Lurleen, Lurleen saying, “You’re doing this to yourself, you know. Psychosomatic. You’re digressing again,” Alison responding, “Re. Regressing.”
* * *
It is evening and Alison is sitting at a TV tray, eating a TV dinner, watching the evening news. Her dinner consists of beef bordeaux, glazed carrots with pearl onions, herb noodles, and a small gummy square of bread pudding. Her father asked her to try it to see if she could think of a fresh approach. It is currently being pitched as lo-cal, semi-gourmet, “fast food” (it is microwaveable), but sales are down.
Alison places two pearl onions on the canvas of beef. She completes the face with a mouth of carrot. She thinks, It’s all in the presentation. She stares at the food face, into the pupilless eyes. She imagines herself a tiny onion, layer upon layer of intricate skin, wrapped in herself, never opening voluntarily, never blooming. She rests at the cool bottom of someone’s martini. She sits, unblinking, atop someone’s slice of beef bordeaux.
“Earth to Alison. Come in Alison.” Zeke waves a hand in front of his daughter’s glazed eyes. “Hello? Anybody in there? Well, I see you haven’t outgrown playing with your food.”
“No one else will play with me,” she says.
“Ha, ha.” Zeke picks up one of the onion eyes and pops it into his mouth. “Say, are you mad because I don’t like to play Scrabble with you anymore? You always win anyway, so what’s the point? It’s redundant. You’re the lexical queen—I concede.” Zeke pushes the onion into his cheek, as though it were a jawbreaker.
“You’ve blinded it.” Alison pushes the other onion eye to the center of the imaginary brow. “Doomed to Cyclops,” she says.
Zeke picks up a carrot and smells it. “So, how is it? Have you tried any of it yet?”
“Better than Lincoln Logs, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Lean Cuisine,” Alison says. “And it certainly isn’t fish sticks and cranberry sauce.”
On the news, the mass murderer Ted Bundy talks to a reporter. He is awaiting his execution. He tells the reporter that pornography worked him into a frenzy, inciting him to commit his diabolical crimes. He says he has other murdering friends and acquaintances and they all agree that pornography is the instigator. The picture switches to a shot of the enormous crowd of people gathered outside the prison. People are cheering and chanting and laughing. Children ride atop the shoulders of their parents and clap their hands above their heads. One man proudly pulls his T-shirt taut so the glittery letters that spell out the words Burn Bundy Burn can be easily seen as a camera pans across the crowd. Twenty seconds before the switch is to be flipped, before the current is to bubble through the convicted man’s veins, the crowd begins to count down. “20, 19, 18, 17 … 4, 3, 2, 1.” The crowd explodes with sound and movement, as if it too were wired. Fireworks and noisemakers sound, confetti and streamers blind the cameras. A man wearing glasses with springy, drooping eyeballs capers in front of a camera. Alison feels her mouth begin to water and runs to the bathroom.
Alison remembers her mother’s leaving. Her mother’s hand shook as she smoked a cigarette, sprinkling ashes on the carpet. She positioned Alison on the divan and kneeled in front of her. She put her cigarette out and clutched both of Alison’s hands. “I have to go away, Alison,” she said. “It will be the best thing all around. I’m just not very good at this mother stuff. You know that.”
“You’re okay,” Alison said. “You forget things sometimes.”
Glenda clutched her own arms as she stood up. “I’m not good at it. You make me nervous and Zeke makes me nervous, and I’m no good at putting Mercurochrome on your sores. I’m not good at making your hair look nice or reading stories with the right whimsical inflection. We have nothing in common.”
Alison walked to her mother and held her hand. Glenda pulled her hand away and held it to her chest. “I don’t like to be touched.
“I’m sorry,” she said, picking up her suitcases. “It’s just not working out.” Glenda stared out the screen door. “Perhaps I can’t forgive you and your father for the pain of childbirth. I was in labor for nearly two days, and then after all that, you weighed only four pounds.” Glenda laughed. She bent over and lifted one of Alison’s braids to her mouth and kissed it.
As soon as Glenda was out the door, Alison’s father jumped into the room and yelled, “Surprise!” He was wearing a party hat and shaking maracas. “La cucaracha! La cucaracha! Come on, Ali, we’re going to celebrate. No room for gloom here. She’s dead to us, Al. D-E-A-D, dead. We’re going to celebrate our independence. What do you say?” He lifted Alison onto his shoes and sambaed around the room. They spun in circles. Alison went limp as her heart beat irregularly. Blood slipped from her left ear and trailed down her neck.
Alison sits in front of the toilet, her heart and mind racing. She wishes her hair were still long enough to braid. She wishes her favorite television program, This Old House, were on. She thinks Bob Vila is kind and wise. She is soothed by the constant activity, the measuring, drilling, caulking. She is amazed how walls always turn out as planned, bathtubs always fit.
Alison is looking at her mother’s distorted profile through the peephole in the front door. She thinks if people who don’t like the way they look could see themselves through peepholes, which erase all traces of beauty from everyone, they wouldn’t feel so bad. Her mother’s face balloons like a hallucination as she moves closer and narrows to a pinpoint as she moves back.
Since she left, Glenda has called Alison several times to wish her a happy birthday, though she was usually off by three or four weeks. Once she had a local florist send Alison an exotic plant, whose fronds of leaves would close like secretive, green jaws when touched. The card said, Sometimes I wish you were here, but didn’t say where here was.
Alison opens the door. Her mother has long blondish-white hair that is ponytailed. She is wearing a denim jacket, a black knee-length skirt that fits like a bandage, white crew socks, and pink Converse high-tops. On the lapel of the denim jacket is a button that says, Walk Stickly and Carry a Big Soft. Alison notices the fine, upward-stretching lines around her mother’s eyes and wonders what she’s been smiling or squinting at. Glenda steps toward Alison then backs up and extends her hand.
“Hello,” she says. Alison shakes her hand. Glenda enters and walks into the living room, seating herself on the divan. Alison sits on the floor across from her. “I know it’s not your birthday,” Glenda says, laughing.
“No, but you’re closer than usual,” Alison says. “Only two weeks away.”
“Really? Pure coincidence.”
Alison remembers the time the brakes went out on her bicycle as she flew down the steep hill of Forty-ninth Street. She wore out the soles of her tennis shoes trying to slow down and ended up careening into a ditch to stop. She dislocated her shoulder and the cartilage cushioning her jaw slipped around the mandibular bone, wedged itself behind the joint, and prevented her from opening her mouth more than a sliver. When she told her mother, through clenched teeth, what had happened, her mother replied, “Why weren’t you playing piano? You should have been playing the piano.”
“We don’t have a piano,” Alison said.
“Well, if you’d been looking for a piano to play, this never would have happened.”
“It was an accident,” Alison said.
“There are no accidents,” Glenda replied. “I suppose now we’ll have to get you those new Day-Glo tennis shoes you’ve been harping about.” Then Glenda bit into the back of her hand until it bled and said, “Those weren’t the right things to say, were they?”
Glenda reaches into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulls out a cassette tape and a clear plastic bracelet filled with pastel beads. “Here,” she says. Alison takes the tape and bracelet from her. “It’s candy,” Glenda says. Alison looks at the cassette. “I mean the bracelet. The beads inside the bracelet.”
“I don’t eat very much sugar,” Alison says.
“Guess you don’t take after me.”
“No.”
“You like the Bulgarian Women’s Choir?” Glenda asks.
“I don’t know.”
Alison is afraid Glenda has X-ray eyes. She knows it is not possible, but something about the way Glenda is staring right at her makes her feel as if she is being cut open. The skin and muscle are pulled back in a wide grin. Her rib cage is pried easily open like the hinged wooden purses her grandmother used to carry. Glenda is fingering her heart, poking at the rubbery red matter as though it were only a meringue that refused to peak, stroking the glass-smooth ventricles. Alison knows Glenda sees the even clicking of blood. She sees her mother’s eyes move up, out of the heart. They crawl up the spine, behind her esophagus, perching on brain stem. She feels her mother’s eyes staring at the gray cauliflower, eyeing pockets of lies and deceit.
“Did you hear me?” Glenda asks. “I said I went to Kansas City. Sort of on a lark. You know what? They have this giant statue of Alfred E. Newman in the parking lot of this filling station. Pretty wild. That’s not why I went of course. Delta was offering round-trip tickets for sixty-five bucks.
“I went to the American Royal there. It’s sort of a glorified indoor rodeo. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but they had calf roping, and I can’t really stomach calf roping, so I left and went to this bar. I met the strangest kid there. He had the most beautiful hands I’ve ever seen. He was the singer for the house band. His name was Clancy, and his brown hair stood straight up in the air like a sun-scorched lawn. You ought to do something fun with your hair.”
“We often go bowling together.”
Glenda laughs but stops short. Alison stands up. “Can I get you a beverage?”
“A beverage? What kind of word is that, beverage? I must have missed more of your birthdays than I thought.”
“We have Perrier, Sleepytime and Red Zinger tea, grape juice, and Dr. Pepper.” Alison sees her mother staring at her again and covers her chest with both hands as if to prevent something from leaping out.
“Didn’t they just recall Perrier because they found benzene in some of it?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t ours. Do you want something or not?”
“Not.” Glenda stands and moves toward Alison. Alison moves to one side as if to let her pass.
Alison remembers her great grandma Reese, her mother’s grandmother, who always kept Kleenex tucked beneath her watch-band. When she was eighty-two, she had to have a pin put in her hip, and forever after she was frightened of metal objects because she thought they might secretly be magnetized. She was afraid the objects would suck her toward them and seize her, never let her go. She abandoned her watch. She was particularly frightened of the radiator. She took to eating only dried fruit, which she believed had a neutralizing effect on the magnetism.
“Should we do something?” Glenda asks, taking a step backward.
“Like what?” Alison stares at her mother’s tanned forearms, the fine white mist of hair that covers them. She wonders what she was doing at the time her mother was cultivating this tan, at the time bursts of melanin were blooming beneath her mother’s skin. In math class, she thinks, examining the even beauty of an isosceles triangle or drawing huge dinosaur humps with the inside of her protractor, not even considering the fact that someone she knew was lying on a lawn chair somewhere, drinking sun tea, listening to a top forty countdown, and absorbing the color-altering heat of the sun. Alison is amazed how so much can happen without your knowledge, leaving you with only aftereffects and inferences.
“I don’t know. Would you like a new pair of shoes?” Glenda twists and rubs her fingers.
“I’d better stay here. Does Dad know you’re here?”
“No. I didn’t even know I was coming until this morning.”
“We could watch television.”
“All right.”
Alison and Glenda sit on the divan. Alison fishes the remote control from beneath one of the cushions. She turns on the television. “We missed Jeopardy and A Current Affair,” she says. She changes the channel to the public television station. A nature special entitled Termites of Endearment is just starting.
“Yuck,” Glenda says.
“This is a good one. I’ve seen it before. It’s about how some termites sacrifice themselves for the advancement of the rest of the colony.”
“Those would be the ones in the Debra Winger role, I guess.” Glenda laughs. Alison does not.
Alison presses the mute button. “Do you remember in second grade when I gave Jason Ordway an Alka-Seltzer and told him it was a new kind of candy? Then after he ate it, I told him he should wash it down with a big drink of water, and he did, and he got sick and said his heart hurt. I got sent home, and you told me that now I was always going to have to look over my shoulder because things like that come back to haunt you, and I got dehydrated because I was afraid to drink water.”
“Why do you always bring these things up, Alison? If anything, surely they must justify my leaving.” Glenda stands up. “I wasn’t trying to be abusive or malicious, I was just in the wrong role. It’s like someone who yearns to be a baker trying to be a cardiologist or something just because it’s expected of them.”
“I’m not a blintz,” Alison says. “No one’s life is altered when someone decides not to make donuts. I have palpitations.”
Glenda picks up Alison’s eighth grade school picture off the coffee table. She kisses it, sets it down, smiles at Alison, and leaves.
Alison looks at the bowed, convex world outside the peephole. “The Sound and the Sound,” she says, “by Alison Wonderland. Skimming the spilt milk with flatulent flair, and guarding the old bard to boot, kicking the cat with cacophonous care, spleens shiver shards hither and nod. Stop with a start Saint Ignatius pig lips, beginning with in the beguine, crackle pop snaps parsimonious snips, while bladderfowl create a scene. Thank you.” She bows. “Thank you all.” Alison feels her body begin to slip out from under her. She tries to corral her senses. She thinks of school.
Ancient Egyptians. Yesterday in humanities class, she read about small statues called kas that were considered receptacles for the soul. When important people died, they were placed inside tombs full of food and jewels, beside their own personalized kas. These statues acted, they believed, as turnstiles between this world and the next, allowing their souls to escape their bodies and pass on to the afterlife. “Better safe than sorry,” Alison says.
Alison feels dizzy. She feels as though she were at the bottom of a malt beneath a straw or buried in a tangle of shag carpeting under the rumble and whir of a vacuum, as if she were being sucked out of this world. “My heartbeat is calm and regular,” she whispers to herself. “My breathing is slow and even.” She removes the barrette decorated with worry dolls from her hair. She holds it next to her temple, closes her eyes. She is unable to imagine what anything looks like. She sees only circles of light.