Distance, 1981
Charlotte’s friend Susan was having a barbecue on the Fourth of July and nobody besides Charlotte felt like going. The party was in Connecticut at Susan’s new husband’s house, a good three hours away. Their father made it a practice not to ever leave the house over holiday weekends. He enjoyed poking around the property drilling holes—anything to avoid traffic. “You know my position on traffic,” he told Charlotte, over breakfast.
“I know, love. Traffic is hell.”
“No, hell is other people. Other people at barbecues.”
Charlotte smiled with half her mouth and squeezed a tea bag with her fingers. She never used a spoon. “I told her we’d go. The kids will have a ball.”
“No, we won’t,” Gus said. His voice was especially deep be- cause it was morning. Sometimes it seemed as if he had literally grown in his sleep. He claimed his joints hurt from growing, but Alice thought that seemed a bit overboard. He was fourteen and she was nearly his height at twelve, but it wasn’t a big deal because she had always been tall.
“There’ll be kids your age,” Charlotte said.
“Wow,” Gus said. “That sounds tempting.”
Alice laughed. “We like doing the same thing each year,” she said.
“Speak for yourself,” Gus said. “I just don’t feel like going to Susan’s. It’s gonna blow.”
“August,” their father said.
“It’s gonna suck moose cock,” he said, laughing.
Alice waited for their father to turn. There was always a point where Gus pushed too far, and she suspected that had been it. But he only looked at their mother and said, “Okay then, looks like we’re going. Let us hope it doesn’t suck. Okay?”
It was too bad. Alice had good memories of Fourths of July at home. She couldn’t explain why exactly—they were essentially uneventful times. Her father grilled—that was something. He grilled burgers, hot dogs, peppers, plums—anything you handed him, he grilled it. Once Alice handed him a piece of coconut cake and he grilled that too, maintaining a straight face. Gus and Alice could invite anyone over; they could do what they liked but they had to come hungry—he grilled from three o’clock on. “I’m the grill man,” he’d say with a shy grin. No matter how many people were shrieking on the lawn or playing games inside if rain was pouring down, her father grilled. So deep was his concentration that it was necessary to approach from the front so as not to startle him.
So the grilling, Alice thought, that was one thing. Also, her mother could be this certain way: she’d have bursts of ambition to create anything that smacked of Americana. One year she bought a crochet kit and spent the day learning. Sometimes she made strawberry shortcake, or an American-flag cake with at least three layers. And her mother wasn’t someone who cooked for the sake of cooking—no, her mother knew how to eat. Alice loved watching her savor each fattening bite. Plus there were Gus’s friends. Last year Gus’s friend Ezra told her (after an impressive turn at spitting watermelon seeds) that she had a great laugh. It was always nice watching fireworks explode and fall into the water. They were able to see not only the sky’s display but also the crowded harbor with all the different boats. “I like this view so much better than if it were just ocean,” Charlotte never tired of saying. “It’s the boats that make for such a lucky view. Alan? Don’t you think?”
It was this reason, Alice finally decided, why she liked the Fourth of July: Her mother usually seemed to realize what on earth she was doing with a family and what it was that kept her coming home.
Susan’s party was in the mountains on a pond. There were steep steps built into the lawn that led down to a large deck where most of the adults were sitting. As she followed her parents down the steps, Alice saw a boy about her age dive off the deck into the water. The dive made a big fat splash and two thin women got wet, making brief but sour faces. There were already plenty of swimmers and inner tubes afloat. A grill was giving off smoke, the sooty gray dissolving into the chalky sky. It was a humid day, and the air was thick and hot enough to keep mentioning. The Greens stood for a moment, stewing in the heat, dazed and surveying the crowd. Charlotte kept holding her light cotton shirt away from her body and then, after a moment, letting it slowly fall. Gus took off his shirt altogether and balled it up in his hands. “I’m exhausted,” Alan said, “and we just got here.”
“Don’t be old,” Charlotte said lightly, her favorite put-down, while waving a swarm of gnats from her face. “Go get wet.”
But Alan didn’t go get wet. He continued to hold a large Bloomingdale’s shopping bag very carefully—the bag that sat between Gus and Alice on the way up to Connecticut, the bag that contained Charlotte’s gift. Charlotte was famous for her gifts, for not only their frivolity and quality but also for their erratic arrivals. Charlotte was a woman who’d forget her husband’s birthday and then spend two days making a hot-wax stamp for a friend she hadn’t seen in years. She’d send the stamp (or lemon-almond torte or hand-beaded choker) in a sequin-decorated box, and when it was returned with the post weeks later, it would sit—unopened—in the front hall for a good six months. She wouldn’t bother to resend it or verify the correct address. She might surprise her husband with a weekend-long apology for forgetting the birthday. There’d be elaborate meals involving quail eggs and oysters, quince, smoked venison, chestnut oil. There’d be quite a bit of “private time,” and Alice’s father—a man slow to smile— would not be able, not even if he tried, to keep from doing so.
Once, on a trip to India, Charlotte bought a ream of violet silk with which she surprised Alice by transforming her daughter’s twin bed into a canopied revelation. A smooth silk canopy, an aerie of purple? Where there was, hours previously, merely blue gingham with a bleach stain? This does things to a child, to a girl.
This year’s gift to Susan was a strawberry-rhubarb pie. Charlotte had made it the previous day—a daylong, all-consuming event—perfecting the crust with crushed almonds and hunting down, with Alice in tow, the absolute freshest fruit. Alice’s father held the bag out to Charlotte when he saw Susan in the distance.
Susan spotted them while pouring vodka into a large pitcher. She made a big hello face and waved them over to the table. There were bowls of chips and grapes and Red Hots, Twizzlers, platters of cheese and artichoke spread, taramasalata. “I can’t believe you got this one to come,” she said to Charlotte, while squeezing Alan’s arm. “You get big points, Alan,” she said. “Oh, my God, will you look at Mr. Gorgeous over here?”
Gus smiled and said, “What’s up?”
“And you,” she said to Alice, heaving a sigh, “look at you.”
Alice was certain she was referring to her breasts, which had appeared quite literally just last week, and over which she was wearing a huge T-shirt that came down to her knees. “What,” said Alice, blushing.
“Just look,” she said, and Susan ran her hand over Alice’s hair, over her shoulders. Susan didn’t have any girls and always made her feel just a little bit special.
“I know you probably have enough food here to feed a few overpopulated countries,” Charlotte said to Susan, “but here’s something to push you over the edge.” She handed over the pie. The crust was shaped like garlands of flowers, the top was a complex latticework, and it made Alice sad to imagine it being smashed up at the buffet table later in the dark, no one understanding the care that went into it.
“Oh. My. God,” said Susan. She squealed a little and gave Charlotte a pristine kiss on the lips. She kissed nearly everyone on the lips. She was generally very affectionate. Alice knew that Susan was some high-powered lawyer, but the idea of Susan leading that kind of life—making deals, wearing suits— was completely baffling. Her new husband, Tom, was a handsome urologist who was also extremely affectionate. When Alice met him last year, he took her by both shoulders and kissed her on the forehead. What made people behave that way? Alice toyed with the idea of growing up and being such a person, capable of grand physical gestures. Such a person, Alice imagined, would attract many people who’d spill their secrets and their deepest nagging fears, all out of an urge toward comfort. Alice suspected that was why her mother wanted to spend three hours in traffic—to be petted this way, in this offhand, almost flirty manner that suggested a deep forgiveness at the same time as it crossed proprietary lines.
There was nothing in either Susan’s or her husband Tom’s manner that suggested Susan’s previous husband gassed himself five years ago in his mistress’s garage, or that Tom left his anorexic wife for lush, messy Susan, and that the wife barely let him see his kids—a fact that (Alice had heard Susan tell Charlotte) he cried over daily.
“Your mother,” Susan said to Alice and Gus.
Here in Connecticut on the Fourth of July there were kisses and squeezes and pats on behinds. There were kids everywhere, even the ones whom Tom barely saw. Both Susan and Tom had two boys, plus Tom had adopted another son during his very first marriage, and that son had a few kids, so there were all kinds of halfs and steps popping up everywhere, waving or nodding hello. Within minutes Gus was in the water, having taken off on what appeared to be a quest to swim across the pond. Alice figured it would be only moments before a few others followed. She caught the eye of three girls in cutoff jeans shorts. They didn’t smile.
“Susan,” Alice said, tapping her shoulder, “do you need any help?”
Susan laughed, “Oh, my God, who raised you}” she said.
Neither of her parents laughed.
Charlotte said, “You don’t need to be so polite, honey—it’s only Susan,” and raised her glass to her friend before breaking into a smile.
“Alice, she’s right. Get out of here! Look at all these kids. Why don’t you go in the pond? Did you bring a suit?”
Alice nodded but there was no way she was taking off her shirt. She backed up and to the side, where the properly tapered off into woods. It was cooler in the shade, if more buggy, and Alice was amazed how easily she could fade into the background, close enough to hear certain adult conversations but far enough away that anyone looking would assume she was the type of girl to sit and look at rocks, a weird but harmless loner kid. But she wasn’t that kind of kid. She wasn’t off in her own world, as she assumed her father was saying to some man who’d just gestured toward Alice. She knew her father liked thinking of her that way, as an inquisitive, if slightly spacey girl. But she was good with groups of kids her own age, good enough, anyway. Right now she wasn’t in the mood. She was, if anything, too much a part of everyone else’s world, a simple link in a chain, and she wanted to step back and watch the chain swing and grow tangled around her.
Her parents were together, drinks in hand, meeting new people. When her mother was introduced to someone new, Alice played a silent game with herself, predicting all of Charlotte’s moves. If the new person looked interesting enough, Charlotte more than likely would ask for the name again, leaning in a little closer. Her eyes were either on the water, the sky, a tall tree, or else they were directly meeting another person’s gaze, almost aggressively so. Though by now she knew her mother’s tricks, her father didn’t seem to, for as distantly as her mother’s gaze traveled, her father’s gaze was shortsighted. It rested, for the most part, on Charlotte. He was snowed, thought Alice. He was a man lost in the blizzard of her mother. At this point she almost envied how he was able to walk around even part-time with snow in his eyes, unable to see a thing. And she couldn’t help it—she liked watching her par- ents and was proud of them like this, so clearly together. Amidst all of her mother’s smooth moves she always held on to her father’s hand. It seemed unimaginable that they should ever be apart, that their mother would feel the need to fly off to distant places the way other moms and other wives went to work or went shopping or sometimes spent a week at a spa. From Alice’s vantage, her father looked the way he always looked—a bit uninterested in others but kind, and her mother looked like a more beautiful than average but otherwise normal wife and mother. She could have been a teacher, a journalist, a psychotherapist. She could have been a pastry chef, a professor of anthropology.
What Charlotte didn’t accept was that what she did with her time was take vacations. If someone asked how her vacation was, after her return from any number of stunning locales, she viewed them askance before explaining precisely why she had been to the Philippines or Peru, or Chile or Nepal. It was always something important or essential, each and every time. The overarching concept was that she was doing research for an ever-changing project. She was interested in the local craftsmanship of various provinces in many countries and needed to do extensive research before deciding on the locus of her importing. She had visions of fostering a true partnership with poverty-stricken craftspeople. It was, everyone agreed, a really swell idea. However, the research had been spread out over many years now, and if her father suggested that they really couldn’t afford her plane ticket or her lodgings or it just wasn’t a good time for her departure, a source of capital (and therefore further proof of why she just had to go) would miraculously turn up. She had frequent-flyer miles, a legitimate tax write-off, a nonprofit foundation agreed to provide transportation if she’d write an article for their annual journal.
However, no matter how often these trips occurred and how opaque Charlotte could be about what she was doing and with whom, Alice didn’t think her parents would get divorced like some of her friends’ parents. They touched each other often (which her friend Eleanor insisted was an important sign of a healthy couple), and they liked to be alone. No matter how far off Charlotte went or how he might have resented her for it, her father issued a kind of unspoken gratitude whenever she returned. Alice made herself consider the idea of her father having an affair, but he just wasn’t the type, and it wasn’t just because he was her father that she thought so. Alice prided herself on being objective, and besides which, she could picture her mother doing it; she was sometimes pretty convinced it had already happened. Sometimes there were strange male voices on the other end of the telephone. They hung up quickly; they never left a message.
It made Alice sick to think about her mother’s possible infidelity but that sickness was given ballast by the perhaps strange notion that it was her mother’s love for her father that seemed the most irrefutable. Alice once overheard two women in a supermarket, squeezing eggplants, talking about their sister. “She thinks he walks on water,” one of them said. It was only later that Alice understood those words as ultimately sarcastic. At the time, though, she was caught up in the beauty of the phrase and the surprising security that came with knowing that her mother’s feelings for her father lay within those words.
There was a peculiar reverence for her father, and it was always in the air. It shifted in degrees the way the temperature shifted with the seasons, but it never went away. Charlotte wasn’t snowed; it was the opposite of that. Her mother was alert to his greatness; she paid attention to all that he was, bringing it to the light if need be.
Alice sat on the ground, letting the soil touch the backs of her legs, ignoring the ants making uphill campaigns over her bare thighs. Up above, crosshatches of dark emerald leaves weighed down the long thin branches. She had disappeared. The adults had willed it so, being more than happy to believe she was old enough or smart enough or weird enough to be off by herself and alone. Clearly no one thought enough of her to believe that what she was really doing was spying.
Having procured drinks, Charlotte let go of Alan’s hand and her parents each drifted into separate conversations. Her father was alternating between listening to Tom list men’s names— “Dan Goddard, Dave Stern, you know Dave Stern, don’t you?”—and looking out at the water, keeping an eye on Gus.
Charlotte was shaking a man’s hand. He was exceptionally tan and young-looking; though on closer inspection he couldn’t have been much younger than Charlotte. He was neither handsome nor particularly tall, but he carried himself in such a way that suggested that he was both.
“What a pleasure to meet you,” her mother was gushing. From the way she was beaming Alice could tell she knew who he was. “Your advice has gotten me through most of Southeast Asia.”
“You’re familiar with my books?”
“Familiar? I’m indebted to you. Oh, and your piece in the Tribune on Burmese trade reforms last year was particularly good. Not to mention that traveling anywhere, especially alone, you appreciate a bit of intelligent humor in a guidebook. Not to say your books could be thought of as simply guidebooks. They’re not easily defined. I mean the section on Chiang Mai, just the noodles alone … I’m sure you get a lot of this—I’m sorry.”
“No,” the man said, clearly enjoying himself, “what?”
Charlotte blushed—a sight so rare it was almost unsettling. Alice felt herself blush along with her. “You know, people feeling like you’ve traveled with them. I’m sure it’s terribly boring for you.”
He laughed a low laugh with not much to it. “Come on. I’m pleased. I take it you have the bug.”
“Oh, you know, anywhere but here” she said, pouring herself more of whatever was in the glass pitcher. Her hair was in a high, loose ponytail, falling to one side. I hate that expression, Alice thought, on hearing her say that stupid phrase, at the sight of all that thick hair secured in bright red elastic, a bright red elastic that belonged to Alice.
“Have you been to Burma, then?”
“Mm,” she said, sipping her drink. “Two years ago was my first time. There’s this project…” She was waiting for him to ask another question, but he was the type to nod intently instead. “It’s in its early stages, but—”
“It’s unusual you had the opportunity to go.”
“I put in a request for a special visa in, oh, 1965.”
The man laughed. “Tell me about it.”
“I figured whenever I got one, whenever it came, I’d just go.” She sighed heavily. “It was worth the wait though. My God,” she said.
He looked as if he was considering something and then asked, “No kids?”
Her mother bristled slightly, her thin eyebrows working. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no, I don’t know, the freedom to take off like that. It gets tough,” he said, “at our age.”
“I have children,” Charlotte said, and Alice’s heart began pounding. “I have two. A boy and a girl.”
“How perfect,” he said, with a tone Alice disliked. She knew she shouldn’t be listening, she knew she shouldn’t be spying, and she also knew that nothing was going to move her from this spot.
“They are perfect,” her mother said, finishing her drink. “They are perfect and I am not.” She smiled wearily, and for a moment Alice had no idea what she was trying to do. She wondered what her mother was thinking. “You know how it is.”
“I don’t, actually. I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Oh, you should,” she said, and then softer, “you really should.” Her fingers grazed a stray hair on her neck that had fallen from her ponytail, and his interest—Alice could feel it— deepened.
So did Alice’s. She wanted to hear her mother talk about her. That was the whole point. Ask, she thought, watching the tan man: Ask about me.
Charlotte saw the man look past her, but still she nearly jumped when her husband put his hands on her shoulders.
“Hello, there,” Alice heard her father say. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Hi,” the tan man said. “You must be—”
“Alan Green,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“J. D. Connor. I’ve been talking with your wife about her travels.” He hesitated, Alice noticed, before saying wife.
“Oh,” he said, “well, in that case, I’m not sure I should listen. There’s too much I probably don’t know.” He spoke almost innocently, almost playfully. “I’m afraid I don’t get away too often.” The silence that followed was brief but awkward enough.
“And what keeps you busy?” J. D. Connor asked. He had a way that made Alice think of California. He was breezy and ordered all at once.
“Alan’s a scientist,” her mother said, trying to keep control of this conversation, even if it was veering down the inevitable path of her husband’s accomplishments. Alice saw her mother switch gears and get in touch with her seemingly endless reserve of intense beyond-wifely admiration.
“That right? What field?”
“Neurobiology,” her father said in his habitually tossed-off way. In a nonscience environment he was used to one of two responses: the conversation stopping there with a banal comment like “Wow,” or a series of questions from an earnest individual who asked what precisely neurobiology was and what it was, exactly, that he did. Her father had mostly nonscience friends, so he assumed no one at parties was really all that interested in his work. He insisted he preferred it that way.
But J. D. Connor said, “Far out.”
Charlotte looked irritated with both his interest and his diction.
“Dr. Alan Green?” J.D. said. “You used to teach at Cornell?”
“A long while ago, yes.”
“Hey that was going to be me, man. I was going that route. I was at Cornell when you’d just left for sabbatical, I think. It’s too bad. Maybe you would have changed my mind. I fell out of step or something. Never even completed my master’s.”
“And I’m sure you’re losing sleep over it, too,” her mother said, smiling. Her cheeks were still flushed with color.
“Actually,” he said, soberly, “it was the most difficult decision I ever made. I always downplay it—you know, make it sound like I just was too busy having fun or something. Hey you do extraordinary work,” J. D. Connor said sadly. “You’ve got the real deal here,” he said to Charlotte.
“I’m quite aware,” she said evenly.
“What is it you do now?” said her father.
“He’s the writer of those books I bring everywhere,” Charlotte told him. “He’s fantastic,” she said with a pale smile. “Would anyone like another drink?”
Alice stood up. As her mother made for the drinks table, Alice eased out from behind the trees, leaving her father and J. D. Connor to talk about science. She felt dizzy and younger somehow, as if she’d woken from a nap. She could see the girls in the jeans shorts lolling in a fading patch of sun, just talking. She could go over and say hello. She could say she liked their hair, the way it was braided in fishtail braids with tiny little strands. She could go ask the only three boys not swimming if they wanted to have a seed-spitting contest. But there was her mother sitting down in a lawn chair with a drink in one hand. Charlotte looked tired, and as her husband continued to talk to the tan travel writer—to one of the people, Alice just knew, her mother most wished to befriend—Alice watched her mother light a hand-rolled cigarette with a huge votive lighter swiped from the grill.
“I thought no smoking,” Alice said, after approaching and sitting at her mother’s feet.
“Yeah, well, I thought so too,” she said. “How’re you doing, Miss Alice?” She put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
“Okay I guess.”
“With these kind, the hand-rolled kind, I do it less, though—the smoking. Don’t I?”
Alice shrugged and leaned back onto her mother’s legs. She could feel the fine hairs that were growing back from waxing. The mild scent of Lubriderm lotion made her think of petals. “Look,” Alice said, “that’s Gus. Do you see?” Gus was still in the pond—just a speck in the distance, flanked by two other specks. She’d been right about his followers.
“Where?” Charlotte said.
Alice got up and pointed. She noticed the sun was blazing through the white haze, announcing a quick descent. “Do you see?”
“I do, sweetheart. He’s right there. He’s heading our way.” “Can I have a sip?” She reached for her mother’s sweating glass of what looked like lemonade.
“I’m not sure you’ll like it,” Charlotte said. “It’s very sour.” Alice—not exactly sure why she wanted it so badly—took a sip anyway. It tasted like etherized bugs. She was coughing and coughing with watery eyes.
“Told you,” Charlotte said, rubbing her back. “You okay?” Alice nodded. “That’s not sour. That is pure alcohol.” “Mm,” she said, kind of grinning, “there’s that too. You want to go get a Coke or something?”
Alice shook her head. She’d get one in a minute. She was hungry for a cheeseburger; it was almost dinnertime. Gus was a bigger speck on the green, dark pond, coming closer. “Why do you think he likes to swim so far?”
After a moment her mother answered slowly. “He needs to know,” Charlotte said, after taking a final long sip. “Your brother needs to know what it feels like to be far away from everything familiar, in order to know how to love it. Does that make sense?”
Alice shook her head. The spike of her mother’s intoxicated breath heightened her careful speech, and Alice had a growing anticipation for the fireworks explosion. She couldn’t help picturing the way her family would find each other—they were that kind of family, the kind who respected these moments like the ball dropping, like the World Series, like fireworks on the Fourth—and they would stand together, their faces upturned like they’d never seen such a show. She couldn’t help picturing how her parents would look amazed and in their amazement they would look young—they would look a bit lost. Everyone looked that way, if only a little, when looking up at the sky. Alice could see it all—how in no time the sky would return to mussel blackness, how they’d soon be back on the highway, leaving Susan and Tom and who knew how many kids to clean up the remains of the party. Alice knew instinctively what this was, this seeing the future as a kind of dull past. It made Alice want to crawl onto Charlotte’s narrow lap, which was hardly big enough to hold her anymore.
“Do you think he’ll always feel that way?”
“I think so,” Charlotte said, nodding.
“That’s sad,” Alice said. She wondered if her mother would call up Mr. J. D. Connor this coming week and ask him all about Cambodia. Or Bhutan. These were the places she’d been pointing out lately in her big world atlas in the living room. “Don’t you think it’s sad?”
“Yes,” her mother said, “I do.”