Sleep, 1984
Her name was Cady DeForrest. Cady, not Katie, not -£. A-Kate. She didn’t go to their school. Gus met her in October at a party illegally given on a tennis club’s courts. The courts were in an old airplane hangar nestled in the woods. They closed at nine P.M., but a burned-out pro (who was leaving the next day for Australia) had the keys, and he’d decided to go out with a bang. Gus knew him from … oh, who knew from where. Alice had stopped wondering and started accepting that her brother just knew people. He knew plenty of girls, different girls over whom he acted crazy but who were inevitably phased out. She had ceased being surprised.
Cady DeForrest, however, tipped the scales.
Alice hadn’t gone to the party. She’d known about it—Gus hadn’t hidden it from her—but she had the feeling Gus didn’t want her along. Because he actually was great about taking her everywhere without her even having to ask, and because these were places where she was the only sophomore in sight, she thought she’d give him a break. It was Friday night. She went with Eleanor to the movies, drank beers in the parking lot with a couple of boys they’d recognized vaguely from school—most of the time wondering why they’d accepted the impromptu invitation, why they were all just standing around watching cars. Out of not much more than agitation, she gave the taller one a hand job between the stand of trees and the lot. He was big and grateful and smelled like soap, like butter. She liked how he kissed lightly and the way he looked so surprised when she went to unbutton his jeans. He said he’d call her but she really didn’t care. Once she had done something like that, once she surprised herself and someone else, the rest felt forced and steeped in obligation, and she didn’t trust obligation any more than she trusted good old neglect.
The next morning, from her window, Alice saw a blond girl in a red pilled sweater sneaking out their front door. There were leaves and small twigs stuck in the wool, and her smooth hair was tied in what looked like a bra. She wore a witchy black skirt with an uneven hem, under which were her white bare feet on tiptoe as she hurried out the door. She sat on the front steps and, obviously freezing, tugged on a pair of brown cowboy boots that she’d been holding like books in her arms. She didn’t look back at Gus’s window. She bypassed the gravel driveway and disappeared into the woods.
Alice went back to sleep and dreamed of the hand job (the odd combination of anxiousness and power, the fear of someone coming and the fear of someone not coming) and she woke up to the smell of bacon. It was the smell of their mother being gone, as she never kept it in the house (a particular vestige of Charlotte’s equally ambivalent Jewish upbringing— shrimp okay, pork not okay skipping Rosh Hashanah barely okay skipping Yom Kippur simply not). Alice could bet there were also any number of preservative-laden baked goods lying on countertops with their bright cardboard containers torn open, their plastic wrapping cast aside, but not thrown away. She could bet Gus had woken full of restless energy and (after their father left for the lab at seven) put Spin in the car and went to the first open deli in town, picked up the bacon and the packaged goods, chatted with the pimple-faced kid at the counter, chatted with the odd old man. He would be waiting now for his sister to come downstairs; he’d be in the mood for talking. Alice did her best—as she wrapped herself in Charlotte’s old blue chenille robe, as she padded down the back stairs—not to be so eager to listen.
“Good morning to you,” Gus said.
“You’ve showered,” Alice said, amazed.
“It is,” Gus said, handing Alice a cup of milky coffee, “a beautiful morning.”
“Are you going to start singing?”
“I might. I’m telling you, I just might.”
“So,” Alice said, sitting down at the table, looking out at the gray water, at what was, in fact, the blandest kind of day.
“So,” he said. Even though she wasn’t looking, she could hear that he was grinning.
“All right, who is she?” Alice asked in a bored voice, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “The girl with the boots, the one who left this morning.” She still didn’t look at him. Spin’s big head nudged her hand up and over and she pet him, hard. Outside, a cardinal stood stone-still on a long bent branch: a swath of blood on an arm.
“Oh, man,” Gus said, biting a jelly doughnut, getting powder on his face and not bothering to wipe it off. He didn’t wonder aloud how Alice had seen her, how she’d known the girl had stayed the night. When you had feelings as big and encompassing as his, Alice assumed it meant you never questioned their importance or their impact on the world. For Gus, the world had stopped. Not just for him, but for Alice as well; and not just for Alice but for everyone. Self-involvement, she supposed, was what that was called. But it didn’t feel like self-involvement; it felt like inclusion, like elevation. She wanted to feel along with him. She wanted to lose herself in knowing. She turned from the red bird knowing full well that when she looked again it would be gone.
“Let’s start with a name,” Alice said, flouting—as she did with nobody else—her expressly practical side.
He told her that Cady DeForrest had been the only one at the party who wanted to actually play tennis. Everyone else had just sat around on the courts doing shots, smoking pot, and she’d shown up with a racket. She had long legs and strong arms and one seriously nice ass. “I’d seen her before,” Gus explained. “I’d seen her at the drugstore buying calamine lotion sometime before Labor Day. She’d had a bad case of poison ivy.”
“Sexy,” Alice said.
Gus, laughing, said, “That’s what she said, when I told her!”
“She did? Weird.”
“Then she said she had to pee, and I said I didn’t want to stop looking at her and I followed her out into the woods, and when we were alone I told her to go ahead and pee. And she did. She peed in front of me.”
“Did you look?”
“Yeah, I looked. We were both laughing. She looked so good. I mean, I’ve never seen a girl look so good. …” He piled bacon on a plate, turned off the stove, put the plate on the table, and sat down. “So, you know, I kissed her then.”
“While she was peeing?”
“No, Jesus, no. Right after.” He was trying not to smile. “She goes to Portbay,” he said, suddenly shy. “She’s a junior.”
“How did she get home this morning?”
“She walked, I guess. I didn’t really know she’d gone.”
Alice would never understand him. “You didn’t know she’d gone? She didn’t wake you to say good-bye?” He was not disturbed in the least, not concerned that she left in a state of regret, composing a list of his shortcomings, a state with which Alice herself was so familiar. “Well, are you going to call her?”
“Already did. She’s coming over later.”
Alice should have hated her. By all rights, she was the kind of girl who had points against her from the start: She was petite but strong, butter-cream blond and actually in the physics club and played the guitar in addition to being indisputably pretty. Cady was rich—but super rich—and she looked it, no matter how pilled her sweaters were (she was wearing a green one now, buttoned up the front with two of the buttons missing) and no matter how stained her tan cords. Her good looks verged on the ordinary, and it was their ordinariness that was so threatening; hers was a face you’d see in sepia tones on the walls of restricted country clubs, in generation after generation of well-documented ladies’ tennis and sailing competitions. It was a face that barely escaped an upturned button nose. She was from a family that had donated libraries, that had appeared in various biographies of politicians and starlets alike. But her parents had died in their own airplane somewhere over the Indian Ocean when she was just six, leaving a spinster aunt to raise her, and somehow this fact made Cady seem more real (if sadly more enthralling) to Alice. This brought her down to the same brown earth, the same place where Alice lived, where a mother and a father defined her existence even if they weren’t there.
“My aunt is a nightmare,” she told Alice in a matter-of-fact tone. They sat together after Gus left them there on the rickety dock; their legs hung down in tacit competition of who could dangle lower without touching her boots to the water.
“Has she always been?” Alice asked carefully. “A nightmare?” not wanting Cady to stop telling about her life. Alice was going for details. They’d already gone through Cady’s debacle at boarding school last year, being thrown out for stealing a good deal of Xanax from the infirmary, which happened to be one floor down from her dorm. “My roommate was so sad,” she’d said by way of explanation of why she wanted all those pills.
Cady chewed on a pale strand of hair in a way that made the gesture look as if chewing hair were the new sitting up straight, the new way to smile. “My aunt,” she said, “she’s all right. We have dinner together every evening at six. It’s been that way since I can remember. I have to wear a skirt and I have to be on time. If I’m late she eats without me. And she doesn’t even particularly like to eat. If it were socially acceptable she’d probably choose to live on Goldfish crackers and gin. We’ve never been what you’d call a warm twosome.” She laughed like someone older, like someone who has already made a new adult home. “People always think I’m exaggerating. You should come over sometime and see.”
“Sounds like the house is stopped in time.”
“That’s about right,” she said. “My aunt is eighty-one.”
“My God,” Alice said.
“There were twenty years between her and my mother. My mother was one of those miracle babies, back when doctors thought it was basically impossible for a woman of forty to give birth, and my parents waited forever to have me, so …”
“You don’t have any brothers or sisters?”
She shook her head.
“Cousins?”
“A few. But they’re all older and awful. They live in the city and piss away all their money on Ralph Lauren and cocaine. I’m from terrible people, I’m telling you,” she said. “My aunt smokes, drinks, and eats red meat at least twice a day. She’s a savage with impeccable manners,” she said. “Although lately the manners have started to go. Her anti-Catholic campaign has reemerged. Most of the staff has quit.”
Alice had a feeling she wasn’t exaggerating. She was not trying to be funny “What’s her name?”
Cady looked surprised. “I never call her by her name. No one ever uses it. The staff calls her Mrs. DeForrest, her friends at the club call her ‘darling,’ and I call her Aunt K. Her name is Kippy” she said. “Ridiculous, right?”
“Yes,” Alice said, “completely.”
“So how about you? Is it always this quiet around here?”
“Our mother travels a lot,” Alice said. She wouldn’t talk about her mother like some character. She wouldn’t reduce her parents to caricatures of themselves. Not yet, at least. I love my mother, Alice could say. I miss her more now than I did when I was little. I have her flight schedule under my pillow. I know her driver Gary’s telephone number by heart—Gary, who drives her to the airport and picks her up in case my father has to work, in case he pretends he has to work because he is just so angry she’s leaving once more now that we are old enough to be left.“Our father works all the time.”
“You know something?” Cady said. “You’re really pretty.”
She said it in a way that assumed that Alice didn’t think so, that she couldn’t possibly have heard that sentiment too often before. Cady DeForrest said it as if she were the first person to notice, as if all Alice needed was this older girl’s approval.
Well, Alice thought, I’m flattered. And then she thought, Fuck you.
Cady probably assumed she’d never gotten a hickey that she had never met a boy at a party, given him a blow job in a closet, felt his eggy cum all over her neck and had him wipe her face with his boxers. Cady assumed she’d never had a boy put his hands down her pants in the costume closet at school, biting her breasts with his big straight teeth, saying “You’re so sexy.” Or that she could do all of this in just the past month, with all different boys, just because she felt like it. Cady no doubt thought that Alice wasn’t pretty enough to do that and not feel used.
Fuck you, she thought. But she didn’t mean it. She wanted to mean it, but she didn’t. “Thanks,” Alice said. “Thank you.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” she said. She took a breath. “Do you like my brother?” Alice asked, looking her over, feeling an insane need to protect Gus. Cady was a deadly combination of needing no one and wanting everything—everything she felt she’d been denied. Gus was the one who was used to being selfish and elusive. He was the one who showed up when he felt like it, went surfing for days if the waves were good in the very dead of winter. He was the one who didn’t call. “Do you?” she said. But Cady had seen Gus coming even before Alice did and she was up and on her feet, running the planks to greet him as if he were back from some great suburban war.
Gus had only run to the house and back to get them all more layers, although Alice was sure that he would have found any excuse to leave them alone. It would be more exciting for him, after Cady left, if he could hear what she was like when he wasn’t around. He liked Alice to be informed, or at least give informed opinions about the girls he was with. He was using her, Alice knew, but she didn’t mind this kind of use. It meant that, in a way, he needed her more than he did before, when girls had yet to become his means of sustenance, before he needed them like he needed water, maybe even more than water. When there was a girl in the picture (which there had been since he’d turned fourteen), he was like those addicts in the movies: always in phone booths fumbling around for some extra coins to place a call to a dealer. Except, with Gus, his bedroom closet was the phone booth and he’d tug the white cord from the phone in the hall into his smelly closet. He’d call the girls. He’d talk and talk; who knew how they got in a word. He’d tell stories and jokes and muse about his worries, worries that were always about natural disasters or some such looming business. He never worried that he wasn’t somehow or other substantial enough to be noticed, or that he felt as if sometimes he could simply evaporate if no one was watching— or even if someone was watching, how he might just disappear. He’d talk and talk and lower his voice so Alice couldn’t even hear him, even as she was unforgivably right outside the closet door.
Then they’d come over. They’d come to him. She tried not to picture him being the kind of boy who begged, who made desperate noise, who convinced a girl that if she didn’t follow through, he’d just go ahead and die. She tried not to picture this but she failed miserably, because it wasn’t like she had to really try—she somehow knew it was true.
And so she didn’t mind him using her to talk about the girls, to keep them going in his mind after they’d all gone home.
Her brother claimed (only half-jokingly) that he was cultivating her gift of intuition. Besides, she was too damn curious.
With Cady it was different. Cady wasn’t merely dashing in and out of his bedroom. Cady asked why the toilet in the front hall bathroom didn’t work. She changed a lightbulb in the laundry room when she thought no one was watching. She refilled Spin’s water bowl, brought over a bag of Gala apples, a crate of Clementines—dumping them without any to-do in the kitchen’s empty wooden bowl. Cady barely went home.
One month later they all sat out on the dock with a thermos of hot chocolate enhanced by rum (prepared by Cady, who insisted they had to have a thermos somewhere) and watched the cold sun ease away. They talked about the worst physical pain they’d ever felt, and as it turned out they’d all been very blessed; none of them had broken a bone, been in a car accident, none of them had even had stitches. Pain surely had to be coming, exquisite, torturous pain. As they talked, Alice lit matches and cast the flames down to the water. She didn’t smoke but she loved lighting other people’s cigarettes; she loved lighting matches and playing chicken with the flame, seeing how long her fingers would hang on before letting fire take over.
“Why do you do that?” Cady asked. She seemed not disapproving but merely curious. She was holding August’s hand. Alice shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Habit, I guess.” “That’s no habit,” Cady said. “That’s a dare.” “Maybe,” Alice said with a shrug, not elaborating, letting Cady think she was maybe a little more mysterious, a bit more dangerous than Alice believed herself to be.
“You know,” Gus said, “our mother is coming home tonight.”
“How long has she been gone again?” Cady asked.
“Well, a little over one month, actually,” Alice said. “Right before you arrived here on our planet. She’s been buying rugs in Marrakech. She’s selling them to some dealer in the city.”
“We think,” Gus added.
“I should go home then,” Cady said, but she didn’t move a muscle. “I really should get going.”
Alice looked at her. She got really lucky with that light. Even the dying sun was hitting on Cady and casting only the most luxuriant light and shadows a girl could ever ask for. If it were thousands of years ago, everyone in Suffolk County would have all started worshipping Cady DeForrest right then and there, lighting candles in her honor, sacrificing virgins in her name, convinced she was a human conceived of spun gold, an impossibly valuable woman. Alice wanted to tell her, Don’t even think about moving; even you will never look this way again. Her skin was warm milk with a splash of rich coffee, and her eyes looked like being underwater on a perfect day, seeing the sky through the surface of the sea. And then she smiled.
Gus seemed to make a decision. “I’ll walk you to the car,” he said, as if he were saying, I want to make a baby. The two of them got up and went to the house.
A few minutes later Alice went too. Cady’s decrepit lime-green BMW was still in the driveway. Nobody was going anywhere. Alice had never been so thankful to live in a big house. She went as far as possible from Gus’s room, to a room where there was, mercifully, a television. For an hour or two she sat frozen on the couch, as if she were commanded by God Himself to crank up the volume and watch old shows on television. She watched until she could be fairly certain she couldn’t possibly hear them doing anything even if she were to go upstairs. Outside was a pitch-black night, a moonless son of a bitch. The phone rang, startling her, and it was their father from the airport saying that he and Charlotte would be home in an hour, what would everybody like to eat? Should they swing by China Express?
“Cady’s here,” Alice said, turning the volume on the television all the way down, “and I have a feeling she’s staying for dinner.”
“Whatever happened to that girl with the hair, that Sharon or whatever her name was?”
“Long gone, Daddy,” Alice said, smiling at her father, how seriously clueless he was. There had been at least three girls since Shannon, but her father liked girls with reddish hair, girls like his wife and daughter. “How’s Mom?” she said, and for some reason she thought she might start crying. Alice looked at the television—as if for consolation—where a pale female hand poured blue liquid on a diaper.
“She’s suntanned,” he said, sounding happy. “She’s right here beside me. Shall I put her on?”
“That’s okay,” Alice said, swallowing hard. “I’ll see her soon enough.”
When she hung up the phone, she heard what sounded like Gus shouting. Gus was yelling at Cady It had been only one month and they’d already fought more than a few times over who knew what. For the first time, Gus wouldn’t expound upon his girl troubles. He said it was just very intense and that it killed him, being with her, that it was like ten years in a day. “It sounds miserable,” Alice had made the mistake of saying, and Gus looked at her as if he were driving away on a long journey and there was no point in keeping in touch. There was the sound of something landing hard on the floor, the sound of a door slamming. And then there was silence.
All day she’d felt pretty good—even kind of excited— comfortable being included in her brother’s wild romance, but now it seemed clear that she’d been only tagging along, that all they’d really wanted was a chance to be alone. They were probably making up from their fight and laughing about it right now—all the times they’d tried to give Alice hints and all the times she’d stayed and stayed. She thought of going out, of having her own destructive passion, but she remembered just last week at Eleanor’s club, which seemed like years ago, the way a lanky boy’s face changed, becoming more set in his features somehow, when she agreed to “just go for a walk.” The idea of passion seemed laughable. It took so little to please them. Each time.
It had started—as most everything she did—as a way to get at her mother. She knew it, too. It was embarrassing, but there it was: two months ago, at a bonfire party on a measly strip of public beach, she’d stayed out later than she had any reason to stay, later than anyone else she knew, because she wanted Charlotte to worry about her just enough that she might go and cancel her trip. Gus was supposed to be back from Mon-tauk, where he’d been working and surfing all summer. He was supposed to have made it back for the party, at least in time to pick her up, but he didn’t come and he didn’t come, and without her brother there Alice was different somehow. Without her brother pounding that one extra beer, without him being the one who’d have hours ago stripped naked sloshing into the sea, inciting at least five others to follow his lead, Alice’s usual quiet self was a different kind of quiet. Lit by firelight and two beers (her tolerance for alcohol being nonexistent), she found herself supplying some dark-haired lifeguard with more than enough reason to believe she just might like to go “gather some wood.”
“It’s cold,” he’d said. “I’m Devin.”
“You’re a lifeguard, right? Didn’t you save a little boy this summer?”
Devin nodded, giving a nice heroic squint toward the circle of embers. The fire was—as it should have been at this late hour—dying down. She set off with him with her hands in her pockets with visions of stumbling home, a wrecked picture of teenage trouble, smelling of someone else’s breath, someone else’s beer. She imagined, she did, crumpling into a ball as her mother screamed and yelled at her, as her father tried to calm Charlotte down.
So Alice followed the would-be wood gatherer and they lay down on a stretch of ground that was somewhere between soil and sand. At first it seemed as if Devin the lifeguard just wanted to lie alongside someone and look at the stars, reinstate his summer memories. He’d explained about saving the little boy, how it all went so fast, how his girlfriend became jealous of all the attention and broke up with him but it was, like, so long over anyway. “I’m driving up to Maine tomorrow,” he said. “I’m supposed to leave at five-thirty.”
Alice, sensing it was now or never, turned on her side and propped her head in her hand as if primed for a set of leg lifts. “You should just stay up all night,” she said. “You’re more than halfway there.”
He didn’t say anything, but he kept his gaze on her. He didn’t smile and he didn’t move. And she felt something drop out from under her, like riding in a skyscraper’s elevator and going straight for the top. There were his eyes, more serious and tragic than she’d noticed before. He’d saved a little boy. He reached out—not to hold her hand or touch her face but to take off her shirt. She let him. It felt like a cross between being undressed as a child and stepping into a sin-red room where she began to understand greed. The air had been warm enough for her skin not to freeze, but cool enough to be alarming. She’d never been shirtless in front of a boy before either, and she was proud she didn’t hide herself away, chickening out in the shadows. He kissed her briefly and surprisingly inexpertly (he was a lifeguard, for God’s sake) with small hard lips, but he had strong hands, and after a couple of years of being so concerned with stopping their hands—stopping the boys’ roving, raging, hormone-fueled hands—she let this one’s hands go everywhere, thinking about not much more than getting herself into trouble at home. But she liked it more than she’d planned. She liked the attention and she liked how he actually smelled like the very end of summer, all that salt and suntan lotion being replaced by chill. Sweat coated them both like sea spray, and she did forget the time. She didn’t let it go that far. He gave her a ride home. No harm done, really.
Except when she did stumble through the front door it wasn’t her mother who greeted her.
“Daddy?” Alice breathed, after she saw her father hunched in a chair, sitting in the dark.
He told her he was worried, that he’d had no number to call.
“I’m fine,” Alice told him. “See? I’m completely fine.”
He looked at her, saying nothing. He ran a hand over the planes of his tired face.
“I lost track of time,” Alice said. “I’m sorry you waited up.” And she was instantly embarrassed, wholly ashamed, an unconvincing bad girl. Her father was the very last person she wanted to worry. She hadn’t imagined his tired face ragged with concern. She’d only envisioned Charlotte and her rage, the rage that Alice craved. She wanted to reassure him that she had stayed out late on purpose—as if that would make it better—and that she was in control.
He asked her to please, please never do that again. He told her it wasn’t fair.
“You’re right,” she said. She nodded. “Is Mom up?”
He smiled, strangely, and told her that Charlotte had been sleeping soundly since shortly after Alice had left for her all-night adventure. “She sleeps like a baby,” her father said. “It’s funny how well she always sleeps before she goes away.”
It’s just those French sleeping pills she insists on finishing up, as if they’re a roll of film, Alice wanted to tell him. It’s to spite me, don’t you see?
And the days got shorter and Alice’s nights became longer, her estimated times of arrival increasingly more difficult to pin down. And her father became angry, and her mother continued planning her trip, taking jaunts into the city to visit embassies and personal contacts, various specially shops.
On the morning of her flight, Charlotte cupped Alice’s chin in her hand, as if Alice were a Czech peasant and Charlotte a busy modeling scout inspecting the local stock. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you look tired and a little bloated; are you getting your period?”
Alice shook her head, and her mother’s hand fell away. “No,” she said, flaunting a yawn. She’d come in the last two nights at three o’clock in the morning and made it to school by eight.
“Well,” Charlotte said, taking off her rings and putting them in a Ziploc baggie, ready for the safe, “I think you ought to get more sleep. All this running around, this late-night drinking—listen, I can only assume—it’ll wreak havoc on your skin, believe me. You can’t escape the bloat, even at your age.”
Alice looked at her mother, trying her best not to show how shocked she was.
Her mother met that look and tripled it. Stop, was what Charlotte’s eyes said, stop this pathetic behavior. Her mother clearly believed that with matters concerning her daughter she had only to think“stop,” and that Alice would. Charlotte obviously believed that of all life’s complications, her daughter could not be counted among them.
“Gus,” Alice yelled, as she got up from the couch and made her way toward the kitchen. “Hey Gus?” She wasn’t going to cower in front of the television all night. “They’re coming home soon,” she called out, not really caring if he heard. She stuck a piece of bread in the toaster and slathered it with honey. The sweetness hurt, she loved it so much. She dripped some on the counter and didn’t wipe it away.
And when they came down the back stairs, they were all rosy and weirdly younger-looking than she remembered either of them looking hours ago. Apparently they’d made up quickly and effectively. Alice felt like the old guardian of a crusty girls’ academy.
“How long have we been sleeping?” Gus asked.
Alice shot him a look.
Cady started cracking up. “We really were sleeping, I swear.”
“Have any good dreams?” Alice asked with a voice she hardly recognized.
“All good,” Gus said, putting a hand on Cady’s shoulder, as if to steady himself.
Alice thought for more than a second about knocking both of them to the ground.
That evening, Cady’s first time meeting Charlotte, they all ate Chinese food and prodded Charlotte to tell stories. It was comforting and sickening all at once, how ritualistic this had become. The taste of mu shu duck would always, for Alice, create the feeling of Charlotte just off a plane. Whether newly skinny or full in the face, smoking new cigarettes or not smok- ing at all, delighted to be home or desolate (she never hid her feelings, their mother; they had to give her that)—she almost always picked up Chinese food on her way home from the airport. Gary the driver sometimes took some egg rolls in the car so she could immediately satisfy her craving. Even if it was barely eleven A.M., even if she’d just eaten, and even if she’d just returned from China, where apparently, according to Charlotte, China Express could clean up.
Charlotte seemed well rested and had dropped at least five pounds. Her hair was tied back in a yellow head scarf, her fingernails weren’t bitten, and she kept touching her husband— his shoulders, his back. She was polite to Cady without being rude or overly solicitous, both of which Gus had previously accused her of being around his girlfriends. Charlotte had tried to pull Alice onto her lap, the way she’d always done when she was feeling affectionate, but Alice felt her face flush with anger as much as with embarrassment and she wriggled herself away.
What Alice wanted from herself: not to get a thrill when her mother treated her like a baby.
As they ate Chinese food on actual plates instead of from the containers (in honor of Gus’s guest), Charlotte talked. She’d burn out soon, her family knew, growing cranky and complaining of stomach cramps or else disappearing upstairs, her clothes strewn in colorful piles throughout the upstairs hallway; in the morning she’d be eager to move on, short with answers regarding her trip, somehow depressed by the idea of describing. And so they listened to her selective stories and didn’t interrupt, hoping to gain at least some understanding of where it was she’d been.
A man called Narouz (a rug merchant? a hotelier? apparently no further description was forthcoming) had given her tea that had smelled like hibiscus flowers, and she’d thrown up for days. She’d seen that French model, the enormous one from the sixties with one name and the square lips (who Charlotte had sworn had long since succumbed to a drug problem) purchasing one hundred small blue bowls. There had been a day spent in search of a Sufi retreat, a night of trying desperately to reach home, a series of broken phones and terrible connections. “I missed my babies,” she said, sloppily grabbing for Gus and Alice, grasping for their hands.
“Had you been to Morocco before?” Cady asked. Alice noticed that Cady had brushed her hair.
Charlotte nodded, swallowing a wonton. “Many times.”
“You’re doing some business there?” Alice could tell, by the way she asked, that Cady had been to Morocco, but she wasn’t going to say so.
Their mother shrugged and looked at Alice. “We’ll see what happens,” she said.
“What does that mean?” said Alice, slipping Spin a scallion pancake—one of Charlotte’s very favorite things—under the table. Her mother couldn’t just keep doing this, waltzing in and out of this house, this life, with nothing but great anecdotes. Cady had done more in a month in terms of light fixtures and consistent fresh fruit and listening than her own mother had done in years. Alice found herself angry with both of them, with her mother for leaving and with Cady for stepping in so easily as a girl who just knew more. How did she know how to run a house? How to move around like a woman? Servants raised her. She was only seventeen.
“It means she’ll see,” said Gus. “What do you think?”
“Well,” Alice said, “I thought it was an all-important trip for some big, urn, rug opportunity. What, did something not workout?”
“Alice,” her father said.
“Yes?” Alice said. “Oh, am I broaching an inappropriate topic? You’ve been gone for over a month and we’re supposed to sit here and listen to stories about models buying bowls?” She felt like pulling her mother’s hair out from under her silly head scarf. “We can’t ask what you’ve been doing?”
“Why not ease up?” her father said.
The phone rang and Alice jumped up to get it, seizing the opportunity for escape. “Let the machine get it,” Gus and Charlotte both cried out. They had an answering machine now. Her father had brought one home in July, and both Gus and Charlotte loved hearing the things that people said to a machine, how some people clammed up and others rambled on. The whole routine made Alice depressed.
Alice ignored them and picked up the phone. There was silence for a moment after she said hello, and she realized she was essentially terrified of who it could be, how her mother left so many loose ends each time she went away. It could be the bank, a hotel, a man who’d claim he found her wallet, that he’d like to give it to her in person, he didn’t trust the mail. “Hello,” she repeated in a lower voice.
“May I please speak to Alice?” a voice said.
“It’s me,” she said. “I mean, this is Alice.”
“It’s Jeff,” he said, “urn, from the parking lot?”
“Oh, hi,” she said too loudly.
“Hi,” he said. She heard what sounded like a small dog yip-ping in the background. She heard his breath.
God, she hated this. “What are you doing?” she blurted out.
“I was wondering if you wanted …” She heard Gus laugh so hard he snorted. She heard her mother: “And then he said, remooove it, s’il vousplaitl”
“Why don’t you come over,” Alice heard herself saying, as if she invited strange boys to hang out at her house, oh, all the time. She saw her mother raise an eyebrow, turn her stupid scarf-head in Alice’s direction. “Why don’t you come over now?”
Her first instinct after he said okay after she didn’t switch phones in order to have more privacy and after her family and Cady DeForrest heard her tell him how to get there (no easy feat with her screwy sense of direction), was to call her friend Eleanor. But not even Eleanor knew about the hand job, or that there had been kind of a lot of them in the past two months. Alice told Eleanor that they had just kissed. That is what, for some reason, she always said, even when Eleanor had heard some rumors— Eleanor was out. She made her way back to the table.
“Who was that?” her father said.
“Jeff. A boy from school.”
“And he’s coming over now?”
“Is that a problem?” Alice said, prepared to use Cady’s presence as a sensible bargaining tool. Gus was playing with Cady’s hair, right there at the kitchen table. “It’s only nine o’clock,” Alice said, “and we’ll just be right here.” The problem was, she didn’t care if he came over. She liked him, she was a little afraid of him, but she was really afraid of herself.
“I just don’t see—”
“Alan,” her mother said, clearly annoyed with Alice but not enough to take a stand, “just let her.”
She’d bring him, Jeff, she’d bring him down to the pool-house and shock him by not talking. He’d ask her to do things and she would. He wouldn’t even have to ask her. She’d beat him to it, doing away with the small negotiations. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what he wanted from her. He was too good-looking and too well liked to be calling her for real. She knew she had pretty hair and nice legs and was smart in a strange sort of way, but there were girls who were girlfriends and girls who were not, and she knew herself—she knew which kind of category she fit into.
By the time Jeff made it over, her parents were splayed on the living-room couch, unaware or unconcerned that Gus and Cady were back at it in his room. It seemed they were going for an all-time record; they simply had no shame.
Jeff was even taller than she remembered. He looked completely foreign to Alice, as if he’d just stepped out of the 1950s—1955 on a farm. And he was serious. If he’d been wearing a hat, on seeing her parents he no doubt would have taken it off.
“See ya,” Alice said to her parents, after a brief introduction.
“Where are you going?” her father asked.
Alice laughed a quick, short laugh. “We’re just going down to the water,” she said. “It’s pretty.”
“Well, I don’t think that’s a great idea,” he said.
“Daddy?”
“This time of year the raccoons are staked out down there. Mrs. Craven was actually attacked by one the other evening.”
Everyone was laughing, even Jeff, who didn’t seem to know where to look.
“Raccoons?” Alice said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
The way her father was looking at her made her crazy. He was asking her with his eyes if she was okay. He was telling her that she was acting strangely and that he’d show this big blond boy to the door right now, that he’d play the asshole expressly for her sake if what she secretly wanted was to hang out with her parents and watch bad TV. His eyes were saying he had a feeling that this was what she wanted.
Alice said, “We’ll bring Spin,” and she heard herself force a laugh. “He’ll protect us from the evil raccoons.”
“I am not kidding at all,” he said, his voice on the rise.
“Alan,” Charlotte said, her feet in his lap, “don’t be absurd. Go on,” she said, not looking at her daughter but flashing Jeff a big smile. Her mother was punishing her with that smile and it was working. She left the room pitched out into the galaxy, far outside of her family and its center, her mother the sun. She tried to be lunar, she tried to be a hedonistic creature of the night reveling in outsider status, but on actually stepping outside, all she noticed was that it was colder than she expected, and that she felt disoriented rather than excited with this stranger walking beside her.
He wore a cobalt fleece, the kind of item that boyfriends wore, the kind that girls liked to borrow, and his blond hair and brown eyes were exotic in a way; they made her think of Wyoming, Montana, Christian Science, Mormons. “I brought some beers,” he said gamely. “They’re in my car.”
“Great,” she heard herself saying. “That’s great.”
Maybe she was imagining it, but it seemed like Jeff was looking at her strangely. Did her breath smell of Chinese food? She’d eaten an orange and drunk a Coke, but maybe he still smelled jade shrimp delight. Maybe she looked different from how he remembered. But amidst all this worry she managed to find her sense of purpose. She was going to touch him. She was going to touch him and it wouldn’t matter if she smelled a little like egg roll. Nothing would matter but her fearlessness, her sheer availability. She didn’t need love like some girls. She knew better by now.
Gus and Cady they’d only just met, and bam, they were a couple. They screamed and yelled and threw things. They made up and made out constantly. Last Wednesday Alice had thought that Gus had been smoking pot (which he didn’t ever do), but then she realized—to her even greater surprise—that he had been crying. Cady had made her brother cry. He be- longed to her now. Alice didn’t have to belong to anyone, and it could be out of choice. She could be the wild one, stepping out of her expected self and into other lives. What would her mother make of that? Nobody had to live up to any expectations, because she wouldn’t expect a thing.
The dock was empty, no raccoons prowling after all. There was a stretch of water-watching, beer-swilling silence. “So where do you think you’ll apply to college?” Alice finally said, sounding as dull as humanly possible. She was giddy from having nothing invested. She could be as boring as she felt like.
“Maybe Colby,” he said, “maybe Bates.”
“Those B and C schools,” she said, and he nodded.
“So what do you usually do on the weekends?” He didn’t fiddle or fidget, Alice noticed. He was calm and smooth as a pond.
“I like to take the train to the city and, you know, wander around.” She was going for sounding something like a misunderstood heroine—a girl worth the focus of at least one French film.
He nodded and smiled a nice smile, one that seemed to imply a certain understanding. But “Your parents seem nice,” was what Jeff said. “Your brother, he’s a really good guy.”
Alice didn’t respond. Instead she walked toward the pool-house and he followed. Once inside they started kissing. It was some kind of great relief. They fell upon each other with a force that completely belied their attempt at conversation. She had no idea what he liked to eat, what music he played when he was in his car, if he’d ever traveled outside the U.S., if his parents were still married. But there she was with his tongue in her ear, her hands gripping the ridges of his hips, feeling not much more than in a big rush to feel something more than anger at her mother for thinking she was nobody to worry over. She was taking off his shirt, unbuttoning his jeans, making herself go further. She was a delirious gambler with a recent windfall, through with hedging her bets. He smelled even cleaner than he did the other night, and he was sighing and moaning and he sounded almost worried. She took that as a good sign and moved on. I’ll see that ten and raise you twenty! You heard me, twenty! Letting her own pants fall to the ground, letting herself fall to the ground with this stranger moving over her. He was so big, so substantial, and this was what she needed, to be pinned to the earth, to be moored by someone else’s pressing need. She was a virgin. She was still, if barely, a virgin. She kept telling herself that as she felt him straining against her leg, searching for her the way she knew he thought she was searching for him. Alice watched herself from up above, and there she was, pale and writhing—a vision of desire incarnate. If she were Jeff, she would be doing exactly what Jeff was doing. She would be fumbling around for a condom in the dark and cursing herself for not having brought one.
“It’s okay,” she heard herself say. “You can.”
“Are you … are you on the pill?” he slurred, and she didn’t answer, only kissed him, brought him to her; she was going going gone. If she were Jeff, she would be bearing up on those big swim-team arms and thrusting steadily—taking advantage of a story-worthy opportunity. But she wasn’t Jeff and she let it happen, let the pain come, let no noise out, and abruptly felt like crying. When he went to roll off of her, she pulled him back on. He was heavy and she could barely breathe, but she told him to just lie there for a moment, if he didn’t mind.
The surf lapped up the last of the shore; she could hear the high tide rising. It was this shifting landscape she always pointed out to anyone new to the view. With the tides there was before and after. Before was the scraggly weedy beach, a path to walk under neighbors’ docks and on the sand for miles.
And after was all water and only water clear to their green grass lawn. You see that buoy? she’d say. At low tide there’s land straight through to there, a true clean sweep of beach.
But the night was so dark, even Alice could scarcely tell the water from the land, the difference between before and after. So really, what could she point out at that very moment to illustrate the difference?
Jeff rolled off, and Alice felt naked, paradoxically, for the first time all evening.
“You should probably go, right?” Alice said, pulling her shirt on.
“I guess,” said Jeff, his voice looser and louder than she remembered. “Listen,” he said, not pulling on his boxers, not rushing to cover up his very beautiful body.
“It’s okay” Alice said. “It’s okay.”
He looked at her strangely, the way he’d done earlier, but this time she wasn’t worried about her breath or her looks. She knew it was her he was looking at strangely, seeing past her reddish hair and her smallish chest, seeing past her nickel-colored eyes. He was seeing into her distance and noticing how she had given him full permission to treat her badly before he’d given any indication that he would. He looked frightened, and frightened in a way that would never reverse.
He said, “It’s my mom’s birthday tomorrow, so …”
Alice watched him put on his clothes. He wasn’t exactly rushing but he seemed to be acquiring a gentle urgency. She imagined him as a husband, accustomed to waking early and dressing in considerate silence so as not to wake his wife.
They walked to his car in a mildly painful silence. After putting the beer bottles in a milk crate in the backseat, he leaned sweetly into Alice and gave her a kiss.
“I’ll see you,” she said, and he left.
After he’d gone Alice went back down to the water. At first she found it hard to breathe. If only he hadn’t kissed her like that—such an open and obvious good-bye. She walked onto the dock and sat down where she’d talked with Cady one month before. You’re really pretty, she had told her, as if the words were precious; as if they actually mattered. Alice still had matches in her pocket, and she burned a few, singeing her fingers as she cast them off to sea. They actually hurt, the small burns, and she thought of her mother never coming out and saying, Look, I’m worried about you. She’d done it with Gus for years now. They’d have huddled conversations about birth control, self-control. They would fight heatedly over his lack of propriety, the way he’d walk around essentially naked whenever he felt the urge. Alice thought, as she rose up and walked toward the house, about how the closest her mother had come to expressing concern or anger toward her was when she told Alice that staying out late was affecting her looks. As if that were all it would take for Alice at fifteen: a quick bit of self-consciousness, a little hit of shame.
She had no idea what time it was, how long Jeff had been there, how long she’d sat alone. Inside the house the lights were out, the television off. Spin was on the kitchen floor, whimpering in his dreams. She didn’t care how late it was, or that her mother had just gotten home from Morocco. She didn’t care that Cady was no doubt in Gus’s room and would hear every hollered word. Alice began steeling herself, preparing to confront her. It was the only available option left to her at this point, unable as she obviously was to keep this kind of anger contained.
She would open the door cautiously, and if her mother was sleeping she would observe her for a while, noting exactly what she looked like before she heard the truth. Charlotte was very particular about how she liked to be woken up, and Alice would break all her rules. She would poke her mother’s shoulder. She would turn on the light. She would raise her voice immediately, shattering the illusion of peace. If her father told Alice that this was something that could wait until morning, she would remain calm with him while disagreeing. And then she’d list her mother’s shortcomings. She’d list them without saying like or urn. You ‘re selfish, you ‘re vain, you ‘re lazy. And on and on and on. She’d ask her to come to the kitchen, and there she’d detail for her mother what she did with Jeff and what she’d risked, why she did it and how it felt—how it felt to be her.
Only when she arrived at her parents’ door, she was humbled by the quiet all around her. She opened the door and was finally silenced by this: the sight of her mother lying so still— head resting on her father’s shoulder, pale hand on his chest.
She stood stunned somehow at this ordinary sight, and for the first time all night she felt drunk. She was drunk on disappointment, on knowing she’d behaved foolishly with Jeff, and drunk with the certainly that she wouldn’t be telling her mother anything tonight. How could she, when the meaning of her family—the small and glowing white-hot center—was laid out before her right here in a private display? She watched them sleep, her mother and father, and now the room was spinning. Her mother’s hand was so much sturdier and plainer than the rest of her. It lay squarely on her father’s chest, a nothing-special hand. Alice was dizzy; she became undone by this simple possibility of how her mother’s world could be stripped of adornment much like anyone else’s. Of how, in her dreams, her careless mother—frivolous, head-scarfed, inscrutable—was possibly more like Alice than Alice had ever allowed herself to believe. But then Alice smelled the very air on her mother’s side of the bed; she saw how Charlotte’s eyebrows were precise like a fairy’s without her ever having to pluck them.
She wanted to crawl between them as she did sometimes as a child. But she wanted even more than that. She wanted to be inside of her mother unnamed and unborn or buried deep within both of her parents, in mere shadows of separate cells. Alice stood watching and wanting and then, when after a while they didn’t even stir, when they stayed fused together in a warm tangle of sleep, she backed out of their bedroom and retreated through the narrow and very drafty corridor.