Promises, 1985
For one whole year Charlotte didn’t go anywhere, at least not by herself. No one mentioned her lack of travel plans, for fear that if it was pointed out, she might realize she was bored. For a whole year she made a mess, tossing her folders of cutout articles and photographs all over the kitchen table, leaving bowls of granola and yogurt and rotting apples on the bookshelves upstairs, as if after looking for a book and having a bite, she’d been called away unexpectedly. She still never walked Spin regularly. She stepped over Gus’s wet suit in the mudroom and walked barefoot over his snack of sugar cereal that inevitably left a trail. Now that she was home so much, she refused to employ a cleaning lady on the basis of retaining her privacy, and when their father finally stopped yelling and started crying at the sight of their kitchen, Charlotte went into a cleaning frenzy, and with the zeal of the converted, took to the high of it, to the simple clarity it provided. She eventually took the cleaning frenzies into the decorating realm, redoing the upstairs guest room, which had hardly ever been used.
Alice loved standing in the middle of the room when it was newly empty. There was much to admire about the original detail work—the low, deep sills that had been obscured by curtains were now stark and freshly painted the color of corn silk, and moldings framed the room boldly, setting off honey wood floors. Alice stood in the room’s center and appreciated how perfect the space was in its blankness, like a new unspoken thought. Her mother intended to retain an elegant austerity, but Alice knew she wouldn’t be able to help herself. The clutter began with a pillow—one little needlepoint pillow—and within weeks there were piles of excess: framed photographs of a pitch-black night, an antique glove collection, leather-bound books found for a bargain at a local church fair. Collectors, Alice felt certain, were lonely or warding off loneliness with other people’s stuff.
Her mother collected with desperation, despaired about the mess, and moved on to a new room. She stopped sleeping late and began clearing out the poolhouse. One day Alice noticed that the drawing her mother had done so many years ago had been taken down from the refrigerator. Charlotte stripped the moldy poolhouse floors and scoured the windows, replaced the broken doorknob with a purple glass fixture, and even oiled the hinges so nothing squeaked. She deemed the pool-house her office, and declared it off-limits to everyone but her. There were shades hung and they were always drawn. She mostly went there to draw and think; no phone was installed. Having run out of her own rooms, she started designing other people’s houses, having lunch with women who had, previously, barely registered on her radar and taking in their goals of midcentury or country classic, Provengal or shabby chic.
“For the first time in my life I’m getting something done,” Charlotte said to Alice, and Alice believed her. Alice had to agree. During the week she drove to fabric outlets, befriended antique dealers, investigated the cheapest methods of importing from Java and France. On weekends, while their father worked and Gus went off surfing, Charlotte and Alice hung around the kitchen and watched for the swans’ arrival, waited for the babies to come around. Alice trailed after Charlotte with a bag of bread, and spent time watching the swans kick up algae for their little ones and the flurry that followed after they tossed bread ends off the dock. They watched the long elastic slide of swans’ necks and the little fuzzy heads bobbing and diving underwater. After an hour or so, they’d do something that required getting dressed. They both enjoyed going to the city on a train. They walked downtown without a specific destination. They went into shops without names, shops with white walls and wood floors, with selections anemically beautiful. Charlotte held clothes up to Alice and inevitably put them back in their place. “With your coloring,” she’d say, “you should stick to black or white. Your looks are ornate enough as they are.” What does that mean? Alice always meant to ask, but she was too taken with watching her mother pick up objects and put them down—earrings, gloves, a transparent blouse— with whatever compelled Charlotte’s attention. Alice would try to predict what her mother would notice and was rarely correct.
Sometimes they went to see an exhibit at the Whitney, the Met, always ending up gazing at the Sargent portraits, wondering over what happened to all the costumes and jewelry, imagining what the people were like, how they talked to and treated one another on an ordinary day. Alice stared at the raven-haired girl who went on to be a singer in Italy who met her death by way of the Nazis, stripped of all her remarkable costumes, stripped of the light in her eyes.
The second Saturday in October, Charlotte was unusually quiet—more romantic than agitated, more spacey than distracted—and as these Saturdays had begun to include stops at hotel bars, they settled into an outdoor table at the Stanhope, where there were heat lamps warming an already toasty Indian summer day. Charlotte told Alice bits about her father: how he used to like nothing better than a whiskey, neat, in a hotel bar; how he’d fixed her cracked teapot on their second date; how he’d worn a coat of chocolate tweed and how she laughed into it, how she laughed and laughed into the wet wool when they were late to the theater after rushing in from the rain. Her mother, in moments of confidence, didn’t talk much about Nepal or Jordan or Tibet or wherever—but always of Paris, an impossible Paris, where she’d met their father only weeks after a sea passage in 1966. She seemed somehow sad when she spoke of it, yet she also felt compelled to do so, and only, it seemed, with Alice, and only on these lazy private days.
“You’re so lucky,” Charlotte told Alice at the Stanhope. She picked almonds out of a nut mix, placed them in a row on the soggy cocktail napkin. They were facing the museum, watching people. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke and the faint salty whiff of pretzels.
“Why am I lucky?”
“Well,” she said, “for one thing, you’ve yet to have anything happen to you.”
“How do you know?”
“Well,” said Charlotte, “I don’t know. You could be living an entire secret life; that is absolutely true.”
Alice laughed in a way she hoped was darkly. She wanted her mother to lose some confidence, to waver in her assumptions regarding her daughter just one single degree.
“Your brother should be in the same place. He keeps flinging himself about so hard but all he really needs to do is break up with that girl and go someplace new. It doesn’t even have to be college, at least not right away.”
“You’ve never liked Cady” Alice said.
“Well, do you?”
“I kind of like Cady, but I definitely wish she’d go home once in a while. I wish they didn’t need to have their loudest moments in the middle of the night.” I wish we’d talk about me.
“She’s too serious for him, too demanding.”
What her mother didn’t seem to notice, it seemed to Alice, was how demanding Gus was of Cady. They seemed to be in a contest of who felt more deeply, of who was more obsessed and more angry and jealous. They needed to fight and make up, it seemed, in order to get through a day.
The only time Gus seemed to be without Cady (besides school, which he attended sporadically these days) was when he went surfing. He’d taken to getting up at five or so in the morning on Saturdays and getting himself out to Montauk. He surfed during the week too, which they all knew except her father. Charlotte didn’t confront Gus about it. Alice could tell it gave her a sense of pleasure each time he took off alone with his board, whether in a borrowed car or headed for the train; he looked so insolent and pleased with himself. No matter how often their father came down on him for his lateness, his grades, his ragged and often-ridiculous clothing, Charlotte didn’t do much more than shrug when she knew he was sneaking off to do what he felt like doing. His grades were good enough to get him into a serviceable college, should he decide to go, and school would not determine his life, was what Charlotte rather obliquely argued—as if Gus were simply larger than school-as-concept. As if he were, by nature, above it all.
Charlotte was concerned only that her son at eighteen would give of himself freely to someone else, to someone (Alice couldn’t help thinking) other than Charlotte.
“What was that, darling?” Charlotte asked her daughter, as she sipped the watery remains of her vodka and lime, as she signaled for the elderly waiter who was perspiring in the heat, wearing white. But Alice didn’t remember having said anything, at least not out loud, and she was left with the familiar feeling of realizing she was always asking a question—invisible, soundless—Do you see me, do you love me—a refrain like a whisper or maddening chimes drowning out the moment.
“Do you like the decorating?” Alice blurted out. “You know, all the stuff you’ve been doing.” She still couldn’t decide if her mother enjoyed having an actual job. Alice was prepared at any moment for Charlotte to start putting down her clients. She was ready, she told herself, for it all to turn.
“Well,” Charlotte said, lighting up a teal-colored cigarette bought at Nat Sherman with the theory that she’d smoke less if the cigarettes were expensive and distinct, “not so much.” She inhaled and her narrow nostrils flared. “To be honest it is basically depressing.” Alice’s heart began beating wildly— beating with the knowledge that she had been right, that this was it and Charlotte would be going soon, that these Saturdays together were mere exercises in killing time. Her mother was about to say it—that when Gus left home, she would leave too. “Other people’s tastes depress me, other people’s lives. It all boils down to rumpus rooms and powder rooms and office-slash-guest rooms—you know, people creating a sense of a life instead of actually having one.”
Alice didn’t bother responding. Her mother was angry sud- denly, and the glitzy cigarette was burning off into nothing but ordinary ash.
“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know if I’m quite cut out for it; what do you think?”
“What do I think?” Alice asked. “You want to know what I think? Why?”
“Because you’re my daughter,” her mother said, as if that could mean everything. “Because you’re a smart girl and I love you.”
Alice felt a ball of wax growing in her throat, choking on the very words she was always desperate to hear. “I think you should do what you really want to do,” she said, not meaning a word of it. “I think you’ve done—it seems to me—pretty much whatever you’ve always felt like doing, and I can see no reason to start changing now.”
Alice saw that her mother had registered the sarcasm. She saw the shift in Charlotte’s eyes, those green eyes that were reddening from smoke and city pollution. She saw the crow’s-feet at the corners deepen in her delicate skin.
The train ride home was long and punishing. There was a half hour delay in Queens and they both had to use the bathroom. Charlotte made a few halfhearted attempts at conversation but none of them took. They each read their books and by the time they reached home they were both worn out from keeping quiet. They had that in common. While Gus and her father could keep quiet for days with an ease that seemed almost sinister, Alice and her mother couldn’t do it. Neither of them had the will or the stamina. “It cooled off,” Alice said. “It was so hot today.”
“It was a strange day,” her mother agreed, before opening the door and heading up the stairs.
Alice found her father sitting in the library in his big brown leather chair, in the only place he looked small. He looked up when she walked in, as if he’d heard her coming, then took off his glasses and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, I give up.
Alice sat on the other side of his desk, the way she did in a doctor’s office when she was free to get dressed and ask questions. She could remember being small enough to sit under the desk and play with a paper clip, when her father handed her paper clips. Charlotte never could get over how she sat quietly and happily at her father’s feet, needing no more than to be held in his lap at one point or another, not needing more than that. You never left me alone, she was fond of telling her daughter. You just talked and followed me from room to room.
“Gus tells me he’s going to teach you how to surf,” her father said.
“Is that right?” Alice said. “First I’ve heard of it.”
“Do you want to learn?”
“I’m not sure,” Alice said. “I hadn’t really thought of it, to tell you the truth. It’s not like we live in a tropical paradise. It seems like so much work just to find the waves and not freeze,” she said.
Her father looked at her and smiled. She wasn’t trying to be funny and he knew it, and that was why he had to laugh. “How different the two of you are,” he said, picking up a heavy fountain pen.
“Not really,” she said, wanting it to be so, but on seeing his expression, she turned it into a joke by simply keeping a solemn expression. “Why ever would you think that?”
He smiled and looked at his daughter in the way that children seldom notice. He looked at her proudly as if to say, / made you.
He uncapped the fat pen and began scribbling on a yellow legal pad, connecting lines and dots. “Something has been bothering me,” he said quietly.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I ran into Isabell Donnelly in the hardware store yesterday,” he said evenly stopping to see if Alice was listening.
“Uh-huh.” She nodded.
“Married to Bart Donnelly the one who looks a bit like Abe Lincoln?”
“Yes?” she said, struggling not to sound impatient.
“You know who she is?”
“She’s one of Mom’s … clients.”
“Clients,” he said, “exactly. Alice, honey, I don’t know how to say this—but have you been having some kind of trouble lately?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure. Like maybe female trouble of some kind, something you didn’t want to talk about? Mrs. Donnelly told me that your mother has been … helping you out with something. Did you need money for something? Something for which you were ashamed to ask me?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alice said, laughing while her heart pounded out a staccato embarrassment, biting her tongue as she thought about what it was that Isabell Donnelly could possibly have to do with Alice having unspecified problems. Did someone tell her mother that she was having sex? Would her mother even care? Besides which, Alice had stopped her little rampage nearly a year ago, pretty much, with one worthy exception.
Her father still doodled purposefully on the pad. “Alice,” he said, his voice tightening, “Mrs. Donnelly seemed to think your mother needed to help you through something lately. She seemed to think you needed money and that it was her money, Mrs. Donnelly’s, that went toward helping you. That is what your mother apparently told her, anyway.” He was trying, Alice could tell, not to ensnare anybody just yet, to let Alice clear up a misunderstanding.
“Daddy, I have no idea what you are talking about,” Alice said, and this time she couldn’t help but sound angry. “What are you talking about?”
He coughed a dry cough and dropped the pen, then clasped his hands together.
“What?” Alice said. “For God’s sake, would you please stop doing that?”
He looked confused. “What am I doing?”
“Taking so long to tell me something. It’s like torture.”
“I think your mother has been not altogether honest with these people,” he finally said. His voice sank low. “I think she’s maybe been inventing some stories,” he continued carefully, “and I think she’s been doing something besides going antique hunting with all these people’s money.” He seemed genuinely mystified. “Do you have any idea what she does every day?”
Alice waited a moment before answering. She tried to be more like him, weighing what seemed like the air around him before giving voice to his feelings. There was a wall of books behind him, all hardcover. There was a picture of Gus and a picture of Alice and a black-and-white shot of Charlotte’s profile, somewhere in the desert. “Of course not,” she finally said, feeling sweat like a sudden bloom all over her body. Alice looked right into her father’s blue eyes and could see that he was afraid too. She had lived with the fear that something like this would happen. There was no way that her mother could be purely going to work and having lunch, picking up the dry cleaning. Since her mother had begun scouring the poolhouse, Alice was afraid to believe. “But…” she said.
“But what?”
“I don’t want her to leave because of me.”
“You’ve always been too dramatic,” he said, not without love. “She won’t.”
“She will. She will leave. She basically told me today.”
“She started going off about her clients and how boring they were, how boring their lives were. What is going on with her? She lied to Mrs. Donnelly about me? What did she tell her?”
“I don’t know, Alice. She didn’t say.”
“Well, think about the possibilities. She probably told her that I was getting an abortion or something. Or maybe extensive plastic surgery? Which would be a better rumor to live with, do you think?”
“Alice, listen—”
“No, you listen,” she said, and then immediately fell silent with shame. “Daddy,” she said gently, “do you want to know what is going on?”
“Of course I do,” he said. But she didn’t believe him.
“How long do you think she’s been lying to people? Do you have any idea?” Sex, thought Alice, drugs; drugs and sex together. Or maybe she was sick. Maybe she was hiding a terrible illness, fleeing home all of these times to participate in experimental treatment. Maybe her mother was dying.
When her father looked beyond her toward the doorway, she knew that Charlotte was standing there. “Alice,” her father said, as if an intruder had just entered the premises, “why don’t you go in the kitchen. August wanted to ask you something.” Alice could hear the blender—evidence that he was in fact there. She almost refused to move, but when Alice looked at her father he was staring so intently that she rose and brushed by her mother’s robe without so much as a glance in her direction.
In the kitchen, Gus peeled a banana and stuck it in the blender whole, then dumped in ice and handfuls of berries, a few spoonfuls of protein powder. He looked up when Alice sat on the counter, passing a pear back and forth between her hands. Alice took a bite of the pear and Gus looked at her again.
“You need anything?” he said.
She shook her head, paralyzed, savoring the overripe pear, sucking down its nectar. She could hear the beginnings of her parents arguing in the library. Her father’s voice was like the bass on an album—significant but muted, stepping aside for the flashier vocals, the rowdy and anxious guitar. His voice was calm but her mother’s was not. Alice remembered the time Charlotte hurled a book in the library to illustrate her rage, and instead of it flying across the room as she’d anticipated, it had landed on her own bare toes, sending her into a fit of tears but thankfully into her husband’s care, defusing the argument with a swift if clumsy kind of peace.
Charlotte was yelling at her father, “Are you sure? Because you’d better be pretty damn sure to make an accusation like that.”
Gus turned on the blender and drowned out their voices.
“Stop,” Alice shouted. “Turn it off.”
But Gus increased the power and blended longer than necessary. I can’t hear you, he mouthed. He wasn’t intentionally being hurtful, she somehow knew. He just couldn’t stand the tension; he had a surprisingly low tolerance for it, given all his fury with Cady. But before she had time to yell at him further or to pull the plug from the wall, Charlotte came bounding into the kitchen, followed by her father.
“Do you have any idea what kind of accusation you are making, Alan?” Her eyes looked to Alice like flashing green lights. Go go go, they seemed to say, give me my reasons for leaving. She was heedless of her daughter’s terrified expression or her son’s defiant blending. “Do you even know what this Isa-bell woman is like?” Then: “Would you turn that bloody thing off?”
When Gus didn’t, Charlotte slapped his face. She slapped Gus and she turned off the blender and he stood up straight, cracking an astonished smile. “You’re out of control,” he said to her. Alice could swear she recognized in his face the hint of admiration she’d seen her mother have in times of Gus’s minor disappearances, his inappropriate attire.
Alice’s face was scorching hot, full of flushed silence. There was nothing she could imagine saying. Her father went over to the refrigerator and opened it, contemplating the shelves as if he might like to step inside and stay there awhile.
Charlotte placed her hands over her face for a moment before taking them away. She took a breath and lowered her voice. “Do you,” she said to her husband, “do you know what you’re suggesting?”
“I do,” he said, into the white refrigerator light. “I’m afraid it’s very simple.” Then he slammed the door shut with surprising force.
“Simple?” Charlotte screeched. “Simple?”
“And I’m only suggesting that if it is true, and you’re the only one who knows what’s true” —he looked at Alice and then at Gus— “if you have been borrowing some of these funds and not exactly doing things on time, if you’ve been telling these … people … that our daughter is having problems in order to provide a false reason for needing money—” He broke off abruptly, as if in weary disbelief. Nobody said a word. The hum of the refrigerator was steady and nearly a comfort. “You ought to apologize,” he said. He was winded. After a few audible breaths, he continued: “Just give them the money, Charlotte. Or purchase what you told them you’d be purchasing for them and apologize for the goddamned delay. What—no, listen—what is so terribly challenging about that? About any of that?” His voice was low and clear. The wormy vein at his temple was visibly laced with purple.
“And if it isn’t true?” asked Charlotte, but something in her husband’s face made her stop insisting. Something made her nod and say, “I’m sorry,” in a way that suggested she was anything but. “Sweetie,” she said to Alice, but Alice couldn’t bring herself to look; everything was too obvious and laid out bare like too much makeup or too little clothing on a girl who tried too hard. Her mother had plainly used her.
When Charlotte exited the room, Gus said, “What just happened?” But neither Alice nor her father could answer him. Her father looked at Gus drinking his shake, at the remaining ingredients scattered on the counter. There was something in her father’s face—Alice couldn’t help notice— that was verging on revulsion. She wanted to assure her brother that her father was just upset, that there was nothing personal in that look. But then her father put his arm around her, stiffly, then looser, and before she’d even noticed he was leaving, Gus was gone from the room.
Charlotte left within a week without warning for nearly a month. And as it turned out, her trip was not spontaneous. She’d been planning and had booked the ticket a good six weeks in advance.
One early evening before Charlotte left, Alice saw her parents standing together on the lawn. They were as close as two people could be without touching. She thought that they might just go ahead and kiss, when suddenly her father sat down on the grass, which must have been damp and cold. He refused to get up, no matter how her mother waved her arms around, and he sat on the grass long after she’d left him there, even after the sun went down. After coming inside and bringing the cold air with her, she told Alice she was leaving on a trip and that it would be the last trip, the last one of its kind.
When she was on a plane, days later, Gus didn’t come home from school. When Charlotte called from Oaxaca to let them know she’d arrived (thanks ever so much, how kind of you to call) Alice could have sworn her mother was mildly uplifted when Alice complained that Gus hadn’t come home. “I’m sure he’s with Cady” was her response. As if it were Cady who’d lured him away—Cady, who was perfectly happy hanging out in her underwear eating pie in their kitchen, Cady, who wasn’t ashamed to admit she wanted a house in a cold climate with at least five children. Cady’s influence, if anything, was oddly domestic. “I’m bringing you home some chile-chocolate,” her mother said, sounding drunk, and Alice, to her own astonishment, hung up on her. It had felt like no more than an involuntary reflex, and when the phone crashed into the cradle, Alice was flush with pride but also regret. She was this close to finding the hotel number and calling right back.
Each moment of the next day—distracted in class or riding in Eleanor’s car with the radio turned up or reading by dim light hurting her eyes—was another stepping-stone on which she couldn’t help but walk, leading her from one side of Charlotte to the other. She was stepping cautiously over a gorge but not for one second looking down or backward. She needed to preserve herself, to reach the other side where it didn’t hurt as badly and where she didn’t live or die by her mother’s tenuous and gilded presence.
In the morning Alice waited for the sun to rise. She was up, showered and dressed and ready for school, her chin-length hair in carefully studied disarray. She drank grapefruit juice and ate a bagel before picking up the phone at seven-thirty A.M. and calling Cady DeForrest. When it became clear that Gus wasn’t with Cady and that he could be anywhere, Alice admitted she was worried, giving Cady the opportunity to reinstate (as if it were necessary) her undisputed cool. “I’m sure he’s fine,” she said, yawning.
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you so certain? Are you sure he’s not there?”
“What must you think of me, Alice?”
“Why are you so confident that he’s fine?”
Alice could hear the rustle of Cady’s bedsheets, which were (though Alice had never seen them) sure to be cotton and verging on threadbare, monogrammed with the stitched script of her parents, reminding her of where she came from with the whisperings of the faultless dead. Alice could hear Cady sitting up and focusing, taking her time. “He’s fine because he has to be,” she said calmly.
“Did you know our mother took off again?”
“I did. He mentioned it.”
“Did he, you know, sound upset?”
“No,” Cady said.
“No?”
“Not really,” she said. “No. What, you don’t believe me?”
“Sure,” said Alice. “Sure I do.” Outside her window the trees were tall and very still, reaching across white sky. Her favorite tree was the one that looked beleaguered by its own lush looks, its ochre and burgundy and vermilion adornments.
“Let me know if you hear from him, will you?”
“Of course I will,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll be home or in school today. He just needs to do this kind of thing once in a while. Don’t you understand that? Alice?”
“Yes,” she said. But she didn’t. Eleanor would be here soon with a ride to school. She would go to school. She would listen and pay attention. She wasn’t like Gus, above it all. She didn’t have it in her—whatever it was—a disregard for objectivity, a steadfast faith and self-love.
“Listen,” Cady said, “your mother sat me down one day last week. She asked me, bitterly, if I was being responsible. She meant about not getting pregnant.”
“She did?” Alice said, hating her high voice, the way her palms were stuck to her thighs, the way her thighs were yellowy white like old office paper.
“She threatened me, Alice,” said Cady. “She told me I’d better be on the pill. She told me she knew from experience.”
“She what} What experience? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s probably just trying to scare me,” Cady said. “She likes doing that. Have you noticed?”
“Why are you telling me this?” Alice almost whispered, wondering if she was a mistake and if that was how her parents still thought of her. “Do you think I need to know this?” August could not have been anything besides perfectly planned and eagerly awaited. Ofthat she had no doubt.
“I’m sorry,” Cady said. “It’s just that Gus will be fine. You’ll be fine. Even if…”
“If what?”
“Even if she doesn’t come back.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” Cady said, obviously awake now, her aquatic voice of sleep drained away. “It just breaks my heart how you both need her so much.”
“I’ve got to go,” Alice said quickly, before hanging up the phone, before opening the windows all the way and breathing hard into the humidity, the stink of warm low tide.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
“Why is it,” Eleanor said, standing in the doorway, “that your family refuses to install a goddamned doorbell? I’m always knocking and knocking with this fuck of a lion’s-head knocker. It’s barely eight-thirty A.M. This can’t be good for me.”
Alice shrugged and touched Eleanor’s shoulder, played with the fabric of her flowery shirt in lieu of trying to explain. “Pretty,” Alice said, feeling like she might throw up. She couldn’t stop thinking of her mother telling Cady about the necessity of the pill, which was a conversation too dark and too easy to imagine. Easier still was the vision of Gus on the side of the LIE mangled by a stranger’s car or else as sinking pieces in the Atlantic Ocean torn apart by sharks. Her father would be racked with guilt. Her mother would disappear for good.
Where was he?
“You look exhausted,” Eleanor said.
“Gus didn’t come home last night.”
“Well, there’s a shock,” she said, opening the car door. “Alice? Getting in?”
Alice sank down into the burgundy leather interior and watched her friend start the car. Eleanor loved to drive and she adored her car—a white Cadillac sedan, inherited from her Kansas City grandfather. She loved it without irony; it made her feel secure. Eleanor lit a cigarette after pulling out of the Greens’ twisty driveway, while Alice winced, rolling down the window. It took Alice a while to say, “He’s not with Cady.”
Eleanor exhaled, laughing. “Shock number two.”
Eleanor always liked Gus too much to act like it. Alice knew she’d never understood why he hadn’t wanted to count her among the many girls with whom he’d spend his time and energy and (at least before Cady) his famous promiscuity. Alice never understood it either, and until recently had spent a good deal of any day dreading how her best friend and her brother would further complicate her life. But the only evidence of what she’d considered serious flirtation between them was their fighting. They fought over any potential issue. If she lit up a cigarette he’d start in with his statistics. She’d pick on his lack of life plans, his affected taste in music, his arrogance. “He’s not with another girl,” Alice said.
“Look, I know you think Cady is some kind of ice queen who is all-powerful or something, but trust me, she isn’t. She’s like us.”
“Us?” Alice laughed. “No.”
“Well, she’s not like your mother either.”
“Who said she was?”
“You did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’m sure you did, and if you didn’t, well…”
Alice felt her lack of sleep, and her tireless need to worry eked away slowly. “Look, I know you’re all into Freud, but do you think you could please quit it?”
“Okay fine.”
They were late. The verdant vineyard to their left allowed for a bigger sky, the downhill slope rolled gently, and there they were on the perfect road—a straight, clean shot with no one in front of them, ideal for blasting music at seventy miles an hour. They never spoke during that one strip of the ride. No matter what the discussion, they both just shut up. After the turn off they were back to morning traffic, but both a little nicer somehow.
Eleanor broke the silence: “Do you and Gus really talk about her?”
“Really talk? What does that mean?”
“I was just wondering. It’s hard.”
“She’s our mother,” Alice said, eyes out the window on new houses in ugly adolescence—out of scale, expectant.
“I know that,” said Eleanor, sucking in her cheeks, her cheekbones high and prominent. “Believe me,” she said, “I know.”
Alice tried not to think of what Charlotte had told her not even a month ago. She’d said that Eleanor was boring— “a bore,” actually, were her chosen words. She’d been drinking vodka in order to sleep, when Eleanor called after eleven. Charlotte said it with cruel detachment and Alice had cried and her mother had watched her cry, doing no more than sighing a heavy sigh, as if her daughter’s tears were additional obstacles on the road to getting some sleep. Alice knew she didn’t mean it, and, even at sixteen, she knew that her mother was somehow jealous of Eleanor—jealous of her looks and her cheerfulness and maybe even her close friendship with Alice, and finally, what it all boiled down to: her youth. Charlotte was jealous of youth, of youthful carefree girls. And perhaps it was no coincidence that Alice took so much care, that she had always appeared a bit older. She could walk alone into the bar near Penn Station and give off not a whiff of innocence. She could order a stiff drink if she felt like it, which always sounded better in theory than in practice because she was, after all, a cautious person who desperately did not want to be so.
When the moon was full and yellow that night and the sky was as dark as it was going to get with a heady scattering of stars, Alice waited. She waited for Gus to walk in the door, she waited for her mother to call, and she waited for her exhausted father to come home. He had a department dinner that evening, which was buying her some time, but Alice knew she had to tell him tonight that she had no idea where Gus was. She was lying on her bed fully dressed, having not so much as removed her shoes, when she found herself waking from a sleep that she hadn’t willingly entered. She had no idea what time it was, no idea how long she must have been sleeping, but she realized, after a moment, that what had woken her was a teakettle whistle. In her dream it had been her own scream.
Down the back stairs and into the kitchen; one tiny light was on, and in the muted shadows she came upon Gus, barefoot in jeans, a damp long-sleeved T-shirt, a green down quilted vest. He was watching the teapot whistling and fuming with steam but he was, for some reason, reluctant or unable to remove it from the heat. It was a wailing, unbearable sound. Alice was wide-awake now and short of breath; she swiped it from the blue flame even before switching off the heat. The clock read ten P.M.“What…” She trailed off, saying nothing and everything.
He didn’t even look at her. His arms drew around her as if clutching a ghost, eager to grasp whatever was there before it faded away. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. Alice felt the collapse of the soft down feathers between them, the wet of his sweat-smelling T-shirt. “I just took off,” he kept saying, muffled and blurry, into the back of her neck.
Where were you? was what she couldn’t say. Tell me everything you saw, everything you did. I’m you but in reverse, can’t you see? He smelled like a ferryboat in the middle of winter—the briny wind and the waft of French fries inside the passenger deck. Alice shook her head, not letting go of him, her strange big brother.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “You don’t want to know how stupid I’ve been. Don’t ask me. Okay?”
Contrition she hadn’t expected. Tenderness she didn’t know quite how to handle, and serious apologies were baffling. So of course she nodded. Of course she agreed to maintain ignorance, which was, in itself, a certain kind of power and the beginning of an implicit understanding between them. She wouldn’t say anything to Cady or to their father. She was his one true keeper.
“I won’t disappear on you like that again,” he said. “I won’t.”
Alice felt grateful, so insidiously grateful, for a statement she could not even begin to believe.