Inside, 2001
The doorman posted outside the Upper East Side apartment building was idly spraying the sidewalk with a hose while sweating in his too-heavy suit. As Alice passed by him, she gave what she hoped was a sympathetic look and recited the apartment number she had scrawled the night before on a scrap piece of paper. The doorman came inside with her and called upstairs, dialing while asking for her name. “Alice?” he repeated back to her, and then, “Yeah, Alice is here?” He hung up the phone, and Alice had an irrational feeling that she’d be turned away, after having taken the train into Penn Station and traipsing uptown on a brutally hot day, worked up for nothing at all. Just as she was debating on whether to spend the day in the frosty reliable Met or get a cheap pedicure and head back, the doorman said, “Go on up.”
“You all right?”
“Perfect,” she said.
“It’s a scorcher today; you’d better be careful.”
“I’ll do my best,” she said, nearly stepping on a little bichon on an extended rhinestone-studded leash, while making her way to the elevator. When she’d entered the building there had been sweat gathering at the base of her neck and dripping down her chest, but the lobby was filled with whirring fans, and by the time she was in the elevator she would have been quite cool had she not grown dizzy and flushed with another very internal heat wave spurred on by the nature of this appointment, its incongruous surroundings and formality.
In the short elevator ride, Alice looked up at the mirrored ceiling, which offered no more than what seemed appropriate— an exaggerated version of herself. She should have been wondering what to say and what not to say, but she was too busy acquiring a phobia of elevators, and when this one stopped with an alarming dip, she nearly pried the doors apart. Alice looked in both directions down the fluorescent corridors, nearly running through the blur of powder-blue walls and black Art Deco moldings. The door opened before she could even knock. “Cady” Alice said, out of breath. And without a word Cady put her arms around her. Her neck was a quick refuge from the impersonal apartment, the stultifying city heat. There were no traces of the expected blackberry soap, but instead fresh-cut grass. Alice pictured a glass bottle of scented lotion next to a porcelain sink—a bottle falling from Cady’s cool hands, crashing to the floor. Cady held her at a distance for a second or two. She was, Alice had forgotten, so much stronger than she looked.
When they let go they were shy with each other; they were all about their surroundings. “Swank company pad,” Alice said, looking around the duplex apartment, done in hues of gray. The air conditioner hummed lightly. “They must love you at work. You must be doing really well.”
“Better,” she said. “I’m doing better.” Her voice revealed a little fury and a lot of pride, and Alice guessed that it had been sheer ambition that had gotten her through these past few months. Cady was in New York for business.
“Good,” Alice said, “that’s good. You look good—beautiful,” Alice said, and it was true and not true at the same time. Even though Cady’s hair was cut in chic layers and her complexion was as lovely as ever, Alice had never seen her this thin; she supposed Cady looked more elegant, but she also looked hollow, her even features verging on stern—like a woman literally just off the Mayflower—except this Pilgrim was also wearing well-applied makeup, good leather shoes. She didn’t know if Cady ever wore stockings or tights in California, but Alice could imagine her pulling them on—one leg after the other— trying to keep balanced. What she looked, Alice realized, was older. It had been only seven months.
“You too,” she said. “Are you … working?”
Alice nodded. “At the bookstore—basically my old summer job—which I suppose should be embarrassing, but I honestly just really like it. I’m running the place now; you wouldn’t recognize it. I even started a reading series.”
“Fantastic,” Cady said with unfiltered pity.
“It’s not forever or anything; it’s just that I decided to fix up the house before I sell it,” she said, in what she hoped was a practical tone.
“I would have thought you’d be long gone by now. I was sure you wanted out.”
“Well,” Alice said, suddenly parched, “I’ll be able to get… I thought there’d be more money this way, if I do most of the work myself. Right?”
“Yeah,” Alice said, “it is. So I’m living there,” she said, beginning to cough a little. “I’m living back at home. Do you think I could have some water?”
“Oh,” Cady said, her cheeks deepening a shade. “I’m sorry.” She went into the kitchen, and Alice watched her pour a glass of water, taking surprising comfort from how familiar it was to see her move around a kitchen. Alice remembered hiding her awe when Cady would search their cabinets for ingredients— Madeira, capers, mint jelly—items Alice didn’t even realize that they had in their pantry or, for that matter, even existed. When Alice finally asked her one day who taught her to cook, Cady admitted that she’d grown up idolizing her aunt’s servants, and that up until not so long ago she’d spoken with a slight Irish accent and wanted nothing more on Sunday mornings than to attend Catholic Mass, which of course horrified her aunt to no end.
While Alice drank a full glass of water, she flinched briefly from a score of persistent little splinters (casualties of a recently stripped windowsill) as she gripped the cold glass too hard. She wandered to the window looking out on Third Avenue, where a woman pushing a stroller stopped to talk to someone she knew. A yellow parasol shaded the child from the sun, the smog, from unwelcome attention. Alice couldn’t stop the thought of how Erika was probably enormous and sure to be screaming in childbirth not too long from now.
“Look,” she said to Cady, “look at that parasol.” And she pointed out the window at mother and child.
“Let’s go to lunch,” Cady said in a virtual outburst. “Let’s go have a real lunch like ladies,” she said. “I can expense it.”
“If you’re sure,” Alice said. She went to put her glass in the sink.
“Leave it,” Cady said, almost critically. “Just leave it. Let’s get out of here.”
They ate in the kind of restaurant that Charlotte would have disdainfully described as Fake French—the label reserved for any establishment that served steak frites and did not allow smoking. But the place suited Alice just fine, as it wasn’t smoky, it was very dark and air-conditioned, and she could order a glass of wine. Cady’s thinking must have traveled along similar lines, for before they even saw menus, she’d asked the waiter for a bottle of Sancerre. There were wine labels laminated to the walls that served as wallpaper, and an alarmingly old couple were the only other patrons; they ate dessert and drank coffee in faint wheezy silence. Alice could imagine the chef and the cooks sweating in the kitchen, wondering who the hell would want food like this on a sweltering day like today.
“I think I’m too hot to eat,” Cady said. But when the menus came she seemed to forget her discomfort, and when Alice ordered a salad, insisted it wasn’t enough. They ended up with a beet-and-goat-cheese salad, an endive-Roquefort salad, mussels and french fries and duck pate, two cold soups.
“We have too much food,” Alice said.
“Come on,” Cady said, smiling sharply—her smile containing a small shard of glass. Help me, was what she was actually saying. Be loud and keep talking. Pretend that you and I have in fact had lunch alone before.
“You’re right; this is no time to hold back,” Alice said, not knowing what exactly she’d meant by that.
Cady described a project she was working on in an Oakland loft space, something about poured wax and the way it looked like water, the functionality of metal as opposed to wood. She could have been speaking Spanish as far as Alice was con- cerned, for though she recognized most words and could basically glean Cady’s meaning from facial expressions, that was the basic extent of her understanding. “Did you think you’d ever see me again?” Cady finally said, after a long, prosaic review of this current client’s demands.
“Did I? I didn’t know. I mean, how could I know?”
“You could have called.”
Alice nodded.
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” Alice said, “I tried. You were unlisted.”
“And you couldn’t have asked your brother?”
Alice pierced the plump meat of a mussel and pried it out of its shell. “We haven’t spoken.”
“You mean you had the conversation—that conversation you told me about—and you left and that’s that?”
“Well, I hope that isn’t that. I hope he comes around sometime.”
“Yes, well, I have to find him,” Cady snapped back. “I have to do something about getting his signature.” She briefly touched her napkin to her lips as if she were ashamed. “I can’t believe he stayed there with her.”
“I can,” Alice said.
Alice wondered what Cady would make of the fact that in the past five months (after learning his last name: McAlistair) she had spent nearly every weekend with Stephen—meeting his friends, his crew, his dog—in upstate New York, and she had not let him once come to see her. She wondered what Cady would say if Alice told her that each time she saw Stephen, the last thing he always asked was, When can I come see where you live? She’d made countless excuses of why it was better for her to come to him. They had started to argue. What I’m really after, he’d yelled, is taking over your house. You’re
right—he laughed, a truly caustic laugh—goddamn it, you’ve figured me out.
Alice said, “I know for a fact that Gus still loves you, and—”
“No,” Cady said, taking a determined sip of wine, “just stop. I don’t want to talk about him. Okay?”
“Okay” Alice said, “I didn’t know.”
“I can’t,” she said tightly.
“Fine,” Alice said, “that’s fine.”
“I’m seeing someone,” Cady said, brightening. It was impossible to tell if she was lying, and Alice hoped—to her surprise—that she was. It was impossible to believe that she was really and truly finished with Gus. “And I might want to marry him one day. Or if it isn’t this person, I would like to have the right to marry someone, which I can’t do, obviously, if I’m still legally August’s wife. I mean, it’s good to see you and everything, but I am trying to take care of some practical matters, which have been holding me back. It’s all so ridiculous that we got married. How did you not laugh in our faces when we told you?”
“Well,” Alice said, “if you jog your memory a little harder, you might recall that I did.”
“Being with him felt as close as I ever want to come to living under an anarchy,” she said with a joyless laugh. “Anytime he hurt me in any way, it was always, according to him, outside of a context—he’d get furious if I ever referred to how ‘normal’ people behave or I dared to analyze our relationship. He would barely let me name it. I can’t imagine what possessed him to suddenly want to become included in the rest of the world’s standard of commitment. And I can’t believe I went along. Being with him,” she said, her voice close to a whisper, “it was all feeling all the time. I can’t imagine how I managed to get through college, let alone high school, when I barely ever slept. I was either waiting up, wondering where he was, or I was … People should not be allowed to feel that good when they’re in high school, for Christ’s sake. It’s punishing.”
Alice looked at her and saw that it was in no uncertain terms that Cady firmly believed what she was saying; she was not being wistful. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about him.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“You were so confident whenever he took off. You always told me I should be more understanding.”
“Well, obviously I didn’t know how else to make myself believe it without preaching it to you.”
They ate and kept quiet; four men in suits were seated, and the elderly couple was trying to stand. The man took the woman’s arm in what looked like an ingrained attempt at chivalry, but the force of his hand appeared to be holding her down. As she saw Cady eating with small, eager bites, she became heartened by the knowledge that Cady had actually needed her. “So what’s he like?” Alice asked. “The man you’re seeing?”
“I’m so sorry, Alice,” Cady said in a sudden flooding, betraying what she now knew. “It must have been awful for you, finding out like that, in a letter.”
“It seems so obvious now, doesn’t it?”
“You can’t let it color everything; not everything.”
“I’m stuck on having something make sense after all of this.”
Even right this moment Alice couldn’t help but think of how, in the house, the sun would be hitting the kitchen’s newly finished floors, showing off the honey-colored wood. She’d found the lumber with the help of an old boatbuilder she knew from the bookstore and it was … sumptuous—a word she’d certainly never have imagined relating to pinewood flooring. She envisioned how the old brass light fixtures and moldings were the house’s only current adornments, and how every single thing was boxed beneath the stairs. She tallied the furniture in her head: dining-room table and chairs, single living-room couch, heavy desk and thirties club chair in her father’s office. Upstairs there were beds and lamps—no curtains, no photos, not yet.
Eleanor: You’ve been living in it like this? It’s kind of… you know … empty, she’d said, before laughing, if a bit worriedly.
Alice hadn’t mentioned how sometimes she could swear she heard the swish of her mother’s robe, the cutting of a cold red apple. But she also knew she hadn’t needed to mention how when the sun was down and the moon was up the sky was a fine dark blue—a blue that was free of everything, including heritage, which enclosed the land and water, bringing them closer together.
Empty, was all Alice had said. Exactly.
Alice now looked at Cady who was dragging a spoon through vichyssoise with the stony concentration of a toddler. “Do you know,” Alice asked, “do you know what I mean about claiming? Maybe that’s what he thinks he’s doing—only he’s … well, he’s going with a different past.”
“A stranger’s past,” Cady said. “A stranger he has decided to call his sister, if that is what he’s really calling her.”
“Cady,” Alice said, but she lost steam. By now the sharp, hollow Cady, the all-business woman—she was long gone. Gus had always warned Alice not to bring up Cady’s dead parents in conversation, presuming it would only upset her to dwell on their absence, and that speaking of their foibles or even their merits would only cause her more grief. But Alice would never forget the few details that had, for whatever reason, come up: Cady’s father could stand on his hands for minutes at a time, and he detested catsup so intensely he refused to have it in the home. Cady’s mother was tiny and plain, with absolutely perfect ears, hands, and feet. It hadn’t occurred to either Gus or Alice how asking might have made it easier for Cady to remember, and how most people need to remember if only to understand where it is they think they are going and how to recognize when they have arrived.
Alice hadn’t asked, not once in all these years. “What …” Alice began. “Cady, what were your parents’ names?”
By four o’clock, the restaurant had hosted a handful more people, and was now completely empty except for Alice and Cady, who was barely coherent after drinking most of the second bottle of wine and had insisted on ordering raspberry sorbet, most of which lay melted in a deep white bowl. After the chef had come out and made an introduction and after he sent them two glasses of Poire Williams, Cady took out her wallet and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles—smudging gray eyeliner—before fumbling for her credit card. “He once told me he’d never be able to fall in love with anyone as long as he knew I was around. Like I was an inconvenience, or … a curse.”
“I understand that,” Alice said, and having stopped expecting anything to change from mere conversations with her brother, after having stopped believing that it was through August that a bit of their mother might emerge, she’d begun to actually see differently: how, while driving, Stephen’s arm inevitably went up in front of her if he made a sudden stop, how, when he laughed hard he nearly always involuntarily cried, and how the tears deepened the flat smoked blue of his eyes.
Since she’d walked away from August, she began to welcome anger—inviting it in for coffee and hours of mindless television, for all-night wine drinking and long, pruning baths until they’d ended up parting ways. She’d noticed, while driving to see Stephen on Friday afternoons, that she’d begun to feel progressively lighter—nearly stripped not only of her mother’s voice, but also of the chronic expectation that she’d inherited from Charlotte.
Last Sunday morning she’d woken early in Stephen’s bed and she’d looked at him breathing big and easy underneath incongruous flowered sheets. She’d felt protective of Stephen, of his mistakes and his misgivings. He was a flawed man, she understood that, but for whatever reason he seemed to turn her upside down inside, like a child with a head rush after compulsive handstanding or spinning, fulfilling an irrepressible urge for a change in perspective. He was not going to change her life. This she somehow knew. But what she’d started to consider, what Alice had begun to allow, was that she might just change his.
“He’s the curse,” Cady said, “August,” her blurry eyes coming into focus.
The two women walked down Third Avenue linking arms, a gesture somewhere between affection and an attempt to keep Cady on her feet. “I see,” is what Cady kept saying, as Alice pointed out cars and people in a rush, sidewalks of broken and glittering glass.
On the short drive from the station back to the house, Alice fought not to get lost in the early-evening sky, which was unusually pallid. Her exhaustion was tempered by the ease that came with driving, with the mixed-up scents of brine and bloom. She loved it here, and she let herself think it, allowed for a silent admission that the only reason she’d sold her apartment, the only reason she was still living in the too-big house—the house where her parents died, the house nearly given away by a man with the last name of Flowers … it was not even close to practical; she was living there because she wanted to. She was living there because—at least for a while— she could. Which wasn’t to say that she was enjoying the house exactly because it was, at best, disorienting, waking up there all alone.
One day—a day not today, not tomorrow, nor next week— Alice will walk down to the site of the former poolhouse, and—without knowing she’d come to do any such thing, without having brought gloves or bags or shears—rather than poking around in the choke of endless weeds, she will grab onto one weed and pull. One day the sky will be yellow with haze, the morning neither warm nor cold, and Alice will feel with her own pale hands the surprising strength of roots—the assertion and resistance from the very earth when faced with sudden change. Though her fingers will grow raw from digging and stung by wild nettles, she won’t feel much of anything, because on this particular day in the future, resolve will override discomfort; it will briefly demolish nostalgia. And when the weeds are piled high as a hay bale and the sun burns overhead, Alice will finally wrench the remaining piece of charred wood from the ground. In the soil where it sat for so many years, slugs and worms will be squirming, and she’ll have the unexpected desire to flatten every last one. But with the wood in her grasp, Alice will be drawn to the ruined dock, and she’ll step out and throw it as far as she can into the outgoing tide. By the time she heads back to the house, the wood will still be floating, loitering in the shallows and of no particular interest to two passing swans, so imperious and cold.
And there will be other days, better ones. Maybe she’ll plant a fruit tree, a birch tree, a spruce. Perhaps there’ll be a neighbor offering a spare slab of limestone, an extra wrought-iron chair.
The details won’t be these—not these exactly—but the days, they are coming; they’re rattling the bars of their cages;
Alice can feel how they’re restless and edgy, almost set to explode.
Now, late at night, when Alice gazed out at this mild Atlantic cove, it was still wild dogs and burning garbage that seemed to surround her, and she didn’t, oddly enough, want any of it to subside—not the persistent barking, not the haze of dust, not even the unfortunate and very smelly remnants of smoke—she wanted to hold on to it all. It was June again—never her favorite time of year, fraught as it was with comings and goings—but it was also Thursday; she had packing to do; she was driving to Stephen’s tomorrow.
As she hugged the turn and saw the cove to her left, she thought, Gus will show up one day.
Stephen has told her this; Eleanor has warned her; but it was only after her daylong lunch with Cady that she began to not only believe them, but also to allow herself to see it. She could see it as if she were dreaming, but she was completely awake and speeding. She could see August walk into the house. He’ll just walk right in—in the middle of a party maybe—into this house where he never wanted to return, a house he knew she would have sold long ago had he bothered to call her, had he bothered at all. She could see him so clearly wearing his tan like a scar, wearing a lightly battered windbreaker, in—let’s just say—the month of March, having not remembered exactly just how cold it can get back east. She could picture how he’ll be clean-shaven with close-cropped hair, having brought the crisp air inside with him, and she could imagine how he’ll seem smaller somehow, how his eyes will shift from the unfamiliar furniture to the new paint colors, new art on the walls, new people.
Come inside, is what Alice will say, is what she will always say. She’ll have to introduce him because he won’t know a soul.
And as her guests filter out into the night, they’ll whisper about him—maybe a newer friend or two in hushed low tones: / didn ‘t even know she had a brother….
But inside, Gus will admire the new stone fireplace and sit by the fire, flinching ever so slightly when the fire pops and sparks. He’ll eat a meal prepared by his sister and he will not leave a crumb. There’ll be just enough food left over from the party. It’s as if—he won’t be able to stop himself from thinking, conceited bastard—it’s as if she’s been waiting all this time, all these years, as if Alice has known all along that he was coming home.