America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  “I have a friend in LA who could,” Charlie said.

  “No,” Fay said, singsong. “I made him. I should bring him here.”

  Everything about it, the certainty of keeping it, her unfounded conviction about the gender, silenced Charlie, who could do nothing but slap a hand to the wet pavement in performative solidarity.

  Charlie fetched a towel for Fay and some scotch for herself. She moved the rough cotton over her sister’s fine hair without love, not adjusting the pressure when Fay whimpered. They separated soon after to their rooms. Two hours later, Charlie appeared in her window, all her broad muscles locked, having found no way into sleep, and looked toward her sister’s. The room was totally dark, totally still. It was as though the demolition of her life had come as no surprise.

  Fay was unconscious ten hours, hardly changing positions, not even when, in the early morning, Charlie pulled away at high speed, the radio on, the gravel fleeing the tires’ rotations, killing the silence of the place.

  15.

  HOUSTON, TEXAS, 1960

  In the weeks of testing in Texas, following interchangeable men in scrubs down reflective hallways, Vincent did not often think of Fay. The examinations came as a relief, for there were very few decisions to be made, only instructions to be followed. Missing was his compulsion to map out an area as soon as he entered it, determine north and south, imagine the crossings of roads or the meetings of hallways. He needed only to do as he was asked, albeit the asks were tremendous.

  On a robin’s-egg-blue vinyl stool he sat while a spectacled, wordless man squeezed syringeful after syringeful of ice-cold water into his left ear. There were no guidelines given, no questions asked as the liquid found the canal, just the shock and the understanding that it would keep coming. At no point was he confused about his obligation. It was to do nothing, to remain still as a houseplant, to not shift on the paltry surface area of the stool, to not look around the room at the cabinets or the clock or the door. To not wipe at the excess running down your face, down the neckline of the clothes they dressed you in, to not flinch when it reached your torso. When the experiment was over, when the door opened and another man appeared, and Vincent stood. “Thank you,” he said to the blank man in the blank room—of all things, he said thank you.

  How could he have thought of her, when. This time he followed the man up a set of stairs, and he placed each foot at a ninety-degree angle with the next step—the oldest part of him believed that was lucky, important. He had tried to say goodbye but her sister had been waiting outside instead.

  Sleeping, she said.

  Can I wait.

  She’s very tired.

  Within the next room was a chamber almost as big, all glass with a backless wooden bench he could barely make out for all the steam. He knew without being told that he was going in alone, and again he thanked the man who opened the door to his next discomfort. Thank you, sir. They had included a thermometer, a cartoonish one the size of a baseball bat, had welded it to the wall he faced. He did not think of Fay there, because he knew it would raise his heartbeats per minute, and they would take note of that as a sign of frailty, and besides, he could not afford the one-degree rise in internal temperature her image would incite. One hundred forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The sweat, he felt, was not something his body had produced for the occasion but a feature of his physiology, something he’d lived with always. The only picture he admitted to his mind was that of a walk he’d taken along the canyon of the Rio Grande. It comforted him, the thought of those curving walls of stone, the river, not so wide, that divided ways of life completely. The water like some kind of decision being made, over and over for miles, steady and green between the cliffs of peach stone. When the door opened—how much later he didn’t know—it was not relief he felt, just an awareness of conclusion, a town he was driving away from, a belonging he had decided to give away.

  She could be sleeping for months, Charlie had said.

  They greeted him with a towel and led him to a long line of shower stalls, where he brought his arms over his head and curled his toes and watched the cold water run down the slant of the tile into the drain. A fresh set of clothes, identical to those he had saturated with sweat. Shortly after another man, this one older, his clipboard thicker with paper. The man made a gesture, a pointer that went back, and Vincent followed him out.

  The next three feet of hallway terminated in double doors, which opened onto a wider stretch of linoleum. Through glass on either side he could see people working, carrying stacks of paper or typing alone, but he did not turn to observe them. At the entrance to the next room the man cleared his throat to speak, a thick wrist already on the knob. “Come out,” he said, “in two hours.”

  When the latch took, the sound short and minor, the room was without light. Vincent heel-toed to what he believed was the center and he lowered himself, slow inch by slow inch, into a squat, from there into what Ernie had called Indian-style. His hands on his knees, he began to sing, his sight unavailable but his grandmother’s Scottish tremor there with him. All choruses and verses included, he knew, ate five minutes, for she had insisted on singing it precisely at midnight on the nights they were awake and together, and he had dreaded it, her gaudy tremolo, and learned to diminish this by knowing when it would be over.

  You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road

  And I’ll be in Scotland afore you

  But me and my true love will never meet again

  On the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond

  Twenty-four fives. He did not think of the concept of two hours, of what that could fill, a matinee in Technicolor or the drive from Edwards to Los Angeles he’d sometimes taken with Fay. A meal at Canter’s, why not, just her perfect teeth around a soup spoon an occasion. He tapped the floor at each conclusion, briefly, to remind himself of the advancing count. Aware he had taken fifteen seconds to get settled, he left the last chorus unsung, and when he felt for the door it was exactly where he thought it would be.

  The light was surgical, examining him from every direction, and he heard the click of a stopwatch. He saw the scientist in the chair, the positions of his brow and jaw in clinical gravitas, saw him break part. The grin was wide and toothy, directed at the timepiece, gone in a blink.

  She could be asleep the rest of her life, the sister had said.

  Two hours, he learned later, and two seconds.

  16.

  PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA, 1960

  Getting in touch with her parents had not proved as easy as either she or Charlie suspected, and the change in them, their sudden remoteness in the world, was something she almost admired her first weeks in their new home.

  Their phone number, the same for thirty years, had been disconnected, and the letter she sent, forwarded to the Petaluma address, took weeks to reach them. Ashamed of their daughters, tired of the country club gossip, Fay’s mother and father had purchased a rambling farmhouse in the northern part of the state. They had driven the nine hours along the coast, silent on a twisting road.

  FAY HAD READ THE REPLY aloud to Charlie on the porch, their feet propped and a little crowded on the same milk crate, passing a bottle of beer back and forth.

  Dear Fay,

  We have moved away and are now just north of San Francisco. A bus leaves twice a day from the city to Petaluma. Enclosed are a map and a schedule. Send us a telegram when you are sure of your arrival. If at all possible, please dress for the trip.

  C & J

  The sisters had cackled at it, clutching at each other’s elbows.

  “If at all possible, please don’t arrive in the nude.”

  “If clothing is worn, please remove all rodents that may be clinging to your attire or dependent on you for food.”

  “If at all possible, stow away inside a tasteful trunk. Using your forehead like a battering ram, heave your way onto the platform without breathing audibly or alarming any of your fellow passengers. Make it appear the trunk has been del
icately placed there by a respectable steward of the railroad.”

  She had still been under the impression that the trip would prove merely an interruption of the life she’d been living, a belief whose bottom fell out the first time they took her to dinner. Her mother knocked on her door before with the dress Fay was to wear, something with an empire waist that would hide the fact of her bump.

  A week before she left, disturbed by the Santa Ana winds, Lloyd had gone missing, four days in which all of Charlie’s syllables elided and she drank only one jam jar of water. “What in shitfire you think goes into beer!” she yelled when Fay asked. When he returned, striding into the bar with a pejorative sigh, Charlie spent fifteen minutes with her head pressed to his. Fay’s going-away party, two nights later, had been informal, unnamed, a secret between the sisters that the men didn’t suspect. That night Fay was quick on her feet again, taking orders from across the room by gesture and wink, a pointer raised for a martini up, two fingers pinched on her nostrils to indicate dirty. Her sister was on the guitar, playing Hank Williams—Her personality made me want her. That she and Charlie both mounted Lloyd, Fay’s chin tucked onto Charlie’s collarbone, and disappeared for twenty minutes, seemed a return to business as usual. The men smoking by the pool had seen them way out, their bodies one slumped shape, a two-headed thing that could not carry itself.

  KINDNESSES IN HER PARENTS’ HOME were indirect, a stray sweater folded neatly where it was left, a fire lit in anticipation of another’s return. Fay, the growing hump in her stomach set low and unyielding, helped with the patch of edibles her mother had planted in a hurry to remake her life. She watered the rows of arugula and corn and spoke idly to the chickens as she gathered their eggs, marbled brown and coral pink. Her father drove her to doctor’s appointments, more careful with left turns than she remembered, and when she came home there was lunch waiting, covered by a butler’s tray. Alone, she ate the tomatoes peeled and cut back to resemble flowers, the ham and apple muffins. The house sat high on a hill and the bay windows were poorly insulated, a breach of the outside world on the domestic that her parents would never have accepted before. As Fay sat at the table situated between them she could feel the winds she imagined were headed for the town, a place she watched every day but had rarely visited. Something had changed about her mind. When it came to a problem it couldn’t solve, it would point, somewhat lazily, to dying. Or you could kill yourself, it thought for her, your mother’s Seconal, your father’s Smith & Wesson. She was disturbed but learned to think around this, a rude guest at dinner whose comments you ignored.

  As she became bigger she was less content to remain on the property, and she felt keenly that this anxiety belonged to her child, that he wanted to see and know and had soaked up all there was in that silent home, on that golden hill. Her father caught her hiking the three miles to the small downtown—a hardware store with a taxidermied brown bear in the window, a movie theater with a marquee that wrapped around the corner, a mostly stagnant estuary—and insisted on driving her. He pulled into a parking space and opened his newspaper, told her to take as long as she needed, but what she needed was for no one to know where she was, so she only skulked a few blocks up to the grocery, where she bought nothing, then returned to the car.

  17.

  It was Charlie who gave the baby his name. The drugs had disguised Fay, hidden her under thick blankets of light and sound. The appearance of her son, finally, after thirty-six hours, had not made words more available. Just the fragility of his head, how easily it could break, cowed her, checked her impulse to touch him. How could she name him, narrow his life that way? “You do it,” she said to Charlie, who had appeared, cigar already lit, halfway through. In a letter a month before, Fay had offered a rough due date but not an invitation. Rather than bringing them in with the rest of their letters and bills, their parents had left the envelopes from Charlie, two a week for almost half a year, in the mailbox for Fay to find on her own. If she left one half-read on the kitchen table it appeared soon after under her door.

  “How did you know to be here?” Fay asked, time wobbling between the walls of the aquamarine hospital room. Thoughts seemed to be arriving in the wrong place, a taste in her mouth or a weight in her hand. How to confirm that her sister was indeed near her, her son still not arrived. It was the smell she finally trusted, the singular odor of Charlie, pomade and tobacco and pine-scented mop solution.

  “Been calling around different hospitals in the area for about two weeks,” Charlie said, rolling the baseball cap she held in her hands. “Pretending to be the father. Some of those nurses got pretty fond of me by the end. It’s sort of a shame they’d be disappointed to see the body attached to those vocal cords. Particularly Lindy. I sang to Lindy while she looked up records and whatnot. Lindy sounded like a hot mug of water.”

  “It’s ‘cool glass of water,’ supposed to be.” Fay was trying to get her hands to spread, trying to prop herself up. “‘Tall drink of water.’”

  “Have you ever had hot water? With lemon and honey? When you really needed it?”

  Fay was laughing and crying, the two feelings coming to her at the same time like warring radios. There was the sound of nurses speaking in the hall, there was the pinch of her legs as Charlie settled herself at the foot of the narrow bed.

  “Lloyd sends his regrets. Couldn’t make it. Thought this might be the weekend he’d finally lick his own asshole.”

  “What do you think I’m doing in this hospital”—Fay was imagining her tongue pushing the words out as she said them—“but attempting to do exactly that. Safer with medical supervision.” She made a monocle of her thumb and index, the other fingers framing her cheek, then smiled as if surprised at her new talent. The high was cresting, holding her open.

  Charlie nodded. “A very good prank on the folks. No progeny, but—”

  The cigar she replaced with a Lucky, which dangled about three-quarters across her bottom lip, an indication she was happy and settled. Recognizing this raised Fay’s body temperature, and then with a wave of the drug she disappeared into a worry. What did it mean that it had not truly bothered her to be without this, old signs of old love? Five months she had been with her parents. If she had sometimes felt starved of conversation, missed the path an overheard argument cut, in the main she had not been unhappy, had filled her pockets with fallen buckeyes and felt glad not to answer any questions. Was it wrong to believe you went on as yourself even in the absence of the people who helped you become it? She thought of Vincent rarely, how he might have reacted even less. She was glad to be without whatever comfort he might have offered in the hour he had to spare, and anyway she could not be sure. There had been the man in Los Angeles, there had been the look on his face above her, more determined than Vincent’s, less compromised. It would be easier to raise the son of a man she had not known than the son of a man she had failed to. In the hospital her mind snapped to certainty about it, that it was his, Raymond’s. Her limp hand in her sister’s stringy, sun-speckled one, she followed the relief of this to sleep.

  WHEN HE CAME FAY WAS surprised by his weight, the fact of it when divided from her body. She kissed him vaguely, near his left ear, and he coughed. Charlie waited with her hands clasped behind her back, her chin tucked, and when Fay handed him up and Charlie spoke she was equally hard to place, the salt gone from her voice.

  “What’ll you call him,” she said. “If I press my thumb here”—she pointed at the chin—“will he have a cleft or what. What will his name be?”

  Fay was aware now of the doctor and the nurses, how they were waiting to take him to some station of sanitization or to offer some remedy. What was wrong with him? Claudette and James stood in the background, polished and withdrawn as people waiting to see a priest. She could not remember anymore which names she had considered. All names sounded like people she already knew, people who had failed to fill the spectacular title of her son.

  “I can’t, I don’t think.”

&nb
sp; “Wright,” Charlie said.

  “Like the flying brothers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Wright!”

  “Wright.”

  Hearing his name where Charlie held him on her chest, Wright curled a hand in resignation. It seemed he was gesturing back toward Fay, toward back where he’d come from, as if to say he had not been told, had not been ready.

  18.

  HOUSTON, TEXAS, 1961–1963

  Elise was happier here, tucked away in the row of identical houses painted in a range of mauves, the driveways all glinting in the early mornings with the cars the dealerships had leased for nothing to the men like Vincent. They lived in as close proximity as they worked, in a cul-de-sac without a sidewalk, and their bodies, subjected to the same diet and regimen, were nearly facsimiles. The push of Texas heat was constant, the power of the air conditioners soul chilling, and life here sometimes felt only about managing the two extremes, pulling on a sweater indoors and dragging a handkerchief across your sopping neck while out. Elise had bought and bought with the determination of someone under deadline, a pitcher with hand-painted stripes of primary colors and eight matching glasses, as though some inspection were approaching, Danish teak sconces that resembled horns, as though someone were coming to make an assessment and say this was or was not a home and a life. The bills were large, and he sorted them on the long walnut dining table with foldout leaves, the few hours he was home, paid them but barely on his government salary. Her parents, calling from their Garden District mansion in New Orleans, would not believe how little money he made. She took out a line of credit at the department store. Nine of the astronauts in his class had bought in this development, but they were kept so long at work that they rarely saw their houses, hardly dug their toes into the deep carpet or marveled at the spring of the toaster, and it was their wives who napped and ate and twisted the telephone cords here, building a community that existed below or inside the men’s daily lives.