The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  He stared at Gus and Gus stared back. Her father’s eyes were low blue flames. Gus had eyes like embers. Alice didn’t know where to look, so she returned her gaze outside. But this time she noticed her reflection in addition to the dark. She wondered if it had been there all along.

  “Please,” Alice said, but the sound just dissolved in the air.

  Her father’s vein stood out on his forehead. It looked like a little worm. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You have no idea.” The way he said it felt like the middle of the night, when everything seemed dead.

  Gus put down his fork and knife. He folded his hands in his lap. Alice thought he’d say “Sorry” but he just kept staring at her father, as if it were the first time he’d really looked.

  They looked nothing alike.

  Nobody ate more. Nobody spoke. Alice wanted a dog. She wanted her Bo back, his enthusiastic breathing. She wanted dessert and heat and her mother. It was so quiet, with the wind picking up outside, with the unseen trees whipping skinny branches up against the glass.

  Her father took his last sip of Scotch, and crunched an ice cube between his teeth, which must have hurt because he sprayed some Scotch across the table and suddenly began to laugh. The air smelled like the nurse’s office for a second, like the art-room sink at school. Gus started laughing the way he did when he watched TV, high-pitched and hysterical and shaking so hard that his parka made all kinds of swishing sounds. Alice didn’t laugh but she breathed. She breathed so deeply that it felt like laughing. She felt light all through her head.

  Her father was shaking his head, laughing through his words: “You’re such an ungrateful kind of kid,” he said, rubbing his face. “It’s okay what do you know? You don’t know. What can I do about that? That’s fine.” Her father had a big smile on his face and he looked from one child to the other. Gus’s eyes were still bright. Her father’s face went red, as if he’d just returned from a long walk, and he took a breath through his nose as if he were about to dive off a high board for the very first time. Sound came from him in a short, loud burst, and then, after a few dry inhalations, her father began to cry. And through the hood that Gus had saved up wearing until tonight, the night that their mother Charlotte was supposed to have returned, Alice could see he wasn’t sorry exactly, but surprised. Maybe it was enough, maybe it was enough for then, because their father asked Alice to play the piano, and when she said no, when she said that she was cold and that she knew that her mother had screwed up the heating bill, that she always did things like that, her father asked if anyone was going to eat some ice cream or what. Gus unsnapped his chin flap and took down his hood.

  “I’ll take it off,” her brother said.

  2

  Water, 1979

  When Alice came home from school (always before V V Gus), she’d find Charlotte at the kitchen table, poring over reams of paper or stacks of photos, reading torn-out articles, seemingly shocked that it was three o’clock, and she hadn’t even shed her robe. There was a clamshell with a few cigarette butts, an open window, a broken screen, and flies crawling on honey-coated spoons beside cups of half-drunk tea.

  “Oh, my God, you’re home already. I haven’t had a chance to—”

  “Did you walk Spin?”

  “Did I… You know, I think I did. Of course I did.”

  Her mother’s narrow feet were bare, bone white, the re- mains of some coral polish dotting her toenails. There was no way she’d been outside today.

  Alice went running through the house, calling out, “Spin, Spin!” And the colorless walls took on shades of skin as the afternoon spring light made everything hot, hotter than the actual temperature—all that sunlight and her mother inside, all that sunlight and the stench hit her as she rounded the bend upstairs in the hallway.

  Small piles of Spin’s crap dotted the area where Alice sat most often, in the narrow corridor where she liked to bounce a neon orange tennis ball off the opposite wall. She’d sit and listen for her brother August coming down the corridor, hoping that he would sit beside her, that he would maybe try to swipe the ball away. But August usually ran by and slid down the banister as he was told not to do, daring the whole structure to buckle. He was interested in explosions.

  “Spin!” Alice called. There was a puddle of pee in the guest bathroom. A puddle of pee on the landing at the top of the back stairwell. A stream of yellow (mostly dry) right beside her bed.

  Her father was coming home that evening from a conference in California.

  Alice stood beside each spot and just looked at what Spin had done. She thought of how badly he’d needed to go, and how he must have whined and whined to deaf ears. Alice yelled out for her mother. She must have yelled for minutes, not moving at all, before Charlotte came up the back stairs, smelling of powder and smoke.

  “Look,” Alice said. “Would you look!”

  “That naughty—”

  “No,“ Alice said, with her face burning, “it isn’t his fault. It is your fault.”

  Her mother laughed and then coughed, dryly. It was too warm up here in the corridor but Alice could not move. “Oh, Jesus,” said Charlotte, with a small round yawn. “You want to calm down please?”

  “It’s disgusting,” Alice said. “How would you feel if you couldn’t go out? No one keeps you inside all day, do they?”

  Her mother didn’t answer.

  “Why don’t you walk him?” Alice asked. “It is so easy. You are the one who said so. You said so to convince Daddy.”

  “Well, love, you wanted a dog, didn’t you?”

  “So.”

  “Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is not. Okay? Sometimes I lose track of time. You two sap my energies and go off to school and I lose track.”

  “Sap your energies?”

  Charlotte looked at her daughter, gave her a half smile that Alice knew too well. The smile was supposed to make Alice feel included in her mother’s infuriating behavior. It was the laziest gesture that Alice knew. It was a look that said, I never need to apologize, not as long as you are mine.

  “That’s not normal,” Alice said hastily.

  “No, I don’t suppose it is.”

  “You just could walk him, that’s all. Make a schedule.”

  Her mother shrugged. Then she reached out to touch the tips of her daughter’s hair. “Let me cut it,” she said.

  “No,” Alice said.

  Charlotte didn’t let go. Her touch should have felt cloying but it felt, instead, like relief. “You won’t even notice. I’ll give it some shape.”

  “Why are you still wearing your bathrobe?”

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Yeah, I like it, but shouldn’t you get dressed?”

  “Getting dressed is very overrated. Sometimes, sweetheart, I feel like if I’m going to get dressed I want to seriously get dressed. You know what I mean?”

  Alice was ten years old and she still couldn’t figure out what it was that her mother did with her days. Charlotte hadn’t gone anywhere since mid-January, when she’d left for a month while the children were at school, having said good-bye only in passing, as they were headed out the door. On the kitchen table Charlotte had left a folder regarding a program started by a Burmese woman and a man from Boston who imported Burmese weavings and sold them on Newbury Street. He made a killing and spread the wealth to the peasant weavers. Everybody won. The folder was accompanied by a brief note, which said, Thanks for reading, as if it were a business proposal for a deal in which her husband and children might have been prospective investors. She’d returned home with a nasty parasite and having taken up smoking again, expressing inarticulate plans about buckling down on “the project.” She didn’t talk about the project in specifics, but it involved, from what Alice could tell, a great deal of sitting around.

  “The project is consuming,” her mother explained, as Alice filled buckets with disinfectant.

  “I’ll be right back,” Alice said, and she went downstairs and got two
mini seltzers, the kind her father drank straight from the bottle. As she climbed the stairs she couldn’t help feeling a little proud.

  “Well, look at you,” Charlotte said, and Alice fluttered inside. “When did you get to be such a smarty-pants? Who taught you about cleaning stains, for heaven’s sake?”

  Alice felt her cheeks burn as she shrugged and tried her best not to smile. She tried not to think about how her friend Eleanor’s mother, Mrs. Deveau (who taught her about the seltzer), had told Alice with pitying eyes that she could always tell her and Mr. Deveau anything, anything at all.

  Charlotte and Alice worked together silently. Alice looked at her mother, down on all fours, and made sure she was scrubbing. Charlotte’s hands were like her own hands. They had short fingers and bitten nails and they didn’t look motherly. Her hair was amazingly thick, the exact color of a pecan, and it was all Alice could do not to touch it the way she’d touch a horse in a stall—tentatively, with love and fear and a nagging shame for pockets empty of apples and sugar, for the inability to ride.

  Even though they were doing nothing more than cleaning, Alice and her mother were together and Alice didn’t want it to end. But just as she was thinking about what she could show her mother in her room or what kind of good question she could ask, Charlotte said, “Jesus, do I need a bath.” She ignored Spin, who had climbed the stairs again, now that all traces of him were gone, and she touched Alice lightly on the shoulder. Alice watched her mother walk down the corridor, her bathrobe tie trailing behind her like a fallen party streamer.

  Alice stood watching the empty corridor and might not have been able to find it in her to move had Spin not begun to whine. She clipped on his leash and set out walking. There were pots of hydrangeas on the front porch and the clay inside them was cracking. The sky was white and the sun shone like a smudge of pale lipstick on a cheek. It was the end of April— warm enough to wear a T-shirt, but just barely. She wondered how far Gus had progressed.

  Her brother was in the water. He’d decided to swim out farther than he’d ever gone. There were markers, he’d explained the night before, ones he’d created for himself, before the cove merged with the sound. He intended to hit the very last one and be back in time for dinner. Gus had told Alice that he’d been going farther and farther each Friday, since the last of the snow had melted. He’d bought a wet suit with money he was given for an upcoming school trip to Washington. His ability to know the ocean, to learn what he wanted to learn (instead of what he was supposed to learn according to some bogus school-time schedule) was more important—way more important. There was a man who rowed in a rowboat from Long Island to California just last year, two women who windsurfed to Lisbon. When Alice had asked why he didn’t just wait till summer, why he didn’t stay after school and swim laps in the indoor pool instead, he laughed and said, “Just don’t tell them, okay? That’s not what I need.”

  What do you need? was what Alice wondered. Why would anyone want to windsurf to Lisbon? And why was it, she wondered, that this was the first thought she had: Her mother would not be worried but pleased. Alice could imagine how her eyes would shine at the thought of Gus courting danger. Alice, therefore, tried not to allow herself to be worried. Her brother, she assured herself as she threw a glance out to sea, always knew what he was doing.

  She walked Spin out to the end of the long driveway and then back to the house. It was high tide and the marsh was flooded so that it looked as though the east porch always faced not reeds and birds and pattern-making sludge, but only the water. She followed the marsh down the sloping properly where Spin drank from a freshwater spring that pooled over mossy rocks. A mass of tall bamboo looked like wheat or sea grass grown to impractical proportions. To Alice’s left was where, at low tide, a beach was revealed, along with the detritus of the ocean. You never knew what you could find. Gus once found an egg carton full of golf balls, secured with duct tape. Alice found a dead cat. But now it was high tide and right up to the lawn was the gray-green sea lapping nice and easy.

  Nestled right there, between the marsh and the sea, was a wooden shack painted a faded barnyard red. The paint was nearly gone, leaving the drab, salt-stained wood. What was most unusual about it was that there was a tiny fireplace that must have, at one point, gotten a good deal of use, as the chimney bore the scars of thick black smoke. When they moved into the house, when Alice was just five, everybody had plans for the place. Gus and Alice could make it into a clubhouse. Her father could house his bone collection, his jars of gelatinous substances—but Charlotte was going to make it into a poolhouse of sorts, even though they had no pool. Charlotte drew a picture of her vision—an inky, broad-stroked affair— and taped it to the refrigerator, where it continued to hang— frayed corners curling upward, a relic of another time. In the picture there was a chest of drawers, stacks of towels, an area rug on the floor. There was a fire in the fireplace, andirons and bellows. There were pictures on the wall; she’d chosen their frames. There was even a bottle of Perrier idling on a counter and a bud vase with a blue flower—by far the brightest color on the white, creamy page. It was a beautiful picture that Alice loved. It bore so little resemblance to anyplace she had ever seen. Plus, it proved something that was always hanging in the air at any adult function; it was whispered as a rumor, with the same tone that made mention of money or its lack, and of a woman’s looks. It was a phrase that smarted with sarcasm or resentment, or else as a kind of excuse: Charlotte is talented.

  But talented at what? To Alice it was never exactly clear. The picture was lovely but it was a rare effort. She never claimed to be any kind of artist. She never claimed to be anything, except—when she’d had a few drinks—she’d admit to being unusually photogenic. She had been asked to audition for a New York production of The Seagull when she was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence simply because someone had photographed her on a train, looking out the window on a foggy morning. The director had seen this photograph printed in Life magazine and had hunted her down, had telephoned the dormitory in search of her. The idea of a director (Alice pictured the low-slung chair, the resonant voice) searching for her mother: nothing but nothing could possibly be more glamorous. Whether or not Charlotte had made any impression at the audition was somehow never the point. Charlotte’s stories cut off at the precipice of meaning. Her stories weren’t so much stories as they were images—nebulous enough that they were always worth a closer, longer look.

  But the poolhouse, as it was so called, sat just as empty and shabby as when the Greens moved in. Alice thought of its best and only uses: the hiding place for hide-and-seek (so obvious— no one ever thought to look!), the once or twice a summer that Alice and Gus would sleep in sleeping bags on its cold, dank boards—Alice up all night listening for creatures, on the constant lookout for claws and teeth, while Gus snored. One evening last July she opened the door to find a raccoon settling in for a still-warm meal swiped from the patio table. The raccoon had looked up with a chicken bone in its hands, as if to point out her rudeness.

  Alice peeked inside. At first she saw nothing, but then she noticed a neatly folded towel and a Yoo-hoo, a Snickers bar and a sweatshirt. This was where Gus would collapse after swimming this evening. Having seen that he’d taken the trouble of purchasing his own special food for the occasion (Yoo-hoo and Snickers having never seen the inside of the Green household), of planning ahead and even bringing a towel… It was impressive. Towels for Gus were an afterthought at best, used after a swim only if someone else remembered. On cooler evenings at the beach, he’d stand beside the comfortably towel-clad, jumping up and down, smiling as his lips turned blue. Someone always offered to share. Usually that someone was Alice.

  Spin looked up at Alice and Alice looked out more carefully at the water. Spin tugged her toward the dock (useless without a permit to rebuild), a dock that stood as a testament to a different kind of homeowner, a wholly other life. People at school belonged to sailing clubs and golf clubs, and sometimes it was easy to imagi
ne what the house would have looked like if Alice’s parents cared about leisure time the way her father cared for research or the way their mother cared for pursuing her leisure elsewhere.

  Now the dock was an eroded gray plank that stretched out into the distance and slid into the water. There was no permit for a mooring and so the wood endured a slow demise—gnawed by the elements year after year. The gulls enjoyed congregating and leaving their white and shiny droppings along the rickety rails. In order to walk onto the dock, you needed to bypass a mound of stones and weeds that were part of a former Indian burial ground. Of this there was no proof, but it was accepted as truth as long as their family had lived here. Once in a great while her father spoke of leveling it, at least trimming the weeds, but nothing was ever done. Alice thought it was beautiful the way the stones made patterns in the bulbous grass; she was certain the mound had powers and that it was the reason the house’s former owners had built the little shack there.

  Out beyond the dock there were two boats racing, their white sails flush with wind. There was a big yellow barge inching across the horizon. She kept expecting to see Gus, to give him a wave, even if he couldn’t see her. It would have been nice to just see him at it, to get a sense of how far he was and how long it would be until he returned. But Alice couldn’t see him anywhere. When he’d told her about his swimming, she’d accepted his plan as she accepted all of Gus’s plans—fully formed and nothing to question too heavily. If he left at two, Alice thought, he would have been gone two hours already, more than two hours really, as it was nearly four-thirty. Dinner wasn’t until seven o’clock though, and Gus said he’d be back just in time for dinner.

  It occurred to her that what he was doing could actually be more than a little dangerous.

  She tugged Spin and set off running up her family’s lawn, under the dogwoods and over the patchy muddy grass. “Mommy!” she belted out, before she even knew exactly of what she was frightened. Alice breathed hard and Spin ran fast, and the humid air turned a notch toward chilly as the sun went behind a dense cloud. She pictured Gus waterlogged blue and everyone wondering, Why didn’t you say something?