The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “Alice,” her father said.

  “Yes?” Alice said. “Oh, am I broaching an inappropriate topic? You’ve been gone for over a month and we’re supposed to sit here and listen to stories about models buying bowls?” She felt like pulling her mother’s hair out from under her silly head scarf. “We can’t ask what you’ve been doing?”

  “Why not ease up?” her father said.

  The phone rang and Alice jumped up to get it, seizing the opportunity for escape. “Let the machine get it,” Gus and Charlotte both cried out. They had an answering machine now. Her father had brought one home in July, and both Gus and Charlotte loved hearing the things that people said to a machine, how some people clammed up and others rambled on. The whole routine made Alice depressed.

  Alice ignored them and picked up the phone. There was silence for a moment after she said hello, and she realized she was essentially terrified of who it could be, how her mother left so many loose ends each time she went away. It could be the bank, a hotel, a man who’d claim he found her wallet, that he’d like to give it to her in person, he didn’t trust the mail. “Hello,” she repeated in a lower voice.

  “May I please speak to Alice?” a voice said.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I mean, this is Alice.”

  “It’s Jeff,” he said, “urn, from the parking lot?”

  “Oh, hi,” she said too loudly.

  “Hi,” he said. She heard what sounded like a small dog yip-ping in the background. She heard his breath.

  God, she hated this. “What are you doing?” she blurted out.

  “I was wondering if you wanted …” She heard Gus laugh so hard he snorted. She heard her mother: “And then he said, remooove it, s’il vousplaitl”

  “Why don’t you come over,” Alice heard herself saying, as if she invited strange boys to hang out at her house, oh, all the time. She saw her mother raise an eyebrow, turn her stupid scarf-head in Alice’s direction. “Why don’t you come over now?”

  Her first instinct after he said okay after she didn’t switch phones in order to have more privacy and after her family and Cady DeForrest heard her tell him how to get there (no easy feat with her screwy sense of direction), was to call her friend Eleanor. But not even Eleanor knew about the hand job, or that there had been kind of a lot of them in the past two months. Alice told Eleanor that they had just kissed. That is what, for some reason, she always said, even when Eleanor had heard some rumors— Eleanor was out. She made her way back to the table.

  “Who was that?” her father said.

  “Jeff. A boy from school.”

  “And he’s coming over now?”

  “Is that a problem?” Alice said, prepared to use Cady’s presence as a sensible bargaining tool. Gus was playing with Cady’s hair, right there at the kitchen table. “It’s only nine o’clock,” Alice said, “and we’ll just be right here.” The problem was, she didn’t care if he came over. She liked him, she was a little afraid of him, but she was really afraid of herself.

  “I just don’t see—”

  “Alan,” her mother said, clearly annoyed with Alice but not enough to take a stand, “just let her.”

  She’d bring him, Jeff, she’d bring him down to the pool-house and shock him by not talking. He’d ask her to do things and she would. He wouldn’t even have to ask her. She’d beat him to it, doing away with the small negotiations. She wasn’t stupid; she knew what he wanted from her. He was too good-looking and too well liked to be calling her for real. She knew she had pretty hair and nice legs and was smart in a strange sort of way, but there were girls who were girlfriends and girls who were not, and she knew herself—she knew which kind of category she fit into.

  By the time Jeff made it over, her parents were splayed on the living-room couch, unaware or unconcerned that Gus and Cady were back at it in his room. It seemed they were going for an all-time record; they simply had no shame.

  Jeff was even taller than she remembered. He looked completely foreign to Alice, as if he’d just stepped out of the 1950s—1955 on a farm. And he was serious. If he’d been wearing a hat, on seeing her parents he no doubt would have taken it off.

  “See ya,” Alice said to her parents, after a brief introduction.

  “Where are you going?” her father asked.

  Alice laughed a quick, short laugh. “We’re just going down to the water,” she said. “It’s pretty.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s a great idea,” he said.

  “Daddy?”

  “This time of year the raccoons are staked out down there. Mrs. Craven was actually attacked by one the other evening.”

  Everyone was laughing, even Jeff, who didn’t seem to know where to look.

  “Raccoons?” Alice said. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The way her father was looking at her made her crazy. He was asking her with his eyes if she was okay. He was telling her that she was acting strangely and that he’d show this big blond boy to the door right now, that he’d play the asshole expressly for her sake if what she secretly wanted was to hang out with her parents and watch bad TV. His eyes were saying he had a feeling that this was what she wanted.

  Alice said, “We’ll bring Spin,” and she heard herself force a laugh. “He’ll protect us from the evil raccoons.”

  “I am not kidding at all,” he said, his voice on the rise.

  “Alan,” Charlotte said, her feet in his lap, “don’t be absurd. Go on,” she said, not looking at her daughter but flashing Jeff a big smile. Her mother was punishing her with that smile and it was working. She left the room pitched out into the galaxy, far outside of her family and its center, her mother the sun. She tried to be lunar, she tried to be a hedonistic creature of the night reveling in outsider status, but on actually stepping outside, all she noticed was that it was colder than she expected, and that she felt disoriented rather than excited with this stranger walking beside her.

  He wore a cobalt fleece, the kind of item that boyfriends wore, the kind that girls liked to borrow, and his blond hair and brown eyes were exotic in a way; they made her think of Wyoming, Montana, Christian Science, Mormons. “I brought some beers,” he said gamely. “They’re in my car.”

  “Great,” she heard herself saying. “That’s great.”

  Maybe she was imagining it, but it seemed like Jeff was looking at her strangely. Did her breath smell of Chinese food? She’d eaten an orange and drunk a Coke, but maybe he still smelled jade shrimp delight. Maybe she looked different from how he remembered. But amidst all this worry she managed to find her sense of purpose. She was going to touch him. She was going to touch him and it wouldn’t matter if she smelled a little like egg roll. Nothing would matter but her fearlessness, her sheer availability. She didn’t need love like some girls. She knew better by now.

  Gus and Cady they’d only just met, and bam, they were a couple. They screamed and yelled and threw things. They made up and made out constantly. Last Wednesday Alice had thought that Gus had been smoking pot (which he didn’t ever do), but then she realized—to her even greater surprise—that he had been crying. Cady had made her brother cry. He be- longed to her now. Alice didn’t have to belong to anyone, and it could be out of choice. She could be the wild one, stepping out of her expected self and into other lives. What would her mother make of that? Nobody had to live up to any expectations, because she wouldn’t expect a thing.

  The dock was empty, no raccoons prowling after all. There was a stretch of water-watching, beer-swilling silence. “So where do you think you’ll apply to college?” Alice finally said, sounding as dull as humanly possible. She was giddy from having nothing invested. She could be as boring as she felt like.

  “Maybe Colby,” he said, “maybe Bates.”

  “Those B and C schools,” she said, and he nodded.

  “So what do you usually do on the weekends?” He didn’t fiddle or fidget, Alice noticed. He was calm and smooth as a pond.

  “I like to take
the train to the city and, you know, wander around.” She was going for sounding something like a misunderstood heroine—a girl worth the focus of at least one French film.

  He nodded and smiled a nice smile, one that seemed to imply a certain understanding. But “Your parents seem nice,” was what Jeff said. “Your brother, he’s a really good guy.”

  Alice didn’t respond. Instead she walked toward the pool-house and he followed. Once inside they started kissing. It was some kind of great relief. They fell upon each other with a force that completely belied their attempt at conversation. She had no idea what he liked to eat, what music he played when he was in his car, if he’d ever traveled outside the U.S., if his parents were still married. But there she was with his tongue in her ear, her hands gripping the ridges of his hips, feeling not much more than in a big rush to feel something more than anger at her mother for thinking she was nobody to worry over. She was taking off his shirt, unbuttoning his jeans, making herself go further. She was a delirious gambler with a recent windfall, through with hedging her bets. He smelled even cleaner than he did the other night, and he was sighing and moaning and he sounded almost worried. She took that as a good sign and moved on. I’ll see that ten and raise you twenty! You heard me, twenty! Letting her own pants fall to the ground, letting herself fall to the ground with this stranger moving over her. He was so big, so substantial, and this was what she needed, to be pinned to the earth, to be moored by someone else’s pressing need. She was a virgin. She was still, if barely, a virgin. She kept telling herself that as she felt him straining against her leg, searching for her the way she knew he thought she was searching for him. Alice watched herself from up above, and there she was, pale and writhing—a vision of desire incarnate. If she were Jeff, she would be doing exactly what Jeff was doing. She would be fumbling around for a condom in the dark and cursing herself for not having brought one.

  “It’s okay,” she heard herself say. “You can.”

  “Are you … are you on the pill?” he slurred, and she didn’t answer, only kissed him, brought him to her; she was going going gone. If she were Jeff, she would be bearing up on those big swim-team arms and thrusting steadily—taking advantage of a story-worthy opportunity. But she wasn’t Jeff and she let it happen, let the pain come, let no noise out, and abruptly felt like crying. When he went to roll off of her, she pulled him back on. He was heavy and she could barely breathe, but she told him to just lie there for a moment, if he didn’t mind.

  The surf lapped up the last of the shore; she could hear the high tide rising. It was this shifting landscape she always pointed out to anyone new to the view. With the tides there was before and after. Before was the scraggly weedy beach, a path to walk under neighbors’ docks and on the sand for miles.

  And after was all water and only water clear to their green grass lawn. You see that buoy? she’d say. At low tide there’s land straight through to there, a true clean sweep of beach.

  But the night was so dark, even Alice could scarcely tell the water from the land, the difference between before and after. So really, what could she point out at that very moment to illustrate the difference?

  Jeff rolled off, and Alice felt naked, paradoxically, for the first time all evening.

  “You should probably go, right?” Alice said, pulling her shirt on.

  “I guess,” said Jeff, his voice looser and louder than she remembered. “Listen,” he said, not pulling on his boxers, not rushing to cover up his very beautiful body.

  “It’s okay” Alice said. “It’s okay.”

  He looked at her strangely, the way he’d done earlier, but this time she wasn’t worried about her breath or her looks. She knew it was her he was looking at strangely, seeing past her reddish hair and her smallish chest, seeing past her nickel-colored eyes. He was seeing into her distance and noticing how she had given him full permission to treat her badly before he’d given any indication that he would. He looked frightened, and frightened in a way that would never reverse.

  He said, “It’s my mom’s birthday tomorrow, so …”

  Alice watched him put on his clothes. He wasn’t exactly rushing but he seemed to be acquiring a gentle urgency. She imagined him as a husband, accustomed to waking early and dressing in considerate silence so as not to wake his wife.

  They walked to his car in a mildly painful silence. After putting the beer bottles in a milk crate in the backseat, he leaned sweetly into Alice and gave her a kiss.

  “I’ll see you,” she said, and he left.

  After he’d gone Alice went back down to the water. At first she found it hard to breathe. If only he hadn’t kissed her like that—such an open and obvious good-bye. She walked onto the dock and sat down where she’d talked with Cady one month before. You’re really pretty, she had told her, as if the words were precious; as if they actually mattered. Alice still had matches in her pocket, and she burned a few, singeing her fingers as she cast them off to sea. They actually hurt, the small burns, and she thought of her mother never coming out and saying, Look, I’m worried about you. She’d done it with Gus for years now. They’d have huddled conversations about birth control, self-control. They would fight heatedly over his lack of propriety, the way he’d walk around essentially naked whenever he felt the urge. Alice thought, as she rose up and walked toward the house, about how the closest her mother had come to expressing concern or anger toward her was when she told Alice that staying out late was affecting her looks. As if that were all it would take for Alice at fifteen: a quick bit of self-consciousness, a little hit of shame.

  She had no idea what time it was, how long Jeff had been there, how long she’d sat alone. Inside the house the lights were out, the television off. Spin was on the kitchen floor, whimpering in his dreams. She didn’t care how late it was, or that her mother had just gotten home from Morocco. She didn’t care that Cady was no doubt in Gus’s room and would hear every hollered word. Alice began steeling herself, preparing to confront her. It was the only available option left to her at this point, unable as she obviously was to keep this kind of anger contained.

  She would open the door cautiously, and if her mother was sleeping she would observe her for a while, noting exactly what she looked like before she heard the truth. Charlotte was very particular about how she liked to be woken up, and Alice would break all her rules. She would poke her mother’s shoulder. She would turn on the light. She would raise her voice immediately, shattering the illusion of peace. If her father told Alice that this was something that could wait until morning, she would remain calm with him while disagreeing. And then she’d list her mother’s shortcomings. She’d list them without saying like or urn. You ‘re selfish, you ‘re vain, you ‘re lazy. And on and on and on. She’d ask her to come to the kitchen, and there she’d detail for her mother what she did with Jeff and what she’d risked, why she did it and how it felt—how it felt to be her.

  Only when she arrived at her parents’ door, she was humbled by the quiet all around her. She opened the door and was finally silenced by this: the sight of her mother lying so still— head resting on her father’s shoulder, pale hand on his chest.

  She stood stunned somehow at this ordinary sight, and for the first time all night she felt drunk. She was drunk on disappointment, on knowing she’d behaved foolishly with Jeff, and drunk with the certainly that she wouldn’t be telling her mother anything tonight. How could she, when the meaning of her family—the small and glowing white-hot center—was laid out before her right here in a private display? She watched them sleep, her mother and father, and now the room was spinning. Her mother’s hand was so much sturdier and plainer than the rest of her. It lay squarely on her father’s chest, a nothing-special hand. Alice was dizzy; she became undone by this simple possibility of how her mother’s world could be stripped of adornment much like anyone else’s. Of how, in her dreams, her careless mother—frivolous, head-scarfed, inscrutable—was possibly more like Alice than Alice had ever allowed herself
to believe. But then Alice smelled the very air on her mother’s side of the bed; she saw how Charlotte’s eyebrows were precise like a fairy’s without her ever having to pluck them.

  She wanted to crawl between them as she did sometimes as a child. But she wanted even more than that. She wanted to be inside of her mother unnamed and unborn or buried deep within both of her parents, in mere shadows of separate cells. Alice stood watching and wanting and then, when after a while they didn’t even stir, when they stayed fused together in a warm tangle of sleep, she backed out of their bedroom and retreated through the narrow and very drafty corridor.

  5

  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.