The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “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 li
kes 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.

  6

  Riddles, 1985

  The phone rang in the middle of the night. When Alice picked up, she heard her mother sobbing and her father saying, “Shh,” over and over until the two sounds were nearly syncopated, their voices working within a framework of a composed and trancelike rhythm. Alice held her breath and listened. Her heart sped wildly as she wondered what could possibly come next. “Cherry,” her father said. Alice had never heard him ever refer to her mother as anything besides her name. “Cherry, come on,” he nearly whispered, “tell me what has happened.” Alice didn’t know what she was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t what came next.

  “Nothing,” she said through labored breath. “Exactly nothing.” She coughed wetly, and tapered herself off in extravagant silence.

  “Charlotte,” he said, as if he knew what she was hiding. “

  I need to come home right now,” she said. “I need to see my children.”

  Alice thought, Who was going to argue with that?

  Charlotte returned from Mexico in time for Thanksgiving— just barely, the night before—with a savage tan and hollow eyes and not one single present. She looked like an actress who’d neglected to put her face on, and she acted almost reserved. Her father and mother sat at the kitchen table late at night. Without realizing they were doing so, Alice and Gus let them alone for a moment, busying themselves with watching water boil for a pot of her new favorite tea. She’d had a carton of hierbabuena in her handbag that was tossed on the counter, along with a box of melted chocolate. Charlotte hadn’t asked either of them a single question, and her eyes were glazed and unfocused. “I’m sure it’s just from being exhausted,” Alice whispered to Gus, “from traveling. …”