The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  Gus looked over at Charlotte and back to his sister. Look at her, he mouthed. Their mother’s hair was unwashed, she had a pimple on her chin, sweat stains on her blouse, and she’d lost at least ten pounds from her already slight frame. Spin was sniffing her madly, and she petted him until he settled down. She alternated her gaze from her husband to her surroundings as if the house hadn’t quite lived up to her memories, and as if it were her husband and children who had disappeared and reappeared so altered.

  “She’ll be fine tomorrow,” Alice said. Her father was holding her mother’s hand in confused consolation. As far as Alice knew (according to her mother’s spare account in the car ride from the airport), Mexico was fantastic, and she had returned for the same reason she’d always returned: because she missed them. And yet here they all were being criminally careful, afraid to upset her mysterious but clearly tenuous balance. It was as if she’d created a household spell that—if broken by curiosity or honesty—would send the walls crashing down. “Mom,” Alice said, “would you like milk or no?”

  Charlotte looked up at the ceiling. “I need to get to sleep.”

  “So you don’t want any tea?”

  “Oh,” she said, “no.”

  “Good to know,” said Gus. He turned off the stove and put away the cups.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Alice asked. Charlotte was looking out the window, past her own reflection at the remains of an early snow.

  As their mother nodded, Gus made a face charged with incredulity, a face that was not meant for Charlotte.

  Charlotte, having clearly seen his face, walked up to her son. “I suppose you’ve never been just the slightest bit antisocial?” she said with a dose of recognizable impertinence. Then she shook her head regretfully, maybe even disgustedly, before reaching for his face. She touched her son’s stubble, the recent lazy shock of it, with her nail-bitten, sun-spotted hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t hate me,” she said.

  “You are spewing such crap,” Gus said, incredibly. And then he laughed; he laughed too hard. It was because, Alice knew, he wasn’t laughing at all. He stepped out of her reach with his shoulders slouching. He laughed into the palm of his hand.

  “You poor things,” she said to both of them, reaching, as she often did, for their no-longer-children’s limbs.

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “Just stop. Just shut up.” Alice looked at her father, whose face betrayed nothing. Gus continued: “We are not poor things. Alice is not a poor thing, and do you really think/ am? The month flew by.”

  Their father watched Charlotte carefully as if watching an infant, making sure with all of his being that she didn’t fall down.

  “When you leave,” Gus said deliberately, “we are free. We are free to stop entertaining you.”

  “Gus,” Alice said, “no.”

  “You shut your filthy mouth,” her father yelled at Gus. “You—”

  “What are you doing?” Gus asked her. “You just show up like this, all dirty and spacey … it’s pathetic. It’s some drama every time. And we—we have to merely wonder at what you do every time you go away. What do you do to come home looking like this? Why not just tell us?”

  Her father growled, “Goddamn it, Gus—”

  “Shh,” Charlotte said weakly, “no, of course.” She looked into each of her children’s faces. She retracted her hands and backed away. “I’m sorry,” she said, biting her bottom lip, which was chapped and oddly pale. “You’re not poor things at all.”

  “That’s not true what he said,” Alice stammered. Despite what she envisioned feeling at this kind of brutal, truthful tirade, all she could see was her mother’s fear, her weakness. “It’s not. Mom, are you okay?”

  “You keep asking me that,” Charlotte snapped. “Alan,” she started, but then lost the drive she needed in order to finish her thought. She went for the stairs without looking back. Her feet were filthy and barely supported by unfamiliar sandals. Alice imagined her mother picking out the sandals, speaking Spanish in a crowded market or a prim store, haggling over the price. Her other shoes had probably given her blisters from miles and miles of walking. She wasn’t a fan of public transportation, and when she did hire a taxi, she consistently over-tipped. She wore lipstick. She wore no lipstick. She smoked and drank tequila. She drank bottle upon bottle of mineral water. She sat alone in a borderline cafe, waiting for someone to talk to. She was lonely. Strange dark men surrounded her. She was nobody’s mother.

  “You haven’t told us anything,” Gus said.

  “You have no idea,” she muttered, “how I missed you.”

  Alice woke when the sky was an unfiery pink, when the only word that came to mind was dawn. It was dawn on Thanksgiving Day, and it had already snowed and thawed, leaving the world a little cleaner. There were still frozen patches along the eaves, tiny corners where the water turned icy, and the snow was caught in the shade. There were no boats on the sound, no trains whistling on the tracks, nothing but a candy haze that would be gone within moments, an unreasonably innocent sky. Alice was hopeful about the day ahead. There was the indisputable relief that came with knowing that her mother was in the house and, to a lesser degree, the state of comfort/anxiety that a holiday can bring, knowing that millions of people across the country are about to embark on the very same questionable traditions.

  Alice wanted to cook. There was no shopping done yesterday, and Alice knew that they’d most likely be eating out—perhaps at her father’s lab, where the cafeteria prepared holiday meals for the international scientists and students, for those who had nowhere else to be. The thought of going to one of those dinners was so thoroughly depressing that Alice rose from bed and braved the cold floor, scouring the cabinets for anything resembling stuffing or yams, even just one staple with which to work.

  What she scavenged: a can of yams, two freeze-dried packets of marshmallows meant to accompany hot chocolate, stale bread, an onion, two carrots, five eggs, two frozen chickens, one can of organic chicken stock, plus an abundance of flour and sugar and butter. It was pathetic or perfect depending on one’s attitude, and she thought about the woman she aspired to be, the one who could whip up something nearly spectacular out of a pitiful nothing-much. For was beauty really beauty when presented fully formed? No! thought Alice—as she withdrew cookbooks from the backs of drawers, as she found a small tin of plump yellow raisins, a packet of slivered almonds, and look: a perfectly unopened jar of garlic artichoke spread. She, Alice, would create beauty. She would make it happen. And in that hollow where the reserve of her family’s unfulfilled wishes festered, where existed a barren and spreading spot of nothingness, there would blossom a minuscule and possibly glorious flower of a meal. She’d slow-roast the chicken with herbs and tea smoke, heat up the yams and top them with tiny marshmallows, use the bread and onion, carrots and almonds, butter and eggs to make a killer stuffing, and try toasting the rest of the stale bread and topping it with the artichoke spread. There’d be sugar cookies; she’d make sure of it, and maybe even a batch of oatmeal raisin, if she could procure some oatmeal. There was plenty for a feast, for a surprise. She’d serve everything on the never-used china with the pattern of lilac butterflies, but only after strewing the dining-room table with crushed shells as if it were a summer wedding. It was not yet seven A.M. She had time. She was sixteen years old and all-powerful; who, if not her, possessed the necessary muscle to create some change?

  She’d start small. She’d chop everything first, prepare the ingredients, lay them out in nesting bowls. There was something perfect about the bowls (they were green, a green not found in nature), about setting them out in size order upon a clean wood counter. After consulting a recipe, she began.

  There was also something deeply satisfying about chopping and chopping with the big sharp blade, until the bulbous carrots and browning onion became lovely and delicate shimmering piles, no less festive than confetti. The perfection Alice felt was a feeble perfection, offset
by the recent memory of her unwashed mother, of Charlotte’s scrawny limbs, crying out to be fed. Alice was neither scrawny nor unwashed. Alice was not anything, was she? Like her mother said outside the Stanhope, she had no stories to tell. She was as empty as these vacant bowls, and the unexpected mix of rage and pleasure that accompanied this memory disturbed her.

  While tearing up the stale bread, she thought of the swans and threw a glance outside, though she knew they were now long gone. It had been roughly a month since the day Alice and Charlotte saw them, and Alice knew that most likely all of the babies had died. The dimpled chickens sweated through their plastic wrap onto the countertop, and suddenly Alice was disgusted and exhausted. Her ambitions felt overblown, her talent for cooking nonexistent. She had never even cleaned a chicken.

  Her mother told strangers that Alice had problems. Her mother took money from some local ladies in order to do what? Cherry, her father had breathed into the phone, tell me what has happened.

  There was another world going on. It smelled and sounded different and it was running throughout their world, the Greens’ world; it was threaded through this house, and Charlotte had brought it from countries and people far away.

  The back door was opening.

  When Alice spied a lock of pale hair escaped from a snug red cap, when she saw the glint of a slim diamond band on an index finger opening the door, she felt an unexpected panic, as if she were about to be caught at something far more illicit than attempting a Thanksgiving meal. Alice held a knife and thought of possibilities. She could ignore Cady and Cady might ignore her. She could shut off the light and hide. Alice dropped the knife on the chopping board, and it made a louder noise than she’d expected. She wiped her hands on her pajama bottoms and breathed.

  “Hi, Cady,” she said.

  “Oh! Shit, Alice, you scared me,” she said, shaking, with an angry smile. She whispered, “What are you doing?”

  “Cooking?” Alice replied. “Sorry to disturb your path. By all means,” she said, gesturing up the back stairs.

  “No, no, come on,” Cady said, as if she were just sneaking in the back door at dawn to say hello to whoever was up. “What are you making?” she asked, and, still whispering, wandered into the kitchen, shrugging off her coat as she moved.

  “Chicken?” Alice said, smiling. “Some stuffing, I guess?”

  “Alice, you are so funny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shook her head as she picked up the packet of marsh-mallows. “You’re the best,” she said, while clearly meaning something else entirely. “I think you’ll end up eating out,” she said, “no offense.”

  “I’m not that easily offended.”

  “Only seems that way, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  Cady didn’t mean to insult her and Alice knew that; Cady was the kind of person who preferred the easier way—say, if Alice, for instance, could be a shy and possibly worshipful friend. Alice wished, in a way, that she could be that friend and settle in gracefully to a clear supporting role. She’d have fewer lines, less pressure; she’d get a couple of good laughs. But she couldn’t quite do it. Instead she felt surges of anger when she sensed she was not on par.

  “Want some coffee?” Alice said. She was a person with confidence—a girl who made coffee with a French press, who didn’t add milk or sugar.

  “Sure,” Cady said, sitting down on a stool.

  Alice lit the stove and surveyed the kitchen: the paltry ingredients, the knife on the cutting board. Cady’s little smile. “What?” Alice asked.

  “That’s so sweet,” she said. Alice followed her eyes. “You lined up the bowls in size order.”

  Alice turned up the heat and the gas flame rose.

  “Careful,” said Cady, and Alice fought not to respond, not to create a challenge where there was none. She did line up the bowls in size order. Cady had said nothing untrue.

  “So,” Alice said, “you’re going to Brown next year.”

  “Well, I have to get in first.”

  “Oh, you’ll get in,” Alice said, meaning it. “You’ll get in and you’ll go.”

  “You never know,” she said, frowning.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You are truly eager to get rid of me,” Cady said, laughing.

  “That’s not true.” And it wasn’t, not exactly. She knew she would miss Cady, even if Gus became more available to her, even if Cady’s effortlessness wasn’t always around as an example of everything that eluded Alice and somehow always would.

  “Last summer when I went to visit my aunt in Switzerland, your mother wrote me a postcard and it just said, ‘Bon voyage.’ I couldn’t help but laugh. What else could I do? I don’t know what it is with me. Why doesn’t anyone actively like me around here? I mean, I know you don’t actively dislike me. But…”

  Alice wanted to sit down but was too surprised. “What’s wrong, Cady?”

  “Nothing. I’m being stupid. I’m just thinking about how much everything has to change next year. Forget what I said.”

  “Oh, well, you know … change is good. Right?”

  “I’m not so sure. I’m pretty happy right here. In your house,” she said, smiling, “even though I’m not fully welcome.”

  “You just love sneaking in the door,” Alice said.

  “That must be it.”

  “I don’t know why you even bother sneaking.”

  “What about you?” Cady asked, surprisingly.

  “What about me?”

  “What do you want to do, where do you want to go—”

  “I have a whole other year. I’m only a junior.”

  “Well, yes, I know that, but how about eventually?”

  The water began boiling and Alice poured and stirred, waited and pressed down. “I have no idea.”

  “None?”

  “Not really, no. I’ve never been good at that, you know, picturing what comes next.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing,” she said.

  “Maybe not.” The sky was no longer pink at all. There was barely a blush to the steely gray. Somewhere, not too far away, a dog was steadily barking.

  “You know,” Cady said, “you get distracted easily.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  “Really?” Alice asked, oddly flattered by Cady’s unconcealed annoyance. “I’m sorry. Do you want to help me make cookies?”

  “Maybe later on,” Cady replied. She lifted her eyebrows to the floor above them.

  “Of course,” Alice said, trying to look indifferent while pouring two cups of coffee. “Do you want to bring him some coffee?”

  “There’s not enough.”

  “Take these,” Alice said. “He can have mine.”

  The stuffing was completed and it sat under plastic wrap in the refrigerator. The chickens continued to ominously defrost. Alice made sugar cookies and ate two, while drinking milk with a touch of brandy just because she could. After sticking another batch in the oven, Alice found that she was wandering with no destination. She was headed for the most impressive and largest room in the house, the living room that no one ever used. A bay window and window seat lined almost one whole wall. The opposing wall hosted a fireplace, with its own cozy assemblage of an overstuffed couch and two chairs. There was a baby grand piano and a tea cart, two shelves worth of photo albums and scrapbooks, boxes and paperweights and pieces of marble. The room was a pastiche of delicate light, in shades of white that were actually blues, browns, celery greens. There were infinitesimal patterns on all of the fabrics. It was a soothing room, its peacefulness interrupted only by the collections: brightly painted warrior masks on shelves and in corners, the ancient carved games from Egypt and Africa that no one knew how to play.

  Alice stood looking out the window at the low tide, the hot sun obscured by clouds. She didn’t see the figure in the chair closest to her, curled up in a ball. She didn’t see Charlotte, nor did Charlotte see her, and for a momen
t mother and daughter were so similar. They were in need of the same room at the same time. They were part of a larger formal silence. It was not until Alice sat on the couch that she nearly screamed from surprise. “Mom?” she barely had the air to say. Her mother wasn’t wearing anything. “Mommy?”

  Charlotte wasn’t sleeping—her eyes were open—but she also didn’t seem quite awake. Her skin was dusted with freckles and—if Alice wasn’t imagining it—had come a bit loose from her bones. Her arms were crossed over her small breasts and she looked girlish and older at the same time. “Why, hello, darling,” was what she said. She sounded as if she’d been up all night—the center of attention at a party—and the time had simply come to be taken up to bed.

  “Aren’t you cold?” asked Alice.

  “Hardly.”

  “Do you have a fever, maybe?”

  Charlotte shook her head and said throatily “Can’t you sleep?”

  “It’s—urn—morning?” Alice replied. Her mother’s hair was still unwashed. She clearly hadn’t yet bathed. She smelled musky, but more so, like inhaling deeply from poverty’s pillow, the smell relentless and wafting up from an underground win-dowless room. Alice couldn’t help but think of how Charlotte, in a wholly different state, would resent how the built-up filth of her own skin was touching such fine fabric.

  “I know it’s morning,” she said. “I’m not that removed, for God’s sake.” Her eyes were no longer jade but olive green, her skin neither smooth nor flushed. “I just thought it might be nice for you to sleep late. I’m jealous of anyone who can sleep. I keep myself up with nonsense. Someone told me the perfect riddle the other day and not only can I not remember the answer, but I can’t get the riddle sorted out either. It’s been keeping me awake.”

  “Don’t you take pills for that sometimes, for sleeping?”

  “Sure do.”

  “And … ?”

  “And sometimes they don’t really work.”

  “Maybe you should go back to bed.”