The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  Charlotte put her hand out for Alice to help her up. She hadn’t shaved her underarms. There was a yellowing bruise on her thigh.

  “Maybe you should take a bath,” Alice blurted out, having had a distinct whiff of garbage in the sun, and Charlotte grinned as if she’d caught her daughter in a rare moment of truth. “What?” Alice said. “It would help you relax.” She helped her mother to her feet and felt how small Charlotte was, how Alice could push her over with hardly any effort at all. “And no, you don’t smell so lovely either. That too.”

  “I remember you used to tell me you loved my smell… do you remember?”

  Alice nodded, walking her mother toward the staircase, and when the beauty of the living room was gone, Alice felt like a bit of a brute walking with her hand on her mother’s skinny upper arm, half convinced that when she took her hand away, a bruise would be imprinted there.

  “But you know, it wasn’t me—that smell you loved—it was my perfume. This is me.”

  “No, Mom, no, this is everywhere you’ve been. This is everyone you’ve spent time talking to, drinking with; this is however long it has been between visits home.”

  Alice wasn’t even fully certain that Charlotte was awake, and she told herself not to be surprised if later in the day her mother denied this entire episode. There was no response to what Alice said, or any kind of explanation. “I’ll take it from here,” Charlotte said when they reached the top of the stairs, and in the pale morning light Alice watched her mother’s bony body fight to stand straight.

  “Mommy?” Alice said, taking herself off guard. “Listen to me.”

  Charlotte placed both hands on the banister and looked at her daughter.

  “Why did you take money from those women?” asked Alice, whose arms were folded at her chest.

  “What are you talking about,” Charlotte said evenly.

  “The women, those ladies, the ones you were helping— working for.”

  “Those women gave me money to buy furniture.”

  “And did you buy it?”

  “No, darling, I did not.”

  “And why didn’t you do what they needed?”

  “I will,” she says. “That furniture isn’t going anywhere.”

  Alice simply waited.

  Charlotte looked at Alice, at her daughter who consistently asked such difficult questions, and said, “All right?”

  Why was it that when called upon, a seemingly spaced-out Charlotte could always come up with a clear-cut answer for her selfish behavior? Charlotte’s skin was tan and there were, Alice noticed, no tan lines. Where had her mother sunned herself in the nude? What was this naked separate life, the one that Alice could feel slithering through their house, making judgments and humming unfamiliar tunes, even as Alice tried to ask the appropriate question? “What did you need?” was what she finally asked.

  Charlotte shrugged, as if there were not, in fact, a choice in the matter of what one could and could not share. “One day …” she said, and after clearing up nothing, conveniently began to cry.

  Alice waited while she cried, as if perhaps this might clear her head. But Charlotte simply shed fat tears without sound, not coming up with anything more than slim apologies, and then finally ambling away. She was thirty-eight years old, her mother. She was, Alice was somehow aware, essentially still a young woman. Eleanor’s mother was fifty-one. But unless Alice was observing with overly dramatic eyes, her mother’s month in Mexico had actually aged her. The fine lines near her eyes and mouth were etched more deeply and her skin … there was something deflated about her skin. The suntan afforded her no glow whatsoever. Instead it was as if her mother’s lovely coloring had been burned away and replaced with an outer coating, which had taken quite a toll on its texture. While the skin itself looked harder and rougher, it lagged and sagged in places it never had before—her thighs, for instance, her knees.

  When Charlotte reached the bedroom door and Alice could be sure her father would take over, Alice returned downstairs. Her mother’s manner, as Alice had come to think of it—the particular sway of her narrow hips, the upward tilt of her striking face in search of exhilaration—it had begun to noticeably change when confronted by her husband. When his hand encircled her wrist, her waist, she more often than not demurred to his assertions. Charlotte was adamant about traveling alone; she could fight wickedly, and was, by most anyone’s account, beyond independent, but the way she responded to her husband was at times nearly childlike. Alice had begun to notice how her mother welcomed the opportunity to be overwhelmed.

  And so, Alice thought, let him take over. Let him tell her to take a hath, to wash her filthy hair. Let him try to understand just what she says and does.

  The smell of burned sugar was everywhere. The cookies were charred and sinister in their repetitive shape, pointing out the repeated failure in rows of black circles. Alice put one in her mouth and forced herself to take a bite. She knew she’d burn her tongue but she had the urge to taste it anyway. The bitterness was pure, uncut by anything. After drinking water, after drinking juice, she could still taste it. All day long it would not go away.

  ⋆.⋆.⋆

  By midday there was a disagreement about food. Gus and Cady were starving and wanted to eat, but Alice wanted to wait for their mother to wake so they could all eat a real meal together. Her father would do either. He did not feel strongly either way. He decided to embark on a project of insulating the dining-room windows by covering them with Saran Wrap and then blowing them with a hair dryer, which warded off the chill from the bay. He did this every year for as long as Alice could remember and insisted that he found it relaxing. The dryer was on now, and he was deep in concentration.

  Gus and Cady were nibblers. They were sneaking a different batch of cookies out from beneath the tinfoil covering. They picked at Alice’s hard-won stuffing as if nobody worked to make it, as if food, any food, were an inalienable right for all postcoital teenagers. “Quit it,” Alice snapped at Gus, who— standing in front of the open refrigerator—had pinched yet another bit of stuffing from the bowl. “How many times do I have to ask nicely?”

  “Sorry,” he said, but it was too late. He said it again loudly, as if to be heard over the absurd noise of the blow-dryer, and now they were both laughing, Gus and Cady. Their faces were free of constraint. Two days ago they weren’t speaking. Alice had heard Gus tell her over the phone that she was the coldest person he had ever met. After a few seconds, presumably in reaction to her response, he hung up the phone. Now her brother looked dopey with affection; his hand lingered on the top of Cady’s jeans, as if he might decide at any moment to pull them down.

  “Do you think you can just laugh at me?” Alice heard herself saying to them.

  “What?” Cady said, her face unable to be completely smile-free.

  “As if you can’t hear me,” Alice said.

  “Alice, there’s a goddamn blow-dryer going,” her brother said. “It’s pretty loud in here. Can’t you lighten up?”

  “Lighten up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Have you seen our mother, by any chance?”

  Gus closed the refrigerator and shot Alice a severe look. “What is it you want me to do? Cower around all depressed like you? Start making home improvements?” He was basically yelling, but with the noise of the hair dryer he could get away with it. “I won’t just wait for her moods to include me. And you shouldn’t either. If she is going to disappear and reappear on a whim, if she is ignoring whatever depression or … or mental problems she may or may not have, then we should play along with her whims. She can’t have both.”

  “But what did she do this time? Don’t you want to know?” At this point the hair dryer stopped and Alice’s questions hung impotently in the air. “Are you finished with the windows in there?” Alice called into the dining room. “Don’t you want to know?” she asked again quietly.

  “Nearly,” said their father. “I think I’ll do the kitchen now—that
is, if you don’t mind.”

  “Go crazy,” Gus said. “Cady and I are going to take a little ride. I’m assuming Mom will be sleeping for a while.”

  “I have no idea,” their father said, half glancing, as was his way, at Gus. “Alice, would you mind helping me with the Saran Wrap?” And then, “She could sleep straight through to morning, I suppose.”

  “See you later,” Cady said, and Gus gave a loose salute as they headed out the door.

  When four o’clock rolled around and Gus and Cady weren’t back yet, Charlotte emerged clean in a blue-and-white-striped cotton robe, with her hair wetly combed away from her face.

  She sat with her daughter at the kitchen table while her husband walked Spin.

  “You look much better,” Alice said, watching her mother’s freckled forehead, her short scrubbed fingers that shook as she lit a cigarette.

  “Thanks, love. I always forget how great a hot shower feels. Especially a hot shower at home.”

  Alice passed her mother the giant clamshell right in time for the first flick of ash. “How was your flight?” asked Alice pointlessly

  Charlotte nodded as an answer, acknowledging that at this point there was really no appropriate response to such small talk. “I’m, ah, sorry about”—she looked around the kitchen as if to remember where she was— “urn, last night? It was last night, right? When you found me in the living room?”

  “Pretty much,” Alice said. “This morning. It was morning. You were pretty out of it,” she said, trying to smile, as if they were no more than two college friends reliving a wild night of debauchery. “You were confused,” Alice said, hoping this was true.

  Again Charlotte nodded, and in such a way that Alice recognized it as not really a response so much as a new nervous habit.

  “Maybe you were dreaming?”

  “No,” Charlotte said very low, and looked her daughter in the eyes. “No, I remember. I’m sorry.”

  “I cooked,” Alice said. “I cooked us some Thanksgiving food. And there are chickens in the oven—we didn’t exactly have turkey available….”

  Charlotte nodded and took an imaginary piece of tobacco from her lips. “That’s just fantastic,” she said. And then, just as before in the grandeur of the living room, her eyes brimmed over with heavy tears, with no warning whatsoever. Her crying seemed purely physical, as if it were no more connected to the inner workings of her heart than sweating or tanning. Her tears rushed on and Charlotte looked down at her own tense hand, gripping the cigarette. When she looked up, Alice saw that she was suffering.

  “Don’t cry,” she said to her mother. She put her hand awkwardly on her shoulder, a deep knot in a spindly branch. “You can tell me what is wrong. It will feel better, really it will.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  Alice shook her head vigorously.

  “I just can’t tell… I mean I can’t remember all the terrible things I’ve done to you and your brother. I …” She was having trouble breathing.

  “No, Mommy, shh—”

  “I’ve made awful mistakes.” Her eyes were wide and terrifying, her voice rising in panic. “Haven’t I? But I never, you know, abused you or anything, did I? Oh, please, no, my God, did I?”

  “Mom, no, okay, listen, what happened on your trip? What has upset you so much? Because you are scaring me.”

  Charlotte put the cigarette out in one hard stamp, and she blew her nose into a cloth napkin within reaching distance. “No,” she said, “listen, this is no good. This is wrong. I don’t want to be this. Let’s set the table. Let’s eat.”

  “The table is set. In the dining room. I set it hours ago.”

  “Great,” she said, and coughed. “Good. Let’s do Thanksgiving. Did you know I’d forgotten it was Thanksgiving?”

  “I can’t say that’s a huge surprise.”

  “ ‘The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock determined they would stay, so with stones and plows and axes, they cleared the land away’ Know what that is?”

  Alice shook her head, waiting to see if this transformation would stick, if her mother wouldn’t collapse in the next minute, crying all over again.

  “Your first-grade Thanksgiving play. I helped you memorize the lines. I helped you make a turkey costume from a bunch of paper bags.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  “Oh, wait, didn’t you get in a fight with the teacher?”

  “There was that too. I was a little flippant. I added a few lines of my own about the brutal slaughter of Indians and the raping of the land. Your teacher, Miss Jeanie, was not thrilled.”

  Alice laughed uneasily, remembering being driven home in uncomfortable silence, her mother seeming angry with her more than anyone, angry over having to take part in such a day.

  “But it was fun,” Charlotte insisted. “You were terrific, so much more mature than any of the other children, so serious. …” She rose from the table too quickly and her robe fell open. She wrapped it around herself, drawing herself in, with a sudden burst of modesty. “I’m just going to go get myself together a bit. I’m going to briefly go upstairs again. Then let’s eat. We’ll have your wonderful meal. Aren’t we lucky that you did that.”

  Alice knew she wouldn’t be down for a good while and she sat, waiting for Gus and Cady, waiting for anything to fill the time and the distance growing between her mother and this home. It was as if Charlotte were in a hot-air balloon getting farther and farther away. She had no anchor, no ability to land even if she wanted to. As for her father, Alice didn’t have any idea what he was doing, what he knew or what he wanted to know. And as the day grew dark she could not find it in her to move, to call out to her mother to come downstairs again, to even watch television or make a phone call to her one good friend. She watched the Saran Wrapped windows and marveled at the patience and care that went into them. And her father, so exacting, finally found her.

  “What are you doing, sitting in the dark?” he said, while turning on the lights.

  Alice squinted and said, “Waiting.”

  “Your mother is asleep again.”

  “Again?” Alice said, making a mental note to search her mother’s bags tomorrow. The cabinets wouldn’t show anything. The real story would be in side pockets and amidst brassieres, the zipped-in detachable linings. It seemed suddenly clear that her mother went to Mexico, fell in with some bad people with whom she frequented secret clubs and formed addictions. If this was so, it was possible to help her. Addicts went to AA, NA—there was a mandatory assembly at school. A guy named Karl who looked normal enough told a roomful of teenagers how he had, as recently as three years ago, been pimping himself to strangers in Port Authority, stealing from his kids, anything for a fix. Alice would find the evidence to confront her. She felt as though she had been preparing for this sleuthing all along, acquiring the necessary patience and intelligence required to help her mother cope. “You must be kidding,” Alice said.

  “No, I’m afraid I’m not,” he replied, weary, opening the refrigerator and taking out a Macintosh apple. As she knew he would do, he took the dullest of knives and sliced a piece of apple, then put the rest of the apple back in the fridge. There were at least three already-sliced apples sitting inside the refrigerator, well on their way to rotting. They would sit unfinished until someone finally threw them away. This, as far as Alice could tell, was her father’s only vice.

  “How do you stand it?” Alice finally said, as he sat down at the head of the table. After years of thinking about saying it, she finally just did. For a moment Alice was afraid she’d angered him by insulting her mother. He was silent for a good long while, but Alice knew not to repeat herself because she was sure he heard.

  “Because I love your mother more than all of her nonsense combined,” he finally said. “No matter how infuriating her behavior gets—and I admit to you, my own lovely daughter, that it does get beyond infuriating—I still know what it is about her that convinced me I needed to marry her. Nee
ded to. I could never put this need in words or … or even measure out its value, but it still exists, and just as much and as strongly as the work to which I have dedicated my entire career. Just as my research won’t be curing Alzheimer’s in my lifetime—I won’t ever see my work come to fruition—it doesn’t mean that I’m not fighting for someone’s memory every day.” Alice paid attention as her father took a bite of the cold, sweet apple, wincing very slightly from the chill hitting his teeth.

  “You’re patient,” Alice said softly. But what she didn’t say was that she suspected he was also afraid. She had begun to suspect him of disillusionment, of using this love, so beyond reproach, as a way to avoid his intense disappointment in himself, his failure as a husband who couldn’t, for whatever reason, inspire his wife to stick around with any great consistency.

  Her father shrugged. “Never thought I’d marry anyone. Did you know that?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “No, I could never conceive of such a thing. I was already thirty-nine when I met your mother. But you knew that already…. You know … look, she gave me you. And your brother, of course. I would have never married nor had children with anyone else. Of this I am positive.”

  “But how do you know? How can you of all people possibly think that?”

  “Because I’m so … rational?” He laughed, finding what Alice considered a strange amount of humor in this perception. “Look, I have, as you might imagine, never believed in the idea of destiny. It always seemed such a preposterous notion, a … a child’s kind of logic. But with your mother, well … I came close to some kind of believing. And now …” He looked around him, at the land outside his window, at the bruiser of a November sky and sea, at his daughter sitting before him, basically miserable. “Now I am still on the verge of believing that this is exactly where I belong. Even like this. Is that craziness? You tell me. You’re a smart girl.”

  “You believe we are pawns or something, that there is nothing we can do?”

  “No, Alice, on the contrary, and there has been much I have tried to do for her, times I have been far more insistent than you and Gus can ever imagine. You have seen it; you know nothing has improved, and in fact she is more erratic than ever. But I would never, never leave your mother. I’ve never even considered it. It is something beyond infatuation and beyond duty and even love, what I have for her. It is just…” Alice waited, but he didn’t finish. There were a few moments of puzzled but dazzling ambiguity. Finally he stood and said, “And that is how I stand it, as you put it.”