The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “Okay.” Alice nodded, and began to see how her father’s sadness was, in a way, what allowed him to come across as a sensitive man. Without his apparent sadness, his reserve would surely dominate and he would seem not so different from the man he might have become had he not met her mother: a man who held up work as the only thing of great value and whose devotion was clearly invested in anything other than people.

  “Okay. Now I think you and I should eat some of this meal you’ve worked so hard to prepare.”

  “But what about Gus and Cady and Mom?”

  “I do not have great faith they’ll be joining us.”

  “And why not?”

  “I called over to Cady’s house and Gus was there. He said he couldn’t handle your mother like this, that he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. He told me to tell you he was sorry.”

  Alice swallowed hard, thinking of her chickens, her carefully chopped vegetables. “I can’t believe this,” was all she could muster.

  As Alice sat with her hands in her lap, her father began removing her covered bowls from the refrigerator. “I can’t help but think that you’ve gotten the real short end of the stick here. You’ve always offered more than anyone has known what to do with. You are the best parts of your mother; do you know that?”

  “No, no, I’m not. I could never come close. It’s Gus who—”

  “Don’t do that, please,” he said almost harshly.

  “Do what?”

  “Do not put your brother above you. You do this, and I know he’s your older brother and I suppose it’s natural, but it isn’t fair.” He stuck the yams and the stuffing in the microwave, the way he used to do for them when they were little. “It isn’t fair,” he said again.

  Alice promised herself to keep together, not to disintegrate into a mess all over the kitchen floor. She’d eat dinner with her father like someone who could handle disappointment. And in silence, she took the overcooked chickens from the oven, put them on colorful plates, and as her father opened a bottle of wine, she set out all of what was her first attempt at cooking a meal all alone. For a passing moment she imagined that she and her father were married, and that she was the consistent, well-behaved wife of his parallel life—the possibility of life in which he didn’t believe. She was the woman who didn’t leave him to his own well-mannered silence.

  “Would you like some wine?” her father asked, seated at the head of the table. Alice faced where her mother would be.

  “Yes,” Alice said. “Yes, please.”

  The cabernet sloshed in a deep and delicate glass, and she had such urges—to knock it over, to knock it back, to get so drunk she’d do anything, say anything. She had the urge to learn what she’d say if she were in an altered state, gone hypnotized, and if revealing her hidden self would make the slightest bit of difference in anybody’s day. “I’m going to live in a city,” Alice blurted out before she knew why. “I can’t stand this quiet. I really can’t take it. The silence here is making me insane.”

  But her father merely said, “I can see you living in many places. You have plenty of time.” He raised his glass and said, “To your very good health.”

  “To yours,” she said back. “To Mom’s,” she said softly, as if it were merely an added thought and not in the forefront of her mind. And the dinner was eaten, such a paltry ordinary meal, and night came again. Night came again and Alice had glass after glass of good red wine, which she knew was good only because she’d been told so, and everything was the same but darker, more silent, her father letting her drink more than she ever had before; she drank more than he did, and he was not holding back. The living room was empty of her mother, Gus’s bedroom was empty of Gus, and Alice called over to Cady’s house, hanging up when a voice said, “DeForrest residence” with a prim Irish lilt. There were dishes bobbing in soapy water, and three empty place settings stayed waiting for her guests.

  They’d stay that way—cornflower-blue cloth napkins rolled through painted animals, ivory-handled forks, knives, spoons, and that precious wedding china—all of this luster, this out-of-season optimism would remain for longer than Alice could anticipate. It would stay waiting on this teakwood table, in a way, forever. If forever was a word that could be trusted.

  It wasn’t the smell, as most people assumed, that woke Alice Green at four in the morning. It wasn’t the red wine, which later in life would always startle her awake, hours after nearly passing out with exhaustion. It wasn’t a nightmare or some nasty premonition. Alice wakes up very relaxed, with the feeling of having had a truly good night’s sleep. She feels so awake that she is surprised that it’s still dark, and she rises from bed in her T-shirt and underwear and wanders to her tall windows to look outside, which is always what she does upon waking, no matter what the hour. She feels disoriented and always slightly panicked if she can’t see beyond her room, as if the outside world could have pulled a fast one and somehow disappeared. And so it is that Alice is up and that she knows she can’t be dreaming when she sees the poolhouse breathing smoke, its roof a crown of flames. She knows she isn’t dreaming when she hears the monstrous sirens encroaching on the silence—the house’s looming silence—stellar, lunar, an absence of sound that she’d earlier despised and would never, no matter how remote the field or how deep down the ocean, be able to hear again. She realizes that Spin is barking in the mudroom, and that his bark might have been what woke her. And there is her father running so fast he’s a blue-bathrobed blur, a barefooted lunatic running toward disaster.

  Alice isn’t dreaming, but Alice is still drunk—she must be— when she finds herself in the downstairs closet, still in her underwear and pulling on the old coyote coat her mother wears to walk Spin, should she ever deign to do so in the cold. Her feet find a pair of flip-flops in the closet and in seconds Alice is outside, doing what seems like a frozen glide toward her father and the raging, burning poolhouse. She can’t quite feel her feet. Fire trucks are in the driveway. Big men are racing with ladders across the lawn. They are carrying stretchers and lugging hoses. They are yelling and they use megaphones, and Alice cannot imagine how her mother in her bedroom could possibly be sleeping through this, though Charlotte has slept through a hurricane and a minor earthquake. The tide is high, and in a matter of hours it will look like a respectable attempt at extinguishing the crawling flames. She thinks of all of her mother’s papers, the secret boxed-up possessions that Alice had recently begun to suspect of being no more than old movie stubs and random souvenirs. Her mother, so nostalgic, will surely miss what’s burning, and no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, its value will grow with hindsight and supply future rainy days with the drama of how her memoirs were destroyed.

  Your mother, her father’s mouth says, but Alice can’t hear above the sound of the flames, the sound of the wind, the sound of the water, the sound of the sirens and men and hoses—she can’t hear a thing.

  “I know,” Alice yells back, “all her things.”

  Charlotte, he yells, but a rain-slickered man grabs hold of him and steers him toward Alice, who’s retreating and choking on smoke. The smoke is everywhere, even when it isn’t visible in fat opal billows, the way it looks from afar. Two men hold a fat hose, which sprays water upward in a hard beam reaching the chimney. When her father breaks free from the man, when he punches him hard and with such uncharacteristic sloppiness, Alice takes that punch deep down in her own gut, and— as she feels her brother’s and mother’s absence—promptly throws up all over the newly ashen grass.

  Charlotte, her father continues to yell, and by this time Alice understands.

  They never saw her body. Alice remembered the black blanket covering where she was, but Gus had come home to only smoke and absence, the charred expanse of ground and a mumbling father prone to strange articulations regarding, say, the sky. They would move, in their separate ways, through the garrote of seasons without her. They would get through days without answering phones and through nights without much sleeping.


  How?

  Why? Alice asked Gus.

  Gus didn’t answer because Gus was gone. He had packed the car and had hugged her with the most absent of all dark eyes. It was suddenly and horribly June.

  It was years ago, Alice would whisper in bed, speaking to the windows. It was a long time ago, she’d insist, while reaching into darkness. Really, she’d say to nothing but shadows, come here, it’s okay.

  Part Two

  7

  Watch a woman pack in a floor-through apartment, in V V Brooklyn, midwinter. An old duffel bag sits precariously on a tangle of an unmade bed. The curtain rod beside the bed has broken, and in place of curtains there hangs a tacked-up sheet of printed leaves. There are clothes strewn over the lamp shade and all over the dusty wood floor, but it’s immediately apparent, and maybe surprising, that this is an efficient packer. She stuffs socks into shoes, folds T-shirts and underwear with retail precision, even separates clothes by color. Watch how you think you’ve seen her—this pale blur of a woman packing—you think you might have seen her before. She is tall and not skinny. She is soft and pale, with dark red hair prone to being frizzy, and she wears black boots, a black skirt, and her father’s sad smile, inherited pearls and inherited silver; she is the picture of inheritance. She wrote her English dissertation on Anton Chekhov, or at least she might as well have. She is the kind of woman whom other women feel very comfortable calling beautiful, and whose uneven features—most often referred to as “unusual” or “dramatic”— are, in fact, misleading. When she closes her eyes, she is petite and doe-eyed; she is ordinary verging on invisible, but when she faces a mirror she sees a curvy character that attracts men with at least slightly gothic sensibilities, men whose charms— both punitive and extravagant—tend to send her running.

  Her name is Alice Green. She hasn’t been in her apartment for more than twenty-four hours in the past eight months. The apartment is littered with mail and lists and—like Alice— has the distinct aura of neglect. Her hair (which tends to grow out instead of down) hasn’t seen scissors in months; her skin is dry, her cuticles ragged, and she’s put on an even ten pounds. As Alice packs, she thinks of her mother, whom she never once saw packing even after Alice began to identify all the signs of imminent departure. It is impossible for Alice to simply stuff clothes in a suitcase without invoking the spirit of those hallowed exits and entrances, without having them rise up again and again like the banging of a door puncturing dreams through a windy restless night. Charlotte Green has been dead for fifteen years and it still feels as if packing is something that belongs to her, to the stash of ordinary acts made meaningful because they were carried out away from Alice. Here is a daughter who has not successfully stopped wanting more from her mother, even if—or especially because—her mother is no longer living.

  She’s packing to see August.

  Here is the beginning of a story, a beginning even she can recognize: now it’s Alice packing and only Alice, and she’s go- ing to see her brother with no clear understanding of why. Here is the middle of a story—the beginning, middle, and end—a move made from fear as much as from freedom. And Alice—she can feel it, even though she is quite lethargic—can feel herself lurching forward and pitching herself through the gray and slushy afternoon. She has always had the vaguely morbid nature of one who can recognize disaster and even name it, but somehow cannot avoid it.

  The house was too big. Whatever room Alice found herself in, whatever task she undertook on the long bone-chilling trajectory from the kitchen or study to her father’s bedroom, Alice couldn’t help but at least once take note of the house’s absurdly hollow nature. The collections still maintained authority; no one had moved the Chinese shoe trees or Turkish prayer rugs, embroidered pillows from forgotten Irish counties, Balinese puppets, Deruta pottery, or African dung sculptures. Yet without Charlotte’s homecomings, the exotic objects failed to become animated. They sat in corners and on shelves like the molted skins of snakes—now merely colorful evidence of a former life. These carefully chosen objects—having once been packed so delicately between layers of Charlotte’s undergarments, or carried on daylong flights along with her bare essentials—were shells of their former selves.

  Her family had never grown into all of the rooms, and left to his own devices her father had stopped trying to make the space anything other than what it was—a drafty renovated barn with rooms and additions added on (quite seamlessly, colonial style) up until the 1940s. He’d seemed to embrace the morose nature of his solitude, never (as far as Alice knew, anyway) entertaining any guests besides an occasional exceptional scientific young mind, along with Charlotte’s ghost. He was the lonely old genius with the beautiful dead wife. The floors were sagging, the salt air had corroded the window frames, and the roof was caving in. To put it another way: There was no shortage of knocks on the door each Halloween.

  As Alice carried a photo from her father’s study to his bedroom, she paused at the front hall table where there was still a bowl of mini chocolates that she’d brought out only weeks ago for the eager and morbid neighbor children. She had actually started coming home for Halloween night a few years ago, when she was still living in the city teaching and researching, when she was very much on track and—more important—when such a track seemed like it actually existed and mattered. To make the trip midweek for only one night had seemed like an ordeal back then, but she hadn’t liked the idea of her father having to open the door all night long, answering questions from young suburban Wiccans regarding rumors of the house being haunted.

  This year, living at home as she was, she’d almost forgotten about the holiday, and although she’d managed to scrounge up some candy, after eight o’clock she stopped answering the door altogether. There was a Goebbels special on the History Channel that she’d watched with her father from the vantage of his bed in a silence punctuated only by the faint sounds of the bronze door knocker knocking and knocking away.

  It was especially difficult to care for her father in this enormous and drafty house.

  The house was 187 years old. Alice’s father had bought it for less than a quarter of its value in the early 1970s from his college mentor—a badly behaved and wealthy cripple by the name of Dr. Norton Flowers. Dr. Flowers was the one dying then, but he’d had no devoted daughter, he’d had no children at all. He loved Alice’s father nearly as much as he loved his decrepit house, and he didn’t care about taking more money to the grave. All of which was practically unheard-of and very exciting, except that her parents had felt as if they really had no choice in the matter of whether to stay. It was too stunning to sell (even if they hadn’t promised Dr. Flowers they’d “make a go of it” there), it cost a small fortune to heat, and it was often talked about in the terms one employed when discussing an elderly relative; it was as if Dr. Flowers were living on the third floor, a proud and necessary burden, watching their lives unfold.

  The house had, in no uncertain terms, fallen into disrepair. The Historical Society (the Hysterical Society, as her father referred to them) had been fining him for years and pressuring the town to enforce its ordinances on account of the barely maintained roof. There was usually someone who took pity on their family, who referenced poor Charlotte at a meeting, or listed the stellar accomplishments of Dr. Alan Green’s career. He was a respected, if puzzling member of the community and a handsome widower, and as such he usually slid by without suffering full rancor, year after year. Even as the area went through the roof on the real-estate market, her father remained steadfast. He quoted his old mentor who sold him the house, his favorite example of a “man of character,” and became a kind of mascot for the small band of properly owners who, as their area became less of a port town and more of an upscale suburb, shared a renegade sensibility. He was the old and odd exception to almost every rule. But not dying, Alice had told him. You‘// die if you don’t look after yourself which you have to admit is much easier in a small and stable environment.

  And
because her father insisted on staying, and because his bedroom was far from the kitchen (he refused to move his bed downstairs), once he was confined to his bed, which had been only a matter of time, eating became impossible without someone there to feed him. It was colon cancer that was pulling out all the stops, that—after years of high blood pressure, a low white-blood-cell count, and eventually the onset of diabetes— had finally come to get serious. He’d been in poor health essentially since Charlotte had died, and had made a shocking transformation from an exceedingly youthful fifty-eight to an ancient seventy-three. At some point within the last five years he’d begun to eschew town and everyone in it, insisting with shocking intensity how he’d always thought, all along, that the neighbors—the same neighbors who’d brought him food and conversation for years after Charlotte died—were anti-Semitic.

  For a while she’d tried to hire someone to come in and care for him so she could live in her apartment at least part-time, but there was so much running back and forth between the bedroom and kitchen, the kitchen and the cellar (to adjust the hot-water heater, to bang the gas tank), that it was tough to ask anyone else to do it, even for a decent salary. The brokers called weekly, and the brokers made such promises, promises that verged on threats when her father categorically refused to sell. Believe me, he said once to Alice when she begged him to take an offer, I, of all people, know how little I can control anything, but I will do what I can; I simply want to die here.