The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  He had told her, when she’d once asked why he loved to surf, that every time he rode the face of a wave, he felt, for those oddly long seconds, all of life’s expectations and disappointments simply disappear. He’d said it was all a balancing act, this rush of letting go. If he were here, he would reveal himself to her, and then he would turn around and wave before duck-diving under the massive walls of water.

  10

  The sky hovered on her eyelids, bearing down on a pounding head. The ocean was going at it, churning away—it was astounding Alice had slept at all. Sand coated her arms and she could feel little grains crunching between her molars. She couldn’t have been too far off the beaten path, she realized, as even though the sky still wore its nighttime attire, there were boys—lean, tan boys—taking vanilla colored surfboards off of jeeps and trucks, dutifully waxing them down, and then—with tubelike leashes—tethering them impatiently to their ankles. The air, due to the surf wax, smelled faintly of bubble gum but also of suntan lotion, shells, salt, and smoke, as fires had clearly been burning for a while now. Alice didn’t remember there being any fires when she’d collapsed only hours ago. She also didn’t remember any trailers or tents. A group of Mexi- cans were burning banana and palm leaves on a low cliff, and surf bums were hovered carefully over smaller flames, heating little tin cans. A woman led five dogs through the glimmer of low tide.

  Alice took four aspirin and gazed at a surfer wiping out, his thin limbs falling with gravity’s force. It would have been nice to think that if her brother were out there she would have known it immediately, but from this distance they all looked alike. You could spend a lifetime with somebody and still not recognize him in a swell of ocean. In Bali, Alice thought she’d witnessed Gus take a spectacular ride and, on running to tell him so as he made his way out of the water, she realized she was about to throw her arms around a total stranger. They all flicked their hair out of their eyes in the precise way that she knew Gus to do; they all leaned on their boards like little kids, looking as slick and optimistic as seals.

  As the sun rose, the mountains in the distance became eggplant-colored, with cool plummy shadows falling between the ridges.

  You looking for somebody? her mother asked wryly.

  “My brother,” Alice said softly, imagining how she’d actually answer that question. “He’s about my height and has dark eyes and hair. We don’t look too much alike.”

  He has my eyes, her mother said impatiently. He has my arms.

  Alice climbed into the car and caught a glimpse of her own face. After expecting to see a swollen temple, at least a few garish bruises, the sight of herself was almost disappointing. She looked fine. She didn’t even look particularly tired. It was as if the marks she’d been expecting would have been proof of all that had happened in such a short span of time. Stories carried only so much meaning. Disaster was filtered out by the time it came to the telling, and horror could be rendered as mundane as directions. A scar, blood on torn lace, a lone shoe on the highway—physical evidence was certainly. Her father’s death wasn’t to be found in the details of his diseases or how he cried out in pain, but in his favorite blue bowl for ice cream, how that ice cream was his only remaining pleasure, and how it sat untouched and melted on the last days of his life.

  The car lurched and bobbed heading out from the scrub brush, and the sun rose as she drove once more on those dangerous hills. An egg was slowly breaking over the world, enclosing Alice in a shock of brightness, and she hoped for what she couldn’t help but think of as her mother’s kind of day, where everything happens with speed and ease and you are in the center; you are in the light.

  Whether it was the obvious and unwelcome thought of the fire’s light or the way Charlotte could (as was said with embarrassing repetition at her memorial service) light up a room—her mother always visited Alice in terms of light, the particulars of which she’d tried to describe in one or two unfinished personal essays, to a man named Josh she met in an airport when they both were stranded overnight during a storm in Denver. It was flickering, she remembered saying. You couldn ‘t help wanting to be closer. It drew you in like a castaway to his own first spark, and still it was cold light, a mirror that reflected only what it felt like. Even if the rest of the world was dark and needed a bit of her glitter, my mother kept it mostly to herself. Alice, of course, never knew if her mother understood this. While Alice had come to the gradual opinion that her mother didn’t have extensive self-knowledge, she nevertheless believed that Charlotte did understand, at least half of the time, how she affected others. She was inconsistent in her self-presentation, and it was in this unaccountable fashion that she gave and received affection. Because Charlotte was manipulative and had seemingly so much confidence, Alice loved her mother most for her moments of insecurity. There were tender flashes in Alice’s memory of Charlotte seriously biting a cuticle, smoking the nasty tail end of a cigarette, holding a hand over her mouth when there was something in her teeth. Alice craved these moments from Charlotte and tended to love the shadows of people, the tenuous impulses and unstable forces that were lost in the face of personality. If someone was shy she’d notice where the boldness lurked— maybe an authority with numbers, decisiveness in restaurants, the tendency to laugh out loud.

  The curves in the road intensified. As Alice began to see a few taco stands, a sign for Coca-Cola, she imagined the shock of seeing Cady leaning up against a wall, looking as if she were pinned there by the force of the harsh sun. Cady would look— with suntanned skin and squinting eyes—younger somehow, as if she were waiting for someone to pick her up from an unpleasant day camp and she was, in fact, the last girl waiting. Alice had a sudden conviction that Cady, with all of her sophistication, had been fighting that look her entire life.

  When she finally parked the rental wreck, she thanked it for taking her this far. Then she left it sitting in a cloud of dust on one of the unpaved streets. The town was eerily quiet. She looked through barred windows into a few craft shops, a hardware store with barrels of merchandise sitting on a dirt floor, and a number of boarded-up taco stands. Just when she began to think how similar the place was to that town in Greece or that place in Tucson, Alice stepped around a new corner and, like falling off an ocean shelf, became utterly lost in dirt and dust, unfinished houses and garbage. She witnessed an argument between two young mothers whose toddlers stood by their sides. Alice watched with admiration how the shorter woman grabbed her small child’s wrist before making a dramatic exit. Besides those women Alice was the only person in sight, and then, rounding a corner, she found herself facing a group of Mexican teenage boys in baggy pants and T-shirts, no doubt taking the slow route to school. There were four of them and they were staring in unabashed silence as the tallest one with the most facial hair whistled, sending the rest into a loud spell of whistling laughter. It was daylight for real now; this was a small farming town with a burgeoning tourist trade, and she knew she was ridiculous for being afraid, but as the shortest one approached her in the middle of the street, her breath became erratic and she kept her hands firmly on her bag.

  “Mami,” the short one said, sticking out his chin. When she’d made it to the next street, sweating profusely and un-mugged, she was faced with a big shirtless man. She was beyond relieved to see that when she smiled at him, nervously, he did nothing but return the favor. Alice kept a smile plastered on her face. She smiled at everyone she passed and was interested to see how everyone—from the old men sitting in chairs in the shade, to the scowling teenage girl—transformed their threatening scowls or else simply ignored her, which made her feel more at ease.

  Certain homes were clearly very old and adobe or brick; history emanated from within the wrought-iron windows and rotted wood doors. Mustached old ladies, who swept dust from doorways, yelled at schoolchildren in Catholic-school attire and at mangy, skinny stray dogs. The dogs were everywhere— heaving in the sunlight and lying under parked cars, barking and crying.

  When A
lice came upon the building where Cady had instructed her to go, the building with the silly name of Casa Communication, it was teeming inside with English-speaking people—but no Cady. Alice bet that Gus would never set foot in such a place, but she checked for his name on the off chance he’d received any messages, which, of course, he had not. She explained about the car and the cow to a Mexican woman working behind the counter with admirable English, an attractive overbite, and a gold crucifix pendant. The woman didn’t look particularly sympathetic as she found the number and dialed Hertz for Alice with long red nails, launching into rapid-fire Spanish. “Green,” she said, before proceeding to intone a whole lot of “si, si, si.“ People were asking for pens, paper, for names of companies, numbers of operators, names of Cabo hotels. The red nails hung up the phone. “They come pick it up now,” she said.

  “So everything is okay?”

  “You wait too long,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Are they going to fine me?”

  The woman tapped her fingers on the counter and gave a small shrug. “Thejudiciak—you go make report …” There were people waiting in line behind Alice, holding nonfunctioning cell phones and useless pieces of paper.

  As Alice watched those long red nails dial another number on her behalf, then click on the counter as the questions became tinged with what sounded like flirtation, she saw, right there on the bulletin board, an envelope with her name on it.

  The red nails hung up the phone. “You have to wait. The judiciak very busy today. Come back tomorrow and I help you.”

  “Thank you,” Alice said, gratefully paying the agreed-upon amount and taking the envelope from her. “Thank you. You have no idea how helpful …” but the woman was already ensconced, helping the next clueless American.

  Inside the envelope was no note, only a perfect rendering of the surrounding area, including a little arrow beside the Casa Communication. You Are Here, it said in architect’s handwriting. August, it said, beside another arrow pointing to where they were apparently staying in what, at least on the map, seemed to be a hotel. She had Cady to thank for this—Cady who apparently felt no obligation to welcome her personally.

  “Is this a hotel?” she asked, interrupting the woman behind the counter, who, after looking at the map, responded with a blank stare. “Is it?”

  “No.” She shook her head, then heaved a sigh. “Here,” she said quite firmly, instructing Alice where to go.

  La Balena, a motel with a sign in the shape of a whale, was attached to a poorly stocked market where kittens played in the potato bin. Flies buzzed around the only available produce— the overripe bananas, avocados, measly tomatoes, onions, and chiles. There was an entire aisle devoted to wrapping paper, ribbons, and pinatas. When Alice opened a door of the glass-refrigerated area to grab a small bottle of water, she saw past the brightly colored grape and orange sodas to what was obviously the meat locker, where carcasses hung from large hooks and two workers heaved cleavers. She’d carried her duffel bag in the rising heat of day, watching the blurs of thatched palapa roofs and gray cement. She had planned on finding something that resembled lunch but ended up with a chile-flavored lollipop that tasted hotter than any fireball she’d ever tried to consume and, mouth afire, eyes tearing, seriously pissed off, she ventured next door to see about a room. She was not enthusiastic about wasting her money in an unimaginative rip-off of a roach-infested motel, but she was exhausted, desperate to put her bag down, and she would have gone almost anywhere to lie down on a bed, any kind of bed, before facing her brother and Cady.

  A frowning Mexican matron showed Alice to a room— linoleum floors, chemicals masking the scent of human dirtiness, the scent of a cheap holiday. The room overlooked a cement courtyard where no one had cleaned up what was obviously something of a wild night or two. Beer cans and cigarette stubs covered the ground, and a few plastic chairs were turned over. “Gracias,“ Alice said with a frazzled smile, handing over one night’s worth of pesos. The woman trudged out of the room, calling out urgently to a man who was down the hall, apparently fixing something.

  With the door closed, Alice felt short of breath, as if the walls—so flimsy and covered with what she realized were smudges of squashed blood-bloated mosquitoes—would close in on her if she used all the air that was available in the room. The bathroom (she finally brought herself to look) smelled like eggs and had a drain in the middle of the floor, a rusted handheld showerhead. When she ran the water it was tinted brown, and she watched for a minute or two before simply turning it off. She found herself sitting carefully on the bed, over which hovered fairly decent-looking mosquito netting. Alice held her hands in her lap and forced herself to breathe. There were muffled voices coming from the right, a broom sweeping the floor to the left. One of the voices began to cackle, and she felt as if whoever was on the other side of the wall was watching her through a small hole, watching her stillness and paranoia, seeing her fall apart.

  She was fairly well traveled. She’d been all over Europe, to Greece and to Bali. She may have gone to college close to home but she had taken some good goddamn trips. And she’d stayed in worse places than this. She’d gone alone on an overnight train from Paris to Rome, sleeping in a cabin with four strange men who snored when they weren’t hollering in German. She had, not even twenty-four hours ago, hit a cow and managed to keep it together well enough to sleep on an unknown beach. She should have been fine, just fine. She should not have been jumping at the sight of a roach, the sound of a man’s cackle. But she found herself leaving her bag in the room and nearly slamming the door behind her. She was sweating all over, her hair was oppressive, and as she took a second to breathe, to tie her hair in a knot, four beefy men—in tank tops one and all—came bounding down the hallway, carrying surfboards. She looked for the woman who’d shown her the room on the off chance she might give Alice a room without rusty water, but no one was downstairs. The beefcakes piled into their well-used Montero and burned rubber toward the waves. “Adios,” the driver howled out to her—the utter worst of southern California—and she was left standing, feeling allergic to her own skin. She flinched when a rental car sped into the lot. The driver jerked the car into a parking space and Alice couldn’t help noticing how, after switching off the engine, he remained seated. For someone who drove with such urgency, it was unusual—almost alarming—how long he stayed in the car. She got a little closer to make sure that he was all right. He was stocky, with brown hair sticking up and out around his head, and he was wearing a white button-down shirt. She saw him take off the sunglasses and throw them on the empty seat beside him. Then, after a moment, he took a breath, and she was surprised to see how he eased his head out the open window, tilting his face to the sun. His face was sunburned on its way to tan, and his temples were damp with sweat. Sweat fell slowly from his sideburns and his forehead down his neck and out of sight. He had a strong brow—darker than the hair on his head and liberally peppered with gray— plus he really needed a shave, but when his eyes closed and his face fell into repose, he went from looking strictly imposing and coarse to seeming a bit vulnerable. Alice noticed a thought float through her mind: This is what this man would look like sleeping. Just as she was thinking how she could relate to him, how maybe they could tell each other stories to pass time over a drink or a meal, he got out of the car and looked at her, squinting without his sunglasses. “Yes?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do you want something?”

  “I was just— Are you okay?” she asked, which was—as soon as she said it, she knew—the wrong thing to say to this man.

  “You okay?” he asked sarcastically.

  “Fine,” she said, incredulous at his rudeness but compelled to keep speaking to him. “Just fine.”

  He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture (whether he was dismissive of her or himself she couldn’t be sure) and heaved a sigh. “You don’t know if there are any free rooms in that hellhole, do you?”

  “It looked
like it,” Alice said. “You sure you’re okay?” she said, now that she knew how to get at him.

  “Perfect,” he snapped, “thanks.” And he headed into the motel. She watched him walk and it relaxed her to be in close proximity to someone who was possibly more frustrated and inconvenienced than she was. Alice waited a few moments before going back inside and giving the bed another try. Inconsiderate as he may have been, the last thought Alice had before drifting off to sleep was that, under some stress, in desert heat, his shirt was bright white and unwrinkled.

  After a few hours’ sleep, Alice set out toward the building where Gus and Cady were apparently staying. She could smell garbage burning in the valley below, which wasn’t even a valley, really, more like a shallow brown bowl. A steady flow of construction sounds reverberated through the heat, calling out in a stilted pattern of drill, buzz saw, voices. Against the setting sun she saw half-built walls and corroded doors, building wires sticking straight up into the air held together by nothing more than Styrofoam, uneven globs of cement. Garbage was cast at the feet of these structures like gods and offerings gone askew. Undeveloped land lay in tangles of dirt, rocks, and beer cans, and amidst the rubble were interlaced tiny flowers. She was moving toward the ocean. Alice could see a silver sliver in the distance, and there were no longer as many houses. As the dirt road became narrower and dust flew up in heavy clouds, the land transformed into farmlands, into sprinkler-fed rows of what she could only guess were onions, maybe chiles. Past the crops, straight up a huge dune and then, the beach: pale sand, dark waves crashing loudly, no people to be found. Alice turned her back to the sea. From this vantage the path she’d traversed was its own vast sea of palm groves.