The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “Why don’t we go get a beer or something,” she offered. “I’d like to talk.”

  “Oh, I… I can’t right now. These guys,” he said, “I promised I’d help one of them with his landscaping business. He cuts back palm trees, plants some herbs … it’s good work.”

  “Right,” Alice said. “So …”

  “I can meet you later. Around six?”

  “Fine,” she said. “We’ll get dinner. I think I saw a place or two.”

  “Oh, well… I haven’t been doing too much of that if I can help it.”

  “What, eating?”

  “I’m broke, Alice.”

  “Dinner does not need to be such an issue,” she muttered. “Let’s get a few tacos, okay?”

  “Hey,” he called to the other guys, heading toward them.

  “August?” she said.

  “Hey,” he called out to the surfers again. “Preston, Javier— my sister, Alice.”

  “What’s up,” they each said, nodding, smiling. “Didn’t know you had a sister here.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “It was a surprise.”

  “Nice,” Javier said. Preston looked more uncertain. “Come have a beer with us,” Javier said to Alice. “No work for us until tomorrow.”

  She turned to her brother and made sure he saw her eyes, empty of everything but comprehension. “That’s okay thanks,” she said in her politest voice. “Gus, I’ll see you at five,” she said. “Can you handle five? In the plaza?” She made sure she saw him nod before she turned away.

  13

  The late afternoon had always felt like a lonely time, a type of quiet relenting. For children and the employed it meant going from the public world of school and office to the private world of home, and for everyone else it seemed it was too early to drink and too late to get a whole lot else done. The shadows at five weren’t quite long enough, Alice felt, the heat was still at work, but there was no mistaking the time. There was a resignation to the light that was basically the same anywhere. If she wasn’t distracted by work, it unfailingly made Alice melancholy.

  After a surprisingly drama-free hour of filing a report with the judiciale, Alice headed for the plaza, which, as it happened, was empty of Gus. The three teenage girls who loitered on the steps of the church definitely appeared to belong to the secret world of mean girls. They wore pastel-blue school jumpers over starched white shirts, and they looked—with their gold earrings, brown skin, and nonwrinkled scowls—like local representatives from the Dominion of Youth and Beauty. They were selling woven bracelets, and Alice was intimidated into buying one: red and turquoise with one clear bead. It looked like something Alice would have made in grade school, but she liked shedding the silver coil and feeling its weight in her pocket. She was happy to replace it with something new.

  Was it possible Gus genuinely thought they’d agreed on six o’clock? They’d agreed on six originally—this was fine; this was better—she could go to the Casa de Cultura, the imposing structure on the main street. She could take in a little culture and thank him for it later.

  Alice had expected a gatekeeper, at least a semblance of an organization, given the official town crest on the building and the impressive crimson Deco lettering, but once inside the enormous doorway, she walked straight into a grand courtyard, where trees were overgrown and sun hit the brick like a spotlight. Oz, Alice thought vaguely, this is the light of Emerald City gone languid, imperial entrance included. There was, however, no welcoming procession; there was nobody around. The wind through the trees sounded like sleep. Labyrinthine hallways surrounded the patio and led into mazes of rooms, cubbyholes, and abandoned desk-lined classrooms. A gigantic papier-mache woman stood as a goddess of fertility, and behind her were low shelves holding up what looked like artifacts collected from the most obscure corners of town. There was an old ruined typewriter. Alice imagined a gringo writer in the early 1950s, a devotee of John Steinbeck, sitting down in a rented casita, set to put his fervor to words. Surely he’d gone mad, Alice thought, driven by the relentless pounding of waves, and had jumped in the ocean late at night, discovering just how cruel those waves really were. His maid, no doubt fascinated by the machine, would have taken it to the cultural center after searching his room for valuables.

  There was a tiny Buddha, botanical fossils, and jawbones of what appeared to be whales and sharks. There were two glittery shoes (brand: Neiman Marcus) and a local map from 1957.

  There was an assortment of bones.

  Alice touched everything. No object was given prominence on the shelf. It was a haphazard pile of the past, chalky and resolute. What made her sick to her stomach was not the familiar faint scent of death and neglect, but of how it could be that she was instantly holding not only her mother’s belongings but her father’s belongings too—recalling how small a part they played in the sorting out of the house. Besides his papers and clothing (he was a man who would wear one pair of trousers and one threadbare tweed jacket for decades but had a lush array of cashmere socks), there was only his collection of fossils and nests with which Alice was left to contend. She hadn’t asked him about it while he was dying because she knew it would break his heart to reexamine each treasured bone. She believed they’d had an unspoken agreement that she should give it to a local school.

  With a black feather in her hand, she heard music—thirties jazz—and at first she thought she was imagining it or that it was coming from a nearby house. But she went toward the sound, getting farther from the courtyard, and found herself in an ochre room, its walls covered with sepia-toned photographs. These were pictures of the very building where she stood, and also of squinting farmers in the huerta, fishermen in their panga boats coming in with the tides. There were fat babies and young beauties, families in caravans, families with horses. The jazz was loud and she could hear the scratch of vinyl.

  Gus had to be up in a booth somewhere, looking down and laughing. She pictured him behind a curtain, aware of his limitations but undaunted, invested in pointless illusion. With her eyes closed, Alice could feel her mother’s hands on her waist, showing her how to dance. Pretend you’re moonlight, she’d say, all silky; you ‘re no longer limited by a body. The things she’d say to teach them dancing; God forbid she counted to the music, gave them something solid like numbers to fall back on. She was always good at getting people dancing, to shut them up about literature and politics and real estate and simply throw themselves around. Charlotte always started with her children— she was a good and shrewd performer—leading them onto the beaten-down wood, the beer-slicked linoleum, the summer-browned grass. There was one time she’d sweated through her clothing, and delphiniums were wilted throughout her straight hair. Such a scent there was, it must have been one hundred degrees, the air so rich there was no refusing her, there was no such thing as embarrassment. Alice had spun like a dervish, and so had Gus; they’d spun around until she’d held them to her bony chest, all of them laughing from the closeness, from being overheated, from how no one was about to pull away.

  When Alice found herself back in the plaza, it was six o’clock, and then six-fifteen, and Gus was still not with her. She pointlessly counted seconds as a mosquito buzzed in her ear and dust kicked up at her ankles. When the smell of candy and cigarettes hit the air, she turned around at once. “Oh,” Alice said, on seeing the woman from the fish store.

  “Surprised?” she asked.

  Alice replied, with a self-mocking grin, “I thought you were someone else.”

  “Claro,” she said. “You’re waiting for someone?”

  Alice nodded. The woman stood next to her, settling into not much more than staring into space. There were some people, Alice noted, who—no matter how sullen a mood she was in—never failed to make her more of a smiler, someone on a crusade to fill silences. There was some chemistry at work, something in the air that made Alice work harder. “Thanks for earlier, you know, with the shrimp.”

  “My pleasure,” she said. She sat down on
a bench and began rolling a cigarette. The lights of the plaza turned on with a flourish, illuminating not only the plaza, but also the surrounding buildings. “Would you like?”

  Alice shook her head. “Thanks, though,” she said, watching the woman’s fingernails. They were bitten down to the point of being swollen and polished bright red. “I’m Alice,” she said.

  She didn’t look up from her delicate task. “Erika,” she replied, “mucho gusto.“ Alice realized that Erika was much younger than she’d originally assumed. With her foreign bravado and confidence Alice had placed her at thirty or so, but now, outside, under the stark plaza lights and without the rapid-fire Spanish, she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Erika was in her early twenties or even younger. She wasn’t wearing the pink scarf anymore, and with her thick hair pulled back in an office rubber band, Alice could see dark hair curling at her temples, on her forearms, and on the sides of her face. All that dark hair made her look younger—oddly enough—like a girl who hadn’t yet learned to be self-conscious, who hadn’t even thought to bleach or pluck or shave a virgin strand. When the cigarette was perfectly rolled, she opened her purse and, in the process of looking for a lighter, she took out a stack of pictures, cards, a key chain, a notebook, a pen, and two lipsticks. There was a picture on top of the stack.

  “My mother,” she said, having seen Alice looking.

  The woman in the picture had narrow, small features, lips in a hard, dark line. “Is she Mexican?” Alice asked.

  Erika nodded. “My father was American.”

  “She looks tough,” Alice said, “strong.”

  “A bitch,” Erika said, and then she laughed. She lit the cigarette and inhaled. “A great talent too, my mother, but what a temper. How about yours?” she asked, almost jauntily. Alice heard more than a trace of the accent that until now had barely registered. Erika’s dark eyes shimmered under heavy brows, behind pale wisps of smoke.

  “My mother?” Alice said.

  “Your temper,” she said. “You do not have much of one, no?” Her neckline hung low, and Alice couldn’t help imagining her leaning over a stove’s blue flame, her flimsy shirt dangling, her hair hanging loose—being careless, daily, with her lighter.

  “No?” Alice asked, surprised by her assumption and slightly galled by her strange way of speaking. “I don’t know about that,” she said, wondering if she should be insulted or flattered.

  Erika gave Alice an impish smile. “I have a terrible temper,” she said with a laugh. “This is why I am always alone.” She picked up the red pen and began to doodle in her notebook with unexpected speed. “You are alone a lot too, no?”

  “I’m waiting for someone,” Alice said, glancing at Erika’s paper, where some sort of acid-sunset church was being frenetically rendered. “Remember?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You said.”

  “So what is your mother’s great talent?” Alice said, surprised to hear the tinge of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Oh, she’s a potter,” Erika said, still doodling maniacally.

  Her voice—slowly suggestive—was at odds with her frenetic hands. “She makes gorgeous pots. It’s so lucky, I think, to have a talent. As you see, I cannot draw,” she said, continuing her endeavors. “What I can do is sell,” she said, and, finally stopping, she offered a grin. “That’s my talent. I can sell anything at all. I do not have to like what I am selling. I am heartless,” she said, laughing, casting her pen aside. “I sell pants too small, bras too big. Last year I sold—I am sure—the ugliest painting ever painted. So think how easy it is for me to sell my mother’s pots. I’m going to open my own store soon, my own gallery. She’d starve if it were not for me, my mother; she’s such an artiste, you know?” she said.

  “Hmm,” Alice said, “I have to say, I doubt you’re always alone. I have a feeling you must meet people all the time.”

  Erika shrugged, closing the notebook. “I am a very jealous person,” she said, as if it were something she’d been told, many times, to say. Alice pictured her throwing plates at a wall, screaming—a sheet thrown around her—in a multitude of languages.

  “You too?” Alice asked, even though she wasn’t sure she really was a jealous person. She was more likely to focus for days on comments that no one would remember even saying.

  “I once came at a man with my car. I had found some letters,” Erika said, waving it off, as if this were nothing at all. “Stupid, I know, but he did deserve it. I broke his arm.” She said this lightly, as if it were only possibly true. And leaving Alice to wonder just what he’d done, she stood up and said, “So what about you? Do you have a boyfriend or anything?”

  “Or anything?” Alice raised her eyebrows with a grin. It occurred to her that she was speaking with a member of the secret world of mean girls and that this was what it felt like when one of them included you. It felt like secrets, like whispered late-night confessions. It made you want to step up the stakes, to either lie or tell the absolute truth. “I’m engaged,” she said, her heart beating at her coy choice of words.

  “Engaged?” she said, laughing, as if such a thing were impossible.

  Alice nodded slowly.

  “Where is the ring?”

  “My ring,” Alice said, “is at home.”

  “Is it big?”

  Once again, Alice couldn’t gauge whether she was serious.

  “I bet we have the same taste in a ring,” Erika said. “After all, we have the same bracelet.”

  Alice looked down at Erika’s wrist and was speechless for a moment. Erika’s silver coil was gone too. In its place was nearly the same homemade bracelet that Alice had bought only an hour ago—the only difference was the color of the bead. “Where did you get that?”

  “What?”

  “Were you watching me or something?”

  She shook her head, looking confused. “It is a coincidence, no? A double coincidence.”

  “You could say that.”

  The sun, Alice noticed, was almost gone, and a slice of moon had risen. Erika picked up a long dark strand of her hair that had escaped from her rubber band and curled it tight around her bitten finger until the skin went red, then white. Alice watched her do so and thought about how her circulation was being cut off, and how she must have been very uncomfortable. Erika saw Alice watching but said nothing. Neither did Alice.

  “So, do you love him madly or don’t you?” Erika blurted out, vamping now with a line clearly lifted from a movie. She was actressy, Alice decided—a frustrated failed siren.

  “What?”

  “Your boyfriend. Your fiance.”

  “Ofcourseldo.”

  “Oh,” she said, “of course. Well, then, I feel sorry for you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have to go,” Alice said. She suddenly wanted to get far away from this woman.

  “Someone stood you up then?”

  “It would seem so.”

  Erika nodded, her small nostrils slightly flared. She smiled. “Bastard,” she said.

  She was walking faster now that dogs were coming out with the sunset—barking and running alongside her. The faces on the road were not those of August, as she looked around at the blown-out cars and piles of garbage decaying in empty lots, but she was still caught in her brother’s gaze—the increasing distance of it, its outside periphery and underlying fierceness that seemed to care for nothing. As Alice made her way to the hotel construction site and when, finding it empty, she returned to the surf beach, she kept expecting August’s face to pass, to catch his rare look of surprise, but there were only strangers going their separate ways. When she lived in a city she could go for days not noticing people, days where faces and figures blended together no more distinctly than leaves. But on some days the faces … they’d pierce through the masses as wholly separate—painfully separate—in their star-ding individuality. It was like that here. Alice held her breath as she saw a brown woman without legs perched outsi
de a small cement house; the lines on her face were plentiful and weblike, offset by clear brown eyes. She placidly embroidered a stark white sheet and looked up with a smile for the gringa, in a rush walking by.

  As the sun began to set and the sky swathed itself in lurid colors, Gus seemed farther off than when she’d been miles and miles away from him, when all she’d wanted was to fly across the country and ask him what had happened. Such a thought now seemed painfully naive. The asking would have automatically led to his telling her, and that telling her would make one bit of difference in his life or hers seemed sadly outdated.

  She smelled burning garbage, that sweet strange smell, and prayed for those dogs to be harmless, for the road to carry her along. What she wanted was to find Gus on that beach, yes, but she also wanted to find the very sharpest of knives. She wanted to cut the cheap bracelet from her wrist in one clean slice. She’d throw it in the ocean, but not even that would be enough.

  14

  On the beach there was a group of women—thin and fidgety as sandpipers—who were gathered watching surfers take their last rides of the day. The surfers looked slight as they waited for waves, like black dogs paddling toward the dimming horizon. Alice had introduced herself to the women, and after asking if they knew her brother, August, she became cause for a small celebration.

  There were two Karens: Skinny Karen and Surfer Karen (who was admirably off fighting for waves). There was Autumn, a quick talker, a former speed freak from Orange County, and Christa, the beauty, quiet in nothing but a crocheted bikini even though it was really quite chilly, now that the sun was gone.

  “You two are really close?” asked Autumn, as if needing Alice to verify her credentials.

  “He’s my only family” Alice replied, not answering her question.

  “That’s cool,” Autumn nodded, working on a cuticle with her little white teeth.