The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “Well,” Alice said, “if you jog your memory a little harder, you might recall that I did.”

  “Being with him felt as close as I ever want to come to living under an anarchy,” she said with a joyless laugh. “Anytime he hurt me in any way, it was always, according to him, outside of a context—he’d get furious if I ever referred to how ‘normal’ people behave or I dared to analyze our relationship. He would barely let me name it. I can’t imagine what possessed him to suddenly want to become included in the rest of the world’s standard of commitment. And I can’t believe I went along. Being with him,” she said, her voice close to a whisper, “it was all feeling all the time. I can’t imagine how I managed to get through college, let alone high school, when I barely ever slept. I was either waiting up, wondering where he was, or I was … People should not be allowed to feel that good when they’re in high school, for Christ’s sake. It’s punishing.”

  Alice looked at her and saw that it was in no uncertain terms that Cady firmly believed what she was saying; she was not being wistful. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about him.”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “You were so confident whenever he took off. You always told me I should be more understanding.”

  “Well, obviously I didn’t know how else to make myself believe it without preaching it to you.”

  They ate and kept quiet; four men in suits were seated, and the elderly couple was trying to stand. The man took the woman’s arm in what looked like an ingrained attempt at chivalry, but the force of his hand appeared to be holding her down. As she saw Cady eating with small, eager bites, she became heartened by the knowledge that Cady had actually needed her. “So what’s he like?” Alice asked. “The man you’re seeing?”

  “I’m so sorry, Alice,” Cady said in a sudden flooding, betraying what she now knew. “It must have been awful for you, finding out like that, in a letter.”

  “It seems so obvious now, doesn’t it?”

  “You can’t let it color everything; not everything.”

  “I’m stuck on having something make sense after all of this.”

  Even right this moment Alice couldn’t help but think of how, in the house, the sun would be hitting the kitchen’s newly finished floors, showing off the honey-colored wood. She’d found the lumber with the help of an old boatbuilder she knew from the bookstore and it was … sumptuous—a word she’d certainly never have imagined relating to pinewood flooring. She envisioned how the old brass light fixtures and moldings were the house’s only current adornments, and how every single thing was boxed beneath the stairs. She tallied the furniture in her head: dining-room table and chairs, single living-room couch, heavy desk and thirties club chair in her father’s office. Upstairs there were beds and lamps—no curtains, no photos, not yet.

  Eleanor: You’ve been living in it like this? It’s kind of… you know … empty, she’d said, before laughing, if a bit worriedly.

  Alice hadn’t mentioned how sometimes she could swear she heard the swish of her mother’s robe, the cutting of a cold red apple. But she also knew she hadn’t needed to mention how when the sun was down and the moon was up the sky was a fine dark blue—a blue that was free of everything, including heritage, which enclosed the land and water, bringing them closer together.

  Empty, was all Alice had said. Exactly.

  Alice now looked at Cady who was dragging a spoon through vichyssoise with the stony concentration of a toddler. “Do you know,” Alice asked, “do you know what I mean about claiming? Maybe that’s what he thinks he’s doing—only he’s … well, he’s going with a different past.”

  “A stranger’s past,” Cady said. “A stranger he has decided to call his sister, if that is what he’s really calling her.”

  “Cady,” Alice said, but she lost steam. By now the sharp, hollow Cady, the all-business woman—she was long gone. Gus had always warned Alice not to bring up Cady’s dead parents in conversation, presuming it would only upset her to dwell on their absence, and that speaking of their foibles or even their merits would only cause her more grief. But Alice would never forget the few details that had, for whatever reason, come up: Cady’s father could stand on his hands for minutes at a time, and he detested catsup so intensely he refused to have it in the home. Cady’s mother was tiny and plain, with absolutely perfect ears, hands, and feet. It hadn’t occurred to either Gus or Alice how asking might have made it easier for Cady to remember, and how most people need to remember if only to understand where it is they think they are going and how to recognize when they have arrived.

  Alice hadn’t asked, not once in all these years. “What …” Alice began. “Cady, what were your parents’ names?”

  By four o’clock, the restaurant had hosted a handful more people, and was now completely empty except for Alice and Cady, who was barely coherent after drinking most of the second bottle of wine and had insisted on ordering raspberry sorbet, most of which lay melted in a deep white bowl. After the chef had come out and made an introduction and after he sent them two glasses of Poire Williams, Cady took out her wallet and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles—smudging gray eyeliner—before fumbling for her credit card. “He once told me he’d never be able to fall in love with anyone as long as he knew I was around. Like I was an inconvenience, or … a curse.”

  “I understand that,” Alice said, and having stopped expecting anything to change from mere conversations with her brother, after having stopped believing that it was through August that a bit of their mother might emerge, she’d begun to actually see differently: how, while driving, Stephen’s arm inevitably went up in front of her if he made a sudden stop, how, when he laughed hard he nearly always involuntarily cried, and how the tears deepened the flat smoked blue of his eyes.

  Since she’d walked away from August, she began to welcome anger—inviting it in for coffee and hours of mindless television, for all-night wine drinking and long, pruning baths until they’d ended up parting ways. She’d noticed, while driving to see Stephen on Friday afternoons, that she’d begun to feel progressively lighter—nearly stripped not only of her mother’s voice, but also of the chronic expectation that she’d inherited from Charlotte.

  Last Sunday morning she’d woken early in Stephen’s bed and she’d looked at him breathing big and easy underneath incongruous flowered sheets. She’d felt protective of Stephen, of his mistakes and his misgivings. He was a flawed man, she understood that, but for whatever reason he seemed to turn her upside down inside, like a child with a head rush after compulsive handstanding or spinning, fulfilling an irrepressible urge for a change in perspective. He was not going to change her life. This she somehow knew. But what she’d started to consider, what Alice had begun to allow, was that she might just change his.

  “He’s the curse,” Cady said, “August,” her blurry eyes coming into focus.

  The two women walked down Third Avenue linking arms, a gesture somewhere between affection and an attempt to keep Cady on her feet. “I see,” is what Cady kept saying, as Alice pointed out cars and people in a rush, sidewalks of broken and glittering glass.

  On the short drive from the station back to the house, Alice fought not to get lost in the early-evening sky, which was unusually pallid. Her exhaustion was tempered by the ease that came with driving, with the mixed-up scents of brine and bloom. She loved it here, and she let herself think it, allowed for a silent admission that the only reason she’d sold her apartment, the only reason she was still living in the too-big house—the house where her parents died, the house nearly given away by a man with the last name of Flowers … it was not even close to practical; she was living there because she wanted to. She was living there because—at least for a while— she could. Which wasn’t to say that she was enjoying the house exactly because it was, at best, disorienting, waking up there all alone.

  One day—a day not today, not tomorrow, nor next week— Alice will walk down to the site of the former poolhouse, and�
�without knowing she’d come to do any such thing, without having brought gloves or bags or shears—rather than poking around in the choke of endless weeds, she will grab onto one weed and pull. One day the sky will be yellow with haze, the morning neither warm nor cold, and Alice will feel with her own pale hands the surprising strength of roots—the assertion and resistance from the very earth when faced with sudden change. Though her fingers will grow raw from digging and stung by wild nettles, she won’t feel much of anything, because on this particular day in the future, resolve will override discomfort; it will briefly demolish nostalgia. And when the weeds are piled high as a hay bale and the sun burns overhead, Alice will finally wrench the remaining piece of charred wood from the ground. In the soil where it sat for so many years, slugs and worms will be squirming, and she’ll have the unexpected desire to flatten every last one. But with the wood in her grasp, Alice will be drawn to the ruined dock, and she’ll step out and throw it as far as she can into the outgoing tide. By the time she heads back to the house, the wood will still be floating, loitering in the shallows and of no particular interest to two passing swans, so imperious and cold.

  And there will be other days, better ones. Maybe she’ll plant a fruit tree, a birch tree, a spruce. Perhaps there’ll be a neighbor offering a spare slab of limestone, an extra wrought-iron chair.

  The details won’t be these—not these exactly—but the days, they are coming; they’re rattling the bars of their cages;

  Alice can feel how they’re restless and edgy, almost set to explode.

  Now, late at night, when Alice gazed out at this mild Atlantic cove, it was still wild dogs and burning garbage that seemed to surround her, and she didn’t, oddly enough, want any of it to subside—not the persistent barking, not the haze of dust, not even the unfortunate and very smelly remnants of smoke—she wanted to hold on to it all. It was June again—never her favorite time of year, fraught as it was with comings and goings—but it was also Thursday; she had packing to do; she was driving to Stephen’s tomorrow.

  As she hugged the turn and saw the cove to her left, she thought, Gus will show up one day.

  Stephen has told her this; Eleanor has warned her; but it was only after her daylong lunch with Cady that she began to not only believe them, but also to allow herself to see it. She could see it as if she were dreaming, but she was completely awake and speeding. She could see August walk into the house. He’ll just walk right in—in the middle of a party maybe—into this house where he never wanted to return, a house he knew she would have sold long ago had he bothered to call her, had he bothered at all. She could see him so clearly wearing his tan like a scar, wearing a lightly battered windbreaker, in—let’s just say—the month of March, having not remembered exactly just how cold it can get back east. She could picture how he’ll be clean-shaven with close-cropped hair, having brought the crisp air inside with him, and she could imagine how he’ll seem smaller somehow, how his eyes will shift from the unfamiliar furniture to the new paint colors, new art on the walls, new people.

  Come inside, is what Alice will say, is what she will always say. She’ll have to introduce him because he won’t know a soul.

  And as her guests filter out into the night, they’ll whisper about him—maybe a newer friend or two in hushed low tones: / didn ‘t even know she had a brother….

  But inside, Gus will admire the new stone fireplace and sit by the fire, flinching ever so slightly when the fire pops and sparks. He’ll eat a meal prepared by his sister and he will not leave a crumb. There’ll be just enough food left over from the party. It’s as if—he won’t be able to stop himself from thinking, conceited bastard—it’s as if she’s been waiting all this time, all these years, as if Alice has known all along that he was coming home.

  for Derek

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to express my gratitude to those who contributed to this book: Dan Smetanka, my tireless and talented editor; my invaluable agent Elizabeth Sheinkman; the generous friends who read anywhere from one chapter to numerous drafts— Merrill B. Feitell, Ellen Umansky Heather Clay, Halle Eaton, Matthew Rooney Tanya Larkin, and Caroline Wallace; and especially my husband, Derek Buckner, for talking it all out. And finally, for years of good stories and so much more, to Judy and Stuart Hershon, my parents.

  By Joanna Hershon

  Published by Ballantine Books

  SWIMMING

  THE OUTSIDE OF AUGUST

  A CONVERSATION WITH JOANNA HERSHON

  HELEN SCHULMAN is the author of the novels Out of Time, The Revisionist, and P.S., which is soon to be a major motion picture. She has published a collection of short stories entitled Not a Free Show and coedited the anthology Wanting a Child with Jill Bialosky. She the acting fiction coordinator of the MFA Program at The New School in New York City.

  Helen Schulman: Can you remember the moment when you knew that The Outside of August was the novel you wanted to write? Was there an inciting incident or image that got you started?

  Joanna Hershon: I began visiting a town at the bottom of the Baja Peninsula in 1997, while I was working on my first novel, Swimming. Very early on during my time there, I knew that’s where my next book would be set. There are endless ways of looking at the town, but I was immediately interested in the idea of how one might “end up” there— that feeling of getting lost in an unfamiliar place, getting in over your head.

  HS: The beating heart of this haunting, compelling new novel of yours is the quasi-romantic attachment Alice has to her elusive brother, August. Although they both have lovers of their own, although their parents’ personal mishegoss is enough to propel both siblings into a lifetime of therapy, it is August’s hold on Alice that both drives her and holds her captive. How did you come to write about this charged and undeniable attachment?

  JH: Although Alice is profoundly attached to August and in perpetual pursuit of her brother, I came to feel, while writing this book, that Alice actually treats her brother as a conduit of sorts. She aligns her mother and brother so strongly that she has the misguided notion that if she can understand August, she will understand her mother as well. Charlotte’s death obviously magnifies both Alice’s enormous needs and August’s desire to escape, and, for Alice, the heart of the matter is ultimately realizing there is no truly catching up with Gus because there is no grasping anyone’s interior world—especially if the person in question is harboring such deeply buried secrets and illusions.

  HS: The novel is constructed in three parts. Did it come to you this way initially or did you discover the need to cordon off the various narrative movements as you went along? I guess what I’m asking you is, How did you come to build this story in this particular manner?

  JH: While writing this book, the question of structure was a huge one. I wrote a first draft of this novel in the first person from Alice’s perspective, and the story began with her packing for a trip with her brother to Baja. It was a linear narrative that spanned only a couple of months and the whole story essentially took place in Baja. I finished the draft in about a year and it was simply not working. After much hand-wringing, I decided I still liked the characters, and so I shot them back in time about twenty-five years and started writing. A very different voice emerged and I realized I had a Part One. Part Two was what I had been working toward, so I moved ahead with the journey to Baja, which had now taken on a wholly different meaning. And then Part Three was very intuitive. I had to see Alice out of Mexico. There was never any question about that.

  HS: Sense of place here is profoundly powerful. Whether it’s the North Shore of Long Island or the ragged coast of Mexico, your readers can smell the air—I found myself longing to buy a plane ticket. Can you talk about the role of location in your work? You seem to treat it like a character.

  JH: I do think of location as a character. Sense of place is something I can’t extricate from drama. I usually think of place as partnered with a sense of longing. Homesickness is not only a sense of missing one
’s home, but it can be a nostalgia for home while you’re right there in the center of it, or a yearning for the place you wish you were, for the person you want to be.

  HS: There is always a high level of sensual description in your fiction, Joanna. This was true in Swimming and it is equally true in The Outside of August. And I’m not just talking about sex—although there are plenty of well-written and evocative sex scenes in your work—but also the sensuality of taste and touch and smell. Is this a conscious application of writerly skill at evoking a world? Or a personal preoccupation with the senses?

  JH: I can’t imagine a novel really working without the strongest possible immersion in the living, breathing world.

  Escapism has a negative connotation but it is, on some level, my requirement for a truly great reading experience. Sometimes it’s necessary to escape the literal world in order to reach some kind of truth—whether personal, political, historical, etc. I suppose, on some level, this sense of escape drives my work, and whatever process ultimately leads me to find a compelling story is probably grounded in the sensual.

  HS: The Outside of August is a narrative driven by secrets— some of which are exposed to the reader at the end of the novel in the form of a letter. How did you happen upon this device? What risks did it bring you as a novelist? Were you satisfied with its powerful statement? Did you already know the answers to the questions you continually pose in the story before you began writing?

  JH: I am honestly not sure how I happened to write Charlotte’s letter, but I really enjoyed writing it. I think I wanted to know exactly what was in that letter, how it sounded, and then it just grew from there. I always knew that Alice and August had different fathers and I knew Charlotte’s story first—that was my original conception of the novel, but in my first draft, the information about Gus’s father was never a secret. I was aware that the letter was a tremendous risk— would it be too much information all at once? too dramatic? too abrupt a change of voice? … the list goes on. But, besides being attracted to messy risks in novels to begin with, I felt like it was the right aesthetic decision. Charlotte is so self-aggrandizing, and I really wanted Alice to read the letter and—while it is of no small significance for her—to be left with simply a piece of paper at the end of such intense wondering. I wanted her to have the feeling of how the truth can sometimes be as large or as small as you make it.