“Yes. Oh yeah, we—”
“You had another baby?”
Could this get worse? “Yeah, we did. We did.”
“Congratulations! Two kids, that is crazy.”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“What kind? So, like, what kind?” Her hand creeping to her hair again, pushing it back off her face.
“A girl, we had another girl.”
“That’s fantastic, Kyle. I mean, congratulations. Two girls, that is so, so great.”
“Thank you.” He hated how he sounded. It was a sound he heard constantly in the world he lived in, upper-middle-class suburbanites multiplying and buying homes and congratulating themselves on the wealth and security they accepted as a birthright and then bragged about as an accomplishment. Everyone he had known in high school, yearning for a life of the mind or the heart, half his friends wanted to be musicians or writers or actors or activists and they had all settled so quickly into careers as lawyers and bankers and doctors and now they all had adorable babies and nice big houses in Clifton and Hyde Park and Indian Hills. And there was Alison, too skinny, too restless, unmoored, but at least she was out there still throwing her dreams at the idea of being an actress. “And you! Wow! Things seem to be going so great for you! I mean, you’ve been busy I guess. Becoming a big television star.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Alison tried to laugh, self-deprecating. “Have you seen that show?”
“We don’t have a television set.”
“You don’t have a television set?”
“Van—my wife—thinks TV is bad for the kids.”
“Oh, that’s right, she said that, whenever that was.”
Kyle blushed. That night, at Dennis’s party. He saw Alison remember what had happened, that night, and shrug it off, like she couldn’t afford the memory. Neither of them could, really. The wary grief that sped across her face, through her eyes, the breath of her disappointment, anointed him.
“It’s just while they’re little,” he reassured her. “She worries about all the colors, and the light patterns, there are so many studies about what they do to kids’ brains.”
“No studies about what that bullshit does to adult brains?” Alison asked. She was looking off now. “Well, it’s great to see you, you look really good, Kyle,” she said. The polite whisper hovered behind the good-bye; what was the point of even talking? Life quite frankly had forbidden them to speak. Another step past and she would be gone.
“How long are you in town for?” he blurted. She hovered for a moment, dragged backward by the hook of the question.
“I’m not sure,” she acknowledged. There was something there, some kind of exhaustion, wariness, something she couldn’t say. Of course he had no right to ask her anything.
“Well, if you’re here for a while, you should come over,” he informed her.
“Come over?”
“Why not?”
“Why not?”
He laughed, finally, at that. “Are you just going to repeat everything I say?” he asked.
“Am I going to repeat everything you say? I don’t know, maybe I will,” she shrugged.
“I have a pretty full plate at the office this week, but I’m usually out of there by seven. You could come over for dinner some night.”
“Dinner?” She actually grinned at that one, awakened by the absurdity of all this into the moment, and he finally could see her again, wry, complicated, quick to amuse. She’s in there, he thought. “I don’t know, Kyle, your wife just had a baby,” she reminded him. “It’s probably not the best time to just have people over for dinner.”
“She’ll love it,” he assured her. “She’s stuck in that house with two babies all day and the only chance she has to talk to anybody at all is when they show up on our doorstep.” His invitation was sure-footed, buoyant with the ring of a truth he was inventing on the spot.
“Maybe you should ask her,” Alison suggested, with enough of a raised eyebrow to acknowledge that there was a reality between them more authentic than this polite conversation might suggest.
“She’ll be thrilled.” Is he insane? Alison thought, but Kyle kept pushing through. “She’s always wanted to get to know you. God knows she’s heard enough about you.”
I bet. “I’m sure you have better things to talk about than me.”
“You’re a big television star! We don’t watch it, but everyone else does. My father is addicted.”
“Your father?” Kyle had tossed that one off casually but Alison inwardly cringed. Mr. Wallace had always had a soft spot for her, and she remembered fondly his steadiness of character and his concern about whether or not you were making the kind of decisions you can live with. She really didn’t want to hear that he had been watching her fall in and out of bed with the losers who were constantly traipsing through the universe on nighttime television. “Seriously, don’t tell me that your father is watching that junk, the very thought makes me want to crawl under a rock.”
“He watches it religiously. My mother hates it but he seems to love it.”
“Terrific.”
“Right?” There was something different here, a lightness which she hadn’t felt with him for years. Well, she’d barely seen him for years, only that once, but before that too everything had been so brokenhearted and operatic. This seemed almost normal. He was actually laughing at her discomfort, not in a mean way, more like an old friend who is just happy to tease you. It was distinctly weird.
“I’m so glad that you think it’s amusing, Kyle, but it makes me kind of uncomfortable to think of your dad watching me on television.”
“After what I’ve watched you do on television, I don’t believe anything makes you uncomfortable.”
“I thought you didn’t have a television!”
“We don’t! But sometimes I just—see ads for it.” That was clearly a lie, but why? Did he secretly sneak off and watch nighttime soaps with his father? The new male bonding. That seemed unlikely.
“You watch it online,” she guessed. “In between patients, you dial it up on Hulu.”
“As if there was a minute to do anything between patients. Other than argue with insurance carriers. No no no, I’ve just seen ads.” No question, he was lying. But then he grinned at her. What did it matter, they were finally talking to each other like actual human beings. Hanging out with Kyle hadn’t gone this well for—well, ever, maybe. There was no worry that this might all suddenly erupt into a huge awful fight which would end up with them almost having sex.
“Really, how long are you in town for?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But you’re at your mom’s?”
“Yeah, I’m at my mom’s.”
“I’ll give you a call there.”
“Okay, sure.”
And so he finally walked away from her, approaching the line of cash registers at the front of the store with his baby formula under his arm, the rules of suburban America respected and complete. It was just what it was, two people parting with the past left like a bland linoleum floor between them. The absurd clarity of the fluorescent lights left no shadows around him to haunt her imagination.
fourteen
HER MOTHER WAS less convinced that Alison’s chance meeting with Kyle was as insignificant as all that. “Oh, Alison,” she murmured, her hand to her breast in simple and yet utterly melodramatic acknowledgment of the heartbreak Alison must be feeling.
“Mom, it was really no big deal,” Alison informed her.
“I would love for that to be true, I really would,” Rose replied. “But might I remind you, the last time you saw him, what was it, more than three years ago? You flew out of Cincinnati like a bat out of hell.”
“I needed to get back to New York.”
“And we haven’t seen you since!”
“And I’ve been really busy.”
“That’s what you said,” Rose sighed.
“Mom—seriously. I have not been avoiding the entire
city of Cincinnati just because one of my ex-boyfriends happens to live here. That would be ridiculous.” Her nerves were too frayed for her to tread into these waters. But the frayed nerves might have had more to do with the eight phone calls she had not returned to her alarmist agent who wanted to know where the hell she was.
“How did he look?”
“Who?”
“Kyle!”
“Oh. He looks good. Tired, but you know, he has two little babies and a full-time job, so of course he’s tired.”
“She doesn’t work, I heard.”
“She just had two babies!”
“A lot of women work these days. You made it very clear, you were not going to give up your career to have a family.”
“Only an idiot would ask me to give up my career to have a family.”
“Well, that was apparently important to him.”
“Mom, maybe she quit her job because she wanted to quit her job. Some women want to quit their jobs.”
“That’s what I’m saying. He wanted to marry you.”
“Mom—he didn’t marry me, and he never asked, by the way.”
“He would have.”
“Didn’t beats would have.”
“You know very well—”
“Mom, we’re not talking about whether or not I should have married Kyle! That’s a nonstarter, it’s a different life, come on.”
“You said he looked tired,” Rose noted, suddenly concerned about Kyle’s health.
“As I believe I just mentioned, he has two little babies and a full-time job.”
“But the wife stays at home.”
“Her name is Van.”
Rose ignored this. “Has he put on weight at all?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Why are you jumping all over me?”
“I’m not jumping all over you, I’m just asking why you would ask that. That is such a terrible thing to ask, like it would be so awful to put on a few pounds.” Alison sounded defensive for a reason; she had put on six pounds since arriving in Cincinnati just four days ago. How, you had to ask yourself, was it possible to put on weight that fast when it took so damn long to shed it?
“The last time I saw him I thought he looked a little heavy, that’s all.”
This was news. “When did you see him?”
“I don’t know when that was, a couple months ago. Your father and I bumped into him at a baseball game.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Alison, it is impossible to get you on the phone. And you have made it crystal clear, might I add, that you are not at all interested in hearing about Kyle Wallace. You have made that crystal clear.”
Rose had taken to repeating herself these days, whenever she landed on a phrase that seemed to do the job. If it sounded good once, it would sound even better a second time. And in this case, she also had a point. After fleeing Cincinnati those years ago, Alison had given herself permission to indulge in an unforgivably hostile surliness whenever Kyle’s name came up. Any reminder of her near miss with him was terrifying to her, in no small part because it led so swiftly and immediately to an act which, if ever discovered, would lead to legal and personal consequences too dire to contemplate. She had only ever heard vague reports from her mother that “someone” had “taken some things” from the house during Dennis’s party, some of them quite valuable, and that the police were called in. All of it repeated by her mother as suburban gossip, the underlying tone carrying a whisper of Catholic righteousness, that wouldn’t have happened if Ronnie Fitzpatrick hadn’t broken up the family and gotten above himself and married that woman who spent all his money on fancy jewelry. Alison couldn’t remember if she had actually heard her mother say those words, or if she had just heard her think them. In any case it was true that anytime that accursed Christmas party made its appearance in a chatty phone call, Alison rather immediately needed to go. Rose had put two and two together and come up with Alison’s crashing regret to have lost so definitively the love of her life.
And who’s to say she was wrong? God knows it was actually easier to bury the memory of the larceny. There was something so frightening about what she had done she couldn’t afford to look at it, and not looking at it meant for the first time since she had met him that she didn’t have to look at Kyle or the memory of Kyle or the hope of Kyle. Her ability to cling to some idiotic dream of Kyle was the collateral damage of that night.
Only there he was, big as life, traipsing around Cincinnati, Ohio, buying baby formula.
“So how does he look?”
“He’s still great looking. Those gray eyes. Good God.”
“What a mistake that was.”
“Mom, stop it,” Alison ordered. “He’s married, he has two kids, I think we can safely say we’ve both moved on.”
“I’m not saying you haven’t! I’m not saying anything! I’m not saying anything.” She went back to the pot of mashed potatoes on the stove, and Alison caught, in the light over the stovetop, how gray her hair had gotten. She looked old. She was wearing a thin beige cardigan with little embroidered flowers at the collar. It had at one time been a simple pattern, etched in white and brown silks, little daisies and leaves with off-white faux pearls floating among the threads, but most of the pearls had been lost over the years, the threads torn. The pattern was more memory than anything at this point.
“You used to wear that sweater when I was in high school,” Alison remarked. Rose looked down at it, surprised.
“Did I? It was my mother’s.” Alison remembered that too, suddenly, how Rose had gone through Grandma’s things when she died and saved whatever clothes she felt that she could wear. But that was years ago, at least ten years, and here she was still wearing her dead mother’s clothing. Was she trying to keep the memory close, or was it just another expression of a nature that was pathologically thrifty? Eight kids, of course she had to make do with anything there ever was to make do with. But surely there was more money now, and God knows there was stuff out there to be had. Malls, department stores, one-click shopping, all those television commercials you had to wade through to get to three minutes of storytelling, the whole universe just seemed to be about stuff now. She remembered her own childhood differently. The specificity of items. Childish treasures carefully accumulated and arranged on a tiny pressed wood desk—a single line of Pokemon creatures, a Lego starship she had inherited from Jeff when he decided Legos were lame. A colored pen collection. And all her clothes for so many years, nothing but hand-me-downs. Boy, that was a drag, but there was no convincing Mom to buy her something new when there were clothes around that still had some wear in them. As Megan used to say, Mom could make a nickel bleed. It seemed another era, simple and humble by comparison to the thoughtless excesses of the present. Or was that yet another one of those strange dichotomies between the Midwest and the East Coast which seemed to multiply every time she turned around? Yet another way Cincinnati was different from New York: They didn’t have as much stuff here, and the stuff that was here just wasn’t as good. They don’t have as much dough. Not to put too fine a point on it.
Or maybe she had missed something. Maybe the fact was that her parents were poor. Maybe she’d grown up poor and somehow never put two and two together. That was actually possible and would explain the astonishment she had felt when she landed in New York and found herself crippled by her own financial pragmatism. In Cincinnati, if you didn’t have money, you figured out how to make that nickel bleed. In New York, you just pretended you had it, because if you didn’t have it, you didn’t count. That had never even occurred to her before, but now that she had fallen into the deep end of the pool in show business everything looked different. People looked different. Money looked different. The past looked different, and honestly it wasn’t that long ago; it was just days ago, it seemed, that she and Kyle were wrapped so entirely in each other that neither one of them could see straight. They were all getting too old too fast. Alison wished
that someone had warned her about this while she was in high school. People get old really fast. Take it easy and learn to forgive. She wondered if she would have known what that meant in high school.
“Anyway, I think it’s a good thing that I saw him,” Alison announced, and she was careful to make sure it sounded like a good thing. For extra measure, she went over to Rose and hugged her, reassuring. It was easy enough to do, hug your mom, why don’t you do it all the time? Rose certainly responded, smiling up at her with such instantaneous gratitude that Alison felt her heart clutch. Why all the sniping at your mom? What was the point? “You don’t have to worry so much, Mom,” she said. “I didn’t lose the love of my life! He’s just a high school boyfriend.”
There was a finality to this that felt fine. Years of idiotic behavior were put in a box and labeled, stuck in a corner of the basement along with old art projects and worn-out Halloween costumes. “At some point, seriously, what’s past is past and you’re an idiot for hanging out in a place that doesn’t even exist anymore,” she declared, definitive. “That thing with Kyle is just done done done. We have to figure out something else to talk about.” The floating awareness that this was merely true breathed through her with something resembling hope. “You know what?” she said. “I have to go wash my hair.” And then that was what she did.
—
THE “SURPRISE VISIT” she had decided to make was welcome and easily explained, especially since she hadn’t yet met Megan’s twins, who were already toddlers. Rose was happy to see Alison and so even was her father, whose skepticism about his wayward daughter had eased considerably since she had started making money. He was still never around, always off golfing or at the gym, but when she did catch a glimpse of him he was nice enough. In his distant dad way, he was proud of her for being on television and didn’t care that the show was crap. Megan, meanwhile, was pregnant again and desperate for help and companionship, so Alison’s glamorous irony was entertaining when she drove over to Walnut Hills and tried haplessly to lend a hand with those twin toddlers. There was a kind of joyful and unthinking chaos that carried everyone through Alison’s sudden arrival, but after a few days she knew that they were whispering behind her back. What, after all, was she doing there? And how long was she going to stay?
I'm Glad About You Page 18