I hadn’t thought, at the time, about what she was seeing, the woman in the housecoat. Or rather, it had seemed to me that she wasn’t seeing. That, in standing in the window in such a way, she was more interested in being seen. But that had been a failure of my imagination, to not grasp the whole of it, only my part.
Alice stared at me, a little taken aback, it seemed—she was on her way here but hadn’t expected to catch me in the window—and I stared at her, in her strappy white sundress that she filled so well, her soft arms and shoulders exposed like Madame Gautreau. Her hair in a falling-out braid, her face flushed from walking. She waved and then pointed, indicating she wanted to go around and meet at the door.
I did as she wanted, not reluctantly, but not enthusiastically either. I was a little tired, of the situation. I was like all the green in the park I’d walked through that morning. And I had a chronic condition.
“Hi,” she said.
We stood there for a moment, as if reenacting our time at the window.
“I kind of feel like a vampire,” she said. “Waiting for you to invite me in so I can cross the threshold.”
“Oh. Yeah, come in.”
“I just thought I’d see if you were around. Stella’s at work and I’m kind of bored. And hungry.”
If she were Stella, I would have already ushered her into the kitchen and we wouldn’t have been standing in the hallway. And I thought: Why this person and not that one? David would have said it had to do with timing. Meaning not only coincidence or the alignment of certain circumstances, but where each of you is within time. You wouldn’t have liked me then and I wouldn’t have liked you. What if it had been Alice I’d found in bunk 18? If I’d removed Alice’s splinter and let her stay? But it wouldn’t have been Alice.
“David’s at work, too,” I said, to find and center our commonality. “I was going to have some wine and make a pizza.” And then, as if it were an obligation, like a meal David and I would have provided for our lodgers, I asked if she wanted to join me. Clearly she did and I wasn’t sure why but I didn’t want to disappoint her. Alice and her good secrets.
“I knew you guys would have a pizza stone and all the fixings,” she said. It sounded a little like an indictment. We were those kind of people. Even though she was, too.
“I was thinking frozen pizza,” I said. “But, yes, we do have a stone. And fixings.”
“My lucky night,” she said. “Your lucky night, actually. I’ll make it for us.”
And though I wanted to rewind, go back a bit and tell her I was worn out from the day, that she was welcome to grab some food but I wasn’t up for company, she was already checking the oven, opening cupboard doors, finding what she needed, uncorking a bottle of red and pouring us each a glass. She was so at home in a house that wasn’t hers that I didn’t feel dispossessed of something that was mine; I only wondered, in a half-thinking way, what possession even was. I was drinking her wine. I would eat her food.
I helped her find what she needed, ingredients and utensils, working under her direction. But mostly I finished what was in my glass and refilled it, as if this were my true vocation.
“I’m worried about your white dress,” I said. “And this wine and this tomato sauce.”
“I could take it off,” she said. Apparently, we had already reached the point where we had a past and could joke about it, joke about our respective nakedness in it.
“I was thinking I could get you an apron.”
“Ah. Sure. Okay.”
When she put it on—plain, dark blue canvas—she looked even more at home, but not necessarily in a domestic way; she took on the air of an artist in the studio. If something bothered me about Alice, it wasn’t her entitlement. Her entitlement justified itself because it was so bound up with capability. She seemed entitled to everything because she was capable of anything. And I knew that was an exaggeration, but it was the thought that came.
“How was your day?” she asked, taking care of getting conversation going.
“It was nice.” I told her I went to Boston, to a park, to a museum, saw a friend for coffee. I left out the part about time compressing and expanding. “What were you up to today?”
“Oh, you know, taking it easy, mostly. Stella and I hung out a bunch and then she left for her shift. I read for a while. Gave myself a mani-pedi.” And that’s when I noticed her crimson nails. How could I not have noticed before, when she was using the corkscrew or rolling out the dough? It was as though her nails had had no color on them and now, just like that, they did.
“You didn’t use the blue,” I said.
“No, that’s Stella’s color. The crimson is more me.”
I almost couldn’t bring myself to look at my own hands, as if they were betraying me with their chipped red polish. It didn’t even look like the same shade, and I didn’t want to ascribe too much meaning to Stella telling me it was my color and Alice now telling me it was hers. It was time, more than time, for me to remove it completely.
“It does look nice on you,” I said.
“Thank you.”
She closed her hand around a ball of mozzarella, with no apparent drama or premeditation, but I experienced it as if watching a movie, like an iris shot, blackness encircling and closing in on that detail in the frame.
“When do you go back to school?” I asked.
“Can’t wait to get rid of me?”
“No, I was just having that coming-of-fall feeling today, you know what I mean? The end of summer, when everything starts looking tired.”
“Yeah. Seasons.”
I laughed and she turned to me, questioning.
“You have this way of laughing at things I say when I don’t mean them to be funny,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. It’s just, something about yeah, seasons. It seemed kind of profound and ridiculous at the same time.”
Alice thought for a moment.
“Well, at this point, seasons are more of a marketing concept than anything. You know, like, it’s time for a fall wardrobe refresh! Sweater weather! Isn’t that the kind of campaign you’ll be doing for that online shop?”
“I guess. If I get that job. But, atmospherically, don’t you still feel something aside from what you’re commercially bombarded with? I mean, the light still changes in certain months. The air changes. The mood changes.”
“Sure, but it still seems kind of arbitrary. Depending on where you live. And it’s only getting more arbitrary. Are we even gonna have seasons in twenty years? In ten years?”
“Right. What will the marketers do?”
“Oh, they’ll get a new concept. Someone’s going to profit from all of it. Someone always does.”
If cynicism was a comfort of the powerless, a release valve for pent-up rage, then what Alice was expressing was not cynicism but something else. Some knowingness bound up with confidence—perhaps derived from her parents, from Brooklyn Heights, from Harvard—that there was, that there always would be, a place for her. My brother had gone to Harvard, and I remembered how the tone of his college graduation was largely one of optimism and triumph: Here we are, world. The tone at my not-Harvard graduation was different, a measure of some accomplishment cut with searching anxiety: Okay, so now what?
As she talked, Alice put the pizza in the oven and assessed the preparatory mess with an exacting analytical quickness so at odds with her blowzy, loose physicality. In an orderly, efficient fashion, she began cleaning up. As if, again, it were not my house, as if I were the guest here, I offered to help and she said, no, no, no, sit, drink. But dishes filled the sink now and doing dishes was my specialty. I knew what to do with dishes, what to do with myself when I was doing dishes, so I started rinsing, getting into enough of a rhythm that when my hair fell into my face, I didn’t want to stop to fix it.
“Here,” Alice said, coming up, not quite against me but so close that we were almost touching. She must have been watching me, attentive enough to notice the hair falling
over my eyes, which she pushed away, her fingers along my temple, my ear, my neck.
“Thank you.”
She stayed right as she was, long enough to force me, so that I had no choice but to turn to her. She took the sponge from my hand and placed it on the counter, a setting-in-motion gesture. If I had put my free, damp hand on her back, her shoulder, out of some momentary, instinctive propulsion, what would she have done? Instead I simply stood there, near motionless and confused, and she turned that curling, not-nice smile on me, the smile she gave Stella by the fire last night.
“You’re not going to kiss me, too?” she said.
She’d done what she must have come here this evening to do. To make clear to me that if Stella was not hers, she was also not mine. If Stella were mine, at all, in any way that mattered, she wouldn’t have told Alice about what happened after the dinner party on the infirmary steps. She wouldn’t have shared what was between us with this young woman whose voraciousness hadn’t yet found a focus, whose voraciousness was let loose without one clear target and hit me because I happened to be in the way. Because I’d put myself in the way.
I backed away from her. My face was burning, from this and the wine, but still I could feel the color, the blood, draining.
“I’m sorry.” Her wicked smile dissolved. “It was just the moment,” she said. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”
“Yes, you did,” I managed. “You did mean it.”
She sighed, with an air of exasperation and boredom. It was maddening.
“Fine. So what if I did?”
“You’ve totally crossed the line.”
“Oh, now all of a sudden there’s a line?”
“Yes, there’s a fucking line!”
“Seems to me like it keeps moving. Like you keep moving it to suit yourself.”
“What do you want, Alice? Just tell me.” It came out more pleading than I would have liked.
“I want to know something. I want to know how it is you get to walk around here like a queen and an invalid. Like you rule over everyone while they wait on you and take care of you. How does that happen?”
“You’ve been here, what, a few days, and you already know all about me?”
“Pretty much.”
“Is this for your research? Into women and leisure and love or whatever?”
“I think it’s for my fucking life. I just don’t know if you’re, like, my role model or a total cautionary tale.”
If I teared up, which is what I could feel happening, then I was only making Alice’s point for her.
“I’ll be both,” I said. “You can have it both ways. Okay?”
“I’m not trying to be a bitch,” she offered.
I was sitting down in a kitchen chair now, I realized, looking up at her. She was a little blurry in her white dress with her red nails and her hair had a golden, fuzzy aura around it.
“You sure about that?”
“I just wanted to clear the air.”
“Right,” I said. I stared into the floor, took a breath, looked up. “Well, in the spirit of clearing the air, you can’t stay here any longer.”
“That’s fine,” she replied, infuriatingly unflappable. “I wasn’t planning on being here much longer anyway.”
“I mean you have to leave tonight.”
And that was enough to provoke an incredulous, petulant sound from her throat.
“What am I supposed to tell Stella?”
I summoned composure from who knows where. Getting up to turn off the faucet, which had been running this whole time, I resumed the dishes, my back to Alice. “Tell her whatever you want. You’ll figure something out.”
But Alice wasn’t done. “Who do you think Stella is?” she said.
What did she mean? Was she going to tell me something awful about Stella? I turned to face her.
“Who do you think you are?” she added, hands on her hips, assessing me as she might a piece of art she didn’t particularly care for. “What do you want with her?”
I couldn’t answer. I could only look away, focus on everything in the sink, and continue scrubbing, as if the motions were keeping me together, and only together enough to say: “You can go now, Alice.” Half queen, half invalid.
I didn’t see her out, I didn’t watch her leave, she didn’t slam doors, she disappeared and I cleared the sink, and then I sat down, shaking. The oven timer dinged and though I thought I had no appetite, I ate the whole pizza in one sitting. I finished the bottle of wine, too.
END OF THE SEASON
I should have saved half of the pizza for David, but Alice had made me ungenerous, thoughtless—really, I couldn’t think—and all I could do was devour whatever was in front of me. That’s what I would have said when David came through the door. But he texted me instead, telling me not to wait up, so I watched another movie, sedated by the wine, and was asleep in our room by the time he got home. I murmured a few barely awake words to him when he got in bed, and when his alarm clock sounded in the morning, I woke apprehensive and went down to the kitchen, furtive, before David did, as though I expected to see something I’d forgotten to hide.
But there was no trace of what had happened with Alice. And why should it have been incriminating anyway? What had I done wrong? I wasn’t sure anymore.
“I asked Alice to leave last night,” I said to David when he came into the room. “I told her to.”
“What happened?”
What happened—it hit me like a rough, churning wave—was that she put me in my place. She got in my way. She made me angry. She made my heart race. She frustrated me. She touched my face and froze me. She made me so protective, so fearful of losing what I couldn’t even name that I wanted to destroy something I couldn’t name. So I sent her away and gorged myself on a pizza.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She came by and she just made me really uncomfortable. More of the same from the other night by the fire. Just too much, you know?”
“What did Stella say?” he asked.
“Nothing, to me. She was out, at work, I think.”
“So maybe they’re both gone.”
“Maybe.”
How had this not dawned on me until now? I had envisioned a tense conversation with Stella, a sort of reckoning, but I had envisioned her still here. There. In the bunk, her bunk.
I kept my cool. David and I had coffee, ate breakfast—he didn’t have time to see what the situation with Stella might be. His presentation, what had been keeping him late, was scheduled for later that morning and he had to get moving.
“You’re going to be great,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I feel like this is like one of those situations where you can’t ask someone’s name because you’re already supposed to know it, like they’ve told you a number of times and you just haven’t been paying attention, and that’s terrible—but I don’t know what this project is that you’ve been working on and it’s seemed like it’s too late for me to ask.”
“Well, thanks for asking, but I guess I hadn’t told you much about it because there’s not much to tell, it’s not all that interesting. I mean, from any perspective other than a problem-solving one.”
“But you’ve solved the problem?”
Maybe, he said. He would have to see. He’d know more tonight. Things would ease up by the weekend, he thought, and he wouldn’t be stuck at work so late.
“That would be nice. To have a night together. Just us.”
“I’d like that.”
I had no real reason to assume he didn’t mean it. He nodded, smiled, kissed me, left.
Wait, my inner invalid-queen would have said. Come back! Don’t leave! But strangely, it was as if that voice, detected and diagnosed by Alice, might have disappeared with her. I didn’t feel the grasping urge to hold to David, to anyone, really. Only the absence of the urge. In sending Alice away, I might have solved another problem.
I checked my phone. Nothing from S
tella.
I put on my housecoat-equivalent clothes—I had housekeeping, of a sort, to do—and went over to her bunk. I knocked. No answer. The solid exterior door had been left open, and the screen door in front of it was closed, but unlocked; it could only be locked from the inside with a latch and nobody was there. Alice’s red sleeping bag was gone. And there was only one piece of baggage on the floor, Stella’s zipped-up green duffel. The rest of Stella’s belongings were still there, neatly arranged as they’d always been. Her two bottles of polish and remover, the set of jacks, on top of the dresser she’d requisitioned for herself. Aunt Esther’s silk robe hanging from a nail.
I didn’t have the drive to snoop through her things, though it was tempting, maybe in the way it is for a parent, merely because I had the opportunity, alone in a quiet house at an off hour, your teenager’s room just down the hall. What had Robin Dart done when faced with the situation? Robin Dart, David Bowie–loving Robin Dart, would have remembered what it was like to be a particular kind of teenage girl, the kind you see in the audience of the concert footage in Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars—ardent, ecstatic, alive, in love not so much with an individual but with a way of being in the world embodied to the fullest by that individual at that moment. Bowie announces at the end that it’s the last show he’ll ever do as Ziggy Stardust, announcing the death of that moment. But the girls, and the boys, know a spectacular way of being in the world now and they’ll take that with them beyond the moment, when they leave the concert hall, or when they leave their bedrooms, when, like Robin Dart, they grow up and have children of their own. When they give those children names.
Robin Dart lived in the western part of the state with a boyfriend Stella didn’t like much, but aside from that, Stella was on good, if not particularly close, terms with her mother. She didn’t need another mother. She didn’t need another girlfriend. She had Alice, more or less. She needed a place to live for a while and that is what I gave her, that’s all she wanted from me. Who did I think I was? I saw it plainly just then.
The Summer Demands Page 13