by Laura Hankin
“Hi,” Beth said. “How are you?”
“Good,” Ally said, nodding. “I’m good. Well, a little hungover, but good. How are you?”
“Good.” Beth’s whole body felt uncertain. She didn’t know where to put her eyes, how to hold her hands. She folded her arms across her chest.
“You look nice,” Ally said. She tugged her sundress down from where it had ridden up. “Very . . . thin.”
“Thanks. You look nice too. Your hair’s different.”
“Oh yeah,” Ally said, moving her hand up to the side of her head. “I grew out my bangs.”
“It’s pretty.” They stared at each other while somehow, impressively, avoiding sustained eye contact. Beth tried to figure out whether she should move forward for a hug, and wondered if Ally was debating the same thing. Neither one of them held out their arms. “Thanks for taking the train out here,” Beth continued, to break the silence. “I just figured that you never know with New York traffic.”
“No, please, of course. If I can make it through my whole life without ever having to drive in New York, I will die happy.”
Beth tried to picture Ally, who was terrified of driving, lurching through NYC traffic. It was not a good image. “Yeah, totally.” She paused, awkwardly. “Anyway, ready to head out?” She grabbed Ally’s suitcase, despite Ally’s protestations that she’d happily carry it herself, and rolled it out into the sunlight. They climbed into the car, and Beth put the key in the ignition, checking her rearview mirror.
“All set?” she asked.
“Yup,” Ally answered.
“All right then. GPS says seven and a half hours to Grandma Stella’s house. Let’s go.” Beth turned the key and the car started up.
“Wow, I haven’t seen your grandma in forever,” Ally said.
“I know. It’s been, what, three years since we went to Maine together?”
But Beth knew exactly how long it had been. Last year, she’d flown off to Haiti just days after arcing her graduation cap into the sky. The year before, Ally had chosen to spend her free summer time with Tom instead. “She’s very excited that you’re coming with me,” she continued, in the understatement of the year. When Beth had made a rare long-distance call from Haiti to offer her help in packing up the house before the big move, Grandma Stella had erupted in the declarations of love and gratitude that accompanied every conversation they had.
“You are the sweetest girl! You know, I ask God every night why he didn’t give me more grandchildren. But I did get the best only-grandchild in the world.” Beth smiled at the familiar gushing. Then Grandma Stella had gotten right down to business. “And Ally will be coming with you, of course.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know. She’s probably very busy,” Beth had hedged.
“Oh, for crying out loud, darling. I love you, but did you pour bleach all over your brain? Ally has to come with you. This house is almost as special to the two of you as it is to me, and I’ve lived here for fifty-three years. Plus, I’d like to see my surrogate granddaughter at least once more before I croak. So, you’ll ask her and she’ll say yes, and I’ll see the two of you at the end of May.” Beth had reminded herself that the purpose of her trip was to help Grandma Stella, in any way possible. Then she’d broken the months of radio silence and sent Ally an e-mail.
Interrupting Beth’s reverie, Ally suddenly ventured, “Hey, do you think your grandma would mind if I interviewed her?”
“Interviewed her? For what?”
Ally looked sheepish. “I’m not sure exactly, yet. I’ve just been thinking a lot about your grandma’s town, and part of me thought it could be really interesting to talk to some people about how it’s been changing. It would be a good subject for a documentary about”—here, without fully seeming to realize it, she put on a newscaster’s smooth voice—“the homogenization of small-town America, or one town’s struggle to resist suburban sprawl, or something like that. You know?”
Beth did know. The town toward which they were steadily heading, Britton Hills, was quintessentially New England, with a population squeaking in at barely five thousand. Whenever Beth thought about Britton Hills, she felt an uncontrollable longing to dig up clams and attend services at a white clapboard church. In trying to describe it to new acquaintances, words like quaint and sleepy kept spilling out of her mouth as if she had Tourette’s.
Britton Hills had once sustained itself almost entirely through the fishing industry. But after years of overharvesting, most people couldn’t count on the fishing trade anymore. Now most residents either commuted nearly an hour to Bangor, the closest city, or floated from one temporary job to another with long periods of unemployment in between. Five years ago, a Walmart opened up a twenty-minute drive away, and it seemed like every time Beth visited, she saw another mom-and-pop store boarded up along the town’s main street. It wasn’t a big story, the way the town’s economy was dwindling, and its character slowly and irrevocably shifting, but the change seemed to live in the bones of all the town’s inhabitants.
“Anyway,” Ally continued, “I brought a camera, ’cause I thought it could be useful to have some interview footage, and some footage of the town in general, for when I apply to production companies.”
Beth could almost hear the rewind sound in her head. “Wait, wait, wait. Production companies? Are you not doing singing and songwriting anymore?”
Ally’s face snapped shut. “Um, yeah. I don’t know. It’s just—it’s really hard.” She looked down at her hands, picking at her fingernails. “Like, there’s no certainty to it at all. Not that film is that much better, but with the singer-songwriter stuff I was doing, you never know where your next gig is going to be, or if you’ll get paid anything for it, or whether anyone actually likes what you do.”
“I’m sure people like what you do. And you’ve only been doing it for a year. It takes time, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t really get better. It’s not like there’s this goal you have to reach, and then you’re set. You never get any measure of stability unless you become a big star, which, let’s be realistic, what are the odds of that happening for me?”
“Oh come on, you’re really good!” Beth protested, even as she thought to herself that her words were only half true. Ally’s voice was like a little pot of honey, steeped in sweetness to its core. But sometimes Beth felt that she could eat up Ally’s voice in a couple of sittings, and then there would be nothing left. The songs Ally wrote were also cute and sweet and fun, just like Ally herself seemed to be if you didn’t know her too well. Beth used to smile along to Ally’s songs, but they never made her cry. They lacked pathos, or maybe it was just weirdness, something that could make them memorable. Still, whenever Beth tried to picture her doing anything else, the most she could see was a business suit and Ally’s brown hair. The face it framed was a hazy Picasso of nose, eyes, and mouth.
“Well, thanks. That’s sweet of you to say,” Ally said. “I think I just picked the hardest career out there.”
A laugh slipped out of Beth before she could stop it. Ally looked over at her, and Beth tried to turn the laugh into a cough. It came out stilted, like an imitation of a cough from someone who’d never been sick before.
“Did you just laugh?” Ally asked, a disbelieving edge to her voice.
“No, sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Ally stared at her unblinking, so she said lightly, “It does sound really hard.”
“So why did you laugh?”
“I just—because, well, it’s not actually the hardest, right?”
“Okay then, enlighten me. What is?” Ally’s face had turned frosty, her little bow of a mouth tightening.
“Well,” Beth said carefully, “not that medicine is definitively number one, but I have a bunch of friends who applied to med school this year. They were top of their class at college and got pretty good MCAT scores. Still, though, t
hey didn’t get in anywhere, so now what do they do? And it’s making me really nervous, having picked that for myself.”
Beth had told Ally of her decision to become a doctor in a recent e-mail, one of the few perfunctory messages they’d sent back and forth over the course of trip planning. She’d tossed the news in casually, among some pleasantries. No mention of the real reason for her decision, of the little boy in her lap and the constellation of blood on her leg.
“Yeah,” Ally said, “but with being a doctor, once you do get into med school, at least you know where you go from there. You have the life path laid out ahead of you and maybe it sucks and you have to push yourself super hard and somehow make life-or-death decisions on two hours of sleep a night, but there’s a clear ladder to climb. A ladder is important. With me, it’s just like—people say, ‘Follow your dream, no matter what, and eventually people will recognize your brilliance!’ But what if you’re not actually brilliant? What if the people who ignore you are right? I don’t know. I’m starting to think that ‘Follow your dream’ is code for ‘Wake up in ten years having accomplished nothing.’”
“That’s scary,” Beth said, trying to rustle up some sympathy.
“Yeah. Believe it or not, it is,” Ally said, and turned her face away. She hunched her body toward the door like she was trying to disappear into her side of the car.
A silence hung between them. Beth felt her hands squeezing the steering wheel too tightly, and loosened them. She sneaked a glance out the window. The suburbs stretched endlessly, houses turning into more houses, fast-food restaurants repeating themselves. Ally rested her head on the other window and they drove like that, not speaking, until Beth’s eyelids grew heavy, and the only thing she could think was the word coffee, over and over again.
She looked over to ask Ally if they could stop. Ally was squinting down at her phone, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, shock written all over her face.
Suddenly, Beth felt awake. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Huh?” Ally’s eyes, when she turned them to Beth, were a million miles away.
Beth indicated the phone. “Seems like something serious.”
“Oh,” Ally said, shaking her head, her eyes unclouding. “No. Just a babysitting thing.” She waved her hand through the air dismissively.
“Okay. Well, I was going to stop for coffee, if you want anything. Now would be the time for food.”
“McDonald’s?” Ally yelped, jerking back in her seat and bonking her head against the headrest.
Beth laughed in sheer delight, slapping her hand against the top of the steering wheel. “I’d forgotten about your all-consuming lust for Big Macs!”
“Oh God, I want one,” Ally said. “I need one. I never go in Queens, because there’s too much delicious ethnic food that I have to eat or I’ll feel guilty. But now? I think it’s fate.”
“It was an unlikely match,” Beth intoned.
Ally smiled. “A girl who ate a lot of kale. A patty of low-quality meat.”
“No one expected them to fall for each other. And yet, sometimes, love surprises us all.”
“But seriously,” Ally said, “let’s go.”
• • •
AS Beth watched Ally wolfing down her burger with near-orgasmic joy, her feet kicked up onto the dashboard, puzzle pieces started fitting together into a person that Beth recognized. Ally’s delight in her Big Mac linked with Ally’s vanilla scent (“Yes, I would like my armpits to smell like cookies,” Beth remembered Ally saying when they’d wandered the deodorant aisle at CVS together after school one day), which in turn fit into the stubble around Ally’s kneecaps.
Those telltale hairs sent Beth hurtling right back to seventh grade, when both girls had started shaving their legs. If it had been up to Beth’s parents, she would’ve gone to college looking like a yeti. But, thankfully, Ally’s mom, Marsha, had prevented that scenario, bursting into Ally’s room one day and announcing, with an overblown sense of import, that it was time.
When Ally had told Beth about her mother’s latest interest in her, she’d dropped her high seventh-grader’s voice to a sexy, smoky rasp and widened her eyes in sincerity, imitating Marsha in an impression that Beth had to admit was uncanny. “It’s time to take your first steps toward becoming a woman,” she’d intoned, and then, dropping into her normal voice, joked, “No, I’d rather take my first steps toward becoming a man.” But the next day, when Beth was breaking in her new set of highlighters, marveling at how seamlessly they transformed her history notes into rainbows, the phone rang and her father bellowed the familiar words up the stairs: “Pumpkin, it’s Ally!”
“I did it,” Ally said, when Beth picked up the phone. “I shaved my legs.” The news of Ally’s newfound maturity came tumbling out of her so quickly that her breathing hit Beth’s ear in rapid, random bursts. In a moment of confusion, Beth wondered if Ally was jogging in place.
That Monday, Beth and Ally went to the drugstore after school, and together they picked out a razor for Beth, since Ally had proclaimed herself an expert on what kind would be best. Beth knew that her parents were hesitant about the issue. They thought she might cut herself, but that was silly of them. She showed them her perfectly smooth legs afterward and said, “See? You didn’t need to be worried.” But Beth’s father started blinking rapidly, and her mother gave her a hug that lasted too long, although, of course, she stayed in it anyway.
Beth put the blade to her skin methodically. Ally was the one who rushed, who either wanted to be out of the shower doing other things or, she confessed to Beth, daydreamed so much that she used body wash as shampoo. She was the one with the tiny cuts on her legs and the patches of hair she didn’t notice she’d missed. As time went on and she mastered the task, the cuts disappeared. But the stubble from nooks on her kneecap remained. And now that stubble was sending up flares of familiarity to Beth.
Ally crumpled up her hamburger wrapper and let out a satisfied sigh. Then she turned to Beth. “I made a road trip playlist,” she said. “Want me to put it on?”
“Yeah, that would be great.”
After a few moments, familiar boy band sounds filled the car. “Ah! ‘Backstreet’s Back’? Oh, this is perfect,” Beth said, looking over at Ally, who grinned back at her.
“I thought you’d be happy about it.” At their first playdate, thirteen years ago, Ally had knocked on Beth’s door carrying this CD. The two of them had spent three hours listening to the whole thing twice, debating which of the Backstreet Boys was the cutest (Brian for Beth, Nick for Ally, although each could see the merits of the other’s position), but this song was the one they played on repeat, ten times in a row. They worked out an elaborate, literal choreography to it, nodding their heads seriously to every “Yeaaaaaah” and holding up their index fingers each time the singers sang the word one.
Now, in the car, they did the dance again, straining against their seat belts. Beth was surprised at how easily it all came back, and how she didn’t feel silly at all doing it.
THREE
Hey Al,
How are you? Hope everything is good on your end. Kind of crazy news: I have a final-round job interview in New York next week. I know, I know, stay in a job for longer than six months already. I swear I didn’t apply to this one—some headhunter found me on LinkedIn. (I told you it was worthwhile to make a profile!) Anyways, it’s all happening pretty fast, but I think I’m going to take advantage of Memorial Day weekend and make a trip of it. I’ll be in NYC from next Friday to the Wednesday after that. We should grab coffee or something. I’d love to hear how your life is going.
Best,
Tom
P.S. Saw this really cool documentary the other night that made me think of you, called Phantom Strings. It’s about this guitarist who loses his arm in a car accident, and how he reinvents himself as a musician. If you end up checking it out, I want to hear what you thin
k.
Ally reread Tom’s e-mail surreptitiously, pretending she was still asleep, her head against the car window. Next to her, Beth sang quietly to herself as she drove. Apparently, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” had gotten stuck in Beth’s head from their earlier dance party. Her rendition of it was hushed, enthusiastic, and gloriously tone-deaf. Beth was so supremely competent, so smart, so graceful, that normally Ally derived an inordinate amount of joy from the fact that she couldn’t sing for shit.
But this e-mail from Tom took things out of the realm of “normal.” The second time through, it was no less confusing. It left her feeling infuriated (Really, Tom? she wanted to yell, Really? You fuck everything up by moving to Portland, and then decide to come back six months later?), but also raw with desire. God, she wanted to see him. She wanted to touch him.
“All I need is time,” Beth warbled. Ally worked out dates in her head. If Tom was flying in from Portland on Friday and leaving on Wednesday, they’d overlap for two days once she returned from Britton Hills. That was enough time for coffee, and then if that went well and he slept over, they could have a full day together before he left. She toyed with responses to the e-mail, coming up with sentences that seemed witty and casual in her head, but they all turned completely mundane as soon as she started to type them out. Eventually, she just wrote, Hey you. That would be great! I’m in Britton Hills now, probably getting back late late Sunday night. Let’s figure something out. Then she forwarded it to Gabby (Subject line: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?!?!?) and, mentally and physically exhausted, fell asleep.
When she woke up, disoriented, her neck stiff from the way her head had lolled, she looked out the window into the dark. The anonymous highway she’d watched roll by all afternoon long had changed into a familiar Britton Hills road. She recognized the houses, the particular clusters of trees, and she rolled down her window to let in the air’s saltwater smell. There was the street sign for Elm Drive. There was the big green mailbox with Abbott painted on it in white.