Alice Fantastic

by Maggie Estep

  “Saddened,” I corrected.

  She gave me another hurt look. And then, begrudgingly, started packing bags and boxes. We agreed that she could leave some things in the garage and, after calling me to arrange it, come pick the stuff up. We said these end-of-relationship things so calmly, as if we’d been rehearsing them for months. I started marveling at the finality of it all, at the wild sense of freedom that was beginning to expand inside me.

  It was 8 p.m., and I wondered if they’d let her in the monastery at such an hour but wasn’t about to ask her this. Now that it was happening, I wanted it over, wanted her out. If the monastery was closed, I knew I’d be half tempted to simply leave her there out front.

  But they let her in. Maybe she was better prepared for all this than I’d thought, maybe she’d been planning it for weeks. As we came around the final hairpin turn and were confronted with the vast complex of buildings, some of them pretty, some of them uglier than a Motel 6 in North Dakota, I saw that they were waiting for her. A monk and two men in regular clothing helped unload her things from the hatch of my second car, my beloved and filthy Honda. There was an awkward moment with her new Buddhist friends standing expectantly, waiting to show her inside, and Betina and I staring at each other like dogs who felt animosity but were too tired to fight. In the end, she turned without a word and walked into the monastery, the monk on one side of her, the two civilians on the other.

  As I drove down the mountain, taking care along the switchbacks and hairpin turns, I almost wanted to burst into song. But my singing voice is awful. I switched the radio on. A rabidly cheerful Beatles song came on.

  I pulled into my driveway and saw lights on up in the guest room. Not that I expected Eloise to be asleep by 10 p.m., but if she had suddenly become an early-to-bed type, I wouldn’t have been shocked. I wouldn’t have been shocked if she’d converted to Orthodox Judaism, renounced sex, or declared herself a presidential candidate. I never knew what to expect of the young woman I had given birth to twenty-nine years earlier.

  I went into the house wondering if I’d feel Betina’s absence. But all I felt was dogs. Everywhere the eye rested, dogs, dogs, and more dogs. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but sometimes it still does. I patted a few heads and rubbed one belly then went upstairs, followed by two pit bulls and a Chihuahua, to check on my daughter.

  “Yes, Mom,” Eloise answered when I knocked at the door.

  I opened up and found her sprawled on top of the quilt, lying on her back, wearing nothing but a long T-shirt. There was a half-stitched stuffed animal on the nightstand, pieces of fabric on the floor. The dogs bounded onto the bed and started wagging their tails.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Working on that roach and not getting anywhere,” she said, exasperatedly motioning at the headless animal on the nightstand. “What are you doing? What gives with your girlfriend?”

  “She moved out.”

  “She what?”

  I told my daughter. About Betina’s sudden announcement, about my relief at hearing it.

  “Shit, Mom. This all happened when I was vegetating in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re okay with all this? What, are you turning into Alice?”

  “I felt I was turning into both you and Alice. You’re a bit capricious too, you know.”

  “But I just had my heart broken. That has to count for something. Has to indicate that there is a capacity for love inside my tiny, shrewish heart.”

  “Maybe.” I sat down at the edge of the bed and Eloise hugged me. Chico, one of the pit bulls, tried to get in there between us. I pushed the beast back and embraced my daughter.

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “Billy Rotten.”

  “Well, with a name like that, what did you expect?”

  “It’s not his actual name. Just a moniker I gave him. He is called Billy. But not Rotten.”

  My daughter told me of her tumultuous and passionate one-night stand culminating in this Billy Rotten character kicking her out into the cold at the crack of dawn.

  “But that’s awful, Elo. How could that happen to you?”

  “I was vulnerable, I guess. Because of Indio. It’s awful to lose someone. Even when you’ve stopped loving him.”

  “You have had a terrible few weeks.”

  “I don’t mean to sound like I’m kicking you out of my room or anything, but I’m exhausted, I need to sleep,” Eloise said after a while.

  “Sure.” I got up.

  “Don’t be forlorn.”

  “Do I look forlorn?”

  “Not really.”

  I smiled. “Good night, Elo.”

  “Night, Mom.”

  I started to usher the dogs out of the room but Eloise said she wanted them there. She’d been dogless for an entire week since Otis, the ridgeback I’d brought her, had been adopted by a family in Riverdale. Now, it seemed, my daughter needed some dog love.

  I went downstairs where there was no shortage of dog love. They were all over me. Black fur and golden fur and spotted fur. Tongues and tails and licking and drooling. I felt like one of those people whose human relationships fail because all the available love inside them pours into animals.

  It was a sobering thought.

  I went into the downstairs bathroom and examined myself. My wild hair was hanging reasonably tamely around my shoulders. My aged neck didn’t look too chickeny and the circles under my eyes were at a low ebb. I was presentable. I walked out the front door, across the low stone wall onto Joe’s property, and knocked on his door. There was music pouring out of his house but it didn’t sound like it was him playing. He was just listening, I supposed. For a moment I panicked, imagining that he was in there wooing some young woman and I would be the nutty middle-aged neighbor interloper.

  “Hi,” Joe said, pulling the door open.

  “Hi back,” I said. I looked him over.

  “Will you stay awhile?” He asked, ushering me in.

  “Maybe.”

  5. ELOISE

  I was lying on the miserably hard bed in my mother’s guest room with a one-eyed Chihuahua on my chest and two caramel-colored pit bulls snuggled next to me when I realized I simply didn’t give a shit about Billy Rotten anymore. I wondered if I ever really had. If he hadn’t just been some suitable vessel to pin my hopes on. I always have to have hope even if I don’t know what I’m hoping for. Without this form of pathological optimism, the gun goes in my mouth just like my second boyfriend, Donny, who blew his head off with a hunting rifle at age nineteen.

  The guest room mattress was too hard so I sat up and went to the closet to look for a quilt I might cover the mattress with. For a wacky, ex-hippie-drug-addict lesbian, my mother has stern ideas about sleeping and what is best for one’s body. Her own mattress is like a bed of rock and the guest mattress isn’t much gentler.

  There weren’t any extra quilts in the guest room so I went to look in the hall closet. My three dog guardians followed and a bunch of other dogs, hearing us stir, came bounding up the stairs. I was nearly knocked down by Timber, a big, shaggy Newfoundland mix who completely fails to understand his own strength.

  The hall closet was taken up with dog crates and old clothes. I tiptoed toward my mother’s room to see if she was still up. The bedroom was empty though. I wondered if she had raced back up to the monastery to retrieve her lunatic girlfriend.

  “Mom?” I called out. Nothing.

  I went down to the living room where I was immediately surrounded by dogs. It was late, the house was quiet; I’m sure the beasts had been sound asleep, but a human stirring was reason enough for most of them to get up and see if their services might be needed. Ira, Mom’s favorite, came over to lick my hand. Lucy, the elegant Ibizan hound, leapt off the couch and raced ahead of me into the kitchen, hoping for an unscheduled feeding. As I opened up the fridge to stare in, about ten muzzles tried poking in there and Arturo, the Italian greyhound, tried to climb into the produc
e bin. I ushered all the dogs out of the kitchen and closed the door so I could study Mom’s food in peace. My realization that I no longer cared about Billy had made me yearn for a celebratory meal, ideally a hunk of birthday cake with white icing. But there weren’t any cakes in the fridge. In fact, there was nothing but sober, healthy food: rennet-free cheeses, organic eggs, veggies, and juices. I closed the fridge and started looking through cupboards. More organic stuff. Grains and dried goods and dozens of things I had no desire for.

  The dogs suddenly started making a racket in the living room. There was barking, toenails scraping against the wood floor, and an apparent consensus to try knocking down the door to the kitchen. A moment later my mother came in, looking extremely disheveled. Her sweater was on backwards, her hair was a mess, and she had a crazy look in her eyes.

  “Mom, where were you?”

  “Nowhere,” she said.

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Okay. Next door,” she amended.

  “Next door? At Joe’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you guys doing? Heroin?”

  “No.”

  “Mother, you’re being monosyllabic and incommunicative.”

  “It’s my right,” she said, reaching behind her to open the door to the kitchen, at which the dog cavalry charged in.

  “It is?”

  “Of course,” she replied, absentmindly reaching down to pat several dogs’ haunches and shoulders.

  “Fine.”

  “What were you looking for?” she asked, squatting down to look into the eyes of Chicken, the aged brindled greyhound.

  “A giant cake with white icing.”

  “Ah.” Normally, she’d want to know why and would spend some time trying to solve the problem of there not being a giant cake with white icing on the premises. She might run to nearest store to buy one, or dig out a recipe book and begin baking one on the spot.

  I started feeling a little peevish that my mother was not acting like my mother. She’d more than made up for her bad parenting in my early years once she started attending Narcotics Anonymous. She truly worked hard at repairing damages and building relationships with Alice and me and had become the mother everyone dreams of, one I can talk to, cry with, or be a child with. One I can expect to bake me a cake at 1 a.m. after I have shown up unannounced at her house on the very night her girlfriend has moved out. But she wasn’t acting like the mother I had grown to trust. She was some crazy-haired harridan.

  “Mom, what’s with you?” I asked, studying her. I hadn’t seen her look this wild since her druggie days when emotional torpor made bathing and grooming repellant to her.

  “Don’t pry, Eloise, it’s unattractive. Maybe that’s why that rotten guy dumped you.”

  I was stunned.

  “Oh, Elo,” she added, the moment she saw my expression. “I’m sorry, that was cruel. Please forgive me.”

  She reached across the kitchen table to try to take my hand. I didn’t let her.

  “Yes. That was cruel. But obviously it’s something you feel. I’m sorry.” I got up and started walking out of the kitchen.

  “Eloise, please don’t.”

  I kept walking. I heard my mother get up to follow me. Gone were all my luxurious, frivolous yearnings for cake and icing. I was hurt to the core. Maybe I am intrusive, I thought, maybe I demand too much too soon from people. Maybe I should be put to death. Maybe the hunting rifle to the temple would suit me after all.

  “I made love with Joe,” my mother said to my back, “that’s why I’m on edge. But it’s no reason for me to make cruel remarks that have no basis in truth. That was awful of me.”

  “You had sex with Joe?” I turned around, sufficiently stunned by this news to put aside the verbal blow my mother had just dealt me.

  “Yes. I don’t know why.” She looked down at the floor.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Was it good?”

  “Shockingly so.”

  “Really?” I pictured Joe. He was a handsome guy, I guess, I just had never thought of him in sexual terms. Not so much because he’s old, more because I’ve known him a long time. He’s like wallpaper to me and, I had always assumed, my mother as well.

  “Really … Elo,” she said, touching my face, “I’m so sorry. I was an evil bitch to say what I said. I was so preoccupied by what I’d just done with Joe that it made me irritable.”

  “Maybe I am too intrusive. Too needy. I demand everything from everyone.”

  “That’s just not true, Eloise. The rotten guy was clearly a jackass.”

  “Yeah, probably. But I’m too tired to think about it now.”

  My mother studied me long and hard and, I suppose, satisfied that I had forgiven her lashing out, suggested we get some sleep.

  As I settled back into the guest room, with not three but four dogs this time, I was too tired to dwell on what my mother had said or on her new adventures in hetero-sexuality. I was even too tired to mind the rock-hard bed and I fell into a deep sleep.

  “You should come with me. It’s a beautiful farm. You can see some chickens. Remember how you love chickens? Remember Bertha, your childhood chicken?”

  “I have no memory of this alleged pet chicken,” I told my mother. “I think it’s another of your embellishments.”

  “Oh no,” she shook her head, “no. You had a pet chicken when you were three. That is a fact of this family.”

  “If you say so,” I replied, then scooped organic Cheerios-type cereal into my mouth.

  “So you’ll come with me to Ava Larkin’s?”

  “I guess so,” I said reluctantly. I don’t care for meeting famous people. One has to struggle to pretend it isn’t surprising to be conversing with someone whose face is plastered across buses and buildings. I find it exhausting. But I didn’t have anything better to do, so why not?

  Twenty minutes later, as we pulled up in front of Ava Larkin’s beautiful old farmhouse, I asked my mother if she had warned Ava that she was not only bringing an unruly pack of dogs with her, but a daughter as well.

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s fine,” she said.

  “Mom, that’s no way to start a new tenure of employment, just showing up with your daughter in tow.”

  “You’re not a toddler in swaddling clothes now, are you? She won’t mind.”

  And, in fact, Ava Larkin did not seem to mind one bit.

  “So nice to meet you,” she said, flashing that million-dollar smile after she pulled open the big door to her farmhouse.

  “You too,” I flashed my own, considerably cheaper, smile.

  Even though she was a certified movie star, Ava Larkin wasn’t exactly traditional Hollywood fare. She was rangy with big breasts and her face was a little oddly shaped, like a strangely executed triangle. She was ridiculously beautiful though. And, I noticed, after she’d led us into the kitchen and offered us juice, she had a great ass. I envisioned telling my lesbian money manager Amy Ross about that. About how I had gay feelings for Ava Larkin’s ass. I imagine most women must have gay feelings for Ava Larkin’s ass though. I’m hardly being innovative in that.

  I kept quiet as Ava and Mom gabbed about this and that and Ava presented Mom with a huge stack of bills that needed to be dealt with and then showed her to the office.

  When Ava came back into the kitchen, I was still nursing my juice and marveling at the beauty of the kitchen where everything from the appliances to the taxicab-yellow walls was nicely done, but not overdone.

  “So what do you do for a living?” Ava Larkin asked, sitting down across the table from me. “Or is that an obnoxious question?”

  “No. It’s not obnoxious. I make stuffed animals,” I said with a shrug. I normally don’t feel apologetic about my occupation but it would be hard to hold a candle to Ava Larkin’s line of work.

  “You do?” Ava’s voice went into a higher register.

  My making stuffed animals was apparently the most delightful
thing she’d heard all week.

  “Yeah, it’s not profoundly lucrative or anything but it keeps me out of trouble.”

  Ava Larkin offered the million-dollar smile again. “I have to show you something,” she said, standing, “upstairs.”

  I followed her up to the second floor. The ceilings were lower here and I probably wouldn’t have noticed if Ava wasn’t such a strapping lass. It’s not like she was going to bang her head, but if she ever dated a basketball player, he’d have a problem. As I followed Ava down a long hall, I tried remembering who it was the media had linked her with most recently. There had been a husband for a while, Cooper Mavic, a movie star who also had a million-dollar smile, but that had ended badly—or so the tabloids said— when Cooper had an on-set affair with Angelina Jolie. He’d been followed by a Russian tennis star but, last I heard, that was off too.

  “I don’t show this to everyone,” Ava Larkin said, opening the door to a small room and ushering me inside.

  The room was packed with toys. There were shelves and tables. All covered in toys. Mostly high-end, hand-made stuffed animals, but some antique iron and wooden toys too. And there, in a place of honor on a middle shelf, was one of my animals—I called it the pit-mouse, a little gray mouse with the big powerful head of a pit bull terrier.

  “I’m sure you think I’m insane now,” Ava Larkin said. She looked really pleased at the prospect of my thinking her insane.

  “Mildly, yes. People who collect things worry me sometimes.”

  “I know. My father is one of them. I always vowed to never collect anything. There really isn’t a bigger waste of time and energy. But suddenly, in my mid-twenties, after my first hit movie, I started buying toys. I can’t really offer an explanation for it. I was not deprived of toys—or anything—as a child. I just like beautiful toys.”

  “I made that,” I said, pointing to the pit-mouse.

  “You did?” Ava nearly squealed as she picked up the pit-mouse and gazed from it to me, as if looking for a resemblance. “Eloise, this is beautiful work, really beautiful.”

  “Thanks.” I felt myself blushing. I don’t think I’ve blushed since the age of seven when the back of my dress got stuck in my tights and I walked around with my ass exposed until another kid pointed this out and laughed.