Little Bigfoot, Big City

by Jennifer Weiner

  “Ladies,” said Mark, holding out first his wife’s chair, then Alice’s. He took two slices of Alice’s bread, then grinned at his wife. “C’mon,” he said, poking Felicia’s arm with the bread basket. Felicia looked predictably horrified as she murmured something about an upcoming black-tie gala and how she wouldn’t fit into her ball gown, before selecting the smallest slice and setting it on the very edge of her plate.

  “Wow,” said Mark. “You’re really going crazy.” He gave Alice a conspiratorial grin.

  Alice smiled back, and wondered. Maybe Mark was her real, actual father. Maybe he’d met a Yare somewhere in the world and fallen in love. Except she couldn’t imagine where on his travels her father, who had spent his entire life in suits, in big cities, might have come across someone from Millie’s Tribe. Nor could Alice imagine her father in the embrace of a woman like the Yare she’d glimpsed during her one trip to Millie’s village. The Yare women were large, and they wore simple homemade dresses and were typically barefoot, with the tops of their feet covered in fur and their calloused soles impervious to twigs or thorns or cold weather. Their eyes, framed by long, curling lashes, looked startlingly lovely in their faces, which, Alice thought, were regular lady faces, underneath the fur.

  She smiled at the thought of Mark in a suit with his arms around a woman with a wild tangle of hair and fur covering her arms and legs and face.

  “Something funny?” Mark inquired.

  Alice shook her head. She served each of her parents a portion of the squash and dug in, enjoying the richness of the cheese, the sweetness of the honey, the texture of the perfectly cooked rice on her tongue. It was the kind of thing Millie could be eating, right at that moment. Except Millie wouldn’t be at a table in a fancy apartment with parents who seemed to have very little to say to each other and nothing to say to her. Millie would be deep in the woods, sitting at a fire in a cozy little house tucked under a hill, snug between parents who loved her, surrounded by her Tribe.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” Felicia was looking at Alice from across the candlelit expanse of the table.

  “Nothing,” said Alice. She made herself smile and buttered another bite of bread.

  “Was this school really all right?” asked Felicia. Her plucked eyebrows were hoisted high, and there was a single black bean speared on the tine of her fork. Her tone suggested that she could hardly believe it. Which wasn’t surprising, Alice thought, given the seven schools she’d been kicked out of or whose administrators had politely asked that she not re-enroll.

  “It was,” said Alice. “It was weird at first—everything’s got funny names. Like, students are learners, and teachers are learning guides. And the food was mostly vegetarian. But I liked it. Some of the kids were okay.”

  She felt, more than saw, the look that her parents gave each other, and tried not to feel insulted by their obvious pleasure and their just-as-obvious surprise.

  “Did you miss me?” she asked, her voice innocent.

  There was only the barest pause before her mother said, “Of course we did. You’re our sunshine.” Her father nodded, trying to say something around a mouthful of squash and stuffing, finally settling for a wordless thumbs-up.

  Alice doubted that either one of her parents had actually even noticed her absence. Felicia’s social schedule, her roster of balls and luncheons and party-planning sessions and Pilates classes, would roll on, unimpeded by the occasional demands that Alice made on her time, and Mark was away so much, either at his office all day or flying off to China and Japan, that Alice knew he went weeks without seeing her mother and even longer without seeing her.

  “I’m just glad we’re all together,” said Felicia, reaching to take Alice’s fingers in her cool, bony ones. It was strange. Alice had always envied her mother’s tininess, her fragility, had thought—and had been taught—that women could never be too thin. Now she could see things differently. She wondered what the Yare would make of Felicia and thought, a little smugly, that if her mother had to run through a forest or swim across a lake to save one of her society-lady friends, she probably wouldn’t be able to make it more than a few hundred yards without collapsing. Those slender arms and fingers would never be able to haul a heavy log out of the way; that slim body wouldn’t be able to hide a friend from view. Alice knew that she would never look right to Felicia, but her body could do things. She could run for miles, maybe not fast, but steadily. She could save a life.

  She smiled at the thought, aware that her mother was looking at her strangely as her father continued to decimate the loaf of bread, lavishing butter on each slice like a man who knew he might never taste it again.

  “Tell us more about the school,” said Felicia, who appeared to be picking each black bean out of her portion of stuffing before spearing them on the tines of her fork and popping them, one at a time, into her mouth.

  Alice took another bite of squash. “I liked being near the forest,” she said. “I went running. And I liked the school. I learned a lot about myself.” She cut another bite, watching her parents closely. Mark’s eyes were on his plate, but Felicia was looking at Alice with what seemed to be a mixture of curiosity and fear. “By the way,” Alice said, “we’re doing family trees, so I’m going to need to ask you both some questions about my relatives.”

  “They do that project at every single school you’ve been to, right?” said Mark, giving her a good-natured smile through a mouthful of rice and beans.

  Instead of answering, Alice imagined that she was Riya, one of her cabin mates and almost-friends, who was a nationally ranked fencer. Riya practiced in the Center’s gym, a ramshackle building constructed as an afterthought by administrators who were obviously not big on the idea of sports. A single court was used for everything from basketball to dodgeball to kickball to tennis . . . and, of course, there was no scoreboard, as the Center did not believe in winners and losers. Riya used the court in the late afternoons, when it was empty, and Alice would watch her, with her silver épée slashing through the air, advancing and retreating, her feet pattering against the ground in a dizzying dance. Sometimes you’d press an opponent, trying to score points, Riya explained, while other times you’d just try to keep your opponent moving until they were exhausted. Alice decided that the second tactic might be in order with her parents. She’d bombard them with questions, keep them off balance, then find out what she needed to know.

  “What kind of baby was I?” she began.

  Mark looked puzzled. Felicia’s face had been rendered largely inexpressive due to the injections she got every month, but she still seemed to be afraid.

  “The regular kind,” Felicia said. Alice could hear the effort it was taking for her mother to keep her tone light. “You slept, you cried, you ate . . .”

  “What were my favorite foods?”

  Felicia tapped her fingertips against the tablecloth. “Oh, sweet potatoes, I think.”

  “Avocados,” Mark supplied. “You liked avocados.” He smiled. “I used to slice one of those suckers in half and feed you the whole thing with a spoon.” Felicia’s mouth pursed.

  “That was too much avocado for a baby,” she said. “Avocados are very high in saturated fats.” She looked down at her plate, the tines of her fork shredding the squash, as if she were checking to be sure that no one had hidden any saturated fats underneath it.

  “Was I a good baby?” Alice asked. “Did I cry a lot? Did I like other kids? Did I have friends?”

  Another uneasy glance traveled across the table, almost like a shadow or a wind. Alice nibbled a raisin. If her theory was correct—if she’d been born to a Yare family, then stolen somehow or given away—her parents wouldn’t have any idea of what she’d been like as a baby, because they wouldn’t have been around to see it.

  “You were fine,” said Felicia, her tone firm, clearly eager to change the subject.

  “Do you have any pictures?”

  This time her parents made no attempt to hide their surprise. Alice
had never in her life asked to see a picture of herself and usually tried to hide when they were being taken. She’d pose for school pictures because she didn’t have a choice, and there were a few family pictures taken at Thanksgivings and vacations, where she’d try to camouflage herself behind a convenient grown-up. In most of them, she was frowning; in a few, when she was little, she’d actually tried to cover her face with her hands, knowing, even then, that she looked wrong.

  Felicia collected herself. “I’ll see if I can find some,” she said.

  Alice had nodded serenely, knowing that her mother would come up with some excuse, and that no photographs would be forthcoming, because they didn’t exist.

  Mark, beaming, clapped his hands. “Who’s ready for dessert?” he asked, and untied the paper box to reveal a cake with white buttercream frosting and pink spun-sugar flowers and the words “Welcome Home, Alice” written on top. Felicia cringed. “I’ll cut it,” said Alice, and she helped herself to a thick slice with a pink frosting rose and a big glass of milk.

  That night Alice sat on her bed, in her favorite plaid pajamas, waiting for her parents to go to sleep. Her plan was to scour the house, every desk drawer and cabinet, trying to find pictures of herself as a baby. She was checking her email—she’d lent Millie her laptop for the vacation, hoping they could stay in touch—when her mother knocked on her door.

  “Come in,” Alice called. Felicia wore a lacy nightgown and a matching robe. Her pedicured feet were bare and there was a book in her arms, with gold-leaf pages and pale-pink leather binding.

  “I wanted to give you this,” she said, handing Alice the book. Alice saw her initials and the date of her birth, all rendered in scrolling gold-leaf cursive on the cover. “It’s your baby book,” she said, unnecessarily, as Alice flipped to the first page and saw a picture of her mother in a hospital bed. “It’s important, I think, to know where you come from.” Alice was so busy studying the first shot that she almost didn’t hear. In the photograph, Felicia looked frail and exhausted. Her hair—not the bright, sleek blond with which Alice was familiar, but instead an unremarkable reddish-brown that looked more like Alice’s own hair—was matted and curling around her cheeks. Her eyes were shiny and her face was flushed as she clutched a blanketed bundle in her arms. Her face was fuller than Alice had ever seen it, her cheeks plump and rosy and without the fashionable hollows underneath. Her lips were chapped and lipstick free, and her gown clung to her, damp with sweat. There were IV lines in both of her arms, and Alice counted the figures of half a dozen people gathered around the bed.

  “It was a very long birth,” said Felicia, as Alice continued to scrutinize the picture. “And, of course, you can’t color your hair when you’re pregnant.”

  Alice nodded, even though she wasn’t sure what hair dye might have to do with a pregnancy. “Was this Mount Sinai?” she asked, naming the hospital in their neighborhood, the one where most of her Upper East Side acquaintances had been born.

  Felicia shook her head. “Upland, Vermont.”

  “I was born in Vermont?” This was new information for Alice.

  “Your father and I were up there for a ski trip. Well, your father was planning on skiing, and I was going to keep him company. Then he was called away for business.”

  Alice nodded, remembering the dozens, possibly hundreds, of times that her father had gotten a call from his boss in the middle of a vacation or a sleepy Sunday or a meal.

  “And then you decided to make your debut a month ahead of schedule. It took a while for Mark to make it back. There’d been this huge snowstorm. It was days before they got the roads cleared and they let me go home.” Felicia flipped the page. There she was in a wheelchair, her hair marginally neater, drawn back in a ponytail, holding a bundle that was probably her baby, and wearing—Alice blinked, looking more closely—sweatpants and a loose plaid button-down shirt and thick wool socks andxs . . .

  “Are those hiking boots?”

  “Snowstorm,” Felicia reminded her, and Alice nodded. Except she’d seen how Felicia dressed for the snow. Her winter clothing typically involved a coat of the stitched-together pelts of small, dead furry animals, and fur-trimmed gloves and high-heeled leather boots that matched.

  Alice turned the page, and there was the mother she knew, in a picture she’d seen before in a silver frame on the table in the apartment’s entryway.

  “Your christening,” said Felicia. In that shot, Felicia’s hair was blond and shining, as she stood in front of their apartment’s floor-to-ceiling windows with the baby in her arms. Alice, in her mother’s arms, was wearing some kind of stretchy yellow garment, patterned with ducks, that covered her from her neck to her toes, and she looked like she had doubled in size since the first picture. She had three chins and no hair, but Felicia had put a headband of fake flowers around her head. There was no fur anywhere that she could see. She looked, Alice thought, with her heart sinking, entirely human.

  “Dinner was delicious,” her mother said.

  Alice, who’d been studying the picture so closely that she’d almost forgotten that her mother was there, gave a little jump. You didn’t eat any of it, she thought.

  “I’m proud of you,” Felicia said, and bent down in a cloud of perfume to brush Alice’s cheek with her lips. Once her mother had departed, in a swish of silk, Alice resumed her study of the photo album, flipping slowly through the pages, feeling her heart sink with each shot that documented the first hairless Yare-less year of her life. There was Felicia feeding her a bottle, and Felicia giving her a bath, and Felicia and Alice, asleep on the couch, with Alice tucked up against Felicia’s shoulder.

  Maybe it was a fake baby, she thought, and checked her phone again, hoping for a note from Millie. Maybe Felicia and Mark had faked all of these shots, just waiting for this very occasion, the day when Alice would ask to see proof that she was theirs.

  Except the baby in the pictures had a heart-shaped birthmark underneath her left ear, the same as Alice. And even though she didn’t want to, Alice could see herself in that pudgy-faced, squishy-limbed baby: the arch of her brows, her full lower lip, even the shape of her fingers.

  In her pajamas, cross-legged on the down comforter on her bed, Alice frowned, leaning so close to the pictures that her breath fogged the plastic that covered them as she flipped back to the very first shot of Felicia in the hospital and newborn Alice in her exhausted mother’s arms.

  She was about to close the book when something in the assembled figures around the hospital bed caught her eye. All of them—doctors? Nurses?—wore scrubs and surgical masks and most of them were men. But one of the figures toward the back was short and round and female, with merry blue eyes that seemed to twinkle with some secret knowledge.

  Alice squinted and held her breath. Unless she was mistaken, or her educational consultant had a twin, she was looking at Miss Merriweather, the small, kindly, white-haired woman who’d been responsible for sending Alice to all eight of the schools she’d attended . . . the one she’d first met when she was six years old.

  But why had she attended Alice’s birth? What would an educational consultant from New York City be doing in a hospital in Vermont with a brand-new baby? Had Felicia and Miss Merriweather known each other before Alice was born? And if that was true, why had her parents introduced Miss Merriweather to her as if she were someone they had just met, instead of someone they were already acquainted with?

  Alice looked more carefully, wanting to be sure. Her heart was beating so hard that she could hear it, and her mouth felt cottony. Millie, she thought. I have to tell Millie. But of course she couldn’t. She could write an email, but Millie would have to find time and privacy to check it . . . and of course the Yare did not have cell phones, so there was no chance of a call.

  “Nyebbeh,” she muttered, which was a Yare expression, before padding, barefoot, out of her bedroom and into the living room. Her parents kept a dictionary on a stand next to the bookcase full of fancy leather-bound books t
hat Alice didn’t think had ever been read. On top of the opened dictionary was a magnifying glass. Alice carried the magnifying glass back to her bedroom, then used it to peruse every bit of the baby picture. She was almost positive—almost, but not entirely sure—that the masked figure at the very edge of the shot was, in fact, Miss Merriweather. She was smiling down at baby Alice, like one of the good fairies in the story of Sleeping Beauty, one who’d come to give Alice a gift, not of grace or beauty or a lovely singing voice, but maybe the gift of strength, of resilience, the patience to wait and the courage to keep trying until she’d found her place in the world.

  She looked at her mother again, her messy hair and flushed, freckled cheeks; her plaid shirt and her flat-soled boots; and, after she closed the book and fell asleep, she dreamed a dream she’d had a thousand times, a dream of running to her real mother, a mother who’d want her and who’d love her. Only, the thousand other times she’d had that dream, she’d never seen the woman. She’d always been some far-off figure in the shadows, too far away for Alice to see her face.

  This time, for the first time, as she ran toward the woman, along an endless, shadowed hallway, she thought she could see hair that looked like hers, freckled skin, chapped lips that smiled, and she could hear a voice that echoed in her bones, a voice that said, “I love you. You’re my girl.”

  DARN IT,” MILLIE MUTTERED AS she glared at Alice’s top-lap—the laptop, she reminded herself—and waited for its screen to bloom into life. “Darn it” was one of the No-Fur expressions she had picked up in her time with Alice and her friends, and she’d started to say it when things weren’t working out, which, just lately, felt like all the time.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Frederee, her Tribe mate and, for the day, her partner in crime.