by Grant Ginder
“Where am I going?” Alice says. “It looks like the road splits up here.”
“Hold on.” Paul struggles to get her phone out of his pocket. “I think you want to stay on the A338.”
“That’s not what my map says.”
“Mom, I thought you put that goddamned thing away. We don’t have a lot of time here, Paul.”
“Hold on.”
Freeing the phone, he opens the atlas. “Yeah, just stay on this road.”
He makes a silent note that Alice doesn’t thank him, and as he’s moving to slip the phone back into his pants, it buzzes quietly in his palm. Looking down, he sees a new message from Jonathan: I TOLD YOU TO STOP CALLING ME.
What should he tell her? That he now knows the source of her irritation? That her boss-cum-lover has rejected her? That, like Paul, she’s being spurned and discarded, written off as subpar? He’s filled, suddenly, with a violent empathy for Alice, with a need to protect her from the awful fucking love mess that’s weighing him down.
With a quick sleight of hand, he deletes the message and watches it vanish from the screen.
Donna
July 9
It’s a spectacular house, she thinks, looking at the accommodations that Eloise has found for her, Alice, and Paul: an old dairy farm called Tenderway Glen that’s been retrofitted and converted into a posh vacation rental. But then, what else should she expect from Eloise? Donna smiles: she taught her well. In addition to the property’s main house, its square lawn is flanked on one side by a smaller guest cottage, and on the other by a series of unused cow stalls, sheltered beneath a sloped tin roof. Beyond the property line, to Donna’s rear, extends a broad meadow of wet, green grass, where there’s a flock of sheep, which make it their business to baa at the wind.
Soon, she’ll need to get in the shower; in a few hours, they’ve got to trek over to the Kings Arms, a restaurant in Dorchester, for the weekend’s welcome cocktails, a precursor to tomorrow night’s rehearsal dinner and Sunday’s wedding. Besides, she’s been standing here, staring at the house, for about ten minutes, ever since she set her suitcase down in the master suite and announced to her uninterested children that she needed a bit of air. And that was true—she did need air—particularly after being cooped up in that car for three hours, smelling the fish and cigarettes on her son’s breath. But she also came out here for some space to breathe, and blink, and generally just exist without fear of her children’s incessant scrutiny. When did they become like this? she wonders. For how long have they been ascribing secret meanings and clandestine messages to each and every thing Donna does? She wants to tell them that she’s not that deep, that she no longer has the energy to be manipulative or conniving. She wants to tell them that, sometimes, a sigh is just a sigh.
She can’t, though. She couldn’t possibly. Because to do so would be to provide them with a whole new set of words and actions to analyze and deconstruct. She can hear Alice now: In saying that a sigh is just a sigh you’re actually admitting that it’s something much larger than that—you’re basically proving my point. Christ! Donna thinks. How exhausting it must be, seeing the world and the people in it not for what they are, but rather as conduits for a language of nefarious messages. Had she taught them to think like that? Likely, she wagers. Yes, somehow, her children are her own fault.
And Paul. Poor Paul. Selfishly, she had been hoping that his breakup with his boyfriend (she can scarcely remember the man’s name) might afford them an opportunity to reconnect, but now she doubts the likelihood of all that. Still, her son’s in pain, and that breaks Donna’s heart. It’s difficult not to think of him as a wounded child who needs his mother during moments like this. Instead of seeing him as a grown man, she can’t help but think of her son as the teenager who bleached his hair or pierced his ear—the boy who was forever searching for ways to escape who he feared he might be, but who always managed to stumble back to himself again.
But then, what else can she do but delicately let him know that she’s here, ready to listen, and hold, and coddle, should he ever allow himself to need her? And oh, God, she knows she can’t blame him for this, but she’d just about screamed when he said he wanted to talk to his father. She’d had to leave Paul in the parking lot, crushing his cigarette into the gravel, lest she risk running her mouth and telling him what she really thought: that his father died a bigot who understood compassion about as well as he understood tolerance, that the only advice he would have had for Paul would be to change everything about who he was.
* * *
“St. Charles,” Ollie’s father says, and Donna strains to hear him above the din of the cocktail party—the mix of music and voices and ice knocking against glasses. “That’s a bit of a ways outside Chicago, is it not?”
Ollie’s mother looks at her husband and then at Donna. She smiles, meekly.
“It’s really not all that far, and it’s still very cosmopolitan,” Donna says. She adds: “I also know London quite well.”
“There you have it! Sounds like you three have already got a lot to talk about.” Ollie kisses Donna’s cheek and squeezes her shoulder, and Donna smiles back at him, taking in his big, puppylike eyes, his floppy hair, his lanky good looks. She’s fond of him. She was when she first met him in Chicago four years ago, but now she feels that fondness growing. He’s likable. Plain and simple. Just like Eloise.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Ollie says, “I’ve got to go have a word with security. Seems that there are some young men who’ve taken to climbing the lampposts outside, and I’ve got a dreadful feeling the suspects are none other than my bloody groomsmen.”
The three of them—Ollie’s parents and Donna—all laugh. Ollie shrugs and leaves.
Now feeling unprotected and exposed, Donna turns back to her soon-to-be in-laws. In one hand a gin fizz sweats against her palm. She’d originally planned to wear the blue tunic tonight, but at the last minute decided to go with something simple instead. An old silver A-line that had always given her luck. Maybe that had been a mistake.
“I’ve never been to Chicago,” Ollie’s mother says, after what appears to be much consideration.
Everyone nods.
How long must she stand here? Donna wonders. On one hand, she wants to flee, to escape into the throngs of Eloise’s friends and assorted in-laws to find some abandoned table where she might fade into the background. On the other, though, she knows she’s obliged to stay and make conversation with Ollie’s parents, no matter how dreadful and vapid that conversation may be. She has to laugh at their jokes, to frown at their minor complaints, to agree with their politics, even if she finds them vulgar. Worst of all, she knows that they’re bound to her by the same set of obligations.
Ollie’s father looks over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where a steady stream of waiters bearing trays of prawns flows out into the restaurant. Really, Donna wants to say, you can go. We don’t have to do this.
Thankfully, just as she’s about to ask something about the price of gas in Dorset, Eloise grabs her arm from behind.
“Mind if I steal you away for a moment, Maman?”
“Ollie’s parents and I were just starting to get to know one another.”
“It’ll only be a second, I swear.”
She smiles at Ollie’s parents and begs their pardon.
“I’ll bring her back shortly,” says Eloise.
Relieved, they both tell her not to worry.
Eloise leads Donna toward a second bar near the rear of the restaurant, where it’s less crowded, and where she can finally hear herself breathe. Of the three tables in the room, two of them are empty, occupied only by crumpled-up napkins and half-empty glasses. At the third sit a man and a woman—Eloise identifies them as a cousin of Ollie’s and his moody wife—engaged in a heated conversation, their heads bowed together. Along the south wall there’s a single window, and through it Donna can see sea-borne mist start to encircle the trunks of the trees on the restaurant’s small lawn. It
’s a moonless night and, save a few courageous stars, the sky’s an inky black.
“What is it?” Donna asks her.
Eloise grins.
“Wait here,” she says.
Donna does as she’s told, sitting at one of the free tables. Happy to be off her feet, she slips her heels off and rubs the sole of her left foot, where a dull ache throbs. Looking out the window again, she watches as lights in the stone houses of Dorchester flicker on and off. As much as she tries not to, she can’t help but concern herself with the impression she made on Ollie’s parents. Had they thought her provincial? Simple? Crass? She’s irritated that she cares. Moreover, she’s irritated that they know that she cares. And she knows that they do; she’d seen it in Ollie’s father’s face, when he asked her about St. Charles’s proximity to Chicago. He’d nearly laughed when she said “cosmopolitan.”
Or maybe she’s making it all up.
She takes a larger gulp of her gin fizz and holds the liquor in her mouth until she’s got no choice but to swallow it or be sick. Where has her daughter gone? she wonders. She thought she wanted to melt away into a wallflower when she was talking to Ollie’s parents, but now that she has her solitude, she feels alone, exposed. Watching the couple argue at the table across from her, she decides that she wants to be back among the throng; she wants to disappear amid other people. Yes, she’ll go search for Eloise. She’ll go find her daughter.
But then, just as she’s standing, she hears her name.
“Donna?” a deep, accented voice says.
“Oh,” she says, her heart in her throat. “There you are.”
Alice
July 9
The hair on the back of her neck stands on end, and she wonders how easily she might nab one of the bottles of champagne chilling behind the bar to her left. She bites her lip: one of the bartenders is trying to seduce a woman twice his age, aware, surely, that her husband is standing hardly two feet from them; the other barman, a fat Welsh guy with a ruddy face, has just escaped off somewhere. In the dining room she hears the clinking of a knife against a glass, but then, this is no surprise; since they arrived two hours ago she’d hardly been able to take a breath without being interrupted by one of Eloise’s friends, clambering over herself to prove her worth and adoration for the bride. Through strands of flickering tea lights Alice can see her sister’s face, beaming and intoxicated by the praise being heaped on her, on Ollie, on their ability to create something so perfect and enviable, to forge it through the sheer strength of their love.
She needs that champagne.
The woman’s husband gently pulls her away from the seductive bartender, and the ruddy Welshman returns; her hopes for a full bottle squandered, Alice settles for two flutes of champagne. Out on the lawn, a few guests have ventured out for cigarettes, and above them the smoke hangs in the humid air. In an hour, their ranks will grow; the fathers who now look at their sons disapprovingly will stumble out and try to bum a fag.
It’s different than younger weddings she’s been to, Alice thinks, the ceremonies she attended right out of college, the first few of which marriages are just now starting to crumble in divorce: there wasn’t the standard bum rush for the bar at the beginning of the evening, the tittering excitement of everyone getting dressed up together for the first time. No, this wedding—her sister’s wedding—has a distinctively thirty-something vibe to it. That’s not to say the people around her, the Hennies and Flossies and Poppies and Minties, aren’t looking to get fucked up. They are, they definitely are, and they’ll pay for it in the morning. But they’ve clopped over this well-worn territory before; they know how to at least cultivate the impression that they’re pacing themselves.
Confronted with such unabashed happiness, she suddenly feels like she’s going to be sick with anger. Where the hell is Paul? she wonders. She needs him. She wants to rest her head on his shoulder and to see her defeat reflected in his eyes.
Outside, away from the smokers and the toasts and the ruddy Welshman, Alice kicks the tire of a Fiat, then yelps as the pain radiates through her toes to her knees. She remembers back in May, sitting on the phone at her office, trying to broker a truce between Paul and Donna. She was nice then. Good. Sure, one could argue that in acting as mediator she was advancing her own interests just as much as anyone else’s, but still, at least altruism was a pleasant side effect of her selfishness. How then, in a matter of a few short months, has she pulled such an abrupt 180? How has she become such a monster?
She looks down at the dress she’s got on—it’s the same one that the rest of the bridesmaids are wearing. (Eloise had bought the dress for her—but then, of course she had.) Watching Henny and Flossie float around in theirs, Alice wants to tear hers off. Wants to throw it down to the cobblestone streets, stomp on it, and run, screaming in her underwear, through the claustrophobic alleyways of this awful little town. Instead, though, she kicks the wheel of the Fiat again, this time relishing the pain. Then she limps over to one of the cabs that Eloise has hired to take guests home in an hour, when the party’s scheduled to end. Slipping the driver a ten-pound note, Alice tells him to take her back to the farm now, please, even though he’s technically off duty. She’s afraid of what she’ll do if she stays here, she realizes.
She’s become, suddenly, afraid of herself.
* * *
The farm, Tenderway Glen, sits at the base of a long, though not necessarily steep, gravel hill, and as the cabdriver approaches it he tells Alice that he can’t take her all the way to the house, but rather must leave her here, on the side of the main road.
“Got to be back in twenty minutes, and I reckon trying to turn around down by the house will take me nothing short of an hour.”
“But there’s plenty of room to turn around down there,” Alice pleads. “And really, it’s not that far. It just looks like it because of the field, and the way the hill curves around that hedge.”
“Don’t know what to tell you, miss. I’ve got paying guests waiting.”
“But I’m a paying guest.”
“Surely you know what I mean.”
She doesn’t, but she gets out of the cab anyway and slams the door. Before the road slopes down the hill to the house, it passes by a small field where, this morning, a company section of the Boys’ Brigade set up camp for a weeklong jamboree. On the acre of unruly grass they’ve erected pup tents, and passing them Alice sees the flicker of flashlights. Charred driftwood and charcoal cut through the mossy scent of wet grass, and as she picks her way past a naked flagpole, she hears young voices whispering beneath the domes of one of the tents. Are they talking about her, she wonders? Did one of the boys, sneaking out for a piss, see her emerge from the cab, her dress hiked up around her knees, her heels dangling from her left hand? And if that’s the case, what are they saying? Are they swapping stories about where this gorgeous mystery woman is going, about why she’s floating down to an old dairy farm in a cocktail dress at nine o’clock at night? Or do their predictions inch closer to the truth? Are they imagining Alice closer to what she actually is: tired, half drunk, annoyed with her shoes, disappointed in herself?
She doesn’t go into the house. For starters, she doesn’t have a key, but also the thought of being alone in such a large space, surrounded only by other empty rooms, sickens her. So, instead, she sits down on an empty bucket in one of the concrete cow stalls that face the house’s lawn. It’s been a while since they’ve been used, she imagines; the stall itself smells more like fresh paint and concrete than cow dung. She likes it, though. She just likes that the stalls are here. She likes her ass pressed up against the tin bucket, and the sensation of her feet against the cold, stark floor. She likes looking into the rambling mess of trees and weeds and hedges beyond the perimeter of the house. She likes hearing the sheep baa.
She reaches into her clutch for her phone and calls Jonathan.
He picks up on the third ring. “Jesus Christ, Alice.”
“You’re telling me.” She
leans back against the stall’s wall and feels the concrete scratch against her skin. “I’ve had a terrible night.”
“I told you to stop calling me,” he says, and she sits up straight again. “Why the fuck are you calling me?”
“What? You never told me that.” Her heart feels as if it’s been pumped with helium. “Jonathan, what are you talking about?”
“I texted you earlier today. Alice, you’ve got to stop calling me. Marissa knows. She figured everything out. She’s threatening to leave me and take my kids.”
“Oh, God. Um. Okay.” She fumbles. “That’s awful, but, uh, I mean, weren’t you saying things weren’t going well, anyway?”
“Married people have problems, Alice. That’s just called life. I’d be fucking crazy to ever leave Marissa, but now she might leave me.”
“But, Jonathan, when we were getting tacos, you said—”
“Look, forget what I fucking said, all right?” he hisses. “God, I can’t believe this is happening.”
Alice stands up and begins pacing in the stall. “That’s impossible, though.”
“It’s not.” He sounds pissed. She imagines him standing in his office overlooking Wilshire, his arms raised about his head as he shouts at her, the glass door blocking out the noise. “It’s not impossible, because you insisted on posting your every goddamned move on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and God only knows where else.”
An owl perches itself on the house’s chimney, and, somewhere in the ink-black field, a dog barks.
“And guess what,” Jonathan continues. “Marissa’s not some fucking idiot. All she had to do was see your thirty missed calls on my phone, check out your Facebook page, and then look at our credit card statement. And now—fuck, Alice, do you know what you’ve done? Do you know how much you’ve fucked me over?”
“Wait a second,” she says. “I fucked you over? What, I tied you down and insisted that you screw me? I demanded that you have an affair? I’d like to remind you that you were the one who followed me into the supply closet and—”