by Robin Kirman
Storrow’s tone was breezy, but sweat had broken out across his forehead; arms stacked with dishes, he quickly escaped into the kitchen. From the next room came the sound of drawers opening and closing; the students sat shooting each other looks. Charlie considered going into the kitchen to check on Storrow, but just then the man reentered, apparently rallied. In one hand he held aloft a bowl of fruit; in the other, a stack of notecards and several pens.
“Let’s have a game, friends. Something we lawyers used to do in the corps.”
The rules were simple. Everyone would be asked three questions—two to be answered truthfully, one with a lie. Storrow’s job would be to spot the lie. But to be kind, to spare his guests any discomfort, he’d allow their answers to be written, and the results to remain a secret between each person and himself.
Storrow distributed the cards and pens among the group: “Relax, I’ll go easy.”
True to his promise, his first inquiries—to Pam, Jasmine, and then Roger—were perfectly mundane: “Have you ever owned a pet? Number of siblings? What sort of profession do you see yourself in?”
Moving on to Becca, Gerry’s friend, Storrow’s questions grew a bit more pointed: “What do you fear most? Have you ever lied to hurt somebody?”
Gerry was next in line. Storrow smiled at him benignly and asked after his favorite musician and the name of the street on which he’d first lived. Gerry scribbled his answers on his card, while Storrow leaned forward to select an apple from the bowl before him. He rubbed the apple on his shirtsleeve as he considered his last question. “Any reason you—Gerald Laverne—would be especially concerned that I exposed a student’s drug use?”
Charlie felt Pam kick his shin under the table. In the silence, he could hear the noise of Storrow chewing. Gerry wrote down his final answer, trying, unsuccessfully, to appear nonchalant; his hands were shaking slightly as he set down his pen. Storrow looked ebullient.
The next guest to play the game was Miguel. Storrow turned to him, distractedly. “So, let’s see, let’s see…what’s the worst thing you’ve ever…stolen?”
“Excuse me?” Miguel looked up and crossed his arms above his large stomach; his movements were slow, his voice monotone. “What was the question you just asked me?”
Storrow rapped his knuckles on the table, apparently oblivious to any misstep he had made, beaming still from his small triumph over Gerry. “Now, don’t let Gerald’s nonsense scare you off, son. No trials, no penalties, you have my word.”
“I’m not scared to answer you. I don’t wish to answer because I don’t appreciate the question.”
Storrow shrugged, still trying to make light of this refusal. “Fine then. I can ask you a different one.”
“But you didn’t ask me a different one: of all the things you could have asked me—about chess or math or any of my interests—instead you asked me about stealing. You assume I’ve stolen. As a Latino, I have to wonder why.”
Storrow took a deep breath and exhaled hard, puffing out his cheeks. “Honestly, Miguel, I meant no offense by it. Look, I just asked Becca about lying—was that because I don’t trust redheads? I’m a redhead, right friend? Hand to heart, Miguel, the thought of your ethnicity was nowhere on my mind.”
And probably this was the truth, thought Charlie: Storrow seemed strangely unaware of the care a man like him must display in less privileged company. He wondered how much Storrow grasped of this new, liberal campus culture he was facing: the mistrust of the sort of old-fashioned white, entitled male he couldn’t help but represent.
“Let’s just move on,” Charlie suggested, but it was too late to salvage the evening; even Storrow made no further efforts to revive the game or find another. He sat sunk into his chair, folding his notecard over and over, into an ever tighter square.
Roger was the first to announce his departure: the others followed suit. A line formed at the front door, Storrow at its head, distributing the coats. For politeness’ sake, he struggled to summon a last burst of gaiety: “Button up, friends, October chill…”
Out on the lawn, Roger and the girls waited for Charlie to join them. He was the last of the guests to exit Apthorp House; in the foyer, while Storrow kicked a few stray leaves from the threshold, Charlie took his time fixing his jacket, fitting his scarf around his neck. He felt the urge to shut the door after the others, to stay behind with his host and offer comfort.
Whatever his faults, Storrow was a good man, Charlie believed. He might even turn out to be a great man—and this, Charlie wished to say, was difficult for people to acknowledge, especially where comparison revealed their own deficiencies.
In that one evening, Charlie’s sympathy was united to this professor he’d only just met; he felt Storrow’s sadness where others perceived blithe arrogance. There was a tragic element to the man: in his outmoded brand of dignity. Looking back, it was strange that he’d foreseen this even when Storrow was at the height of his achievements, before anything to do with tragedy had touched him.
4
Master language, master fate. That was the lesson Alice Kovac received from both her father and her mother, who’d never seemed to agree on anything but this in all the years they’d spent together as immigrants from Belgrade to Wisconsin. Alice’s father, Radovan, was the one who’d insisted on the move. A gifted engineer, he’d worked hard to earn an American professorship and was immensely proud of the life he’d arranged for his wife and children: the ordered, spacious streets of Madison, the manicured lawns of the campus, his private office with its modern equipment, new beige computers and boxes fitted with knobs and dials and wires, whose purposes Alice, as a little girl, could only wonder at. Wonder was what her father wished to inspire on outings with him: to instill in Alice the same appreciation he felt for this world he’d discovered, one marked by rationality and optimism and so utterly unlike that barbaric land he’d left behind.
In this regard, Radovan and his wife were at odds; Senka Kovac had never admired American culture or envisioned any life for herself outside of Serbia. Unlike her husband, she hadn’t chosen to study English in school and so, while Radovan settled into his American life easily, following American news, chatting with his American colleagues, she spent her first years in isolation, daunted by her surroundings and kept at home with two small children. Once the children were of school age, Senka’s situation only worsened. She watched her little girl and boy grow more and more independent and incomprehensible; they no longer needed her, and her own poor English barred her from pursuing any meaningful career. In Serbia she’d briefly worked at a news station, but here no such career was possible for her: she felt trapped, confined to menial housework, to stuttering crude formulations, robbed of humor and grace. Only those who knew her in her native language knew her at all, she insisted; and if she must live in a nation of strangers, at the least her own children should understand her.
From the age of five Alice had been forced to spend long afternoons sitting at the kitchen table with a dismal Serbian language book that her mother had saved from her own school days. She’d detested that book—its faded cover colored orange, yellow, and brown—and those hours studying while her mother cooked up pots of paprikash and goulash, filling the kitchen with heat and pungent smells. Each lesson in Serbian felt, to Alice, like a betrayal of her father, whose wish for her was to become fully American. He took great pride in Alice’s advanced abilities in English—several levels above her grade—and he was convinced her mother’s lessons only slowed this progress.
“You should be the one to study English,” her father told his wife. “You’re unwilling to do anything to get along here.” And it seemed to Alice that he was right; her mother preferred to submit to depression, refusing to pretend she could have a proper future anywhere but in Serbia, refusing to see this country, even if it represented freedom for her husband and children, as anything but a jail for her.
Throughout those first years in Madison, Alice’s mother made regular threats to r
eturn to Serbia. What finally put an end to this was the arrival of her older brother, Vasily. Uncle Vasily, as Alice knew him, was bald and massive, not less than three hundred pounds, with a mole on his cheek and a neck that sloped from his earlobes to almost the middle of his shoulders. Before he’d gained weight and lost his hair, though, he’d been remarkably good-looking, with thick black curls and catlike eyes. (Alice’s mother proudly displayed pictures of Vasily and herself in their teens, when they were still a striking pair.) After decades spent cavorting with various women, Vasily had charmed his way into a marriage to a wealthy American tourist: they’d traveled together for a time before settling down in Broadview Heights, a Serbian community in Cleveland.
The year Vasily finished construction on his new home, he invited Alice’s family to come see it, an outrageous McMansion with sculptures in the front yard and a basement bowling alley, where Alice’s younger brother, Peter, had played for hours on end.
Alice’s father was appalled. He and Vasily were opposites in every way, physically and philosophically. Radovan was lean and mild, while Vasily was inflated and preening; Radovan believed this country rewarded hard work while Vasily maintained that the immigrant dream was entirely a sucker’s game: all that slaving so that one’s children could enjoy a better life. He’d preferred to skip the slaving and the children, too; Vasily lived unfettered, doted on by his wife, waited on by their maid, happily an object of envy in that small Cleveland enclave inhabited almost exclusively by other Serbians like him.
After only a few hours, Alice’s father insisted upon cutting the visit short and leaving Vasily’s. Alice left with him, but her mother stayed behind and wouldn’t be lured away for another week. Nor could she, after she’d returned to Madison, forget the life she’d glimpsed in Broadview Heights—Serbian churches and Serbian restaurants and shops, windows displaying Serbian delights—pindjur relishes and plum brandies, semolina cakes and baklavas—and everywhere her lovely language: on the signs and menus, spoken in the house with her brother and among their countrymen out on the streets.
From then on, during her usual arguments with her husband, “I’m moving back to Serbia” was replaced with “I’m moving to Cleveland,” a threat that she was able to make good on much more quickly than expected because, six months later, while preparing his 3:00 lecture, Radovan Kovac suffered a fatal stroke.
That November afternoon, Alice and her brother were picked up from grade school early and gathered at the kitchen table by their mother. There, Alice learned the news that she’d lost her father—the gentle, clever father that she’d loved—and it was there, in this moment, that she knew her chances of happiness had vanished with him. She’d cried for days, refusing to leave his room, face smothered in a shirt that still smelled of him, while the house that he’d chosen for them and that still bore his imprint—the maps he’d taped up to her bedroom walls, the constellation he’d painted on her ceiling—was emptied around her.
Madison would be home to the Kovacs no longer: Alice, her remaining family, and their belongings were crammed into a moving van bound for Broadview Heights. Her father’s body was shipped separately, to be buried a mile from Vasily’s mansion in the most garish style, with live musicians and a tearful, histrionic eulogy from her uncle, delivered in Serbian to baffle those well-mannered American friends her father was so proud to have acquired. For this insult to her father, for this disregard for all the man had valued in his too-brief life, Alice would have liked to slap her uncle’s fat and oily cheek. Instead, she’d hugged and thanked him: not because her mother told her to, but because she’d understood her situation had changed and that she must now look to Vasily for her support.
Her father’s death marked the division between Alice’s mostly sunny childhood and her wretched Cleveland adolescence. Until age twelve, she’d lived in her father’s tidy universe; now, under the auspices of Vasily, the family regressed. Her little brother turned from a shy boy to a thug; he and his friends were forever punching and kicking each other over nothing, or else in Vasily’s basement knocking pins down with a ball. Her mother embraced a protected helplessness. She settled into a house less than two blocks from her brother’s, grew obese, like him, and also primitive and paranoid: the world beyond Broadview was treacherous; everyone was stealing from her—the cable and electric companies, the tax authorities—sending her bills she didn’t owe, so that Alice was eventually required to run the household for her.
As for Alice, in the space of two and a half years, she grew from a slight, pretty child, to a hulking creature of six feet. Black hair sprouted on her underarms and between her legs, creeping up almost to her belly button. Twice a week she shaved not just her legs, but also her abdomen and the small of her back. She developed broad shoulders, fleshy thighs, and pointy breasts. Boys in her class stared but didn’t dare approach her: the majority stood only to her chin. Girls, who first ignored her, later learned to make use of her, dressing her up with lipstick and powder, like a drag queen, to serve as their guardian for R-rated films.
She was, she knew, at best an object of curiosity among her Cleveland “friends.” At slumber parties they would strip her naked to expose a body so much more developed than their own, gawking at her like they did the slides in health class. Among them she’d lie awake, gripped by the first stages of a lifelong insomnia; to try to sleep, she’d imagine being young again, and small again, and on her father’s lap.
Meanwhile, during the days, Alice came crawling onto Vasily’s lap, even when she was too big to avoid raising eyebrows. An egomaniac, Vasily was easily persuaded of her adoration, and she needed him persuaded because she needed his money, most immediately for electrolysis. During her twenty treatments of electric shocks, Alice discovered she possessed a great tolerance for pain. Anorexia taught her another lesson: she could survive on almost nothing. Refusing her mother’s food, she subsisted on carrots, popcorn, chewing gum, and bottles and bottles of Diet Coke. If she were to drop dead, as her mother insisted she would, she couldn’t think of a more American fate than to die of Diet Coke.
Having mastered her own rebellious body, Alice turned her ambitions toward controlling those around her; here, her gift for language served her well. Nicknames she devised for her new classmates proved surprisingly adhesive. Lovely Carol, who in seventh grade began rouging her cheeks, Alice dubbed Clairol. Her next victims were Priscilla Tucker, Tyra Anne Clark, Shawna Lamb; all the pretty little girls with their pretty little names soon became Pucker, Tranny, Shanks.
In order to be spared the worst of her wit, even the cheerleaders sucked up to her, and by sophomore year, she’d made pets of the most popular girls and come to dominate the manipulable society of her high school. Armed with a fake ID, she became a source for alcohol and cigarettes. Being on her good side brought important benefits, and being on her bad side brought worse risks: dull facts were no match for a lively fiction, and adolescent Alice was expert, already, at telling a story.
It was the one she’d framed about herself—of her family’s heartbreak and perseverance, set against the distant, tragic landscape of her war-torn homeland, and peppered with droll Serbian proverbs she’d invented—that convinced Harvard’s admissions to accept her. Persuading Vasily to pay her way through private college was tougher. Vasily claimed to see no use for education: he’d never finished high school and had still acquired every emblem of that vaunted American prosperity. Not everyone, not yet, Alice had made him understand; in this country, the ultimate symbol of success was to have a child (niece would do as well) enrolled at one of its exclusive universities. A name like Harvard, dropped among his neighbors, would dazzle them more than all the jewels on his fingers or the statues in his front yard. Vasily was curious enough to test her theory; so their neighbors had their expectations set, and, come the next fall, Vasily had no choice but to ship Alice off to Cambridge. In this way, she’d turned her uncle’s vanity to her advantage and never once let on the true motive for her efforts; namely, that
her admission to such a campus would have made her father fiercely proud.
Already, Alice understood that she’d mostly disappointed her father’s hopes for her. Her spirit was too black for her ever to become one of those rational, benevolent, and blessed creatures he’d wished for her to be. But at least she was clever enough to find her way among them, to escape the backward isolation of her uncle’s Cleveland, and to stride onto manicured lawns of the sort that had so pleased her father once.
Arriving with her freshman class that fall, Alice was prepared to maneuver once again for her social position. She “comped” the Crimson, figuring this would give her an overview of what and who mattered in the campus scene. While other first-time writers were covering sports matches, the freshman formal, or auditions for the a cappella groups, Alice proposed a who’s who of the school’s fifteen hottest freshmen. The editor let her move ahead, as a lark, and not only was that item the most talked about that fall, Alice had been happily surprised to find her own name among the nominees offered by the paper’s staff.
Unlike at her high school, where petite blondes were favored, here tastes ran toward the more exotic and high fashion. Tall and starved thin, Alice could pull off the heroin chic then in vogue—she cropped her kinky black hair Linda Evangelista short and went around in clinging tanks and low-riding fitted pants and skirts (designer ones, paid for by Vasily). Girls thought her cool, and men, especially artsy types who pursued obscure degrees, prided themselves on appreciating her androgynous beauty.
Whatever value others might place in her appearance, though, it was conventional, American good looks that Alice envied. Delicate bones and full lips, a narrow waist, a tanned calf: such features never failed to rivet her and, for this reason, she felt her pulse quicken on that morning in the fall of sophomore year, when she entered her art history section and spotted Georgia Calvin.