by Jane Smiley
7
ALICE hated her responses to things. Always amazed and respectful, she never managed to find anything out, or even to see what had to be found out. After Noah left, Alice stood in the shower regretting over and over that she hadn’t picked up on one of their exchanges: “Why didn’t you do anything about it?” and “I did” or “I tried.” (So unobservant was she that she couldn’t even remember his exact words.) It would have been perfectly natural to ask, What did you do, when did you do it? Wouldn’t Honey have asked that? Wouldn’t Honey have secured dates and times, details about Noah’s present relationship with Rya, alibis for the evening and the night of May 9?
Honey intrigued Alice the Citizen. He could perceive the murderer in everyone, she thought, whereas she was only able to instantly sympathize. He was trained to make judgments, while judgments were the last thing she could make. As soon as anyone spoke, she saw his point of view, and it was hard for her to rate points of view or to decide between them. She was a liberal who voted in Democratic primaries, addressed envelopes, and even canvassed from time to time, but she had come to suspect that a vital body politic couldn’t really stand such tolerance as hers, widespread. She wondered what Henry was doing. The door of her bedroom opened. It was Susan, who said, “Yoohoo! Didn’t you hear me shout?”
Alice, momentarily transfixed by surprise, shook herself and smiled. “I was in the shower. I hate this paranoia! Noah just jumped all over me about being out of touch last night, and every time the door opens or a curtain moves, my heart starts pounding.”
“Yours!”
“You probably want to pass out!” Alice kissed her friend on the cheek, and Susan sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry I didn’t call last night. I was coming out of the store and there was the theater showing Breaking Away and Manhattan and I couldn’t resist. I thought of calling you. I’m sorry. And I really didn’t realize that the phones were still unplugged when I got home. I was just beat.”
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Well, actually,” Alice dropped a dress over her head and bit her lip. “I went out to the Botanic Garden in Brooklyn.” She smiled.
“I thought you were going to come over to the shop. I looked for you all day.”
“Did you? When you didn’t say anything about it, I just assumed you’d forgotten and I figured you were busy….” She let her voice fade, but Susan didn’t say anything. “I’m sorry.” But even while regretting her own clumsiness for the millionth time, Alice felt resentful. To have not spent those hours with Henry? She beat it back, beating back as well the reflexive confession of where she had been, how she had found a new “interest.” It would be a good topic of conversation—what he was like, how he was dressed, what he did for a living, how old he was and how experienced. “Hungry?” Alice said, heading for the kitchen. “I’m starved.”
“No,” replied Susan, an expression of perfect reserve that erased Alice’s own reserve. Instantly Alice wanted to press upon her friend the bagels with all the cream cheese, two grapefruit halves and whatever else she could find—a hard-boiled egg, a banana, a sugar cookie, the jar of artichoke hearts. Susan sipped at a cup of tea and talked coolly about work. Yes she had set up her displays, the clothes were nice, but drab colors, lots of khaki, and even more expensive than the owners had expected. Nubbly cotton sweaters for a hundred dollars, thin white balloon pants for eighty-five. Jeanne, the new salesgirl, hadn’t shown up again, they’d caught a fifteen-year-old trying to leave with a French T-shirt under her blouse. Alice said, “These grapefruit are very sweet” and “The cream cheese is Zabar’s best,” lifting her bagel alluringly.
Although she turned down everything, Susan smiled and said, “Remember that time I took you to Denny’s parents’ house?”
“His mother made pie for breakfast.”
“And one of those nights for dinner there were five plates of chicken on the table, one at each corner and one in the middle.”
“And the bowl for gravy was a mixing bowl.”
“And there were two mixing bowls full of mashed potatoes.”
“Tell me about it,” exclaimed Alice. “I mashed them myself with a potato masher.”
“Mrs. Minehart has never operated what you might call ‘une cuisine,’” laughed Susan, “but there was a whole cabinet set aside for candy and cookies. Do you think it wrecked him?”
“Wrecked whom?”
“Denny.”
“How could it have wrecked him?”
Susan tilted back in her chair. “It was so much fun. It was endless fun. I don’t think I ever heard about all the things they did, those kids. One year after school, Denny had a job stuffing sausage. I think he must have been only about seven or eight. He’d stuff with this hand crank sausage stuffer for an hour and a half or two after school, and then on Friday he’d take home a great big circle of sausage for dinner. He was such a little bread-winner! And in the summer he fished and took home bass and things for dinner. He was very proud. I knew him for all those years and he never stopped coming up with stories about little things he had done when he was growing up. He was good at telling them, too. I used to think that I made it bad for him, because before he met me, he just sort of accepted his childhood, but I was so amazed and excited by it all that after a while he began to see it as strange, as a sort of golden age. He was much more delighted by it later on than he was when I met him.”
“It was interesting. You couldn’t help your response. You wouldn’t have wanted to, either, would you? You’ve got to be yourself.”
“But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you’re mad at them for being a certain way, it’s actually you who’s making them be that way.”
“But if you tried to separate that tangle every hour of the day, you’d go crazy, and what’s worse, everything you did would be self-conscious and false.”
After a moment, Susan said, “I don’t think Denny thought it was ever as interesting since as it was before.”
“Since what? Before what?”
“Since we got together.”
“Oh, nonsense.” Alice stood up and began vehemently clearing away, in order to express her dismissal of this proposition.
“I’m not blaming myself. I know how you hate for me to blame myself. That’s just a convenient watershed. I suppose I’m saying that if I had had his childhood, I would have thought that everything since was an anti-climax.”
“Noah was here for about forty-five minutes this morning. I realized it was the first time I’d ever really talked to him. Isn’t that funny? We’ve known each other for twelve—”
“I think Denny had a dream childhood, the last Tom Sawyer boyhood in the history of America.”
“Let’s go outside. It’s another nice day.”
“Why are you so determined to change the subject?”
“You sound like you’re talking out of depression—”
Susan shook her head. “Alice, my dear, you amaze me. How should I talk? What should my voice be coming out of? How should I be seeing everything? You always wait until you think well of something or someone and then you label that the truth.”
Stung by both the justice of this remark and by the glimpse of Susan observing and drawing conclusions about her, Alice did not reply. She remembered Henry Mullet. She hadn’t slept much the previous night. Tears smarted beneath her eyelids. Susan went on, “What has Denny had for the last five years? A job with no future, a rented apartment, some nice clothes. Big deal.”
“A job that he loved, a lover that he adored, an apartment in New York City, and money to spend as he pleased.”
“So you say.”
“So he said. And he didn’t think his job had no future. He had lots of hopes.”
Susan grimaced. “You know that his father used to make him do farm work in the winter with no gloves because he didn’t want his oldest boy ever to like farming? He wanted him t
o be a doctor or a lawyer or a college professor. He never held that against his father. He never held anything against anyone. Not even Craig.”
Not wanting to, Alice exclaimed, “He didn’t have to hold anything against Craig, you did that for him!”
Susan shrugged, reached into her bag, and took out a pack of cigarettes.
“I didn’t realize you were smoking again.”
Susan didn’t reply.
“Don’t smoke! Eat! I’ll go buy you ten pounds of chocolate. You were inhuman when you were giving up smoking.”
“You know, I loved smoking in Minneapolis. I loved to go with Denny to the gigs and sit at a table near the front, and watch him and drink beer and smoke. I’d buy a pack of Camels and get a new book of matches, and put them on the table right in front of me, like a magazine or something. Friends would come over and sit down and leave, Denny and Craig would sit down between sets, the waitress would keep topping off my glass, and I would sit there appreciating Denny and smoking. That was the key activity. I was secure in the knowledge that at the end of the evening, Denny would get paid, pack up, and then take me home and fuck my brains out. When you had a pack of cigarettes in your hand, you really had something weighty and full.”
“You were so determined to give it up.”
“Why did we move to Chicago? Why did we move to New York? Time began to push us. Every time a new group came out with a big record, Craig would figure out their average age.”
“We grew up.”
Susan smiled. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. No one had any kids.”
“Can you imagine?” Alice meant, telling a five-year-old about this.
“No one ever did. Don’t you think that’s peculiar?”
“What?”
“You and Jim were married for almost five years. How come you never had any kids? Or even thought about it, as far as I knew.”
“Kids in New York—”
“Come on. There’re kids all over New York.”
“Yes, but think of the awful lives they lead. Mom has to go with you everywhere till you’re about fifteen. You’re officially indoors, which means behind three locked barriers, or outdoors, which means in some dusty park with five hundred other kids. There’s none of that easy drifting through the house, leaving the refrigerator open and banging the screen door that we had. If we’d lived elsewhere, I think we’d have—”
“Really?”
“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”
“You got to be twenty-seven, and you never thought about it?”
“What room was there for kids? There was always Jim Jim Jim. Can you imagine him modifying his life for kids? Not going out every other night? Getting up at six? Eating hot dogs for dinner? Once when we were at his parents’ house, his cousin came over with her baby, and somehow it got on Jim’s lap. He didn’t hold it at all, and pretty soon, it started to slide off. He didn’t even realize it. Finally, Jim’s mother jumped up and grabbed it before it fell to the floor. I mean, he didn’t have bad intentions, but he didn’t even realize it!”
“What about you? Didn’t you ever lust after a baby?”
“I lusted after Jim! What was left over to lust after a baby?”
“Well, doesn’t all of this seem weird to you? The patterns of our lives formed twelve years ago! And they didn’t basically change until now!”
“We were happy!”
Susan’s eyebrows lifted.
“Well, at least we were going to be happy. I always thought that things with Jim would get smooth and comfortable sometime. When he was around, I felt exposed to something, either danger or embarrassment, every minute, but I knew that would pass, and then we’d do other things.”
“Yes, and I always thought that someday Craig would leave, or at least learn to live his own life, and then we’d do other things. Well, let’s do something. Aren’t you tired of hanging around?”
And something about the way she set her teacup in the saucer and lifted her eyelids reminded Alice that she was with Susan. With Susan! No one was like Susan, after all, no one thought about things as Susan did. Some quality of her mind was unique, attractive but indefinable, inaccessible. Always Alice came around to this sense of something beyond reach, or even comprehension, in her friend. Repeatedly, she had failed to name it: femininity, reserve, integrity, even selfishness, self-reliance, security, but it was larger and more mysterious than any of these, and was something Alice could not help wanting to possess. It was a great talent, this trick of arousing perennial curiosity. Alice put her arm affectionately around Susan’s waist and said, “Let’s go out to the Statue of Liberty. We’ve never once been there.”
AS IT turned out, they ended up merely in midtown, window shopping. Starting at Bergdorf’s, they strolled down Fifth Avenue, looking at store windows. There were high-heeled sandals in alligator-patterned leather, a narrow strap with a tiny gold buckle to set off the bone and tendon of a slender ankle. Chocolates shaped like flowers, spilling from gold boxes. Tablecloths scattered with embroidered violets and appliquéd roses. Cuffed cotton shorts and crisp shirts bearing vivid palm leaves and the faces of tigers and monkeys. Hardbound books with jackets as bizarre and hip as the pictures on record albums. Tight white skirts slit up the front or the back. “I don’t think we’re with it any more,” laughed Susan. They examined their hair and faces in the glittering clean windows.
“I went off to college with a whole new wardrobe,” said Alice. “Six square wool dresses with short sleeves, one of which was purple with green vertical bands—”
“I remember that one.”
“Two pair of hip-hugging woolen slacks, one gold and one red white and blue plaid, with those funny belts that were longer around the bottom edge than they were around the top edge—”
“Ugh.”
“Wait, get this, and a sleeveless wool sweater, also gold, with something in green and blue embroidered in wool across the top. Sleeveless! Hip length—”
“Just long enough to cover the belt.”
“Yards of beads.”
“I had those apple seeds strung on a string. I could wind them around my neck six times and still get them off over my head. I thought they were the choicest jewels I’d ever seen.”
“I was very envious of those. You definitely had more style than the rest of us.”
“My favorite period was the Indian cotton period. Calf length.”
“Tights and Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals.”
“A huge wool sweater.”
“With the lanolin still in it, and preferably with little bits of straw and sheep shit to prove it was wool. And hair as long as the bottom edge of the sweater.”
“Your hair was beautiful long.”
“Peacoat in the winter, with the sweater hanging out beneath.”
“That was a good period for you.” Alice smiled to think of Susan’s hair parted by a pencil line down the center of her head, then brushed smooth and looped over her ears, lifted and twisted once and pinned to her head with a single long silver barrette. Or braided as thick as three fingers down her back.
“Your best period was forties dresses from antique clothing stores.”
“Mmmm.” Alice nodded. “I still have the sneaking suspicion that those dresses are the hippest of all, that they do so much for your figure they transcend the tides of fashion.”
“Dream on.”
“Groovy.” Alice put her arm through Susan’s and stepped off the curb of Fifty-fourth Street. In a moment they stopped to gaze at a tray of glistening preserved fruit: peaches, pineapple, cherries, but also kiwi fruit and sunset-tinted mangoes and lime-colored quinces. Behind them were trays of cakes, mostly varying intensities of chocolate. A sign in the window advertised fifteen varieties of coffee. “Carrot cake is out of fashion, too,” said Susan, with a mock sigh.
“Thank God. And honey bran raisin cupcakes.”
“And mystical morning lightning herbal tea.”
“I loved the cloth
es but I hated the food.”
“Black beans and rice, pinto beans and rice, garbanzo beans and rice.”
“Don’t forget the water. When you’d finished your beans and rice, there was always a lot of water in the bottom of the bowl. You couldn’t really call it broth.”
“Yummy.”
By now they were laughing. The few passers-by smiled to see them. Alice was amazed at the power of things to raise her spirits so thoroughly, even things she couldn’t afford or didn’t want. “What’s your favorite former fantasy?” she asked.
“Oh, definitely dome-commune-with-radio-station. Don’t you remember that one? It was Ray’s, I think, first, but he and Denny and Craig talked about it for at least a year. Craig was going to get a first-class broadcaster license. Plots of vegetables next to each dome, chickens, cows, kerosene lamps until we got the hydroelectric generator in, all cars left at the edge of the property. I had the horse plan all ready to go. And goats. Craig saw these people in California who lived in a teepee and kept goats, and he nearly had one shipped out.”
“That was a good one. Jim imagined himself getting on a perfectly natural sleep schedule. Whenever it would be dark, he would sleep. He thought you could stockpile it over the winter, and if everything averaged out over the year, you’d be perfectly alert and healthy. We were going to sleep on straw mats and do yoga for an hour before breakfast, which would be entirely fruit, of course.”
“Us, too,” said Susan. “They must have talked.”
“It was a wonderful fantasy. Not my favorite, though.”
“What was that?”
“Overland to Nepal.”
“You even saved money for that, didn’t you?”
“Two or three thousand dollars.”
“That was a lot of money, then.”
“We never could decide between the Land-Rover idea and the donkey idea. Jim thought if you were going to do it, then you had to go to every extreme, otherwise it wouldn’t be a pure experience. He always said that if you thought of something like going by donkey or eating only fruit for breakfast, then you had a moral obligation to do it, because you could lose your soul through compromise.”