The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  Then she thought she heard her mother yelling back, but she realized immediately that she was yelling at her father. Her father was home! Her father was home; he was home—she could see through the window his white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, his hands on his head, his elbows bent, his fingers clutching his hair. Her father was home and he was yelling too. He looked younger somehow—he hadn’t shaved. Her father looked handsome and angry.

  From what Alice could tell, listening through the glass, her father was already at a familiar refrain: “What were you thinking?”

  “What do you expect?” her mother bellowed.

  “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “Alan, it’s unfair.”

  “What’s unfair is for me to come home and find dog shit in my shoe because you insisted on getting a dog that you refuse to walk. What is unfair is that our little girl is a nervous wreck.”

  “Mommy!” Alice was yelling again, but now she was at the window; now she was looking through the glass door, but not going in. She was stuck in one place and she did not want to move. They were talking about her. They were yelling. She wanted her mother to come to her, to come forward and cover her with kisses, to treat her like a baby. She wanted her father to listen closely and be impressed by her composure. But neither her father nor her mother came forward. Her father saw Alice through the window and made his face into a smile. Her mother pushed her hair off her forehead and motioned Alice to come in.

  Charlotte said, “What, sweetheart, what is it?”

  Alice ran to her father and threw her arms around him. He smelled like animals—all pelt and heavy musk and somehow so clean.

  “Alice?”

  “He’s out in the water swimming,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “He’s been planning it for weeks. He’s out there in the sound with the … the cigarette boats.” She heard her own voice and its tone increased her worry. Her voice—weak and breathless—made the idea that much more frightening.

  “What do you mean, he’s been planning it?” her father asked, not gently.

  “Alan—”

  “Charlotte,” he said, and her name engendered silence. “Alice, why on earth didn’t you tell us? Do you know how cold the water is?”

  “He has a wet suit,” she said.

  She told them because she was afraid for his life, yes, but also because she was afraid that her parents would continue fighting, afraid that the conclusion would be eventually drawn that no one, when it came right down to it, knew how to keep everyone together, all in one house at one time.

  ⋆⋆⋆

  On a boat, the neighbor’s boat, the Mafia neighbor’s big white speedboat, they went looking. Alice stood wrapped in a towel between her mother’s legs. Charlotte kept saying thank-you to the neighbor, and rubbing Alice’s arms and asking if she was cold. Alice wasn’t cold but she wasn’t exactly comfortable, as her mother’s coat was scratchy, but she would have sooner jumped into the water herself than risk losing those arms around her. Her affection made Alice feel thrilled and guilty as her mother was clearly angry with her father. Not only that, but she knew that when they found Gus, everyone would have more pressing issues of anger. Any affection seemed so temporary.

  The Mafia neighbor was small and strong and gripped the wheel with both hands. Alice liked him. His name was Big John, even though he was short. His wife never left the house. His kids were named Anthony and Amy, and they drove fast cars, two separate ones, back and forth from the high school. Alice knew her parents weren’t friends with Big John, and it was only out of a dire emergency that her father had phoned over to their house. Her father looked in the water intensely, not saying much of anything. The water was oddly blue—not grayish or green but an eerie cobalt blue disturbed with white as the waves grew the farther out they went. Charlotte wore a too-small camel coat over her robe and a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses even though there was barely any sun. She was smoking and she smelled like autumn—a trace of vanilla oil in her hair, Merit Ultra Lights—her mother’s bare skin when the coat fell open was warm despite the cold.

  “John,” her mother said, and then louder, “John? Would you mind slowing down just a bit?”

  They were creeping along, rocked intermittently by small thumping breakers. They were looking at small splashes, at buoys; they were fraught with false sightings. There were not many other boats around, but the ones that appeared were going gangbusters through the glass-blue water—Ginsu blades whirring on their big black motors—unable to detect that the still-freezing water happened to contain a boy.

  “You didn’t notice he was doing this?” her father said for the eighteenth time. At this point he didn’t even look at Charlotte.

  Her mother didn’t answer. She gasped, barely audibly— Alice felt the rise and fall of her mother’s bony chest against her back.

  And then he was there, a few yards ahead, doing the crawl. He was gone and then he wasn’t—just like that. Alice recognized this sick understanding, the way a person could disappear and then reappear—unfair and newly possible, made somehow better than before.

  There he was. There he was—a shiny black wet suit-clad body, a tawny nape of neck, and pale flashes of cupped hands— perfect.

  “Gus!” Alice yelled, jumping from her mother’s lap. It occurred to her that she was fond of yelling. It had suddenly become a part of who she was: She was a girl who yelled.

  Everyone was yelling. Everyone except her mother. Her mother just stood in her scratchy coat, one pale hand shielding her forehead, the other planted on her high ridge of hip.

  Gus swam doggedly, slowly, in a slightly wavering line. If he heard them—and Alice was sure he heard them—he was not letting on. On he swam, even when a wave broke his stride. Big John said, “Good swimmer,” and then, “Crazy fuckin’ kid.” Her father looked annoyed, but Big John seemed to mean it as a compliment. Big John seemed a little jealous. When the yelling didn’t work, and Gus maintained his stroke, pretending they simply weren’t there, her father said, “Get closer,” and Big John got them as close as he could. What her father did then was reach over the side and try to grab hold of Gus, but it was more difficult, apparently, than he had thought; “Goddamn it,” he said. The wet suit was tight and slippery.

  Unlike her husband, Charlotte didn’t seem angry. She hardly seemed riled up at all. In fact, Alice noticed that as her father tried furiously to retrieve Gus from the cold water, her mother merely tilted her face to the sun—as if the sun were a shy suitor in need of some encouragement before going in for a kiss.

  “This kid,” said Big John, shaking his head.

  And August kept swimming, as if he were physically unable to hear their yells or sense their frantic presence.

  “Who knew he was serious,” Charlotte said, quite clearly.

  Her father turned to her, saying, “What?” He was breathing hard, still not giving up on grabbing hold of Gus.

  “Will you quit that,” Charlotte said. “He’ll stop if you do, trust me.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Who knew he was serious’?”

  Charlotte sniffed, and brought a ragged thumbnail to her teeth. “He made mention of doing this—this kind ofthing. He makes mention of a lot of things to me.”

  “Ever wonder why?” her father said. He wasn’t yelling anymore. He sat on the ledge with his eyes on Gus, but in a different way, somehow. Alice stood apart from her mother. She stood wrapped in the towel, listening. She knew her father meant that Gus was trying to impress their mother. He often made this kind of remark; he had various unflattering theories about Gus’s behavior in regard to Charlotte, and Alice could rarely decide if he was right. Most of the time she was certain that Gus was trying to impress no one but himself, and she knew firsthand what a tough audience he could be. “Jesus,” her father said, with a certain degree of finality.

  “You want me to keep close on him like this, or what?” John said.

  The light was starting to fade, casting long shadows on deck. The blue
water was no longer so blue. “That’s right, John; that’s perfect,” Charlotte said, keeping her eyes solely on her son, as if she were merely awaiting a testy reply. Her eyes said, Fm finished; I am counting to three.

  But still nothing.

  Charlotte took off her sunglasses and chewed on an end in apparent contemplation. She took a breath and yelled in Gus’s direction, “I am so bored!”

  Big John laughed.

  Gus then veered in a different direction. He veered toward the boat’s ladder, and when he stopped swimming, he didn’t waste any time getting out of the water. He climbed up on deck without any help. They all knew not to try.

  “What were you thinking?” her father growled, passing Gus two towels. “Gus? Goddamn it, are you all right?”

  “You did a very stupid thing,” Big John said. “A very fucking stupid thing, if you want to know the truth.”

  Gus looked at Big John and said, “I’m fine,” and then to his mother: “I only had a little more to go.”

  Charlotte didn’t say anything. She turned from her son, with his blue lips and bloodshot eyes—her son who was twelve years old—and she pulled Alice onto her lap. She could feel her mother’s nerves—how her skin was feverishly hot for a moment and how she clutched too hard. Gus looked at Alice with cold wet eyes and Alice looked down at her mother’s bare feet. Big John started the boat again. The sound of the motor seemed much louder than before. It was colder now that the sun was gone. It was hard to believe it had, after all, been a pleasant day—one of the mildest of the year.

  Gus kept looking at Charlotte, who played with Alice’s hair for a few idle moments before settling her gaze on the water, now speeding by.

  Alice wriggled out of her mother’s grasp. “I’m sorry,” she said, tapping Gus on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I told.”

  He ignored her, shrugging off her finger tap. She couldn’t help thinking of that empty corridor, after her mother had walked away.

  “Come, Alice,” her father said, motioning her up to the steering wheel. “Be careful, now.”

  And she stood between her father and Big John, looking out from behind the wheel, all of them silently marveling at how much territory he had covered. But Alice was also watching her mother and her brother and how each of them acted unhappy but somehow didn’t look it. They stood apart on opposite sides of the small bow, but they couldn’t have looked more similar. Their stances expressed how the world was attainable; they were ready to collect their portion, whatever it happened to be.

  But neither of them saw the bird.

  It was Alice who gazed up at the sky. She looked up for a moment—if only to look away from her family—the way one looks for any means of escape upon realizing, not without shame, that the love they possess is too much. They know this love is unnameable just as it is unmalleable and that it will, in all likeliness, grow to define them. Alice caught a glimpse of this self-knowledge, but more than anything, she was flooded with wanting. She only knew she had to look away.

  But the sky.

  But the bird.

  It was green and blue and yellow, big as a small dog. It was tropically attired—some flamboyant refugee from a continent away—and it was no illusion. But when Alice yelled (as she’d been wont to do), this time no sound came. She watched the bird as it flew slowly by. Her mouth was open but it was open in awe. By the time the sound came, the bird was gone and no one had seen it but her. Which was sad, when she thought about it, but sad in a way that she would later learn to identify as personal, like touching an old scar on a beloved body and hearing the answer of exactly how it got there.

  In the middle of the night Alice still hadn’t slept, and she rose from bed. Gus had gone to sleep soon after they’d all wandered inside the house and silently eaten cold chicken. They always had chicken—that fact had become a family joke; it usually made her smile. But her brother had refused to even look at her, which had made it very difficult to eat the chicken, which had made it very easy to cry. She hadn’t cried. She thought of the bird, and it helped somehow. She’d asked for a Coke and she got one.

  The moon streamed through her tall windows at two o’clock in the morning, casting the room in silvery dark. She could hear the train whistle far away. Their house was close enough to the station to hear the whistle perfectly and yet far enough away for the noise to sound plaintive. Leaving her room, Alice padded through the corridor—imagining riding the overnight train—past her parents’ closed door. Gus’s door was open a crack, a habit left over from when he was very little, when he was afraid of being locked in.

  She didn’t hesitate. The day was over now, and she was no longer afraid of losing him, no longer afraid of his judgments. His room was warmer than hers, and he’d thrown off the covers to reveal an old Cosmos T-shirt. He was sleeping soundly. Posters of sharks were pinned to each wall. Every poster had the same black eyes staring out into the room.

  It was not by any conscious design that Alice lay down stiffly beside her brother, but she was suddenly there, horizontal in his twin bed, with a wild heartbeat and a ringing in her ears. It was from the fear of sharks and the way their eyes were even darker than these darkly male-redolent surroundings. It was out of dizziness at being displaced and not tired in the middle of the night. And it was also the train shooting off to distant places, of which she had no understanding. The whistle sounded as a kind of reminder that the world was about so much more than houses and trains and the people sleeping in them. The world is without safety, was what that whistle said; the world is without end.

  “August?” she said, and she hated her voice.

  3

  Distance, 1981

  Charlotte’s friend Susan was having a barbecue on the Fourth of July and nobody besides Charlotte felt like going. The party was in Connecticut at Susan’s new husband’s house, a good three hours away. Their father made it a practice not to ever leave the house over holiday weekends. He enjoyed poking around the property drilling holes—anything to avoid traffic. “You know my position on traffic,” he told Charlotte, over breakfast.

  “I know, love. Traffic is hell.”

  “No, hell is other people. Other people at barbecues.”

  Charlotte smiled with half her mouth and squeezed a tea bag with her fingers. She never used a spoon. “I told her we’d go. The kids will have a ball.”

  “No, we won’t,” Gus said. His voice was especially deep be- cause it was morning. Sometimes it seemed as if he had literally grown in his sleep. He claimed his joints hurt from growing, but Alice thought that seemed a bit overboard. He was fourteen and she was nearly his height at twelve, but it wasn’t a big deal because she had always been tall.

  “There’ll be kids your age,” Charlotte said.

  “Wow,” Gus said. “That sounds tempting.”

  Alice laughed. “We like doing the same thing each year,” she said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Gus said. “I just don’t feel like going to Susan’s. It’s gonna blow.”

  “August,” their father said.

  “It’s gonna suck moose cock,” he said, laughing.

  Alice waited for their father to turn. There was always a point where Gus pushed too far, and she suspected that had been it. But he only looked at their mother and said, “Okay then, looks like we’re going. Let us hope it doesn’t suck. Okay?”

  It was too bad. Alice had good memories of Fourths of July at home. She couldn’t explain why exactly—they were essentially uneventful times. Her father grilled—that was something. He grilled burgers, hot dogs, peppers, plums—anything you handed him, he grilled it. Once Alice handed him a piece of coconut cake and he grilled that too, maintaining a straight face. Gus and Alice could invite anyone over; they could do what they liked but they had to come hungry—he grilled from three o’clock on. “I’m the grill man,” he’d say with a shy grin. No matter how many people were shrieking on the lawn or playing games inside if rain was pouring down, her father grilled. So deep was his concent
ration that it was necessary to approach from the front so as not to startle him.

  So the grilling, Alice thought, that was one thing. Also, her mother could be this certain way: she’d have bursts of ambition to create anything that smacked of Americana. One year she bought a crochet kit and spent the day learning. Sometimes she made strawberry shortcake, or an American-flag cake with at least three layers. And her mother wasn’t someone who cooked for the sake of cooking—no, her mother knew how to eat. Alice loved watching her savor each fattening bite. Plus there were Gus’s friends. Last year Gus’s friend Ezra told her (after an impressive turn at spitting watermelon seeds) that she had a great laugh. It was always nice watching fireworks explode and fall into the water. They were able to see not only the sky’s display but also the crowded harbor with all the different boats. “I like this view so much better than if it were just ocean,” Charlotte never tired of saying. “It’s the boats that make for such a lucky view. Alan? Don’t you think?”

  It was this reason, Alice finally decided, why she liked the Fourth of July: Her mother usually seemed to realize what on earth she was doing with a family and what it was that kept her coming home.

  Susan’s party was in the mountains on a pond. There were steep steps built into the lawn that led down to a large deck where most of the adults were sitting. As she followed her parents down the steps, Alice saw a boy about her age dive off the deck into the water. The dive made a big fat splash and two thin women got wet, making brief but sour faces. There were already plenty of swimmers and inner tubes afloat. A grill was giving off smoke, the sooty gray dissolving into the chalky sky. It was a humid day, and the air was thick and hot enough to keep mentioning. The Greens stood for a moment, stewing in the heat, dazed and surveying the crowd. Charlotte kept holding her light cotton shirt away from her body and then, after a moment, letting it slowly fall. Gus took off his shirt altogether and balled it up in his hands. “I’m exhausted,” Alan said, “and we just got here.”