The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “I thought no smoking,” Alice said, after approaching and sitting at her mother’s feet.

  “Yeah, well, I thought so too,” she said. “How’re you doing, Miss Alice?” She put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

  “Okay I guess.”

  “With these kind, the hand-rolled kind, I do it less, though—the smoking. Don’t I?”

  Alice shrugged and leaned back onto her mother’s legs. She could feel the fine hairs that were growing back from waxing. The mild scent of Lubriderm lotion made her think of petals. “Look,” Alice said, “that’s Gus. Do you see?” Gus was still in the pond—just a speck in the distance, flanked by two other specks. She’d been right about his followers.

  “Where?” Charlotte said.

  Alice got up and pointed. She noticed the sun was blazing through the white haze, announcing a quick descent. “Do you see?”

  “I do, sweetheart. He’s right there. He’s heading our way.” “Can I have a sip?” She reached for her mother’s sweating glass of what looked like lemonade.

  “I’m not sure you’ll like it,” Charlotte said. “It’s very sour.” Alice—not exactly sure why she wanted it so badly—took a sip anyway. It tasted like etherized bugs. She was coughing and coughing with watery eyes.

  “Told you,” Charlotte said, rubbing her back. “You okay?” Alice nodded. “That’s not sour. That is pure alcohol.” “Mm,” she said, kind of grinning, “there’s that too. You want to go get a Coke or something?”

  Alice shook her head. She’d get one in a minute. She was hungry for a cheeseburger; it was almost dinnertime. Gus was a bigger speck on the green, dark pond, coming closer. “Why do you think he likes to swim so far?”

  After a moment her mother answered slowly. “He needs to know,” Charlotte said, after taking a final long sip. “Your brother needs to know what it feels like to be far away from everything familiar, in order to know how to love it. Does that make sense?”

  Alice shook her head. The spike of her mother’s intoxicated breath heightened her careful speech, and Alice had a growing anticipation for the fireworks explosion. She couldn’t help picturing the way her family would find each other—they were that kind of family, the kind who respected these moments like the ball dropping, like the World Series, like fireworks on the Fourth—and they would stand together, their faces upturned like they’d never seen such a show. She couldn’t help picturing how her parents would look amazed and in their amazement they would look young—they would look a bit lost. Everyone looked that way, if only a little, when looking up at the sky. Alice could see it all—how in no time the sky would return to mussel blackness, how they’d soon be back on the highway, leaving Susan and Tom and who knew how many kids to clean up the remains of the party. Alice knew instinctively what this was, this seeing the future as a kind of dull past. It made Alice want to crawl onto Charlotte’s narrow lap, which was hardly big enough to hold her anymore.

  “Do you think he’ll always feel that way?”

  “I think so,” Charlotte said, nodding.

  “That’s sad,” Alice said. She wondered if her mother would call up Mr. J. D. Connor this coming week and ask him all about Cambodia. Or Bhutan. These were the places she’d been pointing out lately in her big world atlas in the living room. “Don’t you think it’s sad?”

  “Yes,” her mother said, “I do.”

  4

  Sleep, 1984

  Her name was Cady DeForrest. Cady, not Katie, not -£. A-Kate. She didn’t go to their school. Gus met her in October at a party illegally given on a tennis club’s courts. The courts were in an old airplane hangar nestled in the woods. They closed at nine P.M., but a burned-out pro (who was leaving the next day for Australia) had the keys, and he’d decided to go out with a bang. Gus knew him from … oh, who knew from where. Alice had stopped wondering and started accepting that her brother just knew people. He knew plenty of girls, different girls over whom he acted crazy but who were inevitably phased out. She had ceased being surprised.

  Cady DeForrest, however, tipped the scales.

  Alice hadn’t gone to the party. She’d known about it—Gus hadn’t hidden it from her—but she had the feeling Gus didn’t want her along. Because he actually was great about taking her everywhere without her even having to ask, and because these were places where she was the only sophomore in sight, she thought she’d give him a break. It was Friday night. She went with Eleanor to the movies, drank beers in the parking lot with a couple of boys they’d recognized vaguely from school—most of the time wondering why they’d accepted the impromptu invitation, why they were all just standing around watching cars. Out of not much more than agitation, she gave the taller one a hand job between the stand of trees and the lot. He was big and grateful and smelled like soap, like butter. She liked how he kissed lightly and the way he looked so surprised when she went to unbutton his jeans. He said he’d call her but she really didn’t care. Once she had done something like that, once she surprised herself and someone else, the rest felt forced and steeped in obligation, and she didn’t trust obligation any more than she trusted good old neglect.

  The next morning, from her window, Alice saw a blond girl in a red pilled sweater sneaking out their front door. There were leaves and small twigs stuck in the wool, and her smooth hair was tied in what looked like a bra. She wore a witchy black skirt with an uneven hem, under which were her white bare feet on tiptoe as she hurried out the door. She sat on the front steps and, obviously freezing, tugged on a pair of brown cowboy boots that she’d been holding like books in her arms. She didn’t look back at Gus’s window. She bypassed the gravel driveway and disappeared into the woods.

  Alice went back to sleep and dreamed of the hand job (the odd combination of anxiousness and power, the fear of someone coming and the fear of someone not coming) and she woke up to the smell of bacon. It was the smell of their mother being gone, as she never kept it in the house (a particular vestige of Charlotte’s equally ambivalent Jewish upbringing— shrimp okay, pork not okay skipping Rosh Hashanah barely okay skipping Yom Kippur simply not). Alice could bet there were also any number of preservative-laden baked goods lying on countertops with their bright cardboard containers torn open, their plastic wrapping cast aside, but not thrown away. She could bet Gus had woken full of restless energy and (after their father left for the lab at seven) put Spin in the car and went to the first open deli in town, picked up the bacon and the packaged goods, chatted with the pimple-faced kid at the counter, chatted with the odd old man. He would be waiting now for his sister to come downstairs; he’d be in the mood for talking. Alice did her best—as she wrapped herself in Charlotte’s old blue chenille robe, as she padded down the back stairs—not to be so eager to listen.

  “Good morning to you,” Gus said.

  “You’ve showered,” Alice said, amazed.

  “It is,” Gus said, handing Alice a cup of milky coffee, “a beautiful morning.”

  “Are you going to start singing?”

  “I might. I’m telling you, I just might.”

  “So,” Alice said, sitting down at the table, looking out at the gray water, at what was, in fact, the blandest kind of day.

  “So,” he said. Even though she wasn’t looking, she could hear that he was grinning.

  “All right, who is she?” Alice asked in a bored voice, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “The girl with the boots, the one who left this morning.” She still didn’t look at him. Spin’s big head nudged her hand up and over and she pet him, hard. Outside, a cardinal stood stone-still on a long bent branch: a swath of blood on an arm.

  “Oh, man,” Gus said, biting a jelly doughnut, getting powder on his face and not bothering to wipe it off. He didn’t wonder aloud how Alice had seen her, how she’d known the girl had stayed the night. When you had feelings as big and encompassing as his, Alice assumed it meant you never questioned their importance or their impact on the world. For Gus, the world had stopped. Not just for him, but
for Alice as well; and not just for Alice but for everyone. Self-involvement, she supposed, was what that was called. But it didn’t feel like self-involvement; it felt like inclusion, like elevation. She wanted to feel along with him. She wanted to lose herself in knowing. She turned from the red bird knowing full well that when she looked again it would be gone.

  “Let’s start with a name,” Alice said, flouting—as she did with nobody else—her expressly practical side.

  He told her that Cady DeForrest had been the only one at the party who wanted to actually play tennis. Everyone else had just sat around on the courts doing shots, smoking pot, and she’d shown up with a racket. She had long legs and strong arms and one seriously nice ass. “I’d seen her before,” Gus explained. “I’d seen her at the drugstore buying calamine lotion sometime before Labor Day. She’d had a bad case of poison ivy.”

  “Sexy,” Alice said.

  Gus, laughing, said, “That’s what she said, when I told her!”

  “She did? Weird.”

  “Then she said she had to pee, and I said I didn’t want to stop looking at her and I followed her out into the woods, and when we were alone I told her to go ahead and pee. And she did. She peed in front of me.”

  “Did you look?”

  “Yeah, I looked. We were both laughing. She looked so good. I mean, I’ve never seen a girl look so good. …” He piled bacon on a plate, turned off the stove, put the plate on the table, and sat down. “So, you know, I kissed her then.”

  “While she was peeing?”

  “No, Jesus, no. Right after.” He was trying not to smile. “She goes to Portbay,” he said, suddenly shy. “She’s a junior.”

  “How did she get home this morning?”

  “She walked, I guess. I didn’t really know she’d gone.”

  Alice would never understand him. “You didn’t know she’d gone? She didn’t wake you to say good-bye?” He was not disturbed in the least, not concerned that she left in a state of regret, composing a list of his shortcomings, a state with which Alice herself was so familiar. “Well, are you going to call her?”

  “Already did. She’s coming over later.”

  Alice should have hated her. By all rights, she was the kind of girl who had points against her from the start: She was petite but strong, butter-cream blond and actually in the physics club and played the guitar in addition to being indisputably pretty. Cady was rich—but super rich—and she looked it, no matter how pilled her sweaters were (she was wearing a green one now, buttoned up the front with two of the buttons missing) and no matter how stained her tan cords. Her good looks verged on the ordinary, and it was their ordinariness that was so threatening; hers was a face you’d see in sepia tones on the walls of restricted country clubs, in generation after generation of well-documented ladies’ tennis and sailing competitions. It was a face that barely escaped an upturned button nose. She was from a family that had donated libraries, that had appeared in various biographies of politicians and starlets alike. But her parents had died in their own airplane somewhere over the Indian Ocean when she was just six, leaving a spinster aunt to raise her, and somehow this fact made Cady seem more real (if sadly more enthralling) to Alice. This brought her down to the same brown earth, the same place where Alice lived, where a mother and a father defined her existence even if they weren’t there.

  “My aunt is a nightmare,” she told Alice in a matter-of-fact tone. They sat together after Gus left them there on the rickety dock; their legs hung down in tacit competition of who could dangle lower without touching her boots to the water.

  “Has she always been?” Alice asked carefully. “A nightmare?” not wanting Cady to stop telling about her life. Alice was going for details. They’d already gone through Cady’s debacle at boarding school last year, being thrown out for stealing a good deal of Xanax from the infirmary, which happened to be one floor down from her dorm. “My roommate was so sad,” she’d said by way of explanation of why she wanted all those pills.

  Cady chewed on a pale strand of hair in a way that made the gesture look as if chewing hair were the new sitting up straight, the new way to smile. “My aunt,” she said, “she’s all right. We have dinner together every evening at six. It’s been that way since I can remember. I have to wear a skirt and I have to be on time. If I’m late she eats without me. And she doesn’t even particularly like to eat. If it were socially acceptable she’d probably choose to live on Goldfish crackers and gin. We’ve never been what you’d call a warm twosome.” She laughed like someone older, like someone who has already made a new adult home. “People always think I’m exaggerating. You should come over sometime and see.”

  “Sounds like the house is stopped in time.”

  “That’s about right,” she said. “My aunt is eighty-one.”

  “My God,” Alice said.

  “There were twenty years between her and my mother. My mother was one of those miracle babies, back when doctors thought it was basically impossible for a woman of forty to give birth, and my parents waited forever to have me, so …”

  “You don’t have any brothers or sisters?”

  She shook her head.

  “Cousins?”

  “A few. But they’re all older and awful. They live in the city and piss away all their money on Ralph Lauren and cocaine. I’m from terrible people, I’m telling you,” she said. “My aunt smokes, drinks, and eats red meat at least twice a day. She’s a savage with impeccable manners,” she said. “Although lately the manners have started to go. Her anti-Catholic campaign has reemerged. Most of the staff has quit.”

  Alice had a feeling she wasn’t exaggerating. She was not trying to be funny “What’s her name?”

  Cady looked surprised. “I never call her by her name. No one ever uses it. The staff calls her Mrs. DeForrest, her friends at the club call her ‘darling,’ and I call her Aunt K. Her name is Kippy” she said. “Ridiculous, right?”

  “Yes,” Alice said, “completely.”

  “So how about you? Is it always this quiet around here?”

  “Our mother travels a lot,” Alice said. She wouldn’t talk about her mother like some character. She wouldn’t reduce her parents to caricatures of themselves. Not yet, at least. I love my mother, Alice could say. I miss her more now than I did when I was little. I have her flight schedule under my pillow. I know her driver Gary’s telephone number by heart—Gary, who drives her to the airport and picks her up in case my father has to work, in case he pretends he has to work because he is just so angry she’s leaving once more now that we are old enough to be left.“Our father works all the time.”

  “You know something?” Cady said. “You’re really pretty.”

  She said it in a way that assumed that Alice didn’t think so, that she couldn’t possibly have heard that sentiment too often before. Cady DeForrest said it as if she were the first person to notice, as if all Alice needed was this older girl’s approval.

  Well, Alice thought, I’m flattered. And then she thought, Fuck you.

  Cady probably assumed she’d never gotten a hickey that she had never met a boy at a party, given him a blow job in a closet, felt his eggy cum all over her neck and had him wipe her face with his boxers. Cady assumed she’d never had a boy put his hands down her pants in the costume closet at school, biting her breasts with his big straight teeth, saying “You’re so sexy.” Or that she could do all of this in just the past month, with all different boys, just because she felt like it. Cady no doubt thought that Alice wasn’t pretty enough to do that and not feel used.

  Fuck you, she thought. But she didn’t mean it. She wanted to mean it, but she didn’t. “Thanks,” Alice said. “Thank you.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No,” she said. She took a breath. “Do you like my brother?” Alice asked, looking her over, feeling an insane need to protect Gus. Cady was a deadly combination of needing no one and wanting everything—everything she felt she’d been denied. Gus was the on
e who was used to being selfish and elusive. He was the one who showed up when he felt like it, went surfing for days if the waves were good in the very dead of winter. He was the one who didn’t call. “Do you?” she said. But Cady had seen Gus coming even before Alice did and she was up and on her feet, running the planks to greet him as if he were back from some great suburban war.

  Gus had only run to the house and back to get them all more layers, although Alice was sure that he would have found any excuse to leave them alone. It would be more exciting for him, after Cady left, if he could hear what she was like when he wasn’t around. He liked Alice to be informed, or at least give informed opinions about the girls he was with. He was using her, Alice knew, but she didn’t mind this kind of use. It meant that, in a way, he needed her more than he did before, when girls had yet to become his means of sustenance, before he needed them like he needed water, maybe even more than water. When there was a girl in the picture (which there had been since he’d turned fourteen), he was like those addicts in the movies: always in phone booths fumbling around for some extra coins to place a call to a dealer. Except, with Gus, his bedroom closet was the phone booth and he’d tug the white cord from the phone in the hall into his smelly closet. He’d call the girls. He’d talk and talk; who knew how they got in a word. He’d tell stories and jokes and muse about his worries, worries that were always about natural disasters or some such looming business. He never worried that he wasn’t somehow or other substantial enough to be noticed, or that he felt as if sometimes he could simply evaporate if no one was watching— or even if someone was watching, how he might just disappear. He’d talk and talk and lower his voice so Alice couldn’t even hear him, even as she was unforgivably right outside the closet door.