The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  Then they’d come over. They’d come to him. She tried not to picture him being the kind of boy who begged, who made desperate noise, who convinced a girl that if she didn’t follow through, he’d just go ahead and die. She tried not to picture this but she failed miserably, because it wasn’t like she had to really try—she somehow knew it was true.

  And so she didn’t mind him using her to talk about the girls, to keep them going in his mind after they’d all gone home.

  Her brother claimed (only half-jokingly) that he was cultivating her gift of intuition. Besides, she was too damn curious.

  With Cady it was different. Cady wasn’t merely dashing in and out of his bedroom. Cady asked why the toilet in the front hall bathroom didn’t work. She changed a lightbulb in the laundry room when she thought no one was watching. She refilled Spin’s water bowl, brought over a bag of Gala apples, a crate of Clementines—dumping them without any to-do in the kitchen’s empty wooden bowl. Cady barely went home.

  One month later they all sat out on the dock with a thermos of hot chocolate enhanced by rum (prepared by Cady, who insisted they had to have a thermos somewhere) and watched the cold sun ease away. They talked about the worst physical pain they’d ever felt, and as it turned out they’d all been very blessed; none of them had broken a bone, been in a car accident, none of them had even had stitches. Pain surely had to be coming, exquisite, torturous pain. As they talked, Alice lit matches and cast the flames down to the water. She didn’t smoke but she loved lighting other people’s cigarettes; she loved lighting matches and playing chicken with the flame, seeing how long her fingers would hang on before letting fire take over.

  “Why do you do that?” Cady asked. She seemed not disapproving but merely curious. She was holding August’s hand. Alice shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Habit, I guess.” “That’s no habit,” Cady said. “That’s a dare.” “Maybe,” Alice said with a shrug, not elaborating, letting Cady think she was maybe a little more mysterious, a bit more dangerous than Alice believed herself to be.

  “You know,” Gus said, “our mother is coming home tonight.”

  “How long has she been gone again?” Cady asked.

  “Well, a little over one month, actually,” Alice said. “Right before you arrived here on our planet. She’s been buying rugs in Marrakech. She’s selling them to some dealer in the city.”

  “We think,” Gus added.

  “I should go home then,” Cady said, but she didn’t move a muscle. “I really should get going.”

  Alice looked at her. She got really lucky with that light. Even the dying sun was hitting on Cady and casting only the most luxuriant light and shadows a girl could ever ask for. If it were thousands of years ago, everyone in Suffolk County would have all started worshipping Cady DeForrest right then and there, lighting candles in her honor, sacrificing virgins in her name, convinced she was a human conceived of spun gold, an impossibly valuable woman. Alice wanted to tell her, Don’t even think about moving; even you will never look this way again. Her skin was warm milk with a splash of rich coffee, and her eyes looked like being underwater on a perfect day, seeing the sky through the surface of the sea. And then she smiled.

  Gus seemed to make a decision. “I’ll walk you to the car,” he said, as if he were saying, I want to make a baby. The two of them got up and went to the house.

  A few minutes later Alice went too. Cady’s decrepit lime-green BMW was still in the driveway. Nobody was going anywhere. Alice had never been so thankful to live in a big house. She went as far as possible from Gus’s room, to a room where there was, mercifully, a television. For an hour or two she sat frozen on the couch, as if she were commanded by God Himself to crank up the volume and watch old shows on television. She watched until she could be fairly certain she couldn’t possibly hear them doing anything even if she were to go upstairs. Outside was a pitch-black night, a moonless son of a bitch. The phone rang, startling her, and it was their father from the airport saying that he and Charlotte would be home in an hour, what would everybody like to eat? Should they swing by China Express?

  “Cady’s here,” Alice said, turning the volume on the television all the way down, “and I have a feeling she’s staying for dinner.”

  “Whatever happened to that girl with the hair, that Sharon or whatever her name was?”

  “Long gone, Daddy,” Alice said, smiling at her father, how seriously clueless he was. There had been at least three girls since Shannon, but her father liked girls with reddish hair, girls like his wife and daughter. “How’s Mom?” she said, and for some reason she thought she might start crying. Alice looked at the television—as if for consolation—where a pale female hand poured blue liquid on a diaper.

  “She’s suntanned,” he said, sounding happy. “She’s right here beside me. Shall I put her on?”

  “That’s okay,” Alice said, swallowing hard. “I’ll see her soon enough.”

  When she hung up the phone, she heard what sounded like Gus shouting. Gus was yelling at Cady It had been only one month and they’d already fought more than a few times over who knew what. For the first time, Gus wouldn’t expound upon his girl troubles. He said it was just very intense and that it killed him, being with her, that it was like ten years in a day. “It sounds miserable,” Alice had made the mistake of saying, and Gus looked at her as if he were driving away on a long journey and there was no point in keeping in touch. There was the sound of something landing hard on the floor, the sound of a door slamming. And then there was silence.

  All day she’d felt pretty good—even kind of excited— comfortable being included in her brother’s wild romance, but now it seemed clear that she’d been only tagging along, that all they’d really wanted was a chance to be alone. They were probably making up from their fight and laughing about it right now—all the times they’d tried to give Alice hints and all the times she’d stayed and stayed. She thought of going out, of having her own destructive passion, but she remembered just last week at Eleanor’s club, which seemed like years ago, the way a lanky boy’s face changed, becoming more set in his features somehow, when she agreed to “just go for a walk.” The idea of passion seemed laughable. It took so little to please them. Each time.

  It had started—as most everything she did—as a way to get at her mother. She knew it, too. It was embarrassing, but there it was: two months ago, at a bonfire party on a measly strip of public beach, she’d stayed out later than she had any reason to stay, later than anyone else she knew, because she wanted Charlotte to worry about her just enough that she might go and cancel her trip. Gus was supposed to be back from Mon-tauk, where he’d been working and surfing all summer. He was supposed to have made it back for the party, at least in time to pick her up, but he didn’t come and he didn’t come, and without her brother there Alice was different somehow. Without her brother pounding that one extra beer, without him being the one who’d have hours ago stripped naked sloshing into the sea, inciting at least five others to follow his lead, Alice’s usual quiet self was a different kind of quiet. Lit by firelight and two beers (her tolerance for alcohol being nonexistent), she found herself supplying some dark-haired lifeguard with more than enough reason to believe she just might like to go “gather some wood.”

  “It’s cold,” he’d said. “I’m Devin.”

  “You’re a lifeguard, right? Didn’t you save a little boy this summer?”

  Devin nodded, giving a nice heroic squint toward the circle of embers. The fire was—as it should have been at this late hour—dying down. She set off with him with her hands in her pockets with visions of stumbling home, a wrecked picture of teenage trouble, smelling of someone else’s breath, someone else’s beer. She imagined, she did, crumpling into a ball as her mother screamed and yelled at her, as her father tried to calm Charlotte down.

  So Alice followed the would-be wood gatherer and they lay down on a stretch of ground that was somewhere between soil and sand. At first it seemed as if
Devin the lifeguard just wanted to lie alongside someone and look at the stars, reinstate his summer memories. He’d explained about saving the little boy, how it all went so fast, how his girlfriend became jealous of all the attention and broke up with him but it was, like, so long over anyway. “I’m driving up to Maine tomorrow,” he said. “I’m supposed to leave at five-thirty.”

  Alice, sensing it was now or never, turned on her side and propped her head in her hand as if primed for a set of leg lifts. “You should just stay up all night,” she said. “You’re more than halfway there.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he kept his gaze on her. He didn’t smile and he didn’t move. And she felt something drop out from under her, like riding in a skyscraper’s elevator and going straight for the top. There were his eyes, more serious and tragic than she’d noticed before. He’d saved a little boy. He reached out—not to hold her hand or touch her face but to take off her shirt. She let him. It felt like a cross between being undressed as a child and stepping into a sin-red room where she began to understand greed. The air had been warm enough for her skin not to freeze, but cool enough to be alarming. She’d never been shirtless in front of a boy before either, and she was proud she didn’t hide herself away, chickening out in the shadows. He kissed her briefly and surprisingly inexpertly (he was a lifeguard, for God’s sake) with small hard lips, but he had strong hands, and after a couple of years of being so concerned with stopping their hands—stopping the boys’ roving, raging, hormone-fueled hands—she let this one’s hands go everywhere, thinking about not much more than getting herself into trouble at home. But she liked it more than she’d planned. She liked the attention and she liked how he actually smelled like the very end of summer, all that salt and suntan lotion being replaced by chill. Sweat coated them both like sea spray, and she did forget the time. She didn’t let it go that far. He gave her a ride home. No harm done, really.

  Except when she did stumble through the front door it wasn’t her mother who greeted her.

  “Daddy?” Alice breathed, after she saw her father hunched in a chair, sitting in the dark.

  He told her he was worried, that he’d had no number to call.

  “I’m fine,” Alice told him. “See? I’m completely fine.”

  He looked at her, saying nothing. He ran a hand over the planes of his tired face.

  “I lost track of time,” Alice said. “I’m sorry you waited up.” And she was instantly embarrassed, wholly ashamed, an unconvincing bad girl. Her father was the very last person she wanted to worry. She hadn’t imagined his tired face ragged with concern. She’d only envisioned Charlotte and her rage, the rage that Alice craved. She wanted to reassure him that she had stayed out late on purpose—as if that would make it better—and that she was in control.

  He asked her to please, please never do that again. He told her it wasn’t fair.

  “You’re right,” she said. She nodded. “Is Mom up?”

  He smiled, strangely, and told her that Charlotte had been sleeping soundly since shortly after Alice had left for her all-night adventure. “She sleeps like a baby,” her father said. “It’s funny how well she always sleeps before she goes away.”

  It’s just those French sleeping pills she insists on finishing up, as if they’re a roll of film, Alice wanted to tell him. It’s to spite me, don’t you see?

  And the days got shorter and Alice’s nights became longer, her estimated times of arrival increasingly more difficult to pin down. And her father became angry, and her mother continued planning her trip, taking jaunts into the city to visit embassies and personal contacts, various specially shops.

  On the morning of her flight, Charlotte cupped Alice’s chin in her hand, as if Alice were a Czech peasant and Charlotte a busy modeling scout inspecting the local stock. “Sweetheart,” she said, “you look tired and a little bloated; are you getting your period?”

  Alice shook her head, and her mother’s hand fell away. “No,” she said, flaunting a yawn. She’d come in the last two nights at three o’clock in the morning and made it to school by eight.

  “Well,” Charlotte said, taking off her rings and putting them in a Ziploc baggie, ready for the safe, “I think you ought to get more sleep. All this running around, this late-night drinking—listen, I can only assume—it’ll wreak havoc on your skin, believe me. You can’t escape the bloat, even at your age.”

  Alice looked at her mother, trying her best not to show how shocked she was.

  Her mother met that look and tripled it. Stop, was what Charlotte’s eyes said, stop this pathetic behavior. Her mother clearly believed that with matters concerning her daughter she had only to think“stop,” and that Alice would. Charlotte obviously believed that of all life’s complications, her daughter could not be counted among them.

  “Gus,” Alice yelled, as she got up from the couch and made her way toward the kitchen. “Hey Gus?” She wasn’t going to cower in front of the television all night. “They’re coming home soon,” she called out, not really caring if he heard. She stuck a piece of bread in the toaster and slathered it with honey. The sweetness hurt, she loved it so much. She dripped some on the counter and didn’t wipe it away.

  And when they came down the back stairs, they were all rosy and weirdly younger-looking than she remembered either of them looking hours ago. Apparently they’d made up quickly and effectively. Alice felt like the old guardian of a crusty girls’ academy.

  “How long have we been sleeping?” Gus asked.

  Alice shot him a look.

  Cady started cracking up. “We really were sleeping, I swear.”

  “Have any good dreams?” Alice asked with a voice she hardly recognized.

  “All good,” Gus said, putting a hand on Cady’s shoulder, as if to steady himself.

  Alice thought for more than a second about knocking both of them to the ground.

  That evening, Cady’s first time meeting Charlotte, they all ate Chinese food and prodded Charlotte to tell stories. It was comforting and sickening all at once, how ritualistic this had become. The taste of mu shu duck would always, for Alice, create the feeling of Charlotte just off a plane. Whether newly skinny or full in the face, smoking new cigarettes or not smok- ing at all, delighted to be home or desolate (she never hid her feelings, their mother; they had to give her that)—she almost always picked up Chinese food on her way home from the airport. Gary the driver sometimes took some egg rolls in the car so she could immediately satisfy her craving. Even if it was barely eleven A.M., even if she’d just eaten, and even if she’d just returned from China, where apparently, according to Charlotte, China Express could clean up.

  Charlotte seemed well rested and had dropped at least five pounds. Her hair was tied back in a yellow head scarf, her fingernails weren’t bitten, and she kept touching her husband— his shoulders, his back. She was polite to Cady without being rude or overly solicitous, both of which Gus had previously accused her of being around his girlfriends. Charlotte had tried to pull Alice onto her lap, the way she’d always done when she was feeling affectionate, but Alice felt her face flush with anger as much as with embarrassment and she wriggled herself away.

  What Alice wanted from herself: not to get a thrill when her mother treated her like a baby.

  As they ate Chinese food on actual plates instead of from the containers (in honor of Gus’s guest), Charlotte talked. She’d burn out soon, her family knew, growing cranky and complaining of stomach cramps or else disappearing upstairs, her clothes strewn in colorful piles throughout the upstairs hallway; in the morning she’d be eager to move on, short with answers regarding her trip, somehow depressed by the idea of describing. And so they listened to her selective stories and didn’t interrupt, hoping to gain at least some understanding of where it was she’d been.

  A man called Narouz (a rug merchant? a hotelier? apparently no further description was forthcoming) had given her tea that had smelled like hibiscus flowers, and she’d thrown up for days. She’
d seen that French model, the enormous one from the sixties with one name and the square lips (who Charlotte had sworn had long since succumbed to a drug problem) purchasing one hundred small blue bowls. There had been a day spent in search of a Sufi retreat, a night of trying desperately to reach home, a series of broken phones and terrible connections. “I missed my babies,” she said, sloppily grabbing for Gus and Alice, grasping for their hands.

  “Had you been to Morocco before?” Cady asked. Alice noticed that Cady had brushed her hair.

  Charlotte nodded, swallowing a wonton. “Many times.”

  “You’re doing some business there?” Alice could tell, by the way she asked, that Cady had been to Morocco, but she wasn’t going to say so.

  Their mother shrugged and looked at Alice. “We’ll see what happens,” she said.

  “What does that mean?” said Alice, slipping Spin a scallion pancake—one of Charlotte’s very favorite things—under the table. Her mother couldn’t just keep doing this, waltzing in and out of this house, this life, with nothing but great anecdotes. Cady had done more in a month in terms of light fixtures and consistent fresh fruit and listening than her own mother had done in years. Alice found herself angry with both of them, with her mother for leaving and with Cady for stepping in so easily as a girl who just knew more. How did she know how to run a house? How to move around like a woman? Servants raised her. She was only seventeen.

  “It means she’ll see,” said Gus. “What do you think?”

  “Well,” Alice said, “I thought it was an all-important trip for some big, urn, rug opportunity. What, did something not workout?”