The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  Her mother collected with desperation, despaired about the mess, and moved on to a new room. She stopped sleeping late and began clearing out the poolhouse. One day Alice noticed that the drawing her mother had done so many years ago had been taken down from the refrigerator. Charlotte stripped the moldy poolhouse floors and scoured the windows, replaced the broken doorknob with a purple glass fixture, and even oiled the hinges so nothing squeaked. She deemed the pool-house her office, and declared it off-limits to everyone but her. There were shades hung and they were always drawn. She mostly went there to draw and think; no phone was installed. Having run out of her own rooms, she started designing other people’s houses, having lunch with women who had, previously, barely registered on her radar and taking in their goals of midcentury or country classic, Provengal or shabby chic.

  “For the first time in my life I’m getting something done,” Charlotte said to Alice, and Alice believed her. Alice had to agree. During the week she drove to fabric outlets, befriended antique dealers, investigated the cheapest methods of importing from Java and France. On weekends, while their father worked and Gus went off surfing, Charlotte and Alice hung around the kitchen and watched for the swans’ arrival, waited for the babies to come around. Alice trailed after Charlotte with a bag of bread, and spent time watching the swans kick up algae for their little ones and the flurry that followed after they tossed bread ends off the dock. They watched the long elastic slide of swans’ necks and the little fuzzy heads bobbing and diving underwater. After an hour or so, they’d do something that required getting dressed. They both enjoyed going to the city on a train. They walked downtown without a specific destination. They went into shops without names, shops with white walls and wood floors, with selections anemically beautiful. Charlotte held clothes up to Alice and inevitably put them back in their place. “With your coloring,” she’d say, “you should stick to black or white. Your looks are ornate enough as they are.” What does that mean? Alice always meant to ask, but she was too taken with watching her mother pick up objects and put them down—earrings, gloves, a transparent blouse— with whatever compelled Charlotte’s attention. Alice would try to predict what her mother would notice and was rarely correct.

  Sometimes they went to see an exhibit at the Whitney, the Met, always ending up gazing at the Sargent portraits, wondering over what happened to all the costumes and jewelry, imagining what the people were like, how they talked to and treated one another on an ordinary day. Alice stared at the raven-haired girl who went on to be a singer in Italy who met her death by way of the Nazis, stripped of all her remarkable costumes, stripped of the light in her eyes.

  The second Saturday in October, Charlotte was unusually quiet—more romantic than agitated, more spacey than distracted—and as these Saturdays had begun to include stops at hotel bars, they settled into an outdoor table at the Stanhope, where there were heat lamps warming an already toasty Indian summer day. Charlotte told Alice bits about her father: how he used to like nothing better than a whiskey, neat, in a hotel bar; how he’d fixed her cracked teapot on their second date; how he’d worn a coat of chocolate tweed and how she laughed into it, how she laughed and laughed into the wet wool when they were late to the theater after rushing in from the rain. Her mother, in moments of confidence, didn’t talk much about Nepal or Jordan or Tibet or wherever—but always of Paris, an impossible Paris, where she’d met their father only weeks after a sea passage in 1966. She seemed somehow sad when she spoke of it, yet she also felt compelled to do so, and only, it seemed, with Alice, and only on these lazy private days.

  “You’re so lucky,” Charlotte told Alice at the Stanhope. She picked almonds out of a nut mix, placed them in a row on the soggy cocktail napkin. They were facing the museum, watching people. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke and the faint salty whiff of pretzels.

  “Why am I lucky?”

  “Well,” she said, “for one thing, you’ve yet to have anything happen to you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well,” said Charlotte, “I don’t know. You could be living an entire secret life; that is absolutely true.”

  Alice laughed in a way she hoped was darkly. She wanted her mother to lose some confidence, to waver in her assumptions regarding her daughter just one single degree.

  “Your brother should be in the same place. He keeps flinging himself about so hard but all he really needs to do is break up with that girl and go someplace new. It doesn’t even have to be college, at least not right away.”

  “You’ve never liked Cady” Alice said.

  “Well, do you?”

  “I kind of like Cady, but I definitely wish she’d go home once in a while. I wish they didn’t need to have their loudest moments in the middle of the night.” I wish we’d talk about me.

  “She’s too serious for him, too demanding.”

  What her mother didn’t seem to notice, it seemed to Alice, was how demanding Gus was of Cady. They seemed to be in a contest of who felt more deeply, of who was more obsessed and more angry and jealous. They needed to fight and make up, it seemed, in order to get through a day.

  The only time Gus seemed to be without Cady (besides school, which he attended sporadically these days) was when he went surfing. He’d taken to getting up at five or so in the morning on Saturdays and getting himself out to Montauk. He surfed during the week too, which they all knew except her father. Charlotte didn’t confront Gus about it. Alice could tell it gave her a sense of pleasure each time he took off alone with his board, whether in a borrowed car or headed for the train; he looked so insolent and pleased with himself. No matter how often their father came down on him for his lateness, his grades, his ragged and often-ridiculous clothing, Charlotte didn’t do much more than shrug when she knew he was sneaking off to do what he felt like doing. His grades were good enough to get him into a serviceable college, should he decide to go, and school would not determine his life, was what Charlotte rather obliquely argued—as if Gus were simply larger than school-as-concept. As if he were, by nature, above it all.

  Charlotte was concerned only that her son at eighteen would give of himself freely to someone else, to someone (Alice couldn’t help thinking) other than Charlotte.

  “What was that, darling?” Charlotte asked her daughter, as she sipped the watery remains of her vodka and lime, as she signaled for the elderly waiter who was perspiring in the heat, wearing white. But Alice didn’t remember having said anything, at least not out loud, and she was left with the familiar feeling of realizing she was always asking a question—invisible, soundless—Do you see me, do you love me—a refrain like a whisper or maddening chimes drowning out the moment.

  “Do you like the decorating?” Alice blurted out. “You know, all the stuff you’ve been doing.” She still couldn’t decide if her mother enjoyed having an actual job. Alice was prepared at any moment for Charlotte to start putting down her clients. She was ready, she told herself, for it all to turn.

  “Well,” Charlotte said, lighting up a teal-colored cigarette bought at Nat Sherman with the theory that she’d smoke less if the cigarettes were expensive and distinct, “not so much.” She inhaled and her narrow nostrils flared. “To be honest it is basically depressing.” Alice’s heart began beating wildly— beating with the knowledge that she had been right, that this was it and Charlotte would be going soon, that these Saturdays together were mere exercises in killing time. Her mother was about to say it—that when Gus left home, she would leave too. “Other people’s tastes depress me, other people’s lives. It all boils down to rumpus rooms and powder rooms and office-slash-guest rooms—you know, people creating a sense of a life instead of actually having one.”

  Alice didn’t bother responding. Her mother was angry sud- denly, and the glitzy cigarette was burning off into nothing but ordinary ash.

  “I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “I don’t know if I’m quite cut out for it; what do you think?”

  “What do I th
ink?” Alice asked. “You want to know what I think? Why?”

  “Because you’re my daughter,” her mother said, as if that could mean everything. “Because you’re a smart girl and I love you.”

  Alice felt a ball of wax growing in her throat, choking on the very words she was always desperate to hear. “I think you should do what you really want to do,” she said, not meaning a word of it. “I think you’ve done—it seems to me—pretty much whatever you’ve always felt like doing, and I can see no reason to start changing now.”

  Alice saw that her mother had registered the sarcasm. She saw the shift in Charlotte’s eyes, those green eyes that were reddening from smoke and city pollution. She saw the crow’s-feet at the corners deepen in her delicate skin.

  The train ride home was long and punishing. There was a half hour delay in Queens and they both had to use the bathroom. Charlotte made a few halfhearted attempts at conversation but none of them took. They each read their books and by the time they reached home they were both worn out from keeping quiet. They had that in common. While Gus and her father could keep quiet for days with an ease that seemed almost sinister, Alice and her mother couldn’t do it. Neither of them had the will or the stamina. “It cooled off,” Alice said. “It was so hot today.”

  “It was a strange day,” her mother agreed, before opening the door and heading up the stairs.

  Alice found her father sitting in the library in his big brown leather chair, in the only place he looked small. He looked up when she walked in, as if he’d heard her coming, then took off his glasses and raised his eyebrows, as if to say, I give up.

  Alice sat on the other side of his desk, the way she did in a doctor’s office when she was free to get dressed and ask questions. She could remember being small enough to sit under the desk and play with a paper clip, when her father handed her paper clips. Charlotte never could get over how she sat quietly and happily at her father’s feet, needing no more than to be held in his lap at one point or another, not needing more than that. You never left me alone, she was fond of telling her daughter. You just talked and followed me from room to room.

  “Gus tells me he’s going to teach you how to surf,” her father said.

  “Is that right?” Alice said. “First I’ve heard of it.”

  “Do you want to learn?”

  “I’m not sure,” Alice said. “I hadn’t really thought of it, to tell you the truth. It’s not like we live in a tropical paradise. It seems like so much work just to find the waves and not freeze,” she said.

  Her father looked at her and smiled. She wasn’t trying to be funny and he knew it, and that was why he had to laugh. “How different the two of you are,” he said, picking up a heavy fountain pen.

  “Not really,” she said, wanting it to be so, but on seeing his expression, she turned it into a joke by simply keeping a solemn expression. “Why ever would you think that?”

  He smiled and looked at his daughter in the way that children seldom notice. He looked at her proudly as if to say, / made you.

  He uncapped the fat pen and began scribbling on a yellow legal pad, connecting lines and dots. “Something has been bothering me,” he said quietly.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I ran into Isabell Donnelly in the hardware store yesterday,” he said evenly stopping to see if Alice was listening.

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded.

  “Married to Bart Donnelly the one who looks a bit like Abe Lincoln?”

  “Yes?” she said, struggling not to sound impatient.

  “You know who she is?”

  “She’s one of Mom’s … clients.”

  “Clients,” he said, “exactly. Alice, honey, I don’t know how to say this—but have you been having some kind of trouble lately?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not sure. Like maybe female trouble of some kind, something you didn’t want to talk about? Mrs. Donnelly told me that your mother has been … helping you out with something. Did you need money for something? Something for which you were ashamed to ask me?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Alice said, laughing while her heart pounded out a staccato embarrassment, biting her tongue as she thought about what it was that Isabell Donnelly could possibly have to do with Alice having unspecified problems. Did someone tell her mother that she was having sex? Would her mother even care? Besides which, Alice had stopped her little rampage nearly a year ago, pretty much, with one worthy exception.

  Her father still doodled purposefully on the pad. “Alice,” he said, his voice tightening, “Mrs. Donnelly seemed to think your mother needed to help you through something lately. She seemed to think you needed money and that it was her money, Mrs. Donnelly’s, that went toward helping you. That is what your mother apparently told her, anyway.” He was trying, Alice could tell, not to ensnare anybody just yet, to let Alice clear up a misunderstanding.

  “Daddy, I have no idea what you are talking about,” Alice said, and this time she couldn’t help but sound angry. “What are you talking about?”

  He coughed a dry cough and dropped the pen, then clasped his hands together.

  “What?” Alice said. “For God’s sake, would you please stop doing that?”

  He looked confused. “What am I doing?”

  “Taking so long to tell me something. It’s like torture.”

  “I think your mother has been not altogether honest with these people,” he finally said. His voice sank low. “I think she’s maybe been inventing some stories,” he continued carefully, “and I think she’s been doing something besides going antique hunting with all these people’s money.” He seemed genuinely mystified. “Do you have any idea what she does every day?”

  Alice waited a moment before answering. She tried to be more like him, weighing what seemed like the air around him before giving voice to his feelings. There was a wall of books behind him, all hardcover. There was a picture of Gus and a picture of Alice and a black-and-white shot of Charlotte’s profile, somewhere in the desert. “Of course not,” she finally said, feeling sweat like a sudden bloom all over her body. Alice looked right into her father’s blue eyes and could see that he was afraid too. She had lived with the fear that something like this would happen. There was no way that her mother could be purely going to work and having lunch, picking up the dry cleaning. Since her mother had begun scouring the poolhouse, Alice was afraid to believe. “But…” she said.

  “But what?”

  “I don’t want her to leave because of me.”

  “You’ve always been too dramatic,” he said, not without love. “She won’t.”

  “She will. She will leave. She basically told me today.”

  “She what?”

  “She started going off about her clients and how boring they were, how boring their lives were. What is going on with her? She lied to Mrs. Donnelly about me? What did she tell her?”

  “I don’t know, Alice. She didn’t say.”

  “Well, think about the possibilities. She probably told her that I was getting an abortion or something. Or maybe extensive plastic surgery? Which would be a better rumor to live with, do you think?”

  “Alice, listen—”

  “No, you listen,” she said, and then immediately fell silent with shame. “Daddy,” she said gently, “do you want to know what is going on?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. But she didn’t believe him.

  “How long do you think she’s been lying to people? Do you have any idea?” Sex, thought Alice, drugs; drugs and sex together. Or maybe she was sick. Maybe she was hiding a terrible illness, fleeing home all of these times to participate in experimental treatment. Maybe her mother was dying.

  When her father looked beyond her toward the doorway, she knew that Charlotte was standing there. “Alice,” her father said, as if an intruder had just entered the premises, “why don’t you go in the kitchen. August wanted to ask you something.” Alice could h
ear the blender—evidence that he was in fact there. She almost refused to move, but when Alice looked at her father he was staring so intently that she rose and brushed by her mother’s robe without so much as a glance in her direction.

  In the kitchen, Gus peeled a banana and stuck it in the blender whole, then dumped in ice and handfuls of berries, a few spoonfuls of protein powder. He looked up when Alice sat on the counter, passing a pear back and forth between her hands. Alice took a bite of the pear and Gus looked at her again.

  “You need anything?” he said.

  She shook her head, paralyzed, savoring the overripe pear, sucking down its nectar. She could hear the beginnings of her parents arguing in the library. Her father’s voice was like the bass on an album—significant but muted, stepping aside for the flashier vocals, the rowdy and anxious guitar. His voice was calm but her mother’s was not. Alice remembered the time Charlotte hurled a book in the library to illustrate her rage, and instead of it flying across the room as she’d anticipated, it had landed on her own bare toes, sending her into a fit of tears but thankfully into her husband’s care, defusing the argument with a swift if clumsy kind of peace.

  Charlotte was yelling at her father, “Are you sure? Because you’d better be pretty damn sure to make an accusation like that.”

  Gus turned on the blender and drowned out their voices.

  “Stop,” Alice shouted. “Turn it off.”

  But Gus increased the power and blended longer than necessary. I can’t hear you, he mouthed. He wasn’t intentionally being hurtful, she somehow knew. He just couldn’t stand the tension; he had a surprisingly low tolerance for it, given all his fury with Cady. But before she had time to yell at him further or to pull the plug from the wall, Charlotte came bounding into the kitchen, followed by her father.