The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  “It is shit, this place—the tourists like the coffee, though. He has an espresso machine. So, tell me, what are you doing here? You’d like a decaf cappuccino, or what?”

  “I don’t need any cappuccino.” And of course she desperately wanted one.

  “At least take a coffee. Be polite.”

  “Polite,” Alice nodded, “fine. Cafe, por favor. So,” she said, uchica,” watching Erika behind the counter pouring coffee into a chipped brown cup. “Do you like living here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and handed Alice the coffee, setting a little tray of cream and sugar atop the icebox. Alice could tell Erika hated serving, that even this one cup of coffee was killing her. “I could live anywhere.”

  “Is that right?” As she liberally stirred in sugar, Erika wandered to the door and fingered a set of wind chimes that Alice hadn’t yet noticed. Her mother had hated wind chimes with a passion. Alice could never see why, exactly, but the objects of her mother’s hatred had been so clear that it was impossible not to be influenced by them. Charlotte’s long list included wind chimes, blush wine, gin in winter, men in V-necked sweaters, and loud public good-byes.

  Alice watched as Erika looked around at the walls of this culturally stripped cafe—the existence of which was nearly a culture unto itself—and then stretched into a gesture of exhaustion and boredom. Her thin arms appeared as ghoulish shadows, liquid dark against the walls.

  Alice sat up in the hammock and saw a galaxy of spots in front of her eyes. She drank the strong coffee quickly as Erika came and sat next to her. There was just enough room. Alice knew that she should not let this woman so close, but she found herself sitting immobile. They both faced the doorway and the wind chimes, the bright light just beyond the door. “I know who you are,” Erika said finally. “I know you’re his sister. August’s sister.”

  Alice attempted not to reveal how unsettled she actually was. “That’s right,” she said, running her tongue along the roof of her mouth, where the coffee had left a slight burn.

  “You are here to force him back to where he came from—”

  “No,” Alice protested. “No, you don’t understand. How do you know who I am? Did he tell you?”

  She nodded.

  “When?”

  She sighed, “Oh, before we met in the fish store. He pointed you out, and—”

  “You knew who I was, you’ve been sleeping with my brother, and you didn’t think to point out the connection?”

  “We do not sleep together,” she said soberly, shaking her head.

  It was then that Alice realized that Erika was wearing Cady’s shirt—Cady’s old blue button-down shirt, soft from countless washings. “Why are you wearing her shirt?”

  Erika looked down at her chest, as if she’d forgotten what she was wearing. “This is my shirt.”

  Alice looked at her, meeting her gaze until she was forced to speak.

  Erika insisted calmly, “We do not sleep together; it isn’t like that. And this is my shirt. He gave it to me.”

  “Gus gave you Cady’s shirt? I find that difficult to believe.”

  She shrugged, saying, “He is really something.”

  Alice now kept her eyes trained on the piece of daylight pushing itself through the doorway.

  “He has …” Erika said hesitantly, “your brother has some idea about me.”

  “What kind of idea?”

  Erika waved her hand in dismissal and leaned back in the hammock. Alice leaned forward. She thought about getting up. She could see herself putting a few pesos on the counter, saying thank-you and moving toward the door, but she couldn’t move. She wasn’t paralyzed; that wasn’t it at all. She felt compelled to stay. “What kind of idea?”

  “You ask him,” she said. “You should.”

  Alice had flown here because of a single phone call. Nothing could make less sense. “I’ll ask him, but he won’t answer me. He used to tell me all about his girlfriends. If this were years ago, I would have known more about you than you know about you.” She had to laugh. The sense of purpose she’d been lugging around was all but deflating into a sordid little affair. Alice could now keenly smell Erika’s cigarette smoke clinging to Cady’s shirt—Cady, who could barely be in the same building with a smoker.

  Alice herself had grown up detesting her mother’s cigarettes, and then one day, in her mid-twenties, found that— surprise, surprise—she’d begun an intense and self-loathing affair with soft packs of Marlboro Lights, an affair that lasted just under a year. It had been nearly five years since then. “Will you roll me one of those?”

  Erika barely nodded but began the diminutive motions, slipped into a cadence of performance. “Did you come here from … where do you live?”

  “New York.”

  “New York, aha, did you come all that way just to talk with your brother?”

  Alice nodded.

  “This is fantastic.”

  “What’s fantastic about it?”

  “Most people just spend their lives wondering, waiting.”

  “You have no idea,” Alice said, turning to her coldly.

  Erika nodded, pushing out her bottom lip.

  Alice knew all along that she should leave, but instead she found she was accepting a slim rolled cigarette from Erika’s nail-bitten fingers. She was inhaling and feeling the good punishing burn, the precise letting go. There were blossoms of smoke throughout the darkness. She took another drag. Then another. “This isn’t only tobacco,” Alice said. “Is it?”

  “Oh,” she said, “no, not really. I thought you knew.”

  Alice hadn’t noticed how small the room was. She didn’t see another entrance and she wondered where Erika had come from. The room began to smell like burning crayons, and Erika right beside her was a suddenly welcome anomaly— clean and sharp, like plants before they flower. “What do you want from him?” Alice heard herself asking, her voice sounding like the self she knew—strung tight and timid.

  “Nothing,” she said, “nothing.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You are such a big beautiful woman,” Erika said, and she reached for the cigarette in Alice’s hand and brought it to her own lips. Alice noticed once again the birthmark that covered Erika’s very thin arm. Somewhere out there, Alice was certain there was someone who had run a finger around its crescent shape, or, at the very least, had wanted to. Tales had been spun if not expressed, connecting such a shape with meaning. Erika took her time in exhaling. She reached out and touched the tips of Alice’s hair with the same exact pitch and speed as

  Alice’s mother had done so long ago. Let me cut it. I’ll give it some shape.

  She didn’t brush Erika’s hands away; she didn’t even flinch. She said only, “Why are you so hard?” The words—direct and strangely eternal—floated from her careless mouth.

  “Inside, I am not,” Erika said. “I really am not.” You have no idea how I missed you came skulking from the recesses of her mind. Erika’s eyes were crushed coals, picking up colors like oil slicks on tar where Alice could swear tears were pooling.

  Alice felt her breath grow short and her throat begin to close. She never should have smoked again. Smoking now felt like what those waves would do: they’d take her out with their merciless tides; they’d pull her down with a force just like this force until she knew she was drowning.

  How Erika looked in this light, in this moment, was nothing if not purposeful. She leaned forward and Alice leaned back, pinned to the bottom of the ocean. Erika’s mouth looked smaller, her lips chapped, and when she licked her lips a loose dark strand of hair became stuck there.

  When Alice closed her eyes she saw her mother’s skin— flaccid, bruised—the morning before she died. “I’m his sister,” Alice said, surfacing, her hand at her neck.

  “I know,” said Erika. “I told you I know.” And Erika’s face crumpled—a wilted dahlia, her spiky petals gone.

  “What is it?”

  She was clearly
about to cry and then, with a recovery unlike any Alice had ever seen, she took a breath and righted herself, becoming no less than steely. “Today,” she said, “I found out I am pregnant.”

  Erika’s breath was hot on Alice’s neck, and there was something else now that Alice felt hovering closely, whispering incoherently and it was Charlotte. Charlotte was making her way forward through the protective crowd in her mind.

  You, Alice thought, are dead.

  I’m not swayed by urgency, that’s all. That’s really the only difference.

  Alice gave the operator Cady’s name once again. It was early evening and cars and trucks sped past her toward La Paz. The gas fumes were going to her head as she began to recall her collected stories of disappearance—stories Alice has gathered from bars and from television, hours of eavesdropping on the subway. She’s collected these tales to balance out such moments when remembering her mother fills her with a rage so potent it is very nearly exhilarating. She should be here, is what Alice could not stop thinking. She should be here and she should know what to do.

  There’s a couple in their early thirties traveling through Europe the year prior to their wedding. They have just visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and they are crossing the street. The woman crosses and the man does not, due to an oncoming car. She waves at him and smiles. Just then a massive tour bus passes, and he is out of sight running. He takes his things from the hotel and leaves her a few guilders. It’s years before she hears from him again in the form of a letter, saying little more than “sorry.”

  Cady was unlisted. Alice had tried, besides San Francisco, every neighboring suburb she knew. She went across the highway to a candy stall. From a hugely pregnant woman she bought gelatinous candies flavored withjicama, sugared almonds, limonada. There were sticky little boys under the palapa roof, a teenage girl chasing after them. A blind man sat with a white dog in the very dark shade.

  The father of three small children is driving home from work one day. He stops for gas and fills up the tank. And then he finds that he is driving without a destination. He reaches the city airport, where he boards a plane to Jakarta. He learns to carve furniture. He gets

  into massage. His children think he has died in a car crash. Their mother has told them so.

  The gelatinous candies were like litchi nuts—an alarming rubbery texture but not nearly as sweet. Sugared almonds were Madison Avenue in the cold. Limonada was an alley in Rome. She was eating, consuming; she was her mother’s daughter, never feeling full, high from distraction, from the endless possibilities of taste.

  A billionaire widow is a mother of four. One day she moves to Hawaii and tells her teenage children she no longer wishes to speak to them. For years they all try to make contact, to introduce her to their husbands, wives, her new grandchildren. She refuses. She has a staff of twenty whom she calls her new family for no apparent reason.

  Jangly from nothing but sugar, Alice viewed the promising highway. She could get in the next car that came along and go somewhere else entirely. Forgoing all genuine impulses, she could hop a flight to Los Angeles. She could sit at a hotel bar and meet strangers who’d leave cuff links on countertops, in houses made of glass. Forget about seaweed and ragged tides; she’d swim naked in a Hockney swimming pool, a tame turquoise box where she’d perfect her strokes. She would perfect her timing until she landed in another life entirely. She didn’t have to be here and she didn’t have to go home. She could leave her brother to the mess he was harboring. She could believe the mess belonged to him and him alone.

  If Cady had published her number and if she’d answered, Alice wasn’t even sure what she would have said. She might have told Cady about disappearing, about how she, Alice, was beginning to understand how people did it all the time. That reinventing oneself was a kind of pleasure and even Alice could feel it—the beginning of such a pull. She would forever be amazed that her mother came back. She left but she returned and she chose to die at home.

  She chose.

  Of course it had always been in the realm of possibility, looming as a satellite, a menacing cloud. But Alice had never decided. She’d never felt the right to decide. On the side of the highway in Mexico, with sugar coursing through her veins, with risk in absolutely everything from the speeding trucks to slow conversations, she felt the decision being made.

  November was so dark that year—the sky a vacuum, a cancerous space. Charlotte had been lying in bed, thinking about a particular article that she’d enjoyed years ago. She was heavily drugged and tangential, but her mind kept coming back to one single sentence that she felt the urge to reread. Maybe she only wanted to be briefly surrounded by absolutely nothing not hers. Or perhaps she’d wanted to burn all of her old mementos, having had a fairly typical urge of the somewhat middle-aged to rid oneself of accumulated years of dreams and fruitless planning. In any case she was up, in a robe and her old green wellies, heading out into the cold. The moon, she noticed, was no longer lovely. It was a big crude tooth, and it had been for days now. She thought to turn back because being outside felt so ominous, but decided to press on. And maybe when she made it inside the little house, she was cold enough to have the presence of mind to light a fire, but out-of-it enough to have fallen asleep on the ruby red futon, unaware of her surroundings. Her eyelids had fluttered with consciousness and she saw and felt what was going to happen if she didn’t act quickly.

  She sat up—an unlit cigarette between her lips in utter concentration—watching as the flames licked up the rug, licked up the lines of the shaker chair sitting in the corner. She was so astonished by the fire, by the sheer force of its accident, that she was drawn into it, seduced by the way it accumulated power and colors faster than she could have imagined. She knew her papers would burn—speedy erosion—deteriorating time into rumor, into endless possibility.

  Was it then, Alice wondered, that Charlotte realized that she didn’t want to move?

  The sun was nearly down, and night was slinking in—an aubergine choker cinched too tightly on a neck. There was an implicit sensation of racing against the dark, arriving at her destination before the world was beaten back by black. When Alice came upon the shamble of domes and aborted construction of the incipient hotel, she became aware of her heart beating, though not because it was speeding. Her heart had the cadence of dejä vu or perhaps merely the thump of acceptance. She’d never know what caused her mother to do it, what caused her to retreat so compulsively until she was simply gone. Alice walked as in a dream—not dreamy but in a dream— with the knowledge that something was about to happen. There was the imperceptible timbre of stillness; it hummed like bees making honey far away, like caterpillars eating through leaves. Breaking the stillness were the birdlike cries of geckos and the dogs beginning to bark like mad, stirring up a canine chorus. The dog closest to Alice was not barking. She went to pet the skinny creature and saw that its eyes were yellow. As she retracted her hand, she backed up from the doorway. She looked up at the domes against the greenish-lavender dark.

  The domes, they were called boveda, and they were laid by hand overhead, all in one day. There were artisans who did this on a ladder—laid bricks in the shape of a dome—and they worked lightning-quick because they had to, quick from the outside moving in, so that the center would hold. Stephen had told her. She tried to remember everything he’d said during last night’s strange progression. How the fishermen timed their comings and goings in accordance with the tides. How the fields of chile used to be fields of sugarcane up until the 1950s. How mangoes were his favorite fruit and they flooded the orchards each summer.

  There were two people on top of this miraculous boveda roof.

  It was evening and fires were burning. A megaphone blared an indecipherable stream of muffled Spanish from the roof of a slow-moving car—an upbeat advertisement that repeated in a loop moving farther away—and the dogs spread throughout the valley were howling loudly joining in with the loudspeaker.

  They sat together
on the very top. Gus’s legs were splayed out in front, while Erika’s were crossed beneath her. Their faces were as blank as two days of dawn. They faced the sea, and though they weren’t touching, they may as well have been. They looked close enough to have done away with all formalities: clothing, language, names.

  No one had ever impressed upon Alice how shock can feel the same as dulled acceptance. They were together—her brother and Erika—and they looked the same somehow, absolutely right, like a domesticated animal let loose and meeting with its wild doppelgänger—although it was tough to say between the two of them just who exactly was the wild one. Even Alice could see how they corresponded, how the slight movement of her hand through her hair seemed to answer his high, bent knees. They would go inside when the wind came up. Inside would be yeasty and rank, a smell masked only slightly by lingering hash smoke. They would crawl under scratchy blankets and onto a sandy pile of sleeping bags he no doubt referred to as “bed.”

  To what extent is the future stitched directly to the past? It seemed impossible to believe in an idea as innocent—as fortunate—as the present. But seeing them together in their hushed duality, Alice couldn’t imagine anything else. The present might have merely been a concept to make life seem more possible, to alleviate, for moments at a time, the sense of perpetual waiting. But gazing on them, Alice felt it.

  That night, lying in bed, she looked up at the mosquito net, a spun-sugar cage. There was, for that moment, a bit of rare unbroken motel silence, where she was taken back to years before—gazing up at the Indian fabric that Charlotte had draped over her bed. As she thought of her brother and that dangerous pregnant woman sitting so close together, the netting became a cage and she felt momentarily confined to where grief and silence reigned.