Alice Bliss

by Laura Harrington

  The principal has put on his suit jacket and straightened his tie. He is moving down the hallway at the fastest clip he is capable of with the school nurse in tow, the very small, very shy Miss Lambert. They are pushing through the crowds of students, and Mr. Fisher is reminding them to Keep moving! Get to class! The students reluctantly break up to let him through, and most of them head off to class. A few just draw back slightly to watch from a safer distance. No one is saying much. Mr. Fisher raises his voice and sends the stragglers on their way.

  Somehow Henry is there and he is talking to the principal, gesturing and standing up straight, and even from where she sits on the floor barely daring to look at him through her lashes, Alice can tell he is being very, very convincing.

  But this is a fleeting impression when what floods her mind’s eye is a road called Highway 10, fifteen miles west of Baghdad, a road she has Googled in the school’s computer lab and watched and contemplated, a road her father undoubtedly travels on.

  Henry manages to get her to the nurse’s office and settled onto a cot. He’s about to leave when she hands him the clipping from the Democrat and Chronicle that has been burning a hole in her pocket. He bends his head to read the article.

  Four American soldiers, members of the National Guard from New York, were traveling in three Humvees heading west on Highway 10 toward the city of Falluja. The U.S. military reports that they were on combat patrol when their convoy was attacked by improvised explosive devices, smallarms fire, and rocket-propelled grenades. Two soldiers were burned beyond recognition, a third soldier was dragged off. When found, the body was so badly mutilated the military announced it had found the bodies of two men, not one. The body had no head, legs, or arms. Organs were removed. A fourth soldier has been declared missing. There were no survivors. One of the Humvees burned with such intensity that the surrounding trees were incinerated.

  He carefully folds the paper into a tiny square and puts it into his back pocket.

  “Alice, you’ve gotta stop reading the papers.”

  “How else am I gonna find out what’s going on?”

  “Maybe it’s better not to know.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There are guys who—”

  “Who what?”

  “Who survive, who make it back.”

  “Members of the National Guard from New York. Did you read that part?”

  “There are dozens, maybe hundreds of men from—”

  “Thousands.”

  “Okay. Thousands.”

  “He travels that road, Henry.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “It’s a good guess.”

  “Reading about it will not make anything better.”

  “Not reading about it makes it seem like I don’t care.”

  “No, Alice, that’s not the way it works.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know you’re making yourself a little crazy here.”

  “Just a little?”

  “And that Ellie needs you and your mom needs you and—”

  “I took the paper so my mom wouldn’t see it.”

  Miss Lambert sticks her head in the door to remind Henry to get to class. She waits, too, while he gets up from the edge of the cot.

  “Could we just have a minute?” he asks her.

  Lydia Lambert is young and thin and nervous. She is new to this job. She quit the hospital job she took right out of nursing school, then floundered for a while between two local nursing homes. It was distressing to learn, after all that school and all that training, that she didn’t actually like being around sick or dying people. They make her anxious, really anxious.

  High school kids don’t make Lydia anxious; they make her sad, with their cramps and sprains and heartache and heartbreak and above all, with their loneliness. Being young can be so lonely, she thinks; more lonely than anything.

  She decides to let them be.

  “Do you want to go home? I could take you home.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’ll come back after second period. You’ll be going stir crazy by then.”

  “Wait, Henry . . .”

  “What?

  “Don’t go.”

  Henry sits on the floor next to Alice’s cot.

  “Tell me he’s gonna be okay, Henry.”

  “He’s gonna be okay, Alice.”

  “Tell me every day, every time you see me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Help me believe it.”

  “If anybody can make it through, your dad—”

  “Yeah. Matt Bliss can do anything, right?”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  Alice looks around at the stainless-steel table and the cupboard full of Band-Aids and aspirin and gauze pads and Ace bandages and wishes she still lived in a world where any of these things could make anything better.

  “They cut up the bodies, Henry.”

  “Alice, don’t—”

  “Why would anybody . . . ? God . . . how do you fight against that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Henry leans his head against the cot and inadvertently against her leg, or perhaps not so inadvertently, and straightens his legs in front of him. If she stretches her arm out, Alice can just barely reach the top of his head. It is nearly, but not quite, touch. She doesn’t know why this is so important right now, but it is.

  B.D. is not happy with Alice when she leaves practice at four fifteen and sprints for home. Another little checkmark next to her name on B.D.’s clipboard, Alice thinks. She doesn’t want any checkmarks next to her name, just improving times.

  Gram and Ellie are waiting in the car when she turns into the driveway. Great. Now she gets to go to the hairdressers in her running shorts and sweaty T-shirt. Ellie bamboozled Gram into letting her ride shotgun, so Alice climbs into the backseat and pulls a sweatshirt out of her backpack and over her head.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Gram says.

  “You stink,” Ellie announces.

  “Shut up, Ellie!”

  Gram puts the car into gear and slowly backs out of the driveway.

  “We’re just going to make it.”

  “Don’t worry, Gram, they always make us wait.”

  “Daddy called.”

  “He did?”

  “For two minutes.”

  “And I missed it?”

  “It was a terrible connection,” Gram adds. “We were shouting.”

  “He’s okay?”

  “He sounded good,” Gram says.

  “He sounded great,” Ellie crows.

  He’s okay floods through Alice and she takes what feels like her first deep breath all day.

  At Headlines, Alice’s basic trim takes ten minutes. Ellie is furiously flipping through magazines and turning pages down.

  “I need glasses,” Ellie says as she shrugs out of her coat and climbs onto the stylist’s chair.

  “What?” Alice asks.

  “They tested us at school today. These are the ones I want,” she says, tossing Alice a magazine. Then, turning to Patty, she unfolds the picture of the haircut she wants.

  “Is your mom okay with this?” Patty asks.

  “Oh, yeah,” Ellie bluffs.

  “You sure?”

  “Totally.”

  Alice gets up to take a look at the picture.

  “You want that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could do that at home with a bowl over your head.”

  “Ha, ha,” Ellie says, not laughing.

  “Who is that?”

  “I don’t know. Some film star from the old days.”

  “Gram? You know who this is?” Alice asks.

  “Louise Brooks,” Gram says. “I think she’s the one who inspired everybody to bob their hair.”

  “It’ll be cute on her,” Patty offers.

  “You sure you want this haircut?” Alice asks.

  “I love it,” Ellie says. “Love,
love, love it.”

  “The bangs are really short, Ellie.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Alice sits down to watch as Ellie’s braids are cut off. Gram sits down beside her and reaches over to take Alice’s hand.

  “Your mother is going to kill me,” she whispers, as she pulls out a handkerchief and blows her nose.

  Patty carefully saves the braids in an envelope, knowing that Angie will probably want them. And if not, Ellie can donate them to Locks of Love. Ellie has her hands over her eyes so she can have the maximum surprise when it’s all done.

  “You can open your eyes,” Patty says.

  Ellie takes a look; her expression is dead serious.

  “Can I see the back?” she asks.

  Patty gets a mirror.

  “Okay. Can you take the cape off?”

  Ellie hops off the chair. She’s wearing a dress with a big skirt and cap sleeves. She twirls around and her skirt bells out around her and her hair flies out from her face and for sure, she will be the only little girl with this hairstyle, the only little girl to wear these kinds of dresses. She looks like she could leave the ground she has so much energy, her skinny arms in a blur as she twirls. And she is grinning from ear to ear.

  “Love it, love it, love it,” she says, giving Patty a hug.

  And then, turning to Gram, “Can we go to the glasses store?”

  “Glasses? What kind of glasses?”

  “I need glasses, Gram. I told you in the car.”

  “Well, we probably need to ask your mom.”

  “Can we just look? I like these,” Ellie says, handing Gram a magazine.

  At the eyeglass place Ellie is not happy with the selection they have for kids. She pulls out her picture and gives it to the guy behind the counter. He’s incredulous, but goes to the locked cabinet with the designer frames and hands her a pair. She tries them on. The lenses are elongated rectangles and the frames are dark green plastic.

  “Too big,” Gram says, thinking that will be that.

  But Ellie studies her reflection in the mirror, turning this way and that, trying to keep the glasses from sliding off her face and not having much luck. Alice suddenly has this stab of fear for Ellie. With this haircut and these glasses she will be teased mercilessly; Alice has already swallowed several choice phrases rather then throw them at Ellie. But now that she’s actually looking at her she can see that Ellie is really skinny, maybe even skinnier than usual, and pale, superpale, like maybe she’s coming down with the flu or something, or maybe she’s not sleeping well or eating well and Alice thinks maybe she hasn’t been paying attention to the right things and maybe she should be paying more attention to her sister, and how is she ever going to manage with one more thing to worry about?

  “Can you order these in a smaller size?” Ellie asks the clerk.

  “Sure. We can have them for you in a week.”

  “How much are they?” Gram asks.

  “Three fifty.”

  “Three hundred and fifty?” Ellie asks.

  A tight-lipped smile from the clerk.

  “Thanks so much,” Gram says, ushering them out the door.

  In the car, holding the envelope with her braids in it, Ellie is unusually quiet. Even when Gram gets to talking about the chickens she’s thinking about getting and the chicken coop Uncle Eddie has promised to build for her, even though knowing Uncle Eddie, that could take another year, and how Ellie is going to be her right-hand girl in the chicken-and-egg business. Ellie and Gram love chickens. Alice does not really find chickens remotely appealing, let alone lovable, but Gram keeps telling her: “You just wait and see. When we get our first baby chicks . . .”

  “eBay,” Ellie says out of the blue. “Second-hand stores. We have some options.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alice asks.

  “I’m not giving up on those glasses.”

  At home, Ellie drops her coat on the floor and twirls her dress and her new haircut for Angie. When Ellie hands her the envelope with her braids inside, Angie sits in the nearest chair and bursts into tears.

  “What’s the matter, Mom? Don’t you like it?” Ellie asks.

  “Sure I like it. It’s just . . . It’s just . . .”

  “Don’t you think it’s pretty?” Ellie asks.

  “It’s really pretty,” Angie says. “And really different.”

  “Nobody else is gonna have a haircut anything like this. Not in my school. Not even in your school, Alice. It’s unique. Unparalleled. Radically distinctive and without equal! Can we take a picture so Daddy can see?”

  And Ellie does a wacky herky-jerky dance, her skinny arms pumping up and down over her head, her elbows jutting out; her feet flying. Ellie is taking interpretive dance to new heights, Alice thinks, as she tries to swallow the ache she feels looking at her sister’s braids in her mother’s lap.

  April 8th

  “What are you doing?”

  Alice is in the front hall closet, surrounded by photo albums and photo boxes, when her mother, wearing one of her dad’s old sweatshirts, interrupts.

  “And are you ever going to take that shirt off?”

  Alice considers which question to answer.

  “I’m looking for that picture of me and Dad with the shovel and the pitchfork. The one Uncle Eddie took last October.”

  “What do you want that for?”

  “I’m gonna send it to Dad in the care package.”

  “What about your school photo?”

  “No way.”

  “Daddy would like that.”

  “You send it then.”

  “It’s you right now.”

  “God, I hope not.”

  Angie gives her a look. Here it comes, Alice thinks. The appearances are not everything speech. The it’s what’s inside that counts speech.

  Yup. There she goes. Launches right in. With embellishments even. Alice tunes out the sounds and watches her mother’s very pretty mouth forming the familiar words.

  Alice does not make the appropriate murmuring noises in response, the oh, mom, thanks so much, you really understand, don’t you, and instead just looks at her mother thinking, why do you do this, when we both know it’s total garbage?

  These silent looks are like a little ticking bomb.

  At first Alice can see Angie thinking, in a clenched teeth sort of way, I’m not going to rise to the bait, but before you know it, in a nanosecond, she’s furious.

  “You’re making a mess.”

  “I am not.”

  “I spent days organizing these photos.”

  “Days?”

  “Any order I had managed to—”

  “I’ll put it all back.”

  “The way it was?”

  “Yeah. Exactly the way it was.”

  Just go away, Alice thinks. I was perfectly fine before you walked in here. Angie opens her mouth to say something else, thinks better of it, and turns on her heel and leaves.

  Now Alice is thinking maybe it is a dumb photo. Now she’s thinking about how she’s not pretty and how that’s probably evident in this photo. It’s probably been evident forever, even in her baby pictures. Now she’s thinking about this crap when before she was just looking for a photo where she and her dad were having fun and goofing around and it didn’t have anything to do with being pretty.

  This is why girls hate their mothers, Alice thinks, as she finds the photo.

  They’re in the garden, standing in the middle of their pumpkin patch. Dad is holding a pitchfork; Alice is holding a shovel. There are two bushel baskets tipped over like cornucopia, full of corn and peppers and zucchini and gourds and tomatoes. They’re wearing matching Red Wings T-shirts and baseball hats, and they’re both trying—and failing—to look serious.

  There’s another one and another one—a little series of shots she hadn’t remembered. Uncle Eddie caught them laughing and making faces and pretending their biggest pumpkin was too heavy to lift. />
  She rifles through the box to find the negatives, pockets them, and puts the originals back exactly where she found them. She’s going to send her dad the whole series.

  She raids the change jar before hopping on her bike to go to the drugstore at the Four Corners to make copies. On her way out the door she tells Ellie she’ll be back in half an hour max and then they can seal up the box and take it to the post office.

  “Get some batteries,” Ellie yells after her. “They all need double As!”

  Alice pops back inside.

  “Mom! I’m taking five dollars to get Dad batteries!”

  And she’s out, she’s on her bike. Only now does she realize how cold it still is. There’s a misting kind of rain and the roads are all slushy. She’s gonna get soaked if she rides in the street. She veers off onto the sidewalk, which is marginally better but at least she won’t get sprayed by the passing cars. She pedals past Mrs. Piantowski’s and Mrs. Minty’s and then there’s Gram’s restaurant, with people waiting outside even in this weather. Happens every Saturday and Sunday, people queuing up around the block.

  At the drugstore she marches up to the very tall, very skinny high school boy manning the photo machine, explains what she wants, begs him to make her photos right now, this very minute, it’s urgent, and then heads off to find batteries.

  True to his word, Steven—she reads his badge—has her photos ready. While checking out, she looks at her dad’s watch. Eleven o’clock. They’ll just make it.

  Outside Henry is standing next to her bike.

  “Hey, Alice.”

  “Hi, Henry.”

  “You want to go sit at the counter at your Gram’s and have breakfast or something?”

  “I can’t, Henry. I have to get to the post office before it closes.”

  “After the post office, then.”

  “I have to ask my mom.”

  “I’ll meet you at the post office. She’ll probably say yes, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. I gotta go.”

  “Post office! High noon!” He shouts after her.

  At home, Ellie and Angie have the box all ready. Alice tucks the photos into an envelope and slips in the letter she’s been writing her dad all week during boring classes at school. It’s a dumb letter, she knows that, a rambling, dull letter. She read the guidelines from the army: your soldier wants to hear the news from home. But there is no news in Belknap, there’s just the weather and school and Mom and Ellie and Gram and Uncle Eddie and running and not being able to sleep and missing him and wishing . . . But you are strongly advised to keep any and all worries to yourself. All the sleepless nights, and, let’s face it, the fights with Mom, all the real stuff, you’re supposed to leave that out.