She hands the popcorn maker to Alice and says, “I love backwards dinner.”
“Me, too.”
“Will you make mac and cheese later?”
“If you’re still hungry.”
“Lots of butter for the popcorn, okay? Not the skinny way Mom does it.”
“Okay. You do the butter.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll show you.”
They manage to fold two loads of laundry in front of the movie before Ellie falls asleep. Ellie was so proud of herself for having given up the baby habit of sucking her thumb in kindergarten, but there’s that thumb now, while she’s sleeping. Alice brushes the hair off Ellie’s sweaty forehead. Ellie is wearing her favorite plaid skirt with pleats. Alice thinks of these clothes as throwback clothes. Maybe her mom wore a skirt like this when she was in second grade. Ellie’s bony knees are scraped and scabby, and both kneesocks have scrunched down around her ankles.
When Angie and Uncle Eddie get home, the girls are both sound asleep on the couch. Uncle Eddie picks Ellie up in his arms and carries her upstairs. Angie wakes Alice. Alice was dreaming, she was dreaming about Small Point; she was dreaming about a sliver of moon hanging low over the water; she was dreaming that she and Dad were walking the beach in the moonlight; she’s following in his footsteps, and he was just beginning to turn around to say something to her when her mom wakes her up.
“Alice . . . honey . . .”
When she bends over like that, Alice can smell her perfume and the faint scent of her lipstick, and maybe that other smell is a martini or two.
“Time for bed.”
“Okay.”
Alice sits up and her mom surprises her by sitting down beside her. Close beside her.
“You folded the laundry.”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“Ellie helped.”
“You guys make out okay?”
“Yeah.”
“No fighting?”
“Nope. We had backwards dinner.”
“Perfect.”
“Did you have a good time, Mom?”
“I had a really nice time.”
Uncle Eddie clatters downstairs and sticks his head in the doorway.
“We danced,” he says.
“You did not!”
“Yeah, we did.”
“Where were you?”
“That little roadhouse out by the lake. They’ve got a dance floor the size of a postage stamp.”
“And a piano and this old lady with dyed red frizzy hair who does jazz standards,” Angie says.
“How do you dance to that?” Alice wants to know.
“Your Uncle Eddie’s a good dancer.”
“Sure he is,” Alice teases.
“He taught me everything I know.”
“I thought Dad taught you how to dance.”
“That was more like refining what Eddie had already laid down.”
“Alice, I’ll pick you up tomorrow for your first driving lesson,” Uncle Eddie says.
“What?!” Angie can’t keep the shock out of her voice.
“Really?” Alice asks.
“She’s fifteen! She doesn’t have a permit!”
“Relax, Angie. We’re gonna drive around in circles in an empty parking lot.”
“You’re not going to put that child behind the wheel of that Mercedes.”
“I don’t think that will be a problem for Alice.”
“Eddie!”
“Gotta go, kids.”
Uncle Eddie heads out the door.
“Thanks, Eddie,” her mom shouts, as the door slams. “He’s too much sometimes.”
“He’s great.”
“He put the top down.”
“Cool.”
“We drove out to the park—where the kids go to neck.”
“To what, Mom?”
“Make out?”
“I’ll never understand how you can be so fifties when you grew up in the seventies.”
“He put the top down so we could hear the water and look at the stars.”
“Nice.”
“He had a blanket in the trunk.”
“Pretty smooth.”
“You need to watch out for boys like your Uncle Eddie.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I mean it.”
“Mom—!”
Angie puts her head back against the couch cushions and reaches for Alice’s hand.
“It was so beautiful. We had the radio on . . . And that dumb-ass cigar of his smelled really good outside.”
“I love cigars outside.”
“He’s always surprising me, y’know? Now if he’d just lose twenty-five pounds and find a nice girl—”
“Don’t ruin it, Mom.”
“It would be good for his health. I worry—”
“Don’t you like anybody just the way they already are?”
There’s a long pause while Alice disentangles her hand.
“We didn’t hear from Dad this weekend.”
“He’s probably out on patrol or something.”
“You think he’s okay?”
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You know Dad; he knows how to take care of himself.”
“But what if—”
“Alice, let’s not get into this right before bed, okay?”
“I was just wondering.”
“I know, honey.”
No, you don’t, Alice thinks as she heads up the stairs. You have no idea.
Angie walks through the house turning out the lights before she heads upstairs to her bedroom. She reaches under her pillow and pulls out Matt’s latest letter:
You’ve never seen the moon like it is here. Because the base is blacked out for security reasons and there’s so little electricity anywhere else, it’s truly dark. I don’t know if you can experience this kind of darkness in the U.S. anymore. Whenever I’m out walking across the base—for a meeting, for a meal—I’m so aware of the night sky. And looking up, Angie, looking up kind of lifts you up, you know? Almost like praying or wishing or hitching your wagon to a star. That’s an old time phrase, something my dad would say. But just sensing that mystery feels like a kind of prayer to me, even though you know I’m not much for prayers and all that.
Angie tries to think of the last time she really paid attention to the night sky. Tonight, maybe, out at the lake in Eddie’s convertible. But did she really see it? Or was she all caught up, as usual, in talking or arguing or giving Eddie advice he doesn’t want and never heeds? When was the last time she walked beneath the moon, or sang, or danced, or held Matt in her arms under a starlit sky? Here she is, with every freedom and every convenience and she doesn’t have time to notice the moon. And there’s Matt, doing whatever it is he can’t tell her about every day, reveling in the night sky.
My soul lifts up, she thinks. My soul lifts up . . . Where did that phrase come from and why is it popping into her head now? The moon, the sky, the possibility of a soul, the miles, the oceans, Matt, trying not to worry, getting through the days believing he’ll come home, believing he’ll be okay. It’s all a prayer, she realizes, every breath, every day. Come home to me. Come home.
April 17th
They are sitting on the bed in Henry’s bedroom after track practice, ostensibly working on geometry homework. Alice gets up to open the window because Henry’s feet really stink. She can see into the Grovers’ side yard where Mrs. Grover is taking the laundry off the line. There are robins on the greening grass and the forsythia is just beginning to bloom. Alice wants to be outside, she wants to lie down in the grass and forget about geometry and school and no news from her father and a million other things.
Mrs. Grover is singing. To herself, really, kind of under her breath but every other phrase or so drifts up to the window and Alice can hear it. She’s singing that great Bunny Berrigan song, “Can’t Get Started.” The only reason Alice kn
ows this song is because it is a very big song at Henry’s house. Mrs. Grover has one of the original recordings on a scratchy 78 that she loves to play. She actually has a record player and she changes the spindle and puts this record on and sits down and plays it and listens to it, really leans in and listens to it. Alice had never seen anyone listen to music like this, so it was a bit of an event when she was around four and happened to be playing with Henry when his mother took out the old Bunny Berrigan record and put it on. And sat there. And listened.
Here she is, on a spring day, bringing in the wash and singing to herself. Mrs. Grover is no longer young; at least that’s how Alice’s mother would put it, and Alice’s mother would think she was being tactful, not hearing the obvious criticism and condescension in the phrase. Even though Mrs. Grover wears those awful sensible shoes and has gray hair that she wears in a bun, Alice thinks that maybe Mrs. Grover is still young in the ways that are important. Like she’s not so serious all the time, and she sings and right now she’s teasing a cardinal. Whistling in response to its call and damn if that cardinal doesn’t whistle right back. Alice’s mother doesn’t even have a clothesline, let alone stand outside and lift her face to the sun and sing and whistle to the birds.
Henry works away, oblivious, or so Alice thinks. Henry, of course, has another story to tell and not necessarily one he’s ready to tell Alice. For instance, it is impossible to think when Alice is this close to him. The smell of her shampoo, the habit she has of closing her eyes and scratching her nose as she thinks through a math problem, the way he can tell she is miles away from him even though she’s in the same room. She’s finished her homework, as usual, and Henry is left to try to think his way through the problem on the page when he’d much rather think about, or even just watch, Alice. Which is what he’s doing when she turns back from the window.
“Your mom’s bringing in the wash.”
“Yeah.”
“I love the way the sheets smell when they’ve been dried outside, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“You never thought about it.”
“Nope.”
“Not a guy thing.”
“Nope.”
Alice goes back to watching the clouds and the sky and thinking about her dad, but she can’t stand this train of thought so she turns back to Henry. Henry on the unmade bed, Henry who is scratching his ankle until it bleeds, Henry who forgot to comb his hair this morning and all of his cowlicks are sticking up.
There are still Transformers on the shelves and the complete set of Harry Potter. She knows if she opened the drawer to her left, Henry’s collection of arrowheads would be there, perfectly labeled, right next to the tackle box with all his stuff for tying flies. Henry ties the most beautiful flies. He even has a Web site for selling them. And then there’s his iPod—which he earned by mowing lawns—and his collection of jazz CDs. Henry is one of those kind of dorky boys with a lot of interests. But the piano is moving beyond that now; the piano has totally overshadowed the arrowheads; the piano is even starting to move the fly tying aside. Alice thinks that there is always music inside Henry’s head, and right now she wishes she could have music inside her head, too.
There are no rules at Henry’s house about what Henry and Alice can and can’t do, where they can go, what rooms they can be in, what doors have to be open. At Alice’s house the rules are probably the same rules her parents lived with. No boys in a bedroom, yours or anyone else’s. In fact, no boys on the second floor. Ever. No closed doors. Feet on the floor at all times.
She turns back to the window and wonders what her Dad is listening to. Are there radio stations? Is there rock and roll? R&B? Hip hop? Rap? Does he hear the call to prayer five times a day? Is it just background noise or does he really hear it? What if Alice heard a call to prayer five times a day? And what if, instead of praying, which she only half or one quarter believes in anyway, what if she just stopped and listened five times a day? Could she hear her dad’s voice? She can’t remember his voice. She can almost see his face sometimes, but she can never hear his voice. And the harder she tries to see him or hear him inside her mind the farther away he recedes. If there were music inside her head could she forget for five minutes, could she ride the sound, the voices of the instruments, just take a ride, fly away from everything she’s thinking all the time?
Henry is standing beside her.
“What’s so interesting out there?”
“We haven’t heard from my dad in three days.”
She can feel Henry weighing his words, trying to figure out how to respond, but mostly she can feel his warm, solid presence beside her, and before Alice has time to think about what she’s doing, or even know what she’s doing, she kisses him. Just leans in and kisses him. Everything slows way down for a few seconds as she bumps into his glasses and stumbles over one foot and wonders, fleetingly, if she should close her eyes or not, but really doesn’t have time to worry about that because time flips back to normal mode and Henry recoils in shock—or is that disgust?—she’s not sure. Whatever it is, it’s not pretty and it’s not what she expected, if she expected anything at all and now she can feel a blush blooming from the top of her head and flushing red and hot the whole length of her body. The talking part of her brain is in panic mode: Oh, no! You idiot! Why did you do that? That was so stupid! The feeling/sensing part of her brain is going Wow, not so bad, really, if you were just a little more mellow and relaxed maybe you could get the hang of this. But Henry? What is she doing kissing Henry? From the look on his face, he’s wondering the same thing.
Henry has turned away from Alice. His face is flaming hot and he is so acutely embarrassed he doesn’t know how he is ever going to be able to face Alice again. He cannot believe that the first time a girl—and not just any girl, but Alice—makes a move, he reacts like one of those supersensitive cats who never let you get within ten feet of them. Why did he do that? What’s wrong with him? Surprised. That’s it. He was just surprised. Shocked even. Girls like Alice do not just up and kiss boys like Henry. At least not in Henry’s very limited experience in which all sorts of girls, in fact, all girls, have handily managed to avoid kissing him. And no fair: It happened too fast. Was that really a kiss? Did he even feel it? Did their lips actually touch? The only person he can ask is Alice, and he can’t ask Alice because he still can’t look at Alice. Or speak.
Alice is stuffing her books and her notebooks and her jacket into her backpack. He needs to say something. Anything. It sounds like she’s crying. Say something, you idiot! But Henry is rooted to the floor like his socks have superglue on them and his legs are made of lead and not one single body part is responding to his urgent, desperate commands.
Alice is at the door.
“We could pretend that never happened, okay? So it doesn’t get weird and stuff.”
Too late for that! is what Henry would normally say, if Henry could find his voice, if Henry could just turn and look at her. He’s thinking this is about the loneliest he’s ever felt in his life, this not being able to look at Alice, this business of being glued to the floor when he wants to reach out and touch her hair or her hand or her sleeve even.
And then she’s gone, and Henry finds out that loneliest is right now, after she’s left the room. Suddenly his feet unfreeze and his legs start to move and he’s running down the stairs three, four at a time and throwing open the front door. But Alice is already halfway down the block, jogging steadily, her backpack bouncing on her back.
He watches until she turns in at her driveway and he can’t see her anymore. He sits down on the front steps, pops back up, starts down the walk, retreats to the steps. I need to do something; I need to go over there; I can’t possibly look her in the face; I have never felt so stupid in my life. But mixed in with the stupid feelings and the indecision and the walking up and down, there’s another feeling, a big, welling up feeling in the middle of his chest, this kernel, this diamond—okay, yes, a diamond in the rough—this fact, thi
s incontrovertible fact: Alice kissed me. Then he remembers, right, her father. Three days. No contact. So maybe that wasn’t really a kiss. Not a kiss kiss. More like some desperate something that looked like a kiss, that almost felt like a kiss but was not, actually, a kiss.
That would make more sense. But making sense of this turns out not to be comforting in the least. Making sense of this turns out to feel like a direct blow to the solar plexus. Maybe he’s wrong, maybe he could talk to her. But what would he say, exactly? Hey, Alice, explain your motives. Hey, Alice, could we try that again? The more he thinks about it the more difficult it is to get up and walk down the block. And just as he’s finally getting so uncomfortable he can’t really do anything else but head over there, because nothing could make him feel worse, Alice’s Uncle Eddie pulls up in an old orange Dodge and blows the horn: three long blasts.
He sees Alice run out to the curb, look up the street at him, watching her. She waves and turns away before he can wave back. She slides into the seat beside Uncle Eddie and they head off. Henry walks out into the street to watch them go. He waves at her, willing her to turn around and see him, which she doesn’t do. He waves at her until the old Dodge crests the hill and disappears out of sight.
He turns back and starts trudging up his driveway, staring at the scuff marks and the incipient holes in the toes of his Chucks. Until he is stopped by the sight of the toes of his mother’s brown sensible tie shoes. Pointing directly at him.
Don’t look up, don’t look up, he tells himself! What did she see? Did she see anything? Can he never, not even once in his life do something that his parents don’t know about or find out about, or stick their noses into and ruin? Like splat, total splat. Ruin forever.
“Everything all right, Henry?” his mom asks the top of his head.
“Uh huh,” he answers her shoes.
“Alice seemed like she was in a big hurry to get out of here.”
“Uh huh.”
“Do you need to talk about it?”
“Uh uh.” And he shakes his head for emphasis.
Alice Bliss Page 10
