The End of Alice

by A M Homes

  Her boy had been under observation for several years— he was of course not her first; there had been other, earlier experiments—but this was to be, she hoped, the first complete conquest. He had been discovered two years ago in the most old-fashioned way—on the playground behind the school. He was nine or ten and flanked by twin attendants, the assemblage of his ego, the entire entourage struggling to master the athletic form of the skateboard. The board was new and he on it was rather uncoordinated. All three boys were at that age of supreme softness where muscles waiting to bloom are coated in a medium-thick layer of flesh, highly squeezable. They were at the point where if someone were to take such a child, to roast or to bake him, he would be most flavorful. Our girl thought it a shame, a missed opportunity, that in the environs of Westchester and Dutchess Counties everyone not be treated to a taste of young flesh. She thought that perhaps, once or twice a year, as part of some great festival, one of each, boy and girl, should be prepared and the residents given a skewerful accompanied by lovely roasted onions, carrots, cherry tomatoes, peppers, the stuff of shish kebabs. But grudgingly she acknowledged that such a biannual event might result in a feeding frenzy, destroying the species, rendering it extinct. After all, for centuries it has been said that once certain animals taste meat, there is no going back, and for sure the pubescent boy and girl are of that most ripe, red, and succulent category that would cause such a reaction. Quite possibly just the scent of their juices spilling off the rack could start carnivores round the world salivating uncontrollably and charging the exits of national and international borders. Therefore in principle she agreed—although I am not so easily swayed—that while this massive public tasting was probably not in order, the denial of it encouraged, even begged for, a little nibbling at home.

  She longs to sample him, but has waited, given him first a year and then a second summer of slow roasting, and now has returned, hoping to find him close to perfection, done. She drools.

  The school yard is empty. Swings stand still. A woman with an empty stroller passes through, calling, “Jeffrey, Jeffrey, I know you’re here, come out, come out wherever you are.”

  She marches on—our good soldier—quickly cutting across the painted playing surfaces, four squares and hopscotches, and crosses to the broader street leading toward town. Until now it hadn’t occurred to her that it might take hours, days, to find him, that he might have been sent off somewhere for a summer’s vacation. Panic dizzies her, blurs her vision, but the outline, the single-story skyline of town in the distance, keeps her to her goal.

  If he is gone, all will be lost, all there ever was to be— after so much careful cultivation—was this one summer, this, the shining moment, the last rush of beauty and hope. By October her boy will be too bulky, brawny, full of himself. But here, now, there remains the fragile, the supple, the heat so close to the heart.

  Camp. She hopes his clothing has not been anointed with iron-on identification tags, first-middle-last-name, has not been packed up in some hand-me-down canvas sack and tossed into a tall bus bound for the green hills, the blue mountains, the great glassy lakes of the upper Northeast. On a rampage, she imagines learning his exact location from the weekly required letters that the mailman unceremoniously stuffs into his parents’ mailbox.

  “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m playing lots of tennis, learning riflery, arts and crafts. Accidently hit a kid from Rhode Island with a golf club, he had to get stitches, but no one likes him anyway so it’s okay. Send my goggles and some decent—not sugarless, definitely bubble—gum. Love.”

  She will hunt him down, slither through the gates posing as a new member of the kitchen staff, and butcher knife in hand, will slip from cabin to cabin during the night sampling bits and pieces, a few in every bunk, until she finds him.

  Camp. Evergreens. A mess hall of logs and mortar. Squat cabins dotting the acres. The air inside the cabin is dank, filled with the pungent meaty odor of boys. Not a clue that civilization is within rifle’s range. Here they train, sending arrows through the sky, rigging masts and line, studying the identification marks of both spider and snake, embarking on evening expeditions, survival nights spent deep in the wood, skin painted with insect repellent, Six-Twelve, Cutter’s, each camper equipped with a flashlight, Hershey bar, and Morse-code ring. She thinks of the five hundred boys, the excitement, the charge of their raunchy and rustic range as compared to her own memories of summers spent segregated, sent with a thousand girls to the hills of Pennsylvania. Swimming the dark and mossy lake, ankles kissed by slipper fish, feet taken by the mysterious murk at the bottom, the waterland, an unidentifiable mush forever threatening to open and swallow a plump young camper with a single gulp, a great burp bubbling to the surface. The sharp sting of the guardian’s tin whistle beckons the little ones out of the water, back onto terra firma. From here, even with my obstructed view, I feel I can see them as though in the full light of day; the water beading on their skin, the nylon, the crocheted cotton of their suits, clinging. I see the outlines of thighs, plump and perfect buttocks, hard pin-headed nipples, the sloping, small, dainty V marking the smooth slit, the path to the queen’s palace. I see them breaststroking, sidestroking, crawling their way to health and good fortune, and God, I want one, any one would do. I want not so much to see her—that would be too much, would force too many comparisons—but to blind myself, to close my eyes and simply feel her. And perhaps, as though I were some crippled old man, she would take pity on me and lie next to me on this thin, narrow cot.

  I hear a thousand female voices singing for their supper, crooning, “Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine.”

  I go with them to their cabin. The joint reeks of the endless variety of sprays and soaps they cream themselves with, leaving the cabin a hothouse, a nurseryman’s nightmare of herbal intoxication, sure to make anyone with the slightest predilection to allergies wheeze, gasp, and grope for breath. I go with them into this temporary home and watch as they ready for bed, scurrying around the cabin taking turns at sinks, toilets, running wide brushes through their long locks. So many in motion, it is impossible to focus on any one. The action here is on the spin of the room, the tilt and whirl, so much clothing on and off. It goes on ten, fifteen minutes or more until all are finally washed, pajamaed, and orthodontically equipped for sleep. Like that, they gather round the table in the center of the room, and the counselors—themselves young and understanding women, just past prime—go through the evening prayer, the request to God that by daybreak each girl be so much wiser, more fulfilled, and generous with herself and others. Amen.

  And then the twelve little girls form two fine lines, and one by one the counselors press their practiced lips to the centers of the mind, forehead square. Benediction made. The children, kissed good-night, usher themselves off to bed. Shhh, shhh, shhh, the counselors’ last word. And the whispering is stopped. Shhh, shhh, shhh, and good-night. Lights out.

  It is as though I am medicated, tranquilized. Calmed. Stilled. My respiration steady. I am in heaven, curled among the nymphic creatures: Courbet’s red-nippled wonders; Sleep , touched; Rubens’s Jupiter and Callisto; at one with the titty-tweaking heroes of artistic endeavor; Second School of Fontainebleau, Gabrille d’Estrees and the Duchesse de Villars. I am strengthened, stiff from the presence of such pictures in my mind’s eye, the ability of the senses to conjure. I wish only that the paintings were here so I might lay the canvases out along my bed and wipe my dry face over them, bury myself between the fluffy thighs of so many cherry girls. And perhaps, my dears, you do recognize that while pornography is prohibited from entering the compound—although be sure it does, disguised in the oddest ways; hidden in boxes of breakfast cereal, stapled into New York State tax forms—my interest is not in the clipped beavers of the 1970s or the overinflated bosom of the 1980s. As I have so often stressed, I am a classicist and I like my pictures the painterly and old-fashioned way. What art it is to remember, to cup the luminescence of the oils, the bulk and tang of its mi
x with the turp, to know the months it takes to dry, the propensity the paint has to slide, to move itself for greater comfort away from the artist’s hand to a more suitable position. When in the heyday of this institution they offered courses of instruction, I took the art they gave, but when my still lifes became all too real, when I insisted on squeezing great gobs of paint through my hands and then turning the painted paw onto the primed paper, shaping out breasts and butts, gaping holes for the member made, I was led ever so gently out of the room, hands washed with the help of others in the big utility sink, and returned to quarters with no explanation. What hurt me most was that they kept my paintings, took them all. They came and cleaned out my room and I cried. I spent the night in a deep wallow, bellowing, “But they’re mine, they’re mine,” and was not even offered a drug to quiet the forthright expression of such despair, even though I know for fact that my file says I am allowed such when perturbed. That night they let me suffer, the paint still damp under my nails, my cuticles and the flesh around the tips of my fingers semi-permanently stained. I sucked them, pulling in the pigment, the lead, hoping it would do me something, hoping the putrid flavor of such cheap compounds would draw me closer to some essential self.

  TWO

  What do you do for fun anyway?

  Two guards talk in the hallway. “Best anniversary present I ever got her? This year—new boobs.”

  “Big tits?”

  “Yep. The perfect gift. She just got ’em put in. Cost me five thousand bucks.”

  “How big are they?”

  “Can’t tell yet.”

  “Isn’t it amazing what medicine can do—like an oil change, you just take ’em in and they get big tits.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “You bowling?”

  “Not this week, did something to my back.”

  “Twist it?”

  “I dunno, something.”

  “Get the wife to rub it with her big tits, you’ll feel better soon,” the guard snickers.

  “You’re a card,” the other guard says. “A real card.”

  The decay is everywhere, inside and out. I stuff toilet paper into my ears and go back to her letter.

  Camp. My parents used to send me to camp, but the other girls were too queer, so I refused to go back. She writes of the memory of one particular afternoon—or perhaps I write for her—her syntax, articulation, and understanding are still the stinted, stilted language of youth. The story is of coming into the cool of her cabin to collect her tennis racket and finding the two little girls from Louisville, Kentucky—the two who with greatest frequency received boxes of homemade chocolates—lying across the top bunk, head to toe, the brunette’s narrow foot sweeping back and forth across the strawberry blonde’s nipple, the blonde’s jumpsuit unzipped and parted to the waist. When the lovebirds sighted the girl and smiled at her, there was a flash of light like an explosion, as the sun, reflecting off the brunette’s metal tooth-braces—orthodontia—bounced round the room. And our girl, sour of stomach and spirit, gut rising in a retch, gathered her racket, her balls, and quickly hurried out.

  “I thought I would puke,” she says. “And they weren’t tough like girls from Baltimore or Pittsburgh. They were from Louisville and wore long braids and pearl earrings.”

  I wish to return to that camp with the young one, to witness through the gauzy screens of the curtainless cabin those two Southern girls taking each other high on the top bunk, the bed frame scraping the cement floor as they grind their flat fronts against each other, endlessly. The athleticism and stamina of youth should never go unappreciated. To go there with her and explain in greatest detail the goings-on, to suggest to her that perhaps the sickness she experiences, the nauseating turn, is her own internal structure cramped by the rise of a desire heretofore unknown. I would also suggest that the impulse to “lose one’s lunch,” to spill such rich and fine fare as the three or four peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches consumed under the elm by the canoe pond only an hour before, is not so much a mark of aversion as a pronouncement of attraction, the making room for greater possibility. As her guide, I direct her to watch the two experts from the Bluegrass State as they wrestle and writhe, and upon their collapse, I might give her shoulder a firm push and encourage her to join them for more. Then, there, outside the door, looking in on the three as they take to the floor—the bunk too narrowly thin, too precariously positioned for the synchronistic excursions of three—I’d get my thrill, my treat.

  Something dashes by. A flash like the explosion of a photo cube. A blue dot left before one’s eye. I see a girl in front of me. A girl. I blink. The girl is still there. I am being tempted, teased. Alice.

  Slowly, the past comes back to me.

  Again, as is my habit, my nervous tic, I have gotten away from the story at hand. And meanwhile, my new girl, my correspondent, waits for us alone and annoyed at the lunch counter in town, her only companion the gummy cheese sandwich she can’t seem to make disappear.

  “Take your plate?” the waitress finally asks.

  “Please,” she says.

  With nothing before her, she is free to pay the check, to wander slowly home. The exertion, her efforts, her concentration, has left her drained, dulled. She walks slowly, pathetically, home, tripping over occasional cracks in the sidewalk. Safe behind the doors of the family fort, she lays herself out across the living room sofa, swallows the start of a good cry, and hopes to sleep.

  “Bored already?” I imagine her mother asking as she sweeps from room to room, arranging and rearranging the objects that are their lives. “You know, I have a hair appointment at two—you could come with me. I could have you squeezed in and highlighted. Maybe that would perk you up?”

  The daughter doesn’t answer. The image of her head capped with plastic bag, strands of hair pulled through premade punctures by a practiced hand, is far too frightening.

  “You know,” the mother says, beginning the second sentence of her streak with the same phrase.

  “Why say ‘you know’ when clearly I don’t?” the daughter asks.

  “I was going to say, you’re not a girl anymore, you should start dressing more like a woman. I could take you to Saks in White Plains and have Mrs. Gretsky find you a few new things. We haven’t gone shopping together in years.”

  The daughter imagines herself in a knitted suit with a pillbox hat perched on her highlighted head, chunky gold jewelry like a dog collar wrapped round her neck and a small alligator purse over one arm, still snapping.

  “I thought there was a court order against our shopping together. All the screaming, the swearing.”

  “You’re older now and hopefully more grown-up.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You know, I’ll never know exactly what it was I did to make you so angry, will I?”

  “No,” the daughter says, pulling a creamy cashmere blanket up over her shoulders and turning her face in toward the pillows.

  “Then rest,” the mother says. “You sound crabby, you must still be overtired. I’ll see you later. Nap, but don’t drool.”

  In my memory it is always summer, a certain summer.

  Morning in June. Breakfast. I go downstairs and find my grandmother in my mother’s place, my grandmother hovering over my mother’s stove.

  “Over easy or sunny side up?”

  “Up,” I say, forever an optimist.

  My mother’s absence is not mentioned. And I’m sadly sure that this day is a repeat of the day two years before when I woke to find that while I’d slept, my father had died. My father, a true giant, seven feet eleven inches, had died while I was dreaming, and as I slept, five men eased him down the stairwell, lowered him like a piano with a rope tied around his chest, his body too long and slowly going stiff to carry around the corners.

  “Where’s Ma,” I finally spit at supper.

  “Charlottesville,” my grandmother says, waiting to speak until after dessert is served. “Charlottesville,” she says, as if the name
of a certain small Southern town will tell me what I need to know. “The asylum.”

  “How long will she be there?”

  “Well, that depends now, doesn’t it?”

  My bags are packed. I’m removed from my own life and taken to live at my grandmother’s house. In my memory it is always summer. I have a yellow toy truck with real rubber tires. I love the tires.

  She writes: Sometimes I have the weirdest dreams… .

  Boys. Boys from before, ghosts, come back to visit her. One in particular, sixth grade. The tag end of the elementary years, a four-foot-eight-inch transplant from Minnesota. First noticed when she caught his eyes on the figures at the bottom of her page, copying answers to the math test. In the coatroom, her thick whisper threatening to turn him in had him fast begging for mercy, for leniency, for her pardon. She offered closely supervised parole. He accepted.

  When he felt her up, all he got were the puffy protrusions that promised greater future swellings, and when she felt him down, all she found was the narrow little nightstick that might with patience grow to a cop’s thick billy club. Like that they played, equals, bald in all the same places.

  And perhaps in the guise of making new friends faster, perhaps not knowing the disillusion it would cause—one so willingly makes excuses for the young—at the first boy/girl parties of their lives, before her very eyes, he took up with other girls. All of them, one right after another, if only for a single kiss, a five-minute ride on the swings. She often caught him, lips pressed to the evening’s hostess, to the girl whose desk abutted hers, the one with the blondest hair, biggest boobs, him and whomever, rustling in the bushes beyond the patio. Hers was the divorced heart, but she carried on, sure—or nearly sure—that none of the others did the things she did with him. On the floor of her mother’s walk-in closet, she gagged his mouth with a suede Dior belt; behind the cinder-block retaining wall, she employed a railroad tie to hold his legs spread. Deep in the furnace room, hidden among the spare tires and Flexible Flyers, she repetitiously wrapped him with kite string and extra electrical cords, tying him to the hot-water heater, his puny ass burning a bright and cheery pink as heat seeped through the thin insulation. She pushed him past his limit, drove his sweet Schwanstuck backward and forward, slamming him from drive to reverse. Stripped, she slid her naked body over his, sweeping the rubbery tips of her tits across his fine and sensitive skin from neck to nuts, making him twist and turn, trying to pull away from the heater, the heater itself making a groaning sound and him begging, “Put it in, put it in.” She’d pull away, smile, take herself in hand, and do a little dance around that furnace room, hairless body, narrow hips pumping the oily air until finally with the smallest shudder she’d stand suddenly stone still, like someone struck dead. And when she recovered, she’d go to him, pull his underwear up over it and put her mouth down on it, sucking him off, the thick BVDs a kind of prophylactic cheesecloth. In the end, she’d untie him, turn him round, and spit onto his hot buns, licking his bright red ass, soothing the sore flesh with the water of her tongue. And he’d thank her profusely, bowing to her honor, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She’d shrug it off, moving on to the next thing—the teaching of luxury, of smoke and drink. She’d hand him a Winston filched from the cleaning lady, a stolen bottle of her father’s whiskey, bartered marijuana in a corncob pipe. Days and nights they spent together, inseparable. “Sweet,” both sets of parents said about the twinness of their children, so charmed. Playmates.