The End of Alice

by A M Homes

She jumps up and shows me her supplies, her net, killing jar, spreading board, insect pins, etc. “My sister’s boyfriend taught me everything last summer. I’ve got quite a collection.” She digs out a set of Schmitt display boxes from under the daybed. “But she’s broken up with him now, so I guess I’ll have to get a new hobby.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just how it goes,” she says, shrugging and again taking her place at the tea table. She pours me a fresh cup and I eat another cookie, this time faintly detecting the air of rancidity.

  “I almost had a hysterestimy this year,” she says. “But I decided against it.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “It seemed unnecessary. I resolved it could wait.”

  “One always should get a second opinion with serious conditions.”

  She nods gravely. “Let’s not discuss it anymore. Do you play jacks?”

  “As often as I am asked.”

  We move to the floor, taking with us our cracked teacups—she has brewed a bold Darjeeling. We work our way through twosies, threesies, and fours. I win twice and wonder if she is intentionally throwing me the games.

  “In your whole life, what’s the most awful thing you ever did?”

  Without knowing anything, she knows too much. On the first date she has cut to the core; I have nothing but the deepest respect for a girl like this.

  “Would you mind if we switched to Parcheesi?” I ask.

  She takes out the game and sets up the board.

  “The worst thing you ever did to anyone?” she quizzes again.

  We roll for first.

  “I killed my mother,” I say—with no choice but to answer honestly.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” (Definitely.)

  “Really?” she asks again, almost gleeful in her disbelief, as if she finds it humorous or otherwise entertaining. “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s how I remember it.”

  “Did anyone try and stop you?”

  “They encouraged me, but I didn’t know it at the time.”

  “Really?” She has won the roll. She shakes the dice and sends them across the board. “Five and three. Really?”

  “You’re starting to sound like a stuck record.” I take my turn.

  “What did your father say?”

  “He died when I was five. And what about your father?” I ask, turning the table.

  She shrugs. “I saw him once—well, saw a picture of him. Mother says I took it from her and tore it to pieces. Mother says that’s all there was, there isn’t any more. A short marriage.” She holds up her cup, indicating I should refill it. “Why’d you kill her?”

  “Didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean it at all. It was an accident, all an accident. I loved her very much.”

  “Have you loved anyone else?”

  “Only you.”

  She nods gravely. The game is over. Nobody has won. In the distance a cowbell rings, not naturally but as if it’s being struck, banged on purpose.

  “My dinner,” she says.

  I check my watch, 7 P.M., they’re calling her home.

  I don’t want to leave. I want to stay, to busy myself in this place until she returns, and then I never want her to go again. I can’t be without her.

  “You can stay,” she says. “I’ll be back later.”

  “I must go.” If I don’t leave now, I will stay forever. I will spread myself out on the floor playing games forever and ever, making up imaginary and arbitrary rules as I go along.

  The bell is banged again. “Dressie’s bell,” she says.

  “Gram’s cow?”

  She nods. “I have to go. But before I leave, I have a favor to ask.” She looks at me and waits.

  “Yes?”

  “Let me see it again.” I know what she is referring to and instantly blush.

  “Oh, don’t be a dolt. Show me. I just need to see.”

  I have no desire to flash her my manhood, am in fact embarrassed by it—suddenly it is far too ungainly and grotesque a thing, huge, hanging dark and long. Afraid of frightening her, instead I slip one of my hands into my waistband and, with the other, unzip my fly and poke my index finger out through the fabric door, wiggling the digit. Her eyes fix on my pseudopart with such intensity that regardless of the fact that it is only my finger I’m flashing, the juice in my veins pools in my crotch, pushing the finger up a bit, giving it altogether a different pulse. She giggles and bends closer, examining my indexer. “You bite your nails,” she says, and then runs off, out of the cabin and up to the big house.

  I return home and lie in bed lingering over the sensation of the afternoon and the repeating flavor of tea and old cookies. I belch and I’m in heaven.

  During the night there is a tap-tapping at the door. Hearing it, I am sure they’ve finally come for me. I go to them, ready to turn myself in. Open the door, no one is there, it is night, only night, black all around me. I return to bed. The window is open. She is there between the sheets, pulling my blanket to her chin. “Couldn’t sleep,” she says. “Strange dreams, like nightmares, only my eyes were open.”

  A stranger is shaking me. “Hey, hey, are you all right?” I try to raise my arms, to brush him away, but I am all tied up. I’m in chains. Prison. Guards.

  The sergeant is there, trying to rouse me. “You must have fallen asleep. You must have dropped off.”

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “Time.”

  The sergeant steps aside, the members of the committee are looking out over the table at me. “Would you like something to drink?” the black woman asks.

  “Another cup of tea would be lovely.”

  The black woman nods and in a minute the sergeant is holding a cup of tea. How can I drink all tied up? The sergeant brings the cup to my lips. I sip. Hot tea. “Heaven,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “Can we continue?” the black woman asks.

  “Pardon, I beg your pardon.”

  “We were talking about New Hampshire. New Hampshire and Alice Somerfield,” the black woman says.

  The man adds, “The family has written a letter, asking that you not be released. Are you aware of the letter?”

  “No.” I had no idea they’d written. “Are they still in Scarsdale?”

  No one responds.

  The sergeant gives me another sip of tea.

  “It is June,” the black woman says. “You have rented the cabin, you meet Alice Somerfield at the lake.”

  Close the window, lock the door, all too easily she fits herself around me.

  Awake before dawn, it is my plan to wake her and send her on her way. I shake the bed a bit. She sleeps soundly. Across her lips is a faint grin.

  “This may seem odd,” I say aloud, “but I don’t know your name.”

  The sweet breeze of her breath sweeps my chest, teasing the hairs like wind through trees.

  “Ruby Diamond Pearl,” she says groggily. “The jewels of my mother’s marriages.” She pauses. “But Gram calls me Alice.” And then she is back in her di’eam.

  “Won’t you be missed at breakfast?”

  Eyes still closed, she mumbles, “I never eat so early in the day.”

  We are in bed. I am attempting to make idle conversation.

  “Where do you usually live?”

  “In Scarsdale now, Mum’s just married a Jew. I hate him. He wants to send me away to school.”

  “Tell me more about your family.”

  “I’m trying to sleep.”

  “We could go swimming.”

  “No one swims anymore. Uncle George drowned in the lake when he was almost twelve—exactly my age now—so did Cousin Douglas and his friend Lizbeth. Everyone hates water.”

  “Do you?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Tell me about your accent. It’s vaguely…”

  “Don’t bother,” she says, swinging her legs out from under cover, getting up. “It’s an affectation.”

&nb
sp; Her nightgown, as with much of her wardrobe, is poorly fitting, too small. It’s torn at the neck to keep her from choking and again at the cuffs—the sleeves are so short they almost begin at the elbow.

  “I’ve grown two inches this year,” she says, noticing my concern. “Headed for the world record.”

  I want to do with her as one would a proper lover, fuck her ferociously, working up an appetite for a beast’s breakfast and then returning to bed, to do it again, finally rousing at two or three, to snack, feeding each other in bed like baby birds still in the nest, fucking again, then sleeping until supper with the comfort of newfound familiarity.

  I want to feel the suddenness of being a couple.

  She knows nothing of it. Instead she is out the door, the screen slamming behind her. “Thanks, that was fun,” she screams as she runs up the hill, in her flowered nightgown, in broad daylight.

  I sit by the door panicked, queasy, convinced I will never see her again—someone will see to that.

  I wait. I wait, thinking that if I leave the house, she will come back, find me gone, and not return.

  I wait for hours and then find myself preparing to go out, now equally sure that only if I’m gone will she return.

  A ride in the car. It’s good to get out of the house. Gifts. I will buy her gifts. I find myself in an antique store, rounding up a treasonist’s trousseau, an ancient white nightgown—yellow butterflies finely embroidered around the collar—and a diamond ring. I have no idea what brings this on, but it seems unavoidable. I am compelled to make my intentions clear.

  Returning to the house, there is still no sign of her. Unable to stand it any longer, I set off, charging up the hill toward the big house, not knowing what I’ll do.

  Hidden in the woods, leaning back against a tree, one knee bent, is a woman smoking a dark cigarette. In her free hand she holds a drink, all of it quite posed as if she’s standing for a photograph. I am almost literally upon her before she has any sense of me.

  “You frightened me,” she says, completely cool, dropping her cigarette in the leaves, crushing it with the toe of her espadrille.

  “Pardon,” I say, attempting to disguise my own surprise at coming upon the mater of my babe.

  She is tall, nearly six feet, built like a boy, flat as a board, thin as a reed.

  “The renter?” she asks, lighting a fresh cigarette.

  I nod.

  She exhales. “Gram doesn’t like smoke in the house. It’s my nasty habit.”

  “I suppose,” I say. “But a delicious one.” She offers me a cigarette. I decline, pulling out my own pack. She smiles.

  “I thought I heard something in the woods,” I say.

  “What did it sound like?”

  “I don’t know, I’m not used to the country. A wild boar possibly.”

  “My daughter,” she says, finishing her drink. “You’re probably hearing my daughter. She’s out there somewhere.”

  I make no acknowledgment.

  “I hate this place,” the mother says spontaneously. “Damned greedy lake.”

  A striking but buxom young woman opens the back door. We see her through the trees. “Mother,” she calls into the woods. “Mother, I’m leaving now, see you on the weekend.”

  “Be right there,” the mother shouts, grinding out her second cigarette. “My middle one, Gwendolyn. Just graduated Emma Willard and very anxious to see the world.”

  “Up near Troy.”

  “Yes. You’ll come to dinner one night. Gram doesn’t get out much, she’s starved for company.”

  “Thank you.”

  I am lost without her, thoroughly depraved. I spend the afternoon alone in my hut, masturbating endlessly, failing to find relief. Near dark, I go and jump in the lake. For dinner I take toast and three shirred eggs. At twenty past nine, I go to bed.

  Again in the night she comes. Pretending to sleep through her arrival, the clumsy, clunking clattering of her small paws prying the window open, the grunts and groans as she hoists herself in, through it all I snore sonorously.

  In the morning while she’s aslumber, I slip the ring on her finger. She wakes looking at it as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. Going to the window, she scrapes the stone across the glass and asks, “Is it real?”

  “Of course.”

  “Are we engaged?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Gwen and Penelope will be so jealous.”

  I struggle to find the words. “Darling, sweetheart, dainty dumpling…”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Our arrangement is best kept between us. The ring, a private gift from me to you; something your sisters might easily misunderstand.”

  “You mean, you don’t really love me.”

  “Oh, but I do.” I pause. “But my age. I’m so much older than you.”

  She cuts me off. “How old?”

  “Halfway through thirty-one.”

  “That’s nothing,” she says. And that’s the end of it.

  It occurs to me that if she does turn rat, if anyone ever asks, I can easily suggest that the ring once belonged to my mother and Alice so reminded me of her that I made a gift of it.

  “And what should I offer you in return?” she asks. “Is the pleasure of my company enough?”

  I cannot even bring myself to answer. So pious, so holy, still so sure this is entirely a fix. Secretly she is wearing a wire, a microscopic camera has been implanted beneath her skin, they are there somewhere, watching me, maybe even staring out from inside her titties.

  And despite my priestly guise of apparent abstention I excuse myself frequently, furiously frigging in the bathroom eight or nine times a day if only to relieve the pressure, so steady is the need. At some point, too, I abandon all efforts at concealing my interest and she sees it bobbing excitedly beneath my worsteds.

  “Does it have a name?” she asks.

  “I call it Walter, after my father.”

  Her calves are the loveliest, longest, and most subtle shape.

  Thin ankles, delicate feet, long toes.

  Her armpits are dappled with fuzz, a thing about to bloom yet oblivious to any notions of what it means to finally blossom.

  Again and always I wish I were a photographer, could master the light, could make a picture that would illustrate, with all clarity, the effect she has on me.

  Later I will ask myself what made me break my Philadelphia vows; was it a particular event or simply, stupidly, the path of least resistance?

  What you should know is that in this rare case, it was she who took me. A seduction somewhere between a romance and a rape. I have no explanation for behavior such as this except a few theorems hinting at a sad and sordid explanation for her apparent, if addled, understanding of adult desire. I’m hinting at the possibility of some previous acquaintance with goings-on such as this—perhaps we had that in common as well. I wouldn’t doubt it. Details and the like, admittedly, I didn’t want to know.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” the old woman asks. “I couldn’t make it out. You mumble. Speak more clearly. Enunciate.”

  Again, they are annoying me.

  My speech is slurred, s’s sibilant, l’s lazy, my mouth is sore from Henry’s injection. And there’s this damned pain splitting my cheek, my neck, shooting down into my left arm.

  “I was saying that I think perhaps she’s been abused as a child. If they write you another letter, you might want to write back and ask them that.”

  “Are you speaking now of yourself or her? I’m not clear what you’re getting at,” the old woman says.

  Why do they take everything and turn it, make one thing into something else? In trying to help her, I’ve just made it worse for myself, I’ve said something they don’t want to hear.

  “Explain yourself,” the old woman demands.

  I shake my head. “Everything is not autobiography.”

  “We’re losing our focus,” the black woman says. “We were talking about the events that
occurred in New Hampshire.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything you’d like to add, to clarify.”

  I’m thinking about how the story goes—I wake to find myself tied to the bed, wrists, ankles, bound and even a rope around my neck.

  Dressed only in cowboy boots and a skirt, Alice dances around the room, grabbing at her chest, pinching her nips. Hopelessly hard beneath the cover of a stale sheet, I watch the devil parade.

  “God, I hope I don’t get big boobs,” she says, looking at me.

  My heart races.

  She plays with her breasts, having named them Mildred and Maureen.

  On an earlier occasion she has told me that she paints narratives around them with watercolor and then jumps in the bath and watches her stories disappear.

  At the time I offered to buy her paper, but she said it would defeat the purpose, suggesting instead that I might take a Polaroid of each painting as she finishes.

  I decline, not wanting to create evidence.

  Now, she dances half-naked singing a little song about Mildred, Maureen, and the man they’ve got strapped to the bed.

  She hoists herself onto the mattress and straddles me.

  I distract myself by asking what poem she has on the bottom of her boot.

  “ ‘The Cowboy’s Lament.’ ”

  She crouches over me, drawing on my chest with a pink Magic Marker. Simultaneously I’m straining toward her, wanting more and recoiling in horror.

  “You might want to think about cutting off this hair, it’s kind of disgusting,” she says, making pictures of horses jumping fences. “If Mother’s new husband wasn’t such an arse, I might be able to have a pony.”

  She begins to post as if she’s riding me, the motion of her sliding, bouncing on the bed, works to pull the sheet down. Quite unexpectedly I feel her flesh against me.

  “You’re not wearing underwear!” I scream.

  “I like to catch the breezes.”

  With no warning she is down upon me, unforgivably on me, riding me like an experienced equestrian.

  My eyes are closed. I’m in heaven. I’m in hell.

  It is the tightest fit. Despite her apparent experience, she hasn’t done exactly this before. She pushes herself down, taking her time, clearly struggling. Yet she makes no exclamation, her face merely curls into a scowl.