Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“You’re going to go to college, then?” Sharon bobbed her head. She was so easy to please, there was no joy in it. “Where? What do you plan to study?”

“Community college. I have to get a part-time job and help pay my way.” She gave Sharon a sly look. “It’s hard to get scholarships, coming out of Middlebrook.”

Sharon took this as a rebuke. Alice knew she would. No one had ever wanted Alice ’s approval as much as Sharon Kerpelman did. The slightest suggestion that Alice ’s life was less than it might be was wounding to this woman, who seemed to feel Alice owed her gratitude and affection, if not downright love. Sharon cared about Alice, she announced often, a note of pride in her voice. Sharon ’s pride was what kept Alice from returning her affection. Sharon could not think so well of herself for sticking by Alice unless sticking by Alice was a weird thing to do.

“You know what you should do?” Sharon asked, changing the subject.

Alice was interested in spite of herself. She was quite keen to know what she should do. She always had been. She liked those magazine articles with rules and checklists. She tore them out and tried to follow them, but it was never as easy as it looked. There was always something-an ingredient, an assumption-that kept her from completing everything as prescribed. Kosher salt, for example, for homemade pedicures. She wasn’t sure what that was, and how it was different from other salt. Not that she would have been allowed to give herself any kind of spa treatment at Middlebrook, but she had been looking ahead to a day when she could.

Sharon leaned forward. “You should walk,” she said triumphantly. “You’d be surprised what it does for the body. Just lots and lots of walking. Whenever I go visit friends in New York, I can eat whatever I want because I walk everywhere.”

Sharon beamed at her own brilliance, nodding and smiling, looking for some kind of response. Alice felt stranded, the way she often did in conversations, as if she were standing on an ice floe and needed to leap to another one. The whole sequence mystified her: Walking. Friends. So Sharon had friends? Friends in New York, no less. Why did she have friends in New York? Wasn’t she from Baltimore? Hadn’t she told Alice that a hundred times, how she had grown up less than a mile from Alice, on the other side of the park, in that place with the stupid name?

“My grandparents live in Connecticut,” Alice said at last. Connecticut was right next to New York. It was all she had to offer, conversationally. She had never been there herself, but she had heard her mother speak of it. It was known as the Nutmeg State. To spell it, you have to Connect i to Cut. Connecticut.

“Yes, I remember your grandparents. Have you talked to them lately?”

“No.” Sharon frowned, full of pity. “But then, I never did. Talk to them much. I only saw them once a year, before. They came down a couple of times, at first, but my grandmother said it was too hard.”

“How selfish .” Sharon almost yelped the last word, and people nearby jumped, as if a glass had tumbled to the floor.

Alice thought about the word selfish, turned it over and over in her mind. Certain words had an almost hypnotic effect. Always candid Helen had told Alice about her own “youthful experiments”-Helen’s phrase-with marijuana and other drugs, and how a single word could become the funniest thing in the world for no reason. But you didn’t have to be high to latch onto a word. Selfish . Related to the self, of course. But ish was usually reserved for those things that were inexact-oneish, warmish, newish-or kind of gross. Oh, ish, her friend Wendy would squeal when something offended her. It was cute, even the boys thought so, but only Wendy, who was petite, could get away with that kind of baby talk. Alice would have been mocked for lisping.

“ Alice?” Sharon prompted.

“They’re not really selfish,” she said, now that she had worked the word out for herself. “They just live so far away.”

Which was, of course, what Helen had said to Alice, as if she were trying to convince herself. They were old, older than most parents, and Da hated to fly, and Ma-Ma hated Da to drive, and it was such a pain taking the commuter train into Grand Central, then getting on Amtrak over at Penn Station, so they just couldn’t visit that often. Alice understood.

“Well, I’m sure they love you very much,” Sharon said.

“They do.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Not as if you believed it.”

Alice stared hard at Sharon until the woman finally looked away, pretending to study the toy airplanes hung from the ceiling of the restaurant. Her lawyer had changed very little over the seven years. Of course, Alice had changed so much that everyone else’s changes seemed inconsequential. But she had noticed the subtle differences in her mother’s face, even though she saw her far more often than Sharon. Helen had kept herself up. That was her term, another phrase that had stuck in Alice ’s brain, for it suggested an image of her mother in scaffolding, men working away with paint and brushes. She kept herself up .

But over the past two years, Helen had begun to look her age, no more, no less. She knew it, too, and claimed to be complacent about it. “The French actress Catherine Deneuve said a woman over forty has to choose her face or her fanny,” Helen had said to Alice on her last visit to Middlebrook. “I’m going the fanny route.” And she had patted her slender hip-her “yoga butt,” as she had taken to calling it-and laughed. Alice had laughed, too, for it was her favorite version of Helen. Breezy, a little silly, talking about things that no one else on Nottingham Road could make sense of.

And as long as Helen worried about her own looks, she didn’t worry too much about Alice ’s. She was philosophical when Alice started putting on weight two years ago, said the body knew what it needed and that Alice ’s body was probably reacting instinctively to needs Alice didn’t even realize she had.

“It’s like your body thinks you’re a bear, in hibernation. Maybe it’s because they have you on this rigid eating schedule. You don’t get to eat when you’re hungry, you have to eat when they say you do, so your metabolism slows, in case they start starving you.”

Alice had a different theory. She believed she had a tumor. Someone had left behind a newspaper-a real newspaper, not one of those shameful things from the supermarket racks-with a story about a woman at Johns Hopkins who had a 180-pound tumor in her stomach. No one could figure out why she was gaining weight. Then they took the tumor out, and she was normal again.

The local newspaper did not have a photograph of the tumor, but the writer described it as-the words were burned into Alice ’s memory-“an onion-shaped growth the color of a brown egg and covered with fine, silky hair.” Alice took to pressing her fists into her abdomen, looking for signs of a growth. The skin was soft, yielding, yet she thought there might be something unwanted beneath its folds. Finally, she went to the infirmary and asked if there was a tumor test. The doctor was kind, listening intently with no expression on her tired face. She took notes, prodded Alice all over, asked her questions.

“I’m afraid that it’s just, uh, a fairly normal weight gain, given your circumstances,” she had said apologetically, as if she, too, had wanted to find a tumor. “It comes down to arithmetic-calories expended subtracted from calories consumed.”

“I’m good at math,” Alice told the doctor. “I always was. I’m doing Algebra II, but if I were in a regular school, I’d probably do Trig and even Calculus.”