A. Homes - The End of Alice

She raises the knocker again and puts her ear to the door. There is the inane sound track of a certain cartoon character, an anthropomorphized animated duck with a lisp. Again, she raises the knocker, banging as hard as she can against the door.

She stands waiting. And waiting.

One. Five. Seven minutes. There is the shift of mood that comes with waiting. Her sweat cools. Anxious to angry. Annoyed to exhausted. Disheartened. Did this dinner not mean anything to anyone but her? Of course not, but she doesn’t understand that, yet.

Wasps. Residents of the nest above the door are returning home, wrapping up a day’s work. They buzz around her head, and before she realizes what they are, she swats at them. Stung. Her eye. She cries out. She stumbles, falling back against the doorframe. Her elbow hits a heretofore unnoticed doorbell. Chimes echo through the house.

“Door, door, door,” a voice calls, translating.

The clunk of a dead bolt retracting. The door is opened. Kitchen towel over her shoulder, the mother is there with a can of frozen pink lemonade sweating in her hand.

The girl’s hand is over her eye. She is pressing against it as though she can make the swelling go down.

“I got stung,” she says.

“Are you allergic?” the mother asks.

“I don’t think so.”

“Can you breathe?”

“Yes.”

The mother ushers the girl into the kitchen, her office, her great laboratory, and makes an ice pack out of the dishrag.

“Should I call your mother?”

Deeply humiliated, the girl shakes her head, not realizing that this accident will work in her favor. She is a little dumb, with none of the cunning and lithe charm of a true temptress, who would see fortune here.

“I’ll get you some Benadryl.”

“What’s for dinner?” an anonymous voice screams.

There is no answer.

The boy, her boy, Matthew, a gift of the Lord, comes into the kitchen. The sight of her beloved sends an almost unbearable flash of nearly nucleic heat through her. Every vessel is dilated. Breathless, she bows her head — a gesture of respect, a peasant tipping to royalty. He wears madras shorts, and an untucked, crookedly buttoned blue oxford-cloth shirt — several sizes too large. His feet are bare. It is the first time she’s seen his toes. It’s all she can do not to fall onto her hands and knees and lap at them.

“Were you, like, in a fight?” he asks.

She shakes her head. The mother comes back into the room and stands before her ready to dispense the medication in the child’s liquid form. Momentarily distracted from her boy by the teaspoon being pushed toward her lips, she swallows the stuff. It’s not nearly as good as sucking toes.

“Isn’t it two spoons if you’re over twelve?” the girl asks.

The mother reads the back of the bottle and pours her a refill.

“If you’d like,” the mother says, “I could take you home.”

The girl shakes her head. “I’m fine.”

“What’s for dinner,” the boy says.

“Turkey burgers.”

While my intention is not to interrupt the proceedings, you should be aware that I have no idea of what they’re talking about. I’ve never heard of a turkey burger and can not quite imagine such a thing. Perhaps I have been away for far too long, perhaps this item says something about these people, something I’m not quite picking up on— therefore, I leave it to you to understand its connotations. But in case you are as baffled as I am, let me add that according to the girl, the item is one that requires the combining of many ingredients into a huge bowl, the use of a frying pan, a sprayed or pumped vegetable-oil lubricant, and there are bread crumbs involved. I myself abhor bread crumbs — they are a kind of softened sawdust, an extender used in efforts to make something out of nothing.

“I hope I won’t have to feed the three of you first,” the mother says continuously from six forty-five until seven-fifteen when the father, damp and disheveled, arrives home.

“Car still in the shop?” the mother asks.

The father nods. “No taxis at the station. I walked. Hot out.” The mother pours him a cold glass of pink lemonade, which he appears to swallow in a single gulp. She pours him another, which he consumes almost as quickly. He holds out the glass for another refill.

“This is all there is,” she says, holding the pitcher close to her breast. “I made it for the children.”

The father goes to the sink and fills his glass with water. He splashes his head and face and reaches for a dish towel. “We have three bathrooms if you’d like to wash up.”

“Is that my shirt?” the father asks his eldest son. Matthew shrugs.

“You know I don’t like it when you wear my clothing.” The boy shrugs again.

“You get funny little spots on my things, spots too small for your mother to see. She pretends they aren’t there, but I see them and they don’t come out. So what about that?” Our girl watches the father and son. They seem to be in competition with each other, vying for something the boy has yet to figure out. The father is intent, well-focused on pulling the rug out from under if only to taunt, to tease, to trip the young one up. For the moment her boy has forgotten her, but she doesn’t worry. She recognizes that she must leave him alone, must learn to spend time with him that is unremarkable — that will be her way in, the seeming ordinariness of things. For now, she is content to simply watch, to witness. And although it seems strange — they have all forgotten she is there.

So far, the father, the pater of her dear one, has not so much as spotted her sitting at his kitchen table, ice pack pressed to the right side of her face, dripping chilly water onto the linoleum floor. To keep from jumping out of her skin, from jumping up and running out of the house, bellowing, “You don’t want me, you aren’t even paying attention,” she talks to the dog.

“Oh, you’re a good dog, a pretty dog, a lucky dog. Did you have your dinner? Was it a good dinner?” She rubs the undamaged side of her face against the dog’s muzzle. He licks her.

After pulling plates from the cupboard, the mother decorates them with artful arrangements: beds of lettuce, piles of potato salad, rings of onion, and tomato wedges. She hurries back and forth from kitchen to dining room, laying the table, flipping the burgers, fetching the ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise. No one helps her. Her servitude is unspoken and predetermined. She does it all herself. The girl could help. She has taken home economics and is well educated in these matters, but knows that to act would divide the room into male and female, waitress and waited upon, would separate her from what she wants. Instead the girl scratches the dog’s ears. He sniffs her crotch and attempts to mount her leg.

“Wallace,” the mother says, grabbing the dog by the collar, jerking his neck. “Stop.”

The two boys wrestle in the hallway, the little one screaming joyously for help as his bigger brother flips and flops him, braiding his limbs like a soft pretzel. The father has for the moment disappeared, excused himself to make a phone call from somewhere quiet, somewhere where he can think, where he can talk and be heard.

Burgers are piled onto a platter. “Dinner is served,” the mother announces. “Dinner,” she repeats. And the troops are assembled. A guest, a guest. It is as if rumor of the girl’s attendance is only now circulating as family members find themselves ushered into the dining room and not the kitchen, as they find the napkins are cloth and the glasses crystal. No plastic or paper. Surprise. Surprise. The mother takes the ice pack from our girl and leads her to her place, next to the little one, across from her boy and close to the father. Our girl smiles. “Nice,” she says.