A. Homes - The End of Alice

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The letter. I go back to the letter. I will always go back to the letter. She is there, waiting for me, waiting with something to tell me, needing me. Without me she is nothing.

What do you like about girls ? she writes.

Their secrets.

Blueberries. She’s been out picking berries and has sent me the stained white sheets, eight and a half by eleven, marked with purple juice, the would-be wine or vinegar, a special pot of jam, pressed into the pages. Thinking of you, always thinking of you.

I imagine she has sent me these pages so that we may lie together in the fields among the beetles and bees, lie together on the cricket floor at the height of day, heat of noon, in the full force of God’s light, and have it done— blessed with the necessary relief of an urgency that couldn’t wait. Our personal swellings so engorged, nearly anaphylactic in their shock, that they could not be ignored, and so we’d hump, bump, frig, and fuck, and just in the nick of time, I’d remove myself, spraying my fertilizer, my own dangerous DDT, into the fields while her own quiet passion nectar slowly trickles out. She has mailed me such so that we might be together and enjoy the day.

I bring her pages to my nose, smell the out-of-doors, the curious honey of a fruit field, the uncaged air, the scent of her envelope, her paper, her fingers — Lord knows where they’ve been. I breathe, grateful that at least my olfactories are intact. Once, long ago, I saw a wooden board, a sign that said free wind take some. Her letter is like that, filled with so much. I breathe. Breathe and touch.

Matt’s mom took us picking in Fairfield County. We had a contest to see who could pick most, fastest, etc. I kept dreaming of pie, steaming hot with a lump of vanilla ice cream across the top. Matt picked most and fastest and kept throwing berries at me so I punched him, hard. I think he liked it.

Take note and notice, I am old, more concerned with what is wasted, what fruit falls to the ground and is trampled upon than the intent of their game. Foreplay. Affection expressed. She tells me these things and then adds as if an endnote, an afterthought, And then we did it.

Did what? What did you do? Did it. Done it. What does that mean? Why does no one tell me anything anymore?

I cannot forgive her the imbecilic nature of her communication. There are people who perpetually drool, who cannot hold their head up straight, cannot unfurl their hands well enough to grip a pen, who have a better command of the language than she with her university years seems to display.

How do you even know what you’re doing? You are so backward that your idea of “doing it” might be to pull down your pants and bump butts the way Sissy Hobson and I did as children. We slid our shorts down, had our heinies kiss, and got the greatest thrill.

Is that what she’s getting at — some kind of game? Or did they really do it? Did she stake a claim and steal his slippery stream? Did his minute member grace her saintly shrine? Did he even know what was happening? Did he ask for it, beg, get down on his hands and knees and pant, “Can I? Can I?” And did she simply say “do” and it was done? What happened?

We did it. So she says.

Slut. Whore. Fucking cunt. Does she think I am immune to her musings? Does she not see that I am drawn still further in, that I am to share her with no one else? Does she think that because I am here, because I have been here for so long, that I’ve gone queer? Does she assume that because I am so old, I have no interest?

What do I care that she plays with the boy, learns a trick or two off him? What do I care? I must be crazy, half-gone. I must be. It matters. It matters so much to me.

Shut eyes. Clench jaw. Hold tight. The din, the warble. Roar. Screaming siren. I will not be awake. I will not stay for this.

More soon.

Prison. Night. My gut burns in the bottom of my belly. Searing, deep, starting on the right and spreading left. A smoldering fire is buried in me. Toss. Turn. It is worse lying down, worse yet on my side. I bring my knees to my chest.

“Boy,” my grandmother calls, and I run. Apple pie. Mother is back. She comes out of the door and stands in the yard, white and gold, porcelain and milky glass. Everything is good and right. She smiles. She laughs. So fragile, so cracked. She is the former Tomato Queen. Queen for a day in Morgan County, in the tiny town of Bath, of Berkeley Springs, buried in the Mountain State, West Virginia.

“You and I,” she says a few days after she’s back — we’re still staying at my grandmother’s house. “We’ll take a little trip. We’ll go back to see where I was raised.”

My grandmother, bent over the oranges, elbow bearing down, shakes her head.

“It’s not up for discussion,” my mother says.

Somewhere near the Fourth of July, the Tomato Queen returns to her hometown. She drives slowly, pausing on the outskirts to brush her hair, freshen her lipstick, to suck in the long deep breath that will glue her together. She eases her Chevrolet into town, holding herself as if she expects the streets to be lined with well-wishers waving, a band of trombones and tubas waiting to play a certain pomp and circumstance, as if she is still the Tomato Queen and this is still her day.

“A bath,” she says to the attendant at the old Roman baths. “A great big bath.”

The woman leads us down the hall to a room with a heavy wooden door. “You have an hour,” she says, turning on the tub. Mama ushers me into the narrow room. The water is running.

“How much does it hold?” I ask.

“A thousand gallons,” Mama says.

As wide as the tub and only a little longer, the room has a small space for the steps that lead into the water. There is a narrow chair and a thin cot dressed in a clean white sheet, and that’s all.

“Sometimes, it’s just too hard, it’s just too much,” she says, sitting on the narrow chair, taking off her shoes, reaching up under her dress and rolling down her stockings.

I sit on the cot watching.

She smiles.

I’m watching Mama, more than watching, looking.

“I’m so glad to be home. Missed you,” she says, unzipping her dress, sliding it off her shoulders. “Thought about you three times a day.”

She escapes her underthings and I look away. I’ve been looking too hard, looking instead of watching, looking instead of not noticing.

Her body continuously unfolds, a voluminous and voluptuous twisting, turning monument to the possibilities of shape, to the forms flesh can take. A body. A real body.

“Are you getting shy?” she asks. “Getting too old for your ma?”

My face goes blank, all feeling falls out of it. She reaches over and starts to unbutton my summer shirt, the one my grandmother has starched and pressed so stiff that it’s sharp, painful in places. I raise my hand and take over the unbuttoning. I undress with the awkwardness of a stranger, wondering if this is the way things are supposed to be, if this is simply how it is done, wondering if my discomfort is my own peculiarity. I have no way of knowing.

Mama turns off the tub.

At dawn I call for the guard. I am doubled over, bent in on myself. “The doctor, the doctor,” I say.

In shackles. That’s how they do it, how they move us from place to place. Guards and guns, flanked front, back, and sides. Arms and legs in steel shackles.

You’d think I was an ax murderer.

I am led through chambers, twisting paths, through doors that must be locked behind me before the one in front of me is released. I am held for several minutes in what feels like a vapor lock, in what could be a gas chamber. I listen for the hiss of pellets, sure they would be willing to sacrifice the guards as well, if only they thought it could be done with no complaint.