A. Homes - The End of Alice

She writes: His mother begged me. “ Would you, could you, just this once, please, pretty please. The regular sitter has the flu. I know you don’t like doing it, but could you make a special exception? For me? For Matt?” Can you believe? Vm sitting there, thinking, what to do, what to do, and my mother is yakking in the background, going, “Who is it? Who is on the phone? Is the call for me?”

* * *

Would you, could you?” his mother asks.

The girl pretends to ponder, to think. Time alone with the boy, her toy — her heart leaps. The girl agrees. “Sure,” she says.

“Thank you so much. Thank you. We are so lucky. Come at six and I’ll show you everything.”

The girl arrives and finds the mother wearing a black cocktail dress, unzipped down the back. The mother’s hair is wet. She’s in the kitchen ironing her husband’s shirt. “We’re running late,” she says, leaving half the story unsaid. They were going at it. Upstairs getting ready, she and he got carried away and now they’re late, she’s harried. Her face is flushed. She looks at the clock and sprays the husband’s shirt. “He’s very picky about wrinkles. Until this year, we had a live-in, it was a luxury. The kids are older now and we’ve got to save for the big BM.”

“Pardon?”

“Bar mitzvah.”

“Oh.”

She has a little crushlette on my girl. She kisses her for no apparent reason. Kiss hello. Kiss just because. Kiss. Kiss.

The boy. The boy, where is the boy? The girl is distracted wondering where he roams in his father’s castle. Why didn’t he meet her at the door, greet her with a wink, a whisper, a titty tease? She hopes he has not been taken away, lured out by his friends, bribed with the promise of M&M’s and Jujubes.

One after another, the mother opens the kitchen cabinets, showing the girl around. “Whatever you want, it’s here,” she says, gesturing at cans of Campbell’s soup mix, mandarin oranges, potato sticks, cake mix. She opens the fridge, the freezer, to show what can be defrosted, done in an oven.

“We won’t be home before midnight,” the mother says, “but I’d like the kids to get to bed at a decent hour. The little one’s allergy medicine is here.” She points to a bottle of red syrup near the sink. “If he seems bothered, give him a spoonful, but not too early. It puts him right to sleep.”

Her boy comes into the kitchen, looks at her, and without a word slinks away. By the way his shorts fit, she can tell he is pleased to see her.

“Matt. Matthew, come here, boy,” the father bellows from the upstairs hallway. The son is taken aside. “I trust you to behave responsibly. You’ve been so peculiar lately, I wonder. You know my position on drugs — take only what the doctor prescribes.”

The boy and girl sit in the den in front of the television making small talk while the parents finish polishing themselves up.

“Do you have G.I. Joe?” she asks.

“Not anymore,” he says.

“What do you play?”

He shrugs.

“How’s your forehand coming?” She makes the motion of jerking off. “Have you been practicing?”

The mother ducks her head into the den. “We’re leaving. See you later. Have a good time.”

“Drive carefully,” the girl says.

The mother gives the girl a quick peck on the lips. “Thanks.”

Matt ignores it. He lies on the sofa, arm crooked behind his head. He is nothing if not casual. The band of his underwear pokes out of his shorts. She is tempted to yank it, to jerk it, to hike his BVDs high into his bum, pulling his balls tight against his torso. He scratches himself, rubs, digging in, rearranging things, seemingly surprised at her stare.

“What?” he asks, working his hands over his body without the least awareness of what it does to others.

She adores his absent fascination with all that can be picked, plucked, and snacked upon, cuticles, calluses, nails, and of course scabs. He pops pieces of himself into his mouth as though he wishes to eat himself alive. She imagines him twisted into a contortionist’s pose, arms and legs braided, his body bent to bring mouth to member, to sample the delicacy forbidden by anatomy’s architecture, among other things. She knows the brother of a friend who can do it, who’s down on it morning, noon, and night, sucking himself off and shooting high at an archery target mounted on the ceiling, splashing the bull’s-eye with the splatter of spunk.

“Arf, arf.” On his hands and knees the baby brother comes to her, playing a dog.

“Are you a dog? A pretty puppy dog?”

He nods. “Arf, arf.”

Matthew watches television, ignoring them.

“Do you want me to scratch your ears, rub your belly?” She reaches down and pets the little pup.

“Arrfff, Arrrffff,” he purrs, rubbing against her leg, arching his back, clearly confused about the difference between dog and cat.

Wallace, the real family hound, sits in the corner watching the proceedings, brow raised, perplexed.

“You’re a good dog, a cute doggie,” she says.

Wallace’s tail thumps the floor.

The dog boy wiggles his butt.

Matthew rolls over. “I wanna be your dog,” he says to her.

They look down at the baby brother. “Puppy want to go out?” she asks. The baby boy nods and pants. She gets the leash and collar. Wallace gets up and goes toward the door. “No,” she says firmly. “Not you.” She hooks the baby up, fitting him into the collar, attaching Wallace’s leash. She takes him out into the yard, hooking his lead to the long chain, the tie-out stake stuck deep in the dirt next to the house. Dog boy crawls around on all fours, sniffing the grass, pretending to dig holes and bury bones. “If you need anything, just bark,” she says, leaving him there.

“Take off your clothes,” Matt says. “I need to see what you look like.” He pauses. “I promise I won’t do anything. I just want to look.”

“You don’t have to promise anything.”

“Take off your clothes.”

“You.”

“What?”

“Take off my clothes.”

Teaching thick fingers to be nimble is part of the education. She lies on the sofa and lets him unbutton her shirt. For purposes of early education, her bra is front closing. He lets loose the clasp; it springs open. He unzips her pants. She wiggles out, pulling down her panties. For a while, he does nothing, only looks — all the while absent-mindedly sucking his own index finger. Finally, he touches his finger to her nipple. It shrivels to a tight knot. He wiggles it back and forth. Ding, dingy. He plays with her titty. He cups a breast in each hand, holding them, molding them as if to divine all he can. He scoops them up, lifting from the sides, instinctively knowing how to get the fullest feel in hand, pushing them together so they might meet and make one, squeezing hard as though a display of strength will win the contest.

She winces but says nothing.

His face is against them, sniffing and licking and then sucking, pulling hard as he would on a soda straw. Nothing comes. He is disappointed, having thought there would be something, a little snack, a single squirt. Still so unfamiliar with the connect-the-dot routine — the simple switches that connect lip, tit, and pussy — he hasn’t noticed that all along her hips have been rising and falling, bucking for attention. He has missed the spectacle of her short hairs curling as the humidity increased. And when he finally gets there, when his investigation leads him south, he says, “Oooohhh, gross, it’s all wet. Did you pee in there?”

He peels her apart, asking, “Is it supposed to be like this?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, like this?”

“Yes.”

Studying, staring, making what appear to be mental notes, his fingers dip in, slide down the slit and into the hole, feeling around as though by accident he’s dropped a penny or a dime and would now like it back. Wiggling fingers. Finding nothing, he pulls out.