A. Homes - The End of Alice

“Put your finger up my ass,” he says, tilting up so she can reach behind him. “Up my ass.”

She fingers his asshole and then pokes a digit in.

“More,” he says. “More fingers.”

She sticks two fingers up his ass and he starts to groan. Vaguely disgusted, she slides her fingers in and out, each time going deeper. He grips her head in both hands and slams into her throat. Her jaw aches, his pubic hair scratches her face. Thinking it will bring things to a quicker end, she shoves a third finger up his ass.

He bellows, “I knew it was more than tennis lessons,” then ejaculates, splashing her face, her hair, with cum.

This is what my life is really like. I think you tend to romanticize me, but this is reality. P.S.: Am I supposed to feel sorry for you or think you’re grotesque?

A bit of both would be about right.

Back at her house, the girl, the child, assumes the position, the only possible position, supine on the sofa.

“You were such a happy little girl,” the mother says.

“Things change.”

The black hole, the pit, the bridge over the river Adulescens.

“Nothing ever seems to be enough for you,” the mother says. “Whatever it is, it’s not enough. What do you want?”

“More. I want more. Didn’t you ever want more?”

“What more is there? I have a beautiful home, filled with beautiful things. A husband, a daughter who could be beautiful if she wanted to be. What else is there? What do you think about, dear? You can tell me. Tell me anything, I promise not to be shocked, no matter how awful it is.”

“I hate you.”

The mother begins to cry. The daughter, who in the past would have felt remorse, would have forgotten herself and comforted the mother, gets up and walks away. “Why?” the mother cries. “Why? What have I done to create such a monster, a girl who hates her own mother?”

The daughter cannot get far enough away. “If it makes you feel any better,” she screams, “I hate everybody. And I hate myself even more than I hate you.” She runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door.

The father comes home from work. He sits in the living room waiting for dinner.

“Your mother is very worried about you,” he says to the girl, who has resumed her position on the sofa.

“Do I even know you?”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s not like you have a habit of talking to me. I just wonder, why now?”

“I told you, your mother is worried.”

“Oh,” the girl says. “Just checking.”

“I’m your father. I pay the bills around here. I bought the clothes on your back. Your mother, my wife, is very upset. She asked me to speak to you. She said there’s no talking to you. And you know what?” He pauses. “She’s right.”

The mother comes into the room. “What do you want to do with your life?” the parents ask.

There is no answer.

“A lot of people your age go to Europe for the summer, don’t they?” the father asks. “It’s not too late for you to go away, I’ll buy the tickets.”

“Dinner is ready,” the mother says. “Lamb chops.”

Her throat is sore. The flavor of Matt’s father mingles with the blood of the lamb and drips down her throat. The string beans go down like razor blades.

As soon as dinner is done, without a beat, as though she doesn’t have to stop and think about it for even a minute, as though it were decided long ago, she goes straight upstairs into the bathroom and starts emptying the pill containers. The medicine chest is well stocked. Both parents dose themselves daily, depending on their mood, on the weather, on their pain. She swallows anything and everything, popping pills by the fistful. She swallows everything and washes it down with bottles of NyQuil, Hycodan, and Robitussin.

111. She feels ill. Maybe it’s the combination of the cough syrups, maybe it’s the lamb, maybe it’s Matt’s father. There’s a bad taste in her mouth. She rinses with Listerine and spits.

She’s over the bowl. Everything is coming up, violently rising.

The mother, as if psychically summoned, opens the bathroom door, goes to the girl, and holds her forehead. Fortunately, the mother doesn’t look in the bowl, doesn’t examine what’s coming up and out, the thick mix of red and green syrups, pills, capsules, caplets, tablets, all of it in various states of dissolve. This mix and match has made the girl not only nauseated but very tired.

When there’s a pause in the puking, the girl sticks her fingers down her throat and starts it again voluntarily. All of it has to come out.

The mother seems confused. “Hope it wasn’t something I cooked.”

The girl cannot bring herself to confess. It is too embarrassing, too humiliating, too telling. She is too old for this. This is how she should have felt at fourteen, at fifteen, but now, at her age, nineteen, nearly twenty, it’s ridiculous. It’s worse. Like certain childhood diseases that become more dangerous the later they are contracted, this one has the potential to be fatal.

Suddenly, she doesn’t want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it’s equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn’t she die? She lives because she’s meant to live, because she’s already alive and it’s comparatively easy to stay that way. She lives because, even though she doesn’t know what it is, there must be a reason she’s here in the first place. She lives because either she’s not as brave as all the dead girls who’ve gone before her, or she’s actually braver — it’s hard to tell.

The daughter continues to vomit, flushing the toilet again and again, until the father comes upstairs and stands outside the bathroom door.

“Is something broken?” he asks. “Are you breaking something in there? Plumbers get a hundred dollars an hour. You have no respect for machinery.”

“She’s throwing up,” the mother says, cracking open the door. “She must have eaten some chozzerai this afternoon that didn’t agree with her.”

“Oh,” the father says, backing off. “Hope it wasn’t something you cooked.” He stands in the hallway for a minute, listening to the waterfall, the whoosh and roar of the best American Standard. “Well, maybe she doesn’t have to flush so much, so violently. Could you just ask her to flush less?”

We are quite different, she and I. She is not who I thought she was, who I presented her to be, and so it goes for all of us, for all of this. Things are never quite what they seem. Her time with Matt was not what I had hoped. It was not the discovery of a drive, the awakening of an ambition, the development of a discerning palate for nature’s delicacies, the start of a brilliant career. Clearly, she is not a careerist. If she were, she would have been invigorated by this interlude, her appetite only whetted. She’d be ready, willing, rushing to begin again, to cultivate a fresh one. Instead, she wants out.

No, it’s apparent that I was wrong. This was a onetime thing, a rite of passage, a kind of bridging of the gap between childhood and adult life — however developmentally delayed. And despite her depression, her despondency, she is actually galloping right along, catching up, catching on. By the time school starts again, she’ll be ready to have an affair with either the melancholic professor of Russian literature or the lucky lady adviser living down the hall. I daren’t conjecture which way she’ll go — some things must remain a mystery. But she has been playing both ends against the middle, hoping to work something out. Is she there yet? She is en route.

Despite my best efforts, I am always the one who gets fucked. It won’t ever be any different, some things don’t change — I suppose I have to learn to enjoy it.