A. Homes: The End of Alice

I hear a thousand female voices singing for their supper, crooning, “Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine.”

I go with them to their cabin. The joint reeks of the endless variety of sprays and soaps they cream themselves with, leaving the cabin a hothouse, a nurseryman’s nightmare of herbal intoxication, sure to make anyone with the slightest predilection to allergies wheeze, gasp, and grope for breath. I go with them into this temporary home and watch as they ready for bed, scurrying around the cabin taking turns at sinks, toilets, running wide brushes through their long locks. So many in motion, it is impossible to focus on any one. The action here is on the spin of the room, the tilt and whirl, so much clothing on and off. It goes on ten, fifteen minutes or more until all are finally washed, pajamaed, and orthodontically equipped for sleep. Like that, they gather round the table in the center of the room, and the counselors — themselves young and understanding women, just past prime — go through the evening prayer, the request to God that by daybreak each girl be so much wiser, more fulfilled, and generous with herself and others. Amen.

And then the twelve little girls form two fine lines, and one by one the counselors press their practiced lips to the centers of the mind, forehead square. Benediction made. The children, kissed good-night, usher themselves off to bed. Shhh, shhh, shhh, the counselors’ last word. And the whispering is stopped. Shhh, shhh, shhh, and good-night. Lights out.

It is as though I am medicated, tranquilized. Calmed. Stilled. My respiration steady. I am in heaven, curled among the nymphic creatures: Courbet’s red-nippled wonders; Sleep , touched; Rubens’s Jupiter and Callisto; at one with the titty-tweaking heroes of artistic endeavor; Second School of Fontainebleau, Gabrille d’Estrees and the Duchesse de Villars. I am strengthened, stiff from the presence of such pictures in my mind’s eye, the ability of the senses to conjure. I wish only that the paintings were here so I might lay the canvases out along my bed and wipe my dry face over them, bury myself between the fluffy thighs of so many cherry girls. And perhaps, my dears, you do recognize that while pornography is prohibited from entering the compound — although be sure it does, disguised in the oddest ways; hidden in boxes of breakfast cereal, stapled into New York State tax forms — my interest is not in the clipped beavers of the 1970s or the overinflated bosom of the 1980s. As I have so often stressed, I am a classicist and I like my pictures the painterly and old-fashioned way. What art it is to remember, to cup the luminescence of the oils, the bulk and tang of its mix with the turp, to know the months it takes to dry, the propensity the paint has to slide, to move itself for greater comfort away from the artist’s hand to a more suitable position. When in the heyday of this institution they offered courses of instruction, I took the art they gave, but when my still lifes became all too real, when I insisted on squeezing great gobs of paint through my hands and then turning the painted paw onto the primed paper, shaping out breasts and butts, gaping holes for the member made, I was led ever so gently out of the room, hands washed with the help of others in the big utility sink, and returned to quarters with no explanation. What hurt me most was that they kept my paintings, took them all. They came and cleaned out my room and I cried. I spent the night in a deep wallow, bellowing, “But they’re mine, they’re mine,” and was not even offered a drug to quiet the forthright expression of such despair, even though I know for fact that my file says I am allowed such when perturbed. That night they let me suffer, the paint still damp under my nails, my cuticles and the flesh around the tips of my fingers semi-permanently stained. I sucked them, pulling in the pigment, the lead, hoping it would do me something, hoping the putrid flavor of such cheap compounds would draw me closer to some essential self.

What do you do for fun anyway?

Two guards talk in the hallway. “Best anniversary present I ever got her? This year — new boobs.”

“Big tits?”

“Yep. The perfect gift. She just got ’em put in. Cost me five thousand bucks.”

“How big are they?”

“Can’t tell yet.”

“Isn’t it amazing what medicine can do — like an oil change, you just take ’em in and they get big tits.”

“Unbelievable.”

“You bowling?”

“Not this week, did something to my back.”

“Twist it?”

“I dunno, something.”

“Get the wife to rub it with her big tits, you’ll feel better soon,” the guard snickers.

“You’re a card,” the other guard says. “A real card.”

The decay is everywhere, inside and out. I stuff toilet paper into my ears and go back to her letter.

Camp. My parents used to send me to camp, but the other girls were too queer, so I refused to go back. She writes of the memory of one particular afternoon — or perhaps I write for her — her syntax, articulation, and understanding are still the stinted, stilted language of youth. The story is of coming into the cool of her cabin to collect her tennis racket and finding the two little girls from Louisville, Kentucky — the two who with greatest frequency received boxes of homemade chocolates — lying across the top bunk, head to toe, the brunette’s narrow foot sweeping back and forth across the strawberry blonde’s nipple, the blonde’s jumpsuit unzipped and parted to the waist. When the lovebirds sighted the girl and smiled at her, there was a flash of light like an explosion, as the sun, reflecting off the brunette’s metal tooth-braces — orthodontia — bounced round the room. And our girl, sour of stomach and spirit, gut rising in a retch, gathered her racket, her balls, and quickly hurried out.

“I thought I would puke,” she says. “And they weren’t tough like girls from Baltimore or Pittsburgh. They were from Louisville and wore long braids and pearl earrings.”

I wish to return to that camp with the young one, to witness through the gauzy screens of the curtainless cabin those two Southern girls taking each other high on the top bunk, the bed frame scraping the cement floor as they grind their flat fronts against each other, endlessly. The athleticism and stamina of youth should never go unappreciated. To go there with her and explain in greatest detail the goings-on, to suggest to her that perhaps the sickness she experiences, the nauseating turn, is her own internal structure cramped by the rise of a desire heretofore unknown. I would also suggest that the impulse to “lose one’s lunch,” to spill such rich and fine fare as the three or four peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches consumed under the elm by the canoe pond only an hour before, is not so much a mark of aversion as a pronouncement of attraction, the making room for greater possibility. As her guide, I direct her to watch the two experts from the Bluegrass State as they wrestle and writhe, and upon their collapse, I might give her shoulder a firm push and encourage her to join them for more. Then, there, outside the door, looking in on the three as they take to the floor — the bunk too narrowly thin, too precariously positioned for the synchronistic excursions of three — I’d get my thrill, my treat.

Something dashes by. A flash like the explosion of a photo cube. A blue dot left before one’s eye. I see a girl in front of me. A girl. I blink. The girl is still there. I am being tempted, teased. Alice.

Slowly, the past comes back to me.

Again, as is my habit, my nervous tic, I have gotten away from the story at hand. And meanwhile, my new girl, my correspondent, waits for us alone and annoyed at the lunch counter in town, her only companion the gummy cheese sandwich she can’t seem to make disappear.