A. Homes: The End of Alice

“Take your plate?” the waitress finally asks.

“Please,” she says.

With nothing before her, she is free to pay the check, to wander slowly home. The exertion, her efforts, her concentration, has left her drained, dulled. She walks slowly, pathetically, home, tripping over occasional cracks in the sidewalk. Safe behind the doors of the family fort, she lays herself out across the living room sofa, swallows the start of a good cry, and hopes to sleep.

“Bored already?” I imagine her mother asking as she sweeps from room to room, arranging and rearranging the objects that are their lives. “You know, I have a hair appointment at two — you could come with me. I could have you squeezed in and highlighted. Maybe that would perk you up?”

The daughter doesn’t answer. The image of her head capped with plastic bag, strands of hair pulled through premade punctures by a practiced hand, is far too frightening.

“You know,” the mother says, beginning the second sentence of her streak with the same phrase.

“Why say ‘you know’ when clearly I don’t?” the daughter asks.

“I was going to say, you’re not a girl anymore, you should start dressing more like a woman. I could take you to Saks in White Plains and have Mrs. Gretsky find you a few new things. We haven’t gone shopping together in years.”

The daughter imagines herself in a knitted suit with a pillbox hat perched on her highlighted head, chunky gold jewelry like a dog collar wrapped round her neck and a small alligator purse over one arm, still snapping.

“I thought there was a court order against our shopping together. All the screaming, the swearing.”

“You’re older now and hopefully more grown-up.”

“I doubt it.”

“You know, I’ll never know exactly what it was I did to make you so angry, will I?”

“No,” the daughter says, pulling a creamy cashmere blanket up over her shoulders and turning her face in toward the pillows.

“Then rest,” the mother says. “You sound crabby, you must still be overtired. I’ll see you later. Nap, but don’t drool.”

In my memory it is always summer, a certain summer.

Morning in June. Breakfast. I go downstairs and find my grandmother in my mother’s place, my grandmother hovering over my mother’s stove.

“Over easy or sunny side up?”

“Up,” I say, forever an optimist.

My mother’s absence is not mentioned. And I’m sadly sure that this day is a repeat of the day two years before when I woke to find that while I’d slept, my father had died. My father, a true giant, seven feet eleven inches, had died while I was dreaming, and as I slept, five men eased him down the stairwell, lowered him like a piano with a rope tied around his chest, his body too long and slowly going stiff to carry around the corners.

“Where’s Ma,” I finally spit at supper.

“Charlottesville,” my grandmother says, waiting to speak until after dessert is served. “Charlottesville,” she says, as if the name of a certain small Southern town will tell me what I need to know. “The asylum.”

“How long will she be there?”

“Well, that depends now, doesn’t it?”

My bags are packed. I’m removed from my own life and taken to live at my grandmother’s house. In my memory it is always summer. I have a yellow toy truck with real rubber tires. I love the tires.

She writes: Sometimes I have the weirdest dreams….

Boys. Boys from before, ghosts, come back to visit her. One in particular, sixth grade. The tag end of the elementary years, a four-foot-eight-inch transplant from Minnesota. First noticed when she caught his eyes on the figures at the bottom of her page, copying answers to the math test. In the coatroom, her thick whisper threatening to turn him in had him fast begging for mercy, for leniency, for her pardon. She offered closely supervised parole. He accepted.

When he felt her up, all he got were the puffy protrusions that promised greater future swellings, and when she felt him down, all she found was the narrow little nightstick that might with patience grow to a cop’s thick billy club. Like that they played, equals, bald in all the same places.

And perhaps in the guise of making new friends faster, perhaps not knowing the disillusion it would cause — one so willingly makes excuses for the young — at the first boy/girl parties of their lives, before her very eyes, he took up with other girls. All of them, one right after another, if only for a single kiss, a five-minute ride on the swings. She often caught him, lips pressed to the evening’s hostess, to the girl whose desk abutted hers, the one with the blondest hair, biggest boobs, him and whomever, rustling in the bushes beyond the patio. Hers was the divorced heart, but she carried on, sure — or nearly sure — that none of the others did the things she did with him. On the floor of her mother’s walk-in closet, she gagged his mouth with a suede Dior belt; behind the cinder-block retaining wall, she employed a railroad tie to hold his legs spread. Deep in the furnace room, hidden among the spare tires and Flexible Flyers, she repetitiously wrapped him with kite string and extra electrical cords, tying him to the hot-water heater, his puny ass burning a bright and cheery pink as heat seeped through the thin insulation. She pushed him past his limit, drove his sweet Schwanstuck backward and forward, slamming him from drive to reverse. Stripped, she slid her naked body over his, sweeping the rubbery tips of her tits across his fine and sensitive skin from neck to nuts, making him twist and turn, trying to pull away from the heater, the heater itself making a groaning sound and him begging, “Put it in, put it in.” She’d pull away, smile, take herself in hand, and do a little dance around that furnace room, hairless body, narrow hips pumping the oily air until finally with the smallest shudder she’d stand suddenly stone still, like someone struck dead. And when she recovered, she’d go to him, pull his underwear up over it and put her mouth down on it, sucking him off, the thick BVDs a kind of prophylactic cheesecloth. In the end, she’d untie him, turn him round, and spit onto his hot buns, licking his bright red ass, soothing the sore flesh with the water of her tongue. And he’d thank her profusely, bowing to her honor, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She’d shrug it off, moving on to the next thing — the teaching of luxury, of smoke and drink. She’d hand him a Winston filched from the cleaning lady, a stolen bottle of her father’s whiskey, bartered marijuana in a corncob pipe. Days and nights they spent together, inseparable. “Sweet,” both sets of parents said about the twinness of their children, so charmed. Playmates.

Slowly, steadily, he fell in love, never losing the fear that she would turn on him, direct her anger at the five inches of difference between them and once and for all take it from him — though there is no way he could have told me this, I can swear it is true, remembering it from my own experience, from my grandmother’s helper girl who once came at me with a paring knife. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to my room, where I am free to raise my shirt, lower my pants, and show the white scar it made, tracing down from just below the inverted stump of my umbilicus, through the matted down, and on into the nether regions stopping not a breath away from the veiny cord that is my manhood. Scarred forever.

Summer. Her boy went to camp — the recurrence of this theme being explanation for her worry about the new boy being lost to those woods. There was a long, slow good-bye in the trunk of his father’s Ford — the tire jack like an extra member nearly taking her up the ass — followed two weeks later by a strange late-afternoon phone call and her mother coming quietly into the den, whispering, “Lightning on a ballfield.” And the girl, being the closest companion, the best friend, was offered his toys, his collections — buffalo nickels and tumbled rocks — his cassettes and stereo as parting gifts.