Jane Smiley - Early Warning

“I don’t want to be crossed off the list.”

“Yes, you do; at least finish high school.”

He nodded. She got him off early the next morning, dragging his suitcase, which he had left in a locker at the station the morning he went for the physical. She made him take a shower, so only his clothes stank, but, really, it was amazing what seventeen-year-old boys did not notice. Of course he didn’t write, but a week later she got a letter from her mother:

Dear Debbie—

It’s been terribly hot here. I hope you are getting some sea breezes! When you come home for Labor Day Weekend, you can revive us, if you feel like it. Listen to this! Richie was gone for six days! He showed up Wednesday evening, and he said NOTHING. Well, your aunt Andy was very upset, so she went into his room and got all over him, and he said, didn’t she get his note? And, of course not. Apparently, a friend of his from school had come East for a week, and they had decided to drive around and look at colleges, since the boy had never been in the East before. They went to Annapolis and West Point and Penn, just to have a look. I guess Richie had money from his job. Then he showed her the note he’d left for her, taped it to the BAR in their family room, but now she’s stopped drinking, so she never even opened the bar and never saw it. Frank thought it was a sign of manly independence that they did this, so he isn’t mad. Wonders never cease (and I’m talking about the fact that she didn’t look into the bar for six days). She’s a very mysterious person, and your dad wonders if, now that she is no longer pickled, she will start to age like the rest of us.

Too hot to go on any longer,

We love you!

Mom

—

ANDY LOOKED AROUND the table. Twenty-four people, all smiling. She had been here twenty times now, and she had never once stood up and said, “Hi, I’m Andy, and I am an alcoholic.” She had the book, and she had read most of it. She left it on the coffee table, and sometimes she saw that Frank or Nedra had opened it, or at least moved it. Already this evening, Bob had stood up and related how he went off the wagon on Thanksgiving, and fell down in the kitchen and hit his head. Roman had related how he was supposed to go to his mother’s house, and he knew there would be liquor there. So Roman had turned it over to his Higher Power and tried to forget about it. When he went out to get into his car Thursday, his battery was dead, and at the very moment he was wondering which restaurant, his neighbor two doors down came out onto his porch and asked him what he was doing, because there were only the four of them, and so Roman contributed the pecan pie he’d been planning to take to his mother’s, and it turned out that the neighbor needed new kitchen counters and had the money to pay, and wanted this new surface that was coming out called Corian, God knew what that was, but expensive, so Roman was smiling. And then Mary said that she had gotten through Thanksgiving fine, but yesterday, the 29th, was the fifth anniversary of the death of her daughter from falling out of the window of their old apartment on Ninety-first Street, and even though they now lived in the Village, she had had to go up there and stand on the very spot where her daughter landed, she had had to, but she didn’t drink anything, though she came close. A shocking story, but you were not supposed to make drama, which was maybe why Andy never said a word.

Before coming, she practiced saying, “I am fifty years old and, however pointless your life is, mine is more pointless,” but comparisons were not allowed. Maybe “I am said to exist, but I doubt it”? When she had said that to Dr. Smith, whom she hadn’t seen now in ten weeks, he told her she was acting “grandiose.” As far as she could tell, you were supposed to talk about specific incidents—“I lay in bed yesterday morning, after my sons left, on my back, staring at the ceiling, and thought of nothing”? Not even a drink. “Last week, I overheard a woman say she had stopped drinking, no problem, but then she was up in the middle of the night making popcorn, and so she gave up corn, and it was killing her.” Maybe the others, she thought, should know this? Next to her, Jean stood up and said, “Hi, I’m Jean, and I am an alcoholic. I just want to thank my sponsor, Mary here, for answering the phone at two-thirty-five a.m. Sunday morning. I was upset, and she talked to me for fifteen minutes, and then I went to sleep. Mary, you are a saint and a half; I am very grateful.” Everyone smiled and nodded. Andy stared across the table at Mary, who did have a very kind face, and Mary made eye contact, and then, almost without even thinking about it, Andy stood up and introduced herself, and what she said was “I haven’t had a drink since the Kent State massacre, which I think is when I started to wake up from a twenty-year walking coma, and I absolutely do not know why or what is going on. But I do know that my son disappeared in July for six days, and then he returned, and even though I do not believe in God or magic or anything, really, I am deathly afraid to touch the bottles, even to throw them away.” She fell silent. The others looked at her, and Bob said, “Any reason is good enough, as long as it works.”

WHEN FRANK SUGGESTED that he, Andy, and the boys spend two weeks in Paris, staying at the George V and having Christmas with Janet, who was on her junior year abroad from Sweet Briar, he had consciously fixed things so that there would be no time to go to Calais; anyway, who would want to go to Calais at the end of December? Better to stick to the Eighth Arrondissement, or the First or the Third, even to wander the catacombs, than to think that Lydia and her husband had returned to Calais, and she was sitting in a bistro somewhere, watching the door for Frank. In his mind, Lydia had entirely replaced “Joan Fontaine.” Mote by mote, he had come around to the possibility that the two women were different — maybe sisters or cousins or relatives, but not the same woman. And if he had to choose, he would choose Calais over Corsica, his mature self over his youthful self, because, as “Joan Fontaine” was gone from this earth, so “Errol Flynn” was, too, and in the leathery, hard-looking person who inhabited the house in Englewood Cliffs he saw nothing of the boy he had been.

Even so, he found himself watching the crowds along the Champs-Élysées, outside the Louvre, along the Boulevard Haussmann, even in the lobby of the George V, for that characteristic movement — from the front, the lift of the chin and the turn of the head; from the back, the sway of the hips. Her hair would be mostly gray now, but maybe, being French, she would dye it. Would the husband allow that? But maybe she had gotten rid of him somehow, left him in Calais and moved to Paris. What would she be doing? Something orderly — keeping books for a wealthy politician, performing services like making discreet calls to his mistress and paying his child support.

In the meantime, since they had come in the winter, they were surrounded by French people, not tourists, and though Janet’s French was good, and people smiled at her and were helpful, Frank was a little nettled by Janet’s loud voice, Richie’s and Michael’s exaggerated movements, Andy’s endless observations. It was this last that was a revelation — Andy had always kept her thoughts to herself, except when she had been drinking, and she only drank at home. But now that she wasn’t drinking, she talked all the time — what an elegant building, is that really Napoleon, I thought he was short, oh, there were more Napoleons than the one, look at those horse statues on that pillar. The French didn’t stare at her, the kids didn’t seem to care (though Janet answered a lot of her questions), but it drove Frank crazy. The thing he couldn’t stop noticing was the way her mouth worked. All around him, Parisians hardly moved their lips, and their words issued forth in a liquid stream. Andy’s mouth was like the mouth of a puppet flapping, revealing the empty cavern within. For ten days, he felt as though his glance was shifting between her mouth and momentary glimpses of Lydia disappearing around corners, up steps, and over bridges. By that time, too, all five of them were expressing the opinion that two weeks was too long — you could only go to the Galeries Lafayette so many times, only appreciate so many paintings of the long, pale body of Jesus, his eyes closed, being taken down from the cross, or of a short man in a fancy outfit sitting on a small, bouncy horse. Janet thought they could have spent the second week in Nice; Frank wondered why he had forgotten about Rome; the boys wished they had gone skiing; and Andy wondered when she would ever get to Madrid.