Alice Bliss (16 page)

“Bully for you, Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

Just then she hears the garbage truck screech to a halt at the curb. She looks out the window. There’s her mom,
in her bathrobe
, dragging the garbage can down to the curb. Could she be any more embarrassing?

Which is when Alice puts two and two together and speeds through the front door and down the front steps and down the driveway in her bare feet.

“Mom!
Mom!”

The garbage guy has their garbage can in his hand, he’s hoisting it up and pouring it into the open maw of the truck.

“Wait! Wait!
Stop!”

But it’s too late. She doesn’t actually see the blue shirt going into the grinder thing in the back of the truck. No, it’s probably buried in a bag of trash and used Kleenex and carrot tops.

Angie walks up the driveway. Alice can’t even look at her mother she’s so furious. She’s trying to control her breathing so she’ll be able to speak.

“What’s going on? . . . Alice?”

“Dad’s shirt.”

“Oh, don’t get started on that again.”

“You threw it away, didn’t you?”

“You can stand out here and catch your death in bare feet, but I’m going inside.”

Angie starts to walk past Alice, but Alice steps in front of her, blocking her way.

“If it’s not in the trash, where is it?”

“This is ridiculous. I’m going inside.”

But Alice won’t move.

“How could you do that? And how could you lie to me?”

“I haven’t lied to you.”

“You want to know why girls can’t stand their mothers? It’s shit like this, Mom!”

“Inside!”

“First you steal my clothes, then you lie to me and now you think you can order me around?!”

“Alice!”

Angie tries to walk around her again.

“Couldn’t you just ask me, Mom? How hard is that? Just ask me!”

“I am not going to argue with you in the middle of the driveway! We can continue this inside.” Angie pushes past Alice. “Or not at all.”

“Fine! How about not at all?! That would be just more of the same, wouldn’t you say, Mom?”

Alice has the satisfaction of hearing her mother slam the front door. Hard. Which is when she hears the garbage truck shift into second gear as it continues its lumbering journey down the street to Henry’s house, where no doubt Henry’s father had the trash down at the curb well before six a.m. No mothers running out to the street in bathrobes at Henry’s house.

Where is her dad’s shirt now? Part of the compost of newspapers, orange rinds, cereal boxes, last night’s take out containers.. . . Some of the fight goes out of Alice as her feet begin to ache they’re so cold. She starts up the driveway.

Okay. She’ll get another one of her dad’s shirts, and maybe she’ll take one of his jackets, too. And if she can wear both of those things, maybe, just maybe she’ll be able to hold it together and walk out the door and go to school like she’s supposed to.

As she walks through the front door, her mom pushes past with a cup of coffee.

“Alice, get ready for school. Enough of this nonsense.”

Alice does not respond.

“Alice, I mean it. Get a move on.”

Alice swallows hard and finds her voice.

“If anything happens to Dad—”

“What?”

“—it’s your fault.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I?”

“You want to blame me. Fine. Blame me. You know who you’re really mad at?”

“I don’t want to hear this!”

“You’re mad at Dad.”

“I am not!”

“Think about it, Alice.”

“Dad did not put that shirt in the trash!”

“Dad—”

“—Don’t!”

Alice walks up the stairs and into her parents’ bedroom where she takes another shirt out of her father’s drawer. Angie follows her.

“I’d really rather you didn’t take another one of Dad’s—”

Alice’s hands are shaking as she unbuttons a crisp blue and white striped shirt. Not the same, not the same shirt at all, she thinks in a kind of wild, sad desperation. One of the buttons pops off and skitters across the floor. She looks at the shirt for a moment, the stripes, the missing button, then shoves it back in the drawer, and slams the drawer shut so hard several photos fall off the dresser.

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll never forgive you if—”

“Alice. For heaven’s sake.”

“Can you spare one of these?” Alice asks, as she opens the top drawer and grabs a white T-shirt.

“Take five! Take six! You want them all? Take them all, goddamnit! Take them all!”

“I only wanted one, Mom. The one I had. The one he wore,” Alice replies as she slams out the door and down the stairs.

 

Angie sits on the unmade bed, the broken glass of her favorite picture beneath her fingers. She feels awful, as she always does after a fight. Couldn’t she just have
washed
that stupid shirt?

She looks at their wedding photo. Matt is holding her with both hands around her waist, his head thrown back, his whole face lit up with laughter.

Lighten up
, she can almost hear him say.
Don’t you remember all the shit you put your parents through when you were in high school? She’s just a kid, a scared kid.

Does she have to be so annoying, Angie wonders? Does she have to wave everything right under my nose?

Stop rising to the bait. You’re the grown-up here
.

Easy for you to say, Matt Bliss, from nine thousand miles away.

Alice and Henry catch the bus downtown after school, way downtown, to Pearl Street, to the cool vintage clothing store that specializes in tuxedos. They have twenty dollars to outfit Henry for the dance, and another twenty for Alice. Maybe. For Alice this is all a big maybe. The mothers wanted to take them to the mall; that was a definite no.

Unbeknownst to Alice, Henry also has another fifty dollars in his pocket, given to him by his mother. Henry and his mother have discussed the options; Henry and his mother have outlined a basic game plan; Henry actually knows what he is looking for.

Sitting next to Alice on the city bus, however, Henry feels lost. It’s a cold, comfortless day that could belong to any month from October to May. Henry follows Alice’s lead and pulls out his history homework, but he can’t read. Reading in cars and buses makes him sick. He sneaks a look at her. She appears to actually be reading about the Continental Congress. She does not sense him looking at her and turn toward him and begin to talk, like she usually does.

They have not discussed the kiss. Or the non-kiss. In fact, they haven’t really talked at all. They are both pretending that nothing happened, that everything is the same. But of course, nothing is the same. Riding the bus isn’t the same, sitting side by side so their legs almost touch is not the same, getting thrown against Alice as the bus makes the long curve up onto I-95 is not the same. Not talking is not the same. Not talking and joking and laughing. Not having to think so much about every single thing it gives you brain cramp is not the same. It’s all so overwhelming that Henry falls asleep, right there on the noisy downtown bus, falls sound asleep until Alice wakes him up at their stop on Jane Street at Downtown Crossing.

They walk the two long, dreary blocks to Pearl Street in total silence. Maybe this was a mistake, Henry is thinking. Maybe this whole thing is one big, terrible mistake. Maybe Alice hates him now and maybe he’s mad at Alice for ruining everything and maybe they should just go home. But there’s Alice throwing open the grimy door and striding inside Rerun like she owns the place.

There are millions of tuxedos at Rerun, crammed into a long, narrow, dusty storefront on a street that has seen better days. Rerun is flanked on either side by empty stores. The middle-aged, potbellied, Hawaiian shirt–wearing guy behind the counter is eyeing them as if they are hardened shoplifters out to rob him blind. Alice starts sneezing. They don’t even know what size to look for. Henry walks up to the counter.

“Hi.”

“Yeah.”

“I need a suit. Or a tuxedo.”

“Uh huh.”

“For a dance.”

“Look around.”

“I don’t know what size.”

The guy whips out a tape measure.

“My name’s Henry.”

Measuring Henry’s waist.

“What’s your name?”

Measuring Henry’s chest.

“Roger.”

Measuring Henry’s inseam.

“Nice to meet you, Roger.”

“The smaller sizes are on the left. Upper rack.”

“What size am I?”

“You’re the size that’s gonna need alterations.”

“Which is—?”

“There might be a couple of thirty-fours in there.”

“You got anything for my friend?”

“A tuxedo?”

“Hey, Alice! You want a tuxedo?”

“Maybe,” Alice answers from the other side of a rack.

“I was thinking more like a dress,” Henry says. And then quietly to Roger: “You know that actress in the movie
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
?”

“Audrey Hepburn?”

“A dress like she wore.”

“That’s a sheath, bud.”

“And maybe a hat.”

“Does the girl know?”

“No.”

“You might ask the girl.”

“That’s my mom’s favorite movie.”

Roger gives him a look.

“Do you have anything?” Henry asks.

“I might.”

“Is it in a vault or something?”

Roger calls to Alice. “What size are you?”

“I don’t know. Small?”

“That’s a start.”

He walks to the racks of tuxedos, effortlessly extracts four of them, hangs them in a fitting room wallpapered in leopard print, and disappears through a back door.

“Am I supposed to try those on?” Henry asks.

“Yup!”

Alice plops into a lime green swivel chair to wait.

Henry closes the curtain.

“I think you should look at some pearls.”

“What?”

“Some long strings of pearls.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are there hats? Have you seen any hats?”

“Henry, have you lost your mind?”

He steps out of the fitting room.

“This one’s too big.”

Henry is drowning in this tuxedo. The sleeves reach his knees. He’d need stilts to wear the pants.

“Try the next one.”

“Look at the pearls.”

“What pearls?”

“In the glass case.”

“What do I want with pearls?”

“Alice could you just—”

Henry steps back into the fitting room as Roger appears with half a dozen little black dresses draped over his arm. He hangs them one by one across the back wall of a fitting room papered in faded peppermint stripes.

“I think this is what he was looking for,” Roger says.

“Those are for me?”

“I’ll find you some pearls.”

“Henry . . . ?”

“Just try them on. Just for fun,” Henry says from behind the curtain.

Alice finds herself in the pink room with the peeling wallpaper taking off her backpack and her clothes and carefully pulling the first dress over her head. There is no mirror inside the fitting room, so she’s going to have to step outside to see what it looks like. She hesitates. This could be really embarrassing. It seems like it fits; she can still breathe after she zips the zipper. At least it’s not long, and at least it’s not full of ruffles and bows, and it definitely doesn’t look like anything her mother would pick out for her. It’s straight and close fitting but not tight, and the skirt hits just below the knee. Maybe she’s gonna look like a fifty-year-old widow in this dress.

She steps outside the fitting room. She still has her socks on, but even so she can see that it’s a beautiful dress. And even though she’s mostly all covered up, it’s also a sexy dress. It hugs her body and her waist looks tiny and it shows off her shoulders and her long neck.

“What size shoe do you wear?” Roger asks.

“Seven and a half.”

He hands her a pair of red high heels. She shakes her head.

“Do you have any flats?”

Roger disappears and reappears with a pair of black, pointy-toed flats. Alice pulls her socks off and slips into them.

Henry steps out of his fitting room in a jacket that actually fits and pants that are kind of tight but in a good way. Even just wearing a T-shirt under the jacket, Henry looks good. But Henry is not looking in the mirror, Henry is looking at Alice.

“What?” She laughs.

Roger reappears with an impossibly long string of pearls that he doubles around her neck, and several hairpins.

“Put your hair up,” he instructs, handing her the pins.

Alice lifts her hair off the nape of her neck. Roger glances at Henry, raises an eyebrow. Here it is, the simplest gesture in the world: a girl lifts her hair off the nape of her neck and a boy and an old man catch their collective breath.

“There,” she says, and turns to them.

She smoothes the front of the dress, looking down at her hands, at her bitten fingernails, at her big feet in the pointy-toed shoes. This is a woman’s dress, she thinks, a young woman’s dress. It is not a girl’s dress. It is solidly on the other side of the line outside of girlhood. It is a dress that says something big in a very quiet way; it is a dress that is talking to Alice right now, a dress that is making her feel possibilities never before considered, the possibility of perfume and pretty and dancing and boys. This dress is who she might be, only more so.

When she looks up they are both smiling at her.

“You need a shirt,” Roger says to Henry, and hustles off to find him one.

Henry almost can’t bear looking at Alice. There’s something happening in his stomach that could be the flu or could be just plain, pure misery and longing.