Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (20 page)

"Let's just buy it," Alice said.

Riley looked pleased. "How much is it?"

"Don't even look. You can have the share for my dress, too, and I'll wear one of Mom's."

"Alice, no."

"I mean it. Come on." She took the dress and marched toward the sales counter. "We 'll take it," she said grandly to the saleslady, and threw down her debit card.

As they walked home, slowly, because she could tell Riley was tired, Alice found herself not dreading the wedding for the first time. Because even though most of her clothes were in storage and she would be wearing a hideous dress of her mother's, she had the idea that unexpected things were not always bad.

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"Would you like your receipt?" Alice had developed a special persona for her night job at the Duane Reade on Eleventh Avenue. She wore the blue smock and the name tag that said hi, she was Alice, but she brought only a fraction of herself to work.

"Just toss it," the large customer said, who probably didn't want a record of his two king-sized Snickers bars and his cherry fruit pie.

It was a shitty job, maybe, but they'd hired her on the spot. She didn't feel like working in an office, nor was she in the mood to wait around for one of the restaurants where she'd left an applica tion to call. This place was out of the way, and it was the kind of job you could quit any minute and not feel too bad about it.

She wore nicer shoes than were comfortable for this much standing. She 'd have to remember to pack sneakers in her bag along with her smock. She told Riley and her parents that she was going out with her friends the nights she worked here, so when she left the house, she tried to look like it. She wanted the money more than the social life, but she didn't tell them that. She was their proxy, in a way. They were counting on her to live a life in the world they could pretend was normal.

She had gone out with her friends a few times. "Why did you defer law school? What are you doing over break? What are you doing next year? Are you going out with anybody? You should meet so-and-so. What's Riley up to?"

When you were her age, just out of college, the future was like oxygen. Without it, there was nothing. She didn't like telling the truth: She was stalled. She was waiting.

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She saw a couple of girls in the shampoo aisle she recognized by sight from Fire Island. Not from her town but maybe Saltaire or Fair Harbor.

They wouldn't recognize her, she knew, even as one of them dumped an armload of hair products at her register. The blue Duane Reade smock had the supernatural power of making you invisible, especially to the kind of girls who majored in art history and got internships at Christie's or Elle Decor magazine after col lege. Alice had grown up with such girls, but she could not mistake herself for one of them.

A big part of Alice had wanted to go to law school so she could go on trying to blend in with girls like these. If you ran out of ways to please and you had no family money, you went to law school. It was a sad version of ambition, to want not to stand out but to fit in. Over time, she could bury the evidence, she thought. Who would know by the time she was in her fifth year at an upstanding law firm that she didn't belong?

She felt like her family clung very thinly to the white-collar, vacation-home world, and that if they messed up at all, they would be cast out for generations to come. She needed to do her part.

So why was she here? Why wasn't she there? Why wasn't she at least in a training program at a bank or a big corporation? She'd earned her degree with distinction, her history department prize. She could've held on to her honor. She could have gotten one of those jobs. Why hadn't she?

Because they required commitment. Because she 'd have to give herself to them, and she couldn't do that right now. She couldn't

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look ahead. She needed to stay close to Riley. She just needed the hearts to keep beating and the days to pass.

As much of a pleaser as Alice was, she had her strange bouts of self-negation. She'd learned rebellion from two masters, but the kind she practiced occurred without romance or principle. Mostly, she just undermined herself. It was usually connected to guilt.

She didn't feel mad at Paul for giving her a hard time about law school. She didn't give him credit for her decision not to go, even if he deserved it.

But she did feel mad at him for not knowing how miserable and worried she was, for going about his life and walking with pointy-toed women while Riley was sick. Alice was mad at him for that, even though she hadn't told him and he couldn't know. She could manage only to blame him for the things he didn't deserve.

She got off at 10:30 and walked over to Columbus Avenue and up to a posh gym on 68th Street that stayed open late. She approached the guy at the membership desk.

"Do you think I could take a look at your pool?" she asked.

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Paul knew why his mother signed the house over to him. He swiveled in his father's old swivel chair and he saw it clearly among the twelve hundred vinyl LPs, the curled and decaying piles of magazines, papers, photographs, and posters.

The sale happened faster than he 'd expected. He 'd left it to the broker, Barbara Weinstein, a former acquaintance of his mother's, whose kids he'd grown up with on the island.

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Barbara had gotten her price for the house right away and presented Paul with a contract of sale within two weeks. Now the buyers, married hedge-fund managers with three little kids, wanted to close by Thanksgiving.

He'd done it in anger. He'd done it with the idea that he never wanted to see the place again. But anger had a way of bending around and biting its owner. Now he found himself further into this house than he had ever been before.

He swiveled around, blurring past the pyramid of empty card board boxes he had constructed at one end of the room. He hated how his mother spent her way into and out of commitments, but he would have stooped to almost any hypocrisy to get someone else to do this job.

The more times you had put off a job, the harder it was to do. That could be scientifically proven. He had not only to surmount the num ber of times he had not done this job, but the much larger number of times his mother had not done it. It was another dubious inheritance.

Maybe he could see if the hedge-fund couple would be willing to take the house furnished. "Eclectically furnished," he could say. Including the complete works of Jefferson Airplane and Starship. Enough paraphernalia to start your own head shop.

Maybe he could just start putting things in boxes. Not sorting, just putting. Just put it all away, seal it up, ship it to a storage facil ity, and the job would be done.

That was the idea that stopped him swiveling and got him out of his chair. He got the first box.

He glanced at the photograph at the top of a disorderly pile. It was of his father, not long before he died, sitting on the kitchen

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counter of the old Brooklyn Heights house. Paul looked away. He couldn't start with the pictures.

He picked up the first stack of LPs and laid it down in the box. On the second stack, he couldn't help reading the title of the album: Their Satanic Majesties Request. He turned it over to the back, see ing the pale brown dust on the cuffs of his dark shirt. 1967.

Without thinking, he walked to the old turntable and plugged it in. He lifted the plastic top to inspect the condition of the arm and the needle. He blew on the needle. Gingerly, he tipped the album out of its cover. It came out in its paper sleeve, perfectly preserved. His father had always respected his music.

He laid the album on the player and moved the needle over to start it turning. He remembered these UFO lights, but back then he saw them from underneath. He remembered imagining them as a three-dimensional place that you could climb into. He didn't even know he remembered them until now.

He remembered trying to set the needle on the lip of the record when he was young and having the needle slide off again and again, making a terrible noise as it dragged in the gutter. But he really didn't like to put the needle into the safe grooves where the song was already playing. You had to hear it start. You had to place it just right.

He carefully set the needle down, the muscles in his hands set ting off another sizzle of memory. He could see his hand as his father's hand. He could picture his father's hand.

He sat on the floor and listened. He listened all the way to "She's a Rainbow." Then he put his head in his arms and lay down in the carpet. He let the misery overtake him. For this house and all

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the things that had happened here. For the single minute that he'd let himself want to keep it for Alice.

He wished he hadn't let himself have that thought. He knew it was a trick. He knew it at the time, but he'd done it anyway. He'd spent his life girding himself against that very trick, and he'd gone right ahead and fallen for it.

She was cruel, but he was stupid. He blamed her for pulling away, but he blamed himself more. He loved her. He loved her too much. That was the trouble.

A part of him wanted her to call on the phone just so he could tell her off properly. He imagined she would try that emasculating strategy of wanting to be friends again. She'd already ripped him apart; he wasn't going to let her pick through the bits to see which ones she still wanted. He wouldn't give her the opportunity to assuage her guilt by being friends with him. But anyway, he didn't get to tell her off because she didn't call.

When he woke up the next morning, he had an inscribed pattern of shag pile on his face. He saw stuff all around him and the pyra mid of boxes minus the one on top.

This project was going to take more than he had. He knew as he walked to the ferry that he'd just put one more layer of not doing it between him and getting it done.

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"Okay, so here it is." Alice opened the door of the health club and ushered Riley inside.

"Here is what?"

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"Here is what I wanted to show you."

"In this health club?"

"Yes." Alice said. She took out a card and slid it along the sensor so the turnstile let them through.

"You belong to this place?" Riley followed her into the elevator, and Alice pushed the button for the top floor.

"Well. Not exactly. Follow me." Out of the elevator, Alice led her through a humid locker room and out into a giant glassed-in pavilion. All around were sea-blue tiles and plants growing and climbing from pots. But most extraordinary were the views of the Hudson River in one direction and Central Park in the other. If you walked to the wall and flattened yourself, you could see south all the way to New York Harbor.

"Oh my God."

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

"I never even knew this was here."

Alice got down on her knees and dipped her hand into the water. "Warmest in New York City."

"Really?"

"Try it. Rich people don't like it cold."

"It really is warm." The beginning of a question was forming in Riley's eyes.

Alice pulled out the card and presented in to Riley. "Ta-da. Your swimming membership."

"You aren't serious."

"I couldn't afford the full membership."

"How did you afford this?"

"My rent is cheap."

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Riley laughed. "I can't believe you, Al."

"You need to swim. So here 's a way."

"I can't believe I can swim here."

"Anytime you like."

Alice was suddenly worried that Riley looked teary, and it was so uncharacteristic that it scared Alice. But then Riley was fum bling with her shoes, and without ceremony she pointed her hands in the air and dove into the warm water, clothes and all.

Then Alice was the teary one and Riley was bobbing happily in the water and the world spun straight again.

They walked home, thirty blocks up Amsterdam Avenue, with Riley stumbling in Alice 's sweater and coat and too-long pants and Alice striding next to her in a double layer of terry robes, swinging a plastic bag of wet clothes beside her.

� 195 � Sixteen

Somebody's Wedding

T here was no good reason for Paul to go to Megan Cooley's

black-tie wedding. He wore a top and bottom from two dif ferent tuxedos and brown shoes. His tie was aquamarine.

There would be easier ways to see Alice. He could have buzzed at her apartment building, for instance, or called her on the phone. But he couldn't have made his point in either of those ways.

"This is Diana," he said to Mrs. Cooley, presenting his date at the front of the church after giving his congratulations. How par ticularly happy this particular mother looked to be settling this par ticular daughter.

He saw and greeted a few other Fire Island families. The Green blatts and the McDermotts and the Rosenheims. There was some thing with each of them. A bike he'd stolen, a house he'd snuck

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into, a toilet he 'd clogged, a speaker he 'd blown. They forgave him because he was rich and his father was dead.

He casually scanned the assembly, pushing hair out of his eyes. His hair was outgrown and shaggy, and he hadn't gotten it cut since Alice's amateurish job. Grown-out hair put the test to the quality of a cut, and hers was crap. But he didn't move on, did he? As many nights as he had stayed up hating her, he still clung to her. Always hated her, always clung to her, always for the same reason.

Except for the brief interlude when he'd loved her out loud. Did she even remember it? Did she think of it one time for every million times that he did? Alice accused him of amnesia, but she was the one who had it last and best.

They were seated toward the back on the Cooley side of the church. He looked toward the front. Ethan and Judy were their close friends. They would be up near the front. He looked for Alice's hair.

What if she didn't come? If she didn't come, he would have wasted a lot of wasted energy.