Saving Alice (11 page)
“Of course,” I replied.
The waitress returned his credit card, and Larry signed the credit slip. I could tell he was disgusted with me. As far as he was concerned, I should have been serenading her from the street, wooing her back.
“You’ll regret letting her go so easily,” he said, putting his wallet away. “You’ll wake up one day, it’ll be too late, and you’ll wonder why I didn’t talk sense to you, and I’ll say I did, but you didn’t listen. And then I’ll have to talk you out of doing something really stupid like starting your car in a closed garage.” He cleared his throat. “Take her to Hawaii. Borrow the money if you have to. Maybe something will happen, you know?”
I cringed. For Larry, Hawaii was the answer to all relational ills.
“Which island?” I asked, letting my annoyance show.
“Who cares?” he retorted. “Pick an island. Any island.”
I tossed a couple of dollars on the table for the tip and got to my feet. Larry followed suit. Standing, he shrugged into his black overcoat. “I suppose you think I’m a hypocrite,” he said, brushing the sleeves.
“Never crossed my mind,” I said, watching his ritual. I’d once asked him,
“What are you brushing off?”
And he’d replied with a lecture intended to put an exclamation point on his previous exhortations:
“The past! Stephen! It weighs me down!”
Tossing a wave to the waitress, I followed Larry through the first set of glass doors. He stood in front of the second set for a moment, rubbing his hands together once more as if preparing to tackle the arctic temperatures single-handedly, just as he’d once tackled quarterbacks in high school. He reached over and squeezed my shoulder, his trademark older-brother routine, patronizing yet comforting. “Call me if you need to talk.”
I shrugged, then reminded myself that Larry’s straight-shooting comments, while simplistic, were a shadow of a much better attribute: his rock-steady loyalty. If you were Larry’s friend, you were a friend for life. If you asked for his shirt, he’d begin untying his tie without so much as asking why. And despite our recent drift, and regardless of my continuing friendship with Paul—which he considered my biggest foolishness, at least till now—we remained bonded by the past, connected by countless shared events and emotions.
Zipping up my parka, I followed my friend into the unfriendliness of a South Dakota winter.
I
sleep-walked through the next week, ran the washer and dryer, folded up the “couch sheets” every morning after a restless few hours, and washed the dishes in the sink.
At Kesslers, I bought enough oatmeal and prepackaged macaroni and cheese to last a month. TV dinners would have been easier but more expensive. I skipped the meat aisle altogether, but rationalized produce. Although more expensive, I knew enough about nutrition not to eliminate apples and oranges. One a day wouldn’t break me.
After a brief weather reprieve, we experienced another winter sleet, turning the trees along Eighth Street into skeletal icicles. Temperatures descended precipitously, and the windless atmosphere of the past few days carried the hushed quality of an impending storm. Eventually it came and went, but not until dumping a new blanket of snow. Its fluffy whiteness covered our landscape like mounds of newly spaded dirt over a freshly dug gravesite. My fingers went numb after a few minutes of shoveling our crooked sidewalk.
Each night after work, I noticed a growing absence of Donna’s belongings. One day it was Donna’s remaining clothes, the next day it was the contents of Alycia’s room, until eventually, what remained was what I expected Donna to take first—her books. Her personal shelf contained various volumes of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, and Jane Austen, not to mention dozens of other literary notables.
On Tuesday, more than a week since Donna had left, I sat numbly on the floor in front of her bookshelf and removed her old copy of
The Great Gatsby
. I thumbed through it, noting the underlined passages and scribbled notes from her college days.
“I prefer tragedies,” she’d told me in college. “I love the inexorable descent into hopelessness.”
I’d thought she was joking. “Why?” I’d asked. “If it’s all so hopeless, and the end is so obvious, why keep reading?”
She gave me several justifications for the tragedy before offering her own perspective. “But for me?” she asked as if wondering whether I really wanted to know.
“For you?”
She’d smiled wryly. “I love tragedies because I never stop believing that somehow everything can be solved. Even at the worst of moments, I imagine the characters finally coming to their senses, imploring God to save them from their foolish thoughts and choices, and then I imagine the Almighty … in His brilliant power and majesty snapping His fingers: Poof! All solved!”
I must have looked at her as if she was insane. “
That’s
what you get out of tragic literature?”
She laughed. “Why not?”
Donna eventually persuaded Alice and me to read certain classics for the purpose of discussing them, and while initially I balked out of time constraints, Alice was enthralled with the idea. “C’mon, Stephen, it’ll be fun!”
“We’ll do the short books,” Donna suggested, and since
Gatsby
contained a mere one hundred eighty-nine pages—her favorite tragedy—we settled on that one first. After we read the others,
Gatsby
remained our group favorite as well, although for different reasons. Alice liked
Gatsby
because of his chivalrous, albeit unrequited, love. Donna argued against Alice’s simplistic evaluation, insisting that Gatsby, born to a poor family, was reaching for a woman he could never have.
Personally—and perhaps obviously—while I enjoyed Fitzgerald’s command of language, I didn’t appreciate the book’s apparent theme, that financial and romantic overreaching leads to tragedy.
“What’s wrong with ambition?”
I asked out loud. As far as I was concerned, Fitzgerald had unrealistically manipulated story events to foster an erroneous conclusion.
In the course of the following year, we read five additional novels, most hand-selected by Donna:
Mockingbird,
of course,
The Old Man and the Sea, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm,
and my only contribution to the list:
Ender’s Game
. Donna argued for
Anna Karenina,
but Alice and I put our feet down.
Too long!
I closed the book and placed it back in the shelf. Sitting there, it occurred to me I would have preferred she had taken all her belongings at once. Resting against the wood footboard of the bed, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the next days and weeks ahead. So far I had managed to shrug off the impolite questions, “What happened, man?” with deft humor.
By now, Donna’s version of the story would be circulating from one end of the town to the other, although not from her own lips. Knowing Donna, she would answer inquiries with respectful diplomacy. But knowing her friends, they would distribute the “true” version behind her back.
I stood up, went to the closet doors, and peered inside. Everything else was gone except for the box of photo albums at the top of the shelf. I considered them, wondering if Donna planned eventually to take them at some point with the books.
Removing the box, I grabbed the top album and perused the contents. Mingled with the family photo albums were a few individual albums, and one of college. I removed it and flipped to the first page of our college memories. I recognized it immediately. The three of us huddled awkwardly for the camera, our smiles somewhat forced, taken the night after Alice’s first vocal performance. I smiled wistfully, knowing the end from the beginning. Eventually, hugging each other would become second nature.
Let it go,
I thought, closing the cover like the lid on a coffin.
I removed the family album and flipped through the pages. The photos of Alycia’s first seven years contained an inordinate collection of just Alycia and me—beautiful memories mingled with not so happy ones, like the time Donna hurt her back and was laid up in bed. For a week, I brought her breakfast in bed, and to the amazement of a wide-eyed five-year-old, one evening I presented Donna chocolate pudding for dessert.
Alycia came to me the next day. “My back hurts, Daddy.”
At first I was concerned until she screwed up her face and declared, “I think I need chocolate. That would really help.”
I smiled at the memory, and remembered another, when she’d frowned at me for some indiscretion I couldn’t recall now. “I’m
sad
at you, Daddy.”
The next three years of photos featured a balanced assortment of Donna, Alycia, and me, until the last year when my presence diminished considerably—my financial obsession recorded for posterity. I was somewhat surprised that Donna had continued collecting photos and placing them in the album.
I flipped back to the beginning, to the first pictures taken shortly after our wedding. Even from the earliest moment, it was apparent to me now that Donna and I had made a terrible mistake. You could see it in our eyes—if not panic, at least uncertainty. There was no denying that I had married on the rebound, nor was there any denying that Donna had betrayed her own long-term dream of doing something with her literature major. And yet here we were, smiling for the camera, determined to make the best of it.
Not too long before our wedding, Larry had come to me with a business proposal to form a partnership. Paul was still in school, and Mom and Donna were becoming fast friends. I’d never seen my mother so animated as when Donna was in the room. They were like sisters, twenty years removed in age. “We have so much in common,” Donna once exclaimed to me.
For the first three months Donna and I traded love notes written on yellow Post-its attached to the bathroom mirror, but, in retrospect, it seemed like we were trying too hard. Trying to prove we hadn’t married for the wrong reasons.
All I ever wanted was you,
Donna said to me shortly after our first anniversary. We were making up after an argument, and I must have looked visibly shaken by her declaration, because I couldn’t answer in kind. I tried to think of an equal declaration to make, but the moment passed. “I love you too, Donna,” I replied, and truly meant it.
She seemed to have a hazy view of our history, including a strange, continued guilt over Alice’s death. Again, I viewed this as normal for Donna. After all, she seemed to feel guilty about everything. I figured she felt guilty over marrying the man Alice loved, nothing more, and if I attempted to question her regarding this, she simply froze up. “You wouldn’t understand, Stephen.”
I suppose if I’d truly examined it, I might have realized that Donna’s guilt was an indication of something much bigger. It was Alycia, a regular bloodhound for veracity, who would eventually uncover the truth about her mother’s participation in Alice’s death.
In our second year of marriage, Donna poignantly asked, “Why do you always push me away? Are you afraid you might love me after all?”
“I do love you!” I declared earnestly, unaware of “pushing her away,” but my assertion only elicited another round of silent tears. Then one day, it came to her like a flash of insight. “You’re afraid of losing me, Stephen. Just like you lost Alice. That’s what it is.”
I remember holding her near and kissing her repeatedly. “I don’t
want
to lose you.”
“And you won’t,” she replied firmly. “I’ll prove it to you.” And that’s what she’d meant on the day she left, when she’d said,
“I failed you.”
Like many women, Donna was an incurable romantic, and I truly enjoyed buying her flowers, and chocolate, and little cards. In keeping with this,
Somewhere in Time
was one of Donna’s favorite movies. I thought it was corny but kept my opinion to myself. Christopher Reeve, so enamored with a woman from the past,
thinks
himself back in time.
Yeah, right
.
If only changing the past were that easy,
I remembering thinking. Reeve falls in love with Jane Seymour, only to lose her forever when something from the future breaks the spell. The resolution? They are united in heaven. When I saw the ending, I thought,
That’s all there is??
Donna and Alycia, however, wept lakes of tears.
Later Donna cautioned Alycia regarding certain unsavory aspects to the movie. “They obviously didn’t save themselves for marriage,” she said. “So don’t take any cues from that, Alycia.”
Alycia only rolled her eyes. “I get it, Mom.”
“You don’t want to ruin your life,” Donna cautioned. “Teenage pregnancy would be a lifetime curse.”
“I
get
it, Mom.”
Of course Donna kicked herself for letting Alycia see the movie at all.
Through much of our struggles, our love for Alycia was the glue that kept us together, and for years, I never watched a lick of evening TV. Instead, I came home and spent time with Alycia until it was time for bed. We played board games, made up story scenarios with her dolls, and read nearly every picture book in the library together. As she grew up, the sophistication of her toys and games grew as well. In the evenings, I read from various classics for youth.
Alycia had always waited for me to come home. When I pulled into our driveway, without fail I would spot a dark silhouette in the living room window. Moments later, the silhouette emerged into focus, a little girl pressing her nose to the window. Then suddenly, the front door would burst open, and Alycia would come running down the steps to explode into my arms.
She was no less enthusiastic on birthdays, her favorite “holidays,” and as much as she loved her own birthday celebrations, she preferred planning them for others. I remember the night of my thirtieth birthday when she was only seven. I arrived home, and as usual she came sprinting out the door.
I pressed the power button to the window, and she leaned in grinning. “It’s about time. Mom’s waiting.”
“What for?” I pretended.
I had become the proud recipient of her fast-developing state-of-the-art eye roll. “Dad, you’d forget your own head if it wasn’t attached.”
“Maybe that’s why it is,” I said. “Attached heads are for people like me who really need them to be attached.”
She grinned, then suppressed a giggle. “Happy old age,” she announced, and then, “As if!”
I glanced toward the front window of the house. “Alycia?”
“What?”
“There ain’t no people in them thar hills, are there?”
Her face went blank. “Would you like there to be?”
“Nope,” I replied.
A wry smile emerged. “What if there were
little
people in them thar hills?”
“No little or big people, please.”
She nodded quickly—a little too quickly. “Cool. You have your wish, Kemo Sabe.”
I affected a comically stern face. “Tonto…”
“I mean it!” she protested, and then quickly covered her mouth, spurting a giggle into her hand. “Oops!” She cleared her throat and blanked her face again. “That didn’t mean anything, Dad. Pay no attention to the giggle behind the curtain!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and sighed.
“C’mon, Dad. Get some guts.” She opened my car door and pulled on my arm. “This is how it works. One foot goes in front of the other. It’s called ‘walking.’ ”
I didn’t budge. Instead, I held out my left hand and extended my pinky finger. “Pinky swear,” I insisted, evoking the solemn pledge. “Pinky swear there are no people in there.”
“In where?”
“In the house.”
She extended her pinky, locking it with mine. “I pinky swear there are no people in our house. Now, c’mon, Dad!”
“All right, all right,” I replied. “I’m coming.”
She’d tricked me with a technicality. The people in “them thar hills,” which included Paul, Larry, and John, had been hiding in the garage all along. At age seven, she’d planned the entire thing, including the Daffy Duck cake.
Dethpicable!
In the truest sense, my marriage to Donna was imbued with our daughter’s incessant energy. The older she got, the slower she rose in the morning, but once she did rise, resting was impossible until she finally fell asleep under duress. She never could understand how I could relax on Sunday afternoons when the “entire world was our oyster!”
“C’mon, Dad, let’s take a drive! Let’s see the world! Let’s explore! Let’s eat grasshoppers!”