We Can Only Save Ourselves Page 8
This room had the same bland carpet, but it also had tall windows with arched tops, and below the arches hung thick, green-velvet curtains the color of emeralds. Dark wood bookshelves lined the walls on either side, and in the middle was a table with heavy legs, the kind that ended in the carved, curving claws of some creature with sharp teeth. The spines of the books were scarlet, navy, green, their titles written in gold, in white, and they were fat and thin, and when Alice walked over to a shelf, she saw familiar names, authors she had read in high school, novels she had assumed she would read in college.
“What is this room?” she asked.
“First editions library,” Wesley said, walking up behind her. “When I met you, you were reading.”
“Huckleberry Finn.” She laughed. It was a million years ago already. This girl who was here with Wesley had never read Huckleberry Finn. She was a different girl entirely.
“But as soon as I saw you, I knew you were a girl who deserved more than one book,” Wesley said. “Which is why I brought you here. I knew when I saw you the first time, I knew it when I took your picture, I knew it when I saw you again.”
Alice looked at him over her shoulder and smiled. “I still don’t know how you did that, by the way,” she said, “how you knew I was at the beach and how you knew to bring the picture, since I don’t believe in magic.” She meant it as a joke, but when it came out, it didn’t sound like one. “Or unicorns,” she added lightly. “Or fairies.”
“What do you believe in?” he asked. “If you don’t believe in magic?” He leaned against the table in the middle of the room. His arms were crossed and his ankles, too, the picture of ease.
“God,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Okay,” he said, and he lifted his hand and rotated it at the wrist: Go on.
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I guess I’d say people. I believe in people.”
“People are more interesting than God,” Wesley said, nodding his approval. “But what does it mean to believe in them? Will people save you?”
“Is this a test?” Alice asked. “I’m usually very good at tests, but I feel like I’m not doing too well on this one.” She wondered if she should approach him, but she remembered the feeling of the cool air on her naked body on the bed at the party, how Wesley had dressed her but hadn’t touched her otherwise, and she stayed near the shelves on the far side of the room. Home base.
“I just want to know you,” Wesley said. “I picked you. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So that’s something you believe in,” he said. “You believe in me.”
She tilted her head back and laughed at the absurdity, not of him saying it, but of the fact that it was true.
“I do,” she said in wonder. “I might believe in God, I do believe in people, and I believe in you. How did you do that?”
He straightened up so that he was no longer leaning against the table. “Don’t believe in people,” he said. “They’re mostly bad. Other people, I mean. Not us.” He moved closer to her, and she felt herself shudder a little. “And they don’t know much,” he continued, “and they don’t see things the way we do. They’re stuck in the past or they’re only focused on the future. Trapped by what they think they need. They don’t live in the now. They move through the world like they’re asleep.”
Now he was so close she could touch his shirt, the buckle on his belt. She could push a lock of hair behind his ear, put her lips to his beard if she wanted. “You mentioned that,” Alice said. “Before. About the people at the party.”
He nodded. “But you’re not like them,” he said. “Those other people.”
“I know,” she said and took a step closer to him. (We regret now the things we said to her, how we spent her whole life reminding her of this very thing, how special she was. But now we know she wasn’t who we thought. If she is special at all, it isn’t in a good way.)
“So here we are,” he said.
“With all the books,” Alice said.
“With all the books,” he said. And then his hands were undoing her pants and slipping them down, and he was dropping before her, and she felt like a queen, Wesley the stranger, now a knight pledging fealty to her. Wesley, on his knees worshipping her. She let him. She closed her eyes. His mouth singing her praises.
(She is a child, isn’t she? Not to know that it means nothing. Every mouth sings praises if it has someone who will listen.)
After, he pulled her pants up, buttoned them himself. “I’m going to keep you,” he said.
“What if it’s me who’s going to keep you?” she asked, smiling.
“It isn’t,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “I was only joking.”
“We better go,” Wesley said. “The girls will be expecting us back soon.”
“Apple and Janie,” said Alice.
“And Kathryn,” said Wesley.
“Right,” said Alice. “Kathryn.” Everything about her felt weak—her brain, her body. Only the beating of her heart reminded her she was alive, she was living, this was happening, this was the now.
“And Hannah Fay,” Wesley added. “Come on.” A fourth girl. No, a fifth, including Alice. Behind her, Wesley flicked off the light and locked the door behind them.
Chapter Twelve
BACK AT THE house, the porch light glowed and hummed. A fat June bug beat its wings around it, hovering and then landing on its yellow surface. “Do you think it thinks it’s landing on the sun?” Alice asked, pointing her chin at it. Now another one joined it, and they buzzed around each other, one crawling on eyelash legs around the other.
Wesley squinted up at the light. “I fucking hate bugs,” he said. A shadow fell across his face, and he looked unfamiliar in the light and dark, and she remembered this man was, essentially, a stranger.
But he wouldn’t be a stranger for long. Already, they knew each other so much more than they had just twenty-four hours ago, and in another day’s time, he would know her even more deeply, and she him. And yet it was still important to be winning, charming. So Alice laughed as though he’d said something witty. “They can’t hurt you,” she said. “They’re June bugs.”
“I don’t care,” Wesley said, pushing open the door. “I just hate them on principle.”
No one was in the living room, but from around the corner and out of sight came the sounds of conversations and plates clinking as someone stacked them, the sound of water from a faucet.
On the orange couch the guitar was in the same spot, and beside it, her leather bag leaned against a throw pillow. She felt silly she had worried about it at all. Perhaps she could become the kind of woman who could leave the house empty-handed, tethered to nothing. She could always just go out into the world with nothing but herself.
Apple breezed into the room, going over to the table where the plump-leaved succulents sat and picking up a matchbook. “Oh hey,” she said to Alice and Wesley. “You guys snuck in.” Alice thought Apple might embrace Wesley, but she stayed next to the table, one hand on her hip, the other holding the matches. She was wearing a sweater that looked like one Alice herself had, and Alice considered telling her in the hopes it might endear her to Apple. Twins! she might say, but then decided against it and just smiled warmly at her instead. Apple didn’t smile back.
“What’s the status of dinner, Apple?” Wesley asked.
“Ready,” she said. “I think you’ll be impressed with it considering what we had to work with. Careful, though, Kathryn is grumpy again.” She shrugged, rolled her eyes. “Tread lightly.”
Wesley pointed a finger sternly at Apple as he walked past her. “Respect,” he said. “She’s been here longer than you.” He disappeared around the corner and into the kitchen. Alice could hear his deep voice, warm and low, and the voices of the other girls too. They sounded happy, like a family catching up after a few days apart.
“Have fun?” Apple asked.
Alice looked at her. “Me?”
“Do what again?” Alice asked. Take her to the college? To the library? Touch her? Worship her?
“You know what I’m talking about,” she said.
“I don’t,” Alice said, blushing. “I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” said Apple. She shrugged again. “Let’s go eat. I’m going to light the fancy candles on the table for ambience.” She waggled the matchbook and turned around. When she did, Alice noticed something on her sweater: a small snag, a thread hanging loose. She remembered when that happened; she had been leaning against a tree outside the school, waiting for Susannah, and when she stood up straight, she could feel the fabric clinging to the tree bark. She glanced over to her bag on the couch. The skin of it was smooth and slack, the bulges and lumps gone.
“Hey,” said Alice. She reached out and grabbed the thread, pulled it. The knit puckered.
“What?” said Apple. Her eyebrows were long and dark, like they had been drawn on with a felt-tipped pen, and one arched as she looked over her shoulder at Alice.
There was a burst of laughter, and then she heard Wesley bellowing good-naturedly. “Apple!” he called. “Alice!”
“That color’s nice on you,” Alice said.
“Thanks,” said Apple.
In the kitchen, a girl sitting at the table wore her red hair pushed back with Alice’s tortoiseshell headband, and another girl, carrying a casserole dish to the table, was wearing a skirt Alice never wore at home but had packed for some reason anyway, with a long, gauzy tunic the color of springtime clouds.
“Hi, Alice,” said Janie, who wore a thin gold bangle that Alice’s mother had given her last Christmas. You have such delicate wrists, her mother had said. We should dress them up.
“Hi, everyone,” said Alice. “Thanks for having me.”
Apple breezed past her, her voice low in Alice’s ear: “Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.”
Chapter Thirteen
IT TURNED OUT that it was Kathryn’s house, Kathryn who was wearing Alice’s skirt. When she stood in front of a lamp, her tunic became sheer, and Alice could see the dark green knit of the skirt hugging her hips tightly, curving around her bottom so that it came up shorter in the back than the front. Somehow it didn’t look like something Kathryn would normally wear, and Alice pictured Apple standing over the leather bag, rifling through it and tossing things out to the other girls, distributing them as she pleased. She imagined Kathryn dutifully stepping out of the skirt she had worn to her job at the university library that day, folding it into a neat square, and then pulling on Alice’s skirt instead.
Kathryn gave Alice a tour of the house. “I was always my great-aunt’s favorite, and she left me some money when she died. Then I bought this house,” she said, opening a door. “Here’s my room.” It was small and tidy, with two big windows, and the floor was bare except for a large round rug at the foot of the bed. It made Alice imagine Kathryn as a nun.
“So this is where you stay by yourself?” Alice asked, looking out a window. Then, worried she sounded judgmental, she looked back over her shoulder and added, “Of course it makes sense you have your own room, since it’s your house, obviously.” She turned back around to face Kathryn.
Kathryn shook her head. “Wesley sleeps in here a lot.”
“And then where do you sleep?” asked Alice.
Kathryn raised her eyebrows as though she were surprised by the question. “Here.”
“I see,” said Alice, who pointed to an ivory-backed hairbrush on the dresser. “That’s pretty,” she offered politely, trying to cover her surprise.
“My mother’s,” said Kathryn. (Somewhere, then, another bereft mother. We ask God to think of Kathryn’s mother on our behalf because we cannot. We cannot worry about other people beyond our own. It hurts too much. It takes too much out of us.)
When Alice looked at the room on her way out, before Kathryn closed the door behind them, it no longer recalled a nunnery. It was, she thought, the room of a grown-up, a woman who made her own choices, who shared her bed with a man who shared the beds of others.
There wasn’t much else to the house, really: one level with two bedrooms, the living room, a cramped study at the front of the house that was made even more claustrophobic by its deep crimson walls, lusty against the shabby white crown molding, and a kitchen with enough room for a table and five mismatched chairs.
“Sometimes Wesley sleeps outside,” Kathryn said, taking Alice out the back door. Alice stood at the edge of the patio—a cement slab, really—and looked out at the overgrown and woodsy backyard. The trees were spindly and black in the night, like ink drawings on gray paper. She could sleep outside, too, she thought. “He likes the stars,” Kathryn said, slipping on a fragile pair of eyeglasses. Alice assumed she was farsighted and was searching for something in the dark jungle before them. “Like a Boy Scout. Or a soldier.”
“Those poor soldiers,” said Alice, though the truth was she didn’t really think of them very often. (It’s easier for us, too, if we do not think too much about such things. We pray for them, but we do not dwell on it.)
“Yes,” said Kathryn. “Poor boys. But you know, they aren’t fighting for us. We didn’t ask them to fight for us.”
“What?” said Alice. She turned to face Kathryn. “What do you mean? Who else are they fighting for?”
“Oh,” said Kathryn. “You really don’t know much, do you?” Her lenses winked in the moonlight.
“I do,” said Alice. “More than you think.” Her brain was ticking off the classes she had taken, the books she had read, the grades she had earned.
“Of course you do,” Kathryn said. “I didn’t mean that you’re dumb. I meant more like naïve. What we’re doing here, Wesley and me and the others, we’re our own country. Our own little nation. Or maybe even more than that. Like a whole private world. We don’t answer to the rules of the other world. So those boys, they aren’t fighting for us. But maybe they’re fighting for you.” She shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest, and when she did, it emphasized the fullness of her figure. Alice wondered if that was partly why Wesley went to Kathryn’s bed, looking for something soft and safe, a place to rest. She felt jealous. The hierarchy: Apple or Kathryn, then Janie.
“So you just sit by,” Alice said, “and let terrible things happen around you without doing anything about it?” She realized she would never say this to Apple, would certainly never say it to Wesley. But here was Kathryn, soft and plain in her wire-rimmed glasses and looking uncomfortable in Alice’s skirt, older than her, not a girl, she could see now, but a woman, who went to work every day at an institution, the servant of men and women younger than her, helping them write meaningless term papers, and Alice let herself judge.
“Definitely not,” said Kathryn. “We know the truth, that’s all. And we do what the truth dictates. We have a plan we believe in.”
“What kind of plan?” Alice asked.
“Can’t tell you,” Kathryn said and smiled. She had very small teeth but they were so white that even in the darkness it looked like she was holding two strands of pearls inside her mouth. “Not yet, anyway,” she said. “You can still stay here for a while, no matter what you think. Wesley wants you here. He sees something in you he likes.”
“I know,” said Alice. The warmth of the first editions room at the university spread through her. The pressure of Wesley’s hands on her hips, the cool spines of the books her fingertips grazed. How weak she had been after, her muscles spent, her bones loose as jelly. “I like him too,” she added. She hadn’t ever really liked Carl or any of the other boys. They were fine, but they had never made her weak. She hadn’t believed in them, and now it was like they didn’t exist.
“We all like him,” Kathryn said. She took off her glasses and closed her hand around them. “He prefers me without these,” she said, and they went inside to join the other girls. Alice saw Kathryn squint in the warm light of the kitchen. She imagined what Kathryn’s world looked like now, everything fuzzy and strange. Or maybe it was that crisp, clear world she saw with her glasses that was the strange one, and the blurry world felt familiar to her.
“There you are,” Wesley said when he saw them, as if they’d been gone for days.
“Here we are,” said Kathryn, bright-eyed, taking both of Wesley’s hands with her own. Alice wondered where she had put her glasses.
Chapter Fourteen
COMMUNITY IS IMPORTANT. We’ll be the first ones to tell you that. That’s why we live where we do. Almost all of us came here from somewhere else. Other cities farther inland, on other coasts, in the fingertips of the country, or other neighborhoods, ones that aren’t as nice as this one. There are, of course, nearby fancier streets than ours, with bigger houses, more expensive cars in the garages. But this one is ours. This is what we chose.
We raise our families together. Our children play in the driveways, in our yards. We sit in lawn chairs and wear sunglasses and watch them. We throw parties where we buy Tupperware from each other, we retrieve errant baseballs in our flower beds for the street’s sons. We trade recipes, we trade lovers when we need to, though we’re discreet about this. What binds us together besides our mailing addresses, our shared zip code? This: we are committed to a way of life, to creating it for each other, to maintaining it for ourselves. This is why Mrs. McEntyre studies the shoes of the people who come and go, out of their cars and into our houses, down the sidewalk. Take, for example, that man, Wesley. Brown boots. Dirt on the sole. Shoes of a man who works hard, who enjoys the beauty of the outdoors. But the toes were too pointed, the heel a bit too high. This may seem like nothing, like only the quirks of personal taste, but Mrs. McEntyre knows better. Those boots are not the shoes of a man who can be trusted.