The Pursuit of Alice Thrift. Elinor Lipman
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asked my mother.
“Polly’s,” Frederick confirmed.
My mother said, “Let them work it out on their own turf.” She opened the door and said, “Marietta? Polly’s not home yet. Can you just swing by her house tomorrow and swap the coats? I’m exhausted.”
“Hers is enormous,” said Marietta.
“Maybe a size ten,” Frederick whispered. “More likely a twelve.”
“Can’t you just roll up the sleeves?” asked my mother. “Or borrow something for the ride home?”
“I can’t believe she could even get into mine,” Marietta whined.
I left the kitchen and said to Marietta—the bridge partner famous for wearing a size zero and having quadruple-A feet—“I know it wasn’t your fault, but you might consider name tags or a laundry marker.”
Marietta burst into tears, prompting my mother to do the same.
“You two aren’t crying over the coats, are you?” I asked.
My father joined us and demanded to know what I’d said to my mother to provoke this outburst.
I said, “She’s crying because Marietta’s crying.”
“Take your mother upstairs,” he said. “I’ll drive Marietta home.”
“You didn’t bring your car?” I asked her.
My father said, enunciating carefully, “Alice? I don’t think you understand that Marietta lost her own mother last fall, and sometimes when someone’s crying about a lost coat, it’s not about a lost coat at all.”
How was I supposed to know that Marietta’s mother had died? All I’d ever heard about Marietta was that her life was an endless, frustrating search for clothes and shoes that didn’t fall off her body. I said, “I’m very sorry for your loss. I hope it wasn’t painful or prolonged.”
Marietta sank a little, so my father propped her up by her bony shoulders.
He shook his head and mouthed a string of indistinct words that turned out to be amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
“Which was hell for her and hell for me,” Marietta shouted. “So I haven’t had much time to sew name tags in my clothes.”
“Alice didn’t know,” said my father.
Ray joined us by the coatrack. “Hey!” he said. “I could hear you from the back porch! What are you yelling at Alice for?”
I told him that Marietta’s mother had succumbed to a long, drawn-out, and debilitating disease, which no one had told me about until now.
“Then take a page from my book,” he told her. “My wife died recently but I know how to conduct myself at someone else’s funeral.”
My father was trying to console Marietta at the same time that he was signaling Ray to refrain from uttering one further syllable.
Now barefoot and seated on the stairs, my mother murmured, “It never fails.”
“What never fails?” I asked.
“Your social graces,” she said. “Or lack thereof.”
“Maybe Alice is too busy devoting her brain to medical science to bother with some of the niceties that other people have time for,” said Ray.
“I have friends who are doctors who could be anchorpeople,” sniffed Marietta. “Or social directors on cruise ships.”
“Are they surgeons?” I asked.
My mother sighed. My father looked to Ray.
“Maybe I’ll take Alice home now,” he said.
WE STOPPED TWICE for coffee. I didn’t say much—even less than usual—because I was working up to something like an expression of gratitude. Between sips I said, “I don’t go home a lot because I usually manage to say something tactless, and everyone stays mad for a couple of weeks.”
“Until?”
“Until my mother calls and complains about my sister. No one apologizes. It just goes away.”
“I’ve heard of worse things,” said Ray. “In some families, people stay mad. No one calls and pretends everything’s okay because they all hate each other’s guts.”
I told him this trip was different. I always left like this—earlier than planned. But no one ever walked through the door with me. No one ever came to my defense or pointed out that the Mariettas of the world were the ones deficient in social graces.
“And?”
“I guess that was me saying thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
A few miles later he asked, “Who did this to you?”
I asked what he meant.
“Your parents? Is that who? Did they ever build you up? Tell you you were smart and pretty—their precious daughter, their pride and joy?”
“Pride and joy, sure,” I said. “But because of what I did and not the way I looked.”
I could see that he was studying my profile, searching for a diplomatic counterpoint. “What a pity,” he finally said. “To think that all these years—how many? Twenty-five?”
“I’ll be twenty-seven in two months.”
“To think that in all these years you’ve been carrying around this image of yourself as—how would you define it? Unattractive?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t want to hear that anymore,” he said.
I didn’t flinch when his hand moved to my knee, an act that seemed more brotherly than sexual. Or so I thought. He left it there until he had to downshift, a good fifteen miles later. When it found its way back, higher on my leg and decidedly less fraternal, I let that pass, too. I was only human. No one else was driving me out of state or banishing derogatory adjectives from my vocabulary. No one else’s pupils dilated as I described my two weeks in a remote village in British Honduras with the Reconstructive Surgeons Volunteer Program, aiding the shunned. In a few years I’d be thirty. My sister was a lesbian. I was a heterosexual with the potential to be the favorite child. And here in the adjacent bucket seat, stroking my unloved leg, was a man.
“WHAT I MEANT by ‘stay,’” said Ray, “is pretty much universally understood to mean not go home. As in sleep over.”
I explained, just inside the front door of my building, that overnight parking was prohibited on Brookline Avenue, and, furthermore, overnight guests were not allowed under Leo’s and my covenant.
Ray said, “I’ve never heard of such a thing! Whatever happened to consenting adults? Is this a halfway house or something, with rules about sex, drugs, and firearms? C’mon. Who are you kidding? You’re making this up, aren’t you? Why not just tell the truth? Why not say, ‘Ray? I’m scared to have a man in my bed.’”
“I’m not,” I said. “I just think this is premature and unwarranted.”
“‘Premature and unwarranted,’” he parroted. He moved closer and took my hand. “But I’m a red-blooded guy who’s pretty good at translating body language and I seem to recall you didn’t mind having my hand on your knee earlier this evening between Sturbridge and Natick on the Mass. Pike.”
I said maybe, but that was depression authorizing