Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) (19 page)

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Alice put on her park-issued coveralls on Saturday morning. She zipped them all the way up in the front, over wool pants, two layers of sweaters, and a parka. She looked like a sausage. She braided her hair high up on her head so it wouldn't get caught in the zipper

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while she worked. She looked like a sausage trailing its casing from one end. She glanced in the mirror to see if her hair had turned dark yet.

If every mirror gave you a particular version of yourself, the mirror over her old scuffed Victorian dresser provided Alice with her oldest and most familiar one. The glass seemed to contain all of her selves from when she was first tall enough to see herself in it. It used to contain Riley sometimes, too, until Riley was fifteen and volunteered to move out of their shared room and into the tiny room off the kitchen.

Riley's room thereafter was the size of a large closet, suppos edly intended for a maid, built at a time when even people who rented cramped, dark apartments had maids. Riley could barely fit her twin bed in it, but she claimed to like it. She couldn't fit her shelves of trophies, so she'd thrown them into a box and left them for the garbage pickup. Alice remembered being horrified by that, but Riley didn't seem to care.

Riley seemed to think she was doing Alice a favor by giving her her own room, and there were things Alice had enjoyed about it. At first she'd encrusted the place with terrible rainbow stickers and boy-band posters, later replaced by photo collages, Fire Island memorabilia, and old-fashioned movie posters. But Alice missed sharing with Riley. She looked back longingly on the time when she and Riley had twin beds with matching wildlife bedspreads and talked in the dark before falling asleep.

"You're working today?" her mother asked her as Alice trudged into the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of Rice Krispies. "I thought you didn't usually mow on weekends." Her mother

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uttered the verb "mow" with a degree of distaste suited to smoking crack or mugging children.

"We 're raking. We 're in a state of raking emergency."

Her mother nodded. Alice stared at the cereal box, making a close study of Snap, Crackle, and Pop, hoping to avoid the junc ture where her mother wondered aloud in what way Alice's extraordinarily expensive BA in history from a fine college pre pared her for a job mowing the Great Lawn in Central Park.

"Will you be back for dinner tonight?"

In principle, Alice did not want to answer. You permitted the first round of incursions and the second soon followed. She didn't want to set intolerable precedents for this new stage of living at home. At the same time, when you were living with your parents and not paying rent, you had to accept these things.

"I don't know yet."

"Well, I'd like for you to decide, because I'm going to Fairway this morning."

"Okay, then. No."

Her mother gave her a sharp look, and Alice knew she had to be careful or the wondering aloud about the BA would start. It was a delicate calibration, being subversive and obnoxious without your mother quite noticing. It was a forgotten art to Alice through most of college, but now that she was living at home again, it all came back.

She'd planned on spending part of her law-school loans on housing, but she'd deferred the loans along with everything else. She wished she was making enough money to pay for a room with her friends, but she wasn't even close. It was a well-documented

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curse of growing up in New York City: In order to return to your old hometown, you almost invariably had to live in your old home. What you saved in rent you lost in self-respect and personal growth.

November in New York could bring almost any kind of weather, and today it brought clean, cold air. Alice put on her gloves and turned into the park at 96th Street. She walked south along the road. It wasn't the prettiest way, but it was the most direct, and the traffic on the weekend was closed off for the benefit of walkers, runners, and bikers.

She was sorry, in a way, to be called up in uniform on a Satur day. She'd forgotten how packed the park would be on a sunny weekend with people she would potentially know, and how stupid she would feel among them in her coveralls.

She kept her eyes out for Riley. On days when her sister felt well and her ankles and feet weren't watery, the doctors allowed her to walk, and Riley walked for miles, even if it left her exhausted.

Alice looked up at the towers of the fancy buildings along Cen tral Park West. In most parts of the world, human-made things were surrounded by tall trees. In the case of Central Park it was reversed, God-made things were surrounded by tall buildings.

Her eyes fell on the back of a man wearing a green down vest and a brown wool hat. Alongside him walked a blond woman wear ing pointy shoes. Her arm was tucked in his, and it made Alice feel mournful. She began to walk faster. After the reservoir, she could duck into the interior of the park and mind her loneliness less.

As she came closer to the couple she felt agitated, and it dawned on her, slowly and discordantly, that this man walked like Paul.

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And though she rarely saw Paul wearing layers and walking in winter light, she began to suspect that the similarity between this man and Paul did not stop with his walk. She looked at the man's hand, the one that wasn't involved with the blond woman's arm, and she knew the hand. She knew the fingers. Her body, badly attached as it was, would have whimpered if she hadn't caught it in time. Her breath shuddered. Her heart mismanaged its work of beating.

Should she stop or should she try to scoot around? She couldn't disappear completely unless she climbed up a small cliff, and that would be conspicuous. Not only did she not want the possible Paul and his pointy-toed friend to see her as a sausage, she did not want to know for sure that it was him. She wanted to preserve enough doubt to be able to convince herself, over days and weeks if neces sary, that he was not Paul and that Paul did not have a girlfriend. There were easily non-Paul people in New York City who had Paul's walk and his hands. A case could be made.

She slowed almost to a stop, cursing them for not getting ahead of her faster. Walking slowly seemed the province of people who were enjoying each other too much. She never walked anywhere slowly with Paul. Either he was yanking her along or she was rac ing to catch up. So it probably wasn't Paul.

She was feeling good about that until he turned around and he was Paul. She was still trying to think of a way out of it when he stared directly at her face.

Some people who had been your closest friends since you were a baby might have made some pretense of being pleased to see you,

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but Paul was not. He stopped walking and looked at her as though she had called him by an unpleasant name.

"Alice?"

It was tempting to turn and run in the other direction. "Hi," she said.

He walked toward her, unlooping his hand from the woman's arm. "Why are you wearing that?" he asked.

"Because I'm working here."

"You're working in the park."

"Mowing and raking usually," she said. Why lie?

"What about school?"

"I'm not going."

He looked genuinely surprised by this, but he didn't have the gall to ask why not. He looked discomfited and itchy to her, like his skin didn't fit. In these many weeks his anger had cooled appar ently, and now he was cold. His lips were pressed in, the same color as his face. It was hard to believe that it was the same mouth that had kissed her.

"Your family's all right?"

She paused, then nodded. How could he not know the truth? How could she not tell him? She felt angry at him for not knowing, angry at Riley for not telling him. Alice was going to come apart in a minute, and it seemed best to get away before she did.

Paul suddenly remembered his slow-walking companion. "This is Monique," he said, somewhat brusquely. He didn't even bother with the second half of the introduction.

"I'm Alice," Alice said.

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"Hey," said Monique. Her lips were perfectly shiny. Too shiny for kissing, Alice thought. She didn't seem like the kind of person who hung out with park employees very much.

"Tell your folks hi," Paul said, and turned around again. He was done with her. He was back to his walk, though he kept his arms to himself this time.

She could practically hear Monique commenting on her jump suit. She could practically hear Paul's laugh in reply. She could practically see them walking off together to a caf�, holding hands and celebrating the fact that they never had or would wear a park- issued coverall.

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"Who was that?" Monique asked.

Paul was no longer in a talking mood. He felt stormy and uncomfortable. "She's an old friend. Well, her sister's really my friend."

"Quite an outfit," Monique said lightly.

"Meaning what?" His face was hard, and he didn't have the will to soften it.

"Nothing." She retreated quickly.

"You meant something," Paul persisted, knowing he should let it go. He was furious at Alice, why should he still protect her?

"I meant nothing. Seriously. Just drop it," she said. It had been made clear to her that there would be no scoring points off Alice.

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What was it with Alice and her jobs requiring costumes? he wondered. It seemed to him a sign of her perpetual underemploy ment. And yet it made him ache for the eagerness and complete ness with which she approached her life. She had her dignity, but in a broad way. It didn't confine her as it did other people.

He looked at Monique in her dignified and attractive clothes. Angry as he was at Alice, Paul suddenly felt he could only ever want a woman in a dark green zippered jumpsuit.

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Blame Here and There

I think this would look good on you," Alice suggested

somewhat hopelessly.

"I think it would look good on Aunt Mildred."

"Oh, come on," Alice said, though she put it back quickly.

Riley pulled out a dress of greenish Lycra. "What about this? It would sort of go with your eyes."

"Too shiny." Alice checked the price tag. "Also, it costs two hundred dollars."

"All right, then. This is the one."

Alice couldn't help laughing. It was bright red oversized plaid and about ten inches long from waist to hem. "That would cover half of my ass."

"Megan would wear it."

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Alice considered. She would. Megan had been close to them as children, and her parents were some of her parents' best friends. But Megan had hit puberty with a vengeance, and by fourteen she was regarded as the village slut. By the time she was seventeen, Paul was the only boy she hadn't slept with, and Alice and Riley were the only girls she hadn't pissed off. They remained her only friends.

"I wonder what her wedding dress will look like."

"I wonder, too," Alice said thoughtfully. "When you think of it, it's hard to believe Megan's only going to give blow jobs to one man for the rest of her life."

Riley nodded. "That's true."

"I wonder if it will last," Alice said.

"The marriage?"

"Yeah."

"It might. People change. Okay, how about this?" Riley pulled out a striking dress made of crinkly wine-colored silk that went in a column from shoulder to foot.

"Nice. But I think it will be too short for me."

Riley looked almost shy for a moment. "I was thinking for me."

Alice tried to be measured. "Really?"

"Do you like it?"

Alice held it up under her sister's chin. "I do. I love it. I think you should try it on right now."

In a state of amazement, Alice followed her sister to the fitting rooms.

When Judy had sent them to Bloomingdale's to get dresses for Megan Cooley's black-tie wedding, Alice hadn't really expected

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that they would come home with two. Riley had a long history of eschewing dresses. She'd preferred keeping her hair short and dressing like a boy, even wearing boys' bathing suits until she was eight or nine. And ever since, she'd mostly found ways to avoid them. When her friend David from NOLS got married the year before, she'd worn a tux and stood with his groomsmen. Alice laughed when she saw the pictures, but she remembered the look of strain on her mother's face. Her mother was always looking for confirmation that Riley was gay and also for proof that she wasn't.

"You can come in if you want," Riley said on her way into a fit ting room.

Alice felt warmed by that. Riley never let Judy come into the fit ting room. She hadn't let Judy dress her since she was old enough to say the word "no."

Alice had always been more tractable about being mothered, but then Alice always had the idea that she wanted, someday, to be a mother herself.

Alice perched on the bench. She didn't want to notice the changes in Riley, the shallow way she breathed. She looked away and her own heart began its routine of copying.

Riley wrestled with the dress a little and pulled it over her head. It fell neatly and straight to her feet, leaving only the ends of her toes sticking out.

"Wow," said Alice. It was rather shocking to see Riley like that, but she didn't want to make a big deal of it.

Riley snuck a few quick glances at herself.

"You look beautiful, you know."

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"Do you think?"

"Yes."

Riley turned to see herself from behind just like any other girl, and Alice smiled. Riley had the kind of body that girls yearned for and boys didn't notice. She was straight-down and lithe. She had no unsightly parts that stuck out. No dimples, swags, or cottage-cheesy bits. Her hips were narrow like a boy's, and her breasts were small.

When Alice was in the full trauma of middle puberty, grow ing breasts and hips in every direction, she wished like anything she was Riley. While she got teased and tortured and bra-strap snapped, she wished it even more. Sometimes even now she wished it.