Saving Alice Read online

  “What has changed?” I finally managed to ask.

  “You drink.”

  “Not anymore,” I replied.

  Donna’s mother scowled at me. “Don’t lie to me, Stephen Whitaker. I know you go to that bar.”

  “But—”

  “And now she sees movies!” her mother exclaimed, and I wondered how she knew. In anticipation of her parents’ visit, we’d even hidden the television set in a closet.

  “Disney,” I replied, which was a half truth.

  “Doesn’t matter,” her mother countered, lips firm. “She knows better.”

  After Donna had seen her first movie in college—The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes—she’d promptly rushed back to the dorm in tears, thoroughly repentant.

  Paradoxically, she and her parents didn’t view literature in the same way, leading me to wonder if Donna compensated for her strict upbringing by reading everything she could get her hands on. And while I couldn’t argue with her mother’s points, they didn’t add up to marital abuse, at least in my mind.

  Didn’t matter. According to Donna’s parents, she’d left the straight and narrow, and it wasn’t Donna’s fault. It was mine.

  As I drove and dusk descended, the growing darkness seemed almost sinister.

  Surely our marriage wasn’t for nothing, I rationalized, as if I needed it to have meant something. And yet all the struggles, all the tears, all the good old-fashioned hard work and compromises seemed pointless unless you could achieve the blessed “till death do us part.”

  We wasted a decade, she’d said, because for her, the good times weren’t enough to redeem the bad.

  It’s not over yet, I thought, as if trying to convince myself.

  Eventually, I turned the car around and headed toward home. When I reentered our neighborhood, I parked on the street before remembering the empty garage. Had Donna left the remote? Doubtful. Most likely, it was still attached to her visor.

  I gripped the steering wheel. In the stillness of my car, I took several deep breaths, leaning back in the bucket seat, unsure of what to do next.

  I finally got out of the car and walked to the garage, unlocked the door, and pressed the opener. Although I was prepared for it, the mechanical sound startled me, and in that split-second space between dark and light, her car reappeared in its usual spot only to disappear again.

  Turning on the light, my movements seemed suddenly imbued with hyper self-awareness, as if I were watching myself, studying my reactions, wondering if I might at last be coming undone.

  Shaking my head, I went inside the house and puttered around in the kitchen for a few minutes. On the dining room table lay the garage remote.

  I sighed and felt myself drawn back to the pictures again, as if unable to stop beating my head against the wall. I removed the photo of Alycia at age eight, and I sat at the sofa facing the front window, studying it.

  The first tears slipped down my face. Our marriage wasn’t for nothing, I told myself, tracing the outline of Alycia’s eyes with my fingers.

  “She’s more fragile than you think,” Donna had insisted.

  Losing my battle with self-pity, I clutched my daughter’s photo tightly to my chest and leaned back.

  Surely there’s still a chance, I thought.

  As twilight deepened into darkness, I headed downstairs to my office. The walls seemed to echo with the latest memories, including a tense exchange with my daughter nearly a year ago. Rarely have I walked into my office without a tiny flicker of recollection. Before, the memories seemed painful, but now I welcomed anything that reminded me of my little girl.

  “Let me get this straight.” Alycia’s words were clipped and incredulous. “You’re building … an office … right next door … to my room?”

  “I don’t mind your music,” I’d said. “We can coexist peaceably.” She wasn’t amused and turned to her mother. “Can I have the upstairs room?”

  “That’s Mom’s sewing room,” I intervened.

  “So?” Alycia exclaimed. “She doesn’t sew anymore.”

  I switched gears. “It’s storage now.”

  “She can use mine for that.”

  “I’m not going to spy on you,” I interjected.

  “Spying on me will be the inevitable result,” she countered.

  Inevitable result?

  Donna broke in, “Take my room, Alycia. I don’t mind.”

  Alycia threw me an eye dagger and stormed out of the kitchen. From across the living room door she yelled: “Just forget it! I don’t even care. From now on, I won’t come home unless I absolutely have to.”

  “Perhaps to collect your allowance?” I retorted.

  Donna cast me a disapproving glare just before Alycia huffed out of the house.

  Memories of my selfishness now repulsed me, and in the complete darkness of the room—where I was finally hidden—I put my hands to my face and let it all out. I wept for Alycia. And I wept for what I’d done to her mother, who had deserved far better.

  Hours later, I awakened to a strange vibration. Opening my eyes, I saw my phone blinking, its buzz muffled on the carpet. I must have turned off the sound.

  “Need some company?” Larry asked. “I’m hungry. My treat.”

  I hesitated, knowing Larry well enough. He wasn’t just hungry. Bone tired, and against my better judgment, I agreed to meet him at the Pizza Inn on Sixth Avenue.

  Twenty minutes later, I found Larry standing outside the whitebrick building, blowing into his hands and rubbing them together. He looked like a menacing Mafia figure in his black overcoat.

  I parked and met him at the door. Once inside, we ordered pepperoni and sausage, and I sequenced the gory details. When I finished, he gave me a serious look. “Sounds to me like she didn’t want to leave.”

  I frowned, wondering what part of my story he’d missed.

  “I know what she said,” Larry continued. “But maybe she’s just trying to get your attention.”

  Only a lifelong friend is that pointed, although Larry never let something as small as tactlessness get in the way of his opinions.

  Larry continued to probe. “Did you ask her to stay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Just call her. See how she’s doing.”

  “Maybe she needs some time.”

  “You aren’t gonna fight for her?” Larry shook his head, and expelled an impatient breath.

  “C’mon, Larry. We’ve been through this.”

  “Is it our finances?” Larry asked, raising his eyebrows.

  I shrugged. How could it not be?

  “Did you tell her things are looking up?”

  I nodded. I’d been telling her this for years.

  Larry gestured to the waitress across the room, then leaned forward. “Passion doesn’t last, Stephen. Not for anyone. You have to settle for mutual regard. You have to embrace practicality, and appreciate convenience.”

  Larry viewed life in black-and-white, either-or terms. In his universe, shades of color didn’t exist, and neither did ambiguity or imprecision. His remarks to me often contained the words, In the final analysis, which rarely followed with any analysis on his part— instead spoken as a way of cutting through mine.

  There had been times when I’d wondered how we’d stayed friends so long. But in high school, we were more alike: He was a bit more reflective, I was much more optimistic, and somehow we met in the middle.

  “ That’s not what Donna wants,” I said. “She wants …” I stopped, unable to continue.

  Larry frowned. “Just give her what she wants.”

  I did, I thought. No, that wasn’t true. I tried. And sometimes I probably didn’t try hard enough.

  It was pointless to continue. The waitress brought the check, and Larry, without looking at the bill, handed her his credit card. It was his turn to pay. Larry frowned at the bill, then looked up, his expression sober. “I’m not sure I ever loved Megan. Until she left, that is. I learned my lesson the hard way, after it wa
s too late. But it’s still not too late for you.” He studied me for a moment. “Don’t you miss Donna?”

  “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.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  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 u
p 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.