The Sisters Montclair (6 page)

Alice began to walk again and Stella put the photograph down carefully and followed her. Alice was almost to her bedroom when she stopped and turned her head. “My son Roddy’s writing a book.”

“Oh really?” Stella said. “What about?’

“The family. He won’t let anyone read it. Not until he’s finished.”

“When will that be?”

“He doesn’t know. He says the muse will tell him.”

Something in her expression made Stella laugh. “I hope it’s not one of those
Mommie Dearest
books.”

“It probably is,” Alice said, shoving the walker out in front of her. “It’s probably best that I not read it.”

Later that morning Alice’s son, Sawyer, came by to get her grocery list which was kept on the refrigerator door. He was tall and blonde with a big booming voice and a jovial manner. He went back to Alice’s bedroom and Stella could hear them on the baby monitor.

“Al, I’ve come for your grocery list,” he said.

“Oh, hello,” Alice said. “Is it time to write bills?”

“No, Al. That’s the first of the month.”

“What?”

“We write bills on the first of the month. Not today.”

“Do you still have my checkbook?”

“Yes. But we don’t write bills today.”

“Oh. Not today? Okay then.”

“I’ve come for your grocery list.”

“Oh, you’ve come for my grocery list?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I don’t know what’s on it. They write down what they think I should eat. I just do as I’m told.”

“Now, Al.”

“I like that new one though. That new caregiver. She’s very smart.”

“Is she? Well, that’s good.”

“She has a tattoo.”

“That’s nice.’

“It’s the Sanskrit symbol for peace.”

“Okay well, I’ve come for the list. I’m going to Wal-Mart.”

“Okay then. I don’t have anything else to report.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“Make sure you put Rum Raisin ice cream on that list,” Alice called after him.

She wouldn’t eat bread but Alice had a weakness for ice cream. The notebook said she wasn’t to be given any unless she’d eaten her lunch or dinner first. Stella made her a plate of chicken salad, coleslaw, and yellow squash with onions for lunch. She cut up some watermelon and put it in a small ramekin beside Alice’s plate.

“Oh, doesn’t this look lovely?” Alice said, sitting down.

Stella smiled, pleased, and sat down beside her. Alice folded her hands in her lap and sat staring straight ahead at the wall.

“Is something wrong?” Stella said.

“Bib me,” Alice said.

“Oh, sorry. I keep forgetting.” Stella stood and unfolded the plastic bib and tied it around Alice’s neck. Half-way through tying it, she began to giggle.

“There,” she said. “You’re bibbed.”

“I’m bibbed,” Alice said. She slid her eyes up at Stella and snickered like an evil child.

Stella sat down again and they bowed their heads, but Alice had trouble with the prayer, snorting several times so that Stella had to bite her lip to get through it.

Afterwards, they unfolded their napkins on their laps and ate for awhile in silence.

“Did you like school when you were a girl?” Stella asked, remembering the old photograph.

Alice turned her head slowly, giving her a long look. Her eyes were pale blue, as faded as washed denim. “I liked Miss Fenimore’s School all right. I wasn’t so happy with Marymount.”

“I wouldn’t like it either,” Stella said. “An all-girls school, I mean.”

“You got used to it,” Alice said. “Weesie was there, and later, my sister.”

Stella slowly chewed her peanut butter sandwich, looking down at her plate. She had broken the rules and helped herself to some grapes in Alice’s refrigerator. “I hear those are pretty expensive schools. I had a girl in one of my classes who had gone to Marymount.”

“In those days, the tuition at Marymount was $100 a year. $50 if you had a sister who went there. Now, of course, it’s over $20,000. And I should know since I paid for all my grandchildren’s tuitions.”

“Well, that was nice of you.”

Alice chewed thoughtfully, her blue eyes fixed on the calendar that hung on the wall in front of her. “At Marymount we used to have these Sugar and Spice Parties,” she said.

“Sugar and Spice Party? What’s that?”

“It’s where you sit down with a bunch of girls and everyone says something they like about you and something they don’t.”

“That sounds cruel.”

Alice snorted. “It could be. You had to have a strong temperament to get through it. I was pretty good at it but my sister used to go home in tears. She was always tender-hearted.”

Stella snorted. She couldn’t imagine Adeline ever having a tender heart. She also couldn’t imagine attending a school that cost twenty thousand dollars a year. She had seen
The Dead Poets Society
, had secretly harbored a desire to go off to a boarding school where everyone wore uniforms and lived on a campus with soaring Gothic architecture. A place where being smart and scholarly was encouraged.

She plucked absently at one of the grapes, pulling it off its stem. How different might her life have been if she’d had even a few of the advantages Alice’s grandchildren had had? If she could be certain of success in life, knowing that she could not fail?

“I wasn’t really cut out for a girls’ school,” Alice said, following her own meandering train of thought. “I always liked playing with the boys. In those days girls were supposed to be sweet and dainty but I always liked climbing trees and riding bareback and playing football. I was what my Grandfather Jordan liked to call, a bearcat. Mother was always fussing at me about acting ladylike but I couldn’t seem to manage it.”

She broke off, chewing slowly, her eyes fixed on the calendar above the desk.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Stella said. “When I was little, we moved around a lot. I was always the new kid in school. So I learned early on to go up to the bully on the playground the first day of school and just punch him in the face. We’d go down in a heap of flying fists, and I usually got the worst of it, of course, but it seemed to prevent any future problems. Everyone figured I was crazy enough to be left alone.”

Alice turned her head slowly and looked at her, her expression a mixture of shocked disapproval and consternation. “I’m not talking about physical altercations,” she said. “Girls and boys didn’t fist fight in my day. It was considered a sign of bad breeding. I’m talking about how I liked playing with boys, I wanted to be one of them, I envied them their carefree ways and their freedom. It always seemed to me that my Cousin Dob got away with murder while I was the one stuck having to obey the rules and regulations.” She raised her voice in a high, wheedling tone. “Young ladies don’t do this, young ladies don’t do that,” she said, as if imitating a scolding adult.

Bad breeding
. It was the kind of comment Stella would have expected someone from Alice’s social class to make. She had a sudden desire to shock the old lady, to watch her eyes widen and her chin tremble. Where would Stella have been if she hadn’t learned to fight in those early days, what would have happened to her if she hadn’t known how to take care of herself, to pack up with others to survive the pimps, dealers, and perverts? People like Alice Whittington had no idea how the other ninety percent of the world lived. Money smoothed the way, made troubles bearable, took away the suffocating daily worries and fears. It created an artificial world where everything was shiny clean and fair.

“Of course, there was one boy I never much cared for. Charlie Gaskins. You may have heard of him. His family lived next door to us down on the river.”

“Let me guess,” Stella said. “Is Gaskins Park named for him?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it,” Stella said.

“He used to throw rocks at me over the fence and Mother wouldn’t let me heave them back.”

A boy who threw rocks. How terrible.

Stella didn’t finish the rest of her sandwich. She wrapped it up in a napkin for later. Outside the window, the distant whine of a leaf-blower broke the mid-day stillness.

Alice ate slowly and when she had finished her lunch, she sat back with her hands in her lap. “I’ll have my ice cream now,” she said.

Stella stood and gathered the plates. “What kind?”

“Surprise me.”

“Consider yourself surprised,” Stella said, taking the plates to the sink and flipping on the hot water. She poured detergent into the water until foamy mounds appeared, and then she tossed the bottle back under the sink.

The girl’s voice was low and smooth like water running in a brook and Alice had to turn her head to hear it. The girl didn’t shout and bully her like the other caregivers, talking to her like she was a belligerent child. She spoke in a normal voice which meant that Alice couldn’t hear her at all unless she turned her head so her good ear might catch the wispy threads of the girl’s voice, or faced her so she might read her lips. Usually low-talkers irritated Alice but the girl spoke with heart, she wasn’t condescending, and so Alice was willing to put up with the extra work involved with sitting beside her at lunch.

Besides, despite her admission of fistfights on the playground, there was something gentle about the girl, something she took great pains to hide, that made Alice feel vaguely protective of her. She was the kind who would give her last dollar to a bum on the street corner, the kind who took in every stray dog or cat who showed up at her door. She had seen the girl’s arm when she lifted her sleeve that day in the library, had seen the claw marks and silvery scars, and she’d known immediately that the girl was a cat lover. Alice couldn’t abide cats, and she really wasn’t too fond of dogs either, at least not in the house.

One of her boys had had a dog, hadn’t he?
No, that’s right.
Bill wouldn’t allow dogs. They were dirty and they carried disease in their saliva, he’d said.
Bill.
Funny, how at times like this, she could hear his voice but could not see his face. Memory was both a curse, and a blessing, coming as it did now in unexpected and irrepressible swells. It was probably her age, which she constantly forgot, (she was always amazed at her withered image in the mirror) that caused the daydreams to come to her, shiny and reflective, like shards of broken glass.

She was overcome suddenly by a wave of intense recollection, a memory of the man she had loved in her youth. She remembered his green eyes, and the small silvery scar below his right eyebrow, and the width of his chest and shoulders, covered by a sheen of sweat, as he reared above her. And yet she could not remember his face. Only the intense emotion aroused in her by his hands, by his mouth. Remembering now those first tentative attempts at lovemaking, his practiced movements and her own gradual ratcheting of desire, she was suffused by a delicate shame.

She might not have married Bill. Her life could have taken a different track altogether. In her youth she had conjured this incessantly, this shadowy other-life that could have been hers, imagining a life free of duty and restraint, but with its own achievements and pitfalls. Yet who’s to say this other life would have been any different? Who’s to say that, regardless of the path she took, she wouldn’t wind up learning the same thing about herself? That caution and duty were what she would always choose to build her life on, what she would always come back to.

And now the girl was talking, she could hear the tinkling lilt of her voice, and turning her head, Alice caught the tail end of what she’d said. It was faint and muffled, like talking underwater, and Alice could barely make it out. Already the memory of the man she’d loved was fading, was gone. The girl was smiling, her lip ring glinting beneath the overhead lights and her black hair falling around her familiar face. There was a bitter taste in Alice’s mouth. She felt a growing sense of alarm. The girl had awakened something in her; Alice could feel it low and rumbling.

She felt a shift, a sudden dislodging, and a surge of memories like a rockslide, came tumbling down around her, crushing her with their weight.

Charlie Gaskins had a stutter and so Alice’s mother would not let her throw rocks at him. Alice would be standing at the edge of her yard down near the river and Charlie would come out and start lobbing stones over the fence and mewling like a cat. If she retaliated, he would go inside and call to his mother, and she would go next door and complain to Mother.

“Shame on you,” Mrs. Gaskins would hiss at Alice as she walked by. “Shame on you, a big girl like you, picking on an afflicted child.”

Alice wanted to shout, “Shame on your afflicted child for throwing stones at me,” but she would clamp her mouth shut and keep quiet.

And later when she went to Marymount Academy for Girls with Charlie’s twin sister, Adele, it was the same thing. Mrs. Gaskins could not bear for the other girls to be mean to Adele, even though Adele spoke perfectly well and had no need of parental protection. The result of all of this was that Adele and Charlie grew up as mean as snakes. No one wanted to play with them.

It was Adele who first came up with the Sugar and Spice Parties. None of the other girls wanted to go to Adele’s parties and so Mrs. Gaskins would get on the phone and call around to their mothers, and at the appointed time, the cars would pull up in front of the Gaskins house and out would step girls with big bows in their hair, walking dejectedly toward the Gaskins front door.

If Mrs. Gaskins was present, Adele would be catty to the other girls, and would have temper tantrums if she lost at games. But when Mrs. Gaskins left the room, Alice would walk up and stick her fist in Adele’s face and say, “We don’t like you. We’re only here because our mothers made us comes.” Alice was the only one who could make Adele cry.

When Alice was a senior in high school and had long out-grown Sugar and Spice Parties, Adele was still having her mother call around to make sure her invited guests showed up. At one particular party in October of 1932, Alice brought her sister, Laura. It was a Cat Rat Party; the senior girls were Cats and had been assigned to care for a freshman sister, known as a Rat. Alice had insisted that she be assigned to Laura because she knew she was the only one who could handle her. Laura wasn’t like other girls.