CONTENT YOURSELF WITH ACHIEVING PRECISE RESULTS by Alison Baker
One evening, not long before everything in my life changed, I met Alice in the lobby of the Davenport Hotel. We had arranged to eat there after the show, at the Fireside Café, the fancy little appetizer place that opened last year next to the Grand Eaterie. Raw fish, pale swirls of peach-colored sauce, little tufts of arugula scattered carelessly about the plate. Lovely to look at. Like nothing in nature. We sat directly in front of the walk-in fireplace and I ordered a Poké Tower.
I said A Pokay Tower, please, and the waitron, who had introduced herself as Farrah, said, Oh, the pokey. You know that’s raw? I put my hand to my cheek and gasped in pretended shock, then laughed to show that yes, I understood that it was raw, and Alice and the waitron laughed too, but I felt awkward about having said pokay. But when she brought the little gleaming cone of beige flesh, topped with the roe of some sorry fish, it looked so silly that I felt better; and it was delicious. The tiny orange eggs especially gave me much pleasure. As Alice talked my tongue continuously sought out the tiny spheres in my mouth: caught between my teeth, tucked into crevices between gum and cheeks, snagged on the way into my mouth by a shred of skin on my chapped lower lip. As Alice described the peculiar relationship she had had with a girl in sixth grade, and how she had lived in fear for forty years afterwards, my own busy tongue pressed egg after egg against the wet membrane that lines the roof of my mouth, where each one burst with a satisfying sharp pop! With a dainty little fish fork I pursued eggs through the lime-green pinstripe of wasabi, under each leaf of cilantro. So tiny, those glistening spheres! I hoped I would not have to give up my avid pursuit of the glowing orbs of roe unto the nether reaches of the ebony china charger in order to begin speaking coherently myself.
“Her mother brought her into the classroom late in October,” Alice said. “They came in during Reading and stood at the teacher’s desk, and the whole class listened as her mother talked loudly to the teacher about Moira’s abilities, and she was mortally embarrassed. She looked only at the floor. You know,” she said, “if she had looked up sometimes during that first episode, maybe with a hint of exasperation, or rolled her icy blue eyes, we might have had some sympathy for her. But she revealed herself at once as a victim.”
Alice had a dramatic way of speaking. She had been classically trained – that is, she had majored in theater and then had gone to some graduate program in drama, and she once played the mother in Long Day’s Journey in a well-respected regional theater. But she hadn’t stuck with it. Instead she hit the road with a man, the story of many a woman’s fall.
“Also she had terrible skin,” Alice said. “Terrible. My friend Elaine once said with a shudder You just want to grab her and scrub her face but I knew that Moira washed her face all the time. Some skin, that doesn’t do any good. It’s genetic. It’s in the glands. It’s something teenagers just have to wait out. And Moira was only eleven. An embarrassed pre-teen girl with bad skin has no chance at all.
“Her mother was awful. A loud voice and she stared directly at everyone in the classroom, from one person to the next as we sat at our desks. What’s worse,” Alice said, “she looked like a witch. And it was almost Halloween, so everyone saw it. A wave of very quiet snickering went through the class. Bad skin, a mother who looked like a witch, and the assumption of victimhood. She was doomed from the start.
“Still, she was smart, and that was something that even then I valued highly. So many of my classmates were not particularly bright. Their fathers worked at the factory. Moira’s father did too but he was in management – he wore a jacket and tie to work. Moira read aloud well, and she was ahead of us in math, and in social studies – well, she had lived in Chicago and knew about situations we had never imagined. Also, she read for pleasure. She was one of the first people I ever discussed books with. We were friends. Despite what I did.
“That year, while we were in sixth grade, her mother had a baby,” Alice said. “I dare say plenty of mothers had late-life babies, when their other children were much older, too, but those kids had the sense to be embarrassed about it. Not Moira. When it was her day to do a Current Event she brought in a whole scrapbook full of baby pictures and the birth announcement that was in the paper and stood up in front of the class and told us about her new brother. People didn’t know where to look.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Alice slid a little tortilla topped with a slice of eggplant and a caper from her plate to mine. “You’ll like this,” she said. We had never eaten together before but she could tell I loved to eat. I pointed my fork at my plate and lifted an eyebrow but she shook her head. She knew I didn’t want to part with one taste of my pokey.
“We were at that age,” she said. “We didn’t talk about birth or parents. Those topics were intimately connected with sex and the thought of sex embarrassed all of us mortally.”
“Except Moira,” I said.
“Except Moira,” Alice said. She gazed at a space beyond my ear for a few seconds and then took a swig of Manhattan. “Her parents were the sort who talked openly and straightforwardly with her about sex. I suppose I was jealous. I raised my hand in the comment period and said, little snot that I was, That’s not a real Current Event. It’s not important enough.” She put her hand on her cheek, much the way I had slammed mine against mine when feigning embarrassment about the raw pokey. “I know now I meant something more – that Current Events was intended to draw us out of our own world and into the grander one – but I can’t believe I was so mean. There she was so proud and excited. I think I knew before I finished speaking that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I hope I was sorry at once. The teacher leaped to speak, she thrust her body to the front of the room; and Moira looked at the floor and her bad skin bloomed bright red. Every whiteheaded pimple stood out. I imagine Moira never forgot it. I was like Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird, ragging Walter Cunningham about the syrup. I shamed her.”
“Alice,” I said, “you were just a little girl.”
“Little girls at that age are very mean,” she said. “I know lots of them and they are little bitches, out to break bones.” She worked as a fifth-grade teacher, so she knew. And of course I could remember those little girls from my long-ago youth. I carry numerous scars from the wounds they intentionally gouged in the tender flesh of my own heart.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” Alice said. “I don’t really remember much about Moira in those days. I think I have blocked a lot out of my mind. I went to her house, she came to mine. I don’t even know if I liked her or not. She was smart. We talked about books. And she wasn’t afraid of anything. She was easily embarrassed, often by her own mother, but she was almost never scared. She spoke to adults. Once, at my house, she wanted to show me how grape juice turned clear if you put bleach in it, but I said we didn’t have any bleach. In truth, I didn’t know what bleach was. Imagine! Eleven years old and I didn’t know what bleach was!”
She looked at me with wide-open eyes, then drank again from her diminishing Manhattan. “My mother happened to look out the window as Moira was carrying a cup through the yard on the way to ask the next-door neighbor for a cup of bleach, and she came flying down the stairs and out of the house to stop her. Our next door neighbor was Judge Nicholson. They had a colored man who kept house for them. My mother was very class-conscious and had never spoken more than a couple of words to either Mrs. Nicholson or to Jim, the colored man, let alone the judge. I think she might have died of mortal embarrassment if Moira had made it to the door. A cup of bleach.” Alice stopped again and gazed into the flames skittering politely in the middle of the walk-in fireplace.
“The terrible thing,” Alice said, “is that the baby brother died. There was an accident. The baby was left unattended in the bathtub. Just for a moment, while her mother answered the telephone. He slid down, and either he hit his head or his face was in the inch of water in the bottom of the tub for a moment too long. Any mother knows how easily that might happen. Any person,” she said quickly.
“There was an inquest. There wasn’t any fault, it was an accident, but Moira’s father was a manager at the plant and her mother was weird. She spoke openly about sex, and, I forgot to tell you this, she would breast-feed the baby in public. No one breast-fed in those days, let alone in public. And then the baby dies. Any woman whose baby died that way was as much at fault in the public eye as she surely was in her own.
“It was in the paper. I don’t think,” she said slowly, “I was so cruel as to use it for Current Events. It wouldn’t surprise me if I had. But I’m sure I didn’t.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t believe I was quite so cold as that.”
As Alice talked and I popped fish eggs against my hard palate, something on the far side of the vast lobby of the Davenport caught my attention, and that was the apparent discontent among a clot of young women and their tuxedoed swains in front of the Paradise Lounge. On stopping at the Ladies’ Room before meeting Alice at the fireplace, I had found myself surrounded by young women in shimmering formal gowns, many skin-tight, and most cut so low in front that everywhere aureoles were appearing above the form-fitting bodices, so low in back that those dimples that lie in the hollows just above the buttocks were exposed. I had stood at the sink washing and washing my hands, unable to move, dizzied by the shifting landscape of scarlet and gold and heliotrope surrounding pale creamy hills and the valleys that plunged into the darkness between them. Now some of these young women and their beaux stood watching a stout fellow, far shorter than he probably would like to have been, who stood with stumpy legs apart, awkwardly thrusting the fists at the end of his meaty little arms at another man as ineffectively as a weeks-old infant. Even across the room I could see that his chunky face was bright red. He may have been mortally embarrassed at being so much shorter than other men. Perhaps he suspected his date of being on the verge of ditching him and scampering off with a tall man up the grand staircase to a fourth-floor room. Perhaps one of the tall men had said something to indicate that this was about to occur. Who knows? As I watched, the short fellow tore off his jacket, struggling for a moment to get his thick arms unstuck from the sleeves, and dropped it on the floor; then, freed of the confining black cloth, he danced forward, white-sleeved arms pumping and little pink fists going around like the legs of a Roadrunner whirligig.
“Alice,” I said, “some of the promgoers are coming to fisticuffs outside the Paradise.”
A mistress of subtlety, Alice made a slight movement and her napkin obligingly dropped to the floor. She reached into her lap, frowned, pushed back her chair to peer at her knees, then twisted and turned, looking behind her chair and under the table. When she had located and retrieved the errant napkin and sat up again, her chair had somehow been scootched a tad closer to mine, and now by turning her head only a little bit she too could watch the events near the bar.
The chunky fellow was struggling in the grasp of two men, each holding one of his arms. His target seemed to be responding to his challenges; his companions were holding him back from bouncing out to hit the brief buffoon very hard, or perhaps – a more insulting response – slap him. I thought it likely that he was more articulate, quicker with an infuriating taunt, head and shoulders above the chunky fellow not just in inches but in sharpness of brain and agility of tongue.
A golden-gowned woman stood just behind the chunky one, reaching toward him now and then only to jump back when he suddenly lurched toward his foe. A gaggle of other women clustered behind her in poses of distress – hands over mouths, blonde and red and dark heads bent toward each other in shared apprehension, some clutching each other’s hands. I understood their fear. I felt it too, even on the far side of the great lobby: in the person of the chunky fellow anger and violence had nothing of the beauty and grace of even the most vicious televised struggles. It was ugly, terribly ugly, an unchoreographed series of impotent desperate grabs.
“There is one thing that I am grateful I never experienced in my life,” Alice said, “and that is violence. My father was a sweet and gentle man who never raised a hand to anyone that I can recall. My mother barely believed in corporal affection, let alone punishment. This –” she lifted her hand slightly in the direction of the Paradise Lounge – “terrifies me. This is entirely alien to my experience. How can these men bear to do this?”
Farrah the waitron had appeared at the empty table beside ours, ostensibly swabbing it down but in fact closely watching the scene at the Paradise. Now, making no bones of the fact that she had been listening to Alice, she said, “Me too. No one ever hit me. This is bad business.”
“Who are these people?” Alice said.
We were both eager for information.
Without looking away from the scene Farrah said, “It’s the Young Attorneys’ Ball. There’s a band in the ballroom on the mezzanine.”
Alice and I looked up at the mezzanine where, unaware of the scuffle occurring below, more gowned and tuxed young people milled and strode along the balustrade. They were too far away for me to see their expressions, but it seemed to me that none of them was laughing or even smiling. They seemed anxious! Young women catching up with young men, other young men cautiously steering young women around, their tentative, hungry hands barely touching the bare backs. For a moment I thought that none of them was drinking, that no one held a glass; but then I saw that of course that wasn’t true, many of them clung to the stems of wine glasses and sipped as they strolled and gazed. Now and then a gust of music burst from the ballroom as someone came out or went in through one of the double doors, damped again at once as the doors swung shut.
“I told Mike to call the cops,” Farrah said. She had finally stopped wiping the poor unused table beside us. “I said, ‘Call the police now, before the fight gets big,’ but he said, ‘No, these are new young lawyers, I don’t want to cause them trouble.’ I said, ‘Mike, these are the very people who should face trouble so that they understand what it is,’ but he wouldn’t do it.”
“Who is Mike?” Alice said.
Farrah looked at her in astonishment. “Who is Mike?” she repeated, as if it were unheard of that a person in the Fireside Café of the Davenport Hotel on a Saturday night in April should not know who Mike was.
But at that moment a middle-aged man in a navy blue windbreaker with a white logo on the breast appeared at the edge of the lobby, and the sea of young women and young men parted before him as he walked toward the door of the Paradise Lounge. He strode right into the violent tangle and put his arm around the short man’s shoulders. The short man angrily jerked away, but the older man grasped his shoulder and pulled steadily, until at last the struggling young man had to take a step back to keep from falling.
“A law professor,” Alice said, but Farrah shook her head.
“Building and Grounds,” she said.
The stocky fellow now angrily wrenched his body out from under the hand of Mr. Building & Grounds and stomped toward the elevator. At an apparent taunt he whirled around fists up and skipped back toward his opponent, but when Mr. B&G reached for him again he turned and stomped away. The girl in gold hurried after him.
“People who can’t hold their liquor shouldn’t be allowed to drink,” Farrah announced, turning her attention toward us again. “What can I bring you?”
Alice waved her hand toward our glasses. “Couple of refills,” she said. “Make mine a double.”
I did not know Alice well. We had been friends for only a short time, two or three years at the most, and had spent no more than a couple of evenings together. I knew no one like her. I knew so few people. I had discovered, three-quarters of the way through my expected life, that I had left undone those things I ought to have done, and at times I felt there was no health in me. I looked at Alice and thought of all she had accomplished in the last forty years, and I felt that knowing her might be my last chance, my last hope for a life with meaning. She was the least and the most I could hope for.
“Moira’s family moved away,” Alice said when our fresh drinks had arrived and Farrah had gone. “Well, who can blame them? Who can blame them wanting to leave the scene of such a tragedy? I don’t see how anyone can even go on living after such a thing.”
Alice was a beautiful woman, the kind of woman you could stare at across a little round table for hours as the world revolved around you and you left your separate pasts behind. I had expected to hear about her marriage or about her desires for herself as our time on earth grows short, but she talked about this friend of her childhood, whom she had wronged long ago. Alice’s freckles were still distinct, and she had deep, deep red hair that only later would I discover was dyed. The discovery would make no difference to my impression of her beauty. I had always wished I had red hair – not the carroty kind but the dark red, the color of heart’s blood, that indicates a passionate soul.
“We wrote to each other for some time,” Alice said. “What I wrote was lies. I had no sense that anything about me was interesting or important or useful. It was the late 1960s and I had been born too late, so I lied. I wrote to her about the boyfriends I had and the sexual activities we engaged in. I wrote about my political activism, my participation in protests against the war, my involvement with men of other races. I wrote her that I was spending the summer in a commune in Brown County. I wrote about the marijuana I smoked, and the music I listened to while smoking it, and the sex I had while listening and smoking.”
Alice looked at me and rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t a virgin, but how could I write to Moira about having sex with Larry English, the math whiz, in his family’s rec room? When what I wanted was a big old house in the country with no doors on the bedrooms and bread baking in the sunny kitchen and daisies growing through the cracks in the foundation and my choice of men, including one with long curly hair and blue eyes who was silent and every night chose me over the other girls. And Cat Stevens on the 8-track.”
I liked looking at her. It seemed she was hardly eating a thing, yet when I looked at her plate it was nearly empty, only two sagging mini-tortillas left on the vast expanse of china in front of her. I looked at her hand holding the fork and saw with a little jump of the heart that she had long, beautiful fingers, ending in short but lovely nails. I had expected her nails to be chewed and ragged, her hands to be scarred and even misshapen, as if she had spent the last twenty years killing hogs and stuffing their ground flesh into their own intestinal membranes and regretting it, but her fingers were slender, her nails beautifully manicured, pale and glowing.
I could have looked at her for hours, but I couldn’t look at her for long, and I returned my gaze to my own sadly depleted plate and carefully scraped up the few lingering orange eggs stuck in the streak of pale paste that lay like a green horizon across the surface. I was so hungry, I was so hungry I could have eaten a dozen more Poké Towers!
“I believed everything Moira wrote me in her letters. It is only now, at this very instant, that I wonder if perhaps she wasn’t lying too.” Alice pushed a tress of dark red hair away from her face. “But at the time, it didn’t occur to me. It was an arrogance in me, a condescension toward other people, that I believed they were incapable of imagining what I could imagine. Moira might live that life, but she could never pretend to live it.
“I went off to college, and she wrote that she had gone to India. She wrote that she lived in an ashram where she studied with an old man. I think she said he was eighty, but perhaps she said he was sixty, which at the time was the same thing. ‘Swami has taught me many ways of pleasure,’ she said in her letters. She called him Swami as if it were his name. Not ‘the swami.’ Not ‘my swami.’ Just ‘swami.’” If eyes can be said to flash, I believe Alice’s did. “I hated that. Swami! So pretentious.”
Then her face brightened and flushed from the top of the forehead down to the chin. Her neck and her pale throat darkened with blood. “She wrote that she often thought of me, and that she wished she could fondle my breasts.” She wiped her hand hard across her cheek and mouth, as if she were trying to scrape away her blushes. “I was so embarrassed. I read everything when I was a teenager but I never talked with anyone about sex or desire or the parts of the body.”
She then stared at something above and behind me for a minute, her mouth half open, and when I was about to turn to see what she was looking at she said, “That reminds me of another letter I got when I was in college. It was from a boy I had gone out with a couple of times at home, but whom I never thought of in a sexual way. He had joined the army. He was stationed in some godforsaken part of the world and I wrote to him once or twice, and then he sent me a Polaroid of his erect penis.” She looked directly at me and made a moue of distaste. “What do you suppose he was thinking?”
“Golly, I dunno,” I said.
“What a miscalculation!” she said. “Did he think I’d write back saying, ‘Hurry home’?”
“You were an object of desire all over the world,” I said.
It was at this moment that two men in police uniforms came through the west door and stopped at the edge of the lobby near a bird-of-paradise. A man of the style I most admire – jeans settled strategically at the slim hips, white shirt tucked smoothly in and its sleeves rolled casually halfway up the forearms, dark hair wavy above an angular face – crossed the lobby toward them, and when they saw him they started toward him. He turned, motioning with his hand, and they followed him swiftly. I suddenly noticed a small crowd, which parted at their approach to reveal the door of a Men’s Room. The white-shirted young man – Mike, perhaps? – stopped, and the policemen moved past him to the door. They took guns from the holsters on their hips, nodded at each other, and then one called out. We couldn’t distinguish the words. They waited for a moment, nodded again, and then one of them slammed open the door. We heard it boom against the wall inside. They rushed in, we heard shouts, and we braced ourselves for the sound of gunshots, but none came. For a small time the group outside the Men’s Room stood motionless, but soon they began to sway, then mill, hands in pockets. Mike, hands on hips, stood between them and the Men’s Room door. Farrah, white towel in hand, moved past our table to stand where a large and healthy ficus would obscure her from Mike’s view should he look her way.
Everyone waited.
The quality of sound in that room was disturbing. It was loud, as any big room full of sets of people doing different things in a convivial way – eating, meeting, dancing, calling to each other, hurrying to catch up or to leave behind, their footsteps clattering over the marble floor, then abruptly thudding on thick pile – is loud. Yet from time to time it seemed as if everyone had gone mute, and I had become deaf, like the man in the airport who, hoping to sell me a cross made of emery boards, had handed me a card that read I AM A DEAF. Yes, at times that evening I felt that I was a deaf. The couples still promenading along the mezzanine had turned into mimes, their eyebrows lifted and their mouths open, their arms waving in wildly exaggerated gestures, trying to convey information and to react appropriately to information they imagined was being conveyed to them. When the doors to the ballroom swung open nothing issued forth – no big band music, no colorful burst of warm air, no notes from keyboard or ukulele.
When I looked at Alice I thought she had shrunk. But she was simply at the far end of a tunnel of silence, her eyes vacant, her thoughts in abeyance. Even as I watched she zoomed back toward me, up a twisting passageway that I saw was a cornucopia, a horn of plenty, with Alice as content, fresh fruit bursting with juices and flavor and the sweet fragrance of perfection just before tipping point. As her face slipped into focus I saw the bruise on her cheek, a purple plum on the bone, the first manifestation of the ever-ready decay process, as if she had slept too long pressing the side of her face into the pillow, or as if someone had hit her exactly there.
“Ah,” she said, and I turned to see that a duo of paramedics was rolling an empty gurney across the lobby. One bore a plastic suitcase, one held a cell phone to his ear. The milling men stood down again and Mike held the door to the bathroom open to reveal the brilliant cobalt tiles on its wall. The paramedics rolled in and the door swung shut behind them.
“So much violence in the world,” Alice said. She was staring intently at me, as if demanding something – agreement? Protection? A solution?
“Often,” I said, “I don’t see how children live to grow up. We are always in danger.”
“Not with Mike here,” Farrah said from her ficus. “You saw it happen before your eyes. He called the cops. He led the paramedics through the crowd.” She hooked a slice of her yellow hair behind one thin-rimmed ear.
I looked more closely at Farrah. She was barely clothed, wearing a tiny black skirt and a black tank top with spaghetti straps, displaying a great deal of nicely tanned skin. The display itself, including the prescribed amount of skin, was no doubt decreed by management (by Mike), carefully calculated to elicit pricier orders, larger tips, bigger profits for the dining spot and for the hotel. I found myself wondering if I was affected by the display of young skin on waitrons. Did Farrah’s near-nudity awaken uncontrollable hunger in me? Another Manhattan! More oysters on the half shell, another hot dog, a larger helping of macaroni salad, another Pokey Tower with its sly bloom of golden eggs!
“Farrah,” I said, and when she looked my way I daringly said, “you told us you had to tell Mike to call the police.”
“Well, he didn’t listen, did he,” she said. She was a cool one, one of those women a generation or two younger than I who carry within themselves a sense of entitlement in all situations, a sense that they are the equal in ability and prerogative of any other human being. “What I said had no influence on his actions. He did it in his own good time.”
She continued to stand behind her ficus, watching the closed door of the Men’s Room, and after a while I stopped looking at her. The sight of her flesh did not arouse me, I was sure, not even to the desire for more food.
The door of the Men’s Room opened and out came the cops, one of them holding the upper arm of a young man who held his hands behind his back. I’ll admit I had been expecting to see the stocky young newly-fledged attorney, but this was not he, nor was it his adversary. It was yet another young man, who apparently had engaged in evildoing in the Men’s Room. As the trio headed out to the street the Men’s Room door opened once more, and we all recognized Mike’s thumb and arm holding it as the paramedics rolled the gurney, now laden, through. We peered eagerly, but could see nothing of the body strapped on for the ride. The men moved fast, and if blood had flowed it didn’t show up on the navy blue blanket covering the immobilized injuree.
“I assume,” Alice said, “that since the face isn’t covered, he’s alive.”
We felt an odd sort of lull then, an unfilled space of time, a hiatus. It seemed that we had come to the end of one thing and had not yet discovered what would be the next. My tongue scraped fruitlessly at the gap between my 14th and 15th molars, and then I said, “Did you ever see her again?”
“No,” Alice said. “Yes. Not in person. I stopped writing to her, and after a couple of plaintive letters asking why, she stopped writing to me. I had been frightened by what she had said she wanted. I knew that if we met again I would have to oblige, or worse, tell her what I wanted. And I had no desire to act on my desires.
“Moira had said that she was going to become a midwife. At the time I had only the barest idea of what a midwife was or did. All I could manage was to picture her in a kerchief, cradling babies. I thought she would go back to India. I knew nothing.
“Looking back,” Alice said, “looking back, I have no idea what she was like, what her mother was like. Her family all seemed strange, but were they? Were they unbalanced? Or were they simply outspoken city people? I treated her badly. Not just the Current Events thing,” she said before I could speak. “Not just that. I’m sure I never told her I was sorry about the baby. I was never kind to her. Even though when no one was around we discussed books and laughed at the same jokes. In many ways she was a good sport. A victim,” Alice said, “often learns to be a good sport.
“How often do you actually think about a person? Sometimes they are in your mind, flitting in and out of your thoughts, just there. But sometimes I would actively remember her. For more than thirty years I thought of her maybe seven times a year. I wondered if she lived in India. I wondered if she had married. Who would marry such a girl?
“Then, a few years ago, I learned how to look people up on the Internet. In time I came to Moira, and I entered her maiden name and got two hits. They were both from her twenty-fifth high school reunion. Everyone who attended had written a little narrative about what they had been doing in recent years.
“Moira wrote that she had had breast cancer, and she was thankful that it was in remission. She was surrounded by her family, she had discovered that what is important in life is family and friends. She had been working as a neonatal intensive care nurse but had had to give that up. But she was glad that she had discovered the important things in life.
“I clicked on the other hit,” Alice said. “It was a photograph. The caption said Moira and daughter clown for the camera. After a moment of confusion I recognized Moira. The high cheekbones, the icy blue eyes. But her skin was clear, she was laughing, hugging her teenaged daughter close, and they both had beautiful long blonde hair. Moira’s hair had always been dark brown. My heart was pounding. I realized that Moira never, never thought of me, not even in passing. That I have wasted my life. I clicked off.
“Of course,” she said, “I love my sons, and I believe they love me too. But a daughter is a different matter. With a daughter, who could be lonely?”
I thought about that. I have no daughter, but I once had a mother and I believe she was lonely for many, many years. I did what I could to make her happy but I failed miserably, and over the years I had told myself that no child can assure her mother’s happiness. But now Alice was saying that a daughter is a guarantee of happiness. What should I have done differently?
“I am not comfortable on the Internet,” Alice said. “When I’m online I feel as if I have looked into a Palantir and the Eye will see me if I stay there too long. I feared that if I searched for Moira too long the screen would blur and waver, and in it her face would materialize like that of the Wicked Witch of the West, smiling, crooning to me, one finger raised and beckoning.
“Now in my mind I carried a picture of her as a middle-aged woman with long blonde hair. A year passed,” Alice said. “Maybe two years. At last I went back on the Web and typed in her name, and this time I got three hits. The first two were the ones I’d already seen, the narrative about her happiness and the laughing photograph. The third one was a list of names from a church program headed In Memoriam.”
Alice picked up her empty Manhattan glass and drained the water from the melted ice cubes. “I can’t tell you how shocked I was,” she said. “I was numb. After a minute or two I clicked on the photograph of Moira and her daughter again, but this time I saw a different picture. I saw that all the hair in that photograph belonged to the daughter. She was leaning close to her mother and holding her long blonde hair up around her mother’s face, and if you looked carefully you could see that all Moira had on her own head was a little purple skullcap decorated with mirrors. I looked more carefully and realized that her face, although it was laughing, had no eyebrows.
“I was so ashamed,” Alice said. “I was so ashamed.”
“Alice,” I said, “you didn’t do anything.”
“Ah,” Alice said. “So you understand.”
The things I understood! Above us the music had stopped, the swinging open and closed of the double doors had stopped, the couples had stopped strolling along the mezzanine and leaning over the railing to stare down self-consciously at those of us on the main floor. There were no couples in sight, only a couple of stray men, their ties loose and their shirts untucked, one of them sitting, head in hands, on a velvet sofa in a romantic alcove, the other, not far from the door of the Paradise Lounge, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, staring across the room at the plate-glass window of the darkened Grande Eaterie.
The door to the kitchen that served both the Grande Eaterie and the Fireside Café was propped open, and in the bright narrow hallway behind it Farrah was leaning back against the wall. Mike was pressing his entire body against hers. His face was mashed into her neck, and the one sinewy arm I could see, the shirt sleeve still rolled halfway up his forearm, was angled down and behind her, the hand on her buttock. Her face was turned toward me, her eyes closed, her smooth tan neck exposed to his lips and his teeth and his tongue, and as I watched she closed her arms around his neck and lifted herself, her thighs on either side of his hips, and he pushed her against the wall, his hips moving back and down, back and down, again, again, again.
My throat was dry. I picked up my glass and put it to my lips, turning my face up to drain whatever liquid was left, but there was none. My glass was as dry as a bone. I put it down and scraped my tongue across the ridges of my palate, slid it around the familiar terrain inside my cheeks and lips, but there was nothing there. I felt a terrible thirst.
“I am a casual student of yoga,” Alice said. “In fact, I have only been taking classes for a few months. I am not in it to develop a higher consciousness, or to seek meaning in the world, or to learn to meditate. I take yoga to become more limber. Lately I’m so stiff! My fingers and knees ache in the morning when I wake up, whether or not I’ve done anything strenuous the day before. When I look over my shoulder to back the car down the driveway, sharp pains shoot from my shoulders into my neck. I don’t know if yoga is doing me any good, but I find it relaxing. In fact, not long ago I fell asleep during Savasana and woke with a start to find the instructor kneeling beside me chanting Ommm. The indication that this is a good class,” she said, “is that I wasn’t embarrassed. Even though everyone was looking at me and smiling, I was unembarrassed. The instructor’s name is Kelly.
“But ever since I read Moira’s name in the list of the dead, whenever I assume the Savasana pose – do you know yoga? Savasana is the corpse pose. It allows total relaxation, a close approach to absolute peace. You lie flat on your back, eyes closed, hands at your sides with the palms up. You might focus on a mantra. You are the silent witness of the breath. You listen to your breathing, you bring your mind back again and again to the breath that enters and leaves your body. It is the ultimate position of acceptance. But now,” Alice said, “as soon as I assume Savasana, I find myself experiencing Moira’s death.
“I lie there,” she said, “and I am Moira’s consciousness lying in her death bed, her body wizened and in pain, palms up and accepting, eyes closed, listening to her own slow shallow breathing. I lie at the last edge of life among her memories, among her desires and griefs. I feel her great sorrow at dying so young. I feel her love for her mother. I feel her feet, and I feel the rough and mottled skin of her legs, and I feel the lost weight of her thick coarse brown hair. I feel her grief at leaving her laughing daughter. I feel her inside my body, my body inside hers, and she is dying.”
I watched some tears ease lazily over Alice’s lower eyelids and slide down her cheeks.
“Try as I might,” Alice said, smiling a little as a tear reached her upper lip, “I can’t help weeping as I lie there. I don’t know if I’m weeping for what Moira lost or for myself. I lie in supposed Savasana and tears run down my temples into my ears.”
I imagined Alice lying like a corpse on a mat on the wooden floor of the YMCA. She was on her back, arms at her sides with palms up, her feet slightly apart, her bare toes pointed at the ceiling at eleven o’clock and one o’clock. Her hair had fallen away from her face into a small cloud on the mat around her head, and her eyes were closed, her lids a mass of wrinkles where they met the brow but stretched taut, shiny and almost translucent, over the globes of her eyes. From the outer corner of each eye a tear track gleamed in the light from the windows, beyond which storm clouds were piling up above a line of ponderosa pines. The instructor, a young man named Kelly, in loose jeans and a white shirt, knelt beside her. In a circle around them stood the rest of the class, middle-aged women in baggy pants and loose shirts, their hair in various states of grey. I was one of them, as shapeless, as uninflected, as unremarked as the rest. We stood around her smiling, watching Alice’s tears roll down her temples and darken her deep red hair.
Alison Baker’s short story collections, How I Came West and Why I Stayed and Loving Wanda Beaver, were both published by Chronicle Books and both named New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her last story in Alaska Quarterly Review, “Convocation,” received an O. Henry Award.