This Time Tomorrow(36)

“1976,” Leonard began. “Jerry had this white guitar. I know a lot of people who saw the Dead a thousand times, but I only saw them that one time. The Beacon can feel so small, depending where you’re sitting, and Simon had gotten tickets from his agent, who was this super hotshot, and somehow we were in the third row—the third row!—and every woman there was drop-dead gorgeous, and it was like being on another planet for four hours.”

This was what Alice had been missing. Not just the answers to questions that she’d never been brave enough to ask, and not just family history that no one else knew, and not just visions of her own childhood through her father’s eyes, but also this: the embarrassing stories she’d heard a thousand times and would never hear again. She could see the whole concert, Leonard’s sweaty, smiling face—before he was married, before he was a dad, before he’d published a book. She could see it as clearly as she could see the whale, even with her eyes closed.





29



When they got back to Pomander, the phone was ringing. Leonard swung his body aside and gestured for Alice to answer it.

“It’s for you,” he said.

“How do you know?” Alice said, and picked up the receiver.

“Jesus, I have been calling, like, every ten minutes for hours,” Sam said.

“Sorry, this is Alice, not Jesus.” Alice wound the cord around her pointer finger. Why did people think that having cell phones was less tethered than this? She’d been floating in space all day, unreachable, and now, connection.

“Oh, shut up, grandma. Where do you want to have dinner? I’ll meet you there.”

“Where should we have dinner, Dad?” Alice asked Leonard. He was standing over the kitchen table, looking through a stack of mail and magazines and who knows what.

“Let’s go to V&T. Then Sam can just walk and meet us. Sound good?”

“Yes, Sam, did you hear that? Gooey pizza. V&T. Six o’clock.” Alice turned her body away from her dad. “Anything else?”

“Yes,” Sam said, slightly breathless, as though she’d been jogging in place for hours and not just redialing the telephone. “I think I figured it out. Maybe. Potentially. I’ll tell you when I see you.” Alice felt a flame in her belly, a flare of hope, or anxiety, that buried itself in her rib cage.

“Okay,” Alice said, and hung up.

Leonard tossed the stack of mail back onto the table. “Why is it always just junk?” he asked.

The television was in an awkward place—perched on the end of the kitchen counter, where it could be swiveled one way to face the table and another to face the couch. The table was in the way of the couch, but there wasn’t much space, and anyway, Leonard and Alice were both used to it. The VCR was tucked underneath, all the wires dangling off the counter. If they’d had a different kind of cat, a normal cat and not Ursula, the wires would have been an irresistible trouble, but Ursula was above such things. They had hours before dinner. Alice opened and closed all the cabinet doors until she found the microwave popcorn. She waved it at her dad.

“Want to watch a movie?”

Leonard opened the closet, which was where the VHS tapes lived, and started calling out titles. “Wizard of Oz? Rebecca? Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Bedknobs and Broomsticks? Mary Poppins? Stand by Me? Dirty Dancing? Back to the Future? Eraserhead? Prick Up Your Ears? Peggy Sue Got Married?”

“Peggy Sue,” Alice said. She stepped around the closet door so that she could see him. Leonard pulled the tape out of the box and handed it to her.

“Voilà,” he said. “Now, are we the two most smartest people or what? Other people are jogging, for fun, and we’re watching a movie in daylight hours.”

The movie was just as good as always, except that it drove Alice crazy how little Peggy Sue seemed to notice her parents. Who cared about her lame friends, about her stupid boyfriend? She should have fucked everyone as quickly as possible and then just stayed home. And her grandparents? Peggy Sue had a charmed life. She got married and had kids and still had living parents and everything in her life was perfectly fine except maybe she wanted a divorce. It wasn’t actually time travel at all, not really. Peggy Sue faints and has a dream. It seemed like one of those movies where they might have made three different endings because the test audiences didn’t like the one they were shown. Alice wanted to see the ending where Kathleen Turner crawled around the floor of a bar looking for a rabbit hole but couldn’t find one and so was trapped forever, making the same mistakes all over again. Alice wanted to see the horror movie version. But then again, she might be about to live it, so maybe she didn’t need to see it after all.

Leonard nudged her. Alice had fallen asleep, her head leaning against the arm of the couch like the bottom half of seesaw. In her forty-year-old body, her neck would have been sore for days, but in this one, Alice just sat up.

“Pizza time,” Leonard said.



* * *



? ? ?

V&T was on the corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, across the street from St. John the Divine, where Leonard had taken Alice every year on Saint Francis Day, when they opened the enormous front doors and let an elephant walk in. As a family, the Sterns did not celebrate any religious holidays, but they celebrated lots of New York holidays: in addition to Saint Francis Day with the elephants, there was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, when they would go and watch the balloons get inflated the night before; there were the Christmas windows in the fancy department stores on Fifth Avenue; there were San Gennaro and Chinese New Year, for cannoli and dumplings; and there was the Puerto Rican Day Parade, when all of uptown was flooded with reggaeton, and the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, when it was equally boisterous, but with bagpipes.