This Time Tomorrow(65)
45
Cheever Place. Alone. A birthday gift from Serena, a small pouch full of polished crystals and a lengthy list of instructions about how to use them.
* * *
? ? ?
Melinda packing up her office. Alice threatening to quit. You had to ask, you had to try. She wouldn’t wait to see how it went, but it was good practice.
* * *
? ? ?
A treadmill in her bedroom at Pomander, vegetables in the refrigerator. No ashtrays. Fridge fully stocked with Coke Zero.
* * *
? ? ?
Debbie at Leonard’s bedside. No change.
46
Alice always made sure that Sam told Leonard her idea, even when the conversation didn’t naturally go there. Alice liked his future full, less lonely, and so she figured out how to swerve when necessary, to get Sam to say the thing. Leonard’s eyes always opened wide when she said it, the same lightbulb going on, over and over again.
* * *
? ? ?
Alice and Sam dressed in anime costumes that they cobbled together from Alice’s closet and flirted with Barry Ford at the convention. They didn’t actually let him touch them, but they threatened to call the police when they told him how old they were.
* * *
? ? ?
She did have sex with Tommy again, just because she wanted to, in his bedroom in his parents’ apartment. It was in between lunch and dinner and his parents were out of town. He had a Nirvana poster on one wall, hung neatly with thumbtacks, and a poster of a Ferrari right next to it, which was the whole problem, really.
47
Cheever Place.
* * *
? ? ?
Instead of Barry, Andrew McCarthy in the Centrum Silver commercials.
* * *
? ? ?
A workday. Alice went back to Belvedere and found herself alone in Melinda’s office, which didn’t have Melinda’s things in it. She spun in the chair and looked out the window. Tommy Joffey and his wife were on the list again. Alice felt sorry for him, stuck in the San Remo forever, as absurdly fortunate as he’d been every day of his life, but then she remembered the Ferrari poster.
* * *
? ? ?
London at the desk. Debbie at the bedside. Leonard, pale, unconscious.
* * *
? ? ?
She could do better, she could do more.
48
There were patterns: if Alice slept with Tommy and told him something firm, something concrete—marry me, or even just now you are my boyfriend—she could expect to find herself in the San Remo. Alice didn’t like being there any more than she liked being in her studio apartment. The children were always cute, but they never belonged to her. Tommy was always handsome, but he didn’t belong to her, either, not like that. It was hard to change a pattern once she’d started it, like her body wanted to do what it had done before, and Alice had to knock herself loose from a clear track. The world didn’t care what Alice did, she had no grand illusions about that, but there was clearly some cosmic inertia to overcome. She thought about what Melinda had told her—that everything mattered, but nothing was fixed. Melinda hadn’t been talking about time travel, Melinda had never talked about time travel, Alice thought, because Melinda was a sensible, grounded person, but it was good advice. All the tiny pieces added together to make a life, but the pieces could always be rearranged.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes things changed a lot, and sometimes things changed a little. Sometimes Alice had rented a different apartment, one that she could almost remember seeing—one that she’d ruled out for having too low a ceiling or a strange step-up toilet, or being up four flights of stairs.
* * *
? ? ?
Alice thought about bringing Sam with her but decided against it just in case there was also a Freaky Friday setting, and they ended up in each other’s bodies, or exploded.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes she just wanted a fresh bagel from H&H, steam rising off the dough, too hot to hold with her bare hands. Sometimes she just needed to walk by and smell it. Childhood was a combination of people and places and smells and bus stop advertisements and local jingles. It wasn’t just her father that Alice was visiting; it was herself, the two of them together. It was the way the Pomander gate clanked, the sound of the Romans sweeping leaves off the bricks.
* * *
? ? ?
Sometimes she didn’t tell anyone—not Sam, not Tommy, not her dad. Those were the trips Alice liked best. Just slipping into her own skin and watching everyone around her. It was like going to a zoo, only you could climb behind every fence and get right up close to every lion, every elephant, every giraffe. Nothing could hurt her, because everything was temporary. All she had to do was last the day.
49
Alice shaved her head with Leonard’s beard trimmer. She’d thought about doing it at various points, but the commitment had always seemed too great. Then she and Sam jumped on the 1 train and took it down to Christopher Street and walked for a few blocks until they hit a cheesy tattoo parlor by the West 4th Street stop and Alice asked for a whale, like the one from the Museum of Natural History, and Sam had gaped happily, her elbows digging into the black vinyl of the tattooist’s table as the needle went in and out of Alice’s shoulder. She skipped everything except lunch and dinner with her dad and went to sleep happy, blood seeping onto the giant see-through bandage.