French Braid(10)

Alice often liked to imagine that a book was being written about her life. A narrator with an authoritative male voice was describing her every act. “Alice sighed” was a frequent observation. “Go call Lily for supper,” she told David, and David said, “She’s not here,” and Alice said, “Where is she?” and David said, “She went off with a boy.”

“Alice sighed heavily,” the narrator said.



* * *



—

It was true that Lily was off with a boy. Trent, his name was; apparently they’d met when she happened to stroll past his family’s lake house. She showed up with him toward the end of the meal. By that time Mercy was back from sketching, pine needles clinging to the folds of her skirt, and the four of them were starting in on their butter brickle ice cream. “Where have you been?” Alice asked Lily, while their mother sat up straighter and sent Trent an extra-bright smile. He was a handsome, heavy-browed boy in a U of Maryland T-shirt, and Alice figured him to be several years older than Lily. Lily said, “This here is Trent, and him and me are going to this burger place in town so I won’t be needing supper.”

“Isn’t that nice!” Mercy said, at the same time that Robin asked, “How’re you getting there?”

“Oh, Trent has a car,” Lily told him.

“You a safe driver, son?”

Lily said, “Daddy!” but Alice thought he was right to ask, and also she didn’t like the prompt, easy way Trent answered him. “Yes, sir, an excellent driver,” he said. Something smarmy about him, Alice thought. Robin, though, said, “Okay, then, I guess. Don’t keep her out too late,” and Lily gave a twiddly wave with just her fingertips and the two of them left.

It always puzzled Alice, how the boys would flock to Lily. Oh, she was pretty enough, in a round-faced, dimply sort of way, but that didn’t explain why they grew so alert when she walked into a room. It seemed she gave off some kind of high-pitched signal that only male ears could detect. (Grown men as well as boys. Alice had noticed more than one friend’s father sending Lily that same sharp arrow of awareness.) Alice herself was asked out only on occasion, only for official events like school dances. She knew she lacked Lily’s powers of attraction. She wasn’t even sure she wanted them. (She really disliked the look of that Trent guy.)

“Well,” Robin said, once the two of them had left, “so much for Jump Watkins, heh-heh,” and Mercy told him, “Oh, now, she just likes to socialize.” Then they went back to eating their ice cream.

The next morning, though, all through breakfast, it was Trent this and Trent that with Lily. Trent came from DC; he played varsity tennis; next year he was joining his father’s sporting-goods business. “How old is he?” Alice asked, and Lily said, breezily, “Twenty-one. Why?” and then rushed on to talk about his family’s lake house, just down the shore. It was huge, she said, and they owned it outright, and there was a stag’s head above the fireplace. “You’ve been inside?” Mercy asked, and Lily said, “Yes, and I met both his sisters and their boyfriends.” Then she excused herself and went to get dressed, because she and Trent were taking a spin in his family’s motorboat.

Mercy’s plan for the day, she said, was to paint what she had sketched yesterday. While Alice was still clearing the breakfast dishes, Mercy set her new travel-size kit of acrylics and her pad of canvas paper on the kitchen table—the only workspace available. “Will you be finished by lunchtime?” Alice asked her, and Mercy said, “Oh, my, yes,” but Alice had her doubts. Her mother tended to get all caught up in her painting once she began. Most likely they’d be eating lunch on their laps in the living room, if things proceeded as they usually did.

Alice herself went for a swim, taking David with her, and Robin said he’d be joining them because it was a “shame to waste the lake,” as he put it, but first he wanted to see what he could do about the loose window screen in his and Mercy’s bedroom. Clearly, he was feeling edgy with so much free time on his hands.

Today David brought a collection of toys to the lake—a half-dozen or so little plastic GIs rattling around in his bucket. Except he kept calling them “veterinarians.” Alice thought at first he meant veterans, but no, when they reached the lake he dumped all the GIs out on the sand and told her, “This one here is Herman; he does the big animals, cows and horses. This here is Don and he does the cats and dogs.”

“Where are their patients?” Alice asked him.

“It’s not time yet to see the patients. First the veterinarians have to have a meeting. ‘Well, Don,’?” he said in a growly deep voice, “?‘I’m off to the Pimlico racetrack to see to that horse with the broken leg. What are you up to today?’?” And then, in a slightly higher voice, “?‘That mother cat they brought in is just about to have her kittens and I’m about to deliver them.’?”

Alice failed to see the point of this game. There was no action involved, unless you counted the way he made each soldier jump up from the sand a few inches when it was that one’s turn to speak. But at least he was entertaining himself, and gradually his cases grew more detailed and developed into actual stories. (One dog, for instance, needed to be put down because he’d bitten a little boy, except that then the veterinarian proved the little boy was lying and so the dog’s life was saved and the veterinarian decided to adopt it.) Alice smoothed on her special homemade mix of baby oil and iodine, rumored to speed the tanning process, because the sun here was much weaker than it would have been in Ocean City. Then she stretched out prone on her towel and leafed through a copy of Mademoiselle—the college issue, all about what young women would be wearing to college this fall.