Tangerine(8)

“You look well, Lucy,” she observed, though I thought it sounded as though it were a concession, as though the words had left her lips despite, rather than for, something.

“So do you,” I replied, eager to match her compliment—whether easily given or not—although I suspected we both knew the words were offered out of politeness.

She smiled again, that same inward smile I had witnessed often during those first few days of college, when she had been so shy and uncertain of herself. Toward the end of our four years, she had shed almost every one of those diminishing attributes, and yet here they were again, reemerging one by one. “I would offer you tea,” she said, as though anxious to cover any patches of silence, “but John’s forgot the bottle of gas again, I’m afraid. I won’t be able to boil any water until he brings home another one. But why don’t I show you to the sitting room. Then I can fix us another sort of drink,” she suggested, reaching for my suitcase.

I stopped her, insisting that she let me carry it, fearful that she would buckle under its weight. I looked at her shoulders as she turned, the thin material of her robe doing nothing to hide the two jagged points underneath. I took in the sharp hollows of her cheeks, the bony elbows, the way her hands seemed to shake, almost imperceptibly, but still there.

“I can’t quite believe how long it’s been,” I said, following her down the hallway. As we walked, I noted that almost every inch of the apartment was filled, so that it was nearly impossible to walk without tripping over the leg of a chair or the pouf of a cushion. Not even the walls were safe, I soon discovered, as on top of the layers of paint sat an additional one made up of various bric-a-brac. Plates seemed to be of a particular fascination, I noted. Silver, copper, china, some of them painted, some of them bare—there seemed to be no real pattern that I could decipher, row upon row of them affixed to the brightly colored walls.

“I know,” she replied at last. “Bennington feels like a lifetime ago.”

We moved into the sitting room, and I placed my suitcase down beside my feet, onto the carpet. A few seconds passed, both of us looking around the room, as if the way to reconnect, to find our way back to each other again, to that time, was hiding somewhere in its crevices, in the foreign city of Tangier.

“I’ll just go and fetch us those drinks,” she said, making her way determinedly to the edge of the room.

“Thank you, Alice.” I reached out my hand to touch hers. At my gesture, she flinched, the small movement pressing against my skin. “Alice, are you sure everything is all right?” I asked, my voice dropping to a whisper.

At first, she would not look at me, but then slowly she lifted her thin, hollowed face, her eyes still shining and bright. “Of course, Lucy.” She moved quickly away, back toward the hallway. “Everything is wonderful.”

Later, I reflected on the fact that she had not mentioned the accident.

But then, neither had I.

I SPENT SEVERAL MOMENTS IN THE BATHROOM, a towel pressed against my face, willing the color to disappear from my cheeks. When I emerged, my hair still matted to my face with sweat, I discovered a stack of pink, overly starched towels in front of the door, a few scalloped soaps sitting on top, and the sound of Alice, singing from the kitchen.

I left the towels, following the lyrics and smiling to myself as I walked through the hallway, my hands attempting to push my hair back into place. She was singing a song I recognized from the radio. The girls in my most recent boardinghouse had gone in together on a cream-and-gold-colored Silvertone, at first taking turns keeping it in their respective rooms, more to show it off than anything else, until it had at last ended up downstairs, largely forgotten, becoming a permanent fixture of the common area.

I hummed the melody. “I see you haven’t improved your singing,” I teased, my voice raised just a note or two, so that she could hear me more easily.

A sound of laughter escaped from the kitchen—no longer quite as hesitant, I noted. “Go ahead, take a seat. I’ll be there in just a moment.”

I returned to the sitting room, taking it in for the first time. Similar to the other rooms, it too was composed of dark woods and leather—the sweet, sickly smell of which was overpowering in the late afternoon heat. A few dozen books lay scattered throughout the room. I glanced at one. Charles Dickens. Another was by a Russian author I had never heard of before. Alice, I knew, was not a big reader. I had tried to encourage her during our four years as roommates, but try as I might to interest her, she had only stuck up her nose. They’re all just so serious, she had complained. I remembered thinking that I would have detested the comment had it been made by anyone else, but with Alice, the words were strangely fitting. The idea of her trapped behind a heavy book seemed somehow wrong—she was made of lightness and air, she was made, it seemed, for living, rather than reading about the experiences of other lives. I had told her this once, and in response, she had laughed and waved me away. But it was true. It was Alice who would wake me early in the morning, when it was still dark outside, dragging me to the Adirondack chairs on the Commons Lawn, blankets slipping from her arms and onto the dewy grass, insistent that we be the first to see the sun rise. I would always marvel, in those quiet moments, watching as my breath billowed out in great white clouds, that we had found each other. That Alice’s mother, an American who had later moved across the pond and married a Brit, had been a graduate of our tiny Vermont college, which had, in turn, prompted Alice to attend her mother’s alma mater, in her memory. That Alice had somehow managed, with her tentative smile, to pull me from the comfort of my hiding spot in the library, had exhumed me from the voices of the dead and thrust me into the world of the living. Pulling the blanket tighter, I would shift closer to the warmth of her body, willing those moments to last forever, knowing that they could not.