All the Beautiful Lies(24)
“I don’t mind,” she said. “I mean, do what you want. You can throw that perfume away. I’ll never use it.”
Jake shrugged and put the perfume back on the shelf where he’d found it. He watched Alice dry herself.
“What are you looking at?” she said, smiling. She was bent over, drying her calves.
“You don’t know what you have there, do you?”
“What I have?”
“What you are. What you look like. Right now, you are absolute perfection in every way. You know that? Youth and beauty.”
“And I’m wasting it on you.” She straightened up and smiled so that he knew she was kidding. Even so, she caught a brief look of concern cross his face, like a wisp of a cloud crossing the sun.
“I would never keep you here,” he said.
“I will never leave.”
He pulled her from the bathroom to the bed. As always, what they did together started out slow and reverent, Jake treating her with something akin to worship, and it always ended in an animalistic frenzy, Jake taking complete control. Later, Alice would find bruises on her skin that she didn’t remember getting.
She was as happy as she had ever been. It was a month after the funeral.
When Alice was alone in the house, which was fairly often, she occasionally looked through her mother’s things, sorting through her clothes and shoes, her books, and her few mementos. Some of it Alice wanted to keep, a decent cocktail dress for example, and the Gucci bag that Edith had bought from the fancy secondhand store in Portland. But most of it was junk, and Alice would fill grocery bags with clothes, bringing them down to the condo Dumpster out back and throwing them away, a little at a time. For some reason, she didn’t want to do this in front of Jake, even though she thought it would please him. Still, he must have noticed that there were less and less of Edith’s things around, and that more and more of Alice’s things were making their way into the master bedroom.
At the bottom of the bedroom closet was an old liquor store box filled with some of the more personal effects that Edith had kept, including her Biddeford High School yearbook. Alice had seen pictures of Edith when she’d been young, but never pictures of her as a teenager. There she was in black and white, her hair in a bouffant, looking prettier than any other girl in her graduating class. Alice also found a picture of her in the cheerleaders’ squad, and one candid of her at a car wash fund-raiser. She wore tight white shorts, and a cute sleeveless top, and she was smiling, not at the camera but at another girl. Both had soap bubbles in their hair, and Edith was holding a hose. Alice couldn’t stop looking at the picture, partly because her mother looked so beautiful and so happy, but mostly because of how much she looked like Alice did now. How had she gone from that to what she became, that sloppy, drunken wreck drooling on a couch?
Alice looked through the rest of the box. There was a cheap stuffed monkey that looked like it had been won in a fair, a second-place ribbon beginning to fray, a Bible with a white cover and Edith’s name inside of it, and two letters, typewritten on thin, oniony paper, that Alice was shocked to discover were from Gary Shurtleff, Alice’s biological father. Both were postmarked from San Diego, California. Both were short and apologetic, although in the second one he called Edith an uppity bitch for not writing him back. Neither of the letters mentioned a baby, even though Alice assumed he’d written them after he’d gotten her mother pregnant. Edith had once told Alice that her father had scampered out west as soon as he found out he was going to be a father. Now Alice wondered if her father had ever known about her. She also wondered where he was now. In California still? Then she put the letters back in the box with the yearbook and the Bible and the few other sentimental items that Edith had kept, and brought the whole box down to the Dumpster and got rid of it.
The first winter after high school—the first winter that Alice was alone with Jake—was long and particularly cold. From January through most of March, the coast was pounded with an almost weekly storm, the temperatures rarely above freezing. Alice didn’t mind. When she wasn’t at college, where she’d enrolled in the business administration program with an accounting concentration, she was happy to be at home, warm in the condominium, with its views of the grey ocean, mirrored by its grey sky. The weather made her lazy and hungry. Every day she’d eat macaroni and cheese for lunch, then drowse on the couch, a textbook open across her lap, soap operas playing on the television in the background. She didn’t really pay much attention to them, except for General Hospital, but she liked the background noise. Jake always called before he left the bank, and it would give her time to take a shower, put something nice on, apply a little makeup. On the first real warm day of spring—sometime in mid-May—she met Jake at the door wearing her favorite pair of shorts and a bikini top.
“Summer’s here,” she said.
He squeezed her skin just above the waistline of the shorts, and said, “I’m surprised you can still fit into those things.”
That night, after Jake had fallen asleep, Alice slid from the bed naked and went to the bathroom and weighed herself. She had gained weight, ten pounds at least. Of course, since high school had ended, she no longer ran. She never really exercised at all, so it was no wonder she was getting fat.
The following day, after Jake had left for the bank, she put on a one-piece bathing suit, and walked down to the water’s edge. There were a few shell collectors out, but they were dressed in jeans and sweatshirts. It was going to be a warm day but it wasn’t warm yet, and the water numbed her anklebones. Still, she remembered what Jake had said, and she slid into the icy water, swimming hard for twenty minutes till her lungs burned and her arms were heavy and useless. Walking back across the firm sand to the condominium, Alice told herself that she would swim as long and as hard as she could every day. Her body would return to normal. She wondered how long it would be before Jake noticed that she was starting to lose weight. She imagined him looking at her one evening as she changed out of her clothes and into the lingerie she slept in, imagined him reaching out a hand to touch her flat stomach and telling her how amazing she looked.