The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(5)
Hearing her pull the age card for the first time in memory made me horribly, burningly curious. I had to read that book. Had to. I never saw the copy from the attic again, but I remembered the title and bided my time. I looked for it at libraries and bookshops, and on the shelves of all the people we stayed with, but I never found it. It showed up on eBay once—I used to have a Google alert set for the title—but the bidding quickly climbed beyond my price range.
So I turned to finding out more about its author instead. That’s how my obsession with my grandmother, Althea Proserpine, began.
*
Lana left, and a guy named Norm came in to replace her. He spent the next three hours talking about a hangout he’d had with Lana that may or may not have been a date, not that he was worried about it, but what did I think and had Lana mentioned him?
I gave him noncommittal answers until finally I cracked. “Jesus Christ, Norm. This is the ‘move on with your life’ dance.” I did a dance like I was imitating a train. “There, did that work? Lana’s literally never said your name in my presence.”
The injured look on his face gave me a flush of dark satisfaction. “Damn, Alice, that’s cold.” He took off his hat, folded the brim to make it more pretentious, and re-perched it on his head.
His silent treatment for the rest of the night gave me time to think—time to replay what I’d seen, again and again. When my shift ended, I stepped out into the night feeling skinless. The light was gone, and the houses I passed on the way to the train looked closed and clannish, like that one house you skip on Halloween. I jerked back when a man brushed too close against me on the sidewalk. His skin smelled burnt and his eyes seemed too light in the dark.
He kept walking, barely acknowledging me. I was being paranoid. Everywhere I looked for the stocking cap, the blue eyes. Nothing.
There were a handful of people waiting for the Q. I stood close enough to a woman pushing a baby in a stroller that it might’ve seemed like we were together. She didn’t look at me, but I saw her shoulders tighten. When the train came, I got in and jumped out again at the last possible moment, like I’d seen in the movies.
But then the platform was even emptier. I put one earbud in and played the white noise app Ella put on my phone and made me listen to whenever I started acting like a loaded gun.
When the next train came, I practically leapt on. The scene from the café kept unfolding like a movie in my mind: the crack of the plate, the blue of his eyes, the way he’d vanished out the door with the book in his hands. But already the edges were rubbing off the memory’s freshness. I could feel it degrading in my hands.
My neck hurt from holding it tight, keeping it on a swivel. The constant vigilance became a beat behind my eyes. When a guy holding a saxophone case threw open the door between cars, panic made a hot, hard starburst in my chest.
What if there was an explanation for the man’s unlined face, the sense I had that he hadn’t aged a day? Botox, French moisturizer, a trick of the light. My own black hole of a brain, writing an image from the past over the present.
Even so, he would still be a man who had a book that was impossible to find. Who’d told me ten years ago he knew my grandmother and was taking me to see her. What if he really had been? What if Ella had been wrong about him being a stranger?
What if Ella had been lying?
Years after I thought I’d buried it, the old obsession stirred. When the train finally rose up from underground and onto the bridge, I pulled up an article about Althea on my phone. It was once my favorite, the longest piece I could find. I even had an original copy of the magazine it ran in, which I came upon by some miracle in a used bookstore in Salem. Vanity Fair, September 1987, featuring a six-page spread of my grandmother on her newly bought estate, the Hazel Wood. In the photos she’s as slender as the cigarette she’s smoking, wearing cropped pants and red lipstick and a look that could slice through glass. My mother is a black-haired blur by her knees, a wavering shadow under the glitter of the swimming pool.
It opens like this: “Althea Proserpine is raising her daughter on fairy tales.” It’s an odd opening, because my mom barely figures in the rest of the article, but I guess the journalist liked the double meaning. My mom was raised hearing fairy tales, like anyone else, and she was raised on the money that came from them. Althea’s estate, the Hazel Wood, was bought with fairy-tale money, too.
Before she wrote the strange, brief volume that made her name, my grandmother was a writer for women’s magazines, back when the job was less “20 Sexy Things to Do with an Ice Cube” and more “How to Get That Spot out of Your Husband’s White Shirt.”
Until she took a trip in 1966. She doesn’t name names, but she doesn’t stint on telling the reporter the good stuff: she was traveling with an older man, a married editor at a men’s monthly, lazing around the Continent with a group of other bored American tourists. After nine days spent drinking their liquor hot (couldn’t trust the ice cubes) and writing letters to their friends at home, things went sour between her and the married man. She took off on her own. And something happened.
She doesn’t say what, exactly. “I chased a new kind of story through a very old doorway,” she told the journalist. “It took me a long time to find my way back.” Not another word is said about what she did between 1966 and 1969, while her houseplants died and her job dried up and her New York life got mossed over and swept away.