“You know it doesn’t really matter, right? Your SAT scores?” Leonard had gone to the University of Michigan, which was in his hometown and cost his parents almost nothing, which is why he hadn’t even been allowed to apply anywhere else. Alice did know this, now, but at Belvedere, there had always been pressure. Alice felt like she was part of that pressure now—the parents who brought their kids into her office had to say where they went to school, as if it had any bearing on their children’s lives, whether they went to Harvard or community college or no college at all. Being a parent seemed like a truly shitty job—by the time you were old and wise enough to understand what mistakes you’d made, there was literally no chance that your children would listen. Everyone had to make their own mistakes. Alice had been one of the youngest students in her grade—some kids were a full year older. By junior year, some of her friends already knew where they wanted to go—Sam wanted to go to Harvard, and Tommy had already applied to Princeton, where his entire family had gone, back at least three generations, but swore he would rather die than go. Alice wasn’t sure—she hadn’t been sure then, and even decades later, she thought she could have chosen a hundred different things and had a hundred different lives. Sometimes she felt like everyone she knew had already become whatever they were going to become, and she was still just waiting.
“I guess so,” Alice said. Her stomach rumbled—she was still starving. The test prep class had been a giant waste of time—she remembered it now. Or part of her did. Alice felt aware of simultaneous thoughts, sort of like when you were driving cross-country and the local radio stations kept flipping back and forth as you moved in and out of range. Her vision was clear, but it was coming from two different feeds. Alice was herself, only herself, but she was both herself then and herself now. She was forty and she was sixteen. She could suddenly see Tommy leaning back in his chair, chewing on a pencil, and her stomach began to bubble. It wasn’t the cocktail of emotions she’d had when Tommy had brought his kid into Belvedere, a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment. It was the old feeling—absolutely delusional lust. “What’s your panel about, at the convention tomorrow?”
“Oh,” Leonard said. “It’s a celebration of the Time Brothers show. Someone is going to ask me questions. Tony and Barry are coming, too. Everyone is very excited to see them.” His mouth was a flat line. He had never liked the actors, especially not Barry. “I’m sure Tony will have some fascinating anecdotes from his time on the movie set with Tom Hanks.” Tony had had a small role in the section of Forrest Gump set in the 1970s, as if no casting director knew where in time to place him. Alice thought that was probably the reason he would abandon acting altogether and spend the rest of his days with horses, who only knew him in the present, holding an apple in the flat of his palm.
“Do you have to do it?” Ursula jumped back onto the table and began to lap up the remaining milk in Alice’s bowl.
“Everyone is very excited to see them. It sells tickets, sells books, buys the Grape-Nuts. It’s fine.” Leonard waved a hand in the air, shooing away Alice’s concern. “Where do you want to have dinner?”
“We’re still eating breakfast,” Alice said, petting Ursula. “Let me think about it.” Her father took a sip of his coffee. His arms looked strong. If she was hallucinating, she was doing a really terrific job. There was a loud noise, and Alice thought, Oh, that must be my alarm going off, I’m going to wake up any second, but no, it was her telephone blaring from her bedroom.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Leonard asked. “Usually when your phone rings, you’re like a streak of lightning across the sky. A human blur.”
“I’m sure it’s just Sam. I’ll call her back in a minute.” Outside, on Pomander, the Headricks were sweeping. Alice had always loved them—they were the kind of neighbors who reminded other people to move their cars on street sweeping days, or would let the gas company in, or would help get leaves out of gutters. They had every tool, somehow, even though their house was as small as everyone else’s and equally lacking in storage space. Kenneth Headrick was wearing a Mets hat and khakis, and he put a hand up to say hello when he saw Alice staring through the window.
“Wow. Can we call this maturity, Al?” Leonard shook his head. “I guess sixteen really is different.”
19
Sam called again and said that she’d meet Alice at Pomander and they’d walk to the class together. Ten minutes later, Alice called Sam and asked her what she was wearing. Half an hour later, Sam called to say that she was going to be running late, and that Alice should just go ahead without her. It was like texting, but only with her voice. It hadn’t been this easy to get Sam on the phone in over a decade. The one time that morning Sam didn’t pick up, her answering machine did, with a muffled exhortation to “hit my pager.” Alice remembered it all: 911 for emergencies, 143 to say I love you. *187 to say I’ll murder you if you don’t call me back right away. Alice wanted to keep calling, just to hear Sam pick up every time.
20
Alice asked Leonard to walk her to Belvedere for the prep class. She didn’t need him to, obviously—she could have walked there in her sleep, which maybe she was doing, although whatever was happening was starting to feel much more real. Alice had pooped, which she had never once done in a dream, and showered, and she’d eaten three meals in rapid succession, two of them standing directly in front of the open fridge. The class was only an hour long, and seeing Sam in person as a teenager was irresistible, and so even though Alice was a little afraid to let Leonard out of her sight, she decided that she would go. If Leonard walked her there.
Belvedere was close—twelve and a half blocks. Down Broadway to 85th, then left and up the hill, or one could zigzag according to holes in the traffic. Alice had always been proud of her stride and speed as a walker. There was nothing like the satisfying feeling of stepping into a street as a car zoomed past, the daily ballet of a well-timed jaywalk. Jaywalking, Alice’s only professional sport! Leonard was on the slow side, for a New Yorker, but Alice couldn’t believe how fast he was moving now, practically dancing down Pomander like Cary Grant with an umbrella. The last time Alice had seen her father walk down the street, it had been June. They’d met for dinner at Jackson Hole, the glorified diner at the end of Belvedere’s block, on 85th and Columbus, which made it easy for Alice to meet after school before getting on the train and going back to Brooklyn. Leonard loved Jackson Hole because the burgers were enormous, like hockey pucks for giants, and the onion rings were, too. Alice had gotten there first and grabbed a table near the window, and she’d watched her dad struggle to hurry across the street, narrowly avoiding the downtown M11 bus. Since then, she’d seen him walk up and down hospital hallways, and then not at all.
Leonard was wearing a jean jacket, as he had most days of most years since Alice was born. “Can’t believe you’re sixteen, Al.” He had brought a can of Coca-Cola for the road, which he now opened with that satisfying release of sugary bubble air. On their way out, Alice had glanced at the guardhouse, which looked filled with stuff, as it always had been. The end of last night was blurry except for the barfing, which had been very pink and very gross. Where else had she been for sure? Alice tried to piece it together, like doing a complicated math problem in reverse. “Me neither,” Alice said.
After talking to Sam, Alice had found what she suggested on the floor of her closet: a pair of woolen black sailor pants that had a thousand buttons and a tie in the back, and a silk top that had once been underwear, back when people wore extra layers for no reason and WonderBras didn’t exist. “When you take walks, where do you go?” Alice asked.
She was as tall as her father already—Serena was the taller parent by a few inches, and Alice would end up an inch taller than Leonard, too, but it hadn’t quite happened yet. Her mother hadn’t called to wish her a happy birthday, but it was still early on the West Coast, and who knew what the moon was doing, or the rest of the planets. The planets controlled a lot of Serena’s interactions with the world. The air was cool. Climate change had gotten Alice used to T-shirt weather in October, but now it was still chilly. Had the blizzard already happened? She couldn’t remember, but Alice could see the snowdrifts in her mind, the thick white blanket that had stopped the city for a few days.