Alice
July 6
She can’t see her toes. The robe they gave her to wear after her massage is long enough that it bunches around her heels, and she nearly trips on it as she shuffles, spaced out and bleary eyed, from the treatment room to one of the recliners in the spa’s lounge. A walking terry-cloth pillowcase—that’s what she imagines she must look like. An attendant asks her if she’d like a glass of cucumber water, and she says yes because she thinks she’s supposed to, and as she waits for the girl to return with it she traces the spa’s logo embroidered on the robe’s belt. The room’s dimly lit, and cold, and this latter point puzzles her; in a place where people spend most of their time naked, or at the very least covered in a paper-thin sheet, shouldn’t there be a little heat? On the other side of the room, next to a vase holding a lone orchid, sit two other women, flipping through copies of Tatler and British Vogue. Alice doesn’t recognize them—they aren’t members of the bridal party—but she does notice how they’ve both got their legs crossed in front of them, instead of folded up beneath their chins, and so she quickly corrects her position.
The attendant gives Alice her water. She sips from it and smiles. She knows she’s supposed to like it—she knows it’s supposed to make her feel relaxed, or rejuvenated, or youthful, or something. Still, staring at the cucumber slice floating among the cubes of ice, all she can think of is the shitty salad bar on Wilshire where she usually gets lunch during the workweek. From a collection of hidden speakers, water trickles through imaginary brooks. Reeds blow in electric winds. Zen is carefully and laboriously digitized.
Where is Eloise? Where are the other bridesmaids? A minute ago she heard a door open and close, and then the soft shuffling of slippered feet, but no one materialized in the waiting area; still, the only company she’s got is the pair of Tatler readers. Maybe that’s for the best, though, Alice thinks. Maybe it’s better that she spends some time alone. The past four hours have been exhausting, and the massage—forty-five minutes of being pummeled by a Finnish Vikingess called Majia—did nothing to change that. She needs a rest, a breather, a pause. A break from conversing with Eloise’s friends—an act that feels more akin to moonwalking on a tightrope than talking.
There are three of them, and they’re nice enough. And when they’re not being nice, it’s out of ignorance, as opposed to some classist form of malice: this is what Alice needs to keep reminding herself. She’ll admit, when she first met them at eight o’clock this morning at Eloise’s flat, their names—the sheer things that they called themselves—almost sent her running for the hills. Minty, Henny, and Flossie. Christ—she knew they were nicknames; that they stood for slightly more normal things like Henrietta, or Florence, or Matilda, but still. How could they introduce themselves with straight faces? How could they spend an hour with their parents without breaking down in tears? Without shouting Good God, what were you thinking? Shaking their hands and kissing their cheeks, Alice could feel the bemused shock creep across her face, but she stopped herself at the edge of becoming transparent. This was not how she wanted to start the day.
Because the night before, sitting alone at the bar at Claridge’s, she’d reached the unfortunate and dreadfully boring conclusion that she needed a change of attitude. She was humiliated by how she’d acted since arriving in London. Storming her room’s minibar; gorging herself on eggs and buttered toast until she made herself sick, only to then wipe spittle from her mouth as she reached for a slice of bacon; employing gluttony as an act of retribution against her sister—that was just the start of it. There was also that dinner two nights ago—the one that Eloise planned at that awful, crowded restaurant in Soho. An hour and a half before they were all scheduled to meet, Alice found a hole-in-the-wall pub half a block away, where she fortified herself with two bourbons and a Klonopin. At the time she considered it a necessary move: this was the first time she was seeing her family—her whole family—in three years. There was bound to be some inevitable awkwardness (Paul seeing Donna; Eloise seeing Paul; Paul seeing everyone), and Alice considered getting too blitzed to feel that palpable discomfort to be a matter of pragmatic strategy.
The plan backfired. She hadn’t anticipated having to down another bourbon once she arrived at the restaurant—Eloise had stressed how important it was that everyone showed up on time. But she did, and she suspects that was the drink that tilted her over the edge. At dinner she nearly passed out in her soup, and whenever anyone asked her a question, the most she could manage were monosyllabic responses. When she woke up foggy and cotton mouthed the next morning, the only things she could squarely remember from the evening were the knowing, dickish looks that Mark had shot her from across the table.
Today will be better, she tells herself again, fishing the slice of cucumber out from the cup and crunching down on it. Today she’ll act like an adult. And so far the plan has worked out well. Or, if not well, then at least okay. She does worry that she made a fool of herself during the day’s first scheduled event—a private yoga session that Minty had arranged at a studio in South Kensington. The instructor, a bald, sinewy man named Linus, kept coming around to correct her poses. Whereas Eloise and her friends glided through their sun salutations and crow poses and downward dogs with gelatinous flexibility, Alice’s body seemed hell-bent on being uncooperative. “Breathe into it,” Linus kept telling her, as he pressed his palm against the base of her spine. “Let the breath guide you.” And each time, Alice did: she’d exhale long, and hard, and loud, as she imagined slugging the son of a bitch in his smug, enlightened face. The whole thing was made doubly problematic by how boastful she’d acted before arriving at the studio. When Flossie (was it Flossie?) asked her if she’d ever done yoga before, she scoffed and explained that in L.A. yoga was performed on the beach, at sunrise, most mornings before work. “I just hope I’ll get as good of a workout,” she said. “On account of there not being any sand.”