Althea and Oliver Page 17

  It’s another beautiful autumn day in North Carolina, cloudless and only a little cool. Once Althea’s on I-40 she is soothed by the rush of the asphalt beneath her car, the trees and telephone poles a blur outside her window. She turns up the music and sings along to the Gits, trying to fill the inside of the car with her voice and the shriek of electric guitars, buoyed by the remainder of Oliver’s pills. An hour passes, and another and another. She pulls over at a rest stop somewhere in Virginia and sits on a picnic table, eating a black bean and sour cream sandwich and drinking a warm soda. The mouth of the can tastes like the inside of her car. There’s a metal trash bin a few feet away from the picnic table, and she underhands the can in its direction and misses. It falls to the ground and rolls back toward her, the rest of its contents emptying into the grass with a carbonated sizzle.

  If the great thing about driving is that—like drinking, like a punk rock show—it turns off Althea’s brain, then the problem she doesn’t anticipate is that this hypnotic effect will wear off after the first six hours and she’ll just be bored as hell. She goes through the sandwiches, crumpling each one’s tinfoil into a flower she tosses on the seat beside her; Oliver’s seat is how she thinks of it, and now she’s slowly filling it with garbage. She wasn’t expecting this, to be bored, because whenever she imagined being on a road trip she pictured Oliver beside her, providing the entertainment. And, as always happens when she’s bored, her mind begins to work, a Ferris wheel of distressing memories and unwanted thoughts that takes on more unpleasantness even as she manages to unload what’s already there. Stuck on I-95, she gives up trying to halt the rotation and lets the memories pass before her one by one, to the sound track of “100 Games of Solitaire” in a car fogged by cigarette smoke.

  The winter morning she saw her mother’s vintage luggage—someone who moved as much as Alice did might have had a more practical set, with rolling suitcases and garment bags, but no, she held fast to her trunks and train cases—stacked on the front porch. The week that followed was the only time she ever saw Garth go without shaving or polishing his shoes. It wasn’t long after that when Oliver showed up on the same front porch, apple-cheeked and clad in overalls, Nicky sheepishly asking Garth, whom she barely knew, to keep an eye on him for a few hours.

  The Althea-and-Oliver vignettes that come up, one after the other, are not the happy ones. The time she locked him in a closet while he keened his protestations, or tricked him into giving up his Halloween candy, or tormented him into writing a paper for her. And that summer afternoon with Fat Mouse Oliver, the fight with him in the driveway after the show at Lucky’s. And then Coby shows up—the disastrous night of tequila, Egyptian Ratscrew, and getting screwed; and the climactic scene in the hallway, when she gave everyone—everyone—irrefutable proof that she did not belong among them. If she wanted, she could invert it all, look at it like a solarized picture, like her mother’s absence had warped something inside her, and Garth’s indifference had not helped, and Coby had wrought his own well-deserved thrashing with the five words she would never stop hearing: By the way, you’re bleeding. But she can’t, she can’t look at it that way.

  She thinks of what to say to Oliver when she gets there, tries planning a big speech but knows it’s pointless. There’s really only one thing to say. I’m sorry.

  • • •

  “Have I ever called you anything, you know, really awful when I was sick?” Oliver asks Nicky on the phone that night.

  She exhales smoke loudly into his ear. “Like what?”

  “Just—anything really upsetting. Anything I would have been ashamed to call you under normal circumstances.”

  “If it would make you ashamed, I wouldn’t tell you. Why are you worrying about this, anyway?” He hears a car driving by; she must be sitting on the porch.

  “I was just wondering.” A lone orderly wheels his bucket down the empty hallway, salsa music blasting from his headphones.

  “Let me guess,” Nicky says. “You were sitting around with the Spur Posse and they started trading horror stories and now you can’t stop speculating about what you may or may not have done.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Ol, I don’t want to sound like I’m summing up a fucking parable or something, but when are you going to stop worrying about the things you can’t control and start worrying about the things you can?”

  Talk about the Serenity Prayer. He hits the receiver against his head a few times and wonders: What if I could just knock loose the part that’s broken and shake it out my ear? “How are you doing? Is Mrs. Parker your new best friend yet or what?”

  “I have a date this weekend.”

  “With Mrs. Parker?”

  “No, you little asshole. With a guy I know from the spa.”

  “Did you tell him you have a teenager? I bet it’ll blow his mind to smithereens.”

  Now she waxes philosophical. “I think it’s so weird when people say ‘I have a teenager.’ It’s like saying ‘I have a Ferrari’ or ‘I have a first edition of The Great Gatsby.’ I don’t have you, Ol, I made you, and all I can do is hope you’ll take care of me in my old age.”

  “It’s the nursing home for you, first chance I get.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Look, things are starting to happen up here. My temperature is over a hundred and my knees are killing me. I just wanted to let you know I don’t think we’ll be having these little chats for much longer.”

  “Are you going to lose your mind if you wake up and I have a boyfriend?”

  “Only if he’s a fucking yoga instructor. Or one of those Reiki freaks.”

  “He’s not a colleague, he’s a client.”

  “I hate it when you call them clients. It makes you sound like an escort.” Oliver can’t imagine Nicky out with any man who would frequent a spa on a regular basis. She accepts dates so rarely, it’s difficult to imagine her with anyone at all. Maybe he’s an athlete, an aging minor-league pitcher who needs his shoulders tended to by a talented massage therapist, or a fireman with back problems from years of carrying people out of burning houses. Please, let him be a hero, Oliver thinks. Please let him be someone who loves what he does. Please let this guy not be a fucking joker. Let him not be someone with a standing appointment for colonic irrigations.

  “You didn’t answer my question, you know. When are you going to—”

  “When I learn how to tell the difference,” he says.

  • • •

  It’s after midnight when Althea finally crosses the George Washington Bridge. She cranes her neck for a view of the city she’s come so far to visit, and there it is, lit up like a landing strip. The skyline familiar from movies and photographs is now right outside her window, its buildings almost close enough to touch. This is the city Nicky spoke of, the place where all her stories started. The brake lights of all the cars ahead brighten into a jeweled thread weaving its way down the west side of Manhattan. Opening the window, she lets a brittle November wind lash the inside of the car, and finally the hypnosis brought on by driving starts to dissipate, and she’s overcome with a euphoric optimism. This is going to work, because it has to. She’ll say she’s sorry, Oliver will say he didn’t mean it. They’ll call a do-over, and everything will go back to the way it was, because it has to, because it can’t stay like this.

  • • •

  In the morning there’s a tap on the door as Oliver is working the electrode adhesive out of his hair.

  “Yeah?”

  It’s Kentucky, forlorn in his Browning cap and camouflage pajama pants. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Oliver says.

  “I thought you went down, but one of the nurses told me you were still awake.”

  Oliver’s arms are heavy. “I don’t know for how much longer.”

  Kentucky looks disappointed. “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

/>   “Then I hope I’m next. I’m sick of those fucking gorillas, talking shit and making fun of our accents.”

  “They’re the ones with the accents.”

  Kentucky smiles. “New Jersey’s out. I heard he sings a song from The Little Mermaid whenever he gets up to take a piss.”

  When Oliver laughs, he can still feel the place around his chest where the band was tightened the night before. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Which song?”

  “Stella didn’t say.”

  “That’s what we should be doing for entertainment. Fuck the TV. We should be staking out New Jersey’s room, waiting to hear the chorus of ‘Under the Sea,’” Oliver says.

  “My money’s on ‘Part of Your World.’” Kentucky edges farther inside and sits at the desk.

  Maybe this is what college is going to be like—guys wandering in and out of one another’s rooms in flip-flops and pajamas, sussing out the few tolerable companions among a veritable sea of morons.

  “You picked up that ‘Id without the lid’ thing really quick the other day. You read a lot of Freud?”

  “I guess when you find out you beat off in front of your mom, you get a little curious about Freud.” Kentucky spins himself around in the chair.

  Oliver peels another chunk of glue from his temple. This is what Minty Fresh should have been using, not toothpaste. “Why did you want to come here?”

  “I was bored. And I wanted to tell you about The Little Mermaid. I wish you had darts in here or something.”

  “I mean New York. I mean the study.”

  Kentucky tears a piece of paper from Oliver’s spiral notebook. He folds the rough edge and deepens the crease with a fingernail, then lays the page flat and tears the uneven bit away. “They say we’re sick, right? Sick people go to the hospital.” He makes more folds in the paper. “And I’m pretty sure I scared the shit out of my parents. That night in the neighbors’ kitchen—that put my mother over the top. What about you? Did you figure you’d come up here and they’d fix you, turn you into a normal kid?”

  “I guess,” says Oliver.

  “That never really occurred to me. I’m a fifteen-year-old boy. There’s a fucked-up version of me and then a less fucked-up version. Believe me, if they walked in here tomorrow and said you were cured, it wouldn’t solve all your problems.”

  “What you said the other day, about it being like ourselves times a million. Do you really think that?” Oliver asks.

  Looking down at the carvings on the desk, Kentucky mulls this over, adjusting the brim of his cap. “Freud would probably say yes. Me? I’m not so sure. But sometimes I do think that the reason we don’t remember? It’s our fucked-up brains showing us mercy. Even if the show is still on the air, we stop recording. So we’ll be spared the memory. We can never play it back.” Kentucky sets an origami frog on the desk. He presses on its back legs, then releases it and sends it flying. “You know any alcoholics?”

  Immediately Coby comes to mind. “Not yet.”

  “They say getting sober is the easy part.”

  “You know a lot of alcoholics?” Oliver asks.

  “I live in a dry county, but yes.”

  “Do they say that before or after they get sober?”

  “Usually it’s right before they fall off the wagon again.” Kentucky says this wearily, as if it’s a complaint he’s heard firsthand, and more than once.

  Oliver bends the neck of the lamp this way, then that. “What if something happens that you want to remember? And it happens while you’re not recording?”

  “Like what?” Kentucky asks.

  “Like—something that only happens once.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Never mind.” Oliver stands up. “Let’s go reclaim the lounge.”

  “Something that only happens once? What, like chicken pox?” Kentucky presses.

  “Never mind,” Oliver mumbles, avoiding his new friend’s eyes.

  Kentucky’s face reddens with burgeoning comprehension. “No shit?”

  “No shit,” says Oliver, sinking back down onto the bed.

  “You lost your—”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  Oliver bites the insides of his cheeks. “I have this friend back home. My best friend, since we were kids. She grew up down the block.” He hesitates. “I don’t really know how it happened.”

  “You didn’t—” Kentucky can’t even finish the thought. “Did you?”

  Oliver shakes his head. “No, no, it was nothing like that. She wanted to, she’d been wanting to forever. But I told her I didn’t want to, that I wasn’t ready, and she did it anyway. And when I woke up, she didn’t tell me. Not for months. So isn’t that kind of like the same thing?”

  “So you’re saying she— Is that what you’re saying?”

  Oliver winces. “I don’t even know what I’m saying.” He remembers Althea screaming at him in the driveway: Christ, I’m not a fucking rapist. He didn’t argue with her, not on that point. Something about that word doesn’t feel right. It’s too broad, not specific enough to describe what Althea did to him. Kentucky can’t even say it out loud. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. Not exactly.”

  Kentucky looks baffled. “I don’t get it.”

  “What don’t you get?”

  “Is she ugly or something?”

  “Fuck you, she’s beautiful.”

  “Listen, I pulled out my dick in front of my mother. AK-47’s little sister is going to need years of psychotherapy. New Jersey got dumped for some infraction he’ll never even know about. That shit is all irreparable. You just told me you got laid.”

  “But it’s like I wasn’t even there.”

  Irate, Kentucky leaps to his feet and points to the door. “New Jersey tried to fuck a window treatment! You fucked your beautiful best friend! What the hell are you doing here, man? Go find this girl and screw her brains out! And this time you will remember!” He shakes his head. “Christ on a cross, NC, you should have told that story the first day you got here. You would have been holding the remote this whole time.”

  “I don’t want to have stories to tell!” Oliver shouts. “I want my fucking life back! I got laid, sure, and I have no idea what it was like. I have no idea what I was like.”

  “What, you’re worried you weren’t any good?”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean— Why is this so hard to grasp? When it happens, it’s supposed to change your life, divide everything into ‘before’ and ‘after.’ And instead I’m in some weird limbo. It used to be I was a step behind all my friends. I get sick, time stops for me, they keep going. Now I’ve even fallen behind myself. And how can I ever catch up? It’ll never be my first time again. Not with anyone. Not with her.” Even as the story has galvanized Kentucky, Oliver is wiped out by the telling. Lying back on the hospital bed, he throws a forearm over his face. “We get to stop recording, but we don’t get to hit pause, and we don’t get to rewind.”

  Kentucky launches his frog across the desk again. “What does your girl say about all this?”

  “She’s not my girl. I was so pissed when I found out, I stopped speaking to her.” Exhaustion falls over Oliver like a billowy sheet; it lands on his face and knees first, and then settles over the rest of his body.

  “Look, I hear you. It would bother the hell out of me if I couldn’t remember my first time. Not that I’ve had a first time. You know what I mean. But listen, you’ve heard everyone else’s stories. Doesn’t it seem possible that you were the aggressor? If she’d been wanting to for ages, and you finally made a move, maybe she just, I don’t know, couldn’t help herself.”

  “I can blame KLS for my bad decisions. She’s got no excuse for her lack of impulse control.”

  “What’s her name?” />
  “Althea.”

  Kentucky shakes his head. “You got some beautiful girl named Althea in love with you, and you’re stuck here talking to me. I’d be pissed, too.”

  Stella walks in, brandishing her thermometer. When she leans over to check Oliver’s glands, he can smell the nicotine on her lips and in her hair.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I think it’s time.”

  “Let’s get you set up.” She turns to Kentucky. “Would you mind excusing us?”

  “Can I ask you something first?”

  “Sure.”

  Kentucky looks solemnly at the nurse, and as she looks back, Oliver is aware of the gulf in years between them. This woman weathered her own uncertain adolescence and made it out on the other side. Oliver realizes if he could fast-forward ten years, he’d see that he, too, had done the same, that the unknown territory between now and then would be navigated much as the past had been—inelegantly, and with great confusion, in a clumsy but dogged fashion. KLS might force him to skip ahead here and there, but he’s going to have to do all the hard parts himself. The thought exhausts him further.

  “Do they assign you what color scrubs you have to wear?” asks Kentucky. “Or do you get to choose?”

  • • •

  Althea stands outside the hospital, smoking and planning what she’ll say. Her neck aches from sleeping in her car overnight; she craves a cigarette even though she’s in the middle of one, and she knows she could stand out here all day and never be ready to go in. He’s up there, an elevator ride away. All she has to do is push through the revolving doors and traverse that marble lobby, find his room in this enormous building, and open with some whimsical remark about the weather in New York. That should do it. Some whimsy, the weather, a big smile. Right. Or maybe he’ll just be so impressed by her devotion, that she’s driven all this way to offer one of her rare apologies, that he’ll forgive her on the spot.