Althea and Oliver Read online

  Althea is still trying to decipher these when there’s a soft knock on the door and then Matilda slips in, holding two mugs of coffee. She gives one to Althea. There’s a Shakespeare quote on it: THERE IS NOTHING EITHER GOOD OR BAD, BUT THINKING MAKES IT SO. Part of the handle is broken off. She takes a solid slug of the coffee and flinches.

  “I know,” says Matilda. “It’s got legs. Come smoke with me.”

  She leads Althea to the bathroom, where she turns on the shower and sits on the floor with her back against the tub. “It’s a neat trick. You fill the room with steam and let it open up your lungs, then you smoke a cigarette. It’s like mainlining the nicotine.” She quickly crafts a roll-up and seals it with a pointy pink tongue. Then, pulling today’s issue of the Post from a rack next to the toilet, she flips until she finds the horoscopes. “What’s your sign?”

  “Gemini.” Althea lights a Marlboro.

  Matilda’s feet are tiny, the toes perfectly proportioned, like a doll’s. The temperature in the bathroom rises, and the mirror begins to fog. “Let’s see. How about this? ‘You’ve come a long way, baby, so take a load off and relax. With your moon in Saturn, your financial position is not looking good, but fortunately you will encounter a bunch of slackers who never pay for food. Ask someone to explain how alternate side of the street parking works.’”

  “That’s not really what it says.”

  “It’s more fun to make it up.”

  “How does alternate side of—”

  “I have no fucking idea. Ask Kaleb.” Matilda taps the slim cigarette over the toilet.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “In the house? A couple of years. Ever since I dropped out of college. It’s Ethan’s—his mom cosigned the lease, God bless her. We get a lot of dirty looks from the neighbors, but we pay the rent on time and try to make most of the noise on the weekends. The security deposit’s probably a loss, though.”

  “Why’d you drop out of college?”

  “College is bullshit,” she says. “Most of us didn’t graduate from college. Hell, most of us don’t even have real jobs and we’re doing okay.”

  From her vantage point Althea can see the black mold growing underneath the lip of the toilet seat.

  There’s a knock on the door. “What the hell are you doing in there?” It sounds like Ethan.

  “Fuck off, man, we’re busy,” Matilda shouts.

  “Hurry up, we’ve got cooking to do. It’s fucking Thanksgiving, remember?” Even muffled, he sounds irritated.

  “Just go ahead and ignore Mr. No Fun out there,” she whispers to Althea.

  Ethan pounds on the door again, harder. “I’m not going to piss in the kitchen sink just because you ladies are having a heart-to-heart in there. And this food isn’t—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Jesus H.!” Matilda stands up. Reaching down, she extends a hand and helps Althea to her feet. “You going on that recon mission today?”

  Ethan bangs on the door once more, for emphasis.

  “Why don’t you put me to work instead?” says Althea.

  “Why don’t you do me a favor first,” Matilda says, wrinkling her nose, “and take a shower.”

  • • •

  Stationed in the living room, Althea peels potatoes over a bucket. Mr. Business stalks into the room and meows at her, his tail quirked in the air like a question mark. Jumping onto the couch, he kneads her thigh with his claws.

  “So where do you sleep, Business? Do you get a corner of the bathtub or something?” Althea asks him.

  “He sleeps with Gregory,” Ethan says as he walks in, a peeler in his hand. He’s taller than he looked last night when he was curled in a ball on his chair; he has freckles under the downy hair on his arms and Oliver-fingers, widest at the joint. Batting Mr. Business off the couch, he sits next to Althea and grabs a potato.

  “I thought this would go faster with two people,” he says. The tendons in his hands stand out when he peels, so distinct Althea imagines she could reach out and pluck them like the strings of a guitar.

  “Just about everything does.”

  They work in silence for a while. The sunlight coming through the curtains reveals that someone has written Fuck You in the quarter-inch of dust on the television screen. Their reflections are warped across the curve of the gray glass. From the kitchen on the other side of the house there’s music, laughter, the occasional shriek when someone burns himself on a hot pan, and then the run of the faucet over the wound. But Althea is in the living room, paired off as always. Ethan reaches over her to grab another potato. He smells like lemons.

  “You’re in high school, right?” He starts peeling at warp speed; clearly, he does this a lot. Althea tries to imitate his style.

  “I was.”

  “You’re not now?”

  “I got expelled,” she says.

  A long ribbon of skin falls into the bucket. He looks at her. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen. How old are you?”

  “Shouldn’t you be finishing school?” He drops the naked potato into the bowl and grabs another.

  “Shouldn’t you have a job?”

  He pauses. “I’m twenty.”

  “Did you graduate from high school?” Althea asks, hacking away with her peeler now.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, you’re twenty and I’m seventeen and you graduated from high school and I didn’t, but we’re both sitting here peeling fucking potatoes, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah,” Ethan says. “I guess we are.”

  Dust dances in the sunlight. Althea’s wrist aches. Just holding the clammy potato makes her nauseated. Matilda’s leggy coffee has got her racing.

  “I walk dogs,” Ethan says.

  “Pardon?”

  “I walk dogs. Sometimes for money, for the neighbors. And sometimes I volunteer at the animal shelter, walk the dogs that are in the kennels all day.”

  “You can do that? Just go walk a dog?”

  “Most of the dogs that come in are pit mixes, street dogs, or old fighting dogs, whatever. They’re beat-up and skittish and underfed. They bite and nobody wants them, and most of the time they end up euthanized. But once in a while one shows up that you can tell isn’t a stray. Even if he doesn’t have any tags, you can tell someone’s looking for him. He’s too friendly, he looks too good. And you know someone out there is going crazy, they’re putting up flyers, they’re going around their neighborhood to all his favorite places, calling and calling his name.” Ethan lofts his second potato into the bowl. Rolling the handle of the peeler between his palms, he looks at Althea.

  “You comparing me to a dog?” she says.

  He points at the bucket with the blade. “We see it all the time, when we’re out serving. ‘Platinum card homeless,’ we call them. Kids come down from Westchester during the summertime, live on the streets spare-changing for forties, and when the weather turns cold they go home to their parents—”

  “I get it. Platinum card homeless, that’s really clever. Thanks for your insight and your charming stray dog analogy.” She grabs the bucket and bowl and heads for the kitchen.

  “I hear you have a car,” he says.

  “So?” She turns, standing in the doorway.

  “Who pays the insurance?”

  A potato to the head would probably hurt like hell, and she’d love to nail Ethan right across the bridge of the nose, snapping his glasses and blackening at least one of his eyes. It’s Thanksgiving; at some point she’ll have to call her father and lie to him again, tell him that she’s helping Alice cook cornbread stuffing and making sure the turkey doesn’t dry out. She remembers the popcorn fight with Oliver and how it ended with Garth coming downstairs to break it up. Garth, with his boundless stockpile of historical tales and his perfectly polished shoes; Garth, standing over the barbecue
holding an enormous metal fork, trying to rescue a burger fallen among the coals; Garth, who can effortlessly lecture an auditorium of snickering undergraduates on the sexual practices of ancient Greece, yet cannot speak to his own daughter about similar, more pertinent matters. Who was this beak-nosed boy to talk to her about her beloved and imperfect father, who did, in fact, pay her car insurance, but was so detached he would probably be hard-pressed to name the make and model?

  Mr. Business reaches up, sinks his claws into her jeans, and stretches. “Your fucking mom pays my insurance,” says Althea.

  “You’re quite the charmer.” Ethan takes his graphic novel from the coffee table and folds himself into his chair. “Make sure you ask Kaleb about alternate side of the street parking.”

  In the kitchen, Gregory is dancing Matilda around, crooning in a not-bad impression of Tom Waits, while Kaleb chops zucchini and Leala washes carrots in the sink.

  “Waltzing Matilda, wa-altzing Matilda, you go waltzing Matilda with me,” sings Gregory, leading her across the kitchen.

  There are several enormous steel stockpots going. The walls are covered in vinyl contact paper with a rocket ship motif; row after row of Polaroid pictures of their friends are aligned on the refrigerator door, labeled with names and dates. A sagging flowered couch is pushed against the back wall. On a stand-alone cabinet in the corner, a coffeemaker and a rice cooker sit side by side, their red lights aglow, mugs, bowls, and chopsticks nestled together on a shelf below.

  Gregory spins Matilda around on her bare feet. The song slows and takes a beat, leading into the final chorus.

  “Fuck!” Kaleb yells, throwing his knife onto the cutting board and examining his thumb.

  “Are you okay? Let me see.” Leala pulls up the window shade so she can get a better look in the sunlight.

  “You didn’t bleed on the zucchini, did you?” Matilda disentangles herself from her dance partner. She takes the bowl of potatoes, leaving Althea’s hands empty and nervous, instantly searching for something to do.

  “Your fucking zucchini is fine, I’m the one—”

  “Don’t be a baby,” Leala says. “All you need is a Band-Aid. Christ.”

  Kaleb holds his hand above his head as he follows her out of the kitchen. The zucchini lies unattended. Althea steps up to the cutting board and rinses off the knife.

  “I’ll finish these,” she says.

  • • •

  A couple of days later, on the way to Nathan’s, Althea finds a flaming orange parking ticket tucked under her windshield wiper. “What the shit is this?”

  “I told you to find out about the parking,” Matilda says. “What happened here?” She runs her finger along the crooked path Jason keyed into the paint.

  “It’s a long story.”

  They get their food to go, eating on the boardwalk despite the cold. “I thought you were a vegetarian,” Althea says.

  “The best part about being a vegetarian is eating meat every once in a while.”

  “I can’t imagine that’s a very popular view back at the house,” Althea says.

  “Don’t mention this little excursion to anyone. I’ll get a lecture from Ethan about factory farming and then Leala will go on and on about how this hot dog is going to be lodged in my colon until I’m thirty or I pay someone two hundred bones to flush it out with a hose.” Matilda sips her soda. “It’s exhausting to care about something that much, to put in all that effort. Whenever I quit smoking it’s so much work, and every time I slip up there’s this thrill, because I just stop caring. Sometimes it’s a relief not to give a shit.” She takes another bite of her hot dog. “Remember when you were a kid and you used to try so hard to climb up a slide, just so you could turn around at the top and go back down? I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

  “It makes sense.”

  Matilda finishes eating and skillfully rolls a cigarette. With everything shut down for the season, Coney Island feels more like a movie set than a real place, all potential energy and no kinetic. The sky above them is heavy and gray, the parachute jump propping up its share of the clouds. Althea can’t believe the Atlantic Ocean just steps away is the same one she swam in back home, in the before time, the long long ago.

  “It’s funny,” Matilda is saying now. “The cat just followed Gregory home a few months ago, all the way from the subway. He didn’t want to let him in, you know; he was a stray cat, we didn’t know where he’d been. But the cat just sat on the porch and cried and scratched at the door, he kept jumping up onto the windowsill to look inside, and finally Gregory said, ‘Well, I guess he means business.’ So that’s how we got the cat, and that’s how the cat got his name.”

  Althea indicates the pouch of tobacco in Matilda’s shirt pocket. “Do you mind if I give that a try?”

  Matilda hands it over. “Have at it.”

  Slipping a paper from the thin cardboard packet, Althea holds it between thumb and forefinger and fills it with a fat pinch of tobacco.

  “No, that’s too much,” Matilda says.

  Althea puts some back, spreading the rest evenly down the fold in the paper. Grasping the ends between her fingers, she rolls the contents tighter, then uses her thumbnails to create an even crease.

  “I talked to Valerie,” says Matilda.

  “Oh.” Ducking her head, Althea draws her tongue across the thin line of adhesive, sealing her makeshift cigarette. She surveys the mess and shakes her head.

  “Sometimes it works better if you use two papers at first. Gives you something a little more solid to work with.”

  Althea pulls two more from the packet, tears open her first failed attempt, and starts again. “What did she say?”

  “How about you tell me what happened instead?”

  “You want to see if our stories match up?”

  “Yeah.”

  To tell her version, Althea goes all the way back to the night the babysitter canceled on Nicky. In truth she doesn’t even really remember, but she knows the story from her father. How Nicky had stood there in a denim jacket covered with patches of obscure hardcore bands, her black nail polish mostly chipped away, asking a neighbor she barely knew to watch her son so she could go to work. Althea had hidden behind one of Garth’s corduroy-clad legs, while Oliver, all dimples, shook Garth’s hand and introduced himself like a miniature adult. Althea doesn’t dwell too much on the next decade, quickly skipping ahead to Oliver’s sickness and how it dovetailed with her burgeoning, inconvenient feelings, and the series of debacles those two things wrought. She doesn’t gloss over the part about Coby, either, although she finds it strangely difficult to remember the details of what happened in the hallway; it’s hazy, like something she had done while drunk. The best she can say is, “And then my head exploded.” She’s sure Valerie was able to relay it better anyway, having borne witness. By the time Althea’s finished, she’s finally put together something resembling a cigarette, which she lights with a great deal of relief. “I think that’s pretty much the gist of it. I’m guessing I went into a little more detail than Val.”

  “They say context is everything,” Matilda says.

  “It is at that.”

  “It was Ethan’s idea. I didn’t want to at first, but he was right.”

  “He doesn’t like me,” says Althea.

  “He will. That’s why he wanted to do it now. Before we forgot that you hadn’t always been here. We like spontaneity, not surprises. I have to be sure whatever happened in North Carolina isn’t going to follow you up here.”

  “There are no outstanding warrants against me. I know that getting expelled for beating up a classmate isn’t real savory, but I wasn’t leading a life of crime. It was more like I knew I was ruining everything, and I couldn’t stop.” She points with her cigarette at the yellow paper carton cradling the remains of Matilda’s hot dog. “Imagine that feeling you get when you’r
e a vegetarian eating a hot dog. Imagine that feeling times a million. Climbing up the slide to turn around at the top and go back down. That’s what I am, I guess. A backslider.”

  Matilda shivers and tucks her knees under her chin. “Valerie said Coby had it coming. She said you must have had a good reason, and it sounds like you did. That’s why your things aren’t waiting for you on my porch. But I’ll tell you right now, if you ever raise a hand against anybody in this house—”

  “I won’t, I promise—”

  “—you’ll be out faster than you can say ‘vegan curry.’ And what about your parents? The last thing I need is some hostile adult showing up at my door.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Do you like it here?”

  “I do,” Althea says.

  Before Matilda has even moved, Althea understands she is about to be hugged. She braces herself for physical contact, allowing Matilda’s arms to encircle her shoulders. Althea returns the embrace, swallowing up the tiny blonde girl.

  “What do you think?” Matilda asks. “Do you mean business?”

  chapter eleven.

  OLIVER CAN’T MOVE.

  His eyes are open. Or he thinks they are. But it’s strange; even though he’s lying on his belly with his arms around the pillow, its thin, papery case rustling in his embrace, his view is of the hospital room—the thrift store desk, the low, spinny chair, and the white door, which comes ajar as he stares at it. No, something’s not right. He tries to roll over and can’t.

  Oh, come on.

  Scaling back his efforts, he focuses on one arm, his left arm. Trying to slide it out from under the pillow, all the while watching the door, though he knows his face is buried in the mattress. His arm doesn’t budge, but the door edges open another couple of inches. What the fuck? He concentrates on his leg next—What is the big deal, I used to do this all the time—and still there’s nothing.

  Help! he shouts, except he doesn’t shout at all. Stella, are you there?

  Logic would dictate that he’s dreaming, but he knows he isn’t. He can’t move or speak, but he is most definitely awake in his hospital room, the oximeter Stella wrapped around his finger still in place, the rubber strap tight around his chest, and the electrodes pasted onto his temples. The door has swung a little farther into the room, and though he can’t see beyond it, he can hear the terse, economical exchanges of the doctors and nurses in the hallway and their footsteps as they pass him by, oblivious to his distress.