“You go off and get ready,” said Mrs. Ward. “I’ll direct the others.”
Alice froze. Ordered herself to say it: I am ready.
“Thank you, Mother,” she said instead. She avoided meeting her father’s gaze. If she did, she might have cried, for she knew he would be looking at her with something like pity. Why did she let it all bother her? At this point in life? Peter had been telling her for years—well, never mind what he said. He was part of the problem.
Alice retreated down the hallway, self-conscious now about her body, her bare legs. She could feel her mother’s gaze, still, burning into her.
• • •
In the bedroom, she opened her closet door and stood there for too long, staring at but not processing the visual field before her. Colors were there, and textures, and garments of various lengths.
And then, above the clothing rack, another swath of fabric drew her attention, and she reached for it.
During Alice’s time away—the only term that was ever used to describe her stay at the Dunwitty Institute—Dr. Lewis had urged the rest of the Van Laars to remove all hints of Bear from their Albany house and from Self-Reliance, too. And so his two rooms had been stripped to the studs. The walls—once covered, to Bear’s delight, in wallpaper designed to look like maps of the world—had been painted white. His clothing, gone. His toys and books. This, Dr. Lewis said, was the way to let Alice heal; and in the Van Laar household, the advice of Dr. Lewis—a friend of Peter II’s from his Yale days—was taken.
But there was one possession of Bear’s that they had not seen.
When Bear was born, someone had given her a blanket for him, blue with a silk ribbon trim in a moon-and-star pattern. As he grew, he was rarely without it. But when, at four, he was still trailing it about the house, Peter had issued a command that it be taken from him. And Alice had complied, had kept it hidden from him here on this shelf of her closet, though the boy had wept pitifully for it each bedtime for a week.
When Alice returned from her time away to find all of Bear’s artifacts removed from the house, she had known enough to mask her dismay. (She would rather be there, in a Bear-less home, than in that other place again.) As soon as she was unmonitored, she had retired to her room and thrown open the door to the closet. And there it was: the blanket she had hidden from him so long ago.
Now, Alice held the blanket to her face, trailed over her cheek its frayed edges, which Bear had a habit of tapping lightly with his fingers.
She wouldn’t change her outfit, she decided. She would say nothing to her mother. She simply wouldn’t change.
• • •
She draped the blanket over her face. She lay on her bed like that for a time. She had had none of Dr. Lewis’s pills since her trip to Albany. She had been distracted by preparations for the festivities. Something to do for once, thought Alice. It had not occurred to her, during all of that planning, to have a very bad day.
Someplace else in the house, she heard her mother issuing commands. There, she was saying. There. No. Yes. No.
Mechanically, Alice’s right hand went to her bedside table, and pulled open its drawer, and she felt the comforting curve of the bottle inside, and heard the comforting rattle of the pills, and into her mouth she took one of them, and then two of them, and then three, and then four. She bit down on them and chewed. Then she put Bear’s blanket back over her face. A shroud, she thought, a pall, and then laughed a bit to herself.
• • •
When she opened her eyes, she heard voices on the lawn. Many of them. She tried to sit up but could not. There was darkness above and around her. As a child, she had avoided naps: for waking from them caused in her a sort of supernatural despair. Bear, too, had been like this: the only time he was bleary was after his afternoon rest.
She felt it now. Despite the heat of the afternoon, she pulled the covers around herself.
After a minute, or an hour, she rose.
Then the nightstand, then the drawer, then the pills. Two more. Three.
She walked with a hand on the wall. She felt her way down the hallway and into the kitchen, where she fumbled in the cabinet for a glass, and then ran water from the sink. It came from a well, and tasted sweetly of the earth.
A small trickle of liquid escaped the side of her mouth, and she ran a hand below her chin to catch it. And then she noticed movement: in her peripheral vision, a hesitant human form. She turned. The new cook. The girl from town. The nameless one.
“What,” said Alice.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, ma’am,” said Alice, but the girl only blinked at her.
The cabinets. The wall. The two steps up into the great room. Careful, careful. The back of the sofa. The side of the central fireplace, pleasingly rough.
She stopped short at the glass door that led to the lawn. There before her were her guests—hers too, she thought—not just Peter’s.
Now they had begun without her. No one had thought to rouse her—not even her own husband. Outside, in the sun, all of them were tipping their glasses back, tipping their heads back in merriment.
She scanned the crowd for Peter and spotted him speaking with the McLellans: husband, wife, daughter, son, each one, thought Alice, terrible in a different way.
She moved as if to place a hand on the sliding glass door, but found it was open instead. And so she tipped forward through it, which caused a woman ten feet in front of her to shriek her name gladly—“Alice!”—and then pause.
The crowd, having heard this greeting, turned—and then hushed.
Alice was realizing something: there were too many pills inside her. After a week of not taking any, especially. After a day of not eating. She put a hand to her hair and found it out of order, great strands of it hanging down in front of her ears. She put a hand to her outfit, her short skirt, and found it up too high around her waist.
Her eyes swam toward Peter’s. He was too far from her. He was saying something to the McLellans, something about her: she could see him moving his mouth. The McLellan boy, John Paul Jr., had become a man. He’d take over the business, it was said, and she could see it: he already had the air that all these men had. The feeling he was owed something. Everything.
• • •
Through the haze of her intoxication, she had a sense of déjà vu: a feeling of living a particular series of scenes for the second time in her life.
She put a hand to her face to make certain she was intact.
Then she retreated.
Back into the house, into its shade, back down the hallway toward Bear’s room, unstoppably, where she lay on the bed that was no longer her son’s, where she curled into another tight arrangement of bones and flesh, where, several hours later, two guests would find her deeply asleep.
