Alice said that she would love a glass. At the beach that magnificent day, I’d told her I didn’t think anything could grow inside of me. She touched my belly and said she was sure I was wrong. I said I didn’t want anything to ever grow inside me.
—I had a miscarriage once, she told me. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I’d skipped two periods, but I was an idiot. My boyfriend was French. We were fifteen at a hiking camp in the Dolomites. I told him, I think I’m having a miscarriage. He didn’t know what to do. So he fell asleep. He didn’t sleep on a sleeping bag, or with a cover, and in the morning when it was over and I’d returned from washing myself in a creek, he told me he’d slept uncomfortably all night. That was his gift to me. His night of discomfort.
—Something came out of you?
—You don’t have to look at it. I remember how badly I wanted my mother. Do you miss yours?
—No, I lied. I only wish my aunt were still around.
—Your aunt raised you? How did your parents die, Joan?
—Gosia, yes, she raised me. Or she let me raise myself.
—Tell me about her, Alice said. And happily I described Gosia to her, her smells and clothes and furs. Her large black Mercedes and how, every time she spoke to me from her car phone, I would hear the seatbelt chime and I would say, Gosia, put on your seatbelt, and she would say in her heavy accent, Shut up! Tell me, how you are feeling?
I explained to Alice how it had been calming that Gosia wasn’t my mother, that I didn’t have to care for her in that way. That I didn’t have to know everything about her. There was no backstory through which I had to sift. Her own history only served as a lesson for me. She mined it when she had to give me advice.
I thought of Gosia then in my kitchen, what she would tell me to do. What mental strategy she would instruct me to employ. She always thought that anyone who hurt me should be punished severely. She wanted me to destroy Vic’s life, tell his wife. I told her that he had children and Gosia said, I don’t care about this man’s children. You are child. Look what he is doing to you.
I’d seen pictures of Eleanor. I never wanted another child to hurt the way that I had. The truth is that even then, in my kitchen, I felt sorry for her. I didn’t feel fear. The only fear I felt was that I would lose Alice. Already I had the premonition that Eleanor’s presence would push Alice away.
Eleanor was what my mother would have called a poor soul. She’d suffered so much. I couldn’t decide which parent had been crueler to her. I thought of her little brother in the tub. The last moments of a child’s life. I pictured him looking at his mother, the only thing in the world he knew to trust, looking at her wild eyes as she made that decision. It was easier for Eleanor to blame me than to blame her parents.
I took the glass pitcher from the refrigerator. The fragrant mint leaves floated at the top. I selected three wineglasses by the stem and handled all of them with the skills I’d learned as a waitress at an all-glass restaurant on the marina in Jersey City. That terrible winter I slept with two clients, one of whom—the married one, though I didn’t know that at the time—asked if he could fuck me in the ass the very first night he came to my apartment. We had been fucking for barely five minutes when he asked. The next night he came into the restaurant, this time with his wife. I lifted the rubber bar mat and poured the evening’s spillovers into his Long Island iced tea. Then I stirred it with a knife that had just deboned a raw chicken.
Now I set the glasses on the table and filled Alice’s cup first. As I did so, I saw out of the corner of my eye a blur of activity in Eleanor’s lap. I thought she was going to shoot Alice. I thought of the time her father had me on all fours, going in and out of me, his hands lightly gripping my waist. Not making any noises because he was too happy, too scared it would all end if he made an unpalatable move. I thought of his warm breath in my ear and the glee in his eyes. I thought of what he had done to his daughter and his wife.
—Eleanor, I said. I said it so calmly and sweetly that it shocked her, that she let the gun drop in her lap.
Alice realized what had been about to happen, what might, in fact, still happen. She screamed and then she began to cry. I had never seen someone look so beautiful while they cried. But it made her seem immature. It was such a stupid thing. To be afraid of a little girl with a gun that she didn’t know how to use.
Then Alice pitched forward and projectile-vomited onto the girl’s face. The stink was immediate and terrible. Eleanor stood and screamed and the gun dropped to the floor. The vomit—the color and texture of oatmeal—was in the girl’s eyes, coating her eyelashes; it covered her entire nose and mouth, and as she was
