Goodnight Alice
By Cynthia Hawkins
 

As we rode west toward Monterey I reached over the passenger seat from the back and angled a cell phone over Katherine’s left breast. “Can you see what you’re doing?” she asked as she worked the breast pump that wheezed with each outward draw of its handle.

Hooo-pah , went the pump. “Yes, I can see what I’m doing,” I said, and then, “It sounds like you’re breast-feeding Darth Vader.” My nine-year-old, Hannah clapped her hand to her face and snorted a laugh.

Jen drove. Katherine pumped. Adam worked pistachios out of their shells in the back seat near me. Hannah sat scrunched between us. I snapped a phone photo of Katherine’s left breast with her nipple stretched beyond recognition into the machinery. Hours ago her husband had deemed this, her breast wrung out by a breast pump, a sight he couldn’t unsee. Minutes ago he’d sent a picture of their three-month-old son nestled in a bouncy seat next to a bottle of Rolling Rock with a message that read something like: “Enjoy your day away with your friends, mom. Dad and I are doing just fine.” The picture I took was her retaliation.

“Send a message with it,” Katherine directed.

“Um,” I stared down at her phone, trying to figure it out.

“Here,” Adam sat the bag of pistachios at his feet and flapped his fingers for me to hand the phone to him.

None of us were unfamiliar with Katherine’s breasts. The last time Jen and Adam and I saw her, she’d stepped out of her bathing suit in the half-dark and ate a mango naked in my swimming pool. Hannah had her own unceremonious introduction to Katherine’s breasts earlier when Katherine had excused herself with the baby, leaving the rest of us at the breakfast table. After some discussion of knitted fish and missing legs and farmer’s markets and The Big Lebowski, I looked beside me to find Hannah’s chair empty and angled away from the table. She was in the living room, sitting opposite Katherine, Katherine’s breasts lulling heavily with milk from beneath her rolled-up shirt, the baby curled in Katherine’s arms, Hannah helping Katherine make a list of all the mammals in the world who nursed their young in much the same way. The picture on the phone I’d handed to Adam was perhaps as unremarkable to us all as a picture of her ear twisted out of shape.

“What should I say?” Adam’s thumbs moved over the buttons.

“Say ‘I got your rolling rocks right here,’” she answered.

Adam’s thumbs tapped against the screen, and then he gave the phone back to Katherine.

“There you go,” he said as his hand withdrew from the front seats and reached into the bag of pistachios at his feet again. “You’re welcome.”

He’d made the photo her phone’s wallpaper. She rolled her eyes at the sight of it. “Goodnight Alice!” she growled. She’d implemented the phrase in lieu of cursing shortly after the baby was born. Every time she said it I imagined something equally out of place, a whisk in a potted fern or cleavage on the Mona Lisa. After sealing a small bag of milk, she handed me the bag and the pump so I could shove them both into the cooler of ice behind me. The milk had to keep until she got back home again.

* * *

“What kind of grass is that? That golden yellow grass?” I asked as we wound through the hills clustered around the San Luis Reservoir, perfectly dome-shaped hills like sand molded in upended bowls, perfectly bare of anything except the golden yellow grass pressed flat in the wind.

“Dead grass,” Katherine said. “It’s green earlier in the year.”

I slumped, “But. But, this looks right. The yellow.”

“I know,” Jen chimed in as she steered. “It always reminds me of the setting in E.T.”

“It should be yellow all the time,” I said.

“It should be dead all the time?” Katherine asked.

“Yes. It should be dead all the time. I’m sorry, California, but you can’t have nice, lush green grass because it doesn’t look right. It looks right dead.”

I tried to say that it looked just like a painting I’d seen, but I couldn’t remember the name of the artist or the work. Days after this, when I’d unpack flip-flops and a hairdryer and a box of earplugs, I’d remember it was Mother Earth Laid Bare by Alexander Hogue.

With the land eroded to the smooth sand-colored planes of the dust-bowl days, Hogue’s hills suggested a naked woman lying on her back with her arms twisted aside in listless ridges. In the car, this was all I could remember: “The hills looked like a woman’s curves. You don’t know what I’m talking about?”

No one knew what I was talking about.

Adam motioned for the phone again. He wanted Google answers to the more pressing question at hand. Where was E.T. filmed?

* * *

A cotton curtain, rockets and stars like a child’s bed-sheet, flapped in the opening of a shallow back room in the boat’s interior as Hannah and I, sitting by the windows, clung to a cold metal seat. The boat nosed upward against a wave that slapped its sides and splashed the decks, lifting us from the bench. Hannah glanced at me. “Wahoo!” I said in a laugh, resisting the unstrung feeling in my ribs. She managed a close-lipped grin that faded just as quickly. Out the windows, we could see Jen, Adam, and Katherine on the bow, pressing forward with the boat against the frigid wind and waves. The sailboat-stippled coastline of Monterey retreated into the mist of our wake. I fumbled after my own phone in the bag sliding on the floor into the instep of my shoe. Squeezing against Hannah, holding the phone up for a photo of us both, I said, “It’s like we’re riding The Perfect Storm wave,” then smiled and snapped. I imagined the CGI wall of water and the boat straining to climb it, perfectly vertical, just before being consumed.

“What?” Hannah said, the syllable between us with her cheek pressed to mine.

“Oh, you haven’t seen that yet. It’s a movie. About a crew on a boat.”

“What happens?”

“Um,” I began as we examined the two of us on the small screen, in the lower corner, the gray light in the windows making shadows of us. “Nothing.”

An elderly man in khaki pants, white sneakers, and a windbreaker rose against the inertia like Frankenstein’s creature taking his first steps. His hand clapped to the bar overhead. He swayed as the boat pitched. When his eyes met mine he waggled his brows above a lopsided smile. It was an act. It was a vaudeville routine. It was a joke scribbled on a napkin that only I could unfold. Everyone else, even Hannah, was looking out the windows at the knotted black ribbons of the Pacific. The old man made his way to the side door which he then yanked shut. Our cheeks flushed warm in the sudden absence of the wind.

“When do we get to see the whales?” Hannah asked, peering out, crumpling my sleeve in her fist.

“When we stop.”

As the boat slapped against another rough wave, the tour guide on the loudspeaker ordered Jen, Adam, and Katherine off the bow. Katherine shifted the soft-sided, zipper-topped cooler behind her as she made her way, hand over hand, into the view of the side windows. Hannah thumbed a ginger candy out of her pocket and began to unwrap it. Jen had told her it was for nausea.

“Are you feeling sick?” I asked her.

“No,” came the answer as thin as the hissing of the wind through the crack the old man left in the side door.

* * *

Katherine wiped damp hair from her cheeks, the bare tops of her arms mottled from the cold, and said to Hannah and I on the interior bench, “Time to pump again, but I don’t know where I could do it.”

I nodded toward the rocket-ship curtain sweeping the doorway. “How about back there? Probably if you didn’t mind asking, they’d understand.” With the exception of the tour guide who’d been pointing out whales “at three o’clock, eleven o’clock, one o’clock, folks, they are all around us, we are surrounded by animals,” the boat was run by squinty-eyed, scruffy-chinned men in Levis and frayed cable-knit sweaters. Hannah and I had privately agreed that they looked like men on frozen fish-stick boxes.

“I guess I don’t mind asking, but,” she looked around, “hmm. I don’t know.”

“We are surrounded, surrounded by animals. All around us,” the voice on the speaker practically whispered.

A blonde-headed girl in a fur-trimmed coat skittered inside through one door and out the opposite again, slamming against the rails in the open air and squealing at the sight of another blue whale tail withdrawing back into the water. She clamped fingerless-gloved hands around a small camera. Her ponytail flittered against her shoulder seam in the wind.

Hannah and I had been standing in that very spot only moments ago, Hannah, splayed arms, splayed legs, gripping the side of the boat like a spider while I’d snapped photos and said things like, “Oh my God, Hannah, are you seeing this? Aren’t they so incredibly, massively huge and lovely? Are you seeing this one spout water? Wait. Did you hear that? Whale song? I could hear whale song.” Then with one hand she grappled for the hem of my sweatshirt and suggested it might be less cold inside. She seemed so much smaller, thinner, paler, latched onto the boat that way, her jaw tensing against the fear she refused to acknowledge out loud. I took her hand in mine and said, “I have you. Don’t worry.” But it didn’t matter. She bruised her knees pressing so hard against the exterior bench as she’d shuffled back toward the door, one hand on a rail, one hand on me, holding her breath in her cheeks.

So we sat inside, and Katherine had resigned to wait until we’d docked to find a place to pump milk. As she stood again, ice sloshed out of the gaps at either end of the zipper. “Goodnight Alice!” she said. “What kind of fucking cooler is this?”

With my foot angling after the errant ice cubes, I frantically scraped them under the bench. I could just imagine that old man’s foot meeting one whenever he came back inside, imagine his whole body flying out from under him in a vaudevillian flop, his head cracking like a pistachio against a rivet. Blood everywhere. I scraped the ice-cubes in closer. “Sweet Jesus,” I exhaled. “That was a close call.”

“What?” Hannah wanted to know. Her nose had gone pink in the cold. Her dark eyes squinted down on me. Beyond her, beyond the window, the little blonde girl vomited through her fingerless gloves and into the sea.

* * *

On the trip back to shore the waves had lessened. The boat rose and fell on the swells it cut across, and Hannah slumped asleep against me. I looped an arm around her. The night before in the guestroom we’d shared Hannah had sat up, frantic, patting her hands across the sheets. “Lie back down, sweetie,” I’d told her as I’d reached for the fine knob of her shoulder. “It’s just a dream.”

“Where did my leg go? Where did my leg go!”

“Your leg is right there. You’re just dreaming.”

Her whole body went slack with disgust as she whipped toward me in the dark and said in a rasped breath, “You don’t care about me. You don’t care about my leg.”

“I do care about you, and I want you to go back to sleep.” I urged her to recline into her pillow again, swept her hair from her temples, and kissed her forehead so maybe, as she’d sunk back into her dream, she’d at least remember I was right beside her, keeping watch.

As she slept on the boat in my arm with her face tipped up I snapped a photo and typed for the caption: “And suddenly whale watching got really boring.”

* * *

In a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, the waiter sat us in a corner off to ourselves. “This is perfect,” Katherine said as we opened menus and she motioned for me, sitting at her right-hand side, to pass her the pump from the cooler at my feet. I shook the ice-melt off of the cone-end of the pump, and Adam bristled when it sprinkled across his face.

“Jesus!” He drew his chin to his chest and blinked. “Is that breast milk?”

“Yes,” I laughed.

“No!” Katherine corrected. “It’s from the ice. It was down in the ice.”

“Hey.” Hannah pointed to the fish-and-chips on the menu. “Do you think that’s what I want?” I nodded.

Three tables away, the waiter seated the old man in the khaki pants and his wife. He sat with his back to us, showing a rough bristle of white hair under a cap he tugged into place. You have no idea how I saved your life, I was thinking. In an alternate reality his wife was sobbing into a tissue over his corpse and we couldn’t eat our dinner from the secret, slippery, ice-cube shaped guilt of it all.

Hooo-pah, went the pump under Katherine’s tugged up shirt. I angled myself to obscure the view of the man and his wife should they happen to turn this way.

“I think I’m getting the lobster,” Katherine said.

Pump in one hand, Katherine reached into her bag with the other and checked her phone for messages. Nothing. “Ugh. Change it back, Adam,” she said with her eyes closed, “I’m tired of looking at my own nips.” She handed it to him across the table as Jen, beside him, closed her menu with a slap of its joined covers. Katherine readjusted her breast. The machine wheezed. We placed our orders. And just past Katherine’s left elbow, a small cluster of wide-eyed tourists paused in the wind and drizzle to peer through the picture window she leaned against.

© 2011 prickofthespindle.com