“I bet you didn’t have anything like this at Middlebrook,” Sharon had said when their meals arrived, clasping her hands together as if she might say grace.
No, Alice thought. What we had was better. Thin, crispy fries, which went straight from the freezer to the fryer. Not as good as McDonald’s fries, which were the best, but better than these flabby things. Actually, the food at Middlebrook had been pretty good all-around. It may have had the worst reputation in the state, but it had the best food.
“Really,” Sharon said, “have a sundae.” Sharon loved that word: really. Really, Alice, you have to trust me. Really, Alice, this is for the best. Really, Alice, I believe you. But what did really really mean when Sharon said it? Did it indicate that everything else Sharon said was fake? Or was it supposed to show that what followed was extra-real, really-real, super-size real?
“I don’t need a sundae,” Alice said. “Really.”
“Today’s not a day to worry about calories. Treat yourself.”
Oh, so she should worry about calories, just not today. “I guess I have to go on a diet,” Alice said, head lowered over her plate, maintaining contact with Sharon ’s puppy-brown eyes through the fringe of her pale lashes.
“No, no, that’s not what I meant at all,” Sharon said. “Everyone has to worry about calories. Just not every day. It’s important to build a treat day into your schedule.”
“But I’m fat,” Alice said. “Didn’t you notice? I got really fat while I was in Middlebrook.”
She loved this word, adored making cruel pronouncements about herself. I’m fat. I’m ugly. I’m clumsy. She wasn’t looking for automatic contradictions. In fact, she didn’t actually hold herself in such low esteem. No, she just liked the way adults panicked when she spoke this way, enjoyed their frantic reassurances. Sticks and stones, grown-ups said when you were little. Turned out they were the ones who feared words.
“Oh, no, honey, you shouldn’t talk that way. You’re just…big-boned, like I am. And the diet was so starchy there, and you didn’t get enough exercise, and, well, what with everything, you put on what some people call the ‘freshman fifteen.’ ”
“Only I’m not a freshman,” Alice said. “I’m a graduate. I got my GED.”
“Freshman year of college,” Sharon said. “Because that’s when most kids are away from home for the first time, making their own choices…” Her voice trailed off miserably.
“So I’m precocious,” Alice said.
“Yes,” Sharon said, clearly not getting it. “Yes, you are.”
“I’ve got the freshman fifty-and I won’t start college until the fall.”
“You’re going to go to college, then?” Sharon bobbed her head. She was so easy to please, there was no joy in it. “Where? What do you plan to study?”
“Community college. I have to get a part-time job and help pay my way.” She gave Sharon a sly look. “It’s hard to get scholarships, coming out of Middlebrook.”
Sharon took this as a rebuke. Alice knew she would. No one had ever wanted Alice ’s approval as much as Sharon Kerpelman did. The slightest suggestion that Alice ’s life was less than it might be was wounding to this woman, who seemed to feel Alice owed her gratitude and affection, if not downright love. Sharon cared about Alice, she announced often, a note of pride in her voice. Sharon ’s pride was what kept Alice from returning her affection. Sharon could not think so well of herself for sticking by Alice unless sticking by Alice was a weird thing to do.
“You know what you should do?” Sharon asked, changing the subject.
Alice was interested in spite of herself. She was quite keen to know what she should do. She always had been. She liked those magazine articles with rules and checklists. She tore them out and tried to follow them, but it was never as easy as it looked. There was always something-an ingredient, an assumption-that kept her from completing everything as prescribed. Kosher salt, for example, for homemade pedicures. She wasn’t sure what that was, and how it was different from other salt. Not that she would have been allowed to give herself any kind of spa treatment at Middlebrook, but she had been looking ahead to a day when she could.
Sharon leaned forward. “You should walk,” she said triumphantly. “You’d be surprised what it does for the body. Just lots and lots of walking. Whenever I go visit friends in New York, I can eat whatever I want because I walk everywhere.”
Sharon beamed at her own brilliance, nodding and smiling, looking for some kind of response. Alice felt stranded, the way she often did in conversations, as if she were standing on an ice floe and needed to leap to another one. The whole sequence mystified her: Walking. Friends. So Sharon had friends? Friends in New York, no less. Why did she have friends in New York? Wasn’t she from Baltimore? Hadn’t she told Alice that a hundred times, how she had grown up less than a mile from Alice, on the other side of the park, in that place with the stupid name?
“My grandparents live in Connecticut,” Alice said at last. Connecticut was right next to New York. It was all she had to offer, conversationally. She had never been there herself, but she had heard her mother speak of it. It was known as the Nutmeg State. To spell it, you have to Connect i to Cut. Connecticut.
“Yes, I remember your grandparents. Have you talked to them lately?”
“No.” Sharon frowned, full of pity. “But then, I never did. Talk to them much. I only saw them once a year, before. They came down a couple of times, at first, but my grandmother said it was too hard.”
“How selfish.” Sharon almost yelped the last word, and people nearby jumped, as if a glass had tumbled to the floor.
Alice thought about the word selfish, turned it over and over in her mind. Certain words had an almost hypnotic effect. Always candid Helen had told Alice about her own “youthful experiments”-Helen’s phrase-with marijuana and other drugs, and how a single word could become the funniest thing in the world for no reason. But you didn’t have to be high to latch onto a word. Selfish. Related to the self, of course. But ish was usually reserved for those things that were inexact-oneish, warmish, newish-or kind of gross. Oh, ish, her friend Wendy would squeal when something offended her. It was cute, even the boys thought so, but only Wendy, who was petite, could get away with that kind of baby talk. Alice would have been mocked for lisping.
“ Alice?” Sharon prompted.
“They’re not really selfish,” she said, now that she had worked the word out for herself. “They just live so far away.”