Feels like I have a bag over my shoulder that’s full of yesterday. As I approach Alice’s place it gets not exactly heavy but cumbersome. Alice hasn’t lived here in years and the big house has seen better days. I should know. I was there for them.
Every time I went out, my mother said always know where the exit is so I got good at picturing disaster – I don’t know maybe that’s why I write little eclipses of it into my stories – but first time I went to Alice’s I’d never seen so many ways out I mean there were front doors all over the place, twelve at least, all of them going in different directions, various shapes and sizes, rectangles, squares and whatever you call the ones with a rounded top.
Walking in there first time automatically planning my escape I said what’s with all the doors? and Alice must have been asked that question so many times she could have said the truth, which was that her grandfather who had built the house was practicing, but instead, or first I mean, she said what doors? It wasn’t until the walk home that day I started to see his work on the houses between ours and Alice’s, I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed before, and even my own door as I walked up our driveway was a marvelous thing, shaped like a vertical hopscotch.
Don’t worry I’m not going to tell you the middle part, at least not in a dragged-out way, I mean about growing up and all that, and my sister Paula, who moved out of the city soon as she could, and our parents who got old in that house from which I now feel a certain pull as I face Alice’s place, grappling with the past. I think maybe this is a safe place to put it down.
They were like two little birds my parents for so long in that house getting more shrill and beady but they sold it three years ago and now they live with Paula on the edge of two hundred acres of forest and they insist they love it, that they adore the view. I go every Saturday stay the night leave Sunday afternoon there’s a pocket where escape is not only easy but encouraged, my parents are tired and Paula doesn’t want to worry about my vegetarianism another dinner and off I go, my mother waving through the parted sheers, her black eyes darting as if she can’t find her way out.
When I was a kid I used to go read to Alice after her eyes got bad. I am ashamed to admit that without the exchange of a few dollars I wouldn’t have.
Just the beginning and the end she said none of that middle nonsense so I’d read for instance To Kill A Mockingbird, I’d go until you wanted to know about Boo and she’d say get to the end and there was Boo in Jem’s room already his white hands sweaty on the pale walls.
Alice was the first person I didn’t care about crying in front of after she explained that at all times a black macular degeneration dot took my place. Still my voice evaporated and she knew I cried but it didn’t matter, she cried as well, and I watched freely her easy breakdowns, book after book, and that’s when I began to understand the beauty in heartbreak.
I always stop by her place – it’s not exactly a hospital but a home – on the way back from Paula’s and stay for Sunday dinner. We just read Life of Pi yesterday and I said that’s a book you might want to know the middle about and she said I don’t have time and I just smiled, it was the answer I expected, but now I wonder if she knew.
Her care worker called me this morning said Alice died in her sleep and there’s your eclipse.
