Alternate Endings Read online

  “But I don’t have a remote control on that phone,” Effie replied.

  Later, after her mother had gone to bed, Calyce began what became an hour-long labyrinth into new technology. She finally did it, pressing all the prompts, and she heard her mother’s hesitant, weeks-old recorded pre-operative voice.

  “I’ll be away indefinitely, so you shouldn’t leave a message. Write to me, since all my mail’s being forwarded to my daughter in D.C., where I’ll be living. Here’s the address.”

  The next Thursday at 11 a.m., Calyce drove in clotting D.C. traffic to the newly painted yellow curb in front of Damion’s brand-new building on Eighth Street. Idling with her flashers on, she looked in both directions on the skirting sidewalk. She called up, but he didn’t answer, so she called again. Finally she turned off the Camry and popped out nearly at a run to the elevator inside and up to the door of his apartment, on which she rapped hard and kept rapping.

  When he threw open the door with irritation, she startled at his college sweatpants and directed him to change “right now.” But he wouldn’t.

  He said, “I didn’t ask for this interview. I’m not interested.”

  He closed the door. She heard the tongue of the doorknob in the latch, so stunned she couldn’t move. She stood at eye level with his peephole, staring at the tiny circle of unblinking glass.

  They liked her flash fiction, they told her. The Greek stuff was interesting.

  It pleased her. They had to say nice things because she was grading them, but still. She was encouraged.

  “Our assignment for the week is to write a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. Read a few of them to see how brutal they are, then write one for modern times, using one as your stepping-off point.”

  A girl asked, “Which one are you using for yours?”

  She wasn’t smiling when she told them.

  “The Stubborn Child.”

  Every moment of every day and every night, her strong, lithe body was covered. There was no one to see her, and appreciate her, naked. She had no man to make her lonely skin feel the warmth of touch.

  At night, when she couldn’t stand it anymore, she drew a bath and slipped into it, sliding in her legs and her rump and her hips, then leaning back so the heat enveloped her. She didn’t use bubbles on those occasions, or tea lights. There was no soft music but just the tight hug of the water. It plumped her so that, when she climbed out, her super-rich moisturizer flowed smoothly and rubbed in completely.

  She had hidden the baby blue stiff-crinolined party dress at the back of her small closet, keeping it though it ate up precious room. She had last worn it for a cousin’s wedding when she was in ninth grade. Her mother had saved it, knowing her child had outgrown her yellow-ruffled elementary school dress-up dress with its white-starched collar and turned-up short-sleeve cuffs, the one she had put on for every ceremonial occasion for years.

  This blue one had been her next favorite, with its organza swishy skirt over the full lining whose bulk pinched at the bodice’s tight waist that defined her narrow torso and budding breasts. It had made her uncomfortable at first, this chesty emphasis, but she had grown into it as she had grown into being a young woman. Today, though, it was too long and old-fashioned, and it too had become far too tight. The last time she had tried it on in desperation for a high school dress-up day, the bust darts had stretched and some of the stitches had popped.

  Her mother insisted, though, saying of course it still fit. She made the teenager pull the blue swirl from deep in the closet and required her child to model it, sure she could wear it to the first large family gathering since her mother had finally returned. When her daughter, now seventeen and tall, refused to don it, the mother snatched it from the bed and thrust it at her, announcing that no other dress would be purchased.

  “Mom, you don’t know,” the girl said. “You’ve been gone so long.”

  “No I haven’t. You’re just trying to make me feel bad.”

  “Almost a year. Since August twenty-first. It’s June. You bought me that dress for my birthday two years ago.”

  “But you haven’t changed. It ought to fit you.”

  “I’ve got this now,” the girl said, looking down.

  “You’re just sensitive. Here. Try it on.”

  But still she wouldn’t take it.

  The mother’s mouth made two angry lines. “When did you get so stubborn?”

  The girl’s mouth did the same. “If you’d been here, maybe you’d know.”

  March

  The blue-jacketed young man at the desk knew her well enough already that he no longer made her sign in. He even hopped up that Saturday morning when he saw how over-laden she was and darted around the marble counter to help, unburdening her and rushing ahead across the polished travertine to push the elevator button.

  “He’s sure lucky you do all this for him. My mother doesn’t.”

  “I’m just glad I found parking on the street.”

  She let the guard hold the groceries but held onto a full box of business stationery that she held like a waitress with a tray.

  At Damion’s new door at one far end of the perfect, long, beige, just-carpeted hallway, Calyce knocked. When he finally answered in his sweats, rubbing his eyes on a face not yet arranged for the day, she bustled in past him, talking as she unloaded the perishables into his brand-new, builder-installed stainless steel refrigerator.

  “I brought your resumes,” she said. “You owe me $149.99. That was the cheapest.”

  He watched her empty the bags. “Nobody uses paper anymore. I don’t need them. But I’m glad you’re here. I need your advice about something. Let me walk you back down to the car.”

  She protested that she had more time but he led her efficiently out of his apartment with his hand on her back. As they went he told her he had a new, scenester boss at the bar now, and this idiot wanted him to work a day shift twice a week, with two fewer nights.

  “What’s a scenester?” Calyce asked.

  “An asshole.”

  “Damion.”

  “Sorry.”

  He had to cut fruit garnishes now and fill ice bins and beer coolers in advance for the night bartender, who should be him, who was a fat guy in bad clothes now making Damion’s good nighttime money. He had to get up early, go in and haul beer, wine and alcohol deliveries into the basement store room when he wasn’t pouring fewer drinks for fewer tips for stupid daytime drunks, he said as they walked out the building’s front door. And the bar, he saw now that he lived here, wasn’t nearly as chill as the newer ones right on this street, which attracted a much better crowd and didn’t require a Metro ride for him to get to work.

  “I never did like that place,” Calyce said as they stopped at the curb.

  “So what should I do?”

  She noticed the growing Saturday traffic, which was miffed that her parked car blocked the right lane.

  “The same thing I always tell you,” she said as she fished out her keys. “Get away from there.”

  He thought about it. He nodded. “You’re right.”

  At school the next Monday, Calyce scanned the teacher’s lunchroom from the doorway. I’m imagining it, but she saw it again, people shifting their bodies not to look at her, including a whole table of her English Department colleagues.

  She looked at her wrist, where there wasn’t a watch, and she pretended to remember something that time chased. She pivoted and walked away.

  “He just left,” Effie reported breathlessly when Calyce arrived home. “He quit. You didn’t tell me.”

  “He quit the bar?”

  “He says you told him to this past Saturday.”

  They lumbered in like elephants and moved as a stolid herd, her glum compatriots when they massed for her mandatory weekly meeting. Even DeGroot, who was in town that day, leaned toward the other teachers and away from her. Only Dan seemed to be genuinely friendly.

  “So yes, we’ll do Pe
rsepolis next year,” she said ten minutes later. “It seems to be a popular choice, though I don’t know why. Anything else?”

  Shy Amita spoke up for the first time that year. “I had a question. A comment, actually.”

  The beautiful young woman had wriggled tall in her chair. “I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just say it. What’s with all the oppression? It seems to be the subject of everything we do that’s not Shakespeare.”

  “It reflects the history of the school,” Calyce said, “and the families expect it.”

  “It’s depressing. Can’t we do something else ever?”

  Calyce looked down at her. “What do you suggest?”

  Amita said Goon Squad, but then other answers came spewing as the rest of them added theirs in a flood. Calyce heard The Road, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The Things They Carried, which last one came from DeGroot, surprisingly.

  A week later at school a text buzzed her phone: 2 interviews 2MORO! FRT

  Ten seconds later another one: Ur resumes worked! UFB

  She had to look it all up, then texted back: Language!

  He replied: LYSM SRSLY

  Five minutes later, another text buzzed and Calyce happily dug her hand into her purse again. But it was from Belinda.

  Can you meet today at 3:30 in my office?

  Belinda was alone at her desk, working, but when Calyce knocked lightly she looked up.

  Her face didn’t change. It still didn’t as she stood and gestured Calyce to sit. At the far edge of the plastic playing field Calyce could see through the plate glass, the rimming trees were tumescent with their first blooms.

  Belinda got right to the point, which was unusual. She had received complaints, she said, from several of the English teachers at the other campus about Calyce’s recent meeting there with Javier.

  “Why are they contacting you?” Calyce interrupted.

  Her friend steepled her fingers in a new mannerism.

  “Because you’re Interim Head here at the high school. John’s only a teacher now, which makes him your direct report. You’re mine.”

  No warmth, no smile. “But he’s gotten complaints too. When he came to me, I told him I’d talk to you. What happened with Javier?”

  Calyce told her. She remembered it all and recounted it virtually word-for-word. She said she had no idea why there should be a problem.

  “You really don’t?” Belinda said. “You don’t see why Javier’s so offended, and why the entire faculty at the other campus, and not just the English teachers, want to know whether they’re valued?”

  But Calyce didn’t. Incredulous, Belinda had to explain.

  “And you have to apologize to Javier. That’s a directive. Do it right away because any longer and it won’t make any difference in how they all feel about you. And how the rest of us do here at the high school.”

  At the door, Calyce asked her new boss, “Why hasn’t John said anything to me?”

  “Because he says he’s talked to you time and again but it doesn’t change.”

  The third Sunday in March Damion arrived to move Calyce’s flat-screen TV down to his old room, where Effie was now staying. He didn’t install it, though, on the pivoting wall mount where his own had been. He left the unsightly metal bracket exposed and set the big rectangle instead on the Lucite shelf below it. Calyce was surprised to see that he had stopped on his way to buy a little molded plastic foot-stand.

  Later, above Effie, who had stayed below to enjoy it, Damion asked when his grandmother was finally leaving.

  “I don’t know,” Calyce said. “It’s a sore subject. Why?”

  “She’s chugging around this neighborhood twice every day in that eighties track suit. What’s for dinner?”

  But she sensed something was wrong, and she asked him.

  “I’ve been looking,” he answered. “You know I have, but the jobs aren’t coming.”

  “What about those two interviews?”

  “On the phone! And then they didn’t want to see me. I’m going to have trouble with the rent next week.”

  It was 3 a.m. that same night and Calyce was up, having awakened two hours earlier from a jostling sleep that had coiled her into her bedclothes. She had to untangle herself to get out of bed, and she was sweating in spite of the cold draft from her open balcony door. Her dream had been terrifying.

  She booted her laptop and checked her bank balance, which was $38 lower than it had been at 11 p.m.

  She found the checkbook for her dwindling savings account in a drawer and wrote Damion a $500 check to help with his rent, which was nearly all she had left. Thirsty, she tiptoed to the kitchen for ice water and set herself up at the dining table. She sucked the knuckle of her right thumb as she began researching options. She investigated English tutoring but saw she would have to split the hourly rate with the tutoring companies. She went next to SAT instructing, and she was deep into Kaplan’s website when her mother’s voice right behind her jerked her straight up.

  “Are you looking for a new job?”

  “Where did you come from?” Calyce closed the laptop.

  “I’m a gazelle now,” her mother said happily. “Why did you close that? And why aren’t you sleeping?” Effie pulled out a chair next to her daughter.

  Calyce put an elbow on the computer lid. “I was looking at jobs for Damion. He keeps telling me how much he’s doing, but there’s no way for me to be sure he’s actually doing it. He doesn’t seem to be making any progress.”

  Her mother thought. “Invite Selene, for dinner, just the two of you. I’ll stay in my room. Tell Damion it’s a girls’ night. Find out from her.”

  At six-thirty the next morning, Calyce checked her phone, but Javier still had not responded to the voicemail she had left him asking for another meeting at the middle school as soon as possible. It was unlike him. Javier was punctilious.

  She didn’t want to leave a second one from home, since Effie could awaken, and she didn’t want to do it from school, so she pulled over once she had driven away from the townhouse. In her lap was a white sheet of copy paper with the handwritten script she had composed.

  But he didn’t answer her second call either. She launched into her prepared speech.

  “Javier, it’s Calyce again. I want to take this opportunity to apologize if I have said anything to offend you. I certainly didn’t mean to cause offense. If you’re free for lunch some time next week, I’d like to take you out somewhere by the middle school. I can come down. No need to come up. I would be grateful if you would let me know at your convenience.”

  She then texted Belinda: I’ve apologized. Done.

  Within ten minutes, though, her phone rang, but she was driving and had to let it go to voicemail. She couldn’t listen until she had parked underground at the school.

  “Calyce, it’s Javier. Thank you for your message. Of course I accept your apology. Unfortunately, however, I am not available for lunch any time soon. So there’s no need for you to ‘come down.’”

  On March 23rd the gods announced the arrival of a sparkling spring with the clearest, warmest day of the dawning year, so fine that all across a city renowned for its springs magnolia trees would bend with the wedding-gown weight of waxy blooms by the end of that glorious afternoon. It had already reached sixty-eight degrees by the time Calyce’s Senior Creative Writing class began, and she was staring out the second-floor window as her fizzy students tumbled in.

  She turned to them. “‘I meant to do my work today.’ Who knows the next line?”

  They didn’t. “‘But a brown bird sang in the apple tree and a butterfly flitted across the field and all the leaves were calling me.’ Class, we’re going outside.”

  She took them waddling up the slope to a small park that had grown on an unused corner lot. She chose not to sit on the picnic table near a rusted fountain but rather on the still-dormant grass, tossing her coat on the ground and plopping herself down. She k
icked off her pumps and swung one long leg underneath herself. Looking up, she beckoned to the kids to surround her.

  Once they sat, dumping backpacks and parkas, she told the circle to write a short story that very hour, right then, with what they saw around them. She talked with her hands today, above stockinged toes they had never seen.

  “Create conflict and resolution. Go ahead. It’ll take your minds off those regular decisions. I know you’re worried about what colleges are going to tell you next week.”

  She opened her own spiral notebook and uncapped her pen. “Come on. Will someone time us?”

  In this way Calyce purposely guided them to a safe place in their anxious minds, where everything was still nascent and possible, if just for another hour.

  We sat here, on this bench, with the old wood splintering into my legs in this newborn spring, and I told you I was sorry. I said the words as I felt that hard needle of wood pierce the back of my right thigh. It snapped off as I moved in my own nervousness and drove itself deeper into me. It was you or my leg, and still I chose you. I apologized, made eye contact, everything, I did it all but you rejected me, said I didn’t mean it, said to everyone I’d been robotic.

  If I had told you I had been in pain the whole time from that snaggled bench, would it have proven to you that I meant it? Did I have to jab that wood spike instead into my throat, up here where you could see it?

  Just because this sun-bleached old bench is smooth to you, where you sit, over there, doesn’t mean that sitting here facing you, having to say this, isn’t agony for me even before I say it.

  But I did, I did say it, so the problem is you now.

  “Did you know it waxes and wanes in the opposite direction in South America? In the Southern Hemisphere it moves left to right. Up here it starts on the right side.”