Alternate Endings Read online

  To: Senior Creative Writing Class

  From: Calyce Tate

  Re: Extra Credit Opportunity

  If anyone wants/needs extra credit, please read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and write me a personal essay of no more than 250 words describing how someone you love has betrayed you. Deadline May 31.

  Once Calyce had sent the email, she checked her bank balance again, as she had done twice a day since the vote.

  She then began researching assisted living facilities for her mother.

  Overwhelmed with data an hour later, Calyce phoned Damion, who said he didn’t have time to talk. Selene was coming to cook dinner, and she had just left Whole Foods with two lobsters. She had some good news, he said. “Something about her job. What did you call for?”

  “You were keeping this a secret from me, both you and your grandmother.”

  “It was none of your business.”

  “Everything about her is my business. And it’s not fair to Maria that your grandmother’s giving you money. Your sister’s not getting any, and it ought to be equal.”

  “How do you know she’s not?”

  “Is she?”

  A pause. “Not that I know of.”

  He told her that Effie had insisted. Effie had said she knew he was in a bind because he didn’t have a regular job anymore and a big monthly rent bill as long as Effie continued to live with Calyce and occupy “his room.”

  Effie said he would be doing her a favor, really, that it would be a privilege if he accepted money every month for his “kindness” – her word, he said – in allowing her to stay with her daughter, in a part of the townhouse where she would cause Calyce the least trouble.

  “She was nearly crying,” Damion said. “She begged me. What was I supposed to do?”

  But Calyce would not be diverted. “How much is she giving you?”

  “She said you’d ask, but she says she wants that to stay between us. I don’t feel right violating her trust.”

  To: Calyce Tate

  From: Dan Waggoner

  English Department Head-Elect

  Re: Extra Credit Opportunity

  The parent of one of your Creative Writing seniors has already sent me your email from earlier this evening. You know you can’t give assignments during senior Quest, even for extra credit. I want you to send out an immediate email withdrawing your prior, and copy me on it.

  Also email me in advance about any future changes you propose to make to the set curriculum, including any new assignments/extra credit. All changes will need my advance written approval.

  Calyce read Dan’s email and then checked Kayak for cheap flights to Las Vegas, the closest airport to Zion. When the search window asked how many travelers, she clicked “1.”

  Her phone rang and she answered it. Maria was calling to report giddily that Greg had just gotten his first, directed assignment from his career development officer at the State Department. They were leaving in two months for a consular post in Tanzania, which was a country Greg had put high on his bid list, so he was ecstatic.

  “It’s not as dangerous as you read,” Maria assured her. “Come see us now that you have more time? We’ll have a couch for you.”

  On the final day of May, Calyce took a long shower. She felt the hot water course over her with its dialed pulsations from the yellowing showerhead in her bathroom that was old but still worked perfectly. As she was climbing warm and moist into bed, her phone chimed its incoming-phone-call song, though the sound was muffled in the depths of her satchel, where she had already buried it for the night. The white charging cord kinked out the top and made its way to her wall outlet.

  She ignored the caller, who was violating don’t-call-after-ten etiquette. A minute later, though, she realized that the lateness of the hour might mean something serious had happened, so she climbed out of bed.

  Damion had called, but he had left no message. She cocked her head at the strangeness of a call from her son, rather than a text. She dialed him back, but then he didn’t answer until the fourth ring.

  “I figured you’d be asleep,” he answered without alarm, so she relaxed.

  “I just bought plane tickets for Zion.”

  “With Aunt Nina?”

  “She’s back in Chile. I’m going alone next month, right after school lets out.”

  Calyce propped herself against her headboard and tucked her feet in with her free hand. “God knows how I’ll pay for it. I charged it all, including the hotel for three nights. And I –”

  “Mom. Selene’s pregnant.”

  Catherine couldn’t stand it anymore. Mike had been avoiding her since the Billy Goat Trail. Every day she had waited at lunch but he had walked past her, and no one else had come to share her table. Day after day, she ate alone, right here at the front of the lunchroom by the doorway where everyone could see her. She could have approached other tables and asked to sit with them, but she hadn’t the whole year as she had yearned for him, turning them down until they had stopped gesturing for her to join them, and now she did not know if she would be welcome. So she paged a book and ate in silence.

  That day once more, she smiled at him but he ignored her.

  “I have to talk to him,” she told herself with her head down as he squeezed by toward his friends.

  David was all smiles after the departmental meeting, and he hung at the door as the others filed out congratulating him. He motioned for Catherine to step out ahead of him, so she had to. He joined her in the hallway.

  She swiveled her head to look back through the glass door into the conference room, where Alice now sat entirely alone at the vast table. In that moment, Alice was she, with Catherine’s same expression from the lunchroom every day now watching Mike ignore her. On Alice’s bombed face Catherine saw the same total devastation.

  “You were coughing all during our meeting,” David was saying as they walked. “Do you have something wrong with your throat?”

  “Tonight I want you to read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson,” Catherine told her class. “It’s a modern example of third-person objective point of view, which isn’t used much nowadays. It’s also called the cinematic point of view because we don’t go inside the characters’ heads but receive the story through action and dialogue. It’s my favorite POV because it really makes the writer have to show and not tell. I want you to read The Lottery and write a piece with this point of view.”

  Ryan’s new girlfriend Elena from Target was nice enough, and now she was pregnant. That, at least, he could accomplish.

  June

  Calyce couldn’t remember the last time Damion had come to the high school voluntarily to visit her, the last time it had been his idea without her prodding. In fact, she couldn’t recall that it had ever happened. Even when he had been a student there, Damion had never sought her out. When they had passed in the halls, he had ignored her.

  Once he had graduated he was gone, and he had stayed away until his five-year reunion, when he had drunkenly told her at the end of the night that he’d attended only because “I’m hot now. I wasn’t back then.”

  But he had called that Friday morning, the first of June, to ask if he could take her out for lunch at the French bistro he still remembered on Wisconsin Avenue.

  “The one with the cat,” he said. “On me. My own money.”

  Calyce had been delighted.

  Over mussels in garlic broth and bowl-glasses of wine, he said Selene was ten weeks along already when she had told him the prior evening. She had wanted to be sure, Selene had said, and she had wanted to be sure first that she wanted to keep it. She had decided she was, and she did.

  And so did he. He had made that decision immediately, he told his mother.

  She asked him gently, “Do you love her?”

  He ducked his head and nodded and he was a boy again, bobbing his head about something happy that embarrassed him.

  “When did they paint this?�
� Damion asked half an hour later as they entered the earth and stars stairwell.

  And then, “We’re thinking of Cisco. Cisco Tate. Sort of Western. Do you still get the family discount on tuition here if you’re the grandmother and not the mother?”

  “As long as I teach here.”

  But then she stopped. “Tate. Are you getting married?”

  He smiled deeply then, his joy running to his eyes.

  Near the top he asked as three teenagers angled by them, “When are you going?”

  “Tomorrow morning. They’re giving me a tour of the facility.”

  “You’re still not telling her?”

  “Hey, Calyce.”

  They turned to see Roger coming up behind them. She introduced the two men, who shook hands. Damion then said goodbye, descending quickly as the other two continued. When Damion got to the bottom, he shrugged with both palms up in a playful gesture. Even from thirty feet above, she saw his “guess who’s got a boyfriend” smirk.

  As Calyce and Roger exited into the third floor corridor, she said, “I’m going back to Zion next week. I’m going to get to the top of that thing.”

  “You want company?”

  He had surprised her. She looked at him.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  She inhaled. “Have you got a minute to talk somewhere privately?”

  Calyce found them an empty classroom. She didn’t sit and she didn’t motion that Roger should, so he stood as she moved her fingers inside her clasped hands nervously.

  Finally, she told him. She said he had always been nice to her, and patient. He was a good man and he deserved her honesty.

  He responded by clasping his own hands behind his back as he waited.

  “I like you,” she said. “I do, but I don’t date outside my race. I’m sorry.”

  She took a breath and corrected herself. “No, I’m not sorry. I don’t white men, and I never have, but I am sorry if that hurts you.”

  A pause happened that was so long the class bell rang and ended. It lasted so long the hall began to fill with charging feet.

  “No way to change that?” he asked simply.

  She shook her head but her tone was kind. “People say I should be more open-minded and modern, but I’m not. These are my values and they don’t change.”

  It was a high-rise in Wheaton, a short drive from her townhouse, with surface parking behind the tall structure. On the front side of the assisted living building that faced the busy street, a thin strip of grass surrounded four low-rise trees planted in regular intervals, their mulched brown circles cut precisely into the slip of turf. Facing one another along the cement-tiled walkway to the businesslike front doors were two metal benches, both fully occupied, three each, by elderly women, who watched wordlessly everyone who came and went. All the old women were white.

  The forty-something marketing woman shook Calyce’s hand too eagerly. After a brief meeting in the woman’s office off the dated lobby, which was paneled seventies-style in floor-to-ceiling wood, they began a tour first in the communal dining room in a windowless corner of the first floor, behind the bank of elevators. Under a low ceiling the servers, all of whom were black, were setting up “for luncheon” in the artificial romantic-dining light cast by outdated dangling-crystal wall sconces and overhead can lights in the popcorn ceiling.

  The air was unmoving. The round tables, Calyce saw, each had place settings for six on the green tablecloths.

  “We change them with the seasons,” the woman told her. “Do you see the napkins are cloth too, and they match?”

  No, there was no assigned seating, though “the residents” usually quickly chose their preferred spot and friends “with whom to eat, though family is always welcome.” Several of the tables were partly occupied already with ancient ladies waiting, one of whom at last was toffee-colored. The three meals a day, the marketing woman said, met all the residents’ dietary needs, for they had been established in a set rotating order by their on-site nutritionist.

  “Certainly nothing spicy,” the woman said. “Only American food. Nothing exotic, and we try to keep the salt down. Most of the residents don’t like seafood, so we have sole sometimes but nothing fishy. Let me show you the tenth-floor unit we have available. You said your mother would be the financially responsible party?”

  As the elevator rose she described the levels of care they provided. From what Calyce had said over the phone, her mother would still qualify for independent living, though she was on the cusp of needing some assisted care. The available unit was for their most ambulatory residents. When the time came later, Effie would have to move to a lower story.

  The woman unlocked a door down a shadowy interior hall of identical facing paired doors, one of which still bore an Easter egg wreath, in June. The corridor smelled lightly but distinctly of Clorox.

  They entered an empty one-bedroom unit with a small sitting area. Along one short wall was a mini-kitchen with a sink and a two-electric-burner stovetop, but no dishwasher or oven.

  “Too dangerous,” the marketing woman said.

  She then pointed out the small fridge, explaining that the building had a little commissary on the first floor, which she would show Calyce on the way out. “As for furniture, the residents usually prefer to bring their own, to remind them of home, though we can arrange for rental things if you need them.”

  There appeared to be one large window covered in heavy white pinch-pleat curtains over white sheers over a Venetian blind that was down and closed. As Calyce walked over, the woman said, “It’s not the modern taste, but our residents like their privacy.”

  “From what?” Calyce moved the blind to see outside.

  The window was smaller than the coverings suggested, beginning halfway up the wall. The view was down to the roofs of shorter commercial buildings and 1940s homes.

  “No balcony?”

  “We would consider them unsafe. There is plenty of room outside, though, on the benches out front.”

  Calyce asked, “Doesn’t the window open? I don’t even see where it can slide.”

  “But what will you do?” Catherine kept asking her son Ryan whenever they talked about the cherished baby, who had changed everything even now, still months before its birth.

  “Where will you live?” Catherine repeatedly asked him.

  Calyce toured three other places over the next ten days and didn’t tell her hummingbird mother, who hovered, asking repeatedly what the odd forays were to the outside world, but Calyce kept changing the subject. Finally, it was a Sunday evening and Damion arrived for dinner with a nauseous Selene, whose body still had not gotten used to the idea of a baby. The young woman wasn’t eating much, and she wasn’t sleeping, and she asked Calyce and Effie if she’d be sick for the entire pregnancy. Effie assured her no, this would surely pass, but Calyce answered frankly, that it really depended on each woman. Everyone was different.

  “I think I’ve lost ten pounds.” Selene’s pale skin was wax without any blood coursing.

  Sitting together in Calyce’s small living room, where Effie claimed her usual spot on one loveseat, Calyce wondered out loud whether she should still go to Zion.

  Selene answered, “I’d hate for you to miss it because of me. My mother’s coming from Minneapolis anyway. Damion’s going to meet her next week.”

  The air was filled with the smell of baking pork chops, zucchini and diced tomatoes.

  From under her backside, Effie pulled out an envelope. She announced, “I have a surprise for my Number One Daughter!”

  “Another surprise?” But Calyce opened it.

  While Effie beamed, Calyce pulled out a check signed and dated that same day, made out to Calyce for $4,000.

  “I’m going with you to Zion!” Effie said. “That should cover both our tickets and the car and everything else. I booked us into the Bellagio. You didn’t seem to like the cruise idea, so I thou
ght we could do this instead. Don’t you love it?”

  Damion watched from the other couch, where he sat with Selene. Calyce had seen him lean forward once the check appeared to listen to every word.

  “And when I talked to Nina,” Effie continued, “she told me you really liked that convertible you had before, so I reserved one.” Her wide grin nearly sliced her face in half.

  “Grandma,” Damion said. “Do you think I can go too?”

  “What?” Selene said.

  Damion ignored her, asking, “Is that enough for me to go too?”

  “But what about Selene?” Effie said.

  “She’s got her mother,” Damion said quickly. “And with the baby, who knows when I’ll have the chance again.”

  To Calyce he said, “We never got to go anywhere when I was little. You were always working. This will be that vacation. Selene will let me go if I tell her how important it is to me.”

  Selene jabbed him. “I’m sitting right here.”

  But he still didn’t look at her. “Please, Grandma?”

  The next Friday was the last day of school for the year, and Calyce was heading out with her desktop things in a box she had brought from home. On the first floor a graduating senior called her name and Calyce stopped to wait for her.

  Calyce congratulated the teenager, who was now a poised and confident young-woman version of the anxious child routing deep in her backpack at the beginning of the school year.

  “Are you sure we can’t get that extra credit, like you posted?” the college-bound senior asked.