Alternate Endings Read online

  “You’re working out now?”

  She pointed to the tiny conference room. “Can we talk?”

  Safely inside with the door closed, she said, “John, I was wondering, since I’m Head now, is there any way I could get a raise?”

  He took his time.

  “You’re not actually Head, and certainly not officially. That will take the formal vote.”

  “But you said I was.”

  “What I said was that I hoped your being Interim Head would make your election a fait accompli. Don’t look surprised. You remember I was elected all those years ago. All of us in the department here have to vote. Down at the lower school they do the same thing for their own department. But all that won’t happen until May. That’s when the elections happen school-wide, and that’s when the new Heads all get raises.”

  Roger popped his head into her just-emptied classroom.

  “I have it. You want to see it?”

  He strode in without waiting for an answer, carrying two books and a paper map. He walked to the long table closest to where she sat at the teacher desk and waved her over as he unfolded the map and spread it out, caressing the edges flat. She had no choice but to lift herself from her chair.

  He waited until she stood next to him. “Are you okay?”

  “Pre-occupied. But it’s nice to look at this. I need a mental vacation.”

  He put a finger on the Grand Canyon. “You’ve been here?”

  “As a child with my father back in the 1970s. He was from out there.”

  “That’s where this staircase starts. You know the Grand Canyon’s a mile deep, with something like forty different rock layers? That’s what makes all the stripes you see in the photos. Here.”

  He opened the coffee-table book he had brought too, and she had to smile.

  “Visuals. Always good,” he said as he flipped pages. “The Grand Canyon is the result of two forces. You know what they are?”

  She played along. “The river cutting into the rock?”

  “And the rising of the Colorado Plateau. It’s a single tectonic block, and it’s stayed together. One hundred and thirty thousand square miles. Bigger than forty-six states.”

  He winked at her. “I prepared for this. You know what it’s made of?”

  His eyes were sweatshirt gray. She had never been so close to him before.

  She shook her head.

  “Layer after layer of sedimentary rock, because it all used to be a sea bed. Over hundreds of millions of years, this sediment was laid in different layers made of different things and hidden until the Colorado Plateau was violently forced up, then eroded.”

  He put a finger where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico came together. “It covers Four Corners and extends over parts of these four states, but it’s mostly in Arizona and Utah. It rose in one huge block around the same time the Rockies were formed. You ever driven to Flagstaff from Phoenix on the back roads?”

  There was a single black fleck in one of his cloud-colored irises. She could see it.

  She said No, she hadn’t.

  “You’re driving north in this hot desert and you hit the Mogollon Rim. This huge barrier cliff that just comes up, and it’s two hundred miles long. It’s this giant step that takes you up three thousand feet to a higher level. Once you climb it you’re in ponderosa pines. In an hour, it’s suddenly cool. That rim is the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau.”

  He talked as though he were standing at the top of it. Thatched in with the red hair she saw strands of gray. “You’ve hiked all this?”

  “With this map. This one’s mine. I bought you another one just like it. See that jagged line? That’s where it starts. Now, imagine a flat table of land that’s made up of sediment in stripes, with the oldest on the bottom.”

  He pointed. “This is where the Grand Canyon is, about three and a half hours north. The bottom of it is Precambrian. That’s billions of years old.”

  The gray ran around his skull at the level of his small ears. The nearest one had a tiny hole in the lob. His mop on top was new penny. Not a Lincoln, but one of the nearly beige modern ones. And thick. Much thicker than a middle-aged man’s was supposed to be.

  “You really love this,” she said.

  “I’m teaching here. Pay attention. The thing is, when you’re standing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon looking up, those mountains aren’t mountains. They’re the sides of a cup, like on a golf course, and you’re at the bottom looking up to level ground. You get that same sensation at Zion.”

  She nodded, remembering.

  “Your mind says you’re high up because you see these high peaks,” she said, “but you’re actually at the bottom. If you come from the south where the hotels are, the ground comes in and funnels to this tiny slice where the walls shoot up. It’s incredible.”

  Just for a moment she too was standing in the sunlight of Zion.

  He nodded. He knew. “I ordered this for you too.”

  He turned the pages of the smaller book until he found a drawing and showed her.

  “This flat table that’s the Colorado Plateau runs north from the Grand Canyon’s north rim to Zion in Utah, and because of the staircase, the top layer of the Grand Canyon is actually the bottom layer of Zion, which we can see because the Virgin River cuts through Zion just like the Colorado River cuts through the Grand Canyon. The plateau’s a block being carved by these rivers. Amazing, right? You went to Bryce?”

  She nodded.

  “My God the stars there when you’re camping. The very top of Zion is a white rock layer that’s under the bottom layer of Bryce. Every one of them is a different color. That’s how you get that pink at Bryce that looks like salmon, but the Bryce layers are the youngest. The top is only 60 million years old.”

  “Only?”

  “That’s yesterday! The whole thing is a series of steps over this huge plateau.”

  He doffed a make-believe hat, making a show of it. “Which is why we call it The Grand Staircase. The coolest place on earth.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Did you like my presentation?”

  “‘Coolest’? Really? You sound like one of my kids in here.”

  “But do they bring you such handsome gifts?”

  “No it’s not fixed,” Calyce told Damion over the phone, finally. “And why haven’t I heard from you? Did you get my message about how much this is going to cost?”

  She had left at lunch to sit in the driver’s seat of her car at the far, dark back of the cavernous garage under the high school’s indoor pool building.

  “No, I don’t have eighteen hundred, not with my having paid you that five hundred.” She shook her head as she spoke. “I don’t want to put it on a credit card. The interest rate is exorbitant.

  “Selene’s? Until when? But you hate her roommates. That’s what you tell me when she comes over every night and uses my shower. All right, your shower. But my water, which I’m paying for. I had to take mine here at school this morning. It was embarrassing.

  “What do I want? I want you to contribute. There, I said it. Because you use the water too and you leave your wet towels all over. How much? A few hundred. I can take the rest out of savings but there’s only thirteen hundred left. I had to buy plane tickets to see Mom.

  “I’m flying down day after tomorrow. I told you. There’s something going on and she won’t tell me over the phone.”

  Her mouth fell open.

  “But I’m not your landlord. You don’t pay rent, so it’s not fair to call it my capital expenditure. You’re part of this family and you should contribute. It was supposed to last ten years. How many showers does she take? No, I’m just saying –”

  She took in her breath.

  “No, I don’t want you to move. Please don’t say that. Of course she’s welcome.

  “Yes, I guess it does go into the basis when I sell the house later. Yes, I’ll get the tax ben
efit. You’re right. It does make sense. But I’ve only got thirteen hundred.

  “They would split it? The plumber would do that? I can pay the thirteen hundred in cash and put the last five on a credit card?

  “That’s a good answer. Yes, all right. That’s what I’ll do.”

  She had always hated the sea, with its vast empty plate beyond its persistent, melodramatic waves. It was forever the same, endlessly, topographically, and there was such a small change in real color, from steel to grey to that sudden flash of turquoise that lasted only a second under that breaking curve on a sunny day. Sure, she saw it. No need to point again. Yes, she heard the birds keening and saw them diving and running like madmen on stubby legs across the evaporating slick of sand.

  Even the clouds, when they happened, puffed above nothing but a straight far line, unless you counted the high-rise condos stitching the long beach, which she didn’t. They were man-made. Clearwater was flat, flat, flat, and no amount of toothy marketing or new words for the tiniest increments on the blue color wheel would ever improve the humdrum spectrum.

  But her mother loved it, reveled in it, and spent as much of every day as possible walking with her bare toes in the thick sand of Clearwater Beach. She took the bus over the leaping causeway to the wide strip on the other, ocean side of the peninsula she could see from her sliding condo patio doors. Calyce knew, but her mother didn’t, apparently, that she lived in a box facing wet air and a narrow view of the Intracoastal bathtub.

  With its mid-rise on the edge of the bay, her mother’s building had probably once been a gleaming place to live, a decade before she had bought it. Now it was a latticed has-been stuffed with old people who had stayed, stacked on their tiny cruise-ship balconies, cooking in 1974 fluorescent kitchens whose arched-faced cabinets held crock-pots they still used.

  As Calyce turned from Osceola onto the sloping ramp to the basement parking, she saw a pair of crones, as well as three separate ancient women alone, inspecting her from their plastic armchairs, each in a triangle of shade from the tropical sun. Territorial shorebirds, their eyes pierced from just above their allotted ten-foot spans of iron railing.

  Her mother wasn’t one of them, however. Her narrow sixth floor balcony, the one with a single white plastic chair angled toward the causeway bridge, was empty.

  To get the garage gate to slide open, Calyce had to push a button on the squawk box. It took a moment, but her mother’s reedy voice finally chirped, “I’m so glad you’re here!”

  Calyce waited silently for the buzzer.

  She parked in a visitor’s spot – one of five, with only her rental car in any of them – then turned her head left and right to organize her newly re-stiffed curls on her shoulders, using a newly self-manicured hand to secure her bangs diagonally across her forehead. When she stepped out she smoothed her navy suit skirt and brushed her matching jacket, thoroughly tucking into her waistband the white cotton blouse that stuck to her in the relentless damn humidity.

  “Honey are you all right?” her mother exclaimed lovingly as she held both arms out to her towering daughter. “You look exhausted.”

  Calyce didn’t stop but angled around her to go inside. “Just tired. When did you stop coloring your hair?”

  “And you’re hoarse, too. How long have you had that?”

  “Why am I carrying this? Don’t you want to walk the beach?” Calyce said with irritation the next morning.

  As they had left, the old woman had handed her a folding beach chair with short legs meant for sitting an inch above the sand.

  “Is this the new routine?” Calyce asked as she sped ahead of her slow-moving mother.

  Effie Guthrie was small and bird-boned, with the face of a woman men didn’t whistle at sixty years before but stopped and simply gawked at, in awe, knowing she was something they could never achieve. Even now her cheekbones anchored her skin and her upturned eyes were unhooded by crepe. Time seemed not to have robbed her.

  In her standard beach uniform of striped cotton shirt and blue Capri’s, Effie spent a full minute devoting all her senses to locking her front door and another to shuffling down the sisal-carpeted hallway clutching a worn plastic tote the color of molting flamingoes. She was inhaling heavily into her lungs and paying attention to it as she finally arrived next to her daughter waiting impatiently by the elevator.

  “Let’s take your car. I hate elevators. They take forever.”

  “Why drive?” Calyce said. “You always take the trolley. And why aren’t you telling me to take the stairs, if you hate the elevator so much?”

  Effie’s pixie cut had been finger-fluffed into place for the day and her signature plum lipstick had been perfectly applied, but she looked off. Drained already, and it was still morning. Calyce watched her mother’s mouth gape when she breathed in and her lips purse in puffs with each exhalation. It was a new behavior and it looked affected.

  “Are you all right?” Calyce asked again as she had several times already, but Effie just nodded. It annoyed Calyce that she couldn’t get a straight answer.

  In the basement parking, Calyce slowed to her mother’s pace but maintained two yardsticks of air between them. Effie tried to close the gap but with each wide step Calyce corrected. She opened the passenger-side door for her mother but didn’t stay to load her.

  “How is Damion?” Effie asked after five minutes of silence, as Calyce drove over the new four-lane causeway toward the ocean. “He tells me he has a girlfriend. A white girl. Do you like her?”

  Calyce kept her eyes on the road. “She sure uses a lot of hot water.”

  “What?” Her mother turned to her.

  Calyce evened her voice. “She’s fine.”

  “Pretty?”

  Calyce didn’t answer.

  She steered right on the other side of the Intracoastal, at a new traffic circle napped with palms, and headed north up Mandalay Drive.

  Effie asked, “How’s his job search going?”

  “Ask him. You two seem to talk all the time.”

  Effie said calmly, “He says he’s looking.”

  “I wouldn’t know. He sleeps all day and goes to work until all hours.”

  They passed the white rectangular Hilton to their left, on the seaside. To Calyce, the low-slung building looked like a wall vent for air-conditioning.

  “He’s still young,” Effie said. “It’s taking him time to figure out what he wants to do.”

  “He’s twenty-seven. I had two jobs by then.”

  “Turn here. There’s parking off the street. Very few people are you.”

  Calyce moved her mouth but kept it closed.

  Effie got out and grabbed her pink tote and folding chair, then began walking. As soon as they reached the white sand, her mother took off her shoes and trudged in a beeline toward the water.

  When Calyce realized it, she said, “We’re not walking the beach at all?”

  Effie shook her head. She was once again purse-lipped exhaling.

  “Mom.”

  Calyce staked her stork legs in the sand and felt the soft give under her tennis shoes. “What’s wrong? Can’t you breathe?”

  Effie stopped too. It took her a moment to find her air.

  “Not all the time, and it’s not the breathing. It’s deep, like it doesn’t feed me.”

  “Is it your heart?”

  “Heart’s fine. But I can’t walk the beach anymore. It’s because I’m old. That’s all. Can you take this?”

  Calyce accepted the chair, which weighed nearly nothing, and Effie plodded on, lifting her head every few paces to assess the remaining distance.

  It was slow going. The overcast sky glared a harsh light that made Calyce squint, but not her mother.

  Effie walked straight into the ocean until it covered her feet, and she looked out to sea with her chest over-working. She didn’t speak but soon her body seemed to transform. Her breathing became less labored and she stood taller as
she rolled her shoulders back in the stance of a much younger woman.

  Effie pointed to her own feet. “Here.”

  “You’ll get your backside wet.”

  But Calyce dutifully unfolded the chair and Effie fell into it smoothly, with a surprising fluidity, and she stretched her bare calves into the lapping water. Every third wave wet the seat and her rear end.

  Calyce could either stand next to her or spread one of their towels out ten feet behind. Effie didn’t care. She had gone in her mind to the sea.

  Calyce set herself up silently directly in back of her mother, where Effie couldn’t see her, and she watched Effie’s upright head stare unmoving toward the horizon. She saw how utterly white her mother’s short hair had become and Calyce counted back to when she had last come to Florida.

  Effie began absently scooping water with both hands and splashing it onto her knees. She moved both arms in unison, towards herself then out again, but she didn’t look down. She kept her eyes on the line of the vast gray ocean. Calyce had seen this before, countless times, and she knew to leave her mother alone. Sitting on her towel with both legs bent uncomfortably on one side of her, Calyce fished out her phone and her reading glasses. She sat silently in the day’s glare, trying and mostly failing to read her tiny screen.

  “I don’t know why you do that,” Calyce said as they reached the car later.

  Quietly, Effie answered. “I just love the sea. It’s as if it’s caressing me.”

  Calyce dumped everything on the hood and heard the metal chair bang.

  “He’s dead, Mom. He died a long time ago.”

  “Not when I’m here. It doesn’t seem that way to me.”

  As they waited in silence to make the left onto the down ramp again, Calyce saw the trolley that looped along the shore roads stop in front of Effie’s building. It was an open-air bus that looked like a San Francisco cable car.

  “Are you still taking that?” she asked her mother.

  “They want you to get on and off too fast. Last time he yelled because I was taking so long.”