Alternate Endings Read online

  She consulted her screen, where the math was ready. “Four thousand eight hundred forty-nine dollars and thirteen cents you owe me.”

  “What is wrong with you?” he demanded.

  She was mad now too, but she kept her voice low so that Selene wouldn’t hear them above the shower running. “You’ve got too much disposable income, obviously.”

  He smirked. “You mean discretionary. It’s discretionary income.”

  She leaned forward. “It’s whatever buys you Courvoisier.”

  “Is that what this is?” Damion said. “I have that for customers. Management – you know Shawn – he checks the bottles all the time. I give away free drinks. It gets me better tips, so I started giving away Courvoisier. People laughed. It was a big joke, but Shawn said I wasn’t charging. So instead of dealing with him I decided to buy my own and take it in. I usually keep it in the back of the car, but this one was open, and I didn’t want to spill it. You know I worry about the leather.”

  “So you weren’t drinking it?” She was shocked.

  “And lose all that money? That bottle costs me forty bucks, and there are twenty shots in there. I tell the customers not to pay me, so they always give me a big tip. Sometimes twenty, but usually ten. That’s a minimum of two hundred, so I net a hundred and sixty. I also get customers who keep coming back.”

  His face rose in a cocksure grin. “See? I am using my marketing degree. You say it’s business, but my major was marketing. That’s why you wanted me to pay those bills?”

  She nodded sheepishly.

  “So are we done now with that whole manifesto?”

  “So how long have you had this?” the young doctor asked with his stethoscope to her chest. Calyce had never seen him before. Her last appointment had been her annual physical, and another doctor in the teeming HMO had handled it.

  “I’m not hearing it,” the adolescent General Practitioner said.

  “My mother insisted that I come. I’m a little hoarse in the mornings, but it’s gone by noon.”

  “Every day? Do you have allergies?”

  “I get hay fever in the spring.”

  “Do you snore?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t use to.” She heard the question he wasn’t asking. “I sleep alone. I have for decades.”

  He asked about her weight and she confirmed she had not had a sudden loss in recent months. Yes, she said, her life was stressful, but whose wasn’t? He smiled perfunctorily as he typed into the laptop he held open on one forearm. No, she didn’t smoke.

  “Exercise?”

  “Not enough. Well, not at all. There isn’t time.”

  He was writing already on a prescription pad.

  “Make time, even if you only walk. And I want you to get some antacids over the counter. See if they help.”

  He ripped off the sheet and handed it over. “Here’s the name of an allergist. You may be allergic to something new. That happens as we get older.”

  “Next Tuesday? You can’t go in earlier?” Calyce said to Effie over the phone from the car. “Today. Just now. It’s nothing. He said it was probably allergies.”

  The next morning school was bedlam.

  Calyce was forced to sit in the vast auditorium with wide risers on three sides of a carpeted square well outfitted with a wooden podium over which a huge drop-down screen had been installed in the high ceiling. Parent meetings happened there too, but for the moms and dads they hauled out the folding chairs. For the kids and teachers at the weekly Wednesday assembly, seating was limited to the stair-step risers whose concrete underlayment had already numbed Calyce’s skinny rear end.

  She sat as an island on the fourth row, uninterested in the small nearby pod of teachers, who ignored her. Staff and faculty clotted in random clumps as loud, arm-waving teens poured in all around them. Next to Calyce, on her right, four girls were dressed as cats. Standing, pretending not to preen, each of them checked the crowd surreptitiously. She had to watch the swinging, wired tail of the girl closest to her to make sure it didn’t put her eye out.

  Why was it always cats that allowed nubile taut things to wear stretch black leggings and midriff-baring crop tops? Calyce wondered. Did they really think a headband with cat ears and a caribou tail hid their self-advertising to the ogling boys Calyce watched salivating?

  Ten years before, it had been Jingle Bell Rock from Mean Girls. She remembered a sequence of Halloweens looking up the backsides of strippers-in-training wearing tiny red Santa skirts and long black gloves. One year, even a set of boys had worn a version, but now it was cats. All cats. Cats for years.

  She leaned left and stage-whispered to Belinda, who had just sat next to her dressed as a fortune-teller complete with turban. “Why cats?”

  Belinda raised her eyebrows at Calyce.

  “I don’t get it,” Calyce said.

  “Think,” Belinda said only, then waited.

  “Oh! My God,” Calyce said as Belinda nodded. “How could I be so dumb?”

  Calyce was dressed in a black skirt, black hose, black pumps and a white button-down long-sleeved blouse she had steam-ironed crisp that morning. Over top was her twenty-year-old Halloween serape, solid black with white string fringe along the bottom. Sewn onto it and dangling hung a hardware store’s collection of clinking, jangling trinkets. On her left breast, just under her clavicle, a large red felt “A” was appliquéd.

  On the floor of the auditorium, in the middle of the square well so kids and teachers had to steer around them, two nylon camping tents had been set up. One khaki green, the other sky blue, they were both zipped, no doubt for the annual show that was about to start. High-schoolers were already lining up outside in the wide corridor leading to the double doors that were the school’s main entrance.

  Dan entered the auditorium and looked around, scanning. He was blue. He wore a stretch white ski cap whose tip drooped forward in an apostrophe. It had been stuffed with something, maybe a small balloon, to make it round. Under the bulb, Dan had painted his face and neck blue. His T-shirt was blue as well, but his jeans were white and he had covered his shoes with white gym socks.

  Calyce turned and found the same flashes of blue and white in pairs, in a trio, and several alone. The entire high school English Department scattered in the audience was blue. Even rookie Amita had on a blue dress and a blonde wig.

  Dan climbed the risers toward Calyce, putting his hand on students’ shoulders to steady himself as he praised their costumes. Calyce watched him joke and laugh with the young people, and she saw them high-five him. He made it to her row and waited. When Belinda noticed him, she scooted over a body-width so Dan could sit between them.

  Calyce smelled him, bath soap wafting, barely there but different than the air had been without him. His greasepaint was already drying around his eyes at the same time it had begun to run where he was sweating. His apple cheeks were blue glass. Weird.

  “Pretty funny,” Belinda told him.

  After a minute, he asked Calyce, “Any new ones this year?”

  “This one.” She touched a tiny silk doll’s jacket sewn near the front hem of her serape.

  “Chinese,” he said. “No clue.”

  “Mulan.”

  “The movie? But she gets the guy.”

  “The novel. Seventeen hundreds. She commits suicide.”

  “Do you ever have any fun?”

  She granted him a small smile. “I’d rather be blue. No, wait. That’s you. But seriously, did you send me an email about this Smurf business? You organized it, I’m assuming.”

  He shrugged. “Why bother? It’s always the shawl. Women Who Stand Up For Themselves Have To Die.”

  The show began soon after, as the school’s Drama Department Head emceed the annual parade of Craziest Costumes around the auditorium, with those on the risers applauding their favorites cycling in from the corridor. One senior had built himself into a replica of the Eiffel Tower, which towered phal
lically four feet above his head, his eyes peering through the framework. Another was a red-and-white-striped box of popcorn, the cardboard around his waist filled with actual popcorn, which he threw at his friends.

  As the parade circled them, the two tents on the floor finally opened. To Calyce’s surprise, out popped Roger in a red and black buffalo-checked flannel shirt, shorts, and high-top hiking boots with green wool socks on his muscled blazing-white calves, which Calyce had never seen. When the other tent unzipped too, the school’s pretty young brunette biology teacher bounded out in a matching lumberjack outfit. Both wore matching headlamps, which were turned on.

  As the kids cheered, Dan asked Calyce. “Are they dating?”

  “So here’s the deal,” Calyce said as she stood jangling before her class of seniors dressed as cats and Avengers and Harry Potter characters. The black girl with the long twists had pinned a hand-drawn paper bee to each of her knees through her jeans.

  “Some of you know this because I do this every year. The student who can identify the most heroines from these clues on my serape will receive ten points of extra credit on the next test. That’s a difference of a letter grade. And anyone who brings in another thing for me to add here receives five points. You have the rest of the hour to submit your list, and you can come up here and look at this. I don’t bite.”

  “Hester Prynne,” one of the boys said from his seat. “Scarlet Letter.”

  “THE Scarlet Letter, and now that one doesn’t count. You have to do it silently.”

  She moved her shoulders to set the trinkets tinkling. A tiny train locomotive hung there, as well as a lock of fake hair, a rubber snake attached by the tip of its curving tail, a tiny dollhouse chair, a small loop of green cable, the tiniest bit of white netting, a tiny chainsaw and a miniscule fabric rat swinging by his long gray tail above the silk doll’s jacket at the hem. When she turned to show them the back, her students saw a plastic vial, a small dog charm, a white dinner napkin folded to make two peaks, a tiny door, a miniature brick, the letters CO2, a rubber dagger, the tiniest possible square of cross-stitch embroidery, and a regular-sized pair of rubber navy blue swim goggles that hung by a strap.

  As she glimmered and chimed, she said, “Isn’t this fun?”

  She opened her front door a hundred times that night. As dusk switched off the sunlight, the toddlers appeared first, leery as they gripped a parent’s hand. Uncertain first-timers, they had to be coaxed through the call and response. Calyce bent low to their eye level and assured them it was okay to plunge both little hands deep into the brand-name candy mounded high above her widest aluminum mixing bowl.

  An hour later, suave eight year-olds began to ring, ring her doorbell and sigh when she demanded that each reveal the “trick” she risked if she didn’t offer her candy. These pirates and identically dressed members of some boy band free-ranged without their parents but clustered tightly on her doorstep as the night’s bugs veered and spun around her overhead light. And last of all, standing embarrassed but eager with pillowcases so full of loot only they could carry them were the oldest teenagers, the ones never doing it again after tonight unless they were hauling their younger siblings, which they would do in mufti from now on anyway, and not in costumes.

  As she waited in her entry for the last stragglers, she sympathized. She thought back to all the years of the costumes her daughter and son had worn. Calyce had made them, initially, but eventually had succumbed to store-bought in seductive boxes from the party store and later to whatever her adolescents had wanted to jerry-rig. And she had always been the parent who had stayed home to answer the bell. Not once during her marriage had she made the rounds with their cavorting children and their ricocheting sugar highs. It was something big she had missed.

  At last the stretches between buzzes lengthened and finally stopped, and Calyce returned up the stairs with her paraphernalia. At the top, she suddenly thought about her periods, which five years before had been struggling, then sputtered and ultimately choked to a soundless stop. No matter. But the ensuing desiccation had been a shock.

  She couldn’t sleep, again. Frustrated, she slung on her robe and went downstairs, heading toward the kitchen through the dark living room. The only light angled in from the fluorescent moon that hung round and high above the rooftops of the townhouses on the street behind.

  She startled, though, when the fuzzy moonlight caught a small shape rustling on the loveseat under the window.

  “Mrs. Tate.” Selene turned from staring outside. “Don’t worry. It’s me.”

  Calyce flipped on the light. “Are you all right?”

  Selene tugged on the fake-chinchilla afghan from Damion’s room. “I’m sorry. I know it’s your space.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. Where’s Damion?”

  “Working. Lots of drunks so lots of tips on Halloween.”

  Calyce looked at her. The child was lonely. “You want some tea?”

  “Can I help?”

  She followed Calyce and together they found something sweet, too. Calyce saw that the young woman wore one of her son’s black shirts and a pair of his gym shorts, whose waistband was much larger than her bud-vase waist. She tugged on them to keep them up.

  “I’m sorry I’m here all the time.” Selene cupped the warm mug with her translucent fingers. “I try to keep to myself down there, but it’s so cold. It’s so much warmer up here.”

  They spoke at length about Damion, these two women who shared Calyce’s son, and the older woman saw that Selene seemed to be in love with him. She knew him, knew his weaknesses, and yet she glowed when she spoke of him and rubbed her arms slowly with her hands as she did it, as if he were there holding her. What Selene displayed wasn’t the infatuation of first sex and first “we” but something calm and steadfast, certain of itself and its strength maybe to last. Calyce remembered it.

  “You love him,” she said.

  “I do,” Selene said without hesitation or embarrassment.

  “Does he know?”

  Selene nodded.

  A moment later Selene said, “He feels the same way.”

  Another fact, simply stated. Calyce believed her.

  Calyce felt about that then, giving herself a beat to be with the fact of this mutual love, and she found it to be good and this woman worthy and her Adonis son to be the beneficiary of someone solid, though Calyce could not explain how she knew. So she asked, and Selene shared her story.

  “I got my Associate’s degree from Montgomery College. I thought I wanted to do landscape design, but I don’t. I really don’t care about what plants are there. I just want to light them, so I’m an apprentice electrician.”

  “But you’re a girl.”

  Selene said that she craved the outdoors and hated sitting at a desk. The work was hard. Ladders can be dangerous and muddy crawl spaces filled with spiders and sometimes snakes. But the money was good and so were the benefits.

  “They’re paying me to be an apprentice. And best of all, I won’t have to work at nights usually. I can be home in the evenings with Damion.”

  She leaned both her elbows on the dining table as she said, “That’s why I don’t want him working at the bar either. I’ve been telling him that what you’re saying is right. I don’t think bartending is good for us in the long run. I want him to look for a new job just like you do. I want him to have a daytime career.”

  November

  It was noon before her mother answered, after Calyce had waited through nine burring rings. Effie claimed the noise had startled her awake and she had had to run from the couch, but she could barely deliver words, her breathing was so labored.

  Yes, she said finally. Not her regular doctor, but a new one in the group general practice. A woman. Young.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve been waiting on the results of the EKG.”

  “What EKG?”

  “Some special kind. I’m having i
t on Thursday.”

  “Are you all right?” a boy asked as she returned her phone to her bottomless bag and tossed it under the desk, which wasn’t hers but standard-issue, identical in all the classes.

  Calyce ignored him. “First, our grammar lesson for the day. The difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’”

  All of her students, every one of them, lowed like cattle. They did it now at the start of every grammar lesson she taught now at the beginning of every class.

  “You all need this,” she said with annoyance. “What’s our motto?”

  It was a joke for them. They chanted in unison.

  “Technique before creativity.”

  “Throughout literature, women are punished for self-actualizing. Anna Karenina is just one example.” Calyce fingered the tiny toy locomotive sewn above her right breast.

  “And so is Juliet. She’s the one who comes up with the plan with the priest about the poison so she can be with Romeo. The play could be said to stand for the proposition that, when a woman dares to run things, she has to die.

  “Middle-aged women don’t even exist in literature except in relation to men or their families. When they don’t do what they’re told? Exile.” Calyce touched the Eiffel Tower charm by her shoulder.

  “Or suicide.” She turned to point over her shoulder at the laboratory vial on her back.

  “For Madame Bovary, it was rat poison. See my rat?”

  A boy said, “But what about Pride & Prejudice? She wins.”

  “She gets the man but she gets him by being herself, so I count that as an exception. But Elizabeth Bennet’s not middle-aged. Everything about her mother Mrs. Bennet is her trying to get her daughters married.”

  “But who wants to read about middle-aged people?”

  “Not people. Women. There are plenty of middle-aged men in literature, doing what they want, living lives outside their families. But there aren’t books about me. I’m cast as Penelope. There’s no book where I’m the female Odysseus.