“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Leonard asked. “Usually whenyour phone rings, you’re like a streak of lightning across the sky. A human blur.”
“I’m sure it’s just Sam. I’ll call her back in a minute.” Outside, on Pomander, the Headricks were sweeping. Alice had always loved them—they were the kind of neighbors who reminded other people to move their cars on street sweeping days, or would let the gas company in, or would help get leaves out of gutters. They had every tool, somehow, even though their house was as small as everyone else’s and equally lacking in storage space. Kenneth Headrick was wearing a Mets hat and khakis, and he put a hand up to say hello when he saw Alice staring through the window.
“Wow. Can we call this maturity, Al?” Leonard shook his head. “I guess sixteen really is different.”
19
Sam called again and said that she’d meet Alice at Pomander and they’d walk to the class together. Ten minutes later, Alice called Sam and asked her what she was wearing. Half an hour later, Sam called to say that she was going to be running late, and that Alice should just go ahead without her. It was like texting, but only with her voice. It hadn’t been this easy to get Sam on the phone in over a decade. The one time that morning Sam didn’t pick up, her answering machine did, with a muffled exhortation to “hit my pager.” Alice remembered it all: *911 for emergencies, *143 to sayI love you. *187 to sayI’ll murder you if you don’t call me back right away. Alice wanted to keep calling, just to hear Sam pick up every time.
20
Alice asked Leonard to walk her to Belvedere for the prep class. She didn’t need him to, obviously—she could have walked there in her sleep, which maybe she was doing, although whatever was happening was starting to feel much more real. Alice had pooped, which she had never once done in a dream, and showered, and she’d eaten three meals in rapid succession, two of them standing directly in front of the open fridge. The class was only an hour long, and seeing Sam in person as a teenager was irresistible, and so even though Alice was a little afraid to let Leonard out of her sight, she decided that she would go. If Leonard walked her there.
Belvedere was close—twelve and a half blocks. Down Broadway to 85th, then left and up the hill, or one could zigzag according to holes in the traffic. Alice had always been proud of her stride and speed as a walker. There was nothing like the satisfying feeling of stepping into a street as a car zoomed past, the daily ballet of a well-timed jaywalk. Jaywalking, Alice’s only professional sport! Leonard was on the slow side, for a New Yorker, but Alice couldn’t believe how fast he wasmoving now, practically dancing down Pomander like Cary Grant with an umbrella. The last time Alice had seen her father walk down the street, it had been June. They’d met for dinner at Jackson Hole, the glorified diner at the end of Belvedere’s block, on 85th and Columbus, which made it easy for Alice to meet after school before getting on the train and going back to Brooklyn. Leonard loved Jackson Hole because the burgers were enormous, like hockey pucks for giants, and the onion rings were, too. Alice had gotten there first and grabbed a table near the window, and she’d watched her dad struggle to hurry across the street, narrowly avoiding the downtown M11 bus. Since then, she’d seen him walk up and down hospital hallways, and then not at all.
Leonard was wearing a jean jacket, as he had most days of most years since Alice was born. “Can’t believe you’re sixteen, Al.” He had brought a can of Coca-Cola for the road, which he now opened with that satisfying release of sugary bubble air. On their way out, Alice had glanced at the guardhouse, which looked filled with stuff, as it always had been. The end of last night was blurry except for the barfing, which had been very pink and very gross. Where else had she been for sure? Alice tried to piece it together, like doing a complicated math problem in reverse. “Me neither,” Alice said.
After talking to Sam, Alice had found what she suggested on the floor of her closet: a pair of woolen black sailor pants that had a thousand buttons and a tie in the back, and a silk top that had once been underwear, back when people wore extra layers for no reason and WonderBras didn’t exist. “When you take walks, where do you go?” Alice asked.
She was as tall as her father already—Serena was the taller parent by a few inches, and Alice would end up an inch taller than Leonard, too, but it hadn’t quite happened yet. Her mother hadn’t called to wish her a happy birthday, but it was still early on the West Coast, and whoknew what the moon was doing, or the rest of the planets. The planets controlled a lot of Serena’s interactions with the world. The air was cool. Climate change had gotten Alice used to T-shirt weather in October, but now it was still chilly. Had the blizzard already happened? She couldn’t remember, but Alice could see the snowdrifts in her mind, the thick white blanket that had stopped the city for a few days.
“I walk everywhere,” Leonard said. “I walk uptown, I walk downtown. Once I walked all the way around—circumvented the whole island of Manhattan. Did you know that? Why are you asking?”
Alice tried to shrug. “Just curious, I guess.” She was thinking about Simon Rush and the rest of Leonard’s friends—well-read dorks, all, even the ones who were rich and famous. She had so few memories of her father during daylight hours, outside of Pomander Walk. The Sterns had never gone hiking, they’d never gone camping, they didn’t like the beach or national parks or whatever it was that normal families did. All they had done was this—talk. Be in their neighborhood, their tiny kingdom. That was the stuff that Alice wanted to soak up, to absorb as much as she possibly could. What did it feel like, to have their strides match, to both hurry in the face of an oncoming taxi? What did it feel like to have her father next to her, to hear him grumble and hum, make the noises just beneath language? What did it feel like to see him and not worry if it would be the last time?
Leonard put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s very nice.”
She hadn’t touched him until then—she had wanted to hug him when she first walked into the kitchen, but they weren’t really a hugging family, and Alice was pretty sure that she had smelled at best like dirt and at worst like dirt and alcohol and so she had scooted quickly back into her bedroom, too afraid that one of them would vanish into thin air or turn into a pile of dust. Alice put her hand on top of her dad’s. She didn’t remember him ever being younger than this. “Whatage do you think I was best at?” Alice took her hand back and stared at the ground. “Like, if you had to pick me being one age forever, what age would you pick?”
Leonard chuckled. “Okay, let’s think. You were a terrible baby. Screamed one hundred percent of the time. Your mother and I used to worry that the neighbors were going to call the police. You were very cute after that, to make up for it—say, three to five. Those were good years. But no, I’d say now. I can swear as much as I want to, and you don’t need babysitters anymore. And plus, you’re good company.” Every block they walked had something that Alice had loved and forgotten: the spandex party dresses at Fowad and Mandee, the brightly lit challah bread at Hot & Crusty, the bohemian rich lady shop Liberty House, where Alice had spent her allowance on Indian printed tops and dangling earrings. Tasti D-lite, Alice’s one true love. Were there still Tasti D-lites? Once, in her early twenties, Alice had seen Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson at Tasti D-lite, both of them with small cups, no sprinkles. She started to tell her father that, but stopped. The only Lou Reed song she’d actually owned was on theTrainspottingsoundtrack, and she wasn’t sure if it had come out yet. Without the internet, how would she even check? Mr. Moviefone’s voice sprang into her ears, a robotic memory that she hadn’t thought of in a decade, and Alice laughed. It was another century. It hadn’t felt like it at the time, but it was. New York City did this over and over again, of course, a snake shedding its skin in bits and pieces, so slowly that by the time the snake was brand new, no one would notice.
“Thanks,” Alice said. Maybe that was why. Maybe he was right, and this was the best she ever was, and even though this version of her dad hadn’t seen her barely graduate from art school, and have dumb boyfriend after dumb boyfriend, and never really make art, and still work at Belvedere, he knew that this was the apex.
Leonard grabbed Alice’s elbow and pulled her back from the curb. A boxy gray sedan swung close, taking the corner tight and fast. “Not on my watch,” he said. They walked until they got to French Roast, the coffee shop that was open twenty-four hours a day, and then turned left, toward the park.
21
There were a few people standing outside Belvedere. Alice was so used to the route, and the block, which had hardly changed, except for the hairdresser that had become a dog-grooming parlor and the frame shop that had become a Pilates studio, that she didn’t actually feel anxious until she and her father were close enough to recognize the faces of the people assembled on the sidewalk. Alice froze. She had thought about seeing Sam, who would still be just Sam Wood, without her married hyphen, but Alice hadn’t thought about seeing everyone else. Her life was so full of Belvedere that she hadn’t thought about all the people who had vanished from it. Leonard tossed his cigarette to the sidewalk and stepped on the filter.
“What’s going on?” he asked, though Leonard had never needed a reason to avoid people.
There was Garth Ellis, who played soccer and had the cutest, roundest butt. Alice had kissed him one time, her freshman year, and then pretended that it never happened. There was Jessica Yanker, who curled her bangs into a perfect tube every morning—Alice and Sam used toprank-call her, pretending to be representatives from a hair spray company, but then *69 came along and you couldn’t take the risk. There was Jordan Epstein-Roth, whose tongue was always hanging out of his mouth just a tiny bit; there was Rachel Hymowitz, whose name sounded too much like “hymen” for her to escape unscathed. Everyone was gorgeous and gangly and slightly undercooked, like they’d been taken out of the oven a little bit too early, even kids that she’d never really looked at too closely, like Kenji Morris, who was taking the SAT class a whole year early, like he was Doogie Howser or something. Some people’s arms and legs looked too long, some noses looked too adult. They were people Alice hadn’t thought of in twenty years, and whom she hadn’t given much thought to even at the time. She cringed a little, thinking about what these forgotten classmates would think of her now, still at Belvedere at forty, still alone, still weird. Alice looked up at the building, and to the window of her office. Leonard leaned against a parked car and lit another cigarette.
“Just high school, I guess,” Alice said. It wasn’tTime Brothers, whatever was happening to her, and it wasn’tBack to the Future.It wasPeggy Sue Got Married. Alice tried to remember the plot. She’d fainted? No, that had been a dream, hadn’t it? Mostly? Kathleen Turner had woken up in the hospital, still married to Nicolas Cage.
The front door pushed open, and Alice watched as her boss, Melinda, attached the little metal hook to the side of the building so that the door would stay open. Alice’s breath caught in her throat, the same way it had when she saw her father at the kitchen table. She’d known Melinda for so long that she hadn’t thought of her as having changed—she looked the same, she wore the same clothes—but no: Melinda, like her father, had been young. Alice had just been too young herself to notice.
The other kids started to funnel in. Alice walked over to her father and leaned beside him.
“If you could go back in time, what would you do?” Alice asked. “Back to high school, I mean. Or college.”
“Oh, no, thank you. Wouldn’t want to change too much, because then I wouldn’t have you. And if you’re not going to change it, you don’t want to see it, trust me.” Leonard elbowed Alice gently.
“Mm-hmm.” Alice had to get back to Matryoshka. They probably didn’t open until at least five o’clock. She couldn’t think of anything she would ruin, anything she would lose, but she also did not want to live her entire life over again starting at sixteen. She had to figure out how she had ended up here, and how to shake herself out of it.
“Happy birthday, Al,” someone said behind her. Alice turned.
Tommy had his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a ringer T-shirt and had a plain brown cord tied around his neck, a homemade choker. Most of the boys at Belvedere had already moved on from the Jordan Catalano school of fashion, but not Tommy. His hair was long, and he tucked it behind his ears. He was a senior, still trying to get better SAT scores, even though his were almost perfect. Parents at Belvedere were still like this, willing to spend time and money focusing onalmostinstead ofperfect. He looked better than she remembered, and what she remembered was heavenly. Her stomach squished in a way that it hadn’t when she’d seen him as an adult. It was like there were two of her, the teenage Alice and the grown-up Alice, sharing the same tiny patch of human real estate.
