Althea and Oliver (25 page)

ALTHEA SLEEPS IN
the kitchen now.

Though the floral fabric is faded and stained, the cushions threadbare and flattened, the couch in the kitchen has become her favorite spot in the house. Throughout the night, people wander in and out to fix themselves bowls of rice or get beer from the fridge, but the abiding noise from the living room is muffled in here, making sleep actually possible. The hum of the appliances, the lingering smells of whatever meal has been cooked last, the luminous numbers of the digital clock on the stove—she finds these things all comforting.

She knew she couldn't stay in Matilda's room indefinitely, but had hesitated staking out a place elsewhere. Then, after Althea tried a couple of nights waking up to the gasping sounds of coffee brewing and sunlight illuminating the rocket ships on the makeshift wallpaper, the two girls came to a tacit agreement. Matilda moved back into her room and Althea took her place, putting her clothes on a shelf in the pantry, below the boxes of cereal and cans of vegetarian baked beans. She drew a friendly looking pterodactyl on Matilda's wall as a thank-you.

She'd called Garth a few days after Thanksgiving and told him that being landlocked on the mesa was not as unbearable as she had feared, that she had discovered red chiles and was on a mission to perfect her recipe for huevos rancheros, and that Alice was annoying but well-intentioned and fortunately occupied much of the time with her various endeavors. She made sure to work in a few comments about the long drive and how it seemed like she had just arrived and already it was time to leave, and then it was Garth himself who suggested she stay longer if she wanted to, and if it was all right with Alice. Althea assured him that it was, and they agreed she would stay through New Year's, and then go to Mexico with Garth. She knew Alice would never call North Carolina, that as long as she kept checking in with Garth she could keep the ruse going at least through the holidays. She's not the one who thinks ahead—that's Oliver's department—so she's asked herself every day what he would do, how he would pull off a scheme like this. She'd phoned a few times after that to report on her increasingly deft snowshoeing skills and the glory of New Mexican sunsets, tapering off her updates as Garth got wrapped up in the end of the semester and planning the upcoming trip to Mexico. At first she'd congratulated herself on these clever machinations, but as Christmas grew closer and her phone calls to the hospital continued to prove fruitless, she had to consider the possibility that she might run out of time.

But time is working in other ways. For a long time after the Coby incident, it was the first thing she thought about every morning—the eyes of all her classmates, Coby's stunned face, the ache in her hand. Not guilt so much as surprise that it happened at all, and humiliation that it had been so public. For so long, she'd woken up wincing, mortified. But this morning the wincing doesn't come, only the desire for coffee.

Stretching out, she kicks someone; weight shifts on the other end of the couch.

“Sorry,” Althea says, sitting up.

Ethan's copper hair sticks out from under a blanket. He mumbles something. One freckled arm emerges, then another, then his face, printed with sleep. “My glasses. Do you see my glasses anywhere?”

Still wrapped in Alice's quilt, she retrieves them from the kitchen counter. “What are you doing in here?”

“Sorry. Gregory's in the bed and Kaleb's asleep in my chair. He had some stupid fight with Leala about a game of Risk. I got up to brush my teeth, and by the time I came back he was passed out. Sorry to sort of barge in, but it was the only spot left in the house.” Ethan cleans his lenses meticulously with a corner of his striped brown comforter.

Althea pours coffee for them both. “I didn't even notice.”

“Sooner or later you learn to be a heavy sleeper around here,” he says, blowing on the surface of the coffee and taking a tentative sip. Althea downs hers in a few scalding gulps. “Christ,” he says. “I didn't realize it was possible to drink coffee that fast.”

“You have to be really committed to inducing a heart attack,” she says, fishing for clean clothes inside the pantry.

Upstairs, Mr. Business is leaving the bathroom, tracking bits of kitty litter that stick to the soles of Althea's feet and make them itch. She keeps her eyes closed in the shower so she doesn't have to see the blackened lines of grout between the tiles or the gritty scum along the bottom of the tub. While she gropes blindly for the shampoo and soap lined up on the windowsill, the moldy curtain liner brushes against her leg and she bats it away, shuddering. She quickly lathers the thigh that made contact, down to her calf, the delicate ankle, her calloused foot. Abruptly, she realizes that because it's hers, this foot is her responsibility; she's the only one looking after these knobby knees and quick-bitten fingers, and it makes them seem suddenly, relentlessly fragile.

“Althea? Is that you? Can I come in and pee?” Matilda shouts from the hallway, rapping on the door. Before Althea can even respond, she comes in and sits on the toilet with a sigh of relief.

Shutting off the water, Althea sticks her hand beyond the dreaded foul curtain.

“Towel me, please,” she says.

• • •

That night, Gregory, an aspiring stand-up comic, insists on practicing his routine for a tepid audience. Ethan reads in his chair, Leala and Kaleb are struggling to get to the next level of Chrono Trigger, and Matilda is at her sewing machine, altering an oversize Metallica T-shirt into a fitted halter top. The assorted cast that Althea is learning to recognize—the diminutive drummer who waits tables at a nearby restaurant and is always chewing on a cinnamon stick, the Columbia dropout with nothing to his name but a MetroCard and a backpack full of socks, the effusive tattoo artist with the pierced tongue and chipped teeth—are elsewhere in the house, scouring magazines and newspapers pilfered from the neighbors' recycling bin for free activities taking place anywhere in the five boroughs.

On the floor by the couch, Althea eats a bowl of brown rice doused with sesame oil and soy sauce. The cat is at her side, his little motor running, trying to nose his way into her dish. An avid reader of fantasy novels, Gregory's routine is laced with jokes about griffins and lycanthropy. As he's going for a punch line, Leala's avatar dies and she throws her controller to the ground, narrowly missing Mr. Business's head. “Let's go out. Let's go do something,” she says.

“Wanna make out?” suggests Kaleb.

Gregory is annoyed. “I was in the middle of a fucking joke.”

“Everybody up. Come on. You, too, Ethan.” Leala leans over him and gently pries the book from his fingers. “Is it not Friday night?”

“I don't want to,” Ethan says.

“You heard her,” Kaleb says. “Up. We're going out.”

“To do what? We don't have any money.”

“Money? Money?” Leala shouts. She and Kaleb have Ethan cornered in his chair. “Money is for people with money! Since when do we need money to have a good time? All you need is a commitment to fun. Where's your commitment to fun, Ethan?”

“It's cold outside—”

“What a fucking joke you are.” Kaleb shakes his head. “‘It's cold outside'? Seriously?”

“What are we doing?” Matilda asks, tearing open the shirt with a seam ripper.

“I haven't gotten that far yet,” Leala says.

The drummer, the dropout, and the tattoo artist stand in the doorway. “We going out?” the tattoo artist asks.

Half the room says yes, half the room says no. Kaleb starts to undress.

“Oh, come on,” Ethan says. “Why do you always have to get naked for no reason?”

Kaleb unbuckles his belt. “Right now I'm getting naked so I can slap you in the face with my dick.”

Gathering the final grains of rice with her chopsticks, Althea speaks. “Y'all ever thought of having a scavenger hunt?”

Everyone turns to stare at her. “Goddamn,” says Kaleb, down to his boxers. “She can talk.”

“A scavenger hunt?” Leala asks. She and Kaleb exchange a lustful glance. “Someone get me a piece of paper.”

• • •

Hours later, a tipsy Althea straddles an enormous bronze bull in the desolate Financial District, clutching one of his horns to avoid falling off, while Matilda snaps a Polaroid. Temporarily blinded by the flash, Althea blinks furiously, her eyes tearing in the harsh winter wind. Her ass is freezing from sitting on the bull for five minutes while Matilda searched for the camera in the messenger bag filled with their night's acquisitions. Steam rises from several manhole covers, and there's no one on these streets except for her teammates, hooting and hollering, drinking forties of St. Ides out of paper bags—“wino sacks,” Gregory calls them.

“It really does feel like Gotham City down here, doesn't it?” Ethan helps her down off the sculpture.

Matilda's hands, like her feet, are delicate and undersized. She needs both to hold a forty properly. Bringing it to her mouth, she looks like an unhinged toddler sipping from her bottle. “Good work, Gemini. Let's check it off the list.”

“What's next?” Gregory asks.

“We're right by the 4 train,” says Dennis, the tattoo guy. “We can go up to Astor Place and spin the cube.”

“Yes,” Matilda cries. “Let's go, go, go!” She sprints toward the green globe above the subway station. Everyone follows. The cobblestones are unforgiving under Althea's sneakered feet.

All the enthusiasm in the world can't make the subway come. Underground in a train station as deserted as the streets above them, there's nothing they can do but wait, compulsively check the time, and drink. Matilda, Gregory, and Dennis confer over the remaining items on the list while Althea paces the platform and Ethan leans out over the tracks, looking down the tunnel for any sign of an arriving train.

“Could you not do that?” Althea says. “You're too close to the edge. It's making me nervous.”

Setting down his bottle, Ethan jumps onto the tracks. “There's nothing coming. It's not a big deal.” He waves his arms for emphasis, a conductor in an unlikely orchestra pit.

“Get back up here!”

“It's fine, I'm telling you.” A gigantic rat carrying half a bagel runs across the tracks not far from Ethan's foot. “I think I've made my point.”

Briefly overwhelmed by vertigo, Althea sits on a bench while he hoists himself back onto the platform. She's pretending to show great interest in a discarded issue of that day's
Daily News
when he joins her. Althea turns over the paper. Though baseball season is long over, the Yankees are still on the cover of the sports page, aglow from their World Series victory. Farther down the platform, Matilda is getting hysterical about the minutes slipping by. Gregory has her by the shoulders, trying to calm her down.

“I don't want to lose! I fucking hate losing!” she's saying, her voice enormous in the empty station.

“I'm sorry I was a dick when you first moved in,” Ethan tells Althea.

“Did Management tell you to say that?” she asks, nodding in the direction of the errant blonde girl shouting a soliloquy on the merits of being a winner.

“She doesn't control my every move, you know.”

Althea considers this. “Have you known her a long time?”

“As long as I've known anyone, I guess.” He takes a long pull from his bottle, then offers it to her. Althea drinks several swallows of flat malt liquor, wiping away a trickle that escapes down her chin. It tastes like the gas station where they bought it. “It was me who started the Brooklyn chapter of Bread and Roses. I bet you didn't know that. I bet you just assumed that it was her.” Althea doesn't say anything. “It wasn't her. It was me. I found the house. I started the chapter. Then she dropped out of Vassar and moved in.”

“Are you saying she took over?”

“No,” says Ethan sharply. “I needed the help. And she's good at it. Probably better than me. But she gets—you know that day when you first came to the park? I knew it. I fucking knew it the second you walked up to that table, that you were going to end up staying in our house. And it was a stupid thing for her to do.”

“Thanks a lot,” Althea says, draining the rest of his forty.

“People aren't cats. You can't just take in the strays. We're only supposed to serve meals. It's not fair. You're a young, cute white girl, so you get to come home with us. Everyone else gets a meal and we send them on their way.” He fills his cheeks with air and lets it out thoughtfully. The ink from the newspaper has blighted her fingers; she wipes them on her jeans, almost worn through at the knees. Ethan cleans his glasses on his shirt, and she watches his blue eyes unfocus without them, his face hollow and incomplete. “And I know,” he says, replacing his glasses, sharpening his gaze on her face, “that you are not a stray.”

An approaching train rumbles unseen down the tunnel, a hint of thunder gaining momentum. Althea starts to get up, but Ethan catches her elbow. “It's coming from the other direction.”

It sounds like the noise is coming from everywhere. “How can you tell?” she shouts as the subway bursts into the station across the tracks. The brakes engage with a metallic shriek; she plugs her fingers in her ears, but again Ethan touches her arm.

“Don't do that,” he shouts. “It makes you look like a tourist.”

The nearly empty train sputters to a halt and performs in a perfunctory opening and closing of doors. No one gets on or off. When it pulls away, she suffers through the tumult.

“How did you know?” she asks when the station is quiet again. “Which way the train was going?”

“I can just tell.”

Althea scrapes away the St. Ides label with a fingernail. “Why did Matilda take me in?”

“When we were in high school, Matilda made a real point of not getting stuck in any one clique. She had punk friends, she had square friends, she had friends who did theater and friends who skipped class to do acid in Washington Square Park. I don't know, she just likes collecting people. She'd make a great politician. But, you know, she's great. She wouldn't take you in if she didn't like you.” He glances at the newspaper again. “You know why I hate the Yankees so much? Because even in December, they're on the cover of the sports page. It's like their fucking season is never over.”