Alice by Mikaela Conley

Alice | Mikaela Conley

Alice sidled up to the checkout line that stretched into the aisle of seasonal items — Halloween candy in September. She hated drugstores, always had. But old age brought her more often than ever to this place, what with Larry’s growing list of prescribed medications and recommended vitamins and now the regular purchase of Depends, a demolition so deep that neither she nor her husband spoke of them. Not since he came home with samples from the doctor’s office last year. Alice now just kept an eye on the package in the bathroom closet, and when it was halfway gone, bought another and placed it under the one in current use.

She tried to keep the drugstore trips quick, but today there was only one cashier despite four registers sitting dormant. The clerk, probably around Alice’s age with a halo of gray hair, peered over her glasses and poked at the keys the way old people did. Did Alice look like that when she used her phone or computer? Reading glasses down to the end of her nose, eyebrows raised, a general look of confusion? God, she hoped not. There were two other employees, a girl and a boy, probably eighteen, standing at the opposite end of the counter in their long blue vests, giggling as they restocked the Marlboros on the back wall.

“Excuse me, are you open?” Alice asked, walking over with the adult diapers cradled under her arm. Neither looked up, though the girl momentarily paused at the sound of her inquiry. 

“Excuse me?” Alice asked, now with a lilt of irritation. She never would have used such a tone in her younger years; she would have waited in that line with her mouth shut until closing time to avoid ever being perceived as demanding or impatient or a generally unlikeable woman in any way.

At the age of seventy-seven, she hated to think about this now — how much of her life she spent complicit in her own inconspicuousness. Had she known she’d hit a certain age and become invisible to society anyway — well, she probably would have behaved in the exact same way, the desperate approval of her mother far outweighing any other external attention.

Alice had been a knockout in her youth. She could see it in photos now. But in the face of her mother’s hard-nosed expectations of her daughter — humility, presentability, decorum — she spent most of her life thinking she was plain.

“Excuse me,” she asked one more time, just as the boy turned around to pull a carton of Reds from its stack on the counter.

“Yes, ma’am?”

Ma’am. 

“Are you open over here?”

The boy peered past her, then suddenly and frantically drilled on the register keys. “No, ma’am, as you can see, we’re not.”  

The girl barked out a laugh. 

Alice squinted at the two kids, their backs to her now, shoulders touching, giggling again. The tinny of the fluorescent lights was getting louder. She took another step toward the counter, thought about saying something else, but no words came. 

In fact, she wasn’t thinking much of anything as she slid the last carton of Marlboros off the counter into her hand. Then, walking away, she heard herself say, “Excuse me,” to the customers still waiting in line, and when they didn’t move, she turned sideways, compressed herself to get through them. The automatic doors stretched open like a regal goodbye, and her heart banged in her ear as she scuttled down the ramp.

At the car, she nearly fell over, weak-kneed and dizzy. She threw the diapers over to the passenger seat, before getting herself in and examining the carton of cigarettes against the steering wheel. She was laughing, cackling really, as she ripped open the box, pulled out a single pack and untwirled its little plastic string. Her fingers tingled with a strange, luscious delight as she rifled around the glove compartment for one of Larry’s old lighters. She lit the cigarette, inhaled. The rush went to her head in an instant. 

She held the smoke in her lungs with surprising ease, tilted her neck back on the head rest. She had only smoked one other cigarette in her life, with a boy named John when she was sixteen. She cut school with him on a bright blue day, and they sat under the bleachers, passed a Pall Mall back and forth, talked about The Rolling Stones and kissed. Oh, what a thrill it had been to sit there with a boy she thought she loved, defying every one of her mother’s expectations, even just for an afternoon. She had been devastated when John and his family moved away that following summer. 

Alice exhaled, the smoke enveloping her — head in the clouds. John’s face was still so clear in her mind even after so many faces had faded to faceless through the years. She placed the cigarette between her lips again, let it hang there as she reversed out of the parking spot.

Larry was in the study when Alice arrived home. She could see him through the doorframe in his favorite chair, reading a book, as she walked to the bathroom, lifted the pack of opened Depends in the cabinet, placed the new one underneath.

“Hi, honey,” he called, only after she was well out of the bathroom, in the kitchen, at the sink, the pots and pans she’d washed earlier now clanging as she put them away.

She couldn’t remember the last time they’d spent time together. They were around each other constantly, passing by one another in this big house like complacent ghosts, dust floating in the air, fine and indifferent. For fifty-two years, Larry had loved her with a genial and gentle loyalty, offering a secure life in a well-built home and one winter vacation to a warm place each year. There were Christmases that boasted abundance, and a tolerable group of friends who didn’t enjoy gossip. “You’re beautiful, you know that?” Larry said to Alice so often that it lost its meaning entirely, mostly falling on her ears as sarcasm. As far as she knew, Larry never had eyes for another woman. (But how could she know, really? How could anyone really know the inner workings of another’s mind?) He was a stern but joyful and involved father at a time when that simply wasn’t expected of men. And she credited the two of them, and only the two of them, for raising four well-loved children into four well-loved and stable adults. What more could a woman want? she had asked herself so many nights that it had become a type of prayer, lying awake with eyes closed, sometimes clasping her hands over her mouth so that only the faintest whimper emanated from somewhere deep inside her.

“What are you reading?” she asked, approaching the study, dish towel in hand. Larry wore a collared shirt like the ones he had donned every day at the university for forty years, but now with sweatpants and a blanket draped over his knees. The walker was standing a few feet away against the wall. 

Larry looked brightly at her then lifted the book up just enough to display the cover: THE GERMANS.

“Fun.”

He shrugged.

When did he get so old looking? For years, the Parkinson’s had come on slowly, gas-lightingly slow. Had he been tripping a lot lately? she’d wondered for two whole years before voicing the question to him out loud. It took seventeen doctor’s visits — she’d tallied them up once — to get a definitive diagnosis, and when it finally came, what befell them was a cartoonish combination of relief and devastation, like they’d found a life raft in a rushing river just before getting hurtled over a waterfall. 

For a while, they were able to pretend the disease wasn’t there, that he was just clumsy and stumbled a lot, but then came the undeniable tremors and the stiffened movements and the hunched posture of a forever-straight-backed man, the sometimes-slurred speech and, probably the most horrific for Larry, the difficulty writing.

“You doing anything today?” Alice asked, her attention turned toward the paint peeling on the door frame.

“This is it, baby. And I need to go to Verizon later.”

Larry and his phones. She’d seen more smashed phones in the last three years than she had otherwise seen in her lifetime. They were constantly being flung from his body because of the tremors, the imbalance, the falls. Poor Larry.

“Okay, well I’m going to go out for a bit.”

“You just got back.”

“I thought I’d go visit Marie for a little while.”

She drove until the pavement turned to dirt, pulling into the river viewpoint beside a lone truck idling. She hadn’t been down here for years, decades. It was the place she’d come when the kids were small, usually on the weekends when Larry was home, and, just for a few minutes, sit perfectly still and think of nothing.

She lit another cigarette from the pack, pressed the window button on the door. A man came walking up the path. He was young, maybe mid-forties. He lifted his fishing rod and tackle box as a Hello. 

“How ya doin’,” he said while passing the car. He looked familiar; probably had been in school with one of the kids.

“Catch anything?” Alice asked reflexively.

“Nah, nothing worth taking home today.” He opened the truck’s tailgate. “Those things’ll kill ya, ya know.” 

She examined the cigarette smoldering between her fingertips. Fucking punk.

“Promise?!” she yelped, her voice cracking just as the tailgate smacked shut, jolting three crows from a branch above it.

Alice watched the truck leave in her rearview, taking in a long defiant drag as it went. Then she coughed it all out — too much.

At the senior living center, the doors pulled open and she was met with a firewall of warm putrid air, that combination of urine and disinfectant and a meal of mush being cooked somewhere. 

Last year, Alice came home from the grocery store to find Larry splayed out on the bedroom floor. “Just send me to a nursing home,” he said in the doctor’s office an hour later, wincing in pain as they waited for X-ray results that would display a cracked rib and a fractured ankle. “You can’t handle this all on your own.”

“I’m not sending you to a nursing home,” she said flatly.

She’d never admit it, but this had been a consideration among the many questions that bombarded her after the diagnosis, like, How was she going to take care of a man who had a ninety pounds and over a foot on her? But then she thought about Larry sitting there, reading his big scholarly books among those smells of human waste and it made her feel like she was going to explode. “I’ll take care of you as long as I can, and then, I don’t know.” She paused. “When I can’t, hopefully we both fall and crack our heads open on the same day, same time, and we’ll die right there in the house and be done with it. The kids can deal with the mess. They owe us that much.” She knew this would give Larry a good laugh, which would allow him an excuse to swipe the tears that had been pooling at the ridges of his eyes, and it did.

“I’m here to see Marie Cunningham,” Alice was telling the receptionist, a young thing with crispy yellow hair pulled tightly back. She was watching a video on her phone. “Is she having lunch? I can just pop into the dining area.”

“Let me check,” the woman said, bored, picking up the landline and talking so low that Alice couldn’t decipher a word. Or was she going deaf?

“Yeah, Marie isn’t having a great day,” she said, hanging up. “Unfortunately, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

“Oh, I don’t mind if she’s having a bad day. I can just —”

“Right, well, you might not mind, but Marie would probably mind.”

Alice had known Marie since their sons became friends in kindergarten. She was easy to talk to and had a quick, scathing wit — never would Alice have said some of the things that came out of her mouth. When she was with Marie, she often found herself laughing in a way that sounded devilish to her own ears.

Marie began showing signs of Alzheimer’s a few years ago. That’s what her husband said anyway when he began looking into nursing homes last winter. Alice always got the sense that Marie’s boldness infuriated him, and more than once Marie canceled their plans because “Bob was being Bob,” which, back then, could have been woman code for just about anything. When Marie had a hip replacement six months ago, she was admitted to the senior living center for her rehabilitation period. Then the rehab ended but Marie stayed. 

This wasn’t the first time she’d come to visit Marie and was sent away. The last time was a month ago. As she was leaving that day she saw Marie down the hallway, screaming and punching at the air as a nurse dodged blows trying to restrain her. It felt like catching a glimpse of herself. Alice couldn’t eat or sleep for days after that. 

The receptionist had returned to the video on her phone. There was another smartphone sitting on the ledge of the desk. Alice scanned the room then slipped the phone from the counter into her purse. 

“Okay, well, thanks anyway,” Alice turned toward the door.

“Mind putting that back where it was?” she then heard.

“Sorry?”

“My colleague’s phone.”

Alice’s heart plunged. “Oh! I’m so sorry, I thought it was mine!”

The woman’s eyes stayed on the screen. “Mmhmm. You’d be surprised how often that happens around here.”

Alice nearly threw the phone at the woman before wobbling out the door, woozy and overcome by shame. What was she doing? But, upon exiting, the swell of humiliation lifted and was replaced by something else — something equally disorienting. She wanted to drop to her knees right there on the pavement, thank God for the sun on her skin and that fresh autumn air coursing through her lungs. 

She didn’t want to go home. All that was left for her to do was clean some more. There was always cleaning to do — and then of course the yard work, the basement that needed gutting, the painting, both inside and out. The house had been for years in a state of degenerative disrepair that Alice and Larry couldn’t get ahead of.

The sun was high. She pulled down the visor, took a right onto the main road, merged onto a clear Route 12. It was a Wednesday; kids were in school, adults at work. Retirement had placed Alice in an alternate realm that most people sought their whole lives. She never related to those aspirations of retirement. “Only ten years left!” she often heard friends say when they were in their fifties. She had always cringed at the declaration.

She’d stayed home for more than a decade to take care of the house and the kids, but once she started working, she never wanted it to end, first as a part-time secretary for a local construction company then full-time as their bookkeeper. She loved ironing her clothing each morning and getting into the office early to have the whole place ready to go by the time the bosses arrived. She was good at the job, using the same skills that kept her home running smoothly, and stayed at the company for thirty years until the owner retired and sold the business. After that, she bounced around town doing similar work but was never able to find the stability she had that first time around. The job opportunities eventually dried up as outsourcing and computer programs erased the need for her at all. Retirement arrived unceremoniously when she simply couldn’t find any more work.

She pushed open the door at Verizon and the bell offered up a polite ding. Alice grazed her hands over the phones on the shelf, all bright lines and hypnotic matrices. Larry always insisted on buying the oldest, most neglected iPhone kicking around the back of the store, knowing it would soon meet its demise anyway. 

“Can I help you, ma’am?” a man called from behind the counter. 

“Just looking for a new phone for my husband. He broke his screen.”

“Okay, do you have his phone with you?”

“Oh, no —”

“Well, it’d be a lot easier if you had the old one so we could transfer the data.”

“Oh, we’ve bought one — well, a bunch — here before, without the old one.”

“Yes, you can do that, but —”

“Great, then let’s do that.”

She showed him the phone she wanted, the one tucked in the corner, far away from any sort of display. 

“A lot of apps don’t work on this phone anymore because the software is so old.”

She and Larry knew this by now. They were too old for apps. Larry only wanted a smartphone so he could video call with the grandkids. Still, “Then why sell it?” she asked.

The man shrugged, then, perplexingly, walked away. 

The carpet in the store was faded, and she was sure she could smell it — those industrial chemical fibers soaked in the dirt and grime and shit from the bottom of a thousand different shoes. And again with the lights. So unnaturally effulgent, bringing her body back to Wallace Apothecary, the drugstore now long gone that Alice had frequented as a child, armed with her mother’s prescriptions. She always had to crane her neck to speak to the pharmacist standing on the platform behind the counter and in front of the rows and rows of drugs, like he was some kind of god. Or lord. A drug lord.

Alice was a senior in high school when her mother died of complications from multiple sclerosis. At the end, she was paralyzed and prescribed experimental medication as a last-ditch effort. Alice was convinced the pills were only killing her faster. Still, she obediently doled them out to her, never missing a day.

Alice held the old new phone in her hand. It wasn’t connected to the shelf with a wire like the others. Perhaps not worth the price of the cable to keep it tied down. For the second time today, she dropped a phone that wasn’t hers into her purse. This time, no one saw her. She left the store, the bell delivering another civilized chime behind her. 

Larry had moved to the couch by the time she returned. A glass of lemonade sat on the coffee table alongside a plate of peanuts and a bunch of grapes. She pictured his journey from there to the refrigerator and back again, using the walls and furniture to steady himself. 

“You look like you’re holding on for dear life,” Alice had said yesterday when he refused to use his walker for a similar perilous journey to the kitchen. Larry didn’t respond, hadn’t seemed to hear her at all as his big hands clutched the back of the sofa, then the corner wall. But later that evening, as they ate steak tips at opposite ends of the table, he said, “Don’t ever talk to me like that again,” in a tone that scared and shocked and shamed her all at once.

“I’m sorry,” she said into her plate, and she meant it.

“I could have gotten you that,” she was saying now, pointing her chin to the snacks. He waved her away. Then she said, “Got you a phone.”

He took it from her, examined it. The sight of him holding it sent a fresh thrill up her arms.

“Where’s the box?”

“The kid said he couldn’t find it. He said just take it as is.”

This seemed to satisfy Larry. 

Alice stood there for a while, watching Larry’s big hands crack open the peanut shells. He did this sometimes — allowed her to bear witness to his mundane tasks, like she was his audience in the theater production of his life. 

When she heard the knock on the front door, she thought it was another bird that flew into the kitchen window. It happened just last week — a sparrow torpedoed full throttle into the large pane when Alice was cooking at the stove. She was startled to see the bird’s guts on the other side of the glass and the poor thing lying stunned on the dirt below. 

When she heard another knock, this time three quick raps, she went to the door.

It was Don Sullivan. He was friends with Greg in high school and would often stay over at the house when they had early football practice. He used to be a scrawny thing but now here he was on her doorstep, all shoulders and biceps. My god how these kids grew up. 

“Hi, Donnie,” Alice said, pulling the door wide. The cops were always stopping by to talk to Larry; he’d been a selectman in town for years. “Larry’s in the other room. Come in, let me get you something to drink.” 

She heard Larry on the sofa, fists to cushions as he pushed himself to his feet, then listened for his hand to reach the chair then the corner wall, then — 

“No, thank you, Mrs. Parker. I actually needed to come by to ask you some questions.”

Despite a day of theft, she hadn’t thought for a single moment, hadn’t a single sweep of dread, that this boy, with his cruiser in the driveway, was there to speak to her. 

Now, she reached for the molding of the doorframe to steady herself.

“Mrs. Parker, Verizon called in a theft —” Donnie was saying as Larry appeared around the corner.

“Oh, hi, Mr. Parker.”

“Donnie, how you doing,” he said, planting his feet and reaching out a hand. Donnie shook it. “Why don’t you come in?”

“Oh, actually Mr. Parker, I was just telling Mrs. Parker —” 

“What do you need from me, Donnie? To come to the station?”

“That’d be great,” he said, relieved. 

“I’ll follow you there,” she said, refusing to acknowledge Larry’s stare bearing into her temple.

For a short time as a child, Alice had a pet bunny that she took everywhere she went. One day she was at the neighbor’s house playing hopscotch with one of the girls on the front walk. The bunny sat nearby, a puff of marshmallow in the warm summer sun. Alice was hopping from number 8 to 9 just as the girl’s brother came barreling out the front door, taking a flying leap from the top step, sailing through the air before landing directly on the lump of marshmallow below.

Alice ran home wailing, but all her mother did was shush her. “Get yourself together. Life isn’t fair,” she said, gesturing to the wheelchair in which she sat. “You better get used to it.” 

She had no idea why she was thinking about that bunny while following Donnie in her car to the police station — she hadn’t thought about it for decades — but the thoughts were spiraling and bursting and soon she was punching at the steering wheel, the air, screaming to the heavens for that little creature, and for her nine-year-old self, who had been forced to swallow down the anguish of having watched that creature die such a brutal death.

“You can sit Mrs. Parker,” Donnie said to her. She was standing in the door frame of the station, scanning the cement walls and the yellowed linoleum floor. Donnie’s desk was made of the same brown metal as old filing cabinets. On it sat a small, framed photo of a basset hound.

What had gotten into her? Stealing? Not once in her life had she ever even considered stealing, and now here she was at four o’clock on a Wednesday, seventy-seven years old, arrested — arrested! 

“Am I being arrested?” she asked as Donnie rifled through his desk drawer. 

Donnie said the Verizon manager sent him security footage of her visit to the store this afternoon. “Do you think that was you in the video, Mrs. Parker?” he asked, standing upright. 

She cleared her throat. “Yes, most likely.”

Donnie led her to a small room. “We’ll need to get your fingerprints.” 

He pulled on latex gloves and reached for her hand, weeding out her thumb and pressing it down on the scanner. They watched the green light crawl left to right under the glass. He did that again and again, his fingers momentarily intertwining with hers. 

Later, she stood in front of a gray wall; the ropes of fluorescent light seemed to sing above her. The camera flashed and then she heard, “Okay, now we need a profile shot.” 

She turned, and another flash came.

“Okay, and now Mrs. Parker, I don’t usually do re-dos, but let’s do the front-facing again. It’s recommended not to smile in these photos.”

Donnie talked to Alice for a while and she signed some things. Then she was alone in the office, ankles crossed, running her finger along a ridge of the white wall. It had been so shocking, how the bunny went from living to dead in such an instant, from pure white to a splattered blazing red. 

“Now that’s a hardened criminal right there,” she heard. Larry was in the doorframe, leaning hard on his crutches.

“Can I go?”

“You’re a free woman, Alice Miriam Parker — though you’re not allowed to set foot in a Verizon again.”

She stood quickly and smoothed her coat. It was too warm for such a mild day and she should have restitched the pocket. It was her mother’s, though — the butterfly brooch on the lapel too — and she always looked forward to wearing it once the weather turned.

Larry held an arm wide, his crutch dangling from his forearm. She walked toward him, buried her face into his torso.

“Let’s go.”

At the car, he opened her door, then threw the crutches in the trunk without care or regard, opened the passenger side door and sat. “Where’s your car?” she asked from the driver’s side, turning the key in the ignition halfway. The interior lights blinked on.

“Over there. I’ll get it in a minute. I just want to be with you.”

She held the steering wheel at ten and two and looked at him. “Why?”

“A man can’t sit with his wife?”

So they sat for a while like that, the car between stop and go, the warning chime singing softly.

When Larry reached for Alice’s shoulder, he saw the pack of cigarettes sitting in the center console.

“Since when do you smoke?” he asked, reaching for the pack. 

“Since today, I guess.”

Then Larry laughed, a loud rugged laugh that sounded like he was at the bottom of a barrel, a laugh so true that there was no controlling it. It had taken over. He laughed until he was wiping tears away and she was laughing too, laughing at his laughing, and her laugh made him laugh some more, the sound ping-ponging inside the car like atoms bouncing around in space.

When they were both drained empty, Larry gave the pack three quick taps on the meat of his palm like a professional.

He searched the glove compartment, cracked the window. Alice watched him hold a cigarette between his lips as the lighter let out a quick spit of metal on metal, the flame dancing until it found the end of the roll and he inhaled and held it for a while before releasing a slender plume of smoke from his mouth.

“Ah, the ol’ vice,” he said.

Then he turned toward her, holding the thing upright, the smoke writhing then dissipating into the air. Here and then gone. Here and then gone. She reached for the cigarette and placed it between her lips and watched her husband watching her, the light of the day’s end streaking through the windshield, illuminating both their faces.

Bonus audio of Mikaela reading from her story…

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