The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [94]
Sarah was standing at the top of the platform stairs, scanning the parking lot. She had on a ratty sheepskin coat, beneath which I saw an old pair of my Frye boots that she had confiscated on her last trip home. “These are so urban hippie retro,” she’d said. “I can’t believe you wore these.” When I told her that apparently she was now going to be wearing them, she said, “Yeah, but not seriously.”
Her hair was braided into two pigtails that reached to her waist, and clustered about the crown of her head were what seemed an infinite number of rhinestone barrettes. She would not recognize the car, and so I cruised up beside her, ducked my head across the passenger seat, and called her name.
“Mom, oh my God, this is a horn-dog car!” she said as she threw her bag in the backseat and got in beside me.
She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. It carried a shock, as if she had been rubbing her feet on carpeting.
“Sorry,” she said.
We left the parking lot.
“How was the train?” I asked.
“Is this, like, a midlife crisis thing?” she said. “Go out and get a sports car? I thought men did that.”
“Women get Botox,” I said.
“Right, so what gives?”
“Actually,” I said, “this isn’t my car. It’s a rental.”
“The smell. I should have guessed that! Where’s yours?”
We were stopped at a light across from Roscoe Automotive and the Mail Boxes Etc. store. Cars and mail, I thought. Trains.
“Your head looks like a disco ball,” I said.
“Don’t avoid the question.”
“My car is in the garage, and your father is asleep in my bed.”
I could not help baiting her. It was a game we had played since her childhood, who could get the other’s goat, who could create the best exaggeration. Sarah, I knew, had hoped to make this early skill into an art. She was a child of embellishment and stylish turns. What Emily had in stolid substance, Sarah possessed in her ability to distract everyone from the main topic of conversation. That way, no one ever thought to get a real answer to the question of how she was doing. It was what she’d carried into voice classes like a blank check. She could sing well enough, but—and the “but” held everything, both a buoyant magnetism and what I feared might be her incipient version of the family’s insanity.
“Tell the story,” she said.
We passed the hospital, and I picked up speed. I could tell she was feeling good. Her cheeks were flushed as if she had just come from a run. But Sarah didn’t run. She didn’t exercise. Not for her what she called my “gym crucifixion.” She starved sometimes, and sometimes binged. She drank and smoked, and I was sure did other things.
“There is a lot to tell,” I said. “I’d rather not go home just yet. Your father needs to rest anyway. It might be easier if it’s just the two of us.”
“I sense intensity,” she said.
“We’ll go somewhere,” I said, “then I’ll tell you all you want to know.”
“Yow!” she said, but she did not follow up with anything else. As we passed Easy Joe’s Restaurant, I saw her check each rhinestone barrette with her hands. She took its shape between her thumb and forefinger and then tested it to make sure it held.
“Why the braids?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. My hair was wet. Like or not like?”
“They remind me of your grandmother.”
“Not like, got it.”
I knew where I was headed. Hamish had been the first person I’d gone there with in years. In the daytime the farmland invited the eye, and then the towers between the treetops stopped it cold.
As we passed by the Ironsmith Inn and turned left to crest the hill, Sarah sighed loudly.
“No Schlitz?” she asked regretfully.
Without looking in my rearview mirror, I threw the car into reverse and swung backward into the general store’s lot.
“Cash and carry,” I said. “Make it quick.