“Mama!” a high voice called out from the next room. Alice crossed the hall and poked her head into an open doorway. The room—pink, with a canopied bed—was three times bigger than Alice’s childhood bedroom on Pomander Walk. A small girl was sitting on the rug, sharing tea with a stuffed bear equal to her size, if not larger. Alice felt her body flood with a feeling that she couldn’t quite identify. She wanted to wrap her arms around the little girl, to scoop her up and smoosh their bodies against each other. She wanted to do to Dorothy what Leo had done to her, hug her so hard that they both fell over.
“Hi, Dorothy,” Alice said. “Can I join you?”
Dorothy nodded, solemn with the importance of her task, and poured Alice a cup of pretend tea. Alice scooted over so that she was in between the child and the bear. There was a thunderous noise, and Leo leaped into the room, crashing into Alice and hugging her from behind. Tommy followed after.
After her friends had started to get married and have children, Alice had thought about the by-products of those decisions: an apartment filled with toys, sharing a bed with the same person forever, having someone nearby who potentially understood how to properly file taxes, breastfeeding, what exactly a placenta was and why some people ate it, what happened to love over time, if people found their own children tedious, if people hated their spouses, if she would be good at any of it. At first, it all seemed theoretical, the way teenage girls sometimes planned their future weddings, knowing that everything in their lives would be different when they actually got married but still doing it anyway, but the older Alice got, and the more of her friends actually went through with it, the more it shifted from a fun fantasy into a sad one. Marriage was clearly all about compromise, and parenthood so much about sacrifice, but like everything else that was difficult and unappealing, those conditions were much easier to stomach the sooner they were introduced.
“This tea is delicious, may I have some more?” Alice said. Dorothy nodded and took the cup back with her thick little fingers. “How old are you, you beautiful little person?”
“Poopyface is THREE!” Leo shouted, careening around the room until crashing headfirst into the gigantic stuffed bear. This made little Poopyface explode into tears. She stood up and screamed, her hands clenched into fists.
“Hoo boy,” Tommy said. “Come here, baby.” He scooped Dorothy up and carried her to a rocking chair in the corner, where he plucked a faded scrap of cotton attached to a pacifier. Dorothy took this object with both her hands and plugged her own mouth with immediate comfort that verged on the ecstatic. She moaned. “Go for your run,” Tommy said. “I’ve got this.” He sat in the chair and pulled a book off a nearby shelf. Leo army-crawled across the floor and set his head on top of one of Tommy’s feet. Alice didn’t know when she’d turned into a person who ran for fun, but she laced up a pair of sneakers by the door and went out into the world.
37
The doorman swung the front door open wide, tucking his body next to a six-foot-tall potted tree, one of two that flanked the building’s entrance. “Morning, Alice,” the man said in greeting. He was small, with a round face and a barrel chest inside his double-breasted coat. Alice felt terrible that she didn’t know his name, because she could imagine how many people who lived in this building never bothered to use it until it was time to write it on an envelope at Christmas.
“Morning!” she said, and hurried into the predawn air on Central Park West. Unlike Broadway or Columbus, the busy commercial stretches of the neighborhood, Central Park West looked exactly as it always had. The trees leaned over the stone walls like neighbors sharing sugar, some bending low to shade benches below. The apartment buildings that faced the park weren’t glossy monstrosities like Alice could see poking into the skyline in midtown. These buildings were limestone and brick, elegant and sturdy. It could have been any year in the last five decades. There were flower boxes in front of the most expensive buildings, and doormen standing sentry by the grand doorways, ready to hail taxis or help carry groceries. Alice slid her phone out of her pocket and pressed her father’s name. What had Tommy said? Go visit her dad? Go see her dad? Had he mentioned a hospital? Alice was almost positive that he hadn’t.
The phone rang and rang and then Leonard’s outgoing voicemail message began to play. Alice hadn’t heard it in so long—in the weeks before her birthday, she’d had no reason to call—if Leonard couldn’t answer the phone, which was, after all, just a pocket-sized hunk of metal and plastic, why would she call? He said to leave a message, and that he’d call back as soon as possible. Maybe he was in the shower. Maybe he was having breakfast at City Diner and had left his phone at home—Alice had long envied that about her father, that he retained a certain twentieth-century attitude about telephones, that they mostly stayed at home, and he could easily go hours without touching his, whereas Alice could hardly go ten minutes. Alice hung up instead of leaving a message, then changed her mind, called back, and after the beep, said, “Hi, Dad. It’s Alice. Just want to hear your voice.” She was across the street from the Museum of Natural History, and part of her thought that if she went inside, straight under the whale, she would somehow be able to see herself and her dad lying there. Alice broke into a jog.