Alice decided, when ninth grade began, that she was going to stop wasting time feeling ashamed of her appearance. Whether she felt ashamed or confident, the result was the same: She was very tall, and people were going to talk about it and make fun of her. She was unable to blend in; her height kept her apart from everyone else, quite literally. This meant that Alice felt lonely, but since there was no alternative, she decided to accept her reality. She walked down the school hallways at her full height and made herself smile when some puny boy cracked a joke about how the school was going to need to raise the ceilings. More to prove to herself that she could do it than for any other reason, Alice wore heels to her first high school dance. “You’re very brave,” Carrie whispered, as they walked into the school gymnasium, but Alice shook her head. “It’s not bravery,” she said. “Everyone stares at me, no matter what shoes I wear.” She was shocked, though, when the captain of the basketball team asked her to dance. He was shy and had a stutter, but he looked her directly in the eyes while they danced, and that was exciting. When he asked her out on a date later that week, she was shocked again. The surprise cleared a space inside Alice, though, and she heard a small voice—was it hers, or her mother’s?—whisper no. She had separated herself from the other kids her age, and she would stay separated. She felt safer that way.
“No, thank you,” Alice said, in as kind a voice as she could manage, and walked away. She felt a welling of relief inside her. The tall boy had asked her a question she’d never considered before, and the truth had come out of her mouth. She wanted to be like her mother: independent. Alice didn’t tell anyone, not even Carrie, but by the end of the day the entire school somehow knew that she had rejected the popular senior.
It was strange, but in the weeks that followed, other kids’ faces turned toward her like flowers. Most of them were shy or social misfits in some way. They glanced in Alice’s direction from behind their bangs or over a textbook. They timed their locker visits to match hers. They fell in step beside her in the hallways. They thought Alice was brave, and that made them feel brave too. They wanted to feel better about themselves, and they found that they did, in Alice’s company. I’m not brave, Alice wanted to tell them, because these kids were regularly insulted like she was—called fat, or stupid, or ugly—and she didn’t want to mislead them. But she couldn’t think of a way to explain herself that wouldn’t make them feel bad, so she kept quiet and kept their company.
“What in the world is going on?” Carrie said, wide-eyed. She had spent all of middle school telling boys and girls off for teasing Alice about her height, and she’d started high school poised to do the same. Alice shrugged. She had a sense of what the truth was—she had refused to feel ashamed, and that gave her classmates permission to do the same—but she was unable to put any of this into words. No one else asked her out for a date, though, and that was a relief.
Probably because Alice had more of a life outside her apartment, she now found herself able to accept the silences from her mother about her past and the lack of photographs on their walls. The smallness of their two-person family no longer felt deeply precarious to her. Alice and Julia still made dinner together most nights and watched movies in their fuzzy bathrobes on Fridays, if Alice wasn’t sleeping over at Carrie’s. She and her mother made each other laugh by putting on silly voices and competing to answer the questions first on Jeopardy! But Alice also felt some satisfaction that her very body—with its ridiculous, awkward height and her straight straw-colored hair—was somehow the embodiment of the past that her mother refused to mention. Alice still didn’t know the details, or even the broad strokes, of her mother’s Chicago life, but she no longer felt like she needed the information. She was growing into herself, and she was old enough to be confident that if the time came to save herself, she would have the strength to do so.
By the end of high school, Alice had figured out how to manage her life. She felt less like a zoo animal walking down the school hallways. She slept over at Carrie’s most weekends, and in the middle of the night the two friends quoted their favorite movie lines, and sang along to records, and talked about whatever was on their minds. Alice visited her grandmother in Florida once a year, without Julia, because her mother and grandmother no longer got along. Alice was now fully aware that her mother had cut her sisters, her home city, and to a large extent her own mother out of her life, and so Alice was careful to tread inside the lines that her mother had drawn around them. Alice loved her mother, and even though she didn’t think she could lose Julia, this data said otherwise. Still, Alice couldn’t help but note the look that sometimes passed over Julia’s face when her daughter entered the room or stood tall. There was a quiver to her mother in those moments, an opening to another life, and even though Alice wasn’t allowed entry, she was glad to be the one who occasionally rattled the door.
* * *
—
Julia drove Alice to Boston University at the beginning of her freshman year. Julia talked at her daughter while she drove. Alice thought she knew all of her mother’s moods, but today Julia was shooting out sparks that sometimes looked like excitement and sometimes looked like warning signs for an engine that needed repair.
“I want you to have fun at college,” she said.
“Sure,” Alice said. Her hands were sweating—they did that when she was nervous—and she wiped them on her shorts.
“You didn’t have enough fun in high school. I want you to be happy.” Julia flashed a look at her daughter, to make it clear that she was taking this conversation seriously.
“I had fun,” Alice said. And she had. She’d had fun staying up late listening to music in Carrie’s room and watching movies with her mother. She’d started drinking coffee in her junior year, and wrapping her hands around that warm mug every morning had sent a thrill through her—that fell under the heading of fun, didn’t it? One of her worries about college was that the coffee in the dining hall wouldn’t taste as good as what she made at home. She had many worries about college, actually. She didn’t like the idea of being crammed inside a dormitory with a lot of kids her age. Kids her age were loud and messy, and Alice would never be alone. Luckily, Carrie was attending Emerson, which was also in Boston; it gave Alice great relief to know that her best friend would be close by.
“Oh, these drivers,” Julia said. They were traveling from New York to Boston on Interstate 95, a giant thoroughfare that ran up the East Coast. Motorcyclists, enormous sixteen-wheelers, and cars danced around one another, looking for space. She said, “You should date, go to parties, stay up all night, things like that.”
“Is that what you did at college?” Alice asked.
Julia seemed to consider this. “My situation was different. I had to live at home for financial reasons, so I wasn’t really part of campus life. But you can do anything you want, baby. Smoke pot, even. Or, what do the kids call it, hook up?”
“Jesus, Mom.”
Mrs. Laven had transitioned from calling Alice my little girl to—once Alice passed her in height—my old soul. Alice hadn’t minded; she felt a little proud of the nickname, because it suggested that she was mature. It was a reason that she had no interest in dating boys. She was different, ancient on the inside, and did best on her own. The idea of flirting, kissing, having sex, filled her with horror. Alice’s old soul also helped explain the dread in her chest about the next four years.