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An Unrehearsed Desire
by
Lauren B. Davis
Copyright 2011 Lauren B. Davis,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0447-9
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
IT COULD BE SERIOUS
The prickly sensation started in the back of Alice’s throat, just a tickle really, a sort of hot, dry spot that swallowing didn’t soothe. Oh, please, she thought, don’t let me be getting sick again. Alice got sick frequently, not enough to be branded a weirdo like Arthur Spivak, a penicillin-smelling boy in her class who her mother said was “nearly translucent with illness,” and whose pale temples were marbled with blue veins, but certainly Alice caught more than her fair share of colds and earaches and bouts of tonsillitis.
Alice was playing Mousetrap in Felicity Moreland’s rec room. A room you were supposed to be allowed to wreck, Alice thought, whenever she heard the word, although of course that wasn’t true at all. It was a dingy, chilly room with a gray, poured-concrete floor in the basement of the Moreland’s three-bedroom red-brick bungalow. There were metal poles in the middle of the room that Alice assumed held up the house, and earlier Felicity had hung upside down from one of them and dared Alice to do the same, but she’d said no, because she was afraid of falling and cracking her head open. What an idiot she’d look like if that happened. Felicity now rolled the dice and moved her mouse. She collected a piece of cheese.
“Ha!” she said. “Your turn.”
Alice landed on a dog bone space and so her turn was over. She clicked her tongue at the back of her mouth. It was sore, but not too sore. She decided to ignore it.
Felicity had two younger brothers and their belongings – GI Joes and hockey sticks, balls of various sizes, sports socks and mutilated toy soldiers – were strewn everywhere. The house smelled different than Alice’s house. It smelled of slightly goatish, sweaty boys and fried food. When Alice went to the bathroom, she sniffed the pink towels and wrinkled her nose. Mildew. Sour milk. Perhaps this was what boys brought into a house. Alice herself was an only child, and how so many people got along in one space baffled her. Even when it was just Alice and her mother in their house, which was a split-level and larger than this house, it often seemed like there was no place to go to get away from each other. There was always a sense of the other, somewhere in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or down in the TV room.
Felicity landed on a build spot and added the rickety stairs to the mousetrap. Felicity and Alice were not the best of friends, not even good friends. Felicity belonged to a group of girls who played sports and always had dirty fingernails and scabs on their knees. They raced bicycles and built go-carts out of their old wagons and milk crates. They roller-skated wildly down the hill on Elm Street, howling and shrieking, with no thought to on-coming traffic. They disobeyed their parents and did not fear punishment.
Alice wasn’t part of any particular group, although she very much wished this was not so. She longed to be part of a group, but it wasn’t Felicity’s group she coveted. Alice wanted to be part of the group of girls led by Kathy Baldwin and Carol McKay. These girls wore clothes not made by their mothers and not handed down by older sisters or cousins. They were so sure of themselves, with their shining hair and straight teeth. Pretty and popular and utterly unobtainable, they sat in a huddled group at the farthermost corner of the cafeteria, whispering, and laughing. And they played far more dangerous games than go-carts and field hockey, such as twirling around and around and around while holding their breath, and doing this until they passed out, sprawled on the grass with their legs apart and their eyes half closed, still and unselfconscious as if they were drugged. Sometimes they locked themselves in the girl’s bathroom together and wouldn’t let anyone else in. It was rumoured that they looked at each other’s privates, and examined each other’s chests for signs of breasts. They disobeyed their parents because they were sure of being able to squirm their way out of consequences. Boys became fools around them, cartwheeling, skateboarding, and showing off one minute, punching each other and cursing the next.
Life was like that – one group or the other, or none at all, like Alice, who sat during lunch by herself sometimes, or with other girls who weren’t part of any group, but would never admit to being a group themselves. What would they be? The girls who nobody wanted? It was a peripheral life, as if they were the barnacles they learned about in science class, hanging onto the edge of things, hoping maybe someday the more attractive cluster would envelop them by the power of sheer proximity. Or chance. Or fate. Or there were days like today, when no one much seemed to be around and so by default Alice and Felicity had floated together in the playground until, somewhat reluctantly, Felicity had invited Alice back to her place, to hang out, she said.
Felicity rummaged in the cardboard game lid. “I don’t see it,” she said.
“What?” asked Alice.
“The stupid shoe that’s supposed to tip the bucket that rolls the marble down the rickety stairs. I’ll never trap the stupid mouse.”
“Oh, well,” said Alice.
“I hate living with boys,” said Felicity.
Alice said she had to go to the bathroom.
“Again?” Felicity said.
In the bathroom, Alice swallowed and put her fingers on her throat under her jawbone. Little marble-sized swellings there. She opened her mouth wide and looked in the mirror. The light was at the wrong angle. She couldn’t see if her throat looked sick. She felt awfully tired. She felt hollow inside.
When she went back downstairs, Felicity had turned the television on. The Flying Nun’s feet were just coming off the ground. “Dumb,” said Felicity and she turned off the set. She asked Alice what she wanted to do now.
“I don’t know,” said Alice. “Maybe I should go.” The truth was that her throat felt like it was full of razor blades, but she didn’t want to tell Felicity, who played street hockey with her brothers and never wore shin guards and never complained about bruised shins and cuts and skinned knees.
Felicity shrugged.
Even the short walk from Felicity’s house to Alice’s took an enormous effort. The October wind sliced through her and she shivered. Her legs actually felt weak. Weak-kneed, jelly-legged, spaghetti-legs. She could have cried as she reached her driveway, and then the porch steps, and then the door knob. When she stepped inside the vestibule and called out to her mother that she was home, the air seemed suddenly too hot and her head spun. She smelled roasting meat, but the smell was flat, unappetizing, cloying. Her mother called out to her from the TV room in the basement. Voices from the television reached Alice, but they sounded funny, like someone playing with the volume control, turning it up and down, so that the sound came in waves.
She went up to her room and lay on the bed without taking off her coat or her shoes even. She just looked at the mauve walls, her mother’s favourite colour. Alice’s collection of stuffed animals and figurines decorated the white corner shelves, held up on the wall by metal brackets. The white horse her grandfather had brought her on his last trip reared up on its legs and you could see its private parts underneath. It was a very realistic horse, even if it was plastic. And the little mouse with a real kernel of corn between its paws, the hedgehog, the monkey, the German shepherd, the troll with the bright pink hair. It hurt her eyes to look at that hair. She swallowed. Shattered glass and turpentine. The flannel pillowcase smelled so good, like lavender. It was sweet to lie there, almost like floating.
“What are you doing?” Her mother, Cynthia,