She looked around, her hands on the ground to balance herself, her chest heaving, and saw that the children with the water pistols were still running back and forth, as if the world hadn't turned black and evil. She looked back at the end of the street where the white car was waiting for a break in the traffic.
It was something to do with a car pulling up at that corner.
She closed her eyes and saw the brake lights of a green four-wheel-drive. The number plate said: GINA 333.
Nothing else. She felt simultaneously hot and cold, as if she had the flu. For
God's sake
. Was she about to be sick again? All that custard tart. The children could clean it up with their water pistols.
A horn tooted. “Alice?”
Alice opened her eyes.
A car had pulled up on the other side of the road and a man was leaning out the window. He opened the car door and quickly crossed the street toward her.
“What happened?”
He stood in front of her and blocked out the sun. Alice squinted mutely up at him. She couldn't make out the features of his face. He seemed extremely tall.
He bent down beside her and touched her arm.
“Did you faint?”
She could see his face now. It was an ordinary, kind, thin, middle-aged sort of face, the unassuming face of a friendly newsagent who chatted to you about the weather.
“Come on. Up you get,” he said, and lifted her by both elbows so she rose straight to her feet. “We'll get you home.”
He led her across the street to the car and deposited her in the passenger seat. Alice couldn't decide what to say, so she didn't say anything. A voice from the back of the car said, “Did you fall over and hurt yourself?”
Alice turned and saw a little boy with liquid brown eyes staring at her anxiously.
She said, “I just felt a bit funny.”
The man got back in the car and started the engine. “We were on our way over to your place and then Jasper spotted you. Were you going for a run?”
“Yes,” said Alice. They stopped at the corner of Rawson and King. She thought of the car with the GINA number plate and felt nothing.
“I saw Neil Morris at the IGA this morning,” said the man. “He said he saw you being carried out of the gym on a stretcher yesterday! I left a few messages for you, but I didn't . . .”
His voice drifted away.
“I fell over and hit my head during my âspin class,'” said Alice. “I'm fine today, but I shouldn't have been running. It was stupid of me.”
The little boy called Jasper giggled in the backseat. “You're not stupid! Sometimes my dad is stupid. Like today, he forgot three things and we had to keep stopping the car and he'd say, âBoofhead!' It was pretty funny. Okay, first thing was his wallet. Second thing was his mobile phone. Third thingâummm, okay, third thingâDad, what was the third thing you forgot?”
They were pulling into Alice's driveway. They stopped the car and the little boy gave up on the third thing and threw open his car door and ran toward the veranda.
The man pulled on the handbrake and then turned to look at Alice with gentle concern. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Well, I think you'd better put your feet up while Jasper and I take care of those balloons.”
Balloons. For the party, presumably.
“This is a bit awkward,” began Alice.
The man smiled. He had a lovely smile. He said, “What is?”
Alice said, “I have absolutely no idea who you are.”
(Although, in truth, there was something about the way he smiled and the feeling of his hand on her shoulder that was giving her an idea.)
The man's hand sprang back like an elastic band.
He said, “Alice! It's me. Dominick.”
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Frannie's Letter to Phil
Me again, Phil.
Barb and Roger took me for lunch at Alice's place today.
Physically she seems fine, but she is definitely not herself. She didn't remember Gina! It was disconcerting. Gina played such a big part in Alice's life. Almost too big a part.
Barb talked about it all the way home. “Sometimes I wish Alice had never met Gina,” she fretted. “You can't change the past,” pronounced Roger, and we were all quite overcome by his wisdom. He's a philosopher, that fellow.
It's not relevant now but I always thought that Gina did dominate Alice. (Alice does have a slight tendency toward hero worship.) I remember her making some comment about Alice's outfit at Olivia's birthday party last year. It was something along the lines of “Your such-and-such blouse looks nicer with that skirt.” Alice went straight back upstairs and changed. I noticed Nick was watching the whole incident and didn't look too happy about it.
After Barb and Roger dropped me off, we had yet another Social Committee meeting. This time we were discussing plans for this year's Christmas party. Mr. Mustache suggested a “Casino Night.” People loved the idea! Can you think of anything
less
Christmassy, Phil?
He's the most aggravating man.
I will admit, however, that he did make a point of asking me whether Alice liked the talcum powder.
Elisabeth's Homework for Dr. Hodges
A funny thing happened when I got home from lunch with the Infertiles. Not exactly ha-ha funny. Just stupid ironic funny.
Driving home after lunch, I kept thinking about “Giving Up.” The idea grew stronger and stronger in my head. It suddenly seems quite obvious to me. I can't go through another miscarriage. I can't. The thought of it happening again gives me the feeling of a block of concrete dropping on my chest. I have had enough. I didn't know I'd had enough, but it turns out I have.
We used to keep setting those deadlines. No more after my fortieth birthday. No more after Christmas. But then each time we'd think, well, but what else is there to do? We'd traveled, we'd been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we'd slept in. We'd done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn't want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.
I remember thinking about how mothers were prepared to run into burning buildings to save their children's lives. I thought I should be able to go through a bit more suffering, a bit more inconvenience to
give
my children life. It made me feel noble. But now I realize I'm a crazy woman running into a burning house for children who don't exist. My children were never going to exist. They were always in my mind. That's what's so embarrassing about all this. Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I'd never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren't babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren't ever going to be anything else. They were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies.
And people have to give up on dreams. Aspiring ballet dancers have to accept that their bodies aren't right for ballet. Nobody even feels that sorry for them. Oh, well, think of another job. My body isn't right for babies. Bad luck.
At the pedestrian crossing I saw a pregnant woman, a woman pushing a pram, a woman holding a child's hand. And I actually felt nothing, Dr. Hodges. Nothing! That's a big thing for an Infertileâto see a pregnant woman and feel nothing. No knifein-the-stomach feeling of bitterness. No ugly envy twisting my mouth.
So here's the funny thing.
I got home, and for once, Ben wasn't in the garage working on his car. He was sitting at the kitchen table with paperwork spread out all around him, and I noticed his eyes were a bit red and puffy.
He said, “I've been thinking.”
I told him so had I, but he could go first.
He said he'd been thinking about what Alice had said last week and he'd decided she was one hundred percent right.
Oh,
Alice
.
Alice sat on the couch and watched Dominick using a helium tank to blow up blue and silver balloons. He and Jasper had finally got sick of breathing in the helium and talking in chipmunk voices. Jasper had laughed so hard at his dad squeakily singing “Over the Rainbow” that Alice had worried he might stop breathing. Now he was outside in the backyard, using a remote control to expertly operate a miniature helicopter.
“He's very cute,” said Alice, watching him. She'd gathered that Jasper was in the same class as Olivia. Her daughter. The one with the fat blond pigtails.
“When he's not being a psychotic monster,” said Dominick.
Alice laughed. Perhaps too much. She didn't really get parent humor. Maybe he really was a psychotic monster and that wasn't funny.
“So,” she said. “How long have you and I been, ummm, seeing each other for?”
Dominick glanced quickly at her and away again. He tied the end of the balloon and watched it float straight up to the ceiling with the others.
Without looking at her, he said, “About a month.”
Alice had told Dominick that the doctors had said her memory loss was only temporary. He looked terrified and seemed to be talking to her gently and carefully, as if she had a mild intellectual disability. Unless that was the way he always talked to her, of course.
“And it's, ah, going well?” asked Alice recklessly. It was bizarre. Had she kissed him?
Slept with him?
He was very tall. Not unattractive. Just a stranger. She felt both repelled and mildly titillated by the idea. It reminded her of gurgly, giggly teenage conversations. Oh my God, imagine having sex with
him
.
“Yup,” said Dominick. He was doing something funny and nervous with his mouth. He was one of those awkward, geeky types.
He picked up another balloon and hooked it over the nozzle of the helium tank. He looked at her properly, full in the face, and said, almost sternly, “Well,
I
think so, anyway.” Actually, he was not unattractive.
“Oh.” Alice felt flustered and exposed. “Well, good. I guess.”
She longed for Nick to be sitting next to her. His hand warm on her leg. Claiming her. So she could enjoy talking, maybe even flirting, with this perfectly nice man in an appropriate, safe way.
“You seem different,” said Dominick.
“In what way?”
“I don't know how to explain it.”
He didn't say anything else. Apparently he wasn't a talker, like Nick. She wondered what she saw in him. Did she even like him that much? He seemed sort of dull.
“What do you do for a living?” she asked. The standard dating question. Trying to unfairly slot him into a personality type.
“I'm an accountant,” he said.
Fabulous. “Oh, right.”
He grinned and said, “Just testing to see if you really had lost your memory. I'm a grocer. A fruit and veg man.”
“Really?” She was imagining free mangoes and pineapples.
“Nah!”
Oh, God, this man was a nerd.
“I'm a school principal.”
“No, you're not.”
“I'm being serious now. I'm principal at the school.”
“What school?”
“Where your kids go. That's how we met.”
The school principal.
Straight to the principal's office!
“So you'll be there tonight? At this party?”
“Yes. I'm sort of wearing two hats, because Jasper is in kindergarten, and this party is for parents of kindergarten kids. So I'll be . . .”
He had a habit of not completely finishing his sentences. His voice just drifted away, as if he thought it was so obvious how the sentence finished there was no point saying it out loud.
“And why am I hosting it?” asked Alice. It seemed extraordinary. Why would she even think of doing such a thing?
Dominick raised his eyebrows. “Well, because you and your friend Kate Harper are Class Mums.”
“Like classy mothers?”
He smiled uncertainly. “The Class Mums arrange social events for all the other mothers, and communicate with the teachers, organize the reading roster, and, ah, that sort of . . .”
Oh Lord. It sounded horrendous. She'd become one of those volunteering, involved type of people. She was probably really proud and smug; she'd always known she had a tendency toward smugness. She could just imagine herself swanning about in her beautiful clothes.
“You do a lot for the school,” said Dominick. “We're very lucky to have you. Speaking of which, it's the big day coming up! Wow! I hope you're going to be well enough for it!”
That man on the treadmill at the gym had mentioned a “big day,” too. “What do you mean?” asked Alice with a sense of foreboding.
“You're getting us into the Guinness Book of Records.”
She smiled, ready to laugh at his next joke.
“No, really. You don't remember at all? You're baking the world's biggest lemon meringue pie on Mother's Day. It's a big event. All the money raised is going to breast cancer research.”
Alice remembered her dream about the giant rolling pin. Ah. The rolling pin wasn't a symbol at all. It was just a giant rolling pin. Her dreams were always so disappointingly obvious.
“I'm baking it?” she said in a panic. “This huge lemon meringue pie?”
“No, no. You've got one hundred mums baking it,” said Dominick. “It's going to be amazing.” He knotted the end of another balloon together. Alice looked up and saw that the ceiling was now covered with blue and silver balloons.
Tonight she was hosting a party and next weekend she was planning to break a world record. Good Lord. What had she become?