Published: Potpourri (February and March 1993); Potpourri, Tenth Anniversary Issue (1999).

To the Moon, Alice

            Angry red numbers glared four o'clock in the morning when I slapped my clock-radio off the night stand. It flew for a split second toward the closet, but then its power cord leash caught and yanked it back to fall on the floor with a flimsy crash.

            I can't say how long it took me to realize my new phone was warbling instead of my alarm screwing up. Damn those electronic rings, I thought. What ever happened to the old phones that rang real bells, beat them so hard you could feel the vibration all over the house? I let the phone chirp two or three more times while I pulled myself together, running through a foggy mental list of family or friends I knew to be expecting—or expected to die.

            "mmhmm?" I tried to sound sleepy and pitiful for having been disturbed at such an ungodly hour. And on a Sunday morning.

            "Oh, Kent, I thought you'd never answer!"

            "Alice, is that you?" I sat up wide awake. "Are you okay?"

            "Oh, God, tonight's been the worst ever."

            Again, "Are you okay? Are you hurt? What the hell is going on?"

            A pained silence struggled through the phone line.

            "Alice!" I yelled.

            Finally she said, "My neck hurts and my ankle's twisted, but I don't think anything's broken. I won't be able to go to work Monday for sure. I'm gonna be black and blue."

            "Don't worry about that now. Where are you? Are you still in the house? Where's Harry?  That son of a bitch," I said.

            "Oh, Kent, he's so drunk tonight. I've never seen him this bad. He just came home from working and went nuts. Now everything hurts like hell."

            "Why didn't you just get out or . . ." I swallowed that. "Alice, where is Harry now?" I kept the phone between my ear and shoulder while I jumped up from the bed and looked for some clothes. Alice's voice shook, sounded small and thin. It crossed my mind that she might be in shock or something.

            "He passed out in the shower. He said he wanted to wash me off him, you know? Then he stepped into the shower and passed out. He fell real hard."

            "Alice, listen to me. If he's in the shower, he's not going to stay unconscious for long. You've got to get out of there right now, even if you have to crawl. Just go outside and cross over to the alley between Nevada and Utah. Just keep to the alley, heading toward town, toward the river. I'll pick you up along there as soon as I can. Do you understand? Are you listening, Alice?"

            "Yes, Kent. Please hurry." She hung up.

            Five after four. It would take at least fifteen minutes to scramble across town to the east side neighborhood where Alice and Harry lived, longer than that if last night's storm still hung over the city.

            Outside my apartment the wind had died down, but in the dreary blue of the street lights, the rain fell steady and straight.

            "Crap. I hate driving in the rain," I complained in an angry, sleep-hoarse whisper to that sullen darkness, to Alice. I spun out onto West End Avenue, thinking I should've just made an anonymous call to the police. Too late for that. Alice would already be out of the house and into the alley.

            I splashed roughly through the lonely city streets, constantly scanning around corners for cops, trying to find something worth listening to on the radio. I wondered how I ever let myself get tangled up in such a mess. I mean, I didn't meet Alice in a bar or anything like that. I met her in a cooking class. But I would guess now she was there looking for someone like me—a bachelor, thirty-something, helpless in the kitchen, and if she got lucky, helpless and frustrated where life in general was concerned as well. I don't know. Maybe I was there looking for her, too.

            After class we used to go to this little cafe and talk about music and films, books and politics, anything, everything. Alice liked to talk psychology, self-help theories especially.  She could quote entire paragraphs from those books. And she often did. I've come to see it was just a lot of head knowledge, never taken to heart. But, God, I kept thinking, what a bright and beautiful girl. Until I met her I never wondered why we fall in love with the people we do, never fully felt the haunting of questions without answers.

            The greens and reds and yellows shining on the rain-soaked street brought Alice even more vividly to mind. She loves to wear bright colors. When I first met her I thought that meant she had a happy life. She seemed happy then. In reality she cries easier and more often than anyone I've ever known. But as far as I can tell she only cries on the phone. I lost track of the times she broke down and cried while we sat in our separate beds, in our different homes, on the phone until it suddenly became three in the morning. Sometimes she even answered the phone crying.

            She did that the first time I called to ask her out on a real date instead of one of our cafe encounters after cooking class. She tearfully agreed to my plan for a Saturday evening, but when I picked her up she was all smiles in a tight green dress, her long red hair held back on the left side by a lavender butterfly barrette. We enjoyed that date—dinner and a movie and the long way back to her place. She made coffee. Then someone called, and she stayed on the phone for a long time. I sat in the wood warmth of her yellow and white kitchen, drinking down two sobering black cupfuls and listening to her voice down the hall. It seemed strange, then, that she acted hurt when I didn't get angry with her for leaving me alone so long there in the kitchen. It seemed strange that each of our dates afterwards had a moment like that. That was before I knew what she wanted from me, before she eased me out of her life to make room for rough-and-tumble Harry.

            This guy—Harry Miller's his name—wrestles professionally. I guess I can say that though he never wrestles on television or in any town's big arena. He's strictly small-time. He works for some independent regional promoter that puts on wrestling shows in small town National Guard Armory buildings and rural school gyms, usually fund raising for someone. That's how she met him.

            Alice had already decided one night a couple of months earlier that we were no good at dating. I left her place with my desires intact but relieved to be free of walking on the egg shells scattered thickly around her, free of trying to figure out the times I should pretend to be angry or mean to flip some deep switch that made her comfortable, that even turned her on sometimes. We didn't talk for a long time after that, and I missed her. Then one night she was on the line again.

            "Kent? It's Alice. How are you?"

            I said I was fine.

            "You'll never guess where I've been tonight, so I'll go ahead and tell you. I've been to see wrestling at school."

            I asked how the team did.

            "Oh, Kent, not the school team. These were professionals. They had a ring with ropes around it, a bell and theme music and everything."

            As if she knew I was about to play the wounded smart ass, she rushed ahead with her story.

            "The Booster's Club brought them in to raise money for repainting the gym, and I volunteered to help sell chances on the door prizes. When I sold out of tickets for the drawings I started to leave, but there was this one wrestler guy I'd seen stroll in before the crowd showed up. He had a duffel bag tossed over his shoulder, so wouldn't you think he was one of them? Well, I couldn't believe it because he had the sweetest smile on his face, you know? He even bought the first chance from me, but he didn't win a prize. The principal, Mr. Weaver, he won most of those. Anyway, instead of leaving I sat down on the bottom row of the bleachers to watch, and I've never seen anything like it. It was wild. So Roman!"

            "Sounds like fun."  I thought about my hillbilly aunt and her silent husband who used to come to town to see wrestling at the fairgrounds every Saturday night. I thought about the homely girl who lived across the street from where I grew up and how she used to scream cheers and jeers at the television Saturday mornings when wrestling came on. I couldn't picture Alice in either memory.

            "Really wild.  Anyway, the guy I'd seen earlier, Harry is his name, he wrestled in the third match. This MC fellow rang the bell, and I busted out laughing when Harry came bouncing out of the girls' locker room."

            I've been to a pro wrestling match in a high school gym before. The girls' locker room is where the villains and the nobodies dress. I started to mention that to Alice and ask her which one this Harry turned out to be, but she rambled on.

            "It just struck me as so funny, you know? I mean, think of this tough guy in there where the girls dress, pacing back and forth and banging on those old flowered pink lockers to psyche himself up for a wrestling match. Don't you find that funny? So, he comes trotting by me on his way to the ring, his bleached blond hair bouncing like in a shampoo commercial and red wrestling pants that really just look like your red jockey shorts without the pee hole in front. Oh, Kent, his eyes are like this icy blue and they locked onto me again when he went by. And there was that smile."

            She watched his match in amazement and saw him twisted like a rag doll, tossed helter skelter around the ring, slammed from corner to corner. The other wrestler wrenched Harry into positions that looked so painful Alice said she found herself wincing, her every breath caught and held hostage until he was released. When he gingerly limped back by her, beaten, his hairy tree trunk body glistening with sweat, their eyes met again. He didn't smile this time. She said she felt sorry for him losing like he did in front of everybody, wanted to make him feel better. She said she liked his smile and couldn't help it.

            I didn't have the heart or decency to tell her it was fake.

            She said she waited for Harry and followed him outside, trying to think of something to say. She finally called to him, "I'm sorry you didn't win." When he turned on her and grunted she quickly followed with, "a door prize for your ticket. I'm sorry you didn't win a door prize." She avoided the subject of what happened in the ring. She said he seemed kind of wounded in a way she recognized. They talked beside his truck for a few minutes and then went to a diner on the edge of the city. She called me as soon as she got home.

            I didn't hear from her much after that until Harry moved into her house. Then she called more often, later at night. Sometimes she asked my opinion about new movies she might try to get him to see with her or something she wanted to buy him. Sometimes she wanted to ask if I was dating, how I felt about her, about her and Harry. Sometimes she called crying, afraid of his quick anger, his drinking, and what she vaguely referred to as his violent tendencies. She would tell me how she was trying to work on him, and on herself, with the help of some new books she'd discovered.

            One night she called to say they'd gotten married, and I hung up on her.

*   *   *

            At last I shot across the Scuffle Street Bridge and veered recklessly onto Riverside. My wild turn sent a high arch of oily water crashing down on the gray bench at the corner bus stop. Luckily no one was there so early. Across the street, reflections of downtown danced on the choppy surface of the river. On the right, every street that poured its storm waters into Riverside was named after a state.  Racing closer and closer to the turn I needed, I started reading the street signs aloud as they flew by. "Illinois. Iowa. Nebraska. Wyoming. Montana." Utah whizzed by next, and I slowed to look for the alley entrance between it and Nevada.

            It felt strange to prowl past people's houses in the dead of the night, to look into their back yards, dodge their trash spilled from cans turned over by the storm. But it's not like I took much time to think about it. My mind was locked on Alice and how far she might've hobbled along her escape route. I moved slowly, looked for her behind every tree and garage corner, tried to keep my motor steady, friendly sounding, so she would know it was me. No sign. Surely she wasn't still at the house.

            I reached the point where Victor Drive cut off the alley. Still no Alice. Across Victor to the left, I could see her house. The place stood dark except for the wink-and-shadow-shift of television light through the picture window in front, and the white glow from a smaller window partway back on the near side. I pulled out of the alley and drove slowly by the house. Sure enough, there she stood in the glow of some late night movie, still as stone with her face lit by the screen, a fingernail in her mouth. So, where was Harry? gone to bed? just gone? I moved on down to the end of the block and turned around. Alice must've heard me go by. When I came back down the street, both the porch and living room lights blazed on, and she stood there, holding the screen door open, motioning me inside.

            She looked better than she'd sounded on the phone. As I've said, that was typical of her. She wore sunglasses rimmed with chartreuse frames—to hide bruises or tears, I guessed—and a tight, short, electric blue skirt that immediately made me feel uncomfortable in several ways.

            As I stepped tentatively through the door, Alice walked over to shut off the television. In the quiet, I heard the sound of the shower still running. When she turned she must've seen my startled expression.

            "Isn't it amazing that he's still out like a light in there? I checked on him during the commercials of that movie, and he's breathing fine, sort of laying like a big baby in a bassinet. I made sure the drain didn't get stopped up and pointed the water away from his face, but I was afraid to turn it off. He might've woken up before you got here."

            Again, some look must've escaped me.

            "Of course," she said, "I don't expect him to try to do anything to you. And I don't expect you to defend me if he wakes up still crazy-drunk and mad at me."

            I found that comforting and ridiculous. From what I knew of Harry, I couldn't picture him as one to act civilized catching a man in the house with his wife at four-thirty in the morning—a man she used to date, a man whose only reason for being there was to steal his woman away. And suppose for some reason he didn't come after me but went after Alice again instead? Did she actually think me so meek as to hop around like a referee making sure he followed the rules while he worked her over? I didn't plan to be there to be put in either situation.

            "Whatever," I said. "Let's just get out of here. Where's your bag?"

            "My things are in the bedroom at the end of the hall. I'll go pack."

            "Why the hell haven't you already . . ." Alice turned away from me, threw up a hand and sort of pointed in the direction of the television as if that was explanation enough. "Never mind," I said. "Let's just get them and go."

            She started down the dark hallway, and I followed her until I came to the lighted bathroom. I looked in and saw that the sliding glass door of the shower stood open at the faucet end. Harry's thick knees were all I could see of him. I cautiously walked over and peeked in at the brute. He still wore his red trunks and his black wrestling boots. A small knot sagged a little over his left eye. I smiled, figuring he earned that when he passed out and fell. Only an accident in last night's match—a slipup by Harry or the other guy—would've caused that wound. His skin glowed a certain bug-light-purple-and-beige that I always associate with too much time in the tanning bed. His thick gut and chest were hairy, rotund but not flabby. The shower stream pounded on them like a drum. His mouth drooped open, and he breathed through it heavily. He was dead asleep.

            Teardrops streaked the condensation on the glass shower wall, the little window, the mirror. The hot water had run for a while, but no steam rose at the moment. With a slow finger, I touched the stream of water that shot down on the wrestler. Lukewarm. Alice and I needed to move fast before it went completely cold and woke the hulk up. I backed away, out of the bathroom.

            Alice packed in near darkness. I guess she feared some early rising neighbor spying on her and seeing me. She seemed to grab clothes from the closet and dresser drawers at random, stuffing them into a neon-colored athletic bag. The bright light she'd turned on in the living room spilled in from the hall, casting a rectangle of illumination across the floor and all the crumpled bed clothes there, across the stripped and askew mattress, and up the wall. The one night stand, in the corner on the other side of the bed, had a broken lamp hanging off it and a jumbled pile of three or four romance novels lying on top. I knew they were romances because on two of them I make out the bare-chested young man hovering over the lady in the low-cut, formal gown, a blue bay in the background on one, a hill covered in heather on the other. One of the books lay only partly on the stand, the rest of it ripped and strewed about on the bed and floor.

            "Do you want to tell me what happened here?" I asked. "Did he just come home and start in on you? It looks like a tornado hit this place."

            "I knew he was drunk the minute he pulled in the driveway. I guess he lost again tonight.  Hell, he always loses. But I bet he'd found some little girl he wanted to impress, too. Anyway, he fixed a sandwich in the kitchen and then he came back here and ate it without saying hello or anything. So, I didn't say anything either, just sat there in bed reading a story about this man and woman falling in love over in New Zealand. That place is described so beautifully. I'll never see it, but I'll never forget what it looks like either. Anyway, Harry all of a sudden started yelling about how he knew I pictured myself making love to the men in my romance stories. Only he didn't say 'making love.' I tried to ignore him. I've been feeling one of his rages building up like steam here lately. Usually I can make him just mad enough to let it blow and he'll turn real sweet after when I act a little hurt or pretend to cry. Those times I'm like the only thing in the world to him. It's just that tonight it ended up being more than I could handle. I don't know. God, it was scary. Anyway, he grabbed my book. You can see what he did to that."

            I looked at the mess again and thought how it looked like the far side of the bed, the night stand, the floor, had just been the scene of a ticker tape parade or a New Year's Eve party or a corrupt official's frantic shredding spree. I pictured Alice sitting there naked in bed, a frightened fawn, dappled with the ragged bits and pieces of the only romance her misdirected desires allowed in her life. I wanted to grab her and hold her tight until the tears finally showed themselves, touched my face and chest, and slowly subsided.

            Alice said, "At first he tried to rip it in half through the spine like you see those strong men do, but he strained so hard I was afraid he'd about popped a blood vessel in his eye. Then he started ripping up a few pages at a time and throwing them in the air, growling and red in the face, straining like he was trying to keep from crying. I just sat there and watched him go at it, you know? I mean, sure I was scared, but I really thought we'd be making love in just a few seconds. Then he came after me. I tried to get to the spare bedroom, but he caught me in the hall and dragged me back in here. He threw me on the bed and started putting all his wrestling holds on me. He slapped me, choked me, nearly mashed my head between his legs. He begged me to fight him back. Can you believe that? He kept yelling, 'Fight me for real, Alice, fight me for real!'  And I really think I would have too, but I thought I was really hurt. Then as quick as he started he just broke off and went to the shower. That's when I called you."

            Her bag looked ready to burst at the seams.

            I listened as Alice matter-of-factly described what her husband had done to her as if it didn't seem that far out of the ordinary, as if she accepted what had happened as dangerous but still rooted in and part of love. At that moment I finally understood what she'd tried to tell me the night she gave up hope for us, the night we discussed not seeing each other for a while, the night both of us knew but neither of us said that we wouldn't be seeing each other anymore. I remembered her explaining how love felt like a burning knot in her stomach. It was excitement and fear and everything in between wound up into a tightness like a fist. All her life it felt like that to her. She never felt the knot with me so she figured she'd never love me the way she knew I wanted her to. I listened to her unveil her story in that darkened room where she'd been mauled just an hour before, and I suddenly knew that when I used to come to this house I treated her so nice I bored her.

            I just stood there, desperate in the grip of that realization, confused by the images her story brought to mind.  "I would've taken you to the moon, Alice," I said.

            "I know that, Kent. That's why I called you." She looked down and struggled a moment to zip the bag. "Maybe I'm finally ready to go."

            Her last words hung in the air, almost gleaming with promise but still shapeless and undecided. Go where? I wondered. To the moon? or just out of this house? She looked up at me and we stood like that, quiet and still. Then we froze as the shower stopped and the silence became complete.

            Harry groaned, and the house shook with the hollow, thundering sound of his wet skin rubbing against the sides of the tub as he struggled to stand up. We heard him groan. Wet cloth slapped the floor. We heard his breath drawn quickly, two grunts worth let out in short bursts, and then the remainder released explosively. Unlaced boots banged into the corner. We heard a long sibilant sigh of relief rise above the focused splash of urine in the toilet bowl. Then the dribbling spasms and no flush. Suddenly his hazy shadow stood in the light that fell through the bedroom door. It seemed only to shift slightly when he turned to the living room and cleared his throat. Then he turned again and the shadow began to pull itself together, becoming tighter and darker and more and more menacing, covering the floor and the bed and the wall as he stalked down the hall.

            But in contrast to the threatening shadow Harry's voice sounded plaintive, childlike, crying out for Alice.

            She stood still, looking not toward the shadow but toward the doorway.

            I fell backwards into the closet.

            Then he appeared in the flesh, naked and erect, reaching for Alice. She still didn't move. I don't know if he just sensed my presence or if he heard my heart beating, but he turned and looked at me as I stood cloaked against the back wall of the closet. He froze for a second, arms reaching out to Alice, eyes glaring at me across his right shoulder.

            In that moment I found the rifle in my hand. It must've leaned against the wall right next to the spot where I fell back. Harry began to turn toward me, his hands white-knuckled and rising toward my throat. I hoped the gun wasn't loaded as I buried the butt of the stock in his gut. Then as he doubled over forward I quickly brought it up and caught him square on the chin. He reeled backwards, an astonished look on his face, tripped through the tangled sheets and quilt around his feet, flapped his arms and tried to right himself. But the corner of the mattress caught him behind the knees and flipped him over to land on the back of his neck in the floor on the other side of the bed, momentum slamming him upside down into the night stand in the corner. The lamp broke again and the romance novels took flight.

            I stood amazed—but for only a moment.

            "Run, Alice!"  I dropped the rifle, grabbed the bag in one hand and her elbow in the other. I dragged her out of the bedroom where Harry lay crumpled and moaning on the floor. Down the hall and through the living room we flew. As we burst out the door into the dense rain and the graying of night toward dawn, we could hear Harry bellowing her name.

            I'd parked my car a little way down the block on the other side of Victor Drive. We jumped down the front steps and raced across the yard toward it.

            In the middle of the street, Alice wrenched her elbow free of my grip and stopped. It took me a couple more steps to pull up and whirl around to face her. She stood there, her throat and hands gone white, already dripping wet, her mouth working without making a sound.

            "I can't, Kent," she finally got out. "He's hurt. He needs me."

            "Alice, you're gonna die in there!" Then I tried to find as much calm as the moment would allow. "Even if it's not right now, you're gonna tiptoe around that lion's den one too many nights. Now come on!"

            "No, Kent. I wanted to love you. I prayed I could love you. I prayed I could go with you like this but I can't." She suddenly sounded sure of herself. "I can't do it. I'm going back." She turned in the middle of the street and started for the house.

            Another pained bellow from Harry shook the neighborhood, and it seemed I could feel people watching us through slightly parted curtains all up and down the block.

            What was I gonna do? throw rocks at her back? drag her by her red hair into my car and away from there? tackle her in the front yard and try to reason with her while the raging bull inside slowly found his wits?

            "To the moon, Alice!" I yelled my frustration at her back. "Whether you're ready to go or not, Harry's gonna blast you to the moon!"

            She kept walking. She wasn't afraid of me. She was forever lost to me for that one simple reason—she wasn't afraid of me. I stood rain-soaked in the street, listening to Harry bawl his remorse, watching poor Alice hurry across the yard. Then I spun around in a circle like a discus thrower and hurled her bag high in the air toward the house, aiming for its big picture window, hoping the angry sound of shattering glass would make her turn and see me in a new and fearful light. But above the cars that lined Victor Drive, the bag opened and spewed out blouses and socks, shorts and underclothes—the bright greens and reds and yellows and blues like kaleidoscope glass against the gray dawn sky. The clothes settled in slow motion. Some caught on car antennas and windshield wipers. Blue panties on the mailbox. The rest scattered on the sidewalk and the yard. All darkening, wet by the rain. The bag lost its momentum with its contents and plopped empty at Alice's heels.

            At that she turned. Oblivious to the mess, she looked only at me, as if to say, This is what I know. Then she crawled up the steps and climbed back into the ring.

Michael Cody / PO Box 70279 / Johnson City, TN 37614 / michael.cody@comcast.net / codym@etsu.edu