Chapter 4 #4
Curiosity killed the cat, my dear Alice. Killed it dead.
‘I want us to have our own life,’ Alice said to her mother. ‘Can’t you see? I want you to have a place of your own, for us to be secure. Put up our photos of Dad. You could have a cat, Mom! You’ve always wanted a cat!’
But her mother wasn’t listening, she knew.
Alice cleared her throat. Her head was pounding, and it was so hard to say these things, to reprimand her like this, to tell the truth about how lazy she’d been, how she’d let her parents down, their dreams for her gone.
‘The Kynastons aren’t – they’re not our family.
Dad landed us there but –’ and for the first time in a long while she felt a white-hot, searing poker of anger, jabbing at her, toward her father.
‘I’m tired of helping them out already. I’m tired of going there, of you giving them free labour, cleaning, doing his little tasks for him, me giving him my spare time …
It’s not my home. Or yours. It’s theirs.
I want my own stories. My own place in the world. Don’t you see that?’
‘It’s a nice idea, Allie,’ said her mother absently, soberly. ‘But, for the while, I think things have to stay the same.’ She looked up at the waitress, laden with their food on bright plastic plates. ‘Thank you so much! Isn’t this fun.’
‘Mom,’ said Alice. ‘Thank you for the dress, and the lunch.’
‘Oh,’ said Betsy turning, her face lighting up.
‘I’m having the best time, honey.’ She put her hand on Alice’s arm.
‘I don’t think we settled the question of what job you’ll do next year.
I’ll start asking around. And Allie –’ Her face took on that distant look.
‘I think, perhaps, college isn’t for you.
It is for some people, just not you, honey.
There, I’m so glad we’ve agreed. Now eat up, Allie. Enjoy it!’
As they were leaving, there were shouts and banging noises from out on the street and a motley group of young people rushed past. Then they heard screaming.
‘What’s that?’ Alice’s mother said, clutching the prom dress bag as close to her as she could.
‘Protests,’ said the waitress, tearing the check off the stub and giving it to them. ‘They’re every day at the moment.’
People had gathered on the corner by Fifth Avenue.
Alice looked at the scene: the contrast of an elderly matron in a powder-blue suit and large diamond brooch entering Bergdorf, a doorman holding the door open with a reverent salute, and young people below, one of whom, a girl Alice’s age, was screaming as a policeman dragged her away.
She had on a floral skirt, dirty and torn, and a checked shirt tied at the waist. She was clutching something in her hand, which, in a few moments, Alice could see was a bunch of dirty dead flowers and leaves. I wish I had a camera , she thought.
‘Is she okay?’ Alice said, but the girl suddenly stood up and pushed over the cop and, before he could get his bearings, she too had vanished into the crowd, quicker than a whirling dervish.
‘Come, Alice, don’t get distracted,’ said her mother, tugging at her elbow. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Mom,’ said Alice. ‘One moment –’ She broke away and walked toward the knot of young people, ignoring her mother’s cries.
‘Tag?’ she said to a young man thrusting a placard into the air with considerable force and shouting louder than the others. ‘Hey! Tag Martin? That you?’
The young man turned around. He was in military fatigues, torn and utilized into a sleeveless jacket, shorts, and a T-shirt.
He had on army boots. A livid scar, still white and red, puckered the side of his face and ran into his hair and, with a shock that made her feel like she’d fallen through the floor, Alice saw that where his ear should be was a smooth, white stretch of skin, with a gaping hole and a little polyp sticking out, like a tiny piece of cream-white corn.
‘Hey, Alice! How are you?’
‘Tag! I thought you were in –’ She blushed and looked down. ‘Silly question.’
‘Wounded,’ he said with a twisted smile. ‘Came back last month.’
‘But we –’ She stopped. We prayed for you in school, she wanted to say, and girls cried, and guys said, ‘That Tag! He’s a helluva guy!’ but it sounded so childish. ‘Tag, where are you living? Aren’t you at your folks’?’
‘I’m not going back there just yet, Alice,’ he said, nodding. ‘Just spending some time in the city. I’m helping some souls down in Chelsea – they’re building, making some art. I go and help them. You know.’ He wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
Alice didn’t know what to say to him, what to give him. ‘Here,’ she said. She fumbled in her bag for the roll she had saved from the diner for the train. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Aw, Alice,’ Tag said, smiling at her, but he took the roll quickly. ‘Don’t worry about me. You all good?’ His unfocused eyes moved across to Alice’s mother, who had appeared beside Alice. ‘Hello, Mrs Jansen. Good to see you, ma’am.’
‘Tag,’ said her mother, nodding curtly at him. ‘Alice, honey –’
‘I wrote to Jack,’ said Tag, his eyes ranging past Alice and up between the skyscrapers, to the blue, blue sky.
‘I wrote him a couple times. Told him to come down here. Check out the scene. You know?’ He sniffed.
‘It’s cool, man. It’s all a really cool scene.
The fighting, that wasn’t for me, not so much –’
They had played all their lives together, running through sprinklers and throwing sand in sandboxes and sitting together at birthday parties, and this was more than she’d heard Tag say in years. Alice nodded. ‘Tag, you should come back. Your folks’ll be worried.’
‘Don’t they know you’re here?’ said Alice’s mother.
‘Oh, they know!’ Tag said, too loudly. ‘They know for sure! But for some reason they ain’t so keen on me coming back now I’m not doing exactly what they say!’ He wiped his nose with his arm again, snickering, half furious, half hysterical.
‘I shall see,’ said Mrs Jansen, ‘about asking a member of the NYPD for assistance,’ and she stepped away from them for a moment. ‘Stay there, Alice.’
‘You were always nice, Alice,’ Tag said, when her mother left. ‘You’d like the scene. Down in the Village. Come to St Mark’s Place. Come to the Bowery. Check out the scene.’
‘Okay. But, Tag, you have to stop saying scene,’ said Alice, wanting to inject levity.
‘No, don’t be like that,’ he said, shhing her.
‘It’s good, Alice. Everyone’s kind. Everyone’s a lost soul, come from somewhere.
We’re given freedom to work. To dream. We can build a world that’s honest and pure.
’ He patted the pocket of his filthy, torn fatigues, out of which poked a sheaf of paper.
‘I been drawing a lot. Cartoons, mostly, about what I saw.’
‘That’s great,’ said Alice. ‘I’d love to see them.’
‘They’re mostly of decapitated Vietcong and a dog I saw, which they’d cut to shreds …
They chopped its tail off and they made it into a tailfeather to wear.
’ His eyes were blank, even though his pupils were enormous.
‘It helps me. Drawing. No one making me do what I don’t want to do.
I’m free. And you can be too. You’re talented, Alice.
You’d like it there. You could do anything …
Design posters, chairs, tables … heheheh.
That’s a good beginning to a song.’ He hummed gently to himself.
‘There’s a chick, outside the church, she’s always there, she gave away her shoes, and she’s waiting to see if she gets a pair back, then she’s walking to Monterey, you know?
She has a guitar, and she writes songs, and it’s – it’s beautiful.
’ Tears were in his eyes. ‘I love being here. I love them all, Alice. You’d be welcome. ’
Alice looked down at his sign. It said PEACE . The other side said LOVE . And she had seen those words written down on placards before, heard them joked about, but, in the lopsided, uncertain lettering held in Tag’s quavering hands, she found them moving for the first time.
‘There, officer,’ she heard her mother’s voice say. ‘He’s a runaway. I know his parents –’
Tag gripped her arm, his strength surprising, and she looked down and saw the tattoos, blue-blooded on his biceps, and how the sight of them roused something inside her unexpectedly, her attraction even more surprising than Tag’s strength.
‘I have to go,’ he said, and he nudged her hair aside with his nose and whispered in her ear.
‘No. 5, St Mark’s Place. The East Village, Alice, that’s where we all head.
It’s a safe place. I’ll give you LSD. I’ll show you how …
You’ll love that. And making it with a guy.
I’ll do it to you if you want. You’ll love that too.
I … hey, just come see me. You were the one girl who’d get it, the one girl whose mind would have been open to it … Hey, tell Jack! Tell him!’
‘Alice, don’t let him go, dear! I want this officer to –’
Alice walked away, watching Tag melt into the crowd, swimming back into the blobbed mass of protesters, all curiously alike in their individuality.