Alice couldn’t pinpoint the precise moment in time and space when she had become such a bitch. Perhaps she was just born that way. Perhaps it had been foretold in the stars before her birth. Or perhaps it happened that late Wednesday afternoon when she was preparing dinner and found the gut-punching photos of Al’s cheating on his phone.
Perhaps. There are no life guarantees in perhaps. Only speculation and guesswork and a whole lot of reality being dished up from a menu that Alice hadn’t requested.
Nature vs. nurture? Alice didn’t care. All she knew was that she hated Al with a seething that could not be assigned a label.
Al and Alice. Alice and Al. That was then.
This is now: Alice the Bitch. Large and in charge. And alone. And madder than hell.
It was possible that “Alice the Bitch” had arrived after Alice stupidly poured her entire inheritance from her grandfather into the down payment on their house. Not one single dollar had she withheld for herself, not even to treat herself to that Birkin bag she had been drooling over for years.
Al had warned her that they couldn’t let their future go down the drain by “pissing away” her inheritance on “a goddamned handbag” and that they had to think ahead – “live for their goddamned future selves, for once” – and not be stuck on the “goddamned hamster wheel” that they were currently exhausting themselves on.
Alice had listened to Al then. She had considered him to be the type of person who had a lot to say that made sense. At the time, Alice had sighed as she deleted the pre-owned Birkin from her cart and closed the tab on her web browser.
It made her sick to think how, later that week, she had driven to TJ Maxx to look for an imitation Coach replica in the Birkin’s stead. Swapping a Birkin for a faux Coach. Ridiculous. Well, that was then.
This is now. Al’s affair had made Alice feel just like that cheap Coach knock-off. That she was one of those people who would never be able to afford the real things of life. The genuine things that spoke of value. Of quality. Of timelessness. It was sad, really. No amount of cognitive behavioral exercises from her therapist could derail Alice from beating herself up for being such a damned fool and not buying the Birkin and not telling Al to go fuck himself as she clicked on “BUY NOW.”
Alice hated herself, yes, but she hated Al more.
And the house? Well, she had lost the damn house in the divorce. Damn community property. Damn shitty and useless divorce lawyer. Damn Al and his wandering eye. And damn Alice, herself, for not seeing the signs and getting out before things got so contentious.
The signs were all there, like a night café’s fizzing neon. Of course, they were. Alice was no dummy. She just hadn’t been paying the right kind of attention to the right kind of signs.
Again, all of that was then. This is now: a 3rd-floor walk-up in a sketchy part of the city in a poorly run cooperative. Living with a food-encrusted electric range with one working burner and a leaking water heater that was rotting out the ceiling of the apartment below.
And now, with nothing left in her savings account and no liquid assets but a cash back reward of $23.62 from Costco, she couldn’t believe what an idiot she had been. An idiot. There was no other word for it. But that was then: Stupid Alice. This is now: Hard-Knocks Alice.
Slightly unhinged Alice.
In life, there is no getting around it: There is always that certain someone who ends up paying the bill. And Alice was done paying.
So, when Alice stood in Al’s sunny kitchen and saw Al lying dead on the floor, she didn’t panic. She didn’t scream. And she certainly didn’t cry.
Al’s mouth hung open like the mounted marlin that her boss had hanging on the wall behind his desk, its eyes frozen open with the look of greedy desperation, gawping in futility for fresh water to wash over its gills. The marlin looked like it was praying for the help that it knew would never arrive. And that’s how Al sort of looked now.
As she stepped over Al’s body and thought about the marlin on the wall, Alice wondered why people placed prized artwork and taxidermized animals on the walls behind themselves for others to enjoy when they entered the room. It made more sense to hang it on the wall across the room, such that the desk-sitter could be the one to enjoy it, rather than a stranger who would have very little appreciation for its relevance or share the same context of sentimentality.
Alice just didn’t get it. Why not just enjoy the fish yourself?
Some things in life can’t be scripted, Alice thought. Like love and hate, you can’t beat the purest forms of spontaneity when it comes to seizing the moment and dispensing necessary justice.
Life can suck this way if you are standing on the wrong side of hate.
Oddly, when Alice saw Al lying on the floor in front of her shell-pink pedicured toes, her first instinct was to check his breathing the way that they show you in those first aid refresher courses. Fall to your knees at the side of the inert person and lower your ear to their mouth to feel a tickle of breath escaping their mouth.
But fearing the projectile vomiting that can occur while administering CPR, Alice opted for a visual assessment of Al instead. Ever since she had shared that cab with those two drunk girls (who were more than likely using doctored IDs to get into the bar), she had been paranoid about vomit. The one girl had looked wasted, but the other girl looked dazed while fixating on something before her, as if she could see the Ghost of Barflies Past.
The ghost-girl had stared until she opened her mouth like one of those Gargoyles in a European fountain and vomit had come spewing out of her mouth and nose, much of which fell on both Alice and Wasted Girl.
Alice, unable to help herself, threw up on the spot, soaking the loden green leather of her new Fluvogs with what looked to be partially digested French fries. The boots had been an epic score from the clothing consignment shop, and it made Alice feel sad that they were officially ruined after only one brief wear.
Like her marriage to Al, there had been no saving those cherished boots, no matter how much she had once fallen in love with them.
No, after seeing those photos on Al’s phone of some woman’s vagina and closeups of her nipples, Alice was done with Al. Alice didn’t understand how images like these could give a man an erection. The vagina shots looked like a tangled up slinky that was ready to start its slow drip down the staircase, and the nipples looked like bumpy luncheon saucers with a tiny pink thumb vertically centered on them – the size of plate you see at a wedding reception. Vienna sausage, anyone?
It made Alice want to take pictures of her own vagina and nipples to compare them to Al’s lover, but she thought about that Big Cloud in the Sky and how she had read that anything you have ever looked up online has been uploaded into the cloud. Alice assumed that the same went for photos on your phone. Like fidelity and betrayal, nothing is ever lost – just hidden very well behind layers and layers of firewalls. Like Al’s cheating. Alice didn’t want to leave a digital history of her hoo-hah that could come from behind and bite her on the butt.
Lilia. That bitch. Al and Lilia. Lilia and Al. All those as and ls might explain why they packed it all up and moved to Lahaina on the pretty little island of Maui. There was barely a street sign that didn’t have an insanely long name printed across it, all full of as and ls, hs and ks and ms.
Al’s parting words to Alice, on the day that their divorce was finally finalized, were that he and Lilia couldn’t find a place that could be farther away from Alice than Hawai’i. So, in the words of drama-mama Al, they were forced to flee Alice’s “fucking weirdness,” board a plane, and rent a little cottage in paradise.
Poor Al. Cry me a fucking river.
The one thing that Alice knew about herself is that she didn’t have a true ear for language like some people. When the fast-food employee had started spouting off directions with all of those Hawaiian street names, Alice had to write down each syllable and have him repeat it several times before leaving the restaurant and locating Al and Lilia’s street.
Alice had pressed her thumb, repeatedly, into the doorbell of the cottage. Alice noticed how the metal of the bell was encrusted with salt from the ocean air, and she felt an odd pang of envy. It wasn’t fair that Al got to have his happily-ever-after, naturally-sea-salted life when all Alice got was sucker punched by Al’s cheating.
Al looked more afraid than surprised when he opened the door saying, “What the hell is wrong with you? Why are you here?”
Al couldn’t have known that the painted concrete seashell that he and Lilia had bought at the farmers market and arranged so artfully on their front stoop alongside the green-and-brown painted honu (from the same artist) would be his undoing. One blow was all it took, and Al sank like a stone to the sea floor on a calm day.
Al thought that he had escaped Alice to start a new life. Well, Al had been wrong.
Alice didn’t know how long she had stood there when she was startled by a knock at the door. A plumpish, gray-haired woman was on the other side of the peephole. Her hair, a hot pink fluff of a Q-tip glued to the top of her skull, shouted to the world that she was both keeping up with the times and exploring a bit of her edgier side.
Alice opened the door just the right amount, not a tiny crack to appear shady or suspicious but enough to appear friendly while being understandably cautious about opening the door to a stranger.
The woman’s tattooed eyebrows raised toward her pink hairline, “Oh my. I was expecting Al. Who are you?”
Alice didn’t blink, “Leilani. I’m Al’s cousin from Portland. Oregon, that is. Not Maine.” Then, to herself: Stop your babbling.
The woman commented on what a lovely name Leilani was, and Alice gave a tight smile and lied, “My mother spent a lot of time here before I was born. And my father was from the Big Island.”
Pink Hair said, “Well, I’m glad to see that the cavalry has arrived. The way that that hussy jilted him to run off with that surfing instructor. Her surfing instructor. Al has been heartbroken. Heartbroken, I am telling you. Well, you must have known how much because, well, here you are.”
“Here I am,” Alice pasted what she hoped to be a sympathetic smile on her face and nodded. “I couldn’t stay away after I heard him on the phone. He sounded terrible.”
Pink Hair prattled on for a bit about the ways of heartbreak and hussies and good-looking surfers. She explained that she was Al’s landlady and that she lived next door. Alice glanced at her house, the shutters all peeling and one of them hanging from a corner. I guess that the price of paradise sometimes is living in the equivalent of a 3rd-floor walk-up, Alice thought to herself. Context is everything.
It was all Alice could do to not try to rub the feel of the old woman’s papery fingers off her skin when Pink Hair patted her on the arm before leaving. Alice looked at Al and wondered. It was unlikely that Lilia would ever return to reconcile with Al. He wasn’t much of a catch after all. Al just might have decided to take a trip back to Portland. Oregon, that is. A good story to tell Pink Hair. She likely would believe anything about “poor Al.”
Alice decided to bake a batch of banana bread with those black bananas rotting on the kitchen counter and bring a loaf over to Pink Hair later. A friendly thing to do and to let her know that Alice would be taking over the lease for a few months, if that was okay with her, while Al was away nursing his broken ego on the mainland.
And Al’s body? Alice would figure it out. She always did. Alice located the cutlery drawer and a flat-bottomed Pyrex bowl. She mashed the banana into a black-brown slurry with a fork and then beat in two eggs with the orangest of yolks. The smell of the vanilla extract lifted her spirits. She would email her landlord on the mainland later this afternoon and tell him that she was moving and he could keep her deposit.
As Alice poured the banana bread batter into a greased loaf pan, she noticed a sapphire blue beta fish swimming around in a miniature aquarium on the kitchen counter and recalled the time she had overheard two drunken women talking about her while she sat in the bathroom stall at her favorite karaoke bar.
Raspy Woman had said, “Geez, she didn’t even spill a tear. What kind of bee-yotch could sing “Vincent” without cracking a tear? She’s probably a sociopath.”
The other woman had replied, “No, probably a psychopath. I know. Geez. I was bawling my eyes out even though her face was like stone. Like stone, I’m telling you.”
Raspy added, “I thought for sure she’d be bawlin’ by the time she got to the ‘You took your life as lovers often do’ line? That is one cold fish.”
Alice had come out of the stall and slammed the door with a bang. The two women looked at her, looked at each other, and then looked back at Alice.
Alice sucked in her lips to make a fish face and made kissing noises at them. Although the insides of her cheeks were starting to hurt, she kept it up.
The women fled the bathroom without washing their hands. That was the kind of woman Alice was. The kind who could make a person forego basic hygiene just to get out of her orbit.
Alice started to hum “Starry Starry Night” as she crumbled some fish flakes into the fish’s aquarium. The fish swam to the surface to swallow the crumbs, and Alice thought that she caught a wink from its bulging eye. Then she looked down at Al and said, “Time for you to go swimmin’ with the fishes.”
Alice dragged an area rug from the living room into the kitchen and rolled Al into a burrito. She suddenly realized that she was hungry, so she planned a trip to the tiny market on the corner to buy a pint of expensive ice cream and some apple juice. There was just something about the thought of a cold glass of apple juice that made her shiver. The thought of feeling condensation on a cold glass bottle of juice made her smile.
She said to the fish, “Eve took her apples whole. I’ll take mine juiced.”
The fish swam behind its miniature castle, out of sight.
Life has a funny way of turning over on itself, Alice thought. She slid the loaf pan into the oven. Pink Hair (she’d really have to learn her name if she were going to be renting the cottage from her) would think nothing but generous thoughts about Alice – no, Leilani – after eating a buttered slice of her banana bread. Alice added “butter” to her mental grocery list.
Alice sighed and set the timer on the range.
That was all then.
This is now.