Headed for the TV to check the situation out for herself she almost tripped on Alice’s red stilettos. “My ruby slippers,” she called them, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz. There’s no place like home, thought Annette, sipping her drink, eyes scanning the room for signs of the slippers’ owner to no avail. She picked them up and wandered from group to group asking after Alice. She wasn’t upstairs, either. The gin hit her all at once and, slightly woozy, Annette dumped it in the kitchen sink. She stepped outside, still carrying her friend’s shoes to clear her head in the chilly air and found Alice standing barefoot on the stoop smoking a cigarette.
“You’re exhausted,” said Annette, gently.
“Yes.”
“Jesus Alice, you’ll freeze to death out here. Come on, I’ll walk you home and tuck you in. You just need some sleep.”
Alice nodded, leaning on Annette for balance as she pulled on her shoes.
Kathleen was sleeping on the couch when they walked inside.
“You go lie down,” said Annette. “We can pay her tomorrow.”
Annette sent Kathleen home and checked on Timmy sprawled out in the middle of the Cudden’s guest room bed. As usual, he had kicked off all the covers but still seemed warm when she pressed her palm to his cheek. Both her children ran like little Easy Bake ovens. She covered him anyway.
The monsters were sleeping, too, in twin beds against opposite walls, Michael clinging to a small metal gun from the cowboy outfit his grandfather bought him for his fourth birthday.
Annette slipped into Alice’s room. She lay in bed wan and fragile in a translucent pink slip, collarbones and shoulders jutting anvil-like beneath her taut skin. She’d been losing weight, Annette knew, but hadn’t really noticed how thin she’d become until now. “The kids are fine,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”
“Just a glass of water,” said Alice.
Annette returned and handed it to her.
“When you wake up, Jack will be president,” said Annette, as if to yet another child.
“You think I can dream my way out of here?” she said.
Annette rested her hand on Alice’s forehead. “Want the light off,” she asked.
Alice shook her head. “I can’t stand the dark,” she said.
“Sweet dreams,” said Annette, shutting the door.
She checked on Timmy one more time before heading home.
* * *
Colleen was still tossing and turning and singing “This land is your land…” as Annette passed her room but Annette decided to ignore her. You could not make a person sleep, she told herself, not a big person or a little person. In the bathroom, she took two aspirin and ran cold water on her wrists in an attempt to ward off the hangover that already had her temples in a vice.
Downstairs people had begun repeating their jokes, their stories, and pausing every few minutes to ask each other what was happening on TV, as if in need of constant translation. Annette poured herself a club soda and allowed Gerry to pull her into his lap.
“I could pull a few fuses,” he said, nuzzling her neck. “Fake a power outage.” He ran his palm up her thigh beneath her full skirt, stroking the skin between her silk stockings and girdle. Her brain barely registered the weak pang of desire passing through her. She struggled against the weight of her eyelids as her husband’s strong thumb massaged the hills and valleys of her knee. Alice’s voice came back to her then, echoing in her head:
“You think I can dream my way out of here?”
Instantly revived, she reeled up and dashed upstairs and across the street propelled by a mounting suspicion. She pushed the door of the Cudden’s house open and headed for Alice’s bedroom.
“Alice,” she said, rummaging in the covers.
Her friend did not move or respond in any way.
“Alice,” Annette repeated, shaking her by the shoulders, patting her cheek, pressing her ear to her mouth. She seemed to be breathing, if shallowly. She grabbed her clammy wrist and pressed her fingers to a faint pulse.
“Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, “ she repeated over and over again as she dialed her own phone number. It rang three times before Colleen answered. “Shea residence,” she said, as if she were twelve, as if it were three in the afternoon. “Colleen speaking.”
“Colleen, this is Mommy,” said Annette. “I need you to go downstairs very quietly and tell Joe I need to talk to him right now. Will you do that, please--quickly.”
If Colleen was shocked to have avoided a lecture about still being awake she did not let on.
It seemed forever before Annette heard Joe’s voice on the phone, an eternity before he appeared in his bedroom. Annette had opened all the windows and pressed a wet washcloth to Alice’s forehead as if she might freeze her into consciousness.
“I don’t understand,” she said, massaging a limp hand. “She didn’t have that much to drink, did she?”
“She had more than enough if she took those pills that God-damn doctor gave her,” said Joe, fumbling in the nightstand drawer and holding an orange plastic medicine bottle up to the light. “I don’t know how many were in here but it’s empty.”
“I didn’t know,” said Annette. She thought of Alice sitting at her kitchen table in short-shorts hugging her knees:
“I thought I could marry sanity.”
So much for baring our souls, thought Annette, Alice’s words thick and spongy in her head.
“I called an ambulance,” Annette said, as if reading lines someone else had written. “From the hospital in Haverstraw.”
“Forget the ambulance,” he said. “We’ll get there faster if I drive myself. Give me a hand will you?”
Annette helped him bundle her into the camel hair coat she inherited from her mother and settle her into the back of their Oldsmobile.
“I’ll take the kids over to my house to sleep,” she said. “Call us when you can.”
She watched Joe peel out of the driveway before heading inside to gather up the children.
* * *
“Nothing like a little accident to perk up a campaign party,” said Gerry, carrying a bag full of trash into the kitchen.
Annette stood at the sink. “What if it wasn’t an accident?” she said.
“Jesus, Annette, that’s a helluva thing to say.” He dropped the bag on the linoleum floor. “What about Joe and the kids?” he demanded, as if merely acknowledging the possibility that Alice might have wanted to take her own life amounted to an assault on her family.
Annette dried her hands and hugged herself to keep them from shaking, swallowing the torrent of words flooding her throat, hoarding them for the long overdue real conversation she would have to have with Alice tomorrow.
“That woman needs to go see a priest and get her head screwed back on right,” Gerry said. “She doesn’t know how good she’s got it.”
A vision of her mother asking her father to pull up the car and take her to the priest engulfed her. It happened whenever they disagreed. Father LaCroix always could get Rose’s head screwed back on right. Annette had never really envied her mother at all but she envied her now. Envied her simple, relentless faith, a faith that suddenly seemed impossibly naïve this November morning in 1960.
“Since when did my best friend become ‘that woman’?” said Annette, softly.
“What?”
“You better get some sleep,” she said, arms stiff at her sides now, fists balled like one of those Irish dancers that performed at the church last St. Patrick’s Day.
He rubbed his eyes. “Christ, I can’t believe I have to go to work in a couple of hours,” he said. “You’d think Nixon would have the decency to concede so we could all get a good night’s sleep.” He bent over and kissed her giant hair.
In the living room, Annette checked on Michael and David, sleeping foot-to-foot on opposite ends of the couch. After she’d returned from Alice’s and settled the children in Gerry actually had pulled the fuse supplying current to the basement. People shuffled upstairs, glanced in horror at their watches, and stumbled out to their cars. Joe had called not long ago to report that they’d pumped Alice’s stomach and needed to keep her for observation at least 24 hours. He would stay in the waiting room and call them in the morning.
Annette headed for Timmy’s room next; replacing the crocheted blanket her mother had made over her son’s scissoring legs before looking in on Colleen. The child lay on her side, back to the door. “Where have all the flowers gone,” she sang, making shadow puppets of her hands on the wall in the dim light. “Long time passing…”
Annette sat down on the side of the bed. “What are you still doing up?” she asked.
Colleen flipped over to face her. “I don’t know, Mommy,” she said.
Annette slipped off her dress and stockings, dropped them on the floor, scooted out of her girdle, and climbed into bed beside her daughter. “OK if I sleep with you?” she said.
Colleen turned over and melted into her mother’s torso.
Annette turned off the nightstand light.
“When you wake up, Jack will be president,” Colleen said.