Alice in Bed Read online

  “You look like a drunken sailor on shore leave, Sara. A bizarrely feminine one. Anyway, where would we go? What would we actually do?”

  “A tavern. We’ll pop in and order a whiskey. Two whiskeys.”

  But how did you conduct yourself in a tavern? When you ordered a glass of whiskey, did you ask for a particular brand? Did you pay when you ordered or at the end? While Sara and I knew no end of sewing stitches, ordering a drink in a tavern was plainly beyond us. And then there was the problem of our voices. “Anyhow,” I pointed out, “the moment we leave the house we’ll be recognized by President Eliot, who always knows by some mysterious power what everyone in Cambridge is up to.”

  “Does he really?”

  “Yes, he does. Father says he derives a secret joy from delivering bad news to people. You can be sure he’d lecture us about how young ladies are meant to behave, and bring us home to our families in shame.”

  The tavern idea was jettisoned, for now. We lay on the lawn in silence, slapping the mosquitoes that were landing on our bare flesh with increasing frequency.

  Sara said, “Have you ever studied men’s faces at a dinner party after they’ve gone off by themselves to smoke? When they rejoin the women, they look as if they’d returned from some dark and mysterious country about which they are sworn to secrecy.”

  We stared up at the night sky in silence for a while. Unlike Boston, Cambridge had only a handful of streetlamps then, and the stars were a splash of diamonds on black velvet. I felt a wave of irritation at them for being so far away and inaccessible.

  “If you were a man, Alice, what would you do? I think I’d go live with the Bedouins. Flaubert says the vast silence of the desert is like the sea.”

  More drunken shouts erupted on Kirkland Street. A pack of young men nearby were howling like wolves. “Ah, the great scholars of Harvard,” Sara sighed.

  “I shouldn’t like to go about on a camel, Sara. They are bad-natured, so they say.” In truth, I didn’t feel drawn to join the Bedouins at all, and despite growing up with four brothers, I suspected the real lives of men were as remote from women as the craters of the moon. Meanwhile, women were obliged to live inside safe little cages like parakeets.

  We fell silent. What more was there to say? Our little fantasy of liberation had collapsed and could not be revived. When the mosquitoes became intolerable, we headed for the house.

  The French doors always stuck in humid weather. Sara vigorously jiggled the handle while pushing against the door with the sole of her foot. This did the trick. Inside we wandered about the sleeping house silently, like assassins, grass clippings stuck to the soles of our bare feet. Sara stubbed her toe on a chair leg and at the same moment a mouse jumped down from a pantry shelf and sped across the floor. We grabbed hold of each other as if we were passengers on a sinking ocean liner, laughing and shushing each other.

  In her bedroom, Sara charged around lighting candles and rummaging through drawers as I sat at her dressing table. My arms ached from holding them up to unpin the countless hairpins anchoring my plaits to my head, and I wondered how I should bear the next half century of pinning, unpinning, washing, brushing, combing, braiding, and coiling this uninteresting mass of hair. Just as I was picking up the hairbrush to begin my hundred strokes, Sara popped up in the mirror, smiling broadly and holding a green bottle in one hand and two long-stemmed glasses shaped like tulips in the other.

  “Here is something I’ve been saving for the right occasion, Alice. Prepare yourself for a bouleversement.” She looked like the cat that swallowed the canary.

  “What is it?”

  For answer, she uncorked the flask and poured the liquid into the two tulip glasses. I blinked at the startling green color, like melted emeralds or something else out of a fairy tale.

  “Don’t drink yet,” she warned. “C’est dangereux.” She dashed over to the washstand, returning with a pitcher of water. As she poured half a cup of water into each glass, she instructed me solemnly, “Never drink this straight, Alice.” Mystified, I watched her remove a small sugar bowl from a compartment in her chest of drawers, spoon a half teaspoon of sugar into each glass and stir. Then she picked up one of the glasses and clinked the other glass with it.

  “Salut, Alice! Aren’t you going to drink up?”

  “What is it?”

  “We-ell, they call it la fée verte.”

  My eyes fastened on the bottle’s label with its drawing of a female fairy with green wings. That the fairy looked friendly made me only slightly less apprehensive. (What can I say? I was a youngest child. During my childhood my brothers applied themselves to scaring me to death whenever possible.)

  “Drink up now; ask questions later.”

  Well, why not? I picked up the other tulip glass and touched it to Sara’s. She was now beaming like a goddess bestowing a boon. The glasses were Turkish, she informed me. I took a sip and was surprised by a mouthful of liquor with a licorice under-taste. I coughed and my throat burned.

  Sara, behind me, was drinking with gusto.

  “I would never have guessed you had a tavern in your bedroom, Sara.”

  “It’s absinthe, Alice.” Her warm breath was near my ear. She bent forward, rubbing her upper arms with her hands, and her eyes gleamed. “My brother gave it to me and swore me to secrecy. You know how Arthur is always trying to épater les bourgeois. Part of the mystique of being a journalist, I suppose.”

  “What is it made from exactly?”

  “Anise! That’s where the green comes from. But wormwood is the critical ingredient, I believe. And something else—fennel maybe. What is fennel?”

  “Never mind that. The real question is how soon should we expect to go raving mad?”

  Sara dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “Old wives’ tale. The most we can expect is strange and colorful dreams, which I would not wish to discourage.” I saw that Sara was naturally brave, but daily life provided few opportunities for female bravery apart from the gory mess of childbirth. Wishing I had a brave bone in my body, I kept my eyes fastened on the looking glass. Our eyes met for a moment in the mirror world, and I felt something pass between us.

  “C’est l’heure émeraude, Alice. Would you allow me to brush your hair?”

  I must have nodded.

  “You would not believe how many poems have been written about absinthe,” she said as she brushed. Not since the era of my French governesses had my hair received such single-minded devotion. “It’s practically a cottage industry. It seems when I drink you, I inhale the young forest’s soul during the beautiful green season. I forget the rest, but isn’t that lovely? Oh, and this one, by a different poet. Poetess, actually. I drank till the solid walls of my own room appeared to me like transparent glass, shot throughout with emerald flame/Surrounded on all sides by phantoms.”

  The absinthe was evidently making her loquacious. “Phantoms? That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

  “Well, think of emeralds then.” The green was draining rapidly from her glass, like a stage magician’s trick. “Think of the verses we’ll write under the influence, and with the money we make from our poetry, we’ll buy more absinthe! A perfect plan, no?”

  After an indeterminate period, I found myself falling into an unknown zone of myself. La fée verte was melting me by degrees while Sara ran her fingers through my hair and mock-seriously demonstrated different styles of hairdressing. Each touch of her fingers ignited a fleeting sweet-sharp explosion. I kept my gaze on the mirror. If I looked at her directly, it would break the spell.

  She moved her hands to my shoulders and our reflections gazed back at us, the candle flames multiplied in the mirror and the silvered objects on the dressing table.

  “Voilà! The Grecian look, Alice.” She was referring to the hair arrangement she had erected with a scaffolding of hairpins, combs, and clips. “Godey’s says it is a classic that is coming back in style.” She took a step back to appraise her work. “Yes, I do think you bear an uncanny rese
mblance to Minerva.”

  Her eyes in the candlelight held pieces of flame.

  “You must mean Athena, Sara, if it’s a Grecian look.”

  “I stand corrected. What a mercy we only have one god to remember.” She turned serious. “Do you think God could be a woman, Alice?”

  “I never thought of that.” I felt my mind sinking deeper. How had I never suspected there were so many layers to myself? For the first time I could recall I felt that I could do anything and face the consequences. This was a radical departure from my ordinary self, cautious and tortured by worst-case scenarios.

  “Wouldn’t that be a joke on them?” Sara was saying. “While I don’t believe in God, I would love to see that happen.” I wondered briefly what Father would do about a female God. He didn’t think of God as a person at all and said the events in the Bible were meant to be metaphorical, not literal.

  It was surprisingly easy to relax into the softness and deftness of Sara’s fingers. I felt her warm, absinthe-laced breath on the top of my head and then the kiss she planted there.

  “Oh! I almost forgot, Alice. Close your eyes and don’t peek.”

  With my eyes shut, I felt the absinthe hissing inside my head, the cotton cloth of my nightdress brushing against my nipples, the moistness where my inner thighs met. Then my hand was resting in Sara’s palm and her two fingers were pressing softly on the underside of my wrist where the blue veins came together like the Mississippi River Delta on a map. I opened my eyes and stared at my wrist and forearm, as if I’d never seen them before. The alabaster whiteness of my skin, the delicate hairs, each with its own follicle, the pale scar near my elbow from falling out of a tree in Newport. The perfection of the human body! Why had I never seen this?

  “Smell, Alice!” Sara held her wrist up to my nose, brushing it lightly against my lips. I smelled roses and something else vaguely familiar, and then something remarkable happened. A pulse of electricity shot up from my toes to the middle of my body, hinting at a world of feeling and sensation of which I had but the dimmest notion.

  The emotions that arose in me were strange and familiar at the same time, as if I were reliving something that had already taken place. Had everything already happened in reality and were we just re-dreaming it? Motionless as a caryatid, I kept my eyes on Sara in the mirror.

  “I don’t know what it is exactly. It was my mother’s. For me it is exactly like falling into a poem by Rumi the Persian.”

  “Who?” It was an annoying quirk of all the Sedgwicks to refer to obscure books no one else had read.

  “Oh, he’s a Mohammedan who’s written some shocking verses, which Aunt Grace, of all people, gave me, evidently failing to grasp a few of the metaphors. Have some more absinthe, Alice! You only live once.” She refilled both our glasses, adding more water and sugar. I drank again, my eyes glued on Sara’s in the mirror. As long as I kept my gaze there, my shyness and solitariness could melt away like snow in the sun.

  Holding my gaze, Sara said softly, “Alice, would you like me to show you the seven places where a woman should wear perfume?”

  There was evidently a great deal about being a woman I didn’t know. My mother and Aunt Kate seldom bothered with scent and didn’t seem to know about the seven places. My eyes were fixed on the mirror as Sara’s fingers unbuttoned the first three buttons of my white cambric nightdress, gently dabbing the perfume on the first of the seven places. I almost forgot to breathe. After all seven places were anointed, Sara bent down, took my face in her hands and kissed me tenderly on the mouth. It took me by surprise, that lips should be so soft and pillowy, that a kiss could last so long, have so many different parts to it, and awaken such pleasure.

  Freeing my hair from its restraints, she wound some of it loosely around her hand and buried her face in it. In the candlelight she looked as if she were made of spun gold. The next thing I knew I was being led by the hand over to her bed. Had I fallen into a dream or a dimension so real it made everything else seem fake?

  Then I recalled that I’d been drinking absinthe.

  Sara was lying on her back and, with a yearning expression, tugged at my hand to pull me down on top of her. Wrapping her arms around me, she murmured, “Mmmmm” next to my ear and licked my earlobe with a flick of her tongue. My mind stopped, immobilized like a stunned bird, while my body yielded to the sensations coursing through me. Sara was meanwhile applying herself to kissing my neck and the hollow of my collarbone until my toes curled with pleasure, and then her lips crept lower. When she reached her arms around me and clasped the small of my back, the heat of her touch dissolved something hard and unyielding inside me. My insides were thawing and liquefying like ice in the sun.

  Then her hands were working their way down my spine, pressing and releasing, finding all the chords of my body and playing them. Later I would ask myself how Sara had acquired this expertise, and with whom, but for now my limbs were heavy and every part of me was surrendered—something that had happened before only in the best sort of dreams. My hand found the fullness of Sara’s breast, and then I was feeling and hearing my own breath, and Sara’s, quick and ragged as if we were climbing a steep mountain. Later I would not be able to recall how our nightdresses came off on their own, as if they were our chrysalises.

  It went on for a long time, caressing and being caressed in ways I didn’t know were possible. Cambridge, with its pontificating professors and their doting wives, Sara’s nice old-maid aunts, my parents with their fixed routines, the Nortons and their perfect manners and formal dining room full of Tintorettos—all that fell away and vanished.

  The next morning my life felt brand-new, sharp and bright as crystal, as if I’d never lived before. I hardly knew what to make of the mysteries unveiled to me during the night. It was puzzling that Sara was behaving as usual at breakfast, buttering her toast and methodically smearing jam on it as if our extraordinary night had not happened. It did not help to be hemmed in by Theodora, holding forth pedantically on a biography she was reading, and the Misses Ashburner, kind and pink-skinned, asking after my brothers.

  When we were briefly alone at table, Sara, stirring sugar into her coffee, said, “I believe there was a man who drank absinthe and murdered his whole family. It was in France.”

  “Thank you for the timely warning, Sara.”

  “Obviously it had less to do with the absinthe than with the man’s preexisting lunacy. We haven’t murdered anyone, have we? Yet?” That lovely, wide, slightly insolent smile. Those grey eyes, with their shifting mysterious depths like the sea.

  “That is hardly reassuring.”

  She shrugged and became preoccupied with her eggs. When I bade her good-bye, she barely looked up.

  Over the next few days I noticed new things unfolding inside me, as if Sara’s embraces had implanted a slow-acting drug. Frequently I found myself pierced by a desire so fierce it left me breathless. Natural beauty overwhelmed my senses. Even a passage in a book set off a series of paroxysmal shivers and I had to stop reading or “go off.”

  “What do you mean, you ‘go off’?” Sara said when I mentioned it a few days later. We were out in her garden planting impatiens in the shade of the beech tree. The day was beastly hot. Flies droned over the flowerbeds. Sweat gathered on my upper lip; I tasted the saltiness with my tongue.

  “I don’t know, just that I—I pass out for a minute or two.”

  “Well, why do you do that?” Her tone was impatient. I wondered what I had done to displease her.

  “I don’t know.” Sometimes I suspected the “going off” was a doorway to another world, but seeing Sara’s closed face, I said no more about it.

  At home, meanwhile, I felt like a stranger, or else my family had become strangers to me. At odd moments I felt Mother’s and Aunt Kate’s eyes on me and wanted to swat their glances away like mosquitoes. When I met their gaze, they looked away and pretended to be absorbed in some domestic task. I avoided undressing in their presence; my body held secrets now.
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  Sara had revealed to me the essential nullity of my sentimental education so far. I’d been living in my body as if it were an inert, unfeeling thing. Now I felt like Vasco da Gama or Cortez landing on a new continent, with still unnamed rivers, virgin forests, secret veins of gold. Being so sheltered, I was not entirely sure at this point that the transports of the Emerald Nights were not Sara’s private invention.

  Our rituals were repeated many times over the next few months, always, by unspoken agreement, at Sara’s house, because of the privacy offered by the deafness and sleeping habits of her aunts. Our nights were electric, but none of the enchantment was permitted to touch ordinary daytime life, and thus remained a sort of dream, which was evidently how Sara preferred it.

  No doubt Sara had always been capricious, but it hadn’t caused me pain before. Now everything she did or said cut straight to my heart. One moment she’d say that I was her best, her truest, her dearest friend and we must make a pact not to marry anyone who would take us away from Boston and each other. (This was easy for me. I was not sure what women got out of marriage, anyway.) The next moment she’d be talking about Fanny Morse and her family and would say, “Aren’t they the most wonderful family? Don’t you wish you could be adopted by them?” When her family bought a sewing machine, Sara became preoccupied with the clothes she intended to sew with it—suits for Arthur, dresses for her aunts, Theodora and herself—and shut herself up for two weeks without seeing anyone, including me.

  She would never speak or allow me to speak of what passed between us in the dark, although la fée verte always led us back to the same rapture, with Sara as passionate and tender as I could wish. One night, as we lay in each other’s arms, our hearts slowing to a resting rhythm, I was stroking her hair and blurted, “Let’s run away together!”

  “Where would we run to?” Her tone was resigned.

  I considered this. I had no money of my own, nor did Sara. But if I were ill, surely the funds would be found to send me to a hydropathic establishment in France or Switzerland, and Sara could accompany me. Perhaps she could be ill as well. But it did not take long to grasp that we would never be allowed to sail to Europe unmatronized. If I went abroad, Aunt Kate would come along and that would change everything.