by Aliza Wyman
Alice’s painting got put up on the wall in the cafe bookstore down in Aggieville. Tiffany, the wife at the top of their company’s phone tree, decided that they all needed to make an outing to go see it. That and Alice had just had a baby. According to Tiffany the best thing a person could do after having a baby was to get away from it, as quickly as possible, even if it was only for a night.
“They’re cute,” Tiffany said, leaning over the front seat of the van. “But those little things will eat up your entire life if you let them.”
Tiffany’s husband, Sergent Sharp, sat in the driver’s seat. He was their DD and also Alice’s husband, Colin’s, First Sergeant. The first person they’d told when they’d found out about the baby. The first person who had confidentially looked at Colin, aged twenty and about to be a father and asked, “Are you sure about this man?” Then had shifted immediately from apprehension to unbridled congratulations in the blink of an eye when Colin had said, “Yes.”
“He’s just so little,” Alice said. She kept checking her phone, itching in her fishnets, pulling at her tight black dress. What if something happened while she wasn’t there? Baby Bear was only three weeks old. He hadn’t even smiled yet. She knew that for a fact, she’d been watching him all his waking hours and most of his sleeping ones too. She was so afraid to lay her head down at night, because what if, just when she looked away, he stopped breathing?
Tiffany snapped her fingers in front of Alice’s face.
“Hey,” she said. “You are twenty-three. You need to have a life too.”
Sharp stopped the van on a corner. Alice didn’t know anyone all that well but Tiffany. A shape slipped through the darkness outside, then another from the house beside the first one.
Sharp pressed the button on the automatic door. Alice wanted to run, screaming, back to her home, where there was only the shallow sound of Bear’s breathing, where she could go days without speaking to anyone and life was easy, easy. But she was dying there. Whatever made Alice Alice would not survive being shut up in a box like that. She needed this. She gritted her teeth. The door swung open.
The girl from Alice’s paintings leapt into the car, thick brows, tipped up nose, bright red hair. Alice blinked. No, it wasn’t her, just a real flesh and blood person who looked like the woman who governed Alice’s imagination.
“Hey. Darcy,” the girl said, holding out a ringed hand and tumbling into the backseat.
“Um, ah, hi,” Alice said. She sounded so stupid, her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth.
“Hi, hi.”
Another girl slipped into the car, pressing the button, the door shut behind her. Alice knew her, but didn’t recognize her at first without the uniform. Sergent Fernandez, just Tina now in lipstick and a blowout. Weird.
“Step on it,” Darcy said. “He doesn’t know I’m going with you.”
All the windows on Darcy’s side of the duplex were dark. Sharp opened his mouth like he was going to try to argue.
“Just drive,” Tiffany said.
“Coughman’s going to be pissed,” Sharp said. “And when he is, I’m telling him you were driving the getaway car.”
“Send him on over,” Tiffany said, putting up her fists in a Mohamed Ali pose. “I could take him.”
Alice didn’t doubt it, it was Tiffany who kept them all alive, taught them the ins and outs of pumping and dumping, what to do if you had a case of mastitis, and at their most desperate and hugely pregnant she spoke to them all in calming tones over the phone, reassuring them that castor oil was never the answer.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Darcy said, she was smiling but in a way you do when you don’t think the joke’s all that funny.
Tiffany cranked the radio. Taylor Swift sang out about being Twenty-two, breakfast at midnight and kissing strangers. It was a twenty-two no one in the car would ever know, all being roughly that age and already married with babies. Alice checked her phone again. Nothing.
“You’re the artist?” Darcy asked.
Alice’s cheeks flamed red, her heart beat fast. Don’t talk to me, she wanted to say, even though this was all she wanted, to get close to this girl, to have her tell her something important and new. Something about Darcy felt like fate, that made her terrifying and impossible to turn away from.
“I draw,” Alice corrected.
Sharp pulled off the highway. He tapped his big hands against the steering wheel. “Now remember, don’t leave your drink unattended, use protection, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said. “And most importantly, leave room for the Holy Ghost.”
“Yes, dad,” Tiffany said. Sharp parked beside the liquor store that had a large mural of the Wizard of Oz painted down the side of it.
It was the day after Halloween, the streets were strewn with candy bar wrappers and little empty bottles of alcohol. Aggieville was a block across from campus packed with fast food restaurants, coffee and headshops. The buildings glinted with long iron needles along the top ledges of their roofs and awnings to keep the birds away.
“Where is this masterpiece?” Tiffany asked as the van drove away, Sharp’s taillights receding back out to the main strip.
“Just a little this way.” Alice’s heels clicked across the wet pavement. When had it rained? She’d been so busy with the baby that she hadn’t noticed. She took a deep breath in, exhaust fumes and damp concrete. When was the last time she’d been present in her body, had stopped to take stock of it? When was the last time she’d been out beneath the sky with the moon above her? She missed the night, it used to be her home, sleeping late, shades pulled over her face, wasting away the morning until it was time to go out. She had a theory once, that people were only worth knowing after the sun went down. That’s when they showed you who they really were. Everything else was bullshit.
A lump rose in her throat. She didn’t want to show the girls the painting all of a sudden. What if they didn’t get it or what if it wasn’t like she remembered?
“It’s at the Bean,” Alice said, still pointing them in the right direction. They’d come all this way, how could she deflect them now without making it look as though she’d made the whole thing up? “Little place, right at the intersection.”
The windows were dark. Fernandez pulled on the door handle but nothing going. Closed. Alice should have known. She cupped her hands around her head, pressed her nose to the glass. She could see it, hung up there on the wall above the witchcraft section, above the slim little volumes about palm reading and astrology. The girl in the picture looked uncomfortably like Darcy, sitting in the cradle of an iris bloom, looking out at nothing.
“Can you see it?” Darcy asked from behind. Before Alice could stop her, she leaned her face against the window too, their elbows brushing in a way that made Alice’s chest burst into flames.
Alice sweat through her dress, waiting for Darcy to say something, but she stood there a long time, just assessing. Alice glanced around at the other wives. Jeans and leggings, V-neck shirts, a little extra make up but not that much more than usual. Alice’s neck went red. What had she been thinking, coming out here in a slip and fishnets, high heels? She couldn’t fix it now. She had felt damn good, had looked at herself in the mirror for a solid ten minutes earlier just breathing it in. It was the first time she’d felt okay about herself since the baby was born. Her body was beginning to feel like it belonged to her again. But in the cold glow of the streetlight, she felt like she always did, out of place, strange, not pretty, but a try-hard, maybe even desperate. She missed the before, when she was so sure of who she was, when what other people thought didn’t matter.
Darcy pulled away from the glass. “I like it,” she said.
The other women nodded along, even though they hadn’t really taken the time to look at it all that close.
“Thank you,” Alice mouthed.
The group wound their way through the maze of Starbucks and twenty-four-hour cookie delivery places. College students, girls dressed more or less like Alice were let out of cars all along the sides of the streets. Frat boys roamed the side roads, in packs, whistling. The air smelled like the girls’ perfume, patchouli, and old magnolias, like the ovens in the cookie shops, hot sugar and rising dough. A teenager bent over on the side of the road to vomit in the gutter. A sharp pang of homesickness rocked Alice. This used to be her life. Where had it gone? She tried to keep up with Tiffany, but fell behind, the wives moving quickly down the sidewalk, their Sketchers not used to this, the slow ramble of a Saturday night. These women were tourists, didn’t know the customs. Alice had lived here once, in a place like this.
“So Tubby’s?” Tiffany said, her foot tapping on the sidewalk. “We only have four hours ladies.”
“We can’t go to Tubby’s,” Fernandez said, twisting her black hair between her fingers. Tiffany made Fernandez nervous, that’s one thing Alice picked up on early on, Tiff was loud and knew what she wanted. It was nearly impossible to argue with her. Most of the time, she used this power for good. Most of the time.
“Anyone can go to Tubby’s,” Tiff said. “That’s the beauty of it.”
“Have you heard about the new order?”
Tiffany looked at Fernandez like she was an idiot. “Yeah,” she said, hands on her hips, full stop now, in front of the downtown Cold Stone. An employee stood behind the window, scrubbing down an ice cream vat in the sink. “I just don’t understand what that’s got to do with us.”
“If I get caught in there, like it doesn’t matter for you guys, but I’m active,” Fernandez said. “If they catch me…”
She didn’t have to finish the sentence. The commanding officers had threatened everything from pushups to demotion to dishonorable discharge on the head of the soldier stupid enough to go back to that bar. The Privates of Fort Nowhere had been running a blue streak through the place, fake IDs, fights, baby mamas crowned on the bathroom floors. Alice missed the place too. She dragged Colin there when she first arrived, because it felt like something she could recognize, smoking bummed cigarettes under the fairy lights on the patio, watching his friend Dex dance on a table, his giant body shuffling to the beat. She missed Tubby’s, like it was a kingdom from which she’d been banished.
“This is serious shit,” Darcy said. “You can’t go risking Tina’s career like this, just because you’re bored, Tiff.”
If they went or not, Alice was going to go to that bar that night. She’d left a part of herself there, she needed to go find it.
“Relax,” Tiff said. “I have a plan.”
“Why do you always drag me into these things?” Fernandez groaned, but she was walking again, keeping in time with Tiffany, heading straight for the club at the end of the road. Alice let out a deep breath. Tiffany would take care of them. Nothing really, could happen as long as she was there.
They rounded the corner. There were the doors, the sign that had an overweight football player struggling against the stitches of his uniform. Tubby. The music leaked out into the street, the gravelly voice of Tech Nine, sounding like he’d crawled up from Hell, instead of Kansas City. The line wasn’t too long, but next to the bouncers, stood a man in uniform in attention, looking like he hated his life, taking a second glance at people’s IDs as they shuffled through the entrance.
“Oh fuck,” Fernandez said, twirling her hair tight, the tip of her finger glowing white where she’d cut off the circulation, a red flag that she was anxious. “I know him!”
“Just keep walking,” Tiffany said.
They strolled right past the entrance, without even looking at the door, like they were on their way to someplace else. Alice’s heart beat in her throat. She felt alive and young and herself again as Tiffany led them into the alley that ran along the length of the building.
“If I step on a dead cat,” Darcy said. “I’m blaming you.”
Alice tried not to look down. Debris squished beneath her heels, wet cardboard and old banana peels. She kept her gaze on Tiffany’s thick shoulders, never letting go. Alice needed this, to be in her body, without anyone else, not husband or baby hanging off of it.
The alley emptied out into a bright place, a length of wooden fence on one side and a McDonald’s parking lot on the other. Tiffany ran her hands along the fence.
“What are you?” Darcy said. “Seventeen?”
“Twenty, remember?” Tiffany said.
Her fingers caught the edge she was looking for. Tiffany pulled and a body sized board lifted up, revealing the patio, the fairy lights, the cigarette smoke of the Tubby’s courtyard on the other side.
“Ladies first,” Tiffany said.
***
Alice didn’t believe in a lot of things. Her notions of god were vague at best. She wanted, wished desperately for an afterlife, but caught herself imagining waking up to nothing, an infinite blackness just as empty as the time before she was born. She did, however, believe in clubs, that crush of humanity. She believed in the existential power of dancing with her hands over her head, her body moving without her ever having to tell it to. Her belief system began and ended with a strong drink and a good song, strangers meeting in the dark. She tried to slip back into it, as she followed Tiffany out onto the Tubby’s dance floor, to throw her head back and leave herself behind. But she couldn’t drink enough, pulled a stranger closer and couldn’t melt into him and forget. She found herself checking her phone, staring at the blank screen, wanting – no, needing – a snapshot of the baby, even if he was only sleeping. It was midnight now, and Colin was probably asleep, too. Nobody would be sending her anything. So how come she couldn’t stop thinking about it?
“Are you okay?” Darcy asked, pushing through the crowd to be by her side.
Alice lifted the corners of her mouth into a tight little smile. “Yeah, why?”
“You’re just kind of shuffling,” Darcy said. “And your face looks like this.”
Darcy set her mouth into a perfect imitation of Alice’s resting bitch face.
She laughed, hard, whiskey coming out her nose. “I do not look like that,” Alice said.
Darcy raised a brow. “It’s always hard, the first time you leave them,” she said. “But you know, he’s going to be right where you left him when you get back.”
Alice nodded. “Can we talk about something else?”
They were shouting now, above the beat of the song. Someone grabbed Alice around the waist. A wet mouth landed on her neck. Men’s deodorant pinched the inside of her nose. She felt like screaming. This is what people did at clubs though, snuck up behind you on the dance floor, ground their boner into your ass like you would always be cool with it. How did Alice used to be okay with this? She still had her postpartum pad taped to the inside of her underwear. She was still bleeding from pushing a motherfucking human into this world. Her body demanded more respect than this, felt itself to be holy now. She stood, frozen, her bones locking up in spite of herself. She didn’t know anymore, where to go, how to move forward.
“Let’s ditch the parasite?” Darcy said. “Grab my hand, okay?”
Alice clung to Darcy’s thick knuckles. It was like sticking her finger in an electrical socket. “Don’t let go,” she said.
Darcy pulled hard, tugging Alice along behind her, off the dance floor, through the doorway, into a quiet room where a middle-aged lady stood behind the bar, mixing up bright colored drinks in a loud blender. The air was cooler here. Alice ran her hands along the places on her body where the stranger had grabbed her, there was a little scratch mark on her shoulder.
“I hate this place,” Darcy said.
Alice looked back over her shoulder, searching for Tiffany or Fernandez in the crowd, but she couldn’t see them anymore. “I used to love it here,” Alice said. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Maybe it changed,” Darcy said, not really meaning it, but in a way that was trying to make Alice feel better.
“Yeah, that must be it.”
Darcy ran her fingers through her Ariel red hair. Alice thought briefly what it would be like, those hands on her scalp, then shook her head to make the picture go away.
“Hey artist,” she said. “What else you got?”
Darcy and Alice tucked themselves into a booth in the corner of the upper balcony overlooking the bar, a quiet place where they could people watch through the railing. The ice melted in their whiskey glasses. Alice put her elbows up on the table, flipped through her portfolio on her phone. A thousand women in watercolor and ink that all looked a shocking amount like Darcy. Sober Alice would have been mortified, this would have been worse than standing in front of a stranger naked, all her work laid bare. But with her brain buzzed on cheap drinks and the adrenaline of being in a place she was not supposed to be, she didn’t mind at all.
“I feel like I’m getting really close to something,” Alice said. “Like I’m scratching the surface. But then the painting is finished and I’ve dodged whatever it is I was getting to. I step back and there’s just something off, you know? About each of them. I don’t know if I’ll ever get it right.”
Alice rambled. But then Darcy opened her mouth and a little flash of metal slipped by on the crest of her tongue, a piercing with two tiny words. None of the rest of the world seemed that important any more as finding out what was written in Darcy’s mouth.
“Can I say something?” Darcy said. “Knowing nothing about art?”
“Anything,” Alice said.
“You should have them doing something,” Darcy said, taking a sip of her drink. “It’s just a bunch of bitches staring off into the distance, but at what? What do they want?”
Up close, Darcy smelled like cotton candy and nicotine. This corner of the bar was quiet and dark, calm as a cave. There were things Alice could say here, that she couldn’t anywhere else.
I want you. She could open her mouth and say that too, and it would be okay.
Tiffany ran up the stairs, her face flushed. Fernandez trailed behind her, looking pale, like she’d just found half a finger in her last frozen margarita.
“We’ve got to go,” Tiff said.
“What?” Alice asked, shoving her phone back into her pocket. Out of breath and gleeful, Tiffany pointed through the bars of the railing. Down below the balcony, the man in uniform had wandered inside the club. He stopped people, tapping them on the shoulder, asking in a loud voice to see their ID.
“Shit,” Darcy said. “See, the shit you get us into?”
“Just come on.”
Tiffany pulled them out of the booth, shoved them on the shoulders. “Move, move, move,” she said. If anyone had bothered to look up their way, it would have seemed suspicious, four women booking it out towards the front door, like the club was on fire. One in five-inch heels and another twisting a strand of her hair so hard that part of her scalp glowed white.
They threw themselves back out into the night, laughing and gasping. Tiffany whooped at the taillights of passing cars. On a whim, Alice let out a howl. They did it, they had outsmarted the US Army. It felt good.
“McDonald’s, anyone?” Tiffany asked. “I could use a burger to soak all this up.”
“You. Owe. Me,” Fernandez said, her palm clasped to her chest, still trying to get her heartbeat back down to normal.
They followed Tiffany back down the rain-soaked sidewalk, out onto the road past where Alice’s painting hung on the wall inside the dark windows of the Bean. Alice didn’t stop to look at it this time. She was already putting it behind her, with each step she took, following Darcy’s hourglass back down the street. The painting was nothing now, compared to the work that lay ahead of her.
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Aliza Wyman is a recent graduate of the University of Southern Maine’s MFA program in creative writing. She is the author of The Newly Tattooed’s Guide to Aftercare (2020) and the winner of the 2024 Maine Writers and Publishers Chapbook award in fiction.
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