What Alice Forgot

I automatically went to decline, and then I thought, For heaven’s sake, Frannie, why not?

“Look, Tom, police car!” cried Alice, as a police car with its siren flashing blue streaked by. “Nee nar, nee nar!”

She turned her head, ready to see an excited little face in the backseat, then realized she was alone in the car, and that Tom was too old to be excited by police cars anyway, and also, she actually didn’t remember him as a baby.

These involuntary flashes of memory, or whatever they were, were happening almost every few minutes now. It was like a weird nervous tic. Just then, at the morning tea break at Elisabeth’s seminar, she’d seen one of the butchers taking two chocolate biscuits at once and she only just managed to stop herself from grabbing his hairy wrist and saying, “One is plenty!”

She constantly found herself heading purposefully somewhere, into the study, the kitchen, or the laundry, and then realizing she didn’t know why she was heading there. Once, she was all the way across the road, walking up the driveway of Gina’s old house, when she stopped and said out loud, “Oh.” She picked up the phone and dialed numbers, before quickly dropping the phone with no idea who she was calling. One time, while waiting outside the school for the children, she caught herself rocking her handbag, patting it, and humming a song she didn’t recognize. “Yummy, yummy, yummy in your tummy, tummy!” she’d said at dinner the other night, zooming a spoonful of food toward Olivia’s mouth. “I think you might be going a bit crazy, darling Mummy,” Oliva had said, with wide eyes.

Her memory was coming back any moment now. She could feel it creeping up on her, like the fuzzy head and ticklish throat that heralded a cold. She just couldn’t decide if she should resist it or encourage it.

Now she was on her way from Elisabeth’s seminar to “help in the library” at the school. This was something she apparently did every third Thursday, which seemed excessively generous of her.

As she drove, she thought about Elisabeth, and how smooth she’d been up onstage, talking to all those butchers, making them laugh, telling them what to do. She’d seemed so natural talking into the microphone. So herself. The same way celebrities casually chatted away in interviews to journalists, as if there weren’t cameras right in front of them. But then when Elisabeth had talked to her in the break, she had the strangest feeling that Elisabeth wasn’t really there, that she was just pretending to be Elisabeth. That she was more herself up onstage than right now.

Alice still hadn’t even got to talk to her yet about the unsuccessful IVF cycle. She’d called the night before when she got home from the Family Talent Night, but Ben had said Elisabeth was watching a favorite TV show and could she call back once it was over? She never called back, and of course she could hardly talk to her about it when she was working. It was ridiculous that she had no idea what was going on in her own sister’s mind. She couldn’t even take an educated guess as to how Elisabeth was feeling right now. Angry? Devastated? Sick of the whole thing?

She would try to call her again tonight, but it was weirdly hard to find time once she’d driven the children to all their activities, helped with homework (so much homework! It gave Alice a headache. She’d actually groaned when she saw the number of worksheets Tom had pulled out from his bag the other night, which wasn’t very parental of her), cooked their dinner, cleaned up, made their lunches, tried to convince them to stop fighting over the computer and the television. By the end of it, she was exhausted.

There just wasn’t enough time in 2008. It had become a limited resource. Back in 1998, the days were so much more spacious. When she woke up in the morning, the day rolled out in front of her like a long hallway for her to meander down, free to linger over the best parts. Days were so stingy now. Mean slivers of time. They flew by like speeding cars. Whoosh! When she was pulling back the blankets to hop into bed each night, it felt as if only seconds ago she’d been throwing them off to get up.

Maybe it was just because she wasn’t used to this life. This life as a separated mother of three children.

She was doing things differently, trying to slow down time. She had a feeling the new Alice, the one with that snippy voice, wouldn’t approve of some of the changes.

When she’d picked the children up from school yesterday, Olivia had whined, “I don’t want to go to violin,” and Alice, who had no idea that she was meant to be “going to violin,” had said, “Okay, fine,” and taken the three children to Dino’s, where they’d done their homework sitting at a round table, drinking hot chocolates, and Dino had been quite helpful with Tom’s maths homework.

There had been a very cranky call from someone about the violin lesson who had told Alice that she would still have to pay, seeing as twenty-four hours’ notice hadn’t been given. “Oh, well,” Alice had said, and was met by a shocked silence.

After they had got home from the Family Talent Night, she’d let Madison stay up past eleven baking an enormous Black Forest cake for a “Food from Different Cultures Day” they were having at the school.

“I don’t want your help,” Madison had insisted before Alice even offered to help. “I want to do it myself.”

“That’s fine,” said Alice.

“You always say that,” Madison said. “And then you end up helping.”

“I bet you a thousand dollars that I will not lift a finger to help,” Alice had said, and held out her hand.

Madison stared, before giving her that sudden beautiful smile and shaking her hand.

“I want to bet you something for a thousand dollars,” Tom said. “Bet me something!”

“Me too!” shouted Olivia. “Bet me something, Mum!”

“No, I’m doing the next bet,” said Tom. “Mum, I bet you . . . ummm, I bet you, ummm, just hold on, while I think of something really good.”

“I bet you I can do a handstand for five minutes!” cried Olivia. “No, two! No, let’s maybe just make it one minute.”

“I bet you a thousand dollars I can’t count to one million!” said Tom. “I mean that I can! The way it works is that you give me a thousand dollars if I can.”

“Nobody can count to one million,” said Olivia solemnly. “That would take, like, a week.”