What Alice Forgot

Her hair was cut in a bob just above her shoulders and it seemed to have been colored very blond. She’d cut her hair! Nick had once made her promise to never cut her hair. Alice had thought that exquisitely romantic, although Elisabeth had made gagging sounds when she told her and said, “You can’t promise to still have a fourteen-year-old’s hairstyle when you’re forty.”
When you’re forty.

Or maybe temporary insanity is just an excuse for inexcusable behavior. Maybe I’ll be too ashamed to tell you that somebody called to say my only sister had been in an accident and I hung up on her. I package myself for you. I want to sound damaged, so you feel there is something useful for you to do, but at the same time I want you to think I’m a nice person, Dr. Hodges. A nice damaged person.

“Darling, maybe you don’t get to be a mother, but you still get to be a wife.

“Nature knows best.

Dating was meant to be something from her past, not something from her future. She’d never enjoyed it that much anyway. The self-conscious, trapped feeling when you were sitting in the car together for the first time; the constant horrifying possibility of food caught in between your teeth; the sudden feeling of exhausted boredom when you realized it was your turn to come up with the next stilted topic of conversation. So what do you like to do on the weekends?

It was something you were meant to say to your girlfriends at regular intervals to show you were a proper woman

24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Anyway, I wanted to tell you that we did finally have a ceremony for the lost babies, like you suggested. We took a bunch of roses to the beach one calm sunny winter’s day, and we walked around the rocks and dropped one in the water for each lost little astronaut. I’m glad we did that. I didn’t cry. But as I watched each rose float off, I felt something loosen, as if I’d been wearing something too tight around my chest for a very long time. As we walked back to the car, I found myself taking very deep breaths of air, and the air felt good.