Still Alice

  “Good.”

  “I can’t believe you’re still there after all these years. You ever get too bored over there, you should consider coming here.”

  “I’ll let you know. How are things with you?”

  “Fantastic. You should come by my office after the talk, see our latest modeling data. It’ll really knock your socks off.”

  “Sorry, I can’t, I have to catch a flight to L.A. right after this,” she said, grateful to have a ready excuse.

  “Oh, too bad. Last time I saw you I think was last year at the psychonomic conference. I unfortunately missed your presentation.”

  “Well, you’ll get to hear a good portion of it today.”

  “Recycling your talks these days, huh?”

  Before she could answer, Gordon Miller, head of the department and her new superhero, swooped in and saved her by asking Josh to help pass out the champagne. As at Harvard, a champagne toast was a tradition in the psychology department at Stanford for all faculty who reached the coveted career milestone of tenure. There weren’t many trumpets that heralded the advancement from point to point in the career of a professor, but tenure was a big one, loud and clear.

  When everyone was holding a cup, Gordon stood at the podium and tapped the microphone. “Can I have everyone’s attention for a moment?”

  Josh’s excessively loud, punctuated laugh reverberated alone through the auditorium just before Gordon continued.

  “Today, we congratulate Mark on receiving tenure. I’m sure he’s thrilled to have this particular accomplishment behind him. Here’s to the many exciting accomplishments still ahead. To Mark!”

  “To Mark!”

  Alice tapped her cup with her neighbors’, and everyone quickly resumed the business of drinking, eating, and discussing. When all of the food had been claimed from the serving trays and the last drops of champagne emptied from the last bottle, Gordon took the floor once again.

  “If everyone would take a seat, we can begin today’s talk.”

  He waited a few moments for the crowd of about seventy-five to settle and quiet down.

  “Today, I have the honor of introducing you to our first colloquium speaker of the year. Dr. Alice Howland is the eminent William James Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Over the last twenty-five years, her distinguished career has produced many of the flagship touchstones in psycholinguistics. She pioneered and continues to lead an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the study of the mechanisms of language. We are privileged to have her here today to talk to us about the conceptual and neural organization of language.”

  Alice switched places with Gordon and looked out at her audience looking at her. As she waited for the applause to subside, she thought of the statistic that said people feared public speaking more than they feared death. She loved it. She enjoyed all of the concatenated moments of presenting in front of a listening audience—teaching, performing, telling a story, teeing up a heated debate. She also loved the adrenaline rush. The bigger the stakes, the more sophisticated or hostile the audience, the more the whole experience thrilled her. John was an excellent teacher, but public speaking often pained and terrified him, and he marveled at Alice’s verve for it. He probably didn’t prefer death, but spiders and snakes, sure.

  “Thank you, Gordon. Today, I’m going to talk about some of the mental processes that underlie the acquisition, organization, and use of language.”

  Alice had given the guts of this particular talk innumerable times, but she wouldn’t call it recycling. The crux of the talk did focus on the main tenets of linguistics, many of which she’d discovered, and she’d been using a number of the same slides for years. But she felt proud, and not ashamed or lazy, that this part of her talk, these discoveries of hers, continued to hold true, withstanding the test of time. Her contributions mattered and propelled future discovery. Plus, she certainly included those future discoveries.

  She talked without needing to look down at her notes, relaxed and animated, the words effortless. Then, about forty minutes into the fifty-minute presentation, she became suddenly stuck.

  “The data reveal that irregular verbs require access to the mental…”

  She simply couldn’t find the word. She had a loose sense for what she wanted to say, but the word itself eluded her. Gone. She didn’t know the first letter or what the word sounded like or how many syllables it had. It wasn’t on the tip of her tongue.

  Maybe it was the champagne. She normally didn’t drink any alcohol before speaking. Even if she knew the talk cold, even in the most casual setting, she always wanted to be as mentally sharp as possible, especially for the question-and-answer session at the end, which could be confrontational and full of rich, unscripted debate. But she hadn’t wanted to offend anyone, and she’d drunk a little more than she probably should have when she became trapped again in passive-aggressive conversation with Josh.

  Maybe it was jet lag. As her mind scoured its corners for the word and a rational reason for why she’d lost it, her heart pounded and her face grew hot. She’d never lost a word in front of an audience before. But she’d never panicked in front of an audience either, and she’d stood before many far larger and more intimidating than this. She told herself to breathe, forget about it, and move on.

  She replaced the still blocked word with a vague and inappropriate “thing,” abandoned whatever point she’d been in the middle of making, and continued on to the next slide. The pause had seemed like an obvious and awkward eternity to her, but as she checked the faces in the audience to see if anyone had noticed her mental hiccup, no one appeared alarmed, embarrassed, or ruffled in any way. Then, she saw Josh whispering to the woman next to him, his eyebrows furrowed and a slight smile on his face.

  She was on the plane, descending into LAX, when it finally came to her.

  Lexicon.

  LYDIA HAD BEEN LIVING IN Los Angeles for three years now. If she’d gone to college right after high school, she would’ve graduated this past spring. Alice would’ve been so proud. Lydia was probably smarter than both of her older siblings, and they had gone to college. And law school. And medical school.

  Instead of college, Lydia first went to Europe. Alice had hoped she’d come home with a clearer sense of what she wanted to study and what kind of school she wanted to go to. Instead, upon her return, she’d told her parents that she’d done a little acting while in Dublin and had fallen in love. She was moving to Los Angeles immediately.

  Alice nearly lost her mind. Much to her maddening frustration, she recognized her own contribution to this problem. Because Lydia was the youngest of three, the daughter of parents who worked a lot and traveled regularly, and had always been a good student, Alice and John had ignored her to a large extent. They’d granted her a lot of room to run in her world, free to think for herself and free from the kind of micromanagement placed on a lot of children her age. Her parents’ professional lives served as shining examples of what could be gained from setting lofty and individually unique goals and pursuing them with passion and hard work. Lydia understood her mother’s advice about the importance of getting a college education, but she had the confidence and audacity to reject it.

  Plus, she didn’t stand entirely alone. The most explosive fight Alice had ever had with John had followed his two cents on the subject: I think it’s wonderful, she can always go to college later, if she decides she even wants to.

  Alice checked her BlackBerry for the address, rang the doorbell to apartment number seven, and waited. She was just about to press it again when Lydia opened the door.

  “Mom, you’re early,” said Lydia.

  Alice checked her watch.

  “I’m right on time.”

  “You said your flight was coming in at eight.”

  “I said five.”

  “I have eight o’clock written down in my book.”

  “Lydia, it’s five forty-five, I’m here.”

  Lydia looked indecisive and panicky, li
ke a squirrel caught facing an oncoming car in the road.

  “Sorry, come in.”

  They each hesitated before they hugged, as if they were about to practice a newly learned dance and weren’t quite confident of the first step or who should lead. Or it was an old dance, but they hadn’t performed it together in so long that each felt unsure of the choreography.

  Alice could feel the contours of Lydia’s spine and ribs through her shirt. She looked too skinny, a good ten pounds lighter than Alice remembered. She hoped it was more a result of being busy than of conscious dieting. Blond and five foot six, three inches taller than Alice, Lydia stood out among the predominance of short Italian and Asian women in Cambridge, but in Los Angeles, the waiting rooms at every audition were apparently full of women who looked just like her.

  “I made reservations for nine. Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  Craning her neck, Alice inspected the kitchen and living room from the hallway. The furnishings, most likely yard sale finds and parent hand-me-downs, looked rather hip together—an orange sectional couch, retro-inspired coffee table, Brady Bunch–style kitchen table and chairs. The white walls were bare except for a poster of Marlon Brando taped above the couch. The air smelled strongly of Windex, as if Lydia had taken last-second measures to clean the place before Alice’s arrival.

  In fact, it was a little too clean. No DVDs or CDs lying around, no books or magazines thrown on the coffee table, no pictures on the refrigerator, no hint of Lydia’s interests or aesthetic anywhere. Anyone could be living here. Then, Alice noticed the pile of men’s shoes on the floor to the left of the door behind her.

  “Tell me about your roommates,” she said as Lydia returned from her room, cell phone in hand.

  “They’re at work.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “One’s bartending and the other delivers food.”

  “I thought they were both actors.”

  “They are.”

  “I see. What are their names again?”

  “Doug and Malcolm.”

  It flashed only for a moment, but Alice saw it and Lydia saw her see it. Lydia’s face flushed when she said Malcolm’s name, and her eyes darted nervously away from her mother’s.

  “Why don’t we get going? They said they can take us early,” said Lydia.

  “Okay, I just need to use the bathroom first.”

  As Alice washed her hands, she looked over the products sitting on the table next to the sink—Neutrogena facial cleanser and moisturizer, Tom’s of Maine mint toothpaste, men’s deodorant, a box of Playtex tampons. She thought for a moment. She hadn’t had her period all summer. Did she have it in May? She’d be turning fifty next month, so she wasn’t alarmed. She hadn’t yet experienced any hot flashes or night sweats, but not all menopausal women did. That would be just fine with her.

  As she dried her hands, she noticed the box of Trojan condoms behind Lydia’s hairstyling products. She was going to have to find out more about these roommates. Malcolm, in particular.

  They sat at a table outside on the patio at Ivy, a trendy restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, and ordered two drinks, an espresso martini for Lydia and a merlot for Alice.

  “So how’s Dad’s Science paper coming?” asked Lydia.

  She must’ve talked recently with her father. Alice hadn’t heard from her since a phone call on Mother’s Day.

  “It’s done. He’s very proud of it.”

  “How’s Anna and Tom?”

  “Good, busy, working hard. So how did you meet Doug and Malcolm?”

  “They came into Starbucks one night while I was working.”

  The waiter appeared, and each of them ordered dinner and another drink. Alice hoped the alcohol would dilute the tension between them, which felt heavy and thick and just beneath the tracing-paper-thin conversation.

  “So how did you meet Doug and Malcolm?” she asked.

  “I just told you. Why don’t you ever listen to anything I say? They came into Starbucks one night talking about looking for a roommate while I was working.”

  “I thought you were waitressing at a restaurant.”

  “I am. I work at Starbucks during the week and waitress on Saturday nights.”

  “Doesn’t sound like that leaves a lot of time for acting.”

  “I’m not cast in anything right now, but I’m taking workshop classes, and I’m auditioning a lot.”

  “What kind of classes?”

  “Meisner technique.”

  “And what’ve you been auditioning for?”

  “Television and print.”

  Alice swirled her wine, drank the last, big gulp, and licked her lips. “Lydia, what exactly is your plan here?”

  “I’m not planning on stopping, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  The drinks were taking effect, but not in the direction Alice had hoped for. Instead, they served as the fuel that burned that little piece of tracing paper, leaving the tension between them fully exposed and at the helm of a dangerously familiar conversation.

  “You can’t live like this forever. Are you still going to work at Starbucks when you’re thirty?”

  “That’s eight years away! Do you know what you’ll be doing in eight years?”

  “Yes, I do. At some point, you need to be responsible, you need to be able to afford things like health insurance, a mortgage, savings for retirement—”

  “I have health insurance. And I might make it as an actor. There are people who do, you know. And they make a hell of a lot more money than you and Dad combined.”

  “This isn’t just about money.”

  “Then what? That I didn’t become you?”

  “Lower your voice.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  “I don’t want you to become me, Lydia. I just don’t want you to limit your choices.”

  “You want to make my choices.”

  “No.”

  “This is who I am, this is what I want to do.”

  “What, serving up Venti lattes? You should be in college. You should be spending this time in your life learning something.”

  “I am learning something! I’m just not sitting in a Harvard classroom killing myself trying to get an A in political science. I’m in a serious acting class for fifteen hours a week. How many hours of class a week do your students take, twelve?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Well, Dad thinks it is. He’s paying for it.”

  Alice clenched the sides of her skirt and pressed her lips together. What she wanted to say next wasn’t meant for Lydia.

  “You’ve never even seen me act.”

  John had. He’d flown out alone last winter to see her perform in a play. Swamped with too many urgent things at the time, Alice couldn’t free up to go. As she looked at Lydia’s pained eyes, she couldn’t remember now what those urgent things had been. She didn’t have anything against an acting career itself, but she believed her daughter’s singular pursuit of it, without an education, bordered on reckless. If she didn’t go to college now, acquire a knowledge base or formal training in some field, if she didn’t get a degree, what would she do if acting didn’t pan out?

  Alice thought about those condoms in the bathroom. What if Lydia got pregnant? Alice worried that Lydia might someday find herself trapped in a life that was unfulfilled, full of regret. She looked at her daughter and saw so much wasted potential, so much wasted time.

  “You’re not getting any younger, Lydia. Life goes by too fast.”

  “I agree.”

  The food came, but neither of them picked up a fork. Lydia dabbed her eyes with her hand-embroidered linen napkin. They always fell into the same battle, and it felt to Alice like trying to knock down a concrete wall with their heads. It was never going to be productive and only resulted in hurting them, causing lasting damage. She wished Lydia could see the love and wisdom in what she wanted for her. She wished she could just reach across the table and hug her daug
hter, but there were too many dishes, glasses, and years of distance between them.

  A sudden flurry of activity a few tables away pulled their attention from themselves. Several camera flashes popped, and a small crowd of patrons and waitstaff gathered, all focused on a woman who looked a bit like Lydia.

  “Who’s that?” asked Alice.

  “Mom,” said Lydia in a tone both embarrassed and superior, perfected at the age of thirteen. “That’s Jennifer Aniston.”

  They ate their dinner and talked only of safe things, like the food and the weather. Alice wanted to discover more about Lydia’s relationship with Malcolm, but the embers of Lydia’s emotions still glowed hot, and Alice feared igniting another fight. She paid the bill and they left the restaurant, full but dissatisfied.

  “Excuse me, ma’am!”

  Their waiter caught up to them on the sidewalk.

  “You left this.”

  Alice paused, trying to comprehend how their waiter might come to possess her BlackBerry. She hadn’t checked her email or calendar in the restaurant. She felt inside her bag. No BlackBerry. She must’ve removed it when she fished her wallet out to pay.

  “Thank you.”

  Lydia looked at her quizzically, as if she wanted to say something about something other than food or weather, but then didn’t. They walked back to her apartment in silence.

  “JOHN?”

  Alice waited, suspended in the front hallway, holding the handle of her suitcase. Harvard Magazine lay on the top of a pile of unclaimed mail strewn on the floor in front of her. The clock in the living room ticked and the refrigerator hummed. A warm, sunny late afternoon at her back, the air inside felt chilly, dim, and stale. Uninhabited.

  She picked up the mail and walked into the kitchen, her suitcase on wheels accompanying her like a loyal pet. Her flight had been delayed, and she was late getting in, even according to the microwave. He’d had a whole day, a whole Saturday, to work.

  The red voice-mail light on their answering machine stared her down, unblinking. She checked the refrigerator. No note on the door. Nothing.