What Alice Forgot

by Liane Moriarty

feel as though there is something constricting my throat, as if my mouth doesn’t open wide enough for proper, unthinking conversation. The problem is the rage. It’s permanently simmering, even when I’m not aware of it.

I don’t think those things at all, but I could have said them, I could still say them, and if I did, those words would have been there in both our memories forever. So it was safer to say nothing and pretend, and she knew I was pretending and she pretended too, and then we forgot how to be real with each other.

They were both messy. Their clothes were normally tangled together on the floor in flamboyant embraces. Sometimes they purposely asked people over just to give themselves the incentive to clean up in a frantic rush before they arrived.

We longed to say out loud all the bitter, negative, nasty things we kept in our heads. The medications, the hormones, and the relentless frustration of our lives make us bitchy, and you’re not allowed to be bitchy in public or people won’t like you.

We’d traveled, we’d been to lots of parties, lots of movies and concerts, we’d slept in. We’d done all those things that people with children seem to miss so passionately. We didn’t want those things anymore. We wanted a baby.

Each time I sobbed for a lost baby, it was like sobbing over the end of a relationship when I’d never even gone out with the guy. My babies weren’t babies. They were just microscopic clusters of cells that weren’t ever going to be anything else. They were just my own desperate hopes. Dream babies.

Alice laughed. Perhaps too much. She didn’t really get parent humor. Maybe he really was a psychotic monster and that wasn’t funny.

Tupperware container,