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One Pill Makes You Smaller
Of Love and Squalor“You’re so fucking pretty, Alice,” said Rabbit. “Why are you so completely gorgeous? Huh?”Alice didn’t answer him. Silence, she’d found, was the best response. Rabbit was lying on Aunt Esmé’s bed with his dirty motorcycle boots propped up against the wall. His narrow pointy face was upside down: his head was hanging off the end of the mattress where his feet were supposed to be. His long hair fanned out underneath him, spilling over the bedspread until the ragged ends brushed the shag carpeting on the floor. Rabbit was high, as usual. Alice had seen him take one of the yellow pills that resembled her daily vitamins as soon he’d walked into the Dollhouse. That was what Aunt Esmé’s friends called the cramped attic room. It had a sloping ceiling covered with tinfoil, and a glass cabinet filled with antique porcelain dolls that no one—except for Rabbit—played with anymore. Rabbit held the small Zeit bisque doll in his arms. Repeatedly, Aunt Esmé had told him not to take it out of the cabinet, because soon the Duncan estate would be auctioned—Dean Duncan had gone broke—and the bisque dolls were worth money. They had soft cotton bodies and hard ceramic heads. Their shoes were made of white kid leather. Their faces had been hand-painted in Switzerland, at the Zeit toy factory, in the 1860s. Rabbit had already chipped one of the doll’s pink ears. When told not to do something, he didn’t listen.Rabbit kicked the light switch with his heel, turning on the black light—a slender tube of glass above the headboard. All the white objects in the room—the rocking chair, the rug, the bedspread—were transformed into an electric shade of violet. The whites of Rabbit’s eyes and his big buckteeth turned violet, too. The curtains had been drawn against the daylight. Everything in the Dollhouse glowed in the dark. Alice wondered if the color white would vanish, even after Rabbit opened the curtains up and let the sun back in. Maybe whatever had turned to violet would stay that way.“You destroy me, Alice,” said Rabbit. “Do you realize that? You kill me. You ravage me. You really do.”“Shut up, Rabbit,” said Alice.“I just paid homage to your beauty, you fool. Were you raised in a barn? You’re supposed to thank me.”“Thank you and shut up,” Alice said.Rabbit sighed. “Women. You’re so cruel.”
 
 Alice was sitting on the beanbag chair in the corner of Aunt Esmé’s room, right near the door. Behind her, low to the ground, was an autographed poster of Crash Omaha. Crash sang once a year with his band, the Idiots, at CBGB’s. He’d met Aunt Esmé at Max’s Kansas City when she was a high school freshman.“For Esmé, with love and squalor,” read the autograph in scrawling, jagged handwriting. “Yours eternally, Crash.”Alice thought Crash Omaha would have gotten an F in penmanship, an F in personal hygiene, and an F in organizational skills. Once, he’d come over to their house to see Aunt Esmé. While he was in the kitchen foraging in their refrigerator, he’d asked Alice to tell him her view of life. She’d said she wasn’t sure what life was (maybe stones were alive, maybe snow was) and he’d burst into raucous laughter as if Alice were hilarious. His real name wasn’t Crash Omaha, but Joey Pots. He didn’t look as bad in person. In the poster, his mascara was running and his face was skeletal and haggard. He had red blood dripping down from the corner of his mouth. His stage show, he’d explained to Alice, was billed as “a bacchanalia of self-destruction.” He was supposed to chew on broken glass. He’d told Alice that the glass was manufactured specially for the Idiots as a stage prop. It was made out of sugar and water and, if the Idiots were successful, it would be packaged with their photo on it as a “novelty item.” He’d taken a piece of the fake glass out of the pocket of his leather jacket and displayed it to her proudly. Rock candy, he’d called it. It had been transparent. He’d offered Alice a bite, but it had been so brittle that when she tried to chew it, she’d nearly cracked a tooth. He’d laughed at that, too. His hands, with their black nail polish, had reminded her of Rabbit’s.
 
 Alice had her back turned to the Crash Omaha poster. She was making a collage from pictures that she’d cut out of Aunt Esmé’s magazines. She took the eyes out of the rock stars’ faces in the photographs from Creem and improved them. She pasted lovely new images inside them—tiny pastel-colored scenes from travel ads of leafy palm trees and lemon groves, and sandy beaches on serene, solitary islands surrounded by blue seas. She tried to work on her collage without looking up. Whenever Rabbit announced that he was being ravaged and destroyed by Alice, she ignored him. He had a thin black mustache that drooped down his cheeks, past his jawbone, forming two spindly long whiskers. He had beady dark eyes that sought Alice out when he saw her in the hallway, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the library on the second floor, in the front garden, and in the backyard. She’d known Rabbit since she was in the fourth grade. That was when she’d undergone the first of her alarming rapid-growth spurts, like the Grow-Me Barbie doll whose torso lengthened when Alice pulled her hair in one direction and her legs in the other. Rabbit knew that despite Alice’s unusual height, she was eleven. He’d even attended her eleventh-birthday party. Still, he raved on and on about her gorgeous this and her gorgeous that. Every time he did it, Aunt Esmé had to interrupt him.“May I remind you that Alice is under twelve?” she would say from her usual spot beneath the window.She didn’t say that now. She was down on the floor with Stuart Applebaum, her slender fingers entwined with his. Stuart was taking premed classes over the summer, preparing to study psychology at Columbia University in the fall. His head rested on Aunt Esmé’s stomach. She was wearing her midriff peasant blouse. Alice could see the five petals of the daisy that Stuart had drawn, with a ballpoint pen, around her belly button. Her fine straight hair, parted far to one side, flowed all the way down to her hips. Stuart said Aunt Esmé looked like Lauren Bacall, yet she claimed to be obese. She didn’t smile often, but she had a pert snub nose and jolly, chubby cheeks.“Alice, angel face, why don’t you come over here and give your Rabbit a nice kiss?” said Rabbit. He waved his hands, beckoning to her. He wore a Mickey Mouse watch and a studded leather wristband.Persephone raised her head and growled at him. The dog sat by the stairs, where it was cooler, in the hallway. Persephone was suspicious of Rabbit. Whenever he moved, she growled. His motorcycle boots clattered when he walked up and down the stairs. Persephone was disturbed by boots and by loud noises. Alice figured a loud man in boots must have beaten Persephone with a stick when she was a puppy or something. Alice and her mom had found the dog long before Dean and Rain had divorced—when Alice had been in kindergarten. The fluffy gray mutt had been shivering in an alley behind the school yard, half starving, her rib cage visible. She was a mongrel, part terrier and part Lab.“Persephone, Persephone,” said Rabbit now, as Persephone began to bark. “What did I ever do to you? Why can’t we be friends, girl? Why do you dislike me?”Persephone nestled her chin against her front paws, eyeing Rabbit balefully. She continued to growl, a low rumbling that sounded like approaching thunder.“You should feed her, Rabbit,” Stuart suggested. “That would give her some positive reinforcement. She’d come to associate you with nourishment and food.”“That’s not a bad idea,” Rabbit said. “But I don’t want Persephone to kiss me. The gal I’m after is Alice.”“Quit hassling her,” said Aunt Esmé. “Alice, if Rabbit is bugging you, feel free to leave. He’s perfectly annoying and disgusting.”“Alice is devoted to me,” Rabbit said. “We’re great pals. Aren’t we, Alice?”“I guess,” Alice said. She opened the jar of rubber cement. She took the brush out and daubed some glue on the picture she’d cut out. It was a chrysanthemum. Its intricate shape required intense concentration and advanced cutting skills. She was going to improve the paper rock star. She didn’t know his name. She covered his left eye with her chrysanthemum.“If you won’t kiss me, at least bring that great glue over here,” said Rabbit.“It causes brain damage you know, you moron,” said Aunt Esmé. “We’ve got better shit than that anyway. Take a look in the toy chest. Glue is crap.”“I like the rush. Give it here, hot stuff,” said Rabbit.“Do not call my niece hot stuff. Okay? You can’t come on to her all day long, Rabbit. There’s got to be some limit.”“I’m not coming on,” Rabbit said. “Am I bothering you, Alice?”Alice shrugged. If she was quiet, maybe he’d stop his constant jabbering about how quickly she was growing, what a big girl she was already, and so on. It was murder to sit through, to listen to. Alice held herself responsible. She blamed her own physical condition. It was “the premature onset of pubescence,” said Dr. Fineman. Ever since it had struck, Alice had become a circus act, a one-girl freak show: the kid with tits. She wanted to get a tattoo on her forehead that declared what Aunt Esmé always said to Rabbit: Please don’t bother Alice. She’s eleven.Even then, she wasn’t sure he’d pay attention to the sign. She didn’t look her age, according to Rabbit. She looked three to five years older. It was like a prison sentence: three to five. A period of vigilance and waiting. She hoped to be left alone for a few more years, until she became the age she already seemed to be. In the meantime, she regarded her womanly figure as a deformity. She had to go to the doctor every six months to be measured, and examined, and monitored. Dr. Fineman hit her on the knee with his little silver hammer and looked down her throat with his little flashlight. He recorded her height and weight on the chart he kept over his desk, next to a map of the United States. The map was covered with colored pins. He told Alice she was part of the Fineman Study, a national research project. He was collecting data on Alice—and on twenty-two other girls in New York City—whose “growth rate and maturation process” had “exceeded current statistical norms.” Dr. Fineman had a theory that the average age most girls entered puberty was lower, in 1976, than it had ever been. The Fineman Study girls were just the tip of the iceberg, he assured Alice. It was the printed statistics that were misleading, and he wanted them to change. The old data made doctors think that ordinary girls didn’t “develop” until they were fourteen. But “under certain environmental circumstances,” they did, he said. Alice didn’t like having developed under certain environmental circumstances. She didn’t like being fussed over. She’d been singled out as rare, odd, and unique. She was the tallest girl in her grade; kids made fun of her; male teachers took her aside for quiet personal chats. During recess, her gray-haired gym instructor, Mr. Ridley, sat next to Alice on the wooden bench in the school yard. He kept asking Alice for her advice about his divorce, as if she were an adult. Everyone was divorcing nowadays, Alice told him. Her parents had. He thanked her profusely for listening. And again, Alice had yearned to say: But what do I know? I’m eleven. There was something about her, Aunt Esmé said, that made people want to approach her. Aunt Esmé said it was a pink aura full of positive energy that attracted them. Boys Alice had never met before came up to her in the street and, out of the blue, offered to buy her stuff. They suggested drinks, lunch, picnics, hot dogs. Alice had linked this phenomenon to her participation in the Fineman Study. It had to do with how she looked. Presumably, all across America, other Fineman Study girls were fending off these sorts of offers at the same time that Alice was. They were watching their teachers blush at them, and turning away resolutely when the teenage guy on Fifth Avenue called out to say, “Where you going, beautiful? When will you marry me?”Alice had seen the other Fineman Study girls’ names typed on a sheet of pale green graph paper. The first three had remained lodged in her memory: Irene Abrams; Hilary Anderson; Rebecca Burns. Alice’s last name, Duncan, had appeared sixth on the list. Each name had been followed by hieroglyphics: symbols, initials, indecipherable scribbles, and a row of numbers. More than once, Alice had wished she could meet these other rapidly developing young giantesses, but she found this difficult to explain to Dr. Fineman. She hadn’t ever worked up the courage to ask him if she could. She was growing at a breathtaking pace, like the beanstalk that had sprouted overnight in the children’s story. She’d begun to develop breasts when she was eight. She got her period when she was nine. At eleven, Aunt Esmé said she was “baby-faced.” Yet Alice stood a staggering five feet seven inches in her bare feet. She’d already had to buy new clothes three times that year. She couldn’t keep up with it. Her skirts were always a half an inch too short and her shirts were always a half an inch too tight. Her legs continued to elongate, her bosom continued to mushroom. In the hallway at the Fieldwood School, children had mistaken the Giant Alice for a teacher. Her friends asked her to sneak them into The Exorcist, which was rated R. Alice, in high heels and lipstick, had done it, pretending to be seventeen. The woman in the ticket booth never even asked her for ID. She just said, “Enjoy the movie.”Though Rabbit’s advances disturbed her, she felt the real trouble wasn’t Rabbit. It was Alice. She was two contradictory things at once. She had a kid’s head grafted on a woman’s body. It embarrassed and upset her. It wasn’t only Rabbit who reacted to her strangely. Lately people had been staring, not so much at Alice as at THE BREASTS. THE BREASTS were larger than before. “Lookin’ good,” one man had said while gazing, fixedly, at her chest. Alice, who had been taking Persephone out for a walk on Seventy-second Street, had recognized him. He was Mr. Mann, Felicia Mann’s dad. Felicia was in Alice’s sixth-grade class at the Fieldwood School. Mr. Mann had been standing in the doorway of his office. It was on the ground floor of a brownstone. He was a professional masseur who gave back rubs. He had a beard, an earring, and pink eyes.“Hi, Mr. Mann,” Alice had said.“Hi there.”THE BREASTS, apparently, operated upon him like two tractor beams, magnetizing his eyes. She felt terrible. She felt she had exposed Superman to kryptonite. Mr. Mann was unable to see her face. He was weakened, hypnotized. He had no idea that she was his daughter’s school friend, Alice thought. After a second, he managed to break away from the unholy pull of her deformation. He looked at the rest of Alice.“Mr. Mann?” she said.But his glance had returned to her chest.“Would you like to come inside for a glass of wine?” he said with a leer.“Mr. Mann, I’m Alice,” she’d said. “Alice. Felicia’s friend.”“Hello, Alice,” he said. “Come on in and have some wine with me.”“I’m Alice Duncan,” Alice had said. “Alice Duncan,” she repeated. “Alice? From the Fieldwood School? The sixth grade.” Alice looked at him for a long moment.“The. Sixth. Grade,” she said more loudly, as if he were deaf.He smiled fondly at THE BREASTS.She couldn’t tell if he’d heard her. She hoped he hadn’t, but she thought he had. He was probably high, like Rabbit usually was when Rabbit did that. As soon as Persephone began to snarl at Mr. Mann, Alice had tugged on the leash and they’d walked away.“It was Mr. Mann,” Alice had whispered to Persephone as they passed the entrance to the Whitney Museum on Madison Avenue. “That was Mr. Thomas Mann, my friend Felicia’s dad. Her dad.”Persephone had gazed up at Alice, her tufted eyebrows trembling, as if she understood.And Rabbit said that age was just a number. That what counted was how Alice felt inside. Inside, Alice felt like a monster, a shy weird one of whom no one was afraid. A well-liked monster whom grown men greeted with a friendly “Well, hello there, babe!” In school, with kids her own age, she was ridiculed. They called her Gigantor. They called her Stacked. They made noises behind her back. But on the sidewalks of New York, Alice was approved of. She was popular. Everyone was popular on the sidewalks of New York at this precise point in time. Strangers winked at one another on the steps of the Metropolitan, sidled close, lit each other’s cigarettes, swapped phone numbers. They struck up conversations by the lake in Central Park, stripped their clothes off, and streaked across Sheep’s Meadow. They tossed dandelions in the windows of police cars as they passed. Alice had seen all this, and she’d seen the great blue haze, the clouds of dope that hung heavy in the gardens behind the Central Park band shell, where Aunt Esmé scored her boyfriends, her musicians, and her drugs. It didn’t matter just then that Alice was eleven. It began with Rabbit, and it ended with J.D., but it could just as easily have been anyone.
 
 Stuart reached across Aunt Esmé’s torso and picked up the plastic baggie filled with pot that was on the floor next to her hipbone. “Should we kill this?” he said. “Or save it for next time?”“I’m wasted,” said Rabbit, from the bed.“What d’ya say? Should we finish off this dime of gold, you and me?” said Stuart.“In a sec,” Aunt Esmé told him, patting his head.He lay back on her stomach. “You feel good,” he said. “Like a firm pillow.”“Don’t get too comfortable,” said Aunt Esmé. “In about six seconds, I’m going to go downstairs to get something to eat.”Stuart let the baggie drop from his hand. Some of the buds spilled out onto the carpet. He left it lying there. This was atypical. Usually, Alice had noticed, Aunt Esmé and her boyfriends took meticulously good care of their drugs. The pills, powders, and weeds came inside rolled-up plastic bags, and each one was treated like a cherished toy. Aunt Esmé called the wooden cigar box she kept her stash in the “toy chest.” Like good children, they always put their toys away. There was a test tube inside the toy chest filled with white powder and sealed with a cork stopper. There was an envelope that contained a dozen tiny squares of paper, each one smaller than a postage stamp, printed with abstract patterns. There was a disposable lighter, and a pipe. All these items were neatly arranged inside the toy chest, lined up in tidy rows. Alice wasn’t allowed to take the drugs. But because she was “really very mature” she was welcome to sit in Aunt Esmé’s room, and unless the door was locked, she could go in whenever she wanted to.The presence of the drugs made Alice feel left out. Some of the stuff Aunt Esmé had started taking slowed her speech down and gave her eyes a blank, deadened quality, like a shark’s. That dead look intensified the bad feeling Alice often had. The bad feeling had been born around the time Rain had filled a suitcase with clothes, hugged Alice goodbye, and left, promising to send for Alice one day. Alice had always known, in her heart of hearts, that Rain might leave. Her presence in the house had felt uncertain, temporary. When Aunt Esmé and her friends were high, Alice felt as if they’d gone away, too. Alice, wanting to participate, had asked if she could make a collage for the toy chest, gluing her cutouts onto it. So now the toy chest bore one of Alice’s surreal collages, made of words and eyes. Aunt Esmé, Stuart, and Rabbit had all admired it. It was a great relief to Alice that people enjoyed something she had made for them, and could look at with interest, rather than gawking at Giant Alice and THE BREASTS. She kept them hidden behind thick sweatshirts, contained by large white cotton bras that looked like bandages. Though THE BREASTS were round and symmetrical, she didn’t feel they belonged there, on her chest. She would have liked to detach them and put them away for use at a later date. Ideally, she would have stored them in a toy box of her own—a package marked Do Not Open Until Christmas 1981. It was better to have attracted notice for the collages, she felt, than for THE BREASTS. THE BREASTS were a phenomenon she’d had no part in. Alice hadn’t created them. They’d spawned themselves. Good or bad, “gorgeous” or not, Alice couldn’t take credit for them. The collages, on the other hand, were the product of her industry. She’d worked hard at them. She could make collages for hours, creating whole landscapes of cutout castles and cutout forests, cutout animals, cutout spaceships, cutout aliens, cutout couples, and cutout parties. Aunt Esmé had said that Alice might be an artist like Dean when she grew up. Alice thought she might like to be an artist, but she wouldn’t want to be like Dean. He was a schiz. Alice had overheard Aunt Esmé talking about him on the telephone. She’d said that Dean was “gonzo on lithium” and “way mentally unstable,” because “no one likes the type of paintings he does nowadays.”Alice didn’t like Dean’s paintings, either. He always painted the same thing: adults wearing baby clothes. It was boring. She’d told this to him frankly, not to be mean, but in the hope that he might do something new, that he’d feel better, that he’d change. She’d wanted to inspire Dean. He often paced the floors of his studio muttering, loudly—as if wanting them to hear—“It’s inspiration, damn it. It’s inspiration that I lack!” But when Alice had said the adults-in-baby-clothes theme was tired (she’d learned to talk this way from him, about themes being tiring), Dean hadn’t been inspired at all. He’d just agreed.“Ah, my palette,” Dean had said, sucking on his pipe in the high-ceilinged, dilapidated rooms he painted in. “It’s bleak, Alice. It’s relentless and depressing. It reflects the dark inside my heart and the dark inside my mind.”As she often was inside Dean’s studio, Alice had felt frightened.“I can’t imagine why a collector, or anyone else for that matter, would want to spend three grand to have all this black murk of mine hanging in their living room,” he had continued. Then he’d hung his head in his hands, his usual signal for wanting to be alone.Unfortunately, the art collectors agreed with him about the murk and bleakness. “Portraiture is out. Conceptual is in,” Dean’s agent had said to Aunt Esmé at one of Dean’s poorly attended cocktail parties. (Alice had been standing next to the buffet table, in the backyard, eating canapes. Dean himself hadn’t been there. He never came to his own parties.) Though Dean’s work had once been fashionable, it had become, the agent said, “passe.” Art collectors had gradually stopped buying. Dean’s faltering career had precipitated his first major breakdown. He separated them into Majors and Minors, like baseball leagues. He had a second Major after Rain left. When Alice was nine, her mother had moved to Rome with a man named Knut and had begun designing shoes. She was rediscovering joy. That’s what her postcard said. Rain had been twenty-six when she left them. She’d been seventeen when Dean had married her. He was sixty now—an old, old man, Alice thought. And, Alice thought, old men might die. The only dead person she had ever known was Edgar Allan Poe, who wasn’t a person at all, but an aquatic salamander. She’d buried Edgar Allan Poe underneath the azalea bush in the front yard. Dean had painted flowers on Edgar’s little tombstone in acrylics. He wrote, in calligraphy, “E.P. 1975–1976.” He had explained to Alice that for an aquatic salamander, a year is a full lifetime. But now there was a new blue sign next to Edgar Allan Poe’s tombstone. The white letters on it said: Corcoran Real Estate. FOR SALE.
 
 Alice put the finishing touches on her collage. Aunt Esmé, Stuart, and Rabbit all had their eyes closed, as they always did when listening to the slow, spooky record. It was by Pink Floyd. Even the name struck Alice as improbable. What was a floyd, anyway? And how could it be pink? Everyone in Aunt Esmé’s circle talked about Pink Floyd with reverence, but the music was meaningless to Alice. She liked cheerful music with lucid, pleasant lyrics that made sense. She liked the early, and not the late, Beatles. She preferred them when they’d been clean-cut and chipper. She’d wanted the music to stay perky and upbeat—but when the Beatles grew their hair down to their shoulders and began wearing necklaces, it had gotten more complicated and sad. The messy hairstyles had led to messy music, messy clothes, messy lives. While Alice kept her own room neat, Aunt Esmé’s room was littered with laundry, records and cassette tapes, and the residue of late-night snacks. Her friends sat around and listened to the caterwaul of Robert Plant, or to the weepy guitar of The White Album and the babble of “number nine, number nine, number nine.” Now school had ended for the summer, and they spent all day hanging out by the boathouse in the park, returning in the late afternoon to loaf around. They were dreary. They were decadent. They had the arrogant superiority of teenagers. But they were the only friends Alice had. Everyone else she knew called her Gigantor, except for Veronica Dreyfuss and Skye Winston, who—like many of the neighborhood children on the Upper East Side—had gone away to summer camp.“Alice,” said Aunt Esmé. “Would you mind going to the kitchen and getting us some snacks? I’ve got the munchies.”“Okay,” said Alice. “What should I get?”“How about some of those chocolate chips?” she said. “Those are good.”“I vote for Oreos,” said Rabbit.“Chocolate chips and Oreos, both,” said Stuart.“All right,” said Alice. In Dean’s absence, they survived on cookies, pizza, and spaghetti with miniature meatballs that they ate cold, straight from the can. They sent Alice downstairs like a waitress. She didn’t mind being sent on errands. Aunt Esmé was much nicer to her than other people’s big sisters were. Aunt Esmé was actually Alice’s half sister, from Dean’s first marriage. She was supposed to take care of Alice, and to stay in the house every night. She didn’t. Often she went out in the evening and didn’t come back until the next morning. Now she had a new “connection”—someone called J.D.—who came from North Carolina. He was spending the summer there, in a town called Dodgson, where Aunt Esmé said he owned a house. J.D. had only been in North Carolina since late May, but Aunt Esmé had already driven eight hours there and back to see him, twice, leaving Alice to spend two long weekends in the house on Sixty-seventh Street alone. Aunt Esmé had pleaded with Alice not to ever say anything to Dean about her disappearances.“I’ve got to go make a drug run,” she said. “J.D. has the best blow.”Alice wasn’t sure what the best blow was, and she didn’t ask. She figured it was the white powder that Aunt Esmé sometimes carried with her inside her fringed handbag. It didn’t matter that Aunt Esmé took drugs right out in the open. She’d stop anywhere—on the street, or in a department store—to take a pinch of the powder from her bag, lift it to one nostril, throw back her head, and snort it. It didn’t matter that she left Alice alone for days or hours at a time. It was just that Alice didn’t like being by herself in the house at night. The floorboards creaked in the room where Rain used to be, and the branches of the cherry tree in the front yard near Edgar Allan Poe’s grave swayed in the wind. They scratched against the glass with a soft tap, tap, tap. It sounded like a lizard’s paws. Then it sounded like a serpent’s tongue. Then it sounded like five weak fingers rapping on the windowpane, the same gentle fingers that used to comb and braid Alice’s hair. Alice would run upstairs and call out “Rain? Is that you? Are you here?” Rain had asked Alice not to call her “Mom” or “Mama” or “Mommy,” like other children called their mothers. The house was haunted, Alice thought, by the woman Dean had called a free spirit, her young mother’s ghost.
 
 When she got,back from the kitchen, carrying a plate filled with cookies, Aunt Esmé’s door was closed. Alice tried it tentatively. It was locked, as it often was. Alice set the plate of cookies down, like a bellhop delivering room service in a hotel. As she passed the mirror in the hallway, she paused to look at her reflection. Sometimes, when the two girls were by themselves, they’d stand here. Aunt Esmé would try new hairstyles out on Alice. Then, feature by feature, she’d analyze their looks. She said Alice had liquid brown eyes like a doe’s. But Alice only saw her flaws: a pinched, ashen face, droopy mouth, big lips. The skin under her eyes was puffy, and permanently discolored. Aunt Esmé said a little makeup would correct that—though she deplored Alice’s prissy taste in clothes.Alice returned to her own room, two flights below, on the third floor. She listened to Simon and Garfunkel sing “Bridge over Troubled Water,” one of the melodic songs that she liked. She was flipping through all of Aunt Esmé’s old copies of Sixteen and Seventeen and Dean’s Artforums and Architectural Digests, and Rain’s ancient Vogues and Harpers Bazaars. She was looking for tiny pictures that she could paste inside of rock stars’ eyes.“Alice! Where are you?”It was Aunt Esmé calling for her. Alice set the magazines down and went back upstairs. They’d lock the door when they didn’t want her with them, and then when they were done, they’d call her back in.“Hey, girlfriend,” said Aunt Esmé as Alice padded, barefoot, up the stairs. “Thanks for the cookies.”“Did you eat them all?” Alice asked incredulously.“Yeah. They were excellent.”“You didn’t save any for me?”“I thought you had some,” said Aunt Esmé.“No,” said Alice.“Silly. Next time help yourself.”“I was waiting for you.”“Well, don’t. Two boys are a handful. Trust me.”Alice hesitated on the landing. Twice, she’d gone in too early and had seen Rabbit naked. He’d been lying on his side, curled in the shape of the letter S. Aunt Esmé had been curled in the same shape, right behind him. Stuart had been behind her, huddled close. They’d reminded Alice of newborn puppies in a heap. They’d looked helpless. They’d been asleep.“Come listen,” called Rabbit from inside the room. “We’ve got the new Zeppelin bootleg.”“I don’t like Led Zeppelin,” Alice said from the hallway. She could only see the top of Rabbit’s head and a corner of the mattress.“It’s an acquired taste,” he said. “You have to like them, Alice. And you will.”Led Zeppelin was along the same lines as Pink Floyd, Alice believed. They, too, had a nonsense name and bathed people’s brains in their eerie, otherwordly twilight that descended every time the music played. As she listened, Alice imagined she was an insect who had been washed down the drain and left to wander around forever in a subterranean maze.Aunt Esmé propped the door open with an old sneaker, and Alice walked in. Stuart was lying on the bed with an inflatable pillow under his neck. The pillow belonged to Alice. They often took things from her room. She used the pillow as a flotation device when she went to the swimming pool.“You’re lying on my float,” Alice said to him.“Am I?” Stuart listened to her. He was not like Rabbit. He cooperated.“Yes, you are,” said Alice. “And I can’t swim without it. I need it.”Stuart lifted his head so Alice could take her float away from him.“Don’t you know how to swim yet?” he said, resettling himself against the headboard. “I thought you learned.”“I’m too heavy,” Alice said. “I sink.”“She’s too heavy, she’s too heavy.” Rabbit began to sing the Beatles song. It was not among Alice’s favorites.“Alice Duncan,” said Aunt Esmé. “You don’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Don’t be like Dean, who’s so paranoid. Don’t be irrational and crazy.”Alice wanted to tell them that THE BREASTS felt heavy. But then they would all begin remarking on what a nice figure she already had, and what a weird trip it was, and that she was going to be a heartbreaker any day, and they would stare at her. Because of THE BREASTS, Alice couldn’t swim. She only paddled cautiously in the shallow end. She thought continuously of a great white shark, headed for her, its red maw open, its crooked teeth like saws, unfeeling, disinterested, mechanical—ready to devour her. Obviously, there were no sharks in pools. Alice told herself that, without effect. She’d been able to swim before the arrival of THE BREASTS. She’d liked swimming, and had been very good at it, when she was seven.But once she began “developing prematurely” (how she hated the term Dr. Fineman used, while giving her an ominous smile) Alice thought of sharks whenever she went to the Y for the swimming hour. She would clutch the inflatable pillow to her stomach and stay close to the edges of the pool. The swimming hour was every day from four to five o’clock, except that this year Ethyl hadn’t renewed the Duncan Family Membership. Ethyl was their housekeeper. Alice loved her. She didn’t work for them anymore.“We’ll get Ethyl back,” Dean had said before he committed himself to Saint Joseph’s Hospital. He’d been staring and staring out the window at the cherry tree. “We’ll hire Ethyl, at least part-time, when I’m mended and back on my feet again.”Dean always said “mended,” that he needed “to mend.” Though, when “sick,” he lay on the couch in his studio and wept, though he slashed his canvases with the Thanksgiving turkey knife, though he walked up to the roof one night and said the next morning that he’d contemplated “an ending”—Alice harbored a suspicion that there was nothing wrong with Dean. She doubted him. Her doubt made her feel worse than his mental illness did. It made her think she was a bad person.
 
 Rabbit was just where he had been, on his back. He’d moved further down on the bed so his head wasn’t hanging off the end of the mattress anymore. His feet were propped up on the wall, only now he’d taken his boots off and was just wearing bright red socks. Alice could see the dusty outline of the scuff marks Rabbit’s bootheels had left on the wall. They were open semicircles, like the letter U. Aunt Esmé allowed her friends to mark her walls up. They were entirely covered with doodles, stickers, and graffiti. There was only one spot in Aunt Esme’s room that no one was allowed to interfere with. This was a small blue heart that she’d drawn in eyeliner immediately above the bed. It was no bigger than a thumbnail. Inside the heart was a wispy blond pubic hair that Aunt Esmé claimed belonged to Crash Omaha. She’d borrowed Alice’s rubber cement glue to attach it to the wall.“Crash wuz here,” read the long, spindly letters underneath it. An arrow pointed downward, toward the bed. He’d signed and dated it January 16, 1974. It had been Aunt Esmé’s fourteenth birthday. Now Rabbit’s feet were moving unacceptably close to this sacred souvenir.“Rabbit, you pig! Get your feet away from Crash,” Aunt Esmé said.Rabbit put his feet down on the pillow. He was reading a copy of Natural History magazine, one of the old ones Alice had found in the dumpsters behind the building next door. She often used discarded magazines to make her collages. He peered at Alice from over the top of the magazine. “Alice,” he said, “check this out. This is cool.” He turned the magazine around so that Alice could see it.Alice took a look. It was a photograph of a black-and-yellow bee.“It looks like a bee, doesn’t it?” said Rabbit.Alice nodded.“Aha,” said Rabbit. “You’ve been deceived. Things, my dear, aren’t what they seem to be. It’s not a bee, Alice. It’s a fly. It’s a trick of nature. A disguise.”“So?” said Alice.Rabbit reached out toward her leg and clamped his hand around her ankle. “So,” he said. “Nothing. I got ya.”“Let go of me,” said Alice, “or I’ll kick your teeth in.”“That’s enough, you two,” said Aunt Esmé, who was busy by the stereo rearranging her records. She’d sort them alphabetically until she got to H or J, and then she’d ask Alice to do the rest of them. “The next person who behaves like an animal in this room will be kicked out of here,” she said, yawning. “Permanently.”Rabbit released Alice from his grip. “Camouflaged as a stinging insect, the rat-tailed maggot deters attacks from frogs and reptiles,” he read aloud. “Though defenseless, it cleverly mimics the honeybee to fool its natural predators.”Alice took the magazine. “That’s mine,” she said. “Give it back to me, please.” She began to gather her posterboard, her scissors, and her glue.Aunt Esmé crossed the room holding an album in her hands. She threw herself down across the bed.“Ugh!” Stuart said as she landed on him with a thud. “Esmé, you’re not exactly a feather.” There was a brief scuffle during which Alice retrieved her collage from the floor. It had gotten bent and torn.“Who did this?” Alice said accusingly, brandishing her dented collage.“Hush. The queen bee speaks,” said Rabbit.“Who messed up my collage?” Alice said.“No one,” said Aunt Esmé.“Can’t you take care of anything except your stupid drugs?” said Alice. She set the collage down on the table and tried to smooth it with her hand. The glue hadn’t set. She’d carefully traced the outline of the images with a black Magic Marker. Now the ink had been smudged.“We didn’t mean to, Al,” called Aunt Esmé. Evicted from her bed, where Stuart and Rabbit had rearranged themselves more comfortably without her, Aunt Esmé opened the steamer trunk she kept by the bookshelves near the window. She’d arrived in America with that trunk, she said, from Vienna, when she was small. Dean’s first wife was a dance therapist who grew up in Austria and was living in New Mexico.“Let’s do some hits with this,” said Aunt Esmé. She took a hookah out of the trunk. It looked like a six-headed serpent, with six long winding necks and a potbelly made of brass. Rain had sent it to them one Christmas, from Tangier. The package had arrived, wrapped in brown paper, with a dozen exotic stamps on it, printed in pale earth tones of rust and green.Aunt Esmé set the hookah down in the center of the bed. It wobbled from side to side. Rabbit put a trigonometry textbook under it to steady it. When that didn’t work, the three of them got up off the bed and settled themselves around the hookah on the floor.“My collage is ruined,” Alice said.“Don’t be sore at us,” said Rabbit. “We’re stoners. We’re deadbeat pillheads.”“We’re adolescents,” chimed in Aunt Esmé.“We’re not responsible for our actions,” Rabbit continued. “We can’t help ourselves.”“Would somebody be kind enough to shut their face and play some Zeppelin?” said Stuart.“Alice, would you be a super generous considerate kind of girl?” Aunt Esmé asked.Alice sighed and retrieved the albums Aunt Esmé had scattered across the quilt on her bed. She lifted up the one called Houses of the Holy and studied it. The album cover showed six little girls climbing up the side of a cliff They were as identical as paper dolls. They had coiled platinum blond hair, like Alice. They were naked.From across the room, Stuart was gesticulating at her, frantically. He was in the middle of inhaling, holding his breath, so he couldn’t speak. “Forget the bootleg,” he said, exhaling a puff of swirling smoke. “Would you put that one on? It’s among the best ten albums in the known universe. Jimmy Page is God.”“Top five,” corrected Aunt Esmé. “God is Robert Plant.”Gingerly, Alice took the shining black disc out of its jacket, holding it suspended between her hands, the way Aunt Esmé had taught her, so she wouldn’t scratch or damage it. She set it down on the turntable. The jangling, clashing sounds began to fill the room. Soon it was interrupted by Persephone, howling.“Oh, Persephone, you idiot,” said Aunt Esmé. “Alice, this is a sublime album, and Persephone is making a racket. Can’t you quiet your dog down?”“Be good, Persephone,” said Alice.Persephone knitted her eyebrows together and looked worried. She gave one short whine, lifted her paw off the floor, and set it down again for emphasis. Persephone didn’t care for Led Zeppelin, either. “I’ll be right there,” Alice told her. She wanted to see what it was that Aunt Esmé, Rabbit, and Stuart heard in this weird music. She tried to listen to it, to keep an open mind. She pored over the lyrics and scrutinized the cover of Houses of the Holy. The colors were harsh and glaring, just like the songs themselves. The yellow of the girls’ hair was too bright, the sky too orange. Chemically altered. Artificial. A mysterious purple light emanated from a distant source that couldn’t be identified. Alice found the image shocking. The naked children, she felt, should have been clothed.The little girls looked as if they were intent on getting someplace, Alice thought. But they’d embarked on a dangerous mission. One of the rocks had a circular hole in it, big enough for a child to slip through. She wondered what fate awaited them when they got to the top of the rocks. They might find the “houses of the holy,” or they might drop off the cliff, one by one, like lemmings. They appeared to be under a spell—sleepwalking, drugged, or hypnotized.“Aunt Esmé, can I please make dresses for the children?” Alice asked.“Huh?” said Aunt Esmé.“Can I glue paper clothing onto the girls here, on the Houses of the Holy album?”“Oh my God,” said Aunt Esmé. “That would be sacrilege. Are you out of your fucking mind? You can’t do that. Absolutely, positively, not.”Alice contemplated the picture. She wished that she could put herself into it, not small and naked but tall and dressed—armed and armored in a coat of steel. She’d be the giant bronze statue of Alice in Wonderland in Central Park. She’d sit on a toadstool ten feet wide and five feet high. Playing safely, they could climb on her, and she would clothe them in dresses made of flowers. Oh, she’d have her arms open wide, like the boy in the book, to catch the girls when they fell. Because the naked children would fall. Alice wished they wouldn’t, but they always did fall, they’d been falling forever, and they always would.ONE PILL MAKES YOU SMALLER. Copyright © 2003 by Lisa Dierbeck. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.