“So is that why you called?”
“You know that’s not why I called, Paul.” She sets the tube of lipstick on the desk and spins it in a circle, watching it as it pinwheels.
“I already told you: I’m not going to that wedding.”
Alice pivots. “That’s not why I called, either.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s not,” she says. “I called because Mom’s been trying to get ahold of you.”
Paul is quiet for a moment, and in the background she can hear the soothing monotony of All Things Considered.
Then, Paul spits: “Donna?”
“Yes. And for fuck’s sake, can’t you just call her Mom?”
“No, I can’t.”
Alice’s cell phone vibrates against her desk, and she rolls her chair over to it. On the screen blinks a message from Jonathan—Ready when you are =)—that she quickly deletes.
She says, “There’s got to be a statute of limitations on these things.”
“On what?” Paul says. “Being some frigid cunt?”
Alice pinches the bridge of her nose. In the Relaxation Station, on the other end of the floor, a pair of interns start a game of Ping-Pong. “We’re not talking about this right now. I didn’t call to rehash this.”
“You still haven’t clarified why it is, exactly, that you’re calling.”
“Yes, I did. I said that Mom’s trying to get ahold of you.”
“And that’s it?”
More crunching. A new carrot.
“She would appreciate—and I would really appreciate it—if you called her back.”
“But I haven’t—”
“Paul, can you please swallow before you speak?”
He coughs gutturally. Alice rolls her eyes.
“Better?” he says.
“Much.”
“Good. In any event, as I was saying, I don’t have any missed calls from her, so she couldn’t have been trying that hard.”
Alice thinks for a moment, considering the most strategic way to frame what she has to say next.
“She—she got a new phone,” she offers, weakly. From here, she knows, it’ll all be downhill.
“Well, good for her. Surely the number’s the same, though, and I would have seen it if—”
“I’m sorry, I should have been more specific. She got a new phone with an Indiana area code.”
“Well, that makes absolutely no sense. Why would she—” Paul stops himself for a moment, and Alice waits for him to jam the pieces together. “Oh my God. Oh my God.” She bites her lip hard, just short of drawing blood. “She drove to Indiana to get a phone without a Chicago area code so I wouldn’t know it was her who was calling me. You’re kidding me, Al. Please tell me you’re fucking kidding me.”
In the Relaxation Station, a Ping-Pong ball bounces off the table and into a planter filled with bamboo. One of the interns throws his paddle against the wall. Alice lowers her forehead to rest against her desk.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” she says.
“This is … this is unbelievable. I mean, just when I think that woman has written the book on passive-aggressive manipulation.”
“She just really wants to talk, I guess.”
“We-ell, evidently, Alice.” She cringes. “Do you know what even about?”
“I’m assuming the wedding.”
“Tell her what I told you: I’m not going.”
“Why are you being so difficult about this?” she says. “Eloise is getting married.”
“So?”
“So she’s our sister, Paul.”
“Half sister. And I haven’t spoken to her in over a year.”
Alice says, “Yeah, well. Whose fault is that?”
Her phone, now directly next to her head, buzzes again. Another message from Jonathan. This one less playful than the first: Where are you??
“Look,” she says, “I’ve got to go. Do whatever the fuck you want. Just—it wouldn’t kill you to call Mom back, all right?”
*
The waiter reaches forward and begins pouring a hot green liquid over the Dungeness crab. Through the steam Alice sees Jonathan looking at her. He raises an eyebrow, and she smiles before letting her eyes fall back down to the bowl, where the broth soaks its way into the crab meat, dyeing the flesh a shade of mossy green. “Sea bean porridge” is what the waiter calls it, and Alice is forced to admit (always silently, always to herself), that she doesn’t have the first clue what a sea bean is. Hadn’t been aware, really, that the sea produced beans at all—though, thinking about it now, as she watches the waiter bow slightly and vanish, she supposes it makes sense. The ocean is full of all sorts of crap she’s never stopped to consider: weeds, strange pink blossoms sprouting from coral reefs, translucent fish lurking in bottomless trenches, and—now—beans. Green little pellets that she imagines taste like everything else she’s eaten this evening: salty, and with a trace of gritty canned fish—sardines coated in sand. The trout roe with peas and lemon curd. The tuna with kale oil and quince. Despite the different ingredients, it’s all the same. It all has that flavor she can’t help but associate with the Gulf Coast of Florida, with those horrible smells that assaulted her in places like Pensacola and Panama City and Fort Walton Beach, where her father used to drag her and Paul and their mother (but never Eloise) on vacation every summer so he could fish for tuna, and which, metaphorically, couldn’t be farther from Babél, the restaurant on Wilshire and South Wilton where she currently sits, staring at a trio of critically lauded, Japanese/neo-Nordic fusion dishes.
Discreetly, she looks at her phone. Thirty minutes ago, she checked in to Babél on Facebook. This is nothing new: she always checks in to the restaurant when she’s out to eat with Jonathan. She likes the comments the postings garner, the jealous pleas for tips on getting a reservation, the requests for pictures of her food. More than anything, though, she appreciates the subtle message it sends to her half sister: a reminder that Eloise isn’t the only one who can eat at pricey restaurants, that Alice belongs here just as much as she does.
Scrolling through the twenty-three “likes,” she searches for her half sister’s name. When she can’t find it, she slips her phone back into her purse, irritated.
The waiter returns, this time with two servings of uni. Each one is balanced on its own slate slab and drizzled in almond milk. The man bows, and Jonathan lunges forward with a set of red lacquered chopsticks. Alice looks away.
“You don’t want any?” he asks. A blob of orange clings to the left side of his mouth.