The Hazel Wood

Alice reflects on a few instances of the bad luck that has followed Ella and her: in Providence, a house flood; in Tacoma, wildcat destruction; in Los Angeles, a friend’s husband’s chronic fatigue. After Althea died, however, Ella and Alice moved into a Brooklyn apartment, Ella insisting that the odd strangers Alice encountered were “not bad luck, that’s New York” (8). Alice tried to settle into public school and a part-time coffeehouse job. Eager to give Alice an opportunity to go to college, Ella “married up,” and the two moved into a luxury apartment with Alice’s new husband, Harold, and his daughter. Alice has always struggled with anger issues; her tone toward Harold and the weak marriage is derisive.

At her coffeehouse job, Alice leaves the counter to wipe tables. She is shocked to see the redhaired man who kidnapped her when she was six. He still looks very young, so Alice realizes how unrealistic it is, “[b]ut I knew with certainty it was him, and that he was here because of me” (13). The man exits the shop immediately but leaves a strange pattern of three objects on the table: a dark gold feather, a bleached bone, and a red plastic comb. Alice puts the objects in her apron pocket. She is scared and weak from seeing him. She knows that she saw the man carrying her grandmother’s book, Tales from the Hinterland.

Alice reflects on finding a copy of her grandmother’s book in the attic of the family she and Ella stayed with when she was 10. Twelve short stories comprise the book, and Alice turned right away to the one named “Alice-Three-Times.” Ella took the book from Alice, telling her it was not appropriate for children, which surprised Alice; Ella rarely treated her like a child. Alice had time to read only the story’s first line: “When Alice was born her eyes were black from end to end, and the midwife didn’t stay long enough to wash her” (19). Alice tries to find the book as their travels continue but she is never able to.

Alice gets on the train wondering if the man could be a friend of her grandmother’s after all, and if Ella lied. She remembers a long article from Vanity Fair about her grandmother that explained how she went to Europe with an older man in 1966 but soon parted ways with him, and in Althea’s words, “chased a new kind of story through a very old doorway […] It took me a long time to find my way back” (23). When Althea returned to New York in 1969, she wrote Tales from the Hinterland, and it was published by a small independent press. It gained a strange notoriety and a kind of cult following of devoted fans, becoming an “art-house hit” (23). Alice reflects that she used to read that article and think of Althea in dreamy, fairy-tale-style images, seeing “messengers” sent by Althea and thinking Althea would magically appear one day. Now, Alice understands that Althea was more of an “arrogant fantasist” whose second husband committed suicide, prompting her to close herself and Ella up within the borders of the Hazel Wood for 14 years. Ella does not talk about these years to Alice. She had Alice at 19, never returned to the Hazel Wood, and never told Alice about her father.

Alice hears rude comments from Harold toward Ella behind their closed bedroom door. Furious, she pounds on the door and tries to get Ella to open it. Harold is mad that Ella wore a black sheath dress to a client dinner. Ella calms Alice and tells her they will talk in the morning. Audrey, Harold’s daughter, and Alice converse in strained tones, trying to treat the subject of the wealthy marriage—and Ella’s and Alice’s destitute travels—lightly. In her room, Alice puts the strange objects in her backpack. Ella visits Alice to comfort her and kiss her goodnight. Alice decides to wait a day to tell Ella that their strange bad luck is back.

Alice knows Ella’s marriage to Harold will not last, as it was a clichéd and rapid courtship; she worries, though, about Ella divorcing and the uncertain future it means. On Monday morning, Alice and Audrey have additional half-jesting, half-bitter comments for each other about Ella’s “gold-digging skills” (37), with Alice barely constraining her anger before going to school. Alice is now enrolled in Whitechapel, “the fancy-ass Upper East Side academy Harold paid my way into” (39). There she uses the name Alice Crewe. She goes through her morning of composition class, medieval literature, and calculus; in the afternoon, she goes to drama and is surprised that Audrey skips, as she rarely misses. Alice sees they will have an even number for scene work and has the “premonition” that she and Ellery Finch will be assigned to work together.

Ellery Finch comes from an extremely wealthy family, far richer than other families at Whitechapel; he is, however, slightly off with Audrey’s popular crowd. He dresses in high-waisted pants and jogs in denim and corduroy. He announced to Alice in her first days at Whitechapel that he read her grandmother’s book, so she sized him up as a “superfan.” She seems to run into him often and hesitantly wonders if he could be a friend (or more). On the day Audrey skips drama, the teacher, Toby, pairs Alice and Ellery together. They practice a scene from The Glass Menagerie with Ellery taking the part of the frail daughter Laura. Ellery suggests they “meet up on purpose sometime” (47), and Alice agrees. She does not understand their curious relationship, but she senses that an undercurrent of sadness or trauma runs through Ellery. Alice suspects it is from his mother’s presumed suicide. She thinks they share some similar feelings: “And it made me wonder if we weren’t a little bit alike. Behaving the way we had to get by, while hiding a core that was a mystery even to ourselves” (48).