“And rattlesnakes? And mosquitoes? And crocodiles? What about rabid dogs? And what about Cain? If God cared about Cain, why did he look down on his fruits and vegetables and praise Abel's stinky old dead animals—"
But Mrs. Covington had had enough. She told Alice that asking those kinds of questions came very close to mocking God and assigned her five extra Bible verses to learn by heart. Alice obediently memorized the verses, but Mrs. Covington's disapproval imbued with special clarity her understanding that God was capricious and arbitrary, which was why His Will generally meant very unpleasant things for everybody all around. So although she would not put it past God to have Willed her not to be born, for as long as she believed in God (i.e., until about the age of seventeen) she believed that in fact he had changed His Mind about bringing her into existence, probably at the last second, and had then forgotten to alter His Plan so as to make the change fit into the Greater Scheme of Things. He might notice how every sparrow in the world fared, but she felt virtually certain she had slipped under His radar.
Alice's grandfather might declare he was mad at God after her grandmother died, but Alice understood that God's willing a death had to be a different kind of exercise of will than letting someone slip into the world who shouldn't have. And yet the idea of a forgetful God, who knew what every sparrow, worm, and fly was doing, made no sense to her. In her very first religion class in the first grade they'd had to memorize the attributes of God, one of which was omniscience. Every year Alice tested her new teacher. “Does God ever make mistakes?” The answer, always the same, got frostier and frostier as Alice rose through the grades.
By seventh grade, she knew better than to ask.
4.
When her grandmother died, Alice found herself alone and bereft of a massy body to orbit, weighing barely enough to sustain consciousness of, much less presence in, the world. She often drifted away, her heft so tenuous that between one heartbeat and the next she slipped briefly out of the world to a place that held, to her untutored perception, only images, a jumble subject to shifting as swiftly and unpredictably as the tiles in her cardboard and plastic kaleidoscope.
Her grandmother lingered in her dreams for months. Repeatedly Alice wakened into happiness that shattered in the inevitable moment of remembering, taunting her with a loss she could explain to no one, teaching her that her dreams were false. Her grandmother had known she didn't belong, had noticed and hadn't had to lie about it. To everyone else, she was just nervous. High-strung. Overly sensitive. In need of lightening up: everyone agreed.
On Sunday afternoons at the cemetery, Alice helped her grandfather snip the soft velvety grass and tend the brave, bright petunias and geraniums surrounding the gravestone that lay flush to the earth. The stone never seemed right to her; its pink and gray surface held such a polish that it resembled a mirror on which had been stamped her grandmother's name and dates in unsuitably ornate characters, not a signifier either of loss or of who the woman buried there had been. Still, other than a few photographs and keepsakes, it was all that remained of her.
Alice needed to attend the grave alone, to visit without the distraction of others’ presence and without the pressure of having always to give way to someone else's grief for a woman so many had loved. So Alice became devious. She learned how to fool the adults surveilling her whereabouts, which buses to take, and how to cross the four-lane highway; and she acquired an indifference to walking or bicycling several miles in one day, which previously had been beyond her.
Although the stone radiated cold even when the sun beat down on it, Alice needed to lay her head on it, needed to thrust her fingers into the grass, right into the ground. Being in touch with the grave, she sensed, kept her from drifting out of the world into the other place that so often beckoned to her, where nothing had heft, where everything constantly moved and collided in a chaos devoid of meaning. She hoped that making the physical link would bring her into contact with some small trace of her grandmother remaining in the world, which she thought might be possible simply because her grandmother had had more heft than anyone she had ever known.
On her grandmother's birthday almost a year and a half after her death, Alice lay, as she often did, with her head on the stone and her fingers dug into the sod. The rays of the sun soaked into the side of her face, dazzling her with a red brilliance that warmed and penetrated the closed, thin lids of her eyes. She visualized a yellow sheet cake decorated with sugary white icing, festooned with small pink roses and sixty-five candles, and remembered how because her grandmother had had asthma, she had always needed Alice to help blow out her candles. “Happy birthday to you,” she sang softly. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Grandma, happy birthday to you.” But though she had her eyes closed, pretending, Alice knew there was no birthday cake, no candles, no birthday at all, even though it was May first. Her heart ached. She sighed, and her sigh turned into a sob. “If only I could be with you always,” she said. “I hate it here without you. Hate it hate it hate it.” Her eyes streamed. “I'm tired of being here by myself, Gramma. I want to go home with you. Please. Let me come to you. You know I don't belong here."
“Alice?"
That voice! Alice squeezed her eyes more tightly shut.
“Alice, I want you to listen to me."
Alice grew aware of the pulse of blood pumping through her veins—in her wrists, in her throat, in her belly, in her temples. The sound of it thudded in her ears like a hammer that knew nothing about stopping. She thought that if she opened her eyes her vision would be swimming in blood.
“Alice? That is you, isn't it?"
Alice opened her eyes and sat up. The sun blinded her. She held her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes. “Gramma?” A woman stood nearby. She had gray hair and wrinkles in her face, and she had the right voice; but she was wearing pants, her hair was wrong, and she wasn't as pillowy and large as her grandmother. Death, Alice thought, might change people. Might make them look a little different. Younger, healthier, thinner. And who could it be if not her grandmother? She frowned up at the woman, uncertain.
“Alice, Alice. Who else would be here on May first?” The woman knelt and held open her arms. “Come to me, little Apple. Come give me a hug."
Alice did not hesitate. The only persons who ever called her “Apple” were her grandmother and grandfather. She nestled close, her head tucked into the hollow of the old woman's throat. The arms, the bosom, the lap were not her grandmother's, nor was the old woman's smell. But all of these were good, all surprisingly intimate and familiar. This woman wasn't her grandmother but offered some trace of her. A trace sadly without heft, but better than nothing of her grandmother at all.
Alice the Older held the girl in her arms and laid kisses in the fine, tangled hair that smelled of sun and earth and Prell shampoo. The slightness of Alice the Younger made an ache stir in her belly. Sentimental old fool. You're indulging in narcissism here, even if you didn't expect to find her in this place, even if you'd forgotten all about this moment.
She had expected this visit to the town she had grown up in, a place where no one of her blood had lived for so many years now, to kindle old memories and feelings long laid to rest. But nothing looked familiar. Her grandparents’ house had been torn down. The house on Wolf Road and two of its neighbors had been replaced by condos. The Lutheran school was gone. And there were no cornfields anywhere. Only the river remained, dirty and muddy as it had always been, its dam the familiar site of her longest-running recurring dream. It had seemed reasonable to visit the town since her travel had brought her so close, but the only intimate memory left physically standing seemed to be the small, no longer used graveyard surrounded on three sides by used car lots and fast-food franchises.
Though she hadn't remembered the encounter before she had stepped into the graveyard, as soon as she saw that small girl flung down over the grave she recalled first how she used to come here, alone, and then the conversation she once thought she had ha
d with her dead grandmother. The girl now talked softly into her shoulder, murmuring her longing, her need, her desperate sense of wrongness. Alice the Older closed her eyes and hid from the dazzle; she concentrated on the girl. Alice had never had a child. And this child—she knew this child as no mother could. She imagined taking her with her—out of the girl's proper time. But she knew that doing so could not be right. It might possibly create a temporal paradox. And if that happened, how then could she become the person she was now?
Alice reeled under an attack of vertigo. Listening to the little girl, she remembered that she had always thought she didn't belong anywhere, that her very being had been a mistake. The little girl spoke of that. And of premature birth and incubators....
When the sun began to sink in the sky, Alice the Older told the little girl to go back, go back home to Wolf Road. “You have to stay in your world,” she said. “But remember, little Apple, remember that there's a reason for that. A reason I can't take you with me. So go back now, go back to your world."
The little girl cried; the little girl resisted. Finally, though, she left, and a cold breeze ruffled the tall, unmowed weeds growing carelessly between the gravestones. Alice's pulse beat in her throat. She saw that the place where the girl had been was no longer manicured, that the flowers had vanished. And her grandmother's headstone now lay between two others, all three of them markers of burials Alice had attended at different times of her life. Alice swallowed, as though to rid herself of the heaviness in her chest by ridding her throat of the lump that emotional constraint had put there, and read the inscription chiseled into the polished pink granite. All around her, the weeds ruffled under the whip of the wind. Alice imagined that one good gust would blow her away, into the other dimension where she had long imagined she really belonged. They call abandoned towns ghost towns. But what do you call an abandoned graveyard?
Alice could not remember whether Alice the Younger had gotten in trouble for getting home so late. But she did know that she had never told a soul about the meeting.
5.
Away at college, Alice found friends and fell in love and married. And for a while she believed that her problem had been simply a case of social alienation, of having grown up in an environment too small and parochial to accommodate her differences in personality, perspective, and imagination. Blooming, she convinced herself that the thin stalk of her psyche thrusting up from the world's roots, however tenuously, anchored her in the world's soil, thin and poor as it might be.
When at twenty-four she met Alice aged seven, the hair on the back of her neck stirred with a dread she could only disavow. And just as at seven and ten she had not recognized her older self, so at nineteen she did not recognize the woman of thirty-nine when she faced her in a restroom in New Orleans. But when at thirty-one she met herself at fifty-three, she neither denied nor forgot the encounter. She recognized the fifty-three-year-old woman because she so strongly resembled her mother. They met on Rialto Beach, on the coast of Washington State. The water glistened like the smoothest, bluest silk, brushed at decorous intervals by soft gushes of white foam. Afterwards, Alice the Younger decided that both of them had been sucked into some other temporality, not that either of them had strayed into the other's proper time.
The older Alice had been walking south, stepping from one large slippery rock to the next, moving toward Hole-in-the-Wall. The younger Alice, who had just passed through the hole, saw the sun full on the other's face. She halted, balanced on the flat top of an algae-slick boulder, and, hand at her throat, stared at her older self. The other stopped, too, and removed the blue-mirrored sunglasses. After a long moment in which the sound of the surf filled their ears, Alice the Older said, “We're really going to have to stop meeting like this."
Later, Alice the Younger realized the cliché was meant to be a joke. In the moment, though, she felt not the slightest tickle of amusement, but instead a powerful sense of déjà vu—and a fear fueled by her understanding that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Déjà vu, of course, though caused by the misfiring of a synapse, gives the mistaken impression that one has dreamed the moment one is experiencing. But while Alice had not dreamed about meeting herself on Rialto Beach, she had in fact dreamed often about the particular dimension in which she now found herself.
The ocean held constant, and the rocks on which they stood, and both Alices. But the sky fractured into disjointed shards, zigging and zagging down into the earth and below the surface of the water, every misshapen fragment glittering with sinister, nauseating beauty. Alice and Alice knew she was nowhere, nowhere at all, her being as evanescent as the shifting shards of the world around her, constantly moving, appearing and disappearing, growing and shrinking, in an unceasing parade of change. Alice the Younger held out her hands to Alice the Older. “Touch me, please touch me. I'm so afraid, so afraid I'm not real. That nothing is real. Is this where we really belong? Not in the world, but here?"
Alice the Older said, “In the chaos that preceded the world, before there was gravity, before the separation of light and dark, before there were particles and waves and the weak force and the strong?” She took Alice the Younger's hand, and as they looked into one another's eyes, Alice the Younger wept. She knew then that what she'd suspected as a child had been true, however much her adult self had refused to believe it. A bitter taste filled her mouth.
Alice the Younger said, “It's no place, you're saying. It's nowhere."
“So we can only go back, Alice, go back to the world."
And back they went, to the calm and ordered beauty of Hole-in-the-Wall, where the sky arched in an unbroken vault of blue, safe and certain. Alice stared down at her shoes and saw pink and green anemones clinging to the sides of the rocks, living jewels of wonder, possessing a heft that sang the hymn of belonging. Alice saw how perfect it was and ached, the way one aches for a passionate love irretrievably lost.
6.
Love, Alice's grandmother taught her, was what mattered most; from love came goodness, and from goodness love. Deep down, Alice always believed this, though for most of her adult life she told herself it was bullshit.
Alice's grandmother taught her about love most often when in the presence of food. “Love means forgiving, Apple.” Her grandmother held the golden-crusted loaf she'd made on Saturday to her chest and drew the long serrated blade through the bread toward herself. Gramma had learned to cut bread from her grandmother, on the farm long, long ago. Everyone else had to cut the bread on a board, because it was too dangerous to do it the way Gramma did. “I can't stand to watch her do that,” Alice's mother said once, appealing in vain to Alice's father to get his mother to be more careful in her handling of knives. But that was how Gramma had grown up, and she'd never hurt herself yet.
“Love means forgiving the ones who do wrong to you. Like Jesus did. If your heart is big enough, you can do it, Apple. And you'll be better for it, even if it doesn't look that way at the time.” Gramma didn't use a cutting board to slice apples, either. She'd pull the paring knife through the fruit, straight toward her pillowy bosom. And she'd hand a thin, shapely slice to Alice, who'd just have to say, copying her grandfather, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away!” though she knew that wasn't true for her grandmother, who had to go to the doctor's a lot despite the fact that she did eat an apple just about every day. “Everyone needs to be loved,” her grandmother said, paring one beautiful slice after another, “but what most people don't understand is that everybody needs to love, too. Loving is as important as being loved. And in some ways is better than being loved.” And Alice would think of how passionately she loved her grandmother and nod wisely and say she knew exactly what her grandmother was saying. Loving her grandmother was her world; there was nothing she wouldn't do to make her grandmother happy.
“If you love well enough, Apple, you'll be good. And if you're good, you'll also be loved.” Her grandmother was separating egg whites as she said this, which she had promised Alice she could
whip with the electric beater and which the recipe for angel food cake said must be whipped dry. Alice said, “But aren't there people so good that nobody can love them?"
“What do you mean, Apple?” asked her grandmother. “Who are you talking about?” And Alice said, “You know, Gramma. People like the minister. And Mr. Becker, the seventh-grade teacher who's so strict. And the church elders."
“That's not goodness,” Gramma said. “Not the goodness I'm talking about.” And slowly, slowly, Alice got the idea that the goodness they talked about in school and in church wasn't the real goodness, the goodness of love.
Later, Alice decided that her parents’ idea of goodness wasn't the real goodness, either. And as she grew older, none of the goodness held up to her in this place or that measured up to the idea of goodness her grandmother had taught her. Persons of authority almost invariably failed her. And as Alice spent her life looking for her grandmother everywhere in the world, she elided the idea of heft in the world with the idea of the goodness of love—and never once suspected that she had done so until well after her sixtieth birthday.
As had her grandmother, Daniel offered an elision of heft in the world with the goodness of love. Alice only realized this years after she had married him. He never used words like “love” and “goodness.” He said, “All anyone can do is look into the other's eyes and hope for the best.” But Daniel's idea of looking into and hoping encompassed a world as solid and holding as a lap. And Alice again found herself grounded in love and blood and earth.
Asimov's SF, July 2006 Page 7