After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  She says, “Ah, but young women these days have better things to do with their time and energy.”

  She slips out of the French doors onto the deck to collect herself. Where is she? Can she locate herself in this knot of tall, dark houses, of nested streets? (Badger, Jackrabbit. What names. But the streets of her own neighbourhood, she realizes, carry the names of local birds. She herself lives on Quail Circle.)

  Ah, yes, she recognizes this place now, this curve in the main road. It’s a road she walked, or was driven along, hundreds of times as a child. A stand of ponderosa, Oregon grape, balsam-root, then. Her home a kilometre or so just over the ridge, on the flanks of the hillside. Her family’s closest associates, the Inglises, a kilometre in the opposite direction. And across the road, here — yes — the cemetery road: a shortcut to the ponds, the pickers’ camps, the old gold mine where she and the other children had often hiked or played, dangerously.

  This little development where Stephen lives seems unattached, not the site of anything in particular. In her childhood, just a little area of land only defined by not being anyone’s orchard. Who had bought it, developed it?

  It must have no view: it is not close enough to the hill’s slopes, but tucked into a shallow fold. But neither do the houses have yards, or only tiny ones, and they are not convenient to shops or services. Why here?

  But of course: the orchard land is mostly still in the agricultural land reserve, and can’t be developed. This new housing development has been squeezed into a small pocket of non-arable, or at least noncultivated land.

  Driving up the hill from the highway, she had seen only the familiar orchards, apparently unchanged in the twenty years since she had last visited. But are all the wooded slopes above the lake developed now?

  An ache of nostalgia, of loss.

  A youngish middle-aged man, one of Stephen’s friends, apparently, who is smoking outside on the deck, sidles up, offers her a cigarette. She does not smoke, though she does not mind the smell of tobacco, especially outdoors. She had smoked, for a little while, in the 1960s, before the habit had resurrected her childhood asthma. In Montreal, of course, smoking is still an acceptable social activity.

  Stephen’s friend addresses her. “So, you grew up here,” he says. “That’s amazing.”

  “Why is it amazing?”

  He must have had a few drinks, as he seems a little dazed by her reply. He says, finally, “You must have known my dad, Len Platt. I guess he was kind of a wild young guy then, eh?”

  She recognizes the Platt look now: rabbit-white eyelashes, sharp, hooked chin. Shifty eyes.

  “Him and Steve’s dad. I guess they pulled a lot of dumb stunts. Left a trail of destruct. . .”

  Her fingers curl, and he stops mid-word. His realization, the playing out of social terror in his expression, are almost comic. Almost.

  He mutters an expletive, then apologizes. “Better not go there, eh?” He’s squirming now, his pale Platt complexion suffused. He looks at her helplessly.

  She lays her words down as cards in a hand. “Never mind,” she says. “I don’t think Len Platt’s chronic car theft and occasional arson were in the same class as what Buck Kleinholz got up to.”

  “Got up to,” the man echoes, automatically. His pale eyes slide sideways. He backs away.

  Ah, the Platts. She should have asked after the man’s aunt Lily, with whom she used to play as a small child.

  When she goes back inside, Justin joins her. “Do you like the music?” he asks. Is he being mischievous?

  “It’s a bit cacophonous for my taste,” she says. Then, not to discourage him: “I’m too old to understand your generation’s music, you know.”

  Justin laughs. “This old stuff? I thought it was your music.”

  How strange, that a whole generation could lie between them.

  “No good rock after 1973, right?” Justin asks.

  Standing there in his pullover and tie, his short shining hair, he seems suddenly a little smug. Is there something a little precious about him?

  But no. He’s just young.

  “Maybe not after 1969,” she says.

  She had hoped they’d leave early, but she can see that Cynthia is determined to see the party to its end. They linger and linger while the other guests are disgorged from the house. She wanders into the kitchen, where Justin is surreptitiously reading the spines of cookbooks on a shelf. There don’t seem to be many books in the house. His cousins have also retreated to the kitchen; Alex is making himself a sandwich out of the buffet skewers, while his sister picks the strawberries out of the half-full punch bowl.

  She recalls other parties she has attended where the hosts’ grown children and their friends were a lively presence. Why has neither Alex nor the girl invited any of their own friends? They seem so uncomfortable, displaced.

  Stephen comes into the kitchen, rubbing his hands together like a cartoon maître d’. “Are you kids hungry? Can I make you something else?”

  No, they both say.

  Stephen, she thinks, looks sad. Or perhaps just tired, disappointed. But when Stephen leaves the room, Alex looks directly at her. “Dad says you still have some land, an orchard, here in Marshall’s Landing,” Alex says.

  She nods.

  “I’d like to see it,” Alex says. His eyes are shining; his teeth flash white under his sandy beard. Of whom does he remind her? “I’ve asked Dad, but he isn’t interested. Can you tell me which orchard it is? I’ve been all along the road, but I can’t figure it out.”

  “You’re interested in orcharding?” Sidonie asks. His enthusiasm is a pleasant change from the earlier diffidence.

  “My great-grandparents were orchardists,” he says. “Both sets, on Dad’s side.”

  Well. That’s true, in a way. But she wouldn’t have put the Kleinholz’s smallholding in the same category as her father’s estate.

  “And my great-grandparents on my mother’s side were orchardists, in the Ukraine,” Alex adds.

  She had not known that, and it’s interesting, in a way, to put Debbie’s family into historical context.

  “It’s on the left, around the first bend, after you crest the hill,” she says.

  “Do you know the street number?”

  She doesn’t. There had not been street numbers in her time. She has not visited the orchard since her return.

  Justin says, “I didn’t know you still owned land here. And I can’t believe you haven’t been out to see it in twenty years.”

  She doesn’t want to see it. It is being taken care of. She doesn’t need to go back.

  “What do you do with it?” Alex asks, speaking at the same time as Justin. (Or has he said, “What are you doing with it?” which would have meant something different, less innocent?)

  She decides to answer him as if it has been the first question.

  “The orchard is leased out. The house itself is empty. It’s not habitable.”

  “You’re an absentee landlord, Auntie Sid,” Justin says, smirking.

  Now that is annoying. She is getting so tired of the new versions of the local history that she has been hearing since she moved back from Montreal. It sounds almost colonial: British investors, a stratified society, indigenous and Asian labourers working for pennies a day. It wasn’t quite like that.

  And the land, her land — it’s almost worthless. There’s not enough left to be called an estate, even, now. She’s just holding onto it.

  Holding onto it in hopes that one day it will be worth selling, or rebuilding as an estate. (But that is a daydream, and none of this new grandnephew Alex’s business. )

  “It’s what, a fifteen-minute drive from your house,” Justin says. “I can’t believe you don’t go to see it! The place where you grew up!”

  She shakes her head, frowns at Justin. The young don’t understand about the past. To them, it’s a foreign country, clearly demarcated, walled off. You have to be middle-aged before time begins its collapsing trick and you realize t
hat the past, even the distant past, is just next door, a short walk down a grassy slope. That all of your mistakes, your regrets, your wounds and grievances have collected there, piled up. That all of the people and places you have lost are camped out there, displaced, out of reach, but just in view.

  Alex says again, “I’d like to see it. Would you go with me? Would you show it to me, the house and the orchard?”

  “I’m very busy,” she says, discouragingly. She ought not to have engaged in this discussion to begin with. She has no interest in taking Alex to Beauvoir. Alice’s children have had their share. She has been dutiful there. What is left is Sidonie’s only.

  Cynthia finally looks into the kitchen, says “Ready?” and Justin (who has taken off his tie and sweater; he must have been too warm) gets off his stool so hastily that it rocks and he has to catch it to prevent it from falling over. The girl laughs, not kindly.

  Sidonie catches sight of herself in the simple maple-framed mirror in the hall. In her black trousers and sweater, her still-dark hair in its precise bob, she is too angular; a dark slash, a discontinuity, in the room. Nobody else is wearing black; the men are in jeans or khakis, checked shirts; the women in little coloured dresses; they look like young middle-aged party-goers in any North American city. She looks frightening, witchy. But that is not her fault. She does not belong here.

  Why have Stephen and Cynthia insisted? She has nothing to offer, no connection to recover, with these middle-aged offspring of her sister’s, or with their children. This would have been Alice’s world, this world of houses and domestic arts. It is not hers. She is not good at it; she has repudiated it. She is not Alice. She cannot be Alice for them. And Alice is gone.

  A memory, then, of the apparition on the highway this evening. Certainly not a good sign after the many years of therapy expended after Alice’s death.

  Who even remembers Alice now? Alice’s children. Hugh would, and Walter Rilke, her old neighbour, who manages Beauvoir. Masao, if he is still alive; perhaps a smattering of other former classmates or old friends. (Alice’s old friends! She could look them up. That would be a project. But why? What would be the use?)

  Better to let go: to accept the loss. To sever, to amputate, to prune away. For after all, in this country of her past, the dead outnumber the living. Alice, Mother, Father, Graham, Mrs. Inglis. No doubt also most of her teachers, her parents’ friends, her neighbours, who would otherwise be very elderly. If she begins to visit, she will be pulled in; the weight of losses will pull her under.

  She should never have come. (She should never have come back.)

  She has nothing in common with this nephew and his family; they belong to different worlds. Cynthia can visit if she wants; Sidonie need not. She does not need this sort of social contact, this forced familial interaction. There is no bond, here. She barely remembers Stephen; saw him two or three times as a child, attended his wedding twenty years ago. She would not know him, if not for the accident of birth.

  She has not avoided family entanglements these four decades to be trapped by them now. More reasonable to create one’s own family out of congenial company, as she had been thinking earlier.

  They say protracted goodbyes at the door, only Stephen’s and Cynthia’s to each other sounding sincere. She feels a reprieve. She will refuse any subsequent invitations to this house.

  She waits for Cynthia and Justin on the top step, outside the door. The moon has risen and is visible behind the messy twist of pine branches, through the dead pines at the edge of this new subdivision. It is caged in a snarl of broken, dead limbs.

  How has she made this mistake, to return here? But she will draw herself in; she will regroup, rethink. She begins to descend Stephen’s front steps.

  And then, turning to look back for an instant, she slips, her weak ankle, the ankle she has favoured since the winter before, when she had sprained it in Montreal, turning under her, her foot twisting in a sudden, irrevocable wrench and crack.

  She clutches the heavy iron railing and manages to fall on her bottom and not her face. But the pain: waves of it traveling up though her leg, her trunk, and spreading (she can feel it, from the inside) across her face and scalp.

  Stephen’s wife Debbie says “Oh, Auntie!” with what sounds more like exasperation than alarm, and gets a bag of frozen peas from the refrigerator, and Stephen and Cynthia try to haul her to her feet and back into the house. But she will not go back inside; no, no. She is being unreasonable. She is making more trouble. But she will not go. Cynthia wrings her hands; Debbie flutters. She is a dead weight on Stephen; she hears him grunt, feels her own mass press down cruelly on his meat and bone.

  Then more arms are under her, around her: Alex and Justin have moved in to assist Stephen. Under many arms, she is hoisted, supported more evenly. Now she can find her balance, put down her good foot, help support herself.

  She allows herself to be hobbled to the car and sits on the passenger seat, the car door open, the frozen peas burning her instep.

  Beyond the pain, rage. She had not wanted to go to Stephen’s for dinner, but Cynthia had made a fuss. Family, she had said, playing that trump card. Why should it matter? Old guilt, old burdens and omissions. She is captive to them still; they all are. She had given in, against her better judgment, thinking: it is only for one evening. And now she will pay much more than she had bargained for. Stupid, stupid.

  BRIDGE

  She has broken one of the bones in her foot: a small bone, called the lateral cuneiform. The emergency-room doctor who sets the bone shows her a diagram. “It’s the bridge of your foot, between your heel and your toes,” he says. “It connects all of these parts and makes them articulate: see? If it were one of these long bones, the phalanges, or one of these little cuboid bones of the heel, we would not worry so much. But with the bridge broken, the foot can do nothing. It must be put in a cast, and it must not bear weight.”

  She will be, she calculates, out of commission for six weeks. The pain, at first, is excruciating, but more so, the thought of being immobile. She is able to hobble around her house with crutches; can even manage the stairs, clutching the railing, hopping. But she can’t drive her car, which has standard transmission. She can’t go out walking along the little lake.

  Stupid. Stupid.

  Cynthia has said: call anytime. But she does not call. She will not be supplicant. She will tough it out.

  She lasts five days.

  Justin calls her. (Cynthia can hear a little, can lip-read, but can’t manage on the phone.) “You must be out of groceries.”

  She is, she admits painfully, nearly out of groceries. And other things, too: toilet paper, reading material. But she will not bother Cynthia, who works such long hours. She can wait until the weekend. She is making things more difficult, she knows, but cannot stop herself from this demurring.

  But no: here is Cynthia, within a couple of hours, with Justin, carrying bags of lettuce and lemons and hothouse tomatoes; steaks and eggs; a loaf of crusty, chewy, acidic bread, which Sidonie tears into, wolf-like, when they have barely left.

  She is subjected to the indignity of Cynthia poking through her refrigerator and cupboards, scolding, not so much as a potato in here! But this officiousness is amusing, too: it seems only a few years ago that their roles had been reversed. She herself, or more likely Adam, scolding: how will you take care of yourself? Do you think food magically appears in the cupboards?

  Cynthia says, “I’ve signed you up for the local paper to be delivered.”

  No no no. “I don’t need it, thanks. I get The Globe and Mail.”

  But Cynthia has turned her face, pretending not to hear.

  Her neighbour knocks on her front door, the classic casserole dish in her hands. She has avoided this neighbour: the woman in the other half of the duplex, whom she sees often coming down her mirror-steps, carrying one of those flat-faced, owl-eyed, blonde dogs that look at you like autistic children. (Is it her imagination, or does this woman always leav
e her house just as she does herself? Does she watch from behind those sheer drapes for another human being to appear?)

  “Beef and noodle,” the woman says. “I hope you’re not vegetarian?”

  “No,” Sidonie says. “I am not.”

  “I didn’t think so,” her neighbour says. “I can smell meat cooking sometimes.”

  The irritation of being watched: she feels herself grimace.

  “Your daughter and grandson, I see them come visit,” the woman says.

  “My niece and grandnephew.”

  “Oh? Right then. It looks like you have someone taking care of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s good. Your grandnephew, he’s a nice-looking boy. I couldn’t think who he reminded me of. Then it came to me, in the checkout at Safeway. He’s the image of that young actor, what d’you call him, that Leonardo.”

  Sidonie shifts her weight. She will need to put down her crutches to receive the casserole dish, but she will not invite her neighbour over the threshold if she can help it.

  “He’s at the university, is he? What a nice-looking boy he is, and so polite.”

  “Yes.” The exposure. She wonders perversely: is Justin too polite? Is it a bad sign?

  “Here,” her neighbour says. “I’ll just put it in your kitchen for you.” And she kicks off her rubber clogs, moves through the doorway and past Sidonie, jostling the door open a little as she goes with her elbow, bustling down the hallway in her stockinged feet to the kitchen, as if she knows exactly where it is. Of course she does. Her house is a mirror image of this one.

  Then she leaves, pulling the door shut behind her carefully, and Sidonie breathes again. There’s something almost too chipper about her neighbour. Too casual. A prairie accent. She is not used to the informality of the West, now. Familiar, that’s the word. She does not like having a stranger whisk through her house like that. She does not like the thought of someone making her way, on the other side of the walls, around a space that is a mirror-image of her house. She will admit this. It makes her occupancy of her semidetached house seem even more random, unintentional than it already does.