After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  But the casserole is tasty, laced with sour cream and paprika, juicy with mushrooms.

  The things she has had shipped from Montreal — the contents of her apartment — do not fill up the rooms of her new house, and neither do they seem to belong in it. Her odd bits of furniture, her rugs and pictures, which in her Montreal flat had seemed rich, layered, polyphonous, organic, seem here only unrelated and shabby. Light and openness have disconnected objects from one another, so that the effect has been unpacked, disassembled. Her tables and chairs and rugs are stranded; the house looks like a sparsely-stocked second-hand store. She hasn’t even hung her pictures, for when she took them out of their crates, they had seemed too dark, too strong, and yet too small to hang on the pale walls.

  She could get rid of all her furniture and pictures, buy new. Or she could tear out the kitchen, with its pale cabinets, its cold fauxmarble surfaces, put in something darker, more sober. Paint the interior some deeper, more substantial colour, to suit her furnishings. Such waste, though, to dismantle an almost-new house. And the exterior, which she may not alter, would be disharmonic.

  She doesn’t know how to make this house seem right, intentional.

  Her sister, Alice, had known that sort of thing. It had been her province. Alice won competitions in the sewing of piles of flowered flour sacks into ruffled café curtains and slipcovers with coordinating piped cushions. Sidonie had not been able to sew a straight seam. And it had been Clara who had arranged the furniture and pictures in Sidonie’s Montreal flat. Clara and Anita, her sisters-in-law: they had descended on her, after she had left their brother, and had struggled and heaved, thumped and shaken her new place into that richly-coloured and textured nest. Clara had taken her down to Jaymar to buy that sofa, for Adam had insisted on keeping the le Corbusier pieces. Clara had dickered with Adam for the other furniture, the Barcelona chairs, the Eames lamps; Sidonie wouldn’t have bothered. And Anita had selected the paintings and photographs out of the collection that Sidonie and Adam — but mostly Adam — had bought, over their twenty years together. Anita had selected the ones that she thought would do for Sidonie, an assortment that Adam had agreed to relinquish, and Anita had painted the walls of Sidonie’s new apartment oxblood and teal and plum.

  While Sidonie had sat and watched, passive, dazed, exhausted by the effort of having left Adam, dazed and exhausted perhaps by the change itself.

  Strange to think that time is twenty years in the past.

  In the blue winter light of her new house, her flat in Montreal seems in retrospect a jeweled tent, a Shangri-la from which she has been evicted. Though she has chosen that eviction, chosen exile.

  Perhaps she needs Clara and Anita here to orchestrate her new place. She misses Clara, whom she saw weekly in Montreal — Clara with her indefatigable willingness to analyze any subject, to test it with anecdote and counteridea, to joke about it and weep over it, to wear it down to a few bright shreds. Clara, always arriving with a box of éclairs, a new book, tickets to the play that everyone would be talking about. She misses Anita, too; Anita, cut from the same cloth as Adam and Clara, but always a little mysterious; quiet, then surprising. Anita, who out of silence made a pronouncement that had one thinking for days. Anita who, looking at a picture, a building, a street scene, would point out the object or pattern that suddenly shifted the whole into a new frame.

  She needs Clara and Anita here to make sense of her domestic arrangements, her new neighbourhood. To define and delineate them.

  Though she had wanted to get away from Clara and Anita. Had wanted to escape.

  Perhaps. Perhaps she will admit that. Otherwise, it is all like shipwreck. Arctic shipwreck. She is Franklin, marooned by bad decisions and hubris. A ship in ice; a stone, half-buried in frozen mud.

  She has not enough warmth to light her life up on her own. It is chill; a cold hearth. It has been a mistake, this house.

  It has been a mistake to come back. No, not a mistake: too inconsequential a word, implying that there will be other mistakes, other opportunities. It has been a grievous error, the sort of error that, as she grows older, she realizes cannot be undone, contrary to the reassurances, in her youth, of articles in popular magazines, of Sunday School teachers. Miss Erskine, with her tweed skirts and knee socks, her shapeless sweaters — jumpers, she called them — the heavy soft valise of her breasts resting on her abdomen, even though she must have been young, in her late twenties or early thirties at most. Daphne Erskine, with her smooth, earnest girl’s face, her overbite, her thin, straight, beige hair. She’d be dead now. Or would she? Perhaps not; she had not been that much older than Sidonie. Miss Erskine, Sunday School teacher and Girl Guide leader: the two roles blended into one, somehow, with Jesus asking after the state of their fingernails and teaching Good Sportsmanship, and Lady Baden-Powell inquiring after the state of their souls. Miss Erskine, all fuzzy layers of woolen vests, saying, Girls, there is no mistake you can’t undo. An odd idea for the sister of a Protestant vicar, surely.

  But this error that has cost her too much, in its enacting, to reverse, and that will thus bend and distort the rest of her life, will strew small and large items of regret along her path from now on. She can’t go back; she has retired from her profession, sold her apartment, accepted farewell gifts from her friends and colleagues, and ignored the advice of those closest to her. She has bought a house, moved her furniture and books across the country. There is no going back. It is an irreversible error.

  Clara calls, says, “You sound like you’re waiting for something. Not living your life. What are you waiting for?”

  The bone in her foot to heal, obviously.

  “No, before your accident, even, you’ve had this tone. You’re just marking time.”

  “I’m waiting for spring,” Sidonie says.

  Clara makes a disapproving tongue click down four thousand kilometres of optic fibre cable. (Or is it all microwaves, now?) “You’re willing to spend half of the year waiting for the weather to change? Does everyone do that, out there?”

  “No,” Sidonie says. “Some ski.”

  “Or maybe you are procrastinating over something,” Clara says.

  Clara, her conscience, who has been keeping tabs on her, keeping her on a leash, these decades; who has hung tight to Sidonie, even after Adam let go his hold.

  Sidonie thinks, not for the first time, that possibly it was to move further out of Clara’s range that she has moved back, after all these years.

  She doesn’t try to explain what she is doing with her days.

  Her other former sister-in-law, Anita, telephones a day later: obviously Clara has put her up to it. “But I approve of you having some downtime,” she says. She believes that Sidonie has fallen intentionally, as a way of leaving the rat race. “It’s all about the mind-body connection. Have you thought of trying yoga?”

  But her body has betrayed her; she does not want to pay it attention. She does not tell her former sisters-in-law how she fills her time; she does not quite know herself. Before her accident, she had filled two hours a day marching around the little lake, her boots bristling with spikes and springs, ski poles probing for hidden ice. She had marched around the lake, a forced march, staving off stagnation. Now she hasn’t even that.

  What she should be doing, in fact, is working. She has work: chores not completed when she left the Institute. Books she has been asked to read and review for journals. An article she is supposed to be writing for JASC, a conference paper with a near deadline. She had made a good start, too, rattling through a couple of unfinished reports in the first few weeks in the fall. She had thought: at this rate, I’ll be at loose ends in about twenty-one months. But since then, she has been unable to submerge in her work. She limps about the house, picking objects up and replacing them, checks her email, follows esoteric and irrelevant internet links. She has not written more than a few hundred words.

  Why should it be difficult? She has read and digested and written all of her adult life.
She has produced dozens of articles and conference papers, and two books. She has years of research material to write up, still: has looked forward for years to a fallow period, a break from the endless jostling and chatter of work to be able to write it all up. She is no undergraduate to be stymied by the empty page (or screen).

  The sorting of data, the assembling of information, of observations, into meaningful order, the selecting and presenting that is required, seem all beyond her just now. It is as if a break has opened between one part of her brain and the other. A new stoppage somewhere in the processing room. She has the material, but she cannot seem to conceive of a use for it, a way of disseminating it. Her mind lies unproductive, stalled.

  She gazes out of the window, which needs cleaning; she glances at the clock. (It seems always to be four p.m., surely the most useless time of day.) She stumps around on her crutches. She opens the refrigerator and shuts it. She checks her email. She looks at various internet sites that sell classical recordings. It is shameful, to be in this state. She is guilty of sloth.

  Sidonie’s mother would have found chores for her to do. She had been a great believer in manual labour. Neither Sidonie nor Alice had ever dared admit to boredom. When they had free time, they escaped, made themselves scarce, in order to have the luxury of dawdling, of lallygagging. Or Sidonie had: she can’t speak for Alice, can’t swear now to Alice ever seeking solitude. Though she surely must have tried to escape chores. Even Alice must have occasionally ducked chores.

  Plucking stones from her mother’s garden plot, she remembered as the azimuth of childhood ennui and ill-usage. Blue clay lay below the loam, below the thin topsoil coaxed with its yearly feedings of compost and rotted horse manure. The blue clay spat up stone after stone, dribbles of granite, quartz-speckled eggs, which they must gather in galvanized tin buckets, spring after spring, gumbo agglomerating on gumboots, bent-over back seizing, leaping sixty years forward in its cramps and spasms. Cold-stiffened fingers bruised by the stones; nails, already chewed and chipped, further reduced to splinters. And the stones never stopped surfacing. Father, striding by in his leather breeches that never wore out, his knit-by-mother wool socks, his boots: Ah, the labours of Hercules, girls! Good work, good work!

  Her mother, like the medieval Christian monks, like the Buddhists, had believed in the efficacy of manual work as a grounding exercise. And she herself has designed experiments in manual activity for specific kinds of developmental issues. Digital manipulation, the working of the palms and fingers in sand boxes and sinks, miniature gardens, Lego and Meccano sets. Standard ideas in her field, now, but she had been a pioneer researcher. And she had been unique in prescribing goals, so that the activities resembled work, rather than open-ended play. (She wonders, now, briefly, if anyone has used her ideas in conjunction with large motor stimulation — labour, in other words — and has given subjects large plots of earth to dig up, floors to scrub. Probably some ethical difficulties there. People of her parents’ generation, of course, had no qualms about child labour.)

  But her mother, her father: they would not have, had not, recognized much of what she has been engaged in as work. Is that the issue? She had produced a lot of work at the Institute. She had kept on target. She had kept her division on target, ahead of target, month after month (however the junior staff might complain). She and her team had designed and tested and created computer models for dozens of experiments each year, and these experiments had been performed, and knowledge gained.

  She has designed experiments to test the learning, which is to say the memory, of mice and men and mutant fruit flies, of monkeys and dolphins, newborn humans and those with senile dementia. She has seen her experiment designs used to discover the growth of neuron paths in flatworms, fireflies, houseflies and helmetless bicycle-accident victims. She has provided the means to test hundreds of premises, and dozens of potential therapeutic remedies. She has seen, as a result of her work, cautious results of reversal (more precisely, adaptation to) profound brain trauma. She has seen results of her work used to etch, with lasers, unhappy memories in the brains of fruit flies.

  Work of the eyes and brain: of the head. Had she limited herself too much, there? She has practiced the discipline of putting ideas to paper, of assembling and compiling information for decades; it is in her bones. Are her bones now rejecting it? For they refuse to move into the rhythm of reading and writing. She feels this resistance as an actual stiffness, she notices: an inability to flex muscles, to bend, to incline: a disinclination. She is unproductive, unable to move forward.

  It does not make sense: she has time now to work, and she does not work. Perhaps she has needed the pressure of the group, after all? But she had been a loner, an intellectual coureur de bois. (That was not her term: her director, Dr. Haephestes, had used it, beaming with apparent genuineness, in his speech at her retirement dinner in the fall. She is not sure now that the term was meant entirely as praise.) She had led teams, given direction. (She had not been particularly good at working in a team, but she had led teams.) Is it that she misses her assistants, her researchers and technicians, the way a paraplegic misses limbs?

  She has been happy, since her move, only when working, she realizes. And now she does not work.

  Is she wallowing? She is wallowing. Accidie. Another sin.

  “I have a question,” her niece Cynthia announces, in her thickened speech. They are eating at a popular franchise restaurant off the highway, in the strip that extends now ten kilometres north from the city. It’s noisy, and Sidonie has to lean forward to understand her. (Perhaps she is starting to lose her own hearing?) She has been expecting a question or request. Cynthia doesn’t often take lunches during the week; she says she doesn’t have time. She is an art teacher at an elementary school, and expected to do extracurricular things at noon hour. And here it’s a Wednesday, and she has asked to meet Sidonie for lunch.

  Cynthia, in her late thirties, looks younger, as women of her generation seem to do. Prolonged adolescence: women in their forties dress like teenagers. Well-off women, at least. Entering the restaurant, Sidonie had seen her first from the back, her shoulder-length blonde hair, her puffy silvery parka, her slim, low-slung jeans, and had not recognized her. Had thought she was a young girl, at first.

  “Go ahead,” she says. A habit of Cynthia’s childhood, to announce formally that she has a question, before asking it. Even if the question is minor. Perhaps it is something she was taught at her school for the deaf; an aid to being understood more precisely.

  “The question is about my mother,” Cynthia says.

  She is wearing a very thin T-shirt with an odd screen-printed image of the moon, and a lot of silver jewelry — three chains, one with a silver arrow pendant, one with a bluish translucent stone, and a silver bracelet set also with semi-precious blue stones. Cynthia is fond, Sidonie notices, of a certain kind of hand-made, artisanal costume jewelry.

  “Yes; go ahead.” She keep her voice calm; doesn’t show irritation at her niece, who is fiddling with her fork. Why can’t Cynthia ever broach a subject naturally? It is not as if she ever says no. You spoil her, Clara has said, on many occasions. You don’t have to make everything up to her. But apparently she does.

  “I wanted to ask you,” Cynthia asks, “if you’ve thought some more about letting me look at my mother’s things?”

  Cynthia has asked this of her, now, a few times. An ingenious answer is needed, to buy time: all of her alarm bells are going off. Sidonie says, “I’ve been busy. . . .”

  What is there, besides Alice’s little boxes of keepsakes, of schoolwork and party invitations, that Cynthia might be interested in? There are, in fact, two dozen or more large boxes and trunks from Beauvoir, and they have been in storage for four decades. She does not know what is in them, precisely. Or rather, in part of her brain there is a precise index of those boxes, but she is not, at present, willing to access it.

  Cynthia says, “You said once that you had kept her personal things
, and you would give them to me when I was grown up and had a place of my own.”

  Had she said that? But she must have. And now, certainly, Cynthia is grown up. Grown up, with a nearly grown child of her own. She is not likely to carelessly leave something behind in a move, or to let small children spoil things. Sidonie has been procrastinating, avoiding, locking her mind against it. Though she hasn’t succeeded in forgetting about it.

  “Yes, you should have them,” Sidonie says. Why is she so reluctant to admit this? A relief, surely, to have them taken off her hands. “They’re mostly things from her childhood, you understand. You might not find them that interesting. Our mother, your grandmother, kept everything Alice ever. . .” She had been about to say ‘touched’, but that sounded off, in her own head. “. . . everything Alice ever wrote, and all of her little ornaments and bits of jewelry. Nothing of value, of course.”

  “Except to you and I,” Cynthia says.

  She can’t resist deflecting the point with a correction. “You and me,” she says. “To you and me. They’re all in a muddle, the boxes from the old house. It will take me some time to get them out for you. They should all be sorted.”

  This is true. She had retrieved the boxes from the storage facility, when she moved back. They need to be sorted; most of what is in them needs, likely, to be thrown away. She has been procrastinating. She has had some idea about sorting the papers — she knows that there are invoices, letters, ledgers from the orchards — with a view to donating them to a local archive. That sort of thing is, apparently, useful. There are even university courses in the history of orcharding. And she ought to go through the photographs, too.

  “Where are the boxes?” Cynthia asks. “Are they here, in town? I think you said they were in a storage unit?”

  She had not meant to admit it, but she is powerless against direct questions.