After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  She knows what it means, too, that she doesn’t cook her own meals, that she eats raw things, or food pre-cooked and packaged. She has read her Lévi-Strauss.

  “Well, I thought I’d just touch base with you,” Hugh says, and then, adds, surprisingly, “A happy St. Valentine’s Day to you,” before he rings off, finally. But she has not been paying attention, the past few minutes, to his call. It is too late for the ragout; it’s lukewarm, and reheating it creates a sticky, scorched, rubbery mess. She eats a few bites, puts the rest in the trash, makes some toast, feeling unsatisfied and a little aggrieved. She could heat another meal, but the spoiling of the first makes another seem distasteful.

  She should cook food for herself. All this packaged food is likely very high in preservatives. There is something wrong with it. It will rot her insides, give her cancer. The packaging — which is Styrofoam, she notices, though disguised with some sort of black colouring (and is that also carcinogenic? It looks as if it might be) — will not break down in the landfill. (Does the landfill still lie to the west, off the back road, an old alkali pond shedding sprays of effluvia and gulls? Or has it filled up, now, with Styrofoam packaging and disposable diapers?)

  In her youth, before the landfill, everyone had to deal with their own garbage. But there hadn’t been so much then. Less packaging, less of everything. Anything combustible went into the boiler, anything organic into the compost. Everything that could be clothing or container or conveyance recycled. Broken things ended up in the attic, or, if they couldn’t be mended in any scheme of winter ingenuity, in the gulley to the north of the house. (What a midden that gulley must be now — decades of broken bicycles — wheels and gears removed, of course — of shattered china — though that might have been used to line the walk — of tin cans, perhaps. What would be in it?)

  She eats the toast, and then the heel of a triangle of brie cheese. There is much rind in proportion to cheese, and she chews it hungrily, pressing the cold, floury, sour coating into her palate. Disgust and pleasure, both.

  After the brie, she thinks of pears: pears yellowing, gritty, freckled, on the windowsill; pears hanging like hard green promises in the orchard. They’d only a few pear trees: a half acre, perhaps. Soft fruit was so unprofitable in its ephemeral-ness. But Father had loved pears. They’d had them through the winter, canned, their white slices glowing like quarters of moon through the glass jars. But for a couple of weeks in the fall, there would be fresh, juicy pears, bursting with flavour on the tongue.

  No pears now: if she were to buy one, it would soften and brown before it ripened.

  ITALY

  Hugh has colonized her house: his laptop open on the new desk, his pill bottles lined up on the dresser in the spare room, his ablutions kit next to the sink in the guest bathroom. Hugh in her house. What an odd thing.

  And yet not. As children, they had been in each other’s houses nearly every day, but for half a century, they have barely known each other’s location in the world.

  Hugh is comfortable. He is tidy, quiet at the right times (when she is working, thinking). In the evenings, he puts on music, grunting (approval?) at her collection; choosing Fauré, then Fleet Foxes, without comment. He mixes drinks, which they sip standing at the window, admiring the little lake, or seated with newspapers. (She remembers his mother’s gin-and-tonic ritual, but Hugh, it seems, is a rum man.)

  Moreover, he cooks. He takes her to buy groceries, occupies himself when she is busy, entertains her when she is not. He takes out the trash, and she sees him from the window chatting with her neighbour, who appears animated, even roguish. What are they saying?

  He wipes up the kitchen and his shaving ends, and brings her magazines (travel and architecture) that she would not buy herself, and a walnut torte from a European bakery.

  A good guest. Although she is not used to sharing her house.

  While Hugh is off during the day, doing whatever it is he is doing (“I come in at the end,” he has said, mysteriously, of his consulting work for the new bridge), she finds herself suddenly energetic, alive. In this space (or path? for it seems to be about motion, staying in motion) she finishes her JASC article, easily, clearly: it has not been so convoluted after all. It is merely a small item. She reviews a couple of new books for journals, and surprises herself by finding unsuspected merit in them both. She is pleased with the resulting pieces: she has, she believes, achieved a good tone, wry, matter-of-fact, detached, but with enough wit to engage readers.

  She tells Hugh about Beauvoir, about finding a new lessee or tenant, about leaving it to Justin. He advises her to sell. She could get a handsome price for the orchard. Enough money that she could travel, buy another apartment in Montreal, so she’d have a pied-àterre there. Enough perhaps to endow a scholarship. To take Clara and Anita on a Greek cruise, no expense spared. She would leave Justin the money, rather than the land. He would start out on his life with many advantages.

  Hugh says, “What a nice sensible, reasonable woman you have become, Sid.”

  Sensible? As compared to whom? Herself, younger? Hugh’s former wives?

  “You’re so balanced, so logical,” he says. “Why didn’t we get together? We’d have made a good pair, don’t you think?”

  Ah, so it is in comparison to his most recent ex-wife, the one in Zimbabwe, with whom he is still having arguments over her not leaving, not encouraging their daughter to leave. Not about her, really.

  Hugh asks one night if she has any old photos of his family. “I’ve lost mine, somehow,” he says, “between my moving from continent to continent and my various marriages. I had been thinking that you might have your family photos still, and that there would be some with my parents and Graham in them.”

  She says no at first, then thinks that there must be photo albums, though she had not come across them in her preliminary excavation.

  Hugh is much more direct than Cynthia had been. “Do you think you could look them up for me?”

  She had been too conditioned in early childhood to resist Hugh’s directions. She must look.

  Hugh tells Justin about his daughter Ingrid, apparently enlisting his help as a peer of Ingrid’s, and Justin seems fired up by the idea. He has a lot to say about colonialism, to which Hugh doesn’t respond much. She apologizes after Justin leaves: it’s the university. Young men always pick up these Marxist ideas.

  The photo album is, after all, not difficult to find. It’s not in the boxes from the storage unit, but on her bookshelves: she has kept it with her these decades. Intact, though when she opens the cover, the photographs spring from the stiff yellowed pages like a shower of dry leaves. The little black gummed corners that have held them in place have lost their adhesion. She will have to be careful of order, mindful that she does not lose the connections of the pictures to their captions.

  But between them, she and Hugh can identify most of the scenes and the figures in them.

  “Flower show,” says Hugh. “Circa 1950.”

  A group of women in print dresses and broad-brimmed hats: Mrs. Inglis presenting a ribbon to Mrs. Koyama; Sidonie’s mother in the back row of the group, tall, angular, her short dark hair parted on the left and slicked back behind her ears. She looks odd among the other women with their fair or grey hair, their light cotton dresses. Mother is wearing an Air Force blue (Sidonie remembers — it’s grey in the photo) gabardine skirt, a checked shirt that might be a man’s, except for the buttons going the other way. All around her, Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Inglis, the Misses Thompson, and Mrs. Hubert, and especially Mrs. Koyama and Mrs. Tanaka and Mrs. Imaku, are shorter. It’s a pleasing scene: the dark spike of Mother among the pink and lilac and maize, like a deep blue delphinium in a pot of petunias. “Formidable women,” Hugh says, “my mother, yours, Mrs. Clare, Mrs. Protherow. They ran Marshall’s Landing like an English country village.”

  This is true, Sidonie thinks. The Women’s Institute teas, the Red Cross projects, the Hospital Auxiliary, the Parent-Teacher Association.
Dispensing order and education — and conformity — throughout the community. But many of the women, by the time this photo was taken in the mid 1950s, would have been German or Polish immigrants. A tenuous grip the “English” ladies must have had, at best. Why had they bothered? For it seems to her now that the photos, the concert programs, the cards are records of a fading empire. Why had they bothered to keep up all of the dusty rituals?

  And the Japanese women? “Did they end up here as part of relocation during the war?” she asks. “All those little cabins beside the road, when you come around the bend by the park — was that a relocation camp? Where Masao and Mr. Tanaka lived?”

  “You know it wasn’t,” Hugh says, severely. “It was just a workers’ camp.”

  “I couldn’t remember, exactly. I’m five years younger than you.”

  “The Japanese families came in the early part of the nineteen-hundreds. Before the first war.”

  The grave markers in the cemetery: Sachiko Tanaka Born 1921 Died 1924. Tragedy in six words.

  “I remember the farms in the bottom land,” Sidonie says. “Mother bought cucumbers there; it was too hot at our place for growing cucumbers. I remember the soil, so black. It still is, isn’t it? And the Chinese farmers with their conical straw hats. We called them Chinamen.”

  In the playground, a little ditty: Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, see these. There were accompanying hand gestures, of course. On “Chinese,” you pulled the corners of your eyelids up; on “Japanese,” you pulled them down. On “dirty knees,” you touched your knees, and on “see these,” you plucked out the front of your blouse or shirt with the thumb and index finger of each hand, so that you made tenty little breasts there. The ditty was considered objectionable, but not for the racial stereotyping.

  Where had the Chinese farmers gone? There were only Japanese family names by the time she was in her teens.

  “The Japanese assimilated better,” Hugh says.

  What does that mean? How much loss behind that word? She thinks, then forces herself not to think, about Masao.

  Photos of themselves as children: dressed up for Hallowe’en, perched in boats, posed for comparison against newly-planted saplings. In one early photo, Graham, Hugh, and Alice are lolling, apparently naked, in a large tin washtub. Alice, in the centre, is looking directly at the camera. Her fair hair falls over her shoulders; her chin rests on her knees. Her gaze is assured, evaluative. Sidonie is standing beside the tub, holding onto — possibly holding herself up by — the rim. She is very small, and is wearing a diaper and sunbonnet. She is howling.

  Hugh says, “Is there a picture in which you are not howling?” He says it affectionately, as though it is a natural and pleasing thing that Sidonie should be always in extremis, and himself always ready to rescue. To be gallant.

  Photos of school concerts, of plays: children in costume. Class photos: the fair and red-haired children, the dusky. All varying shades of grey in these photos, of course. She and Hugh identify most of the children. Hugh gets the ones that she doesn’t. In the earlier photos, the von Tälers, the Inglises, the Clares, all stand at the back, taller, with better haircuts, clothes that, even in these old photographs, look like they fit better, are of better cloth. In later photos, the others have caught up in size, though. They are indistinguishable by appearance.

  “A history of immigration and assimilation there,” Hugh says, surprisingly.

  A snapshot of a group of children in shorts and button-down shirts, all wearing kerchiefs tied in square knots at the throat. “The hiking club,” Hugh says.

  Sidonie turns the photo over. On the back is written in ink faded to the colour of tea: Rainbow Hill Hiking Club. “Yes,” she says. “You browbeat half the kids of Marshall’s Landing into learning how to find edible roots and track antelope in the dark.”

  Hugh says, “I think I must have been a tyrant. Did we have badges?”

  “Yes, badges. Not armbands, at least.”

  A badge, sewn of layers of felt and embroidered by hand: Rainbow Hill Hiking Club. That sort of thing was popular then: children were always starting clubs.

  Hugh’s hiking club: Hugh of course, Graham, Alice, Masao, Sidonie. A couple of others? Walt, later, definitely. His brother. Children from their side of the hill, from the few square miles or so that encompassed Beauvoir and Sans Souci and the smaller orchards around.

  “We all had to wear hats and carry rucksacks with water canteens — mostly jam jars,” Sidonie says. “Though you and Graham had real tin ones, with olive canvas carriers. . .”

  “And rations,” Hugh says.

  “We were soldiers,” Sidonie says.

  “We were at war,” Hugh says, “against all of the newcomers. It would have been, what — 1953 or so, when this photo was taken. How old were you?”

  “Nine,” Sidonie says.

  “We’d been going a couple of years by then. So Alice and Masao and I’d have been twelve, Graham about fourteen, when we started it.”

  “Alice had probably been made to take me along,” Sidonie says.

  They had marched up Rainbow Hill and all over Spion Kopje, which must have been miles. Sidonie’s legs would ache, but she never complained: to complain was to be a poor soldier, to endanger the unit.

  It was called a hiking club to placate and lull the parents, though children normally ran around the hills unsupervised all summer, anyway. But it was a paramilitary operation. They were drilled, gave complete allegiance to Hugh. Not to Graham, who was older, who invented everything, who imbedded the jokes, but Hugh, who worked out the practical details and chivvied them along.

  There was a tree fort, built in a thick copse of poplar that had sprung up where a piece of pine forest had been logged out, then left to sit. Hugh had drawn the plans to scale, pages of them. They’d all been commissioned to borrow or steal lumber scraps, saws, hammers, spikes.

  Hugh had trained them in elaborate combat schemes: they were divided up — diplomatically — into armies with historical names: the Danes and Geats and Jutes, she remembers, at one time. Hugh had said (but that must have been later, when more children had joined or been conscripted, and Hugh was the oldest left) that the war was just an exercise in politics: the Germans and Japanese were obviously on the same side as the British. Hard working; good at fighting and keeping order and inventing things appreciative of culture. It was the Polacks and Bohunks, lazy and incompetent and shifty, who were the real enemy.

  Revisionist Hugh.

  Graham, perhaps because he was older, had treated it all ironically. There had been no sign, then, of the illness that had ambushed him in his later teens. No lapses in judgment, no blurring of fantasy and reality. Had there?

  Names: Hugh was Major Sinclair; Graham was also a major, but had to be called The Sandman. What were the others? Richard, she thinks, was Lieutenant Clare, though there was some dispute over that, wasn’t there? He wanted to be a major too. So he was allowed to keep his own name, though the rule was that one must assume a nom de guerre.

  Walt was Sergeant Jones: Graham named him. Masao was Lieutenant Smith.

  Masao, the orphaned nephew of the von Täler’s foreman, the only dark face in the group.

  Alice was Lady Pomona Vere de Vere. Graham’s idea again.

  Sidonie was called May Day. She had not, then, seen the joke. Mayday. M’aidez. Graham had said she was a heroic Japanese double agent. The others had been apt to leave her behind sometimes — to run on and leave her crying, her short, fat legs unable to keep up. Once they had tied her to a tree to stop her from either following them or tattling to their mothers.

  It was Hugh who noticed Sidonie missing, after Alice and Masao and Richard Clare had captured her and tied her up; Hugh who had found her. She had untied herself, though. He had offered to carry her on his back, but she had refused, had stalked resolutely behind him.

  Hugh says that he does not remember that. He says, “In those days, we children had our own parallel world, didn’t we? Apart from th
e adult world. Not created by adults. And we wandered pretty freely.”

  Yes.

  They were, as children, permitted to wander the countryside pretty freely. It was theirs — by virtue of their fathers’ ownership of the orchards, by virtue of their having tramped all over it, following Hugh.

  Hugh says, “Remember Mussolini?”

  Yes.

  Mussolini, who lived in a tumble of rough slate blocks on the south face of Spion Kopje. (Spion Kopje: they didn’t know how to spell it, and called it Spine Cop, or Spy Cop. A South African name, clearly; one of the first managers for the land company must have been fresh from the Boer War.)

  Mussolini: enormously fat, as big around as Sidonie’s arm, and probably long as she was tall. He had a good territory; the hill was pocked with groundhog and vole tunnels. He liked to sun himself on the largest boulder near the peak. Coming up the hill, they would stamp and smack their walking sticks on the ground, to give him warning. That was the safe thing to do. But Mussolini wouldn’t hide or retreat; he merely coiled his dull-grey, diamond-patterned body tighter, watched them pass with glass-bead eyes. Alice and the other girls would shriek; even the boys went pale. Walt said the hairs all down his spine stood on end. Masao said that Mussolini smelled like hot metal.

  Graham and Hugh had argued about whether their response to the snake was conditioned or innate. Sidonie thought she would like to watch Mussolini, to memorize his flat blunt snout, the scales, the graduated ivory beads of his rattle — to fix him in her mind as Richard Clare did with his charcoal pencil in his sketch book. Mussolini was simple energy, she thought — not evil, but not good either — only a length of thick muscle.

  When he left for his boarding school — he’d have been fifteen, maybe? — Hugh had called Sidonie and Walt for a meeting. He marked each of them on the inside of their elbows with a sooty thumbprint and told them to be observant. They should continue patrols, recruitment, training, and report to him. And especially keep an eye on Mussolini.