Please don’t please don’t please don’t, Sidonie thinks in misery. She imagines Clara saying, “You must defend yourself,” but knows that whatever she says, Alice will use it against her.
“Of course,” Alice says, “you rather like that perverted stuff, don’t you, little freak? Do you think that I don’t know about your games? Your little games with older men, and your poisonous little notes?”
Alice means Mr. Defoe. But how is that Sidonie’s fault? It wasn’t a game. Alice must know that it was all Mr. Defoe. But she feels unsure, guilty, shamed.
If Adam were to hear this, he would think that Sidonie has something very wrong with her. He would see that she is a freak, dirtied by her own ignorance, her own helplessness.
No. No.
Adam would say that there is something wrong with Alice, something twisted and nasty. Sidonie breathes in and out, willing Adam’s face, his voice, into her mind.
“I pity you,” Alice says. “You must have a really narrow little life. You must have a lot of restrictions. They can dress you up, but they can’t take you out.”
And there, her mind is clear enough that she can identify the antidote — the one clue in the whole stream of poison. Dress you up. Alice is jealous of her; her nice clothes, the apparent wealth and comfort that Alice must read in those photos. Alice is jealous. Only jealous. A little relief trickles through; she has not fallen into Alice’s ambush entirely.
“I pity you,” Sidonie says, on the strength of that trickle, “because you’re married to Buck, who, everyone knows, is a drunk and a bum, and you’ll always be poor and have black eyes and get fat.”
And then Alice opens her mouth in a sort of grin that is also a snarl, a rictus, and Sidonie sees what Alice has been hiding with her hand, her tight-lipped speech. Both of Alice’s upper eyeteeth are gone, pulled out, and dark spaces gape. Alice is missing teeth. How has that happened?
Instantly, her little surge of anger evaporates. She is horrified at herself.
“Oh!” she says. “I’m sorry, Alice. I didn’t mean it,” but Alice has already gotten up and stalked from the room.
They do not make another trip out to B.C., she and Adam. She returns only after several years for Father’s funeral. It is not hard to stay away: she has a new family, her work, a social circle. She and Adam go out to restaurants, clubs, at least three nights a week. And she has become a different person: has shucked off her old self, grown a new, sharp and edgy one, untouchable in her shiny exoskeleton.
“I think,” Adam says on the trip back (she can remember this even now, the scenery of Kicking Horse Pass streaming past their windows), “that your family’s dynamics are not very good for you.” She does not argue this. For weeks after the visit, she reverts, becomes more gawky, more fearful, more anxious, more prone to automatic movements, unable to sustain eye contact. She agrees, numbly: no more trips to Marshall’s Landing for a long while. To Sidonie, at nineteen, the long while is perhaps indefinite. But at this point, she doesn’t think she cares to see Alice again.
At Christmas of that year, Adam had taken her to the Florida Keys for a fortnight. (You look peaky, Clara had said, when Adam suggested the trip and she had demurred, fearful. Go. Go. You’ll love it. A second honeymoon.) In the newness, the exoticness (grapefruit orchards, giant sea turtles, alligators, palm trees) Sidonie had been remade. She had swum every day, lain on the warm sand. Her body had remembered how to relax, to stay still.
No permanent damage.
She gives her paper, and then she has two weeks of holiday, two weeks to visit her old friends, to inhabit, again, the lighted glass city. Her former sisters-in-law have organized her; she stays the first week with Clara, who conducts a seamless itinerary of shopping and lunches and scenic walks and concerts. Even naps are scheduled in, though Sidonie does not nap, but uses the opportunity to prowl, to read, to answer emails. Clara interrogates her: what is she thinking? How is she feeling? And it is a relief to talk, to have her thoughts drawn out, examined, classified, offered back to her tidied and rearranged. Yet there is something exhausting in all of this too — a sense that she has lost autonomy, that she has lost intactness, that makes her irritable, that makes her hold back. She knows, for Clara has explained this to her, that her terrible introversion is a pathology, something she needs to outgrow. But she feels that she is a soft-bodied creature, shamefully extracted from its shell.
The second week she spends with Anita. Anita’s pace is different than Sidonie’s (different than most people’s, Clara says). There are no regular meals; she will suddenly announce that it’s time to go somewhere, and leave in five minutes or an hour for that place. Sidonie finds the lack of foreknowledge of events both excruciating and bewildering. It is agony to wait, to not know whether to eat or to go for a walk or start a book. When she asks Anita, Anita only says: Do what you like! This is frustrating — she doesn’t want to go out or begin work if Anita is planning an outing or has invited people in, but she has to admit, there is freedom in this arrangement. She can come and go as she pleases — Anita will join her or not, as she pleases.
Clara says that Anita’s habits are ridiculous. It’s all about control, about power, Clara says. Anita wants to have everyone adjust to her plans, but won’t admit that she has plans. She likes to keep everyone unbalanced.
Sidonie isn’t sure about this. But she is grateful for her sisters-in-law, these familiar companions. They are not unchanged; or perhaps more precisely, in being away, she is able to see the changes that have been gradually occurring in the past few years. Both are quite grey, Clara’s customary bob a silver helmet and Anita’s still-long hair streaked with shades of lightest through darkest grey, like one of her own photographs.
She has known them most of her life.
She had formed an attachment to Clara first: Clara has said many times that she recruited Sidonie, rounded her up. Of course, Sidonie did not see it that way.
She is drying her hair after swimming at the Y pool, and a woman’s face appears next to hers in the long mirror: “I see you here a lot, don’t I? And at the Thursday night concerts.”
The woman is young, as tall as Sidonie, with a short dark bob, dark eyes and brows, narrow features, a wide mouth. She is a more vivid, more pronounced version of Sidonie, though she doesn’t notice this until later. Her hair is straight and tucked behind her ears, and Sidonie thinks immediately that she will have her hair cut in the same way: her long braids never fit securely under her bathing cap, so her ends always get wet. And it is such a bother to braid her hair and put it up.
“Yes,” Sidonie says. “I swim here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I go to the concerts.”
“Are you a student?” the woman in the mirror asks.
“Yes,” Sidonie says. “Yes.”
“Me too,” says the woman. “What’s your major?
Sidonie says, “Psychology,” and the woman says, “I’m doing literature,” and smiles as if they have just discovered something important. Then she turns and puts out her hand. “I’m Clara St. Regis.”
“Sidonie von Täler.”
“What have you liked best, in the concert series?”
“Sibelius,” says Sidonie. “That was on the 17th. Also Mahler, on the 12th of April, and Bix, the 15th of March.”
She realizes instantly that she has been overly precise, and blushes. But Clara says, enthusiastically, “Really? You liked the Sibelius? Most people don’t get it. Why did you like it?”
Sidonie explains about the angles, the slip of perspective, the stone edges. She is talking about synesthesia, but Clara thinks she is using metaphors and is very excited. “That’s it! That’s it exactly.” Then: “Do you go downtown on the weekends to hear jazz? Do you ever go to the Yellow Door? No? You must. Come with us this Saturday. No, I’ll pick you up. Where do you live? Brilliant.”
An odd exchange, seen from almost any perspective. But Sidonie finishes drying her hair and goes on to her Wednesday morning classes in a
little cloud of wonder and pleasure. She has not made many friends in her first two years on campus, for a number of reasons. She is, of course, two years younger than most of the other students, and is only now growing into her adult body, filling out. A gangly girl, too tall for her frame, with long braids, huge eyes, a pointed chin, she looks like a child, one of those occasional accelerated students, all intellect and no social or physical development. Then there are the obvious oddities of her personality: her over-precision, her obsession with numbers and arcane facts, her inability to make small talk. She is not the only one like that; she sees others, boys mostly, who carry that mark. She avoids them as if they were pariahs, though she is lonely.
And there is something else; a seriousness that makes it difficult for her to join the other girls in her dormitory over their perpetual hot chocolate and boy talk. There is something more interesting going on in life, she thinks. She has been ready for an adult world for some time, and has been disappointed, generally, in what she has found on campus. Though she would not be able to put her finger on it precisely. She has thrown herself into attending the series of lectures that happen outside of class time, and the foreign films, and the concert series. And she swims. But it has seemed to her that the films and the concerts only hint at a world of people that she has no access to: one in which ideas are important, personal eccentricities are respected, taken for granted, and a kind of intensity of experience not based on personal emotions is a shared goal.
So it is that Sidonie, who up to this point has apparently paid rigorous attention to the dorm’s strictures about talking to or accepting rides from strangers, going out after dark, venturing downtown, or going to bars, finds herself climbing into a strange Volkswagen Beetle at the corner of University and des Pins at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. She has forgotten what Clara looks like — she is not good at recognizing faces, and is relieved to find that she is able to identify her new acquaintance in the back seat. In the front seats are a man, driving, of whom she can only see a quarter profile and a corduroy shoulder, and another woman who looks quite a lot like Clara, and is introduced as Clara’s sister, Anita.
The driver is Clara’s brother, Adam.
Sidonie has never been to a nightclub before. Preparing to go out has cost her some effort and more thought than she is used to putting into her appearance. She remembers from movies that women wear black dresses to nightclubs, but she has not got a black dress. She puts on her good grey dress, but sees that it is all wrong. The dress, with its short sleeves and circle skirt, makes her look like she is going to church. Something more — vertical — is needed. But she doesn’t have clothes like that: all of her dress-up clothes, bought or sewn by Mother and Alice, have fitted bodices, wide skirts, little cap or puffed sleeves. Some of them are Alice’s hand-me-downs, and are in Alice colours: sunflower, rose, seafoam. And they’re all too short: she has apparently grown a couple of inches since leaving home. And her everyday clothes — the skirts and sweaters or white blouses she wears to class or out walking — are also too short, and getting shabby. Most of them were her school clothes; she can remember wearing that tartan skirt, for example, in her grade 11 history class, because she used to trace the pattern with her finger while the teacher droned on about the Stuart kings.
They are familiar and comfortable clothes, and she has not had to think about them. But now she sees that everything she owns is for a different Sidonie, one who at that moment has ceased to exist. Nothing, not her pajamas, not her underwear, not her saddle shoes or little cotton socks, is anything that her new self would have chosen.
And all because of an invitation to a nightclub.
It is not until she is much older that Sidonie understands that most people do not become someone new overnight; do not transform with the flip of a mental switch, and that others find her proclivity for instant transformation disturbing. And she is to do it more than once in her life.
She has an instant conviction that she must go out and buy new clothes, and that the clothes she wants will not come from Mother’s sewing machine, or from Ogilvy’s. Where will she find them? She will discover this. It will be a research project. In the meantime, it occurs to her that the other girls in her dorm borrow clothes from each other on a regular basis. It seems to be an accepted transaction, though she has never participated in it.
She opens the door to the lounge, announces: “I need something straight and black to wear, right now.”
The other girls, who are playing records, eating popcorn, and painting their nails, as usual, on a late Saturday afternoon, freeze and stare at her. Then one of them says, “Woo-hoo, Sidonie!” and before she can escape, she is swept up and showered with garments; someone is pulling out her pinned-up braids, sweeping her hair into a ponytail; someone else is pulling a sweater over her head. In some odd way, she has become accepted, temporarily, into their society, but she must endure a ritual cleansing and robing, she thinks.
The girls buff and comb her and urge her to climb into different articles of clothing, most of which are too wide and short, but eventually they are satisfied, and lead her to a mirror. Sidonie examines herself dispassionately; she has not yet become comfortable with her own reflection, and must look at herself, still, as a compilation of angles and planes. But what she sees pleases her; she has become something sleeker, harder. A package. She has on someone’s tight black sweater, and someone else’s black pencil skirt, nylons, and makeup, but the final effect is of a dark, sine-curved column with striking horizontal marks — dark-lashed eyes and brows and glossy red lips.
And then she looks again, and is reminded of Alice. Though her eyes and hair are dark, she has somehow grown Alice’s cheekbones and brow and oval jaw. How has that happened? She has a nasty feeling that Alice wouldn’t like it, would be quite annoyed. But Alice is a long way away. And strangely, she understands something about Alice now. She has put on this understanding with Alice’s image. It is this: that Alice has always been in disguise, as Sidonie is now. That it is a useful thing to be in disguise, to assume this sort of protective shell. Sidonie has eschewed artifice, feeling ashamed to attempt it, seeing it as a kind of weakness to be seen attempting beauty. But it is her own raw naked self that she has endangered by doing that. Now she sees that in creating this new image of herself, she has become invulnerable in some way. She remembers that when she was young, she used to see Alice as a seed pod: the brittle exterior, the silky threads inside. She feels some sort of surprise or wonder: she has created in her own mind a sense of Alice as being dry, cool, through to her core. Now she must adjust that image she carries, that sensation.
And inside herself, she feels the new Sidonie start to take form, with not a little contribution from Alice. She feels her edginess still, feels her strangled tongue grow quick, sardonic. Her bones and sinews, her very cells, seem to line up differently.
The other girls are pleased with their achievement. One of them says, “You’re really quite pretty, Sidonie,” with obvious surprise, and another says, “You look like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Doesn’t she look just like Elizabeth Taylor?” And they all agree she does.
That is how she goes out to meet Clara. And Adam.
It is dark in the club, and Sidonie doesn’t take in much about her companions: it’s too loud to talk, also. The jazz, she opens herself to (though the cool Alice-shell remains intact; she is still, she is aware of her outer body); it is both the inspiration and detail of her new self, filling out the sketch that she has glimpsed earlier in the evening the way blood pumps through the wings of an adult insect emerging from its nymph state. Imago. The jazz, the little table where she sits with Clara and Anita and Adam, the drink (gin and tonic; horribly, excitingly bitter, but the only mixed drink she’d been able to think of when asked), the low, coloured lights, the smoky atmosphere — they all become her new tissues.
The music says: I am floating apart from the confusion around me. I am seeing and appreciating it and keeping my distance fr
om it. I am a little sad and detached, but surprised or agitated by nothing. I am ordering the world: this room, the wet pavement outside, the neon lights, the red leaves in the park: they all have their place. I am ordering sadness and happiness, tipping them slightly on their edges, spinning them like schnapps glasses. All of the world: the rows of apple trees, the moody lake, Mother’s relentless polishing and preserving, Father’s weary, calm immersion in whatever space he is in, Alice’s cool silky smoothness, the black sewing machine, the battalion of bottled golden peach quarters, Mr. Defoe’s hard hurting hands, the sheen of Masao’s brown back, Mrs. Inglis’s hats and her plummy voice and gee and tee: all of those things are ordered inside me, part of me but not part of me, all winding through their own variations. And calculus and past subjunctive and Dr. Leavis and Dr. Skinner, and all of their ideas, they are lining up to put out their little solos, and it is all about a pattern, and the pattern plays and changes and winds back through itself, but it is only pattern.
She is transformed. It is not to last; the old anxieties and muteness will break through. But she is transformed enough that some of this new vision of self will remain, enough to javelin her, improbably, with amazing luck, into another life, one in which she can expand and bloom; one imminently suited to her oddities, her hybrid culture. Though there is a cost, of course.
A man walks up to her on the path between the Arts building and the Leacock building. He says hello, and ducks under her umbrella. He has dark hair, longer in front, dark eyes, is perhaps in his early thirties. He is also very thin, and walks in an unusual way, as if his arms and legs were too long, too delicate, to bear weight. He holds his head slightly inclined, too. Everything about him, in fact, forms a series of graceful sine curves. But he looks familiar. A prof?
“Adam St. Regis,” he says. “We went to the Yellow Door last weekend.”
After Alice Page 16