After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  On the porch, Gerry Kleinholz lights a cigarette.

  “Give me one,” says John.

  “No.”

  Give me one.”

  “No.”

  “Give me one.”

  “I’ll give you one, alright,” Gerry says. He clouts John above the ear, hard. Lottie’s mouth hangs open.

  Sidonie says, “We don’t smoke on the porch. You go out in the yard.”

  The boys stare at her, then Gerry mimics her, putting on a mincing British accent. Sidonie looks away, straightens her back. It is cold; night has fallen.

  “Do you want to take the truck and go down to the Tastee-Freez?” Gerry asks. It’s a moment or two before Sidonie realizes that he’s talking to her; the others are waiting for her reply.

  “No,” she says.

  John says, “More fun to go down Platt’s, get some hullabaloo juice.” He capers oddly, a little kicking-up of the heels. Oh: the distaste. She can feel the messiness, the wrongness of the Kleinholzes, like black mildew on the pumpkins.

  “Whatchoo staring at?” John says. His face is like a jack-o’-lantern, she thinks: his eyes show nothing but snap, like the desire to punch, to torment; his lips are drawn back over his bad teeth in an appalling grin. It is worse than Lottie’s cow-like blankness.

  Gerry Kleinholz has become popular in the last year or so. He has a better haircut and clothes — rumour has it that Buck pays for them — and a driver’s license. Some of the girls have begun to speak of him as possible.

  But he’s too dumb, too mean, too unpolished, Sidonie thinks, for anyone to look at.

  They wait and wait; finally the boys slouch off, telling Lottie to stay at the house.

  Sidonie fumes inwardly. But she holds herself still, pretends she doesn’t see Lottie shivering in her thin blouse.

  She has noticed that Buck has a suit on tonight, a brownish tweedish suit, and a very narrow tie. It’s a cheap suit, too cheap to even be flashy, but new. In it, Buck looks smaller, older, more ordinary. She had seen Alice glance across the table at him with something like disgust on her face. Had noticed Buck catching the tail end of the look, and almost felt sorry for him. It’s a very sheepish, worried Buck tonight: not the cocksure young man in the T-shirt, now.

  Buck’s brothers return, and they are all finally allowed back into the house in order for the Kleinholzes to leave. Mr. Kleinholz leers at Sidonie: You’ll be wanting to get this one married off soon,” he says. “Overripe by sixteen, remember that.”

  After, Father pours himself some scotch and lights a cigar, and Mother doesn’t say anything about his smoking in the house.

  “Kleinholz,” says Father. “When I was a boy, it was an insult lads tossed at each other. It means “little wood,” of course, but it had another connotation.”

  “None of that vulgar talk,” Mother says. “I think we’ve had about enough of it for one night.”

  In their bedroom, Alice lies fully clothed on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling. “So what’s the scoop?” Sidonie asks. She has learned that approaching Alice with a light, sardonic tone circumvents much of her scorn and disdain.

  Alice shrugs. “Nothing I couldn’t have predicted. ‘You kids don’t know how much it costs to live, here’s some money to get you started, blah blah blah’.”

  In fact, Father has agreed to give Alice and Buck ten acres of orchard: the smallest part that may be subdivided off. Mr. Kleinholz will run it for Buck, though. Buck has got a job at a sawmill in the Cariboo, and he and Alice will go live there.

  What are the Kleinholzes giving in return? Nothing. A son.

  Buck says it will only be for a little while, the living in Horsefly. “Till I can move up to foreman,” he says, in an odd earnest voice.

  So Alice is caught. As they had tried to catch Mr. Defoe, Alice herself is caught.

  And how was it that Alice, in the space of a fall and winter, had gone from bride-elect of the most eligible bachelor in Marshall’s Landing to this?

  That is another story. That is a story that Sidonie can hardly bear to think about.

  In the bright-jacketed paperbacks that Alice smuggles into their room to read (because Father says they’re schmutzig, smutty), girls who become pregnant before they are married are threatened with horsewhipping. But there is no prospect of Alice being beaten. Neither do their parents put Sidonie under close watch, as is supposed to befall the younger sisters. Rather, Sidonie moves, that spring, to the far periphery of her parents’ collective vision. They hardly notice what she does, or even if she is home. Not that she goes anywhere; she is spending her time cramming, cramming. Reading books that she brings home from the high-school library by the bagful, trying to make up for the lost years, the years she had languished, supposedly unteachable, at the elementary school. She has her own project: she is building an escape route.

  Alice is married in June, as soon as can be decently arranged; even so, her belly protrudes a little, and she has to wear an empire-waist dress, rather than the tight-bodiced, low-waisted Juliet gown that is the fashion. The wedding takes place in the Lutheran chapel, which the Kleinholzes nominally attend. Mother says, Mr. Erskine will be heartbroken. And Alice says, I doubt that.

  The Lutheran chapel is bigger and newer than their church, but plainer. Pine pews, white walls, no stained glass. But on the wedding day, it’s full of flowers: roses, peonies, iris, narcissi, some late lilac, boughs of syringe and spirea. There are three giant arrangements at the front, jugs and vases filling the windowsills.

  It’s as if the whole neighbourhood has stripped its gardens for Alice. It is the doing of the Women’s Institute ladies, of course. When she sees all the flowers, Mother cries.

  In August Alice and Buck leave for Horsefly, Buck’s truck packed with boxes of canned fruit, bedding, dishes, Alice’s sewing machine, Buck’s gun and fishing rods. Alice seems excited, glad to be leaving. She hugs Sidonie, unexpectedly. Sidonie feels the swell of Alice’s belly press against her own flat one, and recoils. Mother wishes that they could have waited until fall, so that she could have sent them up with a box of winter squash.

  Alice is twenty. Buck is twenty-one.

  The week after Alice leaves, Sidonie begins her final year of high school, attending the new school that has opened on the flat land between the creek and the community hall at the bottom of Berry Road. She is nominally in Grade 11, but has got her teachers to make certain accommodations for her: she challenges certain courses, doubles up in others. As a new school with smaller student body, some combined classes, this is possible to do without inconveniencing the teachers excessively. She begins sending for university application packages, and has them mailed to Graham, who is living at home this year, and who participates in her quest with cynical indulgence: “The fleshpots of Montreal, eh? Sure that’s what you want?”

  She does not want the packages to come to her house to be commented on and perhaps intercepted by Mother and Father. She doesn’t want them to come to the post office addressed to her either: nothing comes through the post office without entering community discussion.

  She goes to school, speaks almost to nobody, walks home, does her chores, does homework in her room. She lies low. Mother and Father are subdued; little more is required of her than to be quiet and do her chores.

  In June, Father says, “How can you be graduating? You are sixteen!”

  Mother says, “I suppose you could have told me in time to make you a dress!”

  Sidonie thinks that she has done Mother a favour: to sew a formal gown this spring would have taxed Mother beyond even her immense capability. “I’ll wear an old dress of Alice’s,” she says. “I don’t really care about it.”

  In fact, Mrs. Inglis had bought her a frock from a store in town, a bronze taffeta, she remembers. Nearly the only dress left in the shop, so late in the season, but oddly suited to Sidonie’s colouring. It had been cut strangely in the bodice, in a straight line that skimmed the collar bones. Bateau: is that what they ca
lled it? Banded with brown velvet, and otherwise undecorated. Layers of tulle in the skirt, of course. It probably hasn’t been kept. It certainly wasn’t in the trunk of Alice’s gowns. A pity; she’d like to have seen it again. It was the first thing she owned, she thinks now, that she chose herself, and it was a present from Mrs. Inglis, who became, after Alice’s defection, more of a friend to Sidonie than she has probably appreciated.

  She had spent much time at the Inglises’ that summer. Hugh had only been back on a flying visit; he had got a summer job working on the railway. She had gone for walks with Graham sometimes, when he had been well enough. She had played endless games of chess with him, when he was not as well; the games accompanied by a dark running commentary on the actions of the figures, who spoke to him, were part of some court intrigue. Sidonie did not mind this: it had not been so long since she had been small enough that the animate and inanimate alike had spoken to her in cryptic utterances. Graham had always seemed to know her; that is, he had talked to her with the same theatrical, fantastical persona as always, and she had not seen any difference between them. Mrs. Inglis had not hovered, and had thanked Sidonie — genuinely, Sidonie thought — for her kindness. But it had not been kindness, only self-serving propinquity, for Sidonie had been bored and lonely herself.

  Graham had helped her with her applications, and called her the princesse lointaine. And she had not thought of him except as someone who was nearly always available and a satisfactory companion. Only Richard Clare had said to her: Be careful, or you’ll go insane, like Graham Inglis. It was commonly supposed in their community that too much intelligence would tip the brain over the top into madness, as if intelligence were a chemical agent. Too much of it a very bad thing.

  What had they done? Read, played chess, walked. She had not thought of Graham romantically: no. An air of tragedy hung over him, and she was damaged, or thought of herself as damaged, rejecting all sexual thoughts. But Graham must have been practice for her for later: for Adam and others. And also, though she had not seen it, a kind of paradigm of culture and sensitivity.

  Once, she remembers, going with Graham and Walt up one of their old hiking club trails. A significant day: they had found Mussolini dead.

  She had seen him first, fallen into a crack between two of the boulders.

  At first they think he is caught, and debate whether they might be able to pry him loose without coming into striking range. But then they hear the flies, and Walt — cautiously — manages to nudge the end of his stick under the snake’s body and flip it out of the crack.

  They can see right away that he is really dead. Half of his neck is blown open. Twenty-two, Walt says.

  How shocking: first, that someone would shoot Mussolini, who had lived in these rocks for decades; second, that his torn flesh should be the same texture, the same bright red, as a human’s flesh. The wound in his neck looks just like the time Father had gashed his hand open between two bins.

  Walt cuts the rattle off with his pocket knife and then they scrabble a shallow burrow in the loose shale, edge the body (limp, now, drained of its electricity) into this grave and kick a mound of shale over it.

  “Otherwise the magpies will peck it to bits,” Walt says.

  They do not mark the grave, but Sidonie thinks that she can find it again. Graham had said that the location and details of the burial must be reported to Hugh in person; however, the news of Mussolini’s demise must be transmitted right away.

  She remembers that urgency. Had she written Hugh a letter? She thinks so.

  He would not have kept it, on his many travels.

  How strange that they would have called the reptile after a fascist dictator; the snake (who might have been female, actually) had not been, after all, a threat to the world, but only a wild thing. A piece of energy, of sheer being: that had been Mussolini-the-snake. A piece of wildness, of the valley as it had been before orchardists and schoolteachers, before the irrigation pipes had turned the sere, austere slopes into gardens. A piece of dry heat, of muscle and fang and obsidian eye; intrepid hunter and devourer of small wary hairy things; goddess of hot stone and cool secret cleft, alike; collector of the sun’s enormous power though her polished diamond-shaped scales, her forked black tongue, her two-chambered heart.

  What is left, now, of the wild?

  She had left Marshall’s Landing in the fall of 1960 to travel as far from her home as she imagined was possible. She had abandoned her mother and father — more than that, she had seized their moment of weakness, of grief and bewilderment — to betray them, to ambush them with her leaving. She had sent them a few letters, which had been kept, though they are solipsistic things, devoid of feeling or authenticity.

  She had abandoned Alice, and Graham, and the fragile wild hillsides.

  She had escaped Marshall’s Landing. She had saved herself.

  She would not ever say that it had not been worth it.

  FLOOD

  She returns from Toronto to rain: not the intermittent, light drizzle typical of the valley, but a dark, heavy maelstrom of weather. The water is bucketing down so hard that she scarcely notices the grader half-blocking the winding driveway. Fixing the hillocky, potholed road at last?

  She opens her front door to the smell of damp carpet, of damp wood, damp Sheetrock, mould.

  In the basement room is a shallow shining lake, and all of the crates and trunks and boxes sitting in it are cubist islands.

  “I told you that I should check on the house while you were gone,” Cynthia howls. “Why do you have to be so damned stubborn and independent? You make more trouble for everyone in the long run, you know that? You always think you know more than everyone else, but you don’t.”

  Justin says, “Mother,” but he too looks as shocked as Sidonie feels.

  “Do you ever stop and think,” Cynthia shouts, “that other people are intelligent, too? That they might know as much as you? More than you, about some things?”

  It is astonishing; she hasn’t heard an outburst like this from Cynthia in years, not since she was an adolescent.

  “Does it ever occur to you,” Cynthia shouts, her speech now garbled further with choked-back crying, “that you might be wrong sometimes? That you should talk to other people? Has it ever occurred to you that other people might worry about you? Might need some kind of interaction with you?”

  Oh dear. But she can understand why Cynthia is upset: she’s very worried about damage to her mother’s things, which are in the boxes, still in the process of being sorted out, retrieved. Sidonie thinks that most of the personal things — anything of value — have been already moved into the Rubbermaid tubs, which are high and dry. She says so to Justin; Cynthia is in no mood to listen, to read lips.

  Cynthia drives off, tires squealing, to get new boxes, and returns a little more calmly with stacks of heavy cardboard from the Wal-Mart bins.

  Justin says, “I’ve never seen her this mad before.” His voice holds both shock and delight, the delight of the young in drama, in something happening, perhaps in recriminations that are not, for once, directed at themselves.

  Sidonie is angry herself for a few days. Cynthia is over-reacting: it’s unjust. But then contrite, ashamed. How can she make it up? There is nothing to be done but to tip everything hurriedly into the dry boxes and carry it all upstairs. The wet things are spread out across shower rails, chairs, countertops. But much has been spoiled. The smell of mildew consuming cloth and paper fills the house.

  As they’re carrying the wet boxes outside, the next-door neighbour suddenly appears. “You’ve got water, too? I’ve called my lawyer. We’re likely going to have a class action suit.” She looks younger, animated; Sidonie at first doesn’t recognize her.

  Crates and boxes fill her living space now. She has arranged them as best she can to allow entrance and egress to her furniture and doorways, but they obstruct her fifty, a hundred times a day. She feels a pooling of irritation in her stomach. She thinks: I should have had the
lot taken directly to the dump.

  Justin is busy with classes; Cynthia comes over once, stares at the boxes with dismay, then spends the entire evening looking for the box she has begun to pack, which has been lost in the shuffle.

  In the end, it is Steve’s wife Debbie who gets the stuff shifted, bustling in from her car with a stack of flattened cartons, with tape, a Jiffy marker. Debbie tucks her stubby person up on a low stool and begins lifting items from one container and placing them into another, an efficient machine. Sidonie is anxious, at first: will things be lost? — but then surrenders into an appreciation of the rhythm. Debbie doesn’t speak much, only holds items up or reads titles or labels for Sidonie’s deliberation. In three hours they clear half a dozen of the large boxes. Sidonie offers to make tea, belatedly, but Debbie refuses, and bundles herself down the stairs with things they have sorted for disposal: bags for the dump or for recycling. She asks if she may take the boxes of books home to Stephen to look through; Stephen, she says, is a great reader, always picking books up in second-hand stores and flea markets. Stephen has a den in the basement with shelves and shelves of books: a real library. Many of the boxes had held nothing but old clothes — shabby wool coats, worn gabardine work pants, faded print rayon dresses, tattered nightwear and underwear — that must have been in dubious condition even before having been soaked and mildewed. Why had those been kept? They must have been boxed up, stored in the attic by Mother, and moved into storage by Sidonie without being checked after Alice had died. Of course, there had been little time.

  It is dreadful, unbearable. And Cynthia is impossible; furious. She knows that Cynthia does not stay angry long, but that once riled, she makes implacable decisions, is resolute.

  Her house has been disturbed by Furies, it seems. She cannot settle. She cannot eat or sleep; something has infected her. Cynthia’s anger or Debbie’s re-packing, or her trip, or perhaps even the spring air, but she is restless, her nerve endings electrically charged. She throws a suitcase of clothes, some blankets and books, her laptop, a tub of canned food into the back of her car, slips the spare key under the mat, leaves a phone message for Cynthia telling her where the key is, and heads out.