After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  She has not thought it out well, but she will survive. There is no electricity, of course; no running water. The house has been vacant since the early eighties, and had been trashed by the last tenants. She is prepared: she had seen it after that. She sees now that Walter has done some repairs: the graffiti and black paint have been erased with a few coats of white. Someone has swept the house out occasionally; mended the roof. The decay now is the decay of a dry climate: the silvered, splintery wood on the south and west sides, the desiccated putty around the window panes. Dust. Dead bluebottles and wasps.

  “I cleared out the chimney a year ago,” Walt says. “You ought to be able to make a fire.”

  He is worried; she can see that. In his fisherman-knit sweater, he lingers, not willing to leave her on her own. He has brought a wheelbarrow of firewood, a barrel of water, in his pickup. She has showed him her stash: an air mattress and folding chair and paper plates purchased at Wal-Mart on the way; her books. She has assured him that she’ll only be a few days. He does not trust her, or he feels responsible for her: one or the other. Or both.

  “I will be fine,” she says. “Just a few days until my house dries out. It’s only October. I’ll be fine.”

  “There’s still the old bath house,” Walt says. “You could dip water from the well for the boiler. It’s also wood-fired.”

  “If I feel the need to bathe, I will do that,” she says. “I can always run back home for a shower. It’s not fifteen minutes.”

  “You could always run back home to sleep,” he says. She can hear that he is still worried.

  “Go along, Walt,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

  The rain begins again and doesn’t let up. Even when it stops for a few hours, the air is moist; a long cloud sits over the lake, filling the narrow west valley. Since when is the valley so damp? She doesn’t remember this much rain, ever. The climate must have changed.

  She explores the house tentatively. She has not been inside in over twenty years. It is not as big as she has remembered it, but the rooms feel well-laid-out, pleasingly proportioned. The house seems sturdy. There is damage. But she is able to live in it. With a strong fire in the fireplace, it is warm enough, though cold at night; she must wear several layers of sweaters, and long pajama pants under jeans, even with the fire going.

  She sets her cans of food on the kitchen shelves, unfolds her camp bed in what had been the parlour. It is not bad. It would be better if she could shut off rooms. The house is too big, too open.

  The house was not finished until Sidonie was in her teens, because Father had planned it on such a grand scale, and using the best quality materials available, and could only build a little at a time. When she was very small, there were the kitchen and parlour on the first floor, and on the second, Mother and Father’s bedroom and Sidonie and Alice’s bedroom. Father showed them drawings in blue ink on big rolls of paper of the rest of the house that is to come, a ghost house. Bathrooms, upstairs and down; additional bedrooms; a dining room; an office for Father and a sewing room for Mother; a big front porch.

  Old photos of the house show the main wing only, at first; then the new north wing, with its dining room below and bathroom above. The porch, on the west side of the house, overlooked the long lawn and the lake. Their house was different than other houses in Marshall’s Landing at that time: bigger, more open, and less finished, somehow. Their ceilings were higher, and floors bare; they had shutters rather than drapes. Instead of a fireplace, a big porcelain stove. No wallpaper anywhere, or coloured paint, but plaster embossed with designs of curlicues and diamonds. Where the other families — those who had indoor bathrooms — had a small room at the back of the house with a toilet, a sink, a cast-iron tub, Sidonie’s family had a separate WC — a narrow room with a high window, a toilet, a tiny pedestal sink — and another room with a floor patterned in small hexagonal tile, like a honeycomb, and in it a large sink with a mirror, where Father shaved, a big tub like a sleigh, and an immense shower closet, walled inside and out with white rectangular tile.

  When Sidonie was very small, there was no indoor bathroom or WC. She used the outhouse during the day. At night, there was a chamber pot, a white china bowl with a rolled rim, a handle, a painted border of bluebells. Mother said that she was humiliated that they didn’t have a bathroom. Even after it was built, she grumbled: they might have had a smaller, less expensive one, sooner. But Father said he would not build cheap.

  When the new wing was built, the kitchen was moved into the lower part of it, and where the kitchen was became the dining room. The new kitchen had tile floors and granite countertops and maple shelves and cupboards that looked more like other people’s parlour cabinets. It had two sinks, both made of zinc. Other people’s kitchens had smooth, coloured countertops, with bright metal trim and painted wood cabinets. They seemed brighter, cleaner. But Father said they will make more work, and cannot be cleaned thoroughly.

  Other people’s houses, too, had more doors, smaller, intimate rooms, darkened parlours, with figured wallpaper and linoleum, parquet, ornate fringed rugs.

  In Sidonie’s house, the rooms flowed into one another, at least on the ground floor. Only the bedrooms and the bathroom and WC had doors. The windows were large, much larger than in other houses, and light flooded the house, flowing from one side to the other. From May to October, the shutters on the south and west sides of the house were closed for most of the day, because of the intensity of the sun and the heat. The porch, when it was built, provided blissful shade.

  Between the kitchen and parlour, Mother had hung a curtain of a deep, wine-coloured flannel, very soft and thick. Mother said that she did not want to have people seeing her dirty dishes when she was entertaining. Both Alice and Sidonie discovered, very early, that if they sat quietly in the kitchen, they were able to overhear a great deal of what was said in the other rooms.

  Sidonie girds herself against the destruction, and there it is: the scarred floor, the hacked stair railings, the stained ceiling. The kitchen is empty of appliances; where those have gone, she can’t remember. It has stood empty the past few years, though someone had been living in it and working the orchard in the late 90s. A row of green plastic pots lines the deep window sill, some plant — it could have been geraniums — indicated by desiccated grey stalks. The cupboards, though, under their sloppy coat of white paint are the original maple her father had custom-milled and installed, and the granite countertop also has remained intact, though someone has smashed it at one end.

  The wine flannel curtain is long gone, of course. But she finds herself spending all of her time in the kitchen, as she used to do. In the afternoons, when weak sun slants through the kitchen windows, she is able to sit and read; she has no other occupation. She had forgotten about the lack of electricity; her laptop battery is soon depleted. She has brought candles, but they give faint light and cast huge shadows. She goes to bed early, does not sleep, but dozes.

  When Walt brings another load of wood, she asks if she can do some outside work, and he suggests helping stack firewood; Walt and his sons are cutting up some old trees. She hears the buzz of the chainsaw in the daytime, walks among the trees, which are in fall leaf, shades of saffron and pumpkin and wine almost unbearably rich against the charcoal and aubergine of the wet trunks and limbs. She warms up considerably; the heat from the day’s work stays with her into the evening, and she falls asleep more quickly and sleeps soundly. But her appetite grows with the woodpile, and she soon gets through the soups and legumes she has brought. And she wants a bath; she has been sweating freely.

  She finds the bucket Walt mentioned, and the key for the padlock on the well-cover. She drops the bucket down on its rope. It splashes satisfactorily, only twenty feet or so down. Draws up the bucket — she’s found the wooden windlass still attached to the wall of the shed, just above the well opening.

  But the water in the bucket has an oily scum, and smells unpleasant. She puts her face to it, sniffs. Unmistakable: it sme
lls like raw sewage.

  “Oh,” Walt says, pulling a long face. “I hadn’t thought of that. The underground stream must be tainted. The new development up the hill, of course. All those houses on septic.” And through the trees, she can see the blight of structures clustered above.

  The well is tainted. She finds herself trembling with something between cold and fury and disappointment.

  She drives back to her house on Quail Circle, has a long hot bath, collects more food, plugs in her laptop, checks for email and phone messages. For a moment, as she moves around her familiar machines, she thinks she might stay. She has left her air mattress at Beauvoir, left the woodpile unfinished, but she might just stay here.

  But her email has become dislodged from the listserv again, and there are no personal messages — only a voice mail from Hugh, non-urgent. Her house feels damp still. In the basement, she sees the dark has spread again; outside, the driveway has been dug up. None of the boxes has left the living room, but neither is there a message from Cynthia.

  She re-stocks, heads back to Beauvoir. She stops at the IGA in the plaza, on the way, for more food and a jug of water. At the hardware store that used to be Masao’s music store, she buys a cooler, a camp stove, a lantern, a second camp chair. She wonder where Masao is now.

  The girl arrives on the fifth day, in the rain, walking out of the mist, down the alfalfa and knapweed-clotted driveway. The opportunists of the dry land. Robins and magpies and starlings are industrious with the displaced earthworms. If the rain continues, the earthworm population will be decimated. The girl walks up the driveway in her jeans, boots, plaid jacket, an olive-green canvas pack over her shoulder, hips cantilevered to balance the load. Improbably red hair cut jagged and high across the brow, glint of metal like a steel beauty mark, like a lepidopterist’s pin, at the upper lip.

  The walk is familiar, that long foal-stride before the face with its antennae-eyebrows, the straight slash of upper lip, the over-full lower lip, is close enough to see. The von Täler face. It’s Steve’s girl, of course. Natasha, that’s her name. Tasha. But somehow disguised, transformed.

  If the girl is surprised to see the door open to her, she does not let on. She swings down the pack, looks around as if to see if things have been disarranged.

  She has changed somehow. The sullenness has sprouted into something else, or maybe just grown stronger. What does she want?

  Sidonie says, “There’s no hot water. I hope you like baked potatoes and canned tuna.”

  The girl puts down her pack, sniffs the air.

  “What do you smell?” Sidonie asks.

  “Woodsmoke,” the girl says. “Apples. Pee.”

  They are running out of food again, though Tasha has brought granola bars and apples in her pack. They both read in the pale sun during the day, pile wood, talk at night, when it’s too dark and chilly to do anything but wrap themselves in their sleeping bags. They become progressively hungrier and grubbier; after three days of this, the girl smells high, and Sidonie knows that she must too.

  What do they talk of? Of the work of an orchard, of Sidonie’s research. Of the girl’s studies, her unhappiness with her classes, of the music she likes. The girl still seems sullen; her answers are given diffidently, possibly grudgingly, possibly warily. She is bright, though: Sidonie can see that. And well-read for a child of her generation, though her reading is eclectic, and she references books injudiciously, vampire novels tossed in with classics and various books of philosophy, biology, and psychology, apparently first-year university textbooks. She claims to have read every book in her house, including the British Columbia Home Health Reference. She confesses that she once diagnosed herself as having fatigue. Only she thought it was pronounced “fat-i-gyoo.” Her father, she says, curtails their television (ah, the von Täler coming out in him, Sidonie thinks). She has had to read more than is normal, to combat boredom.

  Sidonie, lying in her sleeping bag in the dawn, drifting in hypnogogic sleep, half-dreams of Alice, long-lost Alice. The grandmother that Tasha has never met.

  Alice is spinning people into statues. She grasps the other girls one by one by the wrist, and whirls them around and around, her feet shifting heel-toe faster than Sidonie can see, her spine arched for balance, her pale braids whipping, her outstretched arms with a child at the end like a strange giant flower whirling in circles. Then she lets go, and the child, depending on how much smaller she is than Alice, goes staggering or even flying across the mashed yellow grass until she falls down or bumps into something else. After that, she must freeze in the position in which she has fallen.

  Then Alice comes over and says what she is. This is a variation on the game, which is played by all of the girls Sidonie has met. Only Alice takes it upon herself to name the statue.

  Mary Summers says that everyone is supposed to choose what kind of statue they are. But when Alice is playing, Alice chooses. Nobody argues with this, except Judy, who is new. But even Judy, after a while, stops standing by the wall with her arms crossed and lines up for Alice to spin her.

  It’s Sidonie’s turn. She is one of the smallest and knows that she will fly far, and she does, spinning out of control, then somehow tripping and falling over the steps, which hadn’t been there earlier. There is a painful knock on her forehead and nose, and then her knees and face are stinging, stinging. She is not supposed to move, but has curled up before she can think, so stays in that position. She can taste blood in her mouth. The stinging and pain of the blows to her limbs and face rise in pitch, like screaming, but she will not scream. She won’t move.

  “Oh, my God,” Bonnie Pruitt says, bending over her. “Her face is covered with blood. Oh my God. I’m going to faint.”

  Coralee says, “And her knees, look at her knees. Her stockings are all ripped and there’s dirt and blood!”

  They have left their positions. That’s against the rules. She will not cry and she will not move.

  But some of the younger girls, Lily Platt and Marjorie Tanaka and Susan Taiji ask, “Are you okay, Sidonie?” Then it’s hard to keep the tears away.

  Alice is there. She is standing over Sidonie. The others fall quiet.

  “Just a stone, obviously,” Alice says, pronouncing on Sidonie’s position.

  “Do your parents know you’re here?” she asks the girl.

  Tasha shrugs. Her shoulders remain up; she looks sullen. But Sidonie is beginning to read her posture. She is afraid, Sidonie thinks — but not of her parents. She is afraid of something else. She is afraid to walk through any door — afraid that it will be the wrong one, that she won’t find her way through or back in.

  The girl looks at her sideways. Her lip curls up over the metal pin. “How about you?” she asks. “Do they know where you are? Does Aunt Cynthia know where you are?”

  She has a point. They are bolters, both of them.

  Pruning and burning the branches gets the men so schmutzing — sooty and grimy — that Father invites them to bathe before they leave the orchard. The Japanese are fond of bathing, Father says. A very clean people. In their country, he says, they have great wooden tubs, large enough to sit several men up to their noses. They like the water extremely hot, and they all scrub down with soap and rinse off before they get into the soak-tub.

  Sidonie thinks of naked bodies accidentally touching in the water. She pushes away her potatoes, which have suddenly become slippery, grey-white flesh. At the same time, Alice wrinkles her nose. “They bathe nude? All together?”

  Father finishes chewing, lays his knife and fork on the plate so that they are not quite parallel. Sidonie stares at them, longing to reach over and set them straight. If they were extended two-and-one-fifth times, she sees, they would meet. The point of meeting would fall just short of her water glass. She stares at the spot, almost seeing the shadow cutlery. If her father were to pick up those long utensils, his elbows would have to thrust far out to each side. He would knock Alice and her off their chairs.

  Father says, �
��Alice, there is no shame in the human body.” Mother makes a clicking sound with her tongue: Tsk. They have a proper bathtub in their house, of course; the big cement tub in the wash house, rough like new stone, is for washing when one is very dirty, or washing the dogs. One person’s body fits it, or two small bodies, like Alice’s and Sidonie’s. The wash house floor has cedar planks and a squat iron stove to heat the water. There is a green shade on the light and the soap for the bath smells green, like the sea, and the cedar, when it is wet and hot, smells green also: a smell-colour like the deep green of the orchards in high summer: thick, cool, clean.

  Father says, “In Europe people understand this. There are nude beaches and camping places. People are not ashamed or jokey about bodies.”

  Mother says brusquely, “Well, we’re not in Europe now. The girls can stay away from the wash house while the men are using it.”

  After supper, in the winter henhouse, Sidonie lifts the eggs into her basket. Four, so perhaps the hens have already responded to the shift in daylight, or perhaps she missed one egg the day before. She scans the henhouse for signs of intruders, checks the water and feed troughs, and scratches Number Two’s lizard-like head just behind the earholes, before shutting and locking the big door behind her. The hens settle into creaks that might mean they are discussing her, but benignly.

  As she walks back to the house, the pruners emerge from the washhouse in clouds of steam, fully dressed, bundling their towels and dirty clothes, exclaiming at the shock of the cold. Masao is there, shaking out his blue-black hair. When he sees Sidonie, he waves, grinning. Sidonie waves back. She had been about to retrace her steps, take the long way back to the house to avoid pressing through the crowd of pruners, but now she can’t. She stops and Masao comes over to her, juggling his towel, which has become a sort of soft origami box containing his soiled clothing.