Father says, “Forks next,” and begins whistling again. Sidonie drops two forks on the floor, finds the rhythm, washes them again.
Then her father asks a surprising thing. “Would you go to school in town, if you were driven?”
Sidonie shakes her head.
“Why not? Is it the school or the bus you are afraid of?”
Father has never questioned or discussed her school life: not in her hearing, at least. It’s her mother’s job to see about the children’s schooling, he says. So Sidonie is surprised. She doesn’t know what he knows about her. To start in seems like diving into the lake when it is dark. But he goes on whistling, and in a moment her voice, like her hands, gets pulled along free of her.
“I don’t want to go to the high school,” she says, “because I’d like to stay at my school. I know where everything is.”
While she says this, it is as if she is inside her school, with its long rectangular shape, its echoing wide central staircase, its pleasing safe symmetry: two storeys, two wings for each storey, three classrooms for each wing, one each side of the hallway, and one straight ahead. She can smell the Javex and the rubber sheet on the sofa in the sick room, the chalk, the tempura paint, the decayed grass smell of boots and wet wool in winter. She can smell the hot soup smell of the teachers’ lounge. She thinks of the balance of the school: the rows of windows with their perfect, pleasing rectangles, the fire doors at the back of each classroom, each opening at five minutes to three every day, as the chalkboard monitors step outside to shake the chamois and bang the felt brushes together, the balance of the principal’s office, teacher’s room, and sickroom filling one of the classroom spaces (top right-hand wing), while the library fills another classroom, in the bottom left-hand wing. She thinks of the balance of the teachers: Miss Stewart, the primary teacher, small and plump and kind; Miss Beattie, the intermediate teacher, thin-haired, bony and mean; Mr. Ramsay, the principal, blunt and direct in the hallway, and Miss Duthie, the librarian, quiet and tactful among the books.
Her father says, “I noticed that you can add up the accounts in your head. Do you find the mathematics at the school easy?”
Sidonie says, “I do my own math. Mr. Ramsay gets me a different book.”
“And what level is it that you do, in this book?”
“I don’t know,” Sidonie says. In fact, she does: the book says Journeys in Algebra II. It is a book for high school: she has seen students walking home from the bus carrying it. But Mr. Ramsay said she shouldn’t tell people that she was doing this level, or they would all want to.
“Hmmm,” Father says.
And after that, in the evenings, she does exercises with Father. Every evening. Father puts music on the gramophone, and Sidonie must practice writing, or stitching, or walking on a line on the floor. She must read to him, standing in front of him, forming her words properly. She thinks sometimes that she will burst with impatience. But Father finds her more music, and buys her a violin, and teaches her to play it.
“Order and rhythm!” Father says. “That’s the way we do this!”
Alice whispers to her across their bedroom at night: “Retard. Spazz.”
But she had been lucky: rescued, again and again. And how had she repaid that?
It had been a difficult existence, one in which many children had not thrived. She knows something about that from her work, her studies. She knows about the tender, branching brains of children, about poverty of body and spirit, of the seed sown on barren ground. It is her field. Her ground. But she had been lucky. She had been nurtured. She had been extraordinarily well cared for, given the time and place.
And how had she repaid that care?
Turnip child. In this summer of 2007, she is still pulling herself out of her deep hole.
When Mr. Defoe comes to dinner, Sidonie, who is fourteen, makes the salad. It is June, so there are lots of fresh things in the garden: some new lettuce and peas, which Sidonie’s mother plants in May and June and again in August; peppercress, green onions, radishes. Alice tells Sidonie what to cut, and brings her the vegetables herself, washing them and checking for snails, which Sidonie can’t be trusted to do, because if she finds snails, she will have to take them out to the orchard and release them at strategic points, and will forget to come back. Alice is making a dressing for the salad out of honey and mustard and apple-cider vinegar, which are all very odd things to think about putting in salad, but which taste very good together, like the notes in music. Sidonie wonders if Alice can hear the different flavours, how they will work together, before she mixes them, but when she asks her how she knows, Alice just says in a bored voice that she saw it in a magazine.
Alice is good at knowing how to do things like that; has won blue ribbons for her cakes and pies and flower arrangements in the junior division of the exhibition part of the Regatta, and is always chosen to be in charge of decorating the hall for Teen Town dances and the Hospital Auxiliary Fair, and got the Domestic Science award from the Women’s Institute when she graduated from high school. And, of course, she was Lady of the Lake, elected last year, 1957, at the Regatta, beating out a dozen contestants from up and down the valley.
Sidonie cuts the vegetables very accurately for the salad, because she has remembered that Mr. Defoe is to marry Alice. She has almost said this to Alice three times, but has remembered, just in time, not to. Anyway, Sidonie thinks, Alice already knows, because her electricity is humming more loudly than usual. Of course Alice hums, appropriately, on the inside, her outside remaining cool and silvery white, not like Sidonie, whose electricity, when she is anxious or excited, leaks out inappropriately in a sort of buzzing hum, and makes her arms flap.
Alice knows because she has ironed her blue dress and made a cake that is covered with white icing, but not in peaks; instead, in a thick blanket that has no edges. And on the blanket she has put crisscross blue lines, so perfect that even Sidonie can see no wobble in the size of the diamonds. The cake with its blue lines, Sidonie sees, is the same as Alice’s dress, with its ribbon trim, only opposite. And then Alice has put, in some, but not every diamond, a tiny blue and yellow Johnny-jump-up flower, which she has dipped in egg white and sugar, so that the colours shine through mistily.
“Do you think it’s too much?” Alice asks herself out loud, and Sidonie sees that the cake, with its blue lines, is a kind of net, and the net is to catch Mr. Defoe. Will it work?
Mr. Defoe, whose first name is Gordon, arrives at 5:30 on the dot. Father introduces him to Mother. Father and Alice converse with him in the parlour, which is open to the dining room, so Sidonie hears parts of the conversation as she lays plates and cutlery out. Something very strange: Father and Mother and Alice are all pretending, it seems, that they haven’t met Mr. Defoe before, that he had Father haven’t shouted at each other across the driveway, that Alice hasn’t already climbed into Mr. Defoe’s truck and ridden off down the road.
Alice says, “Don’t you think our little lakeside community is charming?”
Mr. Defoe says, “Oh yes. But tell me, why is it that. . .”
Father says, “I suppose you will be starting to cut out the new Spartans in the east orchard this fall?”
Mr. Defoe says, “Yes, Inglis has mentioned they are full of. . .”
Alice says, “One must go into town in the winter, of course, for any sort of culture. . .”
Mr. Defoe says, “Are you fond of music, Miss Von Täler?”
Father says, “The sulphur sprayer needs an overhaul: when I borrowed it in spring, it was losing pressure. You’ll need to order new coupling joints. . .”
Mr. Defoe says, “I plan to have the equipment serviced. . . .”
Mr. Defoe is like a tennis ball that Alice and Father are playing with, Sidonie sees. Poor Mr. Defoe. But he seems, to her sidelong glances (she is not able to look at him when introduced) not too sub, as Alice would say. He has good shoulders and back, and thick reddish hair, no moustache. He has an accent: not apricot-jam-sti
cky like Mrs. Inglis’s, or full of rushing air, like Mr. Inglis’s, or lilting like Father’s, but an accent like rocks sliding down a metal chute. A funny thing, too: though the hair on his head is reddish, the hair on his wrists and the backs of his hands is black, as though his body and head belong to two separate men.
At the dinner table, Sidonie reverses her earlier thought. Mr. Defoe, she sees now, is not the ball, but another player, taking on both her father and Alice (and now her mother as well) all at once. He does not drop the ball, she sees, though he’s often cut off in midsentence. He doesn’t say anything that Father would see as arrogant or boastful, or that Mother would say was coarse, or that Alice would complain was uneducated. He acquits himself well, a voice inside her head says, as if reading from a book, and she smiles, privately. So she is caught off guard when he addresses her directly in the lull brought on by the chewing of pork chops.
“And where do you go to school, Sidonie?”
She swallows too hastily through a perhaps constricted throat, chokes, knocks over her water glass, and bumps the table leg hard with her knee. Alice’s eyes narrow: she will make Sidonie pay, after. Spazz, she will say, meaning spastic.
Sidonie says, not looking up, that she goes to school in town.
“And will you go to the new high school when it opens?”
Yes, she says. But she cannot drag her eyes to Mr. Defoe’s face, as she knows is polite. She glances wildly at Alice, but Alice’s face is set, remote. Will Mother rescue her? But Mother is busy with the gravy boat.
Father says, “We shall all be glad to have the high school here in Marshall’s Landing. Too long have our youth been drawn out of the community.”
Now Sidonie feels irritated instead of awkward. Does Father always have to sound like he’s intoning Goethe? Mr. Defoe must think they’re comical. She must do something to mend the net, or Alice’s minnow will escape and it will be her fault.
She raises her eyes to their visitor’s face, as nearly as she can. A million sparks of conversation flicker and die on her tongue. When she speaks, her voice sounds tremulous to her own ears.
“What do you like to do for fun, Mr. Defoe?”
Is that what she had said? Something like that. Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been the right thing, though nobody had apparently noticed the long calculating look Mr. Defoe had given her before turning back to his plate.
Father’s cherries, which are a different strain, ripen later than the Inglises’, so there is no shortage of pickers. School is out, and Sidonie and Walt and Masao, and Alice on her days off, all pick for Mr. Inglis, or rather, Mr. Defoe, and then for Nakamuras, and then in their own orchards.
“Pick clean!” Mr. Defoe says, as if they haven’t been picking cherries all their lives. He treats them no differently than the other pickers, though he has been to their house, and comes by every few days to pick Alice up. (“Where do you go?” Sidonie asks, and Alice says, “None of your beeswax.”) But once, when he shouts at Alice to clean more of the stones and leaves out of her bag before she dumps it, Alice mutters, just loudly enough for Sidonie to hear: “Oh, go hump yourself.”
It is better when they are picking their own cherries. Then Sidonie can eat as many as she wants — her mouth and fingers and the soles of her feet are stained purple for that whole week.
In their own orchard, too, they have Masao to goof around with. Mr. Defoe had put the men from the camp down in the Hare Road orchard, so they never saw him. Masao is here with his hijinks, his jet-eyed grin. He carries Alice’s bag sometimes, and arranges to work in the tree next to hers. He helps Sidonie, and jokes with her, too. But it is Alice who is Masao’s friend.
In August there is time between picking cherries and picking apricots and peaches to spend the whole day at the lake, and the younger set converge there by late morning, parents driving down the hill in the late afternoon, bringing picnics and folding chairs. Mother packs egg salad sandwiches or potato salad (the hens laying superbly now) or sometimes an entire cold fried chicken (the expendable roosters), crisp and paprika-scented, the way Father likes it. (Paprika, Sidonie thinks, is made of ground red earth from some exotic, tropical country; it imparts to food the tang of palms and dust and sun and wild music played on long-stemmed string instruments, and the taste of some fruit that she will only many years later identify as mangoes.) Also there are rolls and butter and cake and fruit — apricots or raspberries. Mr. Tanaka and Masao and some of their friends come along as well. Mother and Father and Mr. Tanaka will plant their unfolded chairs on the shallow beach, and ceremoniously, ritualistically, disrobe.
Sidonie used to find this process terrifying, but now it’s only embarrassing to see the adults in their bathing suits. Mr. Tanaka with his thin, ribby chest, his little pot, his smooth, hairless body like Masao’s, only slacker, stretched out like an old sweater; Father with the blond pelt on his chest, as if the hair from his head has migrated to his torso, his white legs and upper arms contrasting startlingly with his sunburned neck and forearms; Mother, with her skirted bathing dress (Out of the twenties! Alice protests) and the blue spider veins like cryptic messages on her legs.
They swim in the little bay, next to the pier and pilings and great red hulk of the packing house. The camp road, if you follow it to the hill’s crest, past the reservoir and down again, zig-zags in hairpin turns down the steep slope to the lake. At the end, the road plunges straight down like a boy running across a field on the last day of school. The hillside between the orchards is dotted with ponderosa pine and balsam-root and saskatoon bushes, but along the narrow shoreline, cottonwoods grow, providing shade and shielding the beach from the view of the road and hills, so it seems a separate, discrete world.
Alice spreads her mat and arranges her things, slowly taking off her shorts and shirt. This year Alice’s bathing suit is a two-piece: red bottoms, a red and white halter top. She looks, Sidonie thinks, like a candy cane. All the boys and men look at her; they don’t try to disguise that. How can Alice bear it? She, Sidonie, would hate it. But Alice seems oblivious, unconcerned.
Sidonie wears one of Alice’s old suits. It’s navy, and has faded to an uneven purplish shade, and the white piping has turned grey. Sidonie has worn it for two summers already. She likes it, despite its ugliness: it feels comfortable, familiar. Mother tried to throw it out this year, but Sidonie is glad she has kept it. It fits her better than it did before, sitting becomingly on her chest and hips now, instead of hanging in folds. She feels vindicated in saving it: it has become a second skin.
The small flat stones that line the beach change colour at the water’s edge: the dry ones are dull: grey, fawn, with little contrast, while under the water, they gleam like semi-precious gems: jade, tiger-eye, jet, quartz. Sometimes she finds translucent agates: at home she has a small bag of these that she has been collecting for years.
Overhead, the sky is cloudless, a deep, even saturated blue. The lake is a darker blue, and the hills on the far side a different shade yet, though of course they’re not really blue, but dark green from the pines and firs, and gold from the sunburned grass. And the lake is not really blue: only in the distance, where it reflects sky. At the shore, it is clear, like glass, and a little deeper, a light, shimmery green: beyond that, deeper green, though still translucent.
She wades in to her knees, her thighs, then stands transfixed, watching the play of light and colour in the water, which has become a layered, moving thing. Minnows materialize, nibble at her shins.
Alice says from the beach, from under the brim of her hat: “Sidonie, don’t flap.”
Has she been flapping? Yes, and humming, too. She holds her arms down by her sides, wades further in, drawing the minnows after her. Now her feet find the cold layer, and the surface, rising up her thighs, is also cold, but not as cold. The differences in temperature and the tickling of the minnows make her aware of her feet and legs as different regions: she is segmented. She pauses a moment, then lets herself fall into the lake sideways,
lightly, so that there is no splash or sound.
Submerged, swimming with her eyes open, she sees the water is clear — not like glass, but like something else she has never seen, but can imagine — something viscous, but so bright that light is refracted stronger, intensified by it. For as long as she can hold her breath, she is free in this medium — free of gravity, of the gaze of others. She arches her back and swims, seahorse-like, along the smooth bottom stones. They are black, white, ochre, rose, green-grey. They form a mosaic of a kind: random, abstract, but with a sense of pattern, a pattern she could discern, if only she could stay under long enough.
She launches herself upward for a few lungfuls of air, and is under again. Now she noses along the bottom, waving her legs from side to side for thrust, fluttering her fingers for equilibrium. The small ripples she leaves on the surface are reflected on the lake bottom, a net of light. She swims in the net, banking and rolling to catch her own shadow, which, infant-sized, darts along with her.
She surfaces again, gulps in more air (oh, how delicious, how taken for granted!) and plunges in again. This time she follows the splintery stump of a piling to its root, pulling herself down hand over hand, climbing in reverse. At the base of the post she finds a strip of algae, lank, like a hank of hair. All at once she is afraid: it will wrap around her ankle, drown her.
Towards shore is brighter. She swims hard, under the water, using her strong long legs and arms, froglike. When she is in the shallows, she sees that Masao has come into shore as well, and is flicking water at Alice and laughing, and that Alice launches herself into the water, grabs his ankles.
After Alice Page 26