After Alice

by Karen Hofmann

  She thought — no, felt — how will I walk out in the world, now that Mr. Defoe has done this to me?

  She thought: well, it is not the end of the world. The world makes a big fuss about this, but it is not the end of the world.

  She felt intense pity for Alice, who would marry Mr. Defoe, and belong to him, and not know what he was. It did not occur to her that Alice might not want to know. She herself would want to know.

  She saw that the world was not as it had seemed, and she began to think very carefully about how she must be in the world, and that changed things for her completely. She saw that a literal world existed under the one that people spoke about, and that this world was both more and less dangerous than the one represented in words. She saw that people were unable to speak directly about the literal world, and that they spent a great deal of their energy speaking about it indirectly, and pretending it was not as it actually was, while at the same time creating a detailed coded picture of it, and not letting each other forget about it.

  She felt sorry for Alice, and decided to tell her, but could not. The day of the wedding drew closer, and she could not. She saw little of Alice, now, in avoiding Mr. Defoe: that was one reason.

  She decided that she would write a note to Alice. She wrote it carefully, composing it all first, using her best Alice-style handwriting. She tried to use a grown-up way of speaking.

  Gordon Defoe raped me, she wrote. She had first written “Mr. Defoe,” but that sounded childish.

  There: clear and concise. She put the note into Alice’s apron pocket: why? Because she was about to press it into Alice’s hand in the kitchen, and lost her nerve. When Alice finds it in her pocket, it will be detached, somehow, from Sidonie. Alice will get the message, but it will be somehow separate, authorless.

  The message will be the thing Alice gets, not the connection with Sidonie. Alice will read it and know what to do.

  Only Alice doesn’t find it: Mother does, borrowing Alice’s clean apron, for hers is sticky from canning. Mother finds it, and thinks it is from Alice.

  Mother calls Sidonie down from her room, where she is reading. “Why are you hiding away? We have company.” But it is only Mrs. Inglis, who often walks over in the evenings to chat for a few minutes on the porch or in the sitting room.

  Mother is agitated: she rubs her hands, feints to the left and right, finally seems to come to a decision. “Let’s sit in the kitchen,” she says to Mrs. Inglis. “I’m baking a sponge and want to keep an eye on it. Sidonie, you may stay here in the sitting room and read, but I want you near if I call you for help.” By which Sidonie understands that she is to watch for anyone coming through and alert Mother in time. Mother and Mrs. Inglis go through the wine flannel curtain. Their voices are even more audible in this direction than when Sidonie eavesdrops on the parlour from the kitchen. Mother doesn’t know how the sound carries; perhaps Sidonie’s ears are just much sharper than Mother’s.

  “What should I do, what should I do?” Mother wails.

  “What does she want?” Mrs. Inglis asks.

  “What does she want?” Mother sounds bewildered by this question.

  “Well, does she want to lay charges?” Mrs. Inglis asks. “Does she feels this was an attack? Or has she been inviting it, as girls do, only not wanting it so precipitously? There’s some grey area there. Or maybe she’s pregnant and doesn’t want to admit she’s jumped the gun?”

  Mother says, “No, no. . . . I don’t believe Alice would. . . . She’s a sensible girl.”

  Tears in Mother’s voice now, incredibly. Sidonie would almost say she sounded frightened.

  “What do I do?”

  “What do you want to do, Frances?” Mrs. Inglis asks, calmly, and Sidonie thinks: how rarely it is that she hears adults addressed by their first names.

  “I don’t know. . . . I don’t know. It’s so terrible! After all my hard work, that it should come to this, that I should have to have this in my face. . . .”

  “It may not be as terrible as you think,” Mrs. Inglis says. “I think you must have a heart-to-heart with Alice. See what she meant by that note. Do you have it still?”

  A crackle of unfolding paper, a pause.

  Mrs. Inglis says, “Are you sure Alice wrote this?”

  Mother is indignant. “Do you think I don’t know my own daughter’s handwriting?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Inglis says. “I’d talk to Alice, before anything else. Find out what really went on.”

  “I will,” Mother says.

  Sidonie is awakened by rough shaking, a slap. She has been waiting for Alice to come home, to come upstairs, to intercept Alice and warn her. But she has, impossibly, fallen asleep. Her first sensation is astonishment. For the past few days she has felt herself drifting, never fully conscious, but not sleeping, either. But here! She has been asleep after all. And it is Mother shaking and slapping her.

  “What have you done,” Mother cries. “Stupid, dirty girl!”

  There are a number of things she might have done: tracked chicken manure into the house, left the frying pan unscoured, forgotten to put her sanitary napkin in the outhouse drop. But she knows: her stomach a lump of cold pie dough, she knows what it is. She begins to cry.

  Mother flies at her, boxing her ears, pulling her hair. “Stop that! Pull yourself together and tell me what you’ve done!”

  She cannot speak the words to Mother; it is Alice, slouching in, pale and mean-lipped, who gets it out of her. Alice is cold and dry, and Sidonie is able to speak, to tell everything, to not break down.

  “Well,” Alice says, matter-of-factly, as if she’s been sweeping up a broken dish, “That’s that.”

  Mother’s expression changes. “Do you think it’s so bad?” she says to Alice. “What if — what if she were to go away. She could stay with her aunt Mary in Harwood maybe. Nothing would have to. . .”

  They’ve all been speaking in hoarse whispers, but now Alice shouts, her face screwed up and red: “Gaaah! What are you, retarded?” and bangs out of the room, slamming the door, thumping down the stairs.

  Sidonie can her Father move in his bed, call out sleepily: “Was ist los?”

  A terrible empathy between herself and her mother: a terrible shared understanding that Father must not know. At that moment, she would have stabbed herself in the heart to sever that connection.

  Mother walks out into the hallway. “Everything’s fine, Peter,” she says. “Girls having a little argument; that’s all.”

  Please please please let this not be spoken of again, Sidonie wishes, and it is not, at least within her hearing. She feels reprieved, lucky.

  She had wished never to hear of it, and she had not. She had wished never to see Gordon Defoe again, but he had stayed on as the Inglises’ foreman. She had understood that to be the price of the silence.

  And Alice had put away her Lady of the Lake frocks, and had begun to spend time with Buck Kleinholz, to whom, before, she would not have given the time of day.

  She had wished for the wrong thing, of course. She had buried not only herself, but also Alice, with undeserved shame. How had they not been protected, how had they not been defended?

  Always going at things slant-wise; always drawing near but missing the point, that was herself. She had entered the field of psychology, searching, obviously, for some connection, some understanding of what went on in other people’s heads, but had slid off on the tangent of experiment design, always at an arm’s length from the conclusions she wanted. She had chosen Adam as a lover, then married him, condemning both of them to decades of dissatisfaction. She had adopted Cynthia, her sister’s child, and yet turned her over to the primary care of Adam, never stepping into the role of female parent. Never letting herself take Alice’s place.

  She had moved back to Marshall’s Landing, clearly following a deep, intuitive longing for home, and had been sidetracked by logical considerations (or the fear that often takes logic as its disguise) and had landed down in this house just kilo
metres from where she really wanted to be.

  To be whole; to see wholly: those have always been her goals. But how often in her stochastic approach has she missed the mark? It is not good enough: there is not time for this, now. She must learn to listen, to be still and listen. To get it right.

  On the other hand (and there is always, it seems, another hand), the stochastic is perhaps all there is. There is no knowing; all that can be hoped for is that something will hit the mark. Or perhaps there is no mark, no centre: and where the arrows hit most must be declared the intended bull’s eye.

  LADY OF THE LAKE

  In July 2007, Walter’s son Jack calls: Walter has had a heart attack. “We’re short-handed,” Jack says. “We’re going to have to leave the fruit on the trees at Beauvoir, unless you want to hire someone to do it. Thought I should let you know.”

  Oh, it happens: fruit left on the trees. She has seen it happen. It is only a small tragedy. But the waste. A small chance that Alex, who is unemployed again, might be interested. Possibly he might have some friends. She’ll ask him.

  But surprisingly, half an hour after her phone call, she has a whole army of pickers: not Alex, who’s away, but Tasha and Steve and Debbie; Cynthia and Justin, who profess to having always wanted to pick fruit, and even Kevin, who will drive up from the coast, taking time off work, bringing his former wife, his stepsons.

  So they have become orchardists: they have camped out here, ten of them, all weekend. Kevin’s former wife is Native, or, as she should say, First Nations. She remembers Cynthia has told her that Kevin had been with this woman the longest — perhaps seven or eight years — of all of his relationships. But Sidonie has never met her, and nobody had mentioned Celeste’s background. The boys, Cashiel and Fearon, who look about eleven and thirteen, are lighter-skinned than their mother.

  “Celeste has picked cherries before,” Sidonie observes, watching the woman sling her bucket over one arm and hoist a ladder, balancing it on her shoulders.

  Kevin says, “Oh, yeah — she grew up around here, and did some picking as a kid, didn’t you, Celeste?”

  “I did,” she says. She has the soft, slightly guttural voice of one who has spoken a native language as a child, Sidonie notices, surprised.

  “She’s one of the Cedrics,” Kevin says. Sidonie remembers the family, remembers Dolores and Sam, who were not much older than her. “Dolores,” Sidonie says aloud, and Celeste says, “She was my auntie. She’s dead.” Celeste is a little reserved, wary.

  “What’s the story with her and Kevin?” Steve asks Cynthia, and Cynthia shrugs.

  The boys seem easy with Kevin: joking, looking at him with open faces, though they are, perhaps naturally, very shy with the other adults. The boys pick slowly, for the first couple of hours eating more than they put into their pails, and then slacking off their picking, complaining of tiredness and boredom. But Steve and Kevin are both easy on them. She remembers now Mr. Rilke and Mr. Tanaka and Father would holler at her and Alice and Walt, holler at and drive them. They were incompetent, slow, rough on the fruit, moved their ladders carelessly.

  Perhaps it was necessary. Everyone’s livelihood depended on the older children, the adolescents, working as hard as adults. But how they all, almost all, grew to hate the constant reprimands and corrections. And to hate, perhaps by association, the trees, the monotony, the extremes of weather, the physical labour.

  They work through the rows steadily, a small swarm of human locusts. Debbie brings tubs of meat sandwiches, ice chests of water and pop. They work all Saturday; at three, in the heat of the day, Kevin takes the boys and Celeste, Tasha and Justin, down to the lake in the back of the truck. The rest of them lie down in the shade of the spruces.

  Steve says, “I should have brought my generator; I could get the pump working and we’d have water in the house.”

  Cynthia says, “Where’s Alex?”

  “Don’t know,” Steve says, a little angrily. “He took off a few days ago in his car with his sleeping bag and a few clothes.”

  “I’m thinking he might have gone to Whistler to visit Jessica,” Debbie says.

  Sidonie had asked the same question, when she arrived at the orchard earlier, and Justin had said, with a sidelong look at Tasha, that Alex had gone to look for something he needed, which somehow didn’t sound quite as legitimate as Debbie’s explanation. She hopes he is not engaging in some risky enterprise. He has been restless since spring, unsettled, at times almost sullen.

  It is too bad that they can’t manage to pull off Alex’s idea. But there are too many impossibilities.

  When they’re too tired to pick any more that day, they all go down to the lake again. A light evening breeze ruffles the water, and the wavelets lap and shuffle the small polished stones. A hiss, a drag, a click: shellac, shellac, the pebbles say. The breeze, blissfully cool, smells of sage and dust, of mud, of cool wet leaves, of iron, of fruit esters, of limestone, of the lake itself. Sidonie has brought her bathing suit. “You’re going to swim?” Fearon asks, and Cashiel scoffs, “Put her toes in, just. You know old ladies.”

  Sidonie swims out into the lake in a wide arc. The water in the evening light waves green and gold around her, vanishing both to the north and south in rounded blue points. The hills curve, deeper blue, on both sides. The lake is a blue-green egg, herself the centre. That’s a trick of perspective, though, thinking the lake is oval; it’s really a long, narrow, hundred-kilometre snake, slightly curved, between a kilometre and five kilometres in width.

  She swims out a hundred metres or so, then begins looping back, toward the cluster of pilings, which rise perhaps three metres from the water. There is still a ladder. She climbs it, not as quickly as she had done as a girl.

  “Be careful, Miss,” one of the small boys perched above says to her. “There’s broken pilings under the water.”

  “Yes, there are,” she says.

  When she pulls herself up, the boys leap from the posts. One plunges head first, another feet first, into the green and gold mirror below. In a few seconds, which seem longer, they emerge in little silver explosions of spray.

  She knows she is showing off. But there is a point of honour here. She measures the distance, glances back at the others on the shore. Only Justin and Cynthia are watching her, though Justin nudges Tasha to look. She focuses on the clear jade surface, flexes her feet, raises her arms over her head, arches her back. The boys below her are quiet. She springs outward and upward. The air rushes by her only briefly (fifteen feet per second, she thinks) before she cuts cleanly into the water. The rush of water against her skin, the slowing, in the dim depths. Deep here, but she turns, thrusts with her feet, her thighs perfect machines in this element, follows her own trail of silver bubbles back into the light.

  The next day Sidonie wakes with her arms and shoulders at once locked rigid and on fire from the repetitive motion of the picking. She can hardly pull a T-shirt over her head. But here is still a day’s worth of cherries to pick.

  The day is even hotter than before. She considers opening up the house to give everyone a place to escape the heat and to rest, but decides no, no. Everyone complains of sore shoulders and arms. Under the trees, she sees from her ladder Kevin massaging Celeste’s wrists, pressing his lips to them.

  Celeste laughing.

  When they’re picking in adjacent trees, Steve says to her, “I picked up this interesting book at a flea market. It’s called The ’60s: Montreal Thinks Big. Do you know it? It’s about architecture.”

  She knows it, though she hasn’t thought about it for years. She is not surprised by Steve’s comment; Cynthia has told her that he buys and reads his way indiscriminately through boxes of secondhand books.

  “It’s really theoretical,” Steve says. “I can’t get my head around a lot of it. But it mentions your husband — your late husband, I should say. Adam St. Regis. That’s him, right? Same last name as Cynthia.”

  Yes.

  “I didn’t know he worked on Hab
itat,” Steve says. “I’ve always been interested in that. I’d like to see it.”

  “I lived in it,” Sidonie says. “From the time it was built until, oh, the mid-eighties. Adam lived there until he died.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Stephen says, and she thinks in his voice is something of the regret of a possible life. Her fault: she had abandoned him. As she had others. Will they continue to ambush her, these losses?

  Coming in for a break, she finds the boys stretched out on the lawn, under the trees. “You can come up onto the porch,” she says. “It’s cooler.” The younger boy, Cash, shows the whites of his eyes. “I’m scared to go near that house. I heard someone was murdered in there!”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “My dad told us. My other dad.”

  “Is it true?” the older boy, Fearon, asks. He is going to be good-looking, Sidonie thinks, with his clean jawline, his high cheekbones and deep-set, almond-shaped eyes, which are green, not black, and his dark hair and long thick eyelashes.

  “Yes, it’s true,” she admits.

  “Who was it?”

  “My sister,” she says. “Steve and Kevin and Cynthia’s mother. Her name was Alice.” And as she says this, she feels a sigh, a release of air from the open front door.

  “Did her old man do it?” Fearon asks, knowingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you used to live here, then?” Cash asks.

  “Yes,” Sidonie says. “I was born in this house. And my sister too.”

  “Did you have electricity?”

  “Oh my goodness. Yes.”

  “My grandma didn’t, in her house,” Fearon says. “It must have been boring without computers or TV.”

  “We had a record player,” Sidonie says. “And a radio. And we read books and magazines, and drew a lot. And spent a lot of time outside.”

  “Fearon can draw,” Cash says.

  “Not really,” Fearon says, but he is pleased.

  “My dad, my real dad, is from here too,” Cashiel says. “Do you know him?”