After Alice (25 page)

Now she must be nice to Lottie Kleinholz, who is as stupid as a Silkie hen, but is Buck's sister. The Kleinholzes are invited to dinner: all of them still at home. Buck's younger brother Gerry, who once pelted Sidonie with pieces of frozen horse manure. His brother John, who has a wall-eye and a lisp. His sister Lottie, who stares like a rabbit in headlights when anyone speaks to her. The parents: nasty Mr. Kleinholz, whose eyes run, and who is famous for trying to touch girls' breasts; nobody will play at Lottie's house. Mrs. Kleinholz, with her pale eyes and overbite, whom Sidonie does not actually dislike. She looks like a rabbit, but she is kind, speaks kindly to all children, in her accented voice.

They all come to dinner. Mother cooks a large pork roast, but with an air of resignation rather than celebration. There is no cake: Mrs. Kleinholz has insisted on contributing some pies. And no garden salad or young peas, for it is too early in spring.

Sidonie is told to take Lottie upstairs. In her room, which she shares with Alice, Sidonie sits on her bed while Lottie wanders around. Lottie seems confused by the pictures, the framed reproductions that hang on the walls: why are these here? Who painted them? Are they of one of your homes? It's as if she's never seen paintings hanging in a house before.

When she bends to examine the rabbit lamp, Sidonie says “Don't touch that,” sharply. Then Lottie sits on Alice's bed and stares at Sidonie.

Father has bought wine for the dinner, over Mother's objections. “They'll think it's a party,” Mother had said. Father had been sheepish: “Only a little Gewürztraminer. It's customary.”

Mr. Kleinholz drinks three or four glasses quite quickly, and begins making lewd references, and Mother gives Father her dark look. But Mrs. Kleinholz's cheeks become pink, and she seems less sad, and almost pretty. During dinner they talk about apples —
Ja, the Gravenstein is a good producer, but hasty to get thrips
— and after dinner Buck's younger siblings and Sidonie are sent outside while the parents and Alice and Buck talk about the wedding arrangements.

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 called 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.