After Alice (26 page)

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.

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.