After Alice (34 page)

She stops for a moment. Around the base of a dogwood, where the glossy red stems branch out, the snow has thawed into multiple overlapping circles, and among the circles are the cross-hatchings of bird tracks. She waits; one more moment, two, and then the chickadees come back as silently as they must have left at her approach, landing in the bright ruddy branches, then hopping down to forage in the leaf litter.

It is serious business, foraging for food in the wild in January. Claw and bill, they sort and seize, only a slight toss of their throats showing that they have found sustenance under the withered leaves. How diligent they are, how resourceful, their sleek grey bodies and black-and-white hoods moving quickly, purposefully, economically.

And then she moves her hand in its white fleece glove, and they scatter upward and into the brush like blown leaves.

Two hours to circumambulate the lake; that breaks the back of the afternoon.

She returns to her house after her walk along the lake path, a little less heavy. Succored. Is that the word? She says it aloud, hears the pun. Suckered. Suckered into carrying on for another day, another evening. Though it's not as if there's much choice.

FISH GIRL

When Sidonie was born,
she got stuck. Her head was very large, and she was a large baby altogether. Dr. Stewart estimated at least ten pounds, though they didn't think to get the scale from the shed. The district health nurse, visiting a week later, said her scale weighed Sidonie at ten pounds and four ounces. Mother was in labour for seventy-two hours, she says. Though Sidonie knows how babies are born — Alice and Hugh have enlightened her, and anyway, she has watched the cat have kittens — when she imagines her own birth, she sees Mother pulling her out of a hole in the ground.

The hole would have to be somewhere on the outer edge of the garden near the rhubarb and asparagus patches, where the orchard grass started. It would have to be smaller than the well, but larger than a marmot's tunnel. Mother would have pulled for three days. That was labour: Mother bent over double, grunting, sweat flying from her forehead, darkening her dress beneath her armpits and breasts. Mother pulling Sidonie by the hair, which sticks straight up like beet or carrot tops. It is not painful, but a pleasant sort of pressure. And then, finally, Sidonie bursting from the earth, head first of course, and Mother flying backwards, head over heels. Heels over head. Arse over teakettle, as Mr. Inglis would say. But ending up sitting right-side-up, turnip-headed Sidonie lying in her lap, naked except for a fine dark fur over her private parts. And blue as a saskatoon berry.

Mother says that Sidonie was blue when she was born. Blue and limp. “I was quite sure she was dead,” Mother says. “After three days of that. But Dr. Stewart put her across her arm and massaged the life back into her. And then she stitched me up, because her shoulder came up at the last minute and ripped me from stem to stern. I couldn't sit without a cushion under me for six weeks.”

Stem to stern: what does that mean? But Sidonie can't ask, because she hears this narrative from behind the wine flannel curtain. She is not supposed to have heard it.

Sometimes Mother will say about Dr. Stewart, “Without her, neither of us would be alive today.” And sometimes she will say, “Doctors — hang you up on a meat hook and carve you up, just as soon as look at you.”

This is women talk: conversation that takes place in hushed voices when there are no men or children around. Sidonie extracts from what she overhears that childbirth and pregnancy are battles played out on women's bodies: fierce, violent, unnatural calamities. The cat has her kittens silently, slipping them out, little wet packages, into the hay, bending her head around to nip and lick off the caul — which she then neatly eats — and, with her Turkish-towel tongue, licks the kittens into blind mewing life.

Once Sidonie hears someone ask Mother if Sidonie had been quite all right after being without air for so long. Mother says, coldly, “Without air?”

“You said she was blue.”

“Oh, yes — well. She only needed to start breathing. A good slap on the backside would have done it, I daresay.”

“I knew a woman in Calgary,” this woman says, “whose baby wasn't breathing when he was born. And the doctor got him breathing finally, but he was quite handicapped, poor child, though he looked normal. I wondered if it would have been kinder not to interfere.”

Mother says, “Well, there's nothing wrong with Sidonie. She's just always been awkward.”

She remembers herself at eleven or twelve. She and Father are doing the dishes. Father says “Time and motion!” and “One-two-three-hoopla!” and whistles Bach, which is very good washing-up music. Sidonie cleans the table knives as her father taught her: put them in the sink all facing the same direction, grab them by the handles, fan out the blades, pass the wash rag back and front, swish, drop onto the drain board. The rhythm of the whistling moves her hands, gives her brain a chance to think, but not think itself into the usual tangle.

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-sticky 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.