After Alice (6 page)

Plucking stones from her mother's garden plot, she remembered as the azimuth of childhood ennui and ill-usage. Blue clay lay below the loam, below the thin topsoil coaxed with its yearly feedings of compost and rotted horse manure. The blue clay spat up stone after stone, dribbles of granite, quartz-speckled eggs, which they must gather in galvanized tin buckets, spring after spring, gumbo agglomerating on gumboots, bent-over back seizing, leaping sixty years forward in its cramps and spasms. Cold-stiffened fingers bruised by the stones; nails, already chewed and chipped, further reduced to splinters. And the stones never stopped surfacing. Father, striding by in his leather breeches that never wore out, his knit-by-mother wool socks, his boots:
Ah, the labours of Hercules, girls! Good work, good work!

Her mother, like the medieval Christian monks, like the Buddhists, had believed in the efficacy of manual work as a grounding exercise. And she herself has designed experiments in manual activity for specific kinds of developmental issues. Digital manipulation, the working of the palms and fingers in sand boxes and sinks, miniature gardens, Lego and Meccano sets. Standard ideas in her field, now, but she had been a pioneer researcher. And she had been unique in prescribing goals, so that the activities resembled work, rather than open-ended play. (She wonders, now, briefly, if anyone has used her ideas in conjunction with large motor stimulation — labour, in other words — and has given subjects large plots of earth to dig up, floors to scrub. Probably some ethical difficulties there. People of her parents' generation, of course, had no qualms about child labour.)

But her mother, her father: they would not have, had not, recognized much of what she has been engaged in as
work
. Is that the issue? She had produced a lot of work at the Institute. She had kept on target. She had kept her division on target, ahead of target, month after month (however the junior staff might complain). She and her team had designed and tested and created computer models for dozens of experiments each year, and these experiments had been performed, and knowledge gained.

She has designed experiments to test the learning, which is to say the memory, of mice and men and mutant fruit flies, of monkeys and dolphins, newborn humans and those with senile dementia. She has seen her experiment designs used to discover the growth of neuron paths in flatworms, fireflies, houseflies and helmetless bicycle-accident victims. She has provided the means to test hundreds of premises, and dozens of potential therapeutic remedies. She has seen, as a result of her work, cautious results of reversal (more precisely, adaptation to) profound brain trauma. She has seen results of her work used to etch, with lasers, unhappy memories in the brains of fruit flies.

Work of the eyes and brain: of the head. Had she limited herself too much, there? She has practiced the discipline of putting ideas to paper, of assembling and compiling information for decades; it is in her bones. Are her bones now rejecting it? For they refuse to move into the rhythm of reading and writing. She feels this resistance as an actual stiffness, she notices: an inability to flex muscles, to bend, to incline: a disinclination. She is unproductive, unable to move forward.

It does not make sense: she has time now to work, and she does not work. Perhaps she has needed the pressure of the group, after all? But she had been a loner, an intellectual
coureur de bois
. (That was not her term: her director, Dr. Haephestes, had used it, beaming with apparent genuineness, in his speech at her retirement dinner in the fall. She is not sure now that the term was meant entirely as praise.) She had led teams, given direction. (She had not been particularly good at working in a team, but she had led teams.) Is it that she misses her assistants, her researchers and technicians, the way a paraplegic misses limbs?

She has been happy, since her move, only when working, she realizes. And now she does not work.

Is she wallowing? She is wallowing.
Accidie
. Another sin.

“I have a question,”
her niece Cynthia announces, in her thickened speech. They are eating at a popular franchise restaurant off the highway, in the strip that extends now ten kilometres north from the city. It's noisy, and Sidonie has to lean forward to understand her. (Perhaps she is starting to lose her own hearing?) She has been expecting a question or request. Cynthia doesn't often take lunches during the week; she says she doesn't have time. She is an art teacher at an elementary school, and expected to do extracurricular things at noon hour. And here it's a Wednesday, and she has asked to meet Sidonie for lunch.

Cynthia, in her late thirties, looks younger, as women of her generation seem to do. Prolonged adolescence: women in their forties dress like teenagers. Well-off women, at least. Entering the restaurant, Sidonie had seen her first from the back, her shoulder-length blonde hair, her puffy silvery parka, her slim, low-slung jeans, and had not recognized her. Had thought she was a young girl, at first.

“Go ahead,” she says. A habit of Cynthia's childhood, to announce formally that she has a question, before asking it. Even if the question is minor. Perhaps it is something she was taught at her school for the deaf; an aid to being understood more precisely.

“The question is about my mother,” Cynthia says.

She is wearing a very thin T-shirt with an odd screen-printed image of the moon, and a lot of silver jewelry — three chains, one with a silver arrow pendant, one with a bluish translucent stone, and a silver bracelet set also with semi-precious blue stones. Cynthia is fond, Sidonie notices, of a certain kind of hand-made, artisanal costume jewelry.

“Yes; go ahead.” She keep her voice calm; doesn't show irritation at her niece, who is fiddling with her fork. Why can't Cynthia ever broach a subject naturally? It is not as if she ever says no.
You
spoil her
, Clara has said, on many occasions.
You don't have to make
everything up to her
. But apparently she does.

“I wanted to ask you,” Cynthia asks, “if you've thought some more about letting me look at my mother's things?”

Cynthia has asked this of her, now, a few times. An ingenious answer is needed, to buy time: all of her alarm bells are going off. Sidonie says, “I've been busy. . . .”

What is there, besides Alice's little boxes of keepsakes, of schoolwork and party invitations, that Cynthia might be interested in? There are, in fact, two dozen or more large boxes and trunks from Beauvoir, and they have been in storage for four decades. She does not know what is in them, precisely. Or rather, in part of her brain there is a precise index of those boxes, but she is not, at present, willing to access it.

Cynthia says, “You said once that you had kept her personal things, and you would give them to me when I was grown up and had a place of my own.”

Had she said that? But she must have. And now, certainly, Cynthia is grown up. Grown up, with a nearly grown child of her own. She is not likely to carelessly leave something behind in a move, or to let small children spoil things. Sidonie has been procrastinating, avoiding, locking her mind against it. Though she hasn't succeeded in forgetting about it.

“Yes, you should have them,” Sidonie says. Why is she so reluctant to admit this? A relief, surely, to have them taken off her hands. “They're mostly things from her childhood, you understand. You might not find them that interesting. Our mother, your grandmother, kept everything Alice ever. . .” She had been about to say ‘touched', but that sounded off, in her own head. “. . . everything Alice ever wrote, and all of her little ornaments and bits of jewelry. Nothing of value, of course.”

“Except to you and I,” Cynthia says.

She can't resist deflecting the point with a correction. “You and
me
,” she says. “To you and
me
. They're all in a muddle, the boxes from the old house. It will take me some time to get them out for you. They should all be sorted.”

This is true. She had retrieved the boxes from the storage facility, when she moved back. They need to be sorted; most of what is in them needs, likely, to be thrown away. She has been procrastinating. She has had some idea about sorting the papers — she knows that there are invoices, letters, ledgers from the orchards — with a view to donating them to a local archive. That sort of thing is, apparently, useful. There are even university courses in the history of orcharding. And she ought to go through the photographs, too.

“Where are the boxes?” Cynthia asks. “Are they here, in town? I think you said they were in a storage unit?”

She had not meant to admit it, but she is powerless against direct questions.

“In my basement now.”

“Oh,” Cynthia says, in her slightly guttural speech. Then: “I wonder if you would be willing to let Justin or I help you sort the things out.”

Justin or
me
, not Justin or I. But she does not correct her niece this time.

“I'll think about it,” she says.

What Alice has left behind. Well, it's out of her control, except for those boxes in her basement, the little odds and ends of a life. Those she can deal with. She will take them on. It is her duty. She sees, too, that what is required of her is something more than sorting through the boxes that half-fill her basement. What Cynthia wants is a history, a background, a past. Understandably, perhaps. Sidonie has always been taciturn on the subject of Cynthia's parents. With good reason, of course.

But now more is required. Sidonie can understand that, though she herself is suspicious of this kind of investigation. What one is likely to turn up is rarely useful, and usually only what one already knows. It is the nature of human beings, as well as other sentient things, to try to fit anything new into the patterns they already know.

Yes, a dubious exercise, this knitting up of narratives. Very few have the perception, the curiosity, the courage, perhaps, to really discover anything useful.

But she will begin to sort through the boxes. She hasn't the excuse of a shortage of time, and it would be churlish not to. Also, she would very much prefer, now that she thinks of it, to do this herself, rather than to have Cynthia or one of her reprobate brothers, or any of their children, take it on, either before or after Sidonie's demise. She might as well face facts: she will not be around forever. At some point, someone will have to deal with these things. And there are things that she wants to protect them from, things they likely should not see. As well as things she wants to protect from their eyes.

She allows Justin
to fetch her in Cynthia's car, drive her to the mall, where they may rent, for a nominal sum, a wheelchair, and travel up and down the corridors with their polished stone floors: temples, she thinks, to materialism and conspicuous consumption. She can see that even to someone Justin's age, there is something faintly embarrassing about the mall; something bourgeois. Clara and Anita disapprove, highly, of shopping malls. Yet how open and accessible, compared to the fusty department stores of the city when she had been taken to shop here, as a child. Fulmerton's, Bennett's, with their smell of rubber boots, their utilitarian racks of drab dresses, their supercilious sales clerks. At the mall, she buys socks, underwear. Buys herself some blue jeans, which she has not worn in nearly fifty years, so long ago that they were called dungarees.

She sits with Justin, in the long afternoons when he has no classes, in cafés, as she and Adam — or more precisely, Adam — had sat with Cynthia in cafés twenty years ago, and lets him talk. Justin, like other eighteen-year-olds she knows, does not know what he “wants to do,” as he puts it. He gets good marks in all of his subjects, he says. None appeals to him more than the others. She sees that there is a gap, a disconnect, between his sense of what he likes to do and what he knows or imagines work to be. This state, too, is not uncommon in his generation — a generation of dilettantes, she thinks. We have provided too much. They have not learned the discipline of work.

She recalls her parents and their friends saying the same thing.

In the mall, she sees Justin surreptitiously looking at displays of clothing with skull decorations, loose, long, hooded jackets, and short pants and high-topped sneakers.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. The hoodie, there.”

“Do you want to go in and look at it?”

“No. . . no. It's too young for me.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” she says, surprising herself, her mother's voice rising through her. She makes him turn around, wheel the chair into the store, between the electronic sensors. He explains to her the motifs of skateboarding culture. She offers him the word “iconoclasm,” watches him store it carefully. She buys him the jacket. She supposes that she feels an attachment for Justin because of those early months of close association, when he and Cynthia had lived under her roof, when she had helped to care for him. She does not think of this time often — it was a short time, less than two years. It had been difficult for various reasons, including the practical difficulty of having a baby under the same roof. She had not been used to babies. She had been a great deal worried about Cynthia at that time, and about other things.

It is not especially fondness or pride or protectiveness that she feels, though. She perceives him, necessarily, as healthy and thriving in a transparent bubble. An odd conceit. She has never spoken of it to anyone. She is careful not to speak of Justin to anyone except Cynthia, and then only cautiously. She does not wish to invite scrutiny or censure, or to encroach on someone else's territory. She will not be proprietary.

She had, many nights, walked Justin, a colicky infant, up and down the length of her apartment while Cynthia, still more or less a child herself, had slept. She had tried not to become attached to him, knowing that the arrangement was temporary, that Cynthia would finish her degree and leave. And believing or suspecting at some level that Justin represented some deep, unimaginable betrayal.