After Alice (15 page)

She sidles back to her stool, but it is too late. There is a listening quiet, an awareness, from the other side of the curtain. Her mother and Mrs. Inglis have remembered that she is within earshot. They will say no more.

Alice, in Sidonie's imagination, in the place she sorts and stores everything, is a wisteria pod: long, silvery, languidly curved, probably stuffed with silky down. Sidonie can see in her mind a picture of Alice the seed pod: the shimmery white seed hairs lying smooth, tightly packed, all going in one direction. Alice isn't quite as tall as Sidonie is, but is willowy rather than gawky, as Sidonie is. She has hair that is almost naturally platinum blonde and is a beauty.

Alice is treated, now that she has been away, as if she were a little different from the rest of the family, from Sidonie and her parents. She doesn't have to eat the same food and has new clothes and is allowed to visit the friends she has made at college, the town girls, instead of doing chores. The girls Alice has made friends with are Nancy and Diana and Jill. They have the clothes advertised in magazines. They have only to do small chores, like brush the cat or dust the piano. Or so Alice tells Sidonie, when she is in a talkative mood.

And Alice works at Fulmerton's in town, in Ladies' Clothing. She must dress up for work, unlike Sidonie, who wears dungarees or shorts, or her mother, who wears sturdy gabardine skirts and aprons, and puts on dresses when company comes.

Alice is a beauty, and is good at everything that Sidonie is not — sewing and writing and baking and dancing. Sidonie is certainly not a beauty, and is possibly a disgrace. Although she is fourteen, she is still scrawny, knobby, with stick legs. She can't walk across a room without tripping over something. She makes messes when she helps in the kitchen, as she has been expected to do the last year, with Alice gone, and her schoolwork is a disgrace. Also, she slouches, and doesn't look people in the eye when they speak to her.

Alice has come back from college even more impatient with Sidonie's looks and comportment, or lack of it.

One day, she had seized Sidonie by the shoulders, forced her to look at her own face in the little square mirror over the bathroom sink. Sidonie had stared at the two faces: Alice's oval, like a three-quarters moon, with its rows of evenly crimped cornsilk waves, and her own, which she could not bear to look at, which reached out to her, jumping, alarming, as if seen through moving ripples. Alice had squeezed Sidonie's jaw in her hand and turned Sidonie's face to the mirror, and held it there until Sidonie raised her eyelids. And finally, the face had stopped moving, for a few seconds, and she was able to see it: square, brownish, with dark brown, wavy hair escaping from her braids and lying on her forehead, her flattish nose, her grey eyes. For a few seconds, it was only a face. It did not shout out the whole history of her being, did not turn her inside out, like a wound, as she felt. For a few seconds she saw this. Then, something else: her eyes were not round like Alice's, but long and just slightly slant, and her eyebrows made another long line at the same angle and so did her hairline and the edge of her cheekbones. Now her face was a pleasing arrangement of long, slightly arched, lines, like a painting of the sea or cirrus clouds. Only the mouth, with the lips pulled back in a sort of snarl, ruined the effect.

Sidonie is not a beauty, but Alice is: that is what people know of her. It is her job.

Alice must have beautiful clothes, have her hair styled, wear gloves and hats. Sidonie does not wish for any of this. She does not wish to be Alice, only to admire Alice, and for Alice to be kinder to her. And when Alice has found a husband, someone to care for her, to give her what she deserves; then she will be happy.

All the stories say so.

And that is the first she had heard of Mr. Defoe.

Perched on her stool, listening to Mother and Mrs. Inglis plot: what had she learned? More than gossip: she had ingested, with her milk and graham crackers, something more insidious. A sense of separation that had not served her or Alice well. Respectability: how Mother and Mrs. Inglis both had cherished that hothouse plant. So much effort. How they had fought, how much energy they had put into cultivating that glossy thing, for their children. How they had worked to provide for their children something they themselves did not completely understand. And how ephemeral, how untenable it had been, for all of them, and how deadly, in the end, for them all.

Yet she can see what they fought for, and does not know that she would have had it different. Her world has been larger, richer, because she had the opportunities for education beyond the rows of fruit trees. And she does not know how that wider world would have been brought to her without the trappings of culture surrounding it. What was possible in those days?

She shuts up the trunk, poking the billowing cellophane bags back inside, ineffectually. It's too much: What's shut in there is too much.

And now it is May and feels like summer.
She takes a trip to Vernon to hear a jazz trio play at the college. (How Vernon has come along!) She'd invited first Cynthia, then Justin, to come with her to the little concert, but both had pled prior engagements. Her own fault; she hadn't thought of asking someone to come along until too late. She leaves her house an hour earlier than she needs to and takes a detour, driving off the highway to find the old track (now paved, and lined with houses) that they had followed to the gold mine. The paving doesn't go all the way though: it stops, perhaps a quarter of a mile short. She is relieved: the hill is still there in its loose curtain of trees, a granite knob rising from the other slopes.

On the way back to the highway, she takes the route that winds up through the orchards, and sees stick-legs of the tall ladders among the rows of trees, men and women thrust head and shoulders into the sharp spring green of the leafy canopy.

Thinning. She has done that. Her fingers, in her sensory memory, twist around small furred fruit: little plush ears. The fruit that will not survive, will not be food. (The fruit that will not reach fruition.) She can remember the last time, fifty years ago.

During thinning, everyone works: most of the kids miss school. Alice has her job, of course, but Sidonie and Mother and Father, Walter and Mr. Rilke are all out in the orchard early, early, in the cool fresh dawn. Walter's cousins Trudy and Anna, who are too young to thin, are conscripted to rake the small hard unripe fruit from the mowed grass under the trees, as Sidonie used to do. Father has mowed before the thinning to make the fruit easier to pick up. If it is left on the ground, it will rot and foster pests.

Sidonie and Walt must each finish half a row per day. Mother and Father and Mr. Rilke can do much more. They work longer, too: from dawn till dark.

Thinning seems to take forever this year. Sidonie worries about missing school, and the apricots, she notices, are a little larger every day. It's almost too late, and the ones left have already had to share too much of the tree's sap and sunlight with their neighbours.

Thinning seems a strange thing to do, if you think about it. When the bees and warmth have been plentiful during blossom time, and the fruit has set in heavily, as many as eight or nine of the little fruits have to be removed for every one that is left. It seems preposterously wasteful. Mother says, “When I first thinned, coming from the prairies in the Depression time and hardly having seen fruit, I couldn't believe we were supposed to take all of that fruit off. I never thinned clean enough. And then when your father came up here, it was the same all over again.” But it seems odd to Sidonie, too, though she's lived in the orchards all her life, and understands that if the fruit isn't thinned out, none of the fruit will grow big and juicy; it'll all be small sour fruit.

The thinners stand on tall A-shaped ladders, dropping the green fruit to the ground below. It makes hardly a sound. Father keeps them spaced when they're thinning, so that they don't chatter and waste time. In the morning, the low sun slants in through the trees, and the orchard is alive with birds and light and the rustling of leaves in the breeze. The big trees are ships tossing gently in a sea: the ladders are rigging. But in the heat of the day, everything is still, silent, deep in the dappled pale green shade of early spring

It's strange to be thinning in such silence. Usually Alice is there, and Masao and the men from the camp. Even neighbours are hired, so that the thinning can be finished in a couple of days. And then everyone moves on to the next orchards. It's always the same order, because the fruit is not all exactly at the same stage. Some orchards face in a more southerly direction; others are sheltered, free of frost pockets; others slope more steeply or are in shadow part of the day. And everyone, people like Mr. Rilke, who have only a dozen acres, and orchardists like Father and Mr. Inglis, who own a hundred acres, knows what order they will come in, and everyone who can works in the orchards for as long as it takes for all the work to be done.

But Mr. Defoe has changed the order of things. He's started thinning earlier, and hired all the people to come and work in Mr. Inglis's orchards who would usually be working in Father's right now. Father was angry — he stopped Mr. Defoe as he drove by in his truck, and said “What are you playing at, my man?” in a loud voice. Mr. Defoe didn't get out of the truck; he said, “Now look here, von Täler, I'm running things now.” Then Father talked to Mr. Inglis, and Sidonie didn't know what Mr. Inglis said.

Sidonie doesn't mind the quiet, though for the first couple of days, she is stiff from thinning, and her arms and back so sore she has trouble sleeping. Mother rubs arnica lineament into their shoulders, and the house smells of it; a hot, angry smell. But in the daytime, in the trees with their new sharp green leaves, nobody is angry, only working very hard to snap off the little green nubs. When they come in for the evening, Sidonie tries to do her pages of math and geography and composition. But her fingers cramp up, and won't hold the pen. The muscles for holding the pen are the same muscles as for the tiny twist and pull that snaps off the fruit, Father says, rubbing Sidonie's fingers between his palms, blowing on them. Sidonie does the dishes, even though it's not her turn: the hot water is so soothing.

The thinning is taking too long. Already they should be starting the apples and pears, but the apricots and peaches aren't done. Father says: the children shouldn't be out of school any longer. Father goes to ask Mr. Nakamura, who looks after the Clare's orchard, for some help, but Mr. Nakamura is working as hard as he can. He can't spare anyone.

“It is unfortunate,” Mr. Nakamura says, and Father nods.

“A bad business. We will have to do something. I've spoken to Inglis, but he says his hands are tied.”

The next morning, Masao turns up, rapping lightly on the kitchen door before they're even all dressed.

“I said I was too sick to work today,” he grins. It's a joke: the men in the camps have all been working for Mr. Defoe. But Masao has come to help
them
.

Alice is smoothing her hair back in the mirror over the kitchen sink. When Masao says he's staying, she puts down her hairbrush. “I'm sick too,” she says. And on the telephone to Fulmerton's, she sounds so quiet and faint that Sidonie wants to laugh. “Mrs. Lloyd? I'm afraid I can't come in today. I've got such a headache. . . flu, I think.”

So they have two more pairs of hands. Alice and Masao are fast at thinning, even though they talk and laugh and pelt each other with green fruit.

And then they are at the last tree, and the thinning finished, but it is not a triumph, because they are all so dirty and tired, and have not eaten a good meal for days, and it is so late: the spraying has been delayed. People stop by the house every evening to see if there is work, but the orchards are all finished now. Mr. Inglis's orchards have all been thinned, and also the independent farmers. There will be no work until July, when the cherries are ripe.

“And what then?” asks Father. “Will Defoe hire all the pickers at once, too? Pick the green cherries?”

“I'm sure it will all work out,” Mother says, but Sidonie thinks she doesn't sound sure. She wonders if Mother remembers that Mr. Defoe is supposed to marry Alice.

Mr. Inglis's truck is stolen, near the end of the thinning season, and found in Vernon. Everyone suspects the Platt boys, but they protest their innocence vehemently (and probably truthfully for once, Father says).

“It was them out-of-town pickers that the new foreman hired, eh? Them
interinits
,” Sidonie hears Len Platt saying, in front of the Red and White Grocery.

Mr. Defoe comes to talk to Father
and drink whiskey in the parlour. None of the family is allowed in. “Business,” Father says. There is no shouting, but after Mr. Defoe leaves, Father seems smaller, in a frightening way.

And then he comes over again two evenings later, driving his red truck up the driveway into the yard. Sidonie has been getting the eggs. He brakes the truck beside her and stops. His sandy hair looks damp, and he smells like soap. Sidonie notices the black hairs on the forearm resting on the open cab window.

“Hello, Sidonie,” he says. “Is your sister home?”

Sidonie feels herself scowl. She wants to say no, but Alice has already seen the truck: The back door slams and Alice strides out, wearing a blue skirt and white blouse. Her tanned legs are bare, and she has sandals on her feet, and her pale pink toenail polish looks shockingly nude in comparison to the bright red polish most women are wearing.

Sidonie asks, “Alice! Where are you going?”

“See ya,” Alice says, climbing into the truck beside Mr. Defoe. He reverses and turns the truck, nearly crushing the mock-orange bush, and then speeds down the driveway.

If Mr. Defoe marries Alice, he'll be Sidonie's brother-in-law. But maybe it would be a good thing. If he were married to Alice, he couldn't treat Father badly, could he? Perhaps Alice will convince him to change his mind about hiring away all of the orchard workers. Perhaps she is doing that right now: talking earnestly but sweetly to Mr. Defoe, explaining why it's better to cooperate.