After Alice (21 page)

Never a direct mention of Buck: only news of their moves necessitated by his unemployment and failed ventures. Scarcely a mention of the children, except to say that Father had taken Stephen on a fishing trip or that the older ones were running wild: every time they visited, they broke something or hurt themselves.

Kevin cut his lip open on one of Father's chisels. Stephen fell off the shed roof. Paul fell off the shed roof. Kevin tried to climb down the chimney and got stuck in a flue. Paul got a rock in his eye.

On that visit, that Saturday night, Buck didn't come back till past midnight. Sidonie woke to hear shouting, a crash that might not have been the first one, Father getting out of bed and going heavily down the stairs, remonstrations, more shouting. In the morning, Buck, unshaven, undershirted in the kitchen. Alice scrubbing at his shirt in the sink. Buck tossing tiny Paul up in the air, heart-stoppingly high. Alice's sharp rebuke, Buck's surly grin.

Alice and Sidonie and the little boys going to church with Mother; when they got back, Buck honking the truck horn impatiently, rudely, for Alice, while she changed Paul's diaper.

The calm after Alice left, which at least partly answered the question: why did Mother and Father allow it? Why didn't they tell Alice to leave Buck, come back home?

But there are other answers to that question.

On the Saturday evening, after supper, before Buck had come back, Sidonie and Alice had gone up to their old bedroom, sat on their old beds.

“So,” Alice said, surprisingly, “you didn't get to have this room to yourself for very long.”

It is so exactly what Sidonie had thought that she is shocked, though not so shocked that she doesn't hear the mockery in Alice's voice.

“Is it strange to have sex in your old room?” Alice asks. Then says, “I always found it quite exciting when Buck and I did it in here.”

This turn of the conversation is more than shocking: it is aggressively coarse. Sidonie feels her lips purse. Of course she has had much more frank discussions of a sexual nature in her psych classes, and with Clara and with Adam, but it is Alice — Alice, who has always been reserved, prim — who is speaking like this.

“Or
do
you fuck?” Alice continues. “No offense, but it's hard to imagine you getting into bed with anyone without putting their eyes out with your elbow. And your
bridegroom
” — she stretches out the word, so that it sounds both pompous and lewd — “looks like he's used to women more sophisticated than you. But maybe you two just like to cuddle and read all night?”

Sidonie says at last, “You know nothing about my life. Why don't you mind your own business? Why do you have to be so mean?”

She hates that she sounds childish, but she has no defense against Alice.

Alice raises her eyebrows. “Mean? No; you know what, Sidonie? I'm actually concerned about you. I think maybe you're being taken advantage of, and don't even realize it. Who are these people? They've rather taken over your life, haven't they?”

Please don't please don't please don't, Sidonie thinks in misery. She imagines Clara saying, “You must defend yourself,” but knows that whatever she says, Alice will use it against her.

“Of course,” Alice says, “you rather like that perverted stuff, don't you, little freak? Do you think that I don't know about your games? Your little games with older men, and your poisonous little notes?”

Alice means Mr. Defoe. But how is that Sidonie's fault? It wasn't a game. Alice must know that it was all Mr. Defoe. But she feels unsure, guilty, shamed.

If Adam were to hear this, he would think that Sidonie has something very wrong with her. He would see that she is a freak, dirtied by her own ignorance, her own helplessness.

No. No.

Adam would say that there is something wrong with Alice, something twisted and nasty. Sidonie breathes in and out, willing Adam's face, his voice, into her mind.

“I pity you,” Alice says. “You must have a really narrow little life. You must have a lot of restrictions. They can dress you up, but they can't take you out.”

And there, her mind is clear enough that she can identify the antidote — the one clue in the whole stream of poison.
Dress you up
. Alice is jealous of her; her nice clothes, the apparent wealth and comfort that Alice must read in those photos. Alice is jealous. Only jealous. A little relief trickles through; she has not fallen into Alice's ambush entirely.

“I pity
you
,” Sidonie says, on the strength of that trickle, “because you're married to Buck, who, everyone knows, is a drunk and a bum, and you'll always be poor and have black eyes and get fat.”

And then Alice opens her mouth in a sort of grin that is also a snarl, a rictus, and Sidonie sees what Alice has been hiding with her hand, her tight-lipped speech. Both of Alice's upper eyeteeth are gone, pulled out, and dark spaces gape. Alice is missing teeth. How has that happened?

Instantly, her little surge of anger evaporates. She is horrified at herself.

“Oh!” she says. “I'm sorry, Alice. I didn't mean it,” but Alice has already gotten up and stalked from the room.

They do not make another trip out to B.C., she and Adam. She returns only after several years for Father's funeral. It is not hard to stay away: she has a new family, her work, a social circle. She and Adam go out to restaurants, clubs, at least three nights a week. And she has become a different person: has shucked off her old self, grown a new, sharp and edgy one, untouchable in her shiny exoskeleton.

“I think,” Adam says on the trip back (she can remember this even now, the scenery of Kicking Horse Pass streaming past their windows), “that your family's dynamics are not very good for you.” She does not argue this. For weeks after the visit, she reverts, becomes more gawky, more fearful, more anxious, more prone to automatic movements, unable to sustain eye contact. She agrees, numbly: no more trips to Marshall's Landing for a long while. To Sidonie, at nineteen, the long while is perhaps indefinite. But at this point, she doesn't think she cares to see Alice again.

At Christmas of that year, Adam had taken her to the Florida Keys for a fortnight. (You look peaky, Clara had said, when Adam suggested the trip and she had demurred, fearful. Go. Go. You'll love it. A second honeymoon.) In the newness, the exoticness (grapefruit orchards, giant sea turtles, alligators, palm trees) Sidonie had been remade. She had swum every day, lain on the warm sand. Her body had remembered how to relax, to stay still.

No permanent damage.

She gives her paper,
and then she has two weeks of holiday, two weeks to visit her old friends, to inhabit, again, the lighted glass city. Her former sisters-in-law have organized her; she stays the first week with Clara, who conducts a seamless itinerary of shopping and lunches and scenic walks and concerts. Even naps are scheduled in, though Sidonie does not nap, but uses the opportunity to prowl, to read, to answer emails. Clara interrogates her: what is she thinking? How is she feeling? And it is a relief to talk, to have her thoughts drawn out, examined, classified, offered back to her tidied and rearranged. Yet there is something exhausting in all of this too — a sense that she has lost autonomy, that she has lost
intactness
, that makes her irritable, that makes her hold back. She knows, for Clara has explained this to her, that her terrible introversion is a pathology, something she needs to outgrow. But she feels that she is a soft-bodied creature, shamefully extracted from its shell.

The second week she spends with Anita. Anita's pace is different than Sidonie's (different than most people's, Clara says). There are no regular meals; she will suddenly announce that it's time to go somewhere, and leave in five minutes or an hour for that place. Sidonie finds the lack of foreknowledge of events both excruciating and bewildering. It is agony to wait, to not know whether to eat or to go for a walk or start a book. When she asks Anita, Anita only says: Do what you like! This is frustrating — she doesn't want to go out or begin work if Anita is planning an outing or has invited people in, but she has to admit, there is freedom in this arrangement. She can come and go as she pleases — Anita will join her or not, as
she
pleases.

Clara says that Anita's habits are ridiculous. It's all about control, about power, Clara says. Anita wants to have everyone adjust to her plans, but won't admit that she has plans. She likes to keep everyone unbalanced.

Sidonie isn't sure about this. But she is grateful for her sisters-in-law, these familiar companions. They are not unchanged; or perhaps more precisely, in being away, she is able to see the changes that have been gradually occurring in the past few years. Both are quite grey, Clara's customary bob a silver helmet and Anita's still-long hair streaked with shades of lightest through darkest grey, like one of her own photographs.

She has known them most of her life.

She had formed an attachment to Clara first: Clara has said many times that she recruited Sidonie, rounded her up. Of course, Sidonie did not see it that way.

She is drying her hair after swimming at the Y pool, and a woman's face appears next to hers in the long mirror: “I see you here a lot, don't I? And at the Thursday night concerts.”

The woman is young, as tall as Sidonie, with a short dark bob, dark eyes and brows, narrow features, a wide mouth. She is a more vivid, more pronounced version of Sidonie, though she doesn't notice this until later. Her hair is straight and tucked behind her ears, and Sidonie thinks immediately that she will have her hair cut in the same way: her long braids never fit securely under her bathing cap, so her ends always get wet. And it is such a bother to braid her hair and put it up.

“Yes,” Sidonie says. “I swim here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and I go to the concerts.”

“Are you a student?” the woman in the mirror asks.

“Yes,” Sidonie says. “Yes.”

“Me too,” says the woman. “What's your major?

Sidonie says, “Psychology,” and the woman says, “I'm doing literature,” and smiles as if they have just discovered something important. Then she turns and puts out her hand. “I'm Clara St. Regis.”

“Sidonie von Täler.”

“What have you liked best, in the concert series?”

“Sibelius,” says Sidonie. “That was on the 17th. Also Mahler, on the 12th of April, and Bix, the 15th of March.”

She realizes instantly that she has been overly precise, and blushes. But Clara says, enthusiastically, “Really? You liked the Sibelius? Most people don't get it. Why did you like it?”

Sidonie explains about the angles, the slip of perspective, the stone edges. She is talking about synesthesia, but Clara thinks she is using metaphors and is very excited. “That's it! That's it exactly.” Then: “Do you go downtown on the weekends to hear jazz? Do you ever go to the Yellow Door? No? You must. Come with us this Saturday. No, I'll pick you up. Where do you live? Brilliant.”

An odd exchange, seen from almost any perspective. But Sidonie finishes drying her hair and goes on to her Wednesday morning classes in a little cloud of wonder and pleasure. She has not made many friends in her first two years on campus, for a number of reasons. She is, of course, two years younger than most of the other students, and is only now growing into her adult body, filling out. A gangly girl, too tall for her frame, with long braids, huge eyes, a pointed chin, she looks like a child, one of those occasional accelerated students, all intellect and no social or physical development. Then there are the obvious oddities of her personality: her over-precision, her obsession with numbers and arcane facts, her inability to make small talk. She is not the only one like that; she sees others, boys mostly, who carry that mark. She avoids them as if they were pariahs, though she is lonely.

And there is something else; a seriousness that makes it difficult for her to join the other girls in her dormitory over their perpetual hot chocolate and boy talk. There is something more interesting going on in life, she thinks. She has been ready for an adult world for some time, and has been disappointed, generally, in what she has found on campus. Though she would not be able to put her finger on it precisely. She has thrown herself into attending the series of lectures that happen outside of class time, and the foreign films, and the concert series. And she swims. But it has seemed to her that the films and the concerts only hint at a world of people that she has no access to: one in which ideas are important, personal eccentricities are respected, taken for granted, and a kind of intensity of experience not based on personal emotions is a shared goal.

So it is that Sidonie, who up to this point has apparently paid rigorous attention to the dorm's strictures about talking to or accepting rides from strangers, going out after dark, venturing downtown, or going to bars, finds herself climbing into a strange Volkswagen Beetle at the corner of University and des Pins at nine o'clock on a Saturday night. She has forgotten what Clara looks like — she is not good at recognizing faces, and is relieved to find that she is able to identify her new acquaintance in the back seat. In the front seats are a man, driving, of whom she can only see a quarter profile and a corduroy shoulder, and another woman who looks quite a lot like Clara, and is introduced as Clara's sister, Anita.

The driver is Clara's brother, Adam.

Sidonie has never been to a nightclub before. Preparing to go out has cost her some effort and more thought than she is used to putting into her appearance. She remembers from movies that women wear black dresses to nightclubs, but she has not got a black dress. She puts on her good grey dress, but sees that it is all wrong. The dress, with its short sleeves and circle skirt, makes her look like she is going to church. Something more — vertical — is needed. But she doesn't have clothes like that: all of her dress-up clothes, bought or sewn by Mother and Alice, have fitted bodices, wide skirts, little cap or puffed sleeves. Some of them are Alice's hand-me-downs, and are in Alice colours: sunflower, rose, seafoam. And they're all too short: she has apparently grown a couple of inches since leaving home. And her everyday clothes — the skirts and sweaters or white blouses she wears to class or out walking — are also too short, and getting shabby. Most of them were her school clothes; she can remember wearing that tartan skirt, for example, in her grade 11 history class, because she used to trace the pattern with her finger while the teacher droned on about the Stuart kings.