After Alice (27 page)

When Walt brings another load of wood, she asks if she can do some outside work, and he suggests helping stack firewood; Walt and his sons are cutting up some old trees. She hears the buzz of the chainsaw in the daytime, walks among the trees, which are in fall leaf, shades of saffron and pumpkin and wine almost unbearably rich against the charcoal and aubergine of the wet trunks and limbs. She warms up considerably; the heat from the day's work stays with her into the evening, and she falls asleep more quickly and sleeps soundly. But her appetite grows with the woodpile, and she soon gets through the soups and legumes she has brought. And she wants a bath; she has been sweating freely.

She finds the bucket Walt mentioned, and the key for the padlock on the well-cover. She drops the bucket down on its rope. It splashes satisfactorily, only twenty feet or so down. Draws up the bucket — she's found the wooden windlass still attached to the wall of the shed, just above the well opening.

But the water in the bucket has an oily scum, and smells unpleasant. She puts her face to it, sniffs. Unmistakable: it smells like raw sewage.

“Oh,” Walt says, pulling a long face. “I hadn't thought of that. The underground stream must be tainted. The new development up the hill, of course. All those houses on septic.” And through the trees, she can see the blight of structures clustered above.

The well is tainted. She finds herself trembling with something between cold and fury and disappointment.

She drives back to her house on Quail Circle, has a long hot bath, collects more food, plugs in her laptop, checks for email and phone messages. For a moment, as she moves around her familiar machines, she thinks she might stay. She has left her air mattress at Beauvoir, left the woodpile unfinished, but she might just stay here.

But her email has become dislodged from the listserv again, and there are no personal messages — only a voice mail from Hugh, non-urgent. Her house feels damp still. In the basement, she sees the dark has spread again; outside, the driveway has been dug up. None of the boxes has left the living room, but neither is there a message from Cynthia.

She re-stocks, heads back to Beauvoir. She stops at the IGA in the plaza, on the way, for more food and a jug of water. At the hardware store that used to be Masao's music store, she buys a cooler, a camp stove, a lantern, a second camp chair. She wonder where Masao is now.

The girl arrives
on the fifth day, in the rain, walking out of the mist, down the alfalfa and knapweed-clotted driveway. The opportunists of the dry land. Robins and magpies and starlings are industrious with the displaced earthworms. If the rain continues, the earthworm population will be decimated. The girl walks up the driveway in her jeans, boots, plaid jacket, an olive-green canvas pack over her shoulder, hips cantilevered to balance the load. Improbably red hair cut jagged and high across the brow, glint of metal like a steel beauty mark, like a lepidopterist's pin, at the upper lip.

The walk is familiar, that long foal-stride before the face with its antennae-eyebrows, the straight slash of upper lip, the over-full lower lip, is close enough to see. The von Täler face. It's Steve's girl, of course. Natasha, that's her name. Tasha. But somehow disguised, transformed.

If the girl is surprised to see the door open to her, she does not let on. She swings down the pack, looks around as if to see if things have been disarranged.

She has changed somehow. The sullenness has sprouted into something else, or maybe just grown stronger. What does she want?

Sidonie says, “There's no hot water. I hope you like baked potatoes and canned tuna.”

The girl puts down her pack, sniffs the air.

“What do you smell?” Sidonie asks.

“Woodsmoke,” the girl says. “Apples. Pee.”

They are running out of food again, though Tasha has brought granola bars and apples in her pack. They both read in the pale sun during the day, pile wood, talk at night, when it's too dark and chilly to do anything but wrap themselves in their sleeping bags. They become progressively hungrier and grubbier; after three days of this, the girl smells high, and Sidonie knows that she must too.

What do they talk of? Of the work of an orchard, of Sidonie's research. Of the girl's studies, her unhappiness with her classes, of the music she likes. The girl still seems sullen; her answers are given diffidently, possibly grudgingly, possibly warily. She is bright, though: Sidonie can see that. And well-read for a child of her generation, though her reading is eclectic, and she references books injudiciously, vampire novels tossed in with classics and various books of philosophy, biology, and psychology, apparently first-year university textbooks. She claims to have read every book in her house, including the British Columbia Home Health Reference. She confesses that she once diagnosed herself as having fatigue. Only she thought it was pronounced “fat-i-gyoo.” Her father, she says, curtails their television (ah, the von Täler coming out in him, Sidonie thinks). She has had to read more than is normal, to combat boredom.

Sidonie,
lying in her sleeping bag in the dawn, drifting in hypnogogic sleep, half-dreams of Alice, long-lost Alice. The grandmother that Tasha has never met.

Alice is spinning people into statues. She grasps the other girls one by one by the wrist, and whirls them around and around, her feet shifting heel-toe faster than Sidonie can see, her spine arched for balance, her pale braids whipping, her outstretched arms with a child at the end like a strange giant flower whirling in circles. Then she lets go, and the child, depending on how much smaller she is than Alice, goes staggering or even flying across the mashed yellow grass until she falls down or bumps into something else. After that, she must freeze in the position in which she has fallen.

Then Alice comes over and says what she is. This is a variation on the game, which is played by all of the girls Sidonie has met. Only Alice takes it upon herself to name the statue.

Mary Summers says that everyone is supposed to choose what kind of statue they are. But when Alice is playing, Alice chooses. Nobody argues with this, except Judy, who is new. But even Judy, after a while, stops standing by the wall with her arms crossed and lines up for Alice to spin her.

It's Sidonie's turn. She is one of the smallest and knows that she will fly far, and she does, spinning out of control, then somehow tripping and falling over the steps, which hadn't been there earlier. There is a painful knock on her forehead and nose, and then her knees and face are stinging, stinging. She is not supposed to move, but has curled up before she can think, so stays in that position. She can taste blood in her mouth. The stinging and pain of the blows to her limbs and face rise in pitch, like screaming, but she will not scream. She won't move.

“Oh, my God,” Bonnie Pruitt says, bending over her. “Her face is covered with blood. Oh my God. I'm going to faint.”

Coralee says, “And her knees, look at her knees. Her stockings are all ripped and there's dirt and blood!”

They have left their positions. That's against the rules. She will not cry and she will not move.

But some of the younger girls, Lily Platt and Marjorie Tanaka and Susan Taiji ask, “Are you okay, Sidonie?” Then it's hard to keep the tears away.

Alice is there. She is standing over Sidonie. The others fall quiet.

“Just a stone, obviously,” Alice says, pronouncing on Sidonie's position.

“Do your parents
know you're here?” she asks the girl.

Tasha shrugs. Her shoulders remain up; she looks sullen. But Sidonie is beginning to read her posture. She is afraid, Sidonie thinks — but not of her parents. She is afraid of something else. She is afraid to walk through any door — afraid that it will be the wrong one, that she won't find her way through or back in.

The girl looks at her sideways. Her lip curls up over the metal pin. “How about you?” she asks. “Do they know where you are? Does Aunt Cynthia know where you are?”

She has a point. They are bolters, both of them.

Pruning and burning
the branches gets the men so
schmutzing
— sooty and grimy — that Father invites them to bathe before they leave the orchard. The Japanese are fond of bathing, Father says. A very clean people. In their country, he says, they have great wooden tubs, large enough to sit several men up to their noses. They like the water extremely hot, and they all scrub down with soap and rinse off before they get into the soak-tub.

Sidonie thinks of naked bodies accidentally touching in the water. She pushes away her potatoes, which have suddenly become slippery, grey-white flesh. At the same time, Alice wrinkles her nose. “They bathe nude? All together?”

Father finishes chewing, lays his knife and fork on the plate so that they are not quite parallel. Sidonie stares at them, longing to reach over and set them straight. If they were extended two-and-one-fifth times, she sees, they would meet. The point of meeting would fall just short of her water glass. She stares at the spot, almost seeing the shadow cutlery. If her father were to pick up those long utensils, his elbows would have to thrust far out to each side. He would knock Alice and her off their chairs.

Father says, “Alice, there is no shame in the human body.” Mother makes a clicking sound with her tongue:
Tsk
. They have a proper bathtub in their house, of course; the big cement tub in the wash house, rough like new stone, is for washing when one is very dirty, or washing the dogs. One person's body fits it, or two small bodies, like Alice's and Sidonie's. The wash house floor has cedar planks and a squat iron stove to heat the water. There is a green shade on the light and the soap for the bath smells green, like the sea, and the cedar, when it is wet and hot, smells green also: a smell-colour like the deep green of the orchards in high summer: thick, cool, clean.

Father says, “In Europe people understand this. There are nude beaches and camping places. People are not ashamed or jokey about bodies.”

Mother says brusquely, “Well, we're not in Europe now. The girls can stay away from the wash house while the men are using it.”

After supper, in the winter henhouse, Sidonie lifts the eggs into her basket. Four, so perhaps the hens have already responded to the shift in daylight, or perhaps she missed one egg the day before. She scans the henhouse for signs of intruders, checks the water and feed troughs, and scratches Number Two's lizard-like head just behind the earholes, before shutting and locking the big door behind her. The hens settle into creaks that might mean they are discussing her, but benignly.

As she walks back to the house, the pruners emerge from the washhouse in clouds of steam, fully dressed, bundling their towels and dirty clothes, exclaiming at the shock of the cold. Masao is there, shaking out his blue-black hair. When he sees Sidonie, he waves, grinning. Sidonie waves back. She had been about to retrace her steps, take the long way back to the house to avoid pressing through the crowd of pruners, but now she can't. She stops and Masao comes over to her, juggling his towel, which has become a sort of soft origami box containing his soiled clothing.

Masao peers into her basket, then jumps back in pretend surprise, throwing his arms over his head. “Grenades!” he yelps. “Spare me, lady! I'm on your side!” Then he leaps back, pulls the hood of Sidonie's coat up over her head, shakes an admonishing finger under her nose. “Now stay away from the wolf, okay?”

Sidonie laughs, forgetting her intention to slip around the back of the washhouse. Masao slips his arm through hers and begins to sashay. “We're off to see the wizard,” he sings, in a high voice, like a girl's. Sidonie is worried she'll drop the eggs, but can't stop laughing. Masao can do all the parts from the movie. Suddenly, he's down on all fours, wiggling his rear end. “Woof!” he says. “Woof!” He's Toto, barking at the Cowardly Lion. But Mr. Tanaka, coming down the path toward them, is not amused. He speaks sharply to Masao in Japanese, and Masao stops playing. He looks around to see if Mr. Tanaka is watching, and then takes something out of his pocket, slips it into Sidonie's basket.

“For Alice,” he says. It's another little folded box, made out of paper. Sidonie has watched Masao fold these little boxes — he can make them small as a pea, large as two fists. She has watched him square off a sheet of paper — any paper will do: a sheet of newspaper or a bit of flowered wrapping paper or silver-foil cigarette paper or even a bill or receipt — and go through the methodical steps, first the diagonal creases, then the squares, the turning back and forth, the flipping over, the final blowing the box into shape with a puff of air — but has never been able to do it herself.

This little box is made of a sheet of the pink paper used by Father or Mr. Tanaka to write down each picker's bucket weight or number of boxes or bins in the summer and fall, when the pickers line up at the scales with their metal and canvas bags. Sometimes Sidonie helps with this; she can add up all of the numbers in her head very quickly — more quickly than Mr. Tanaka with his pencil — so that he scratches his head and says “Eh?” and then gives her a caramel sweet. Sidonie and Alice are not supposed to take the pink slips — they are used for accounting, for keeping track of how much has been picked and how much each worker is to be paid, and are important. But it is winter now; perhaps this sheet is an old one.

The little box lies among the eggs. Sidonie knows that inside is a funny note for Alice, for she has delivered these before, and Alice always laughs to read them. The note will be written on the paper, folded inside it. It's a trick that Hugh taught them in the Hiking Club. They had to learn secret ways of passing messages: they might be written in potato juice or in codes, hidden in a knothole in an alder tree, tied into a bandana. When Masao had produced the little boxes, Hugh had seen right away that they would be useful for messages.