After Alice (36 page)

The wooden and canvas chairs are unfolded and placed in front of the umbrella, then various unguents and towels spread over the Inglises themselves. Mr. Inglis, under his straw fedora, lights a cigar, pours clear fluid (gee and tee, Mrs. Inglis calls it) from an ice-packed flask into a glass, and opens a newspaper. Mrs. Inglis, after calling silvery hellos and waggling her fingers to all of her acquaintances, settles with a magazine or a book. Hugh, who is pale as a white rabbit, with a white rabbit's colourless lashes and pinkish eyes, stays in the shade with his parents and a book; Graham sometimes joins the other young people, sometimes swims far out into the lake until his head is a tiny blob.

Seeing her next to him on the beach, Hugh says, “Is this
Sid?
Sidonie, what happened? You've metamorphosed from a darling little girl to a heartthrob! Legs! Betty Grable, look out!”

Graham says, “Down, boy.”

Sidonie knows Hugh is kidding. She's not at all like Betty Grable. Her hair is still in fuzzy braids, her chest almost flat, her face all pointy chin and straight slash of mouth and eyebrows. But she looks at her legs stretched out in front of her. Are they nice? She doesn't know; she's never thought about it. But for the first time, she feels that it would be good to have nice legs. She hopes that they are nice.

She says, “
Alice
is the belle.”

“Oh, she speaks,” Graham says. Sidonie blushes.

“Alice,” Hugh says, “could have launched the whole goddamn sixth fleet.”

Sidonie blushes again: not because swearing isn't nice, but because she is afraid Graham or Hugh will think that she thinks that. Hugh is allowed to swear, she thinks; he's been at university. Also, now that she is fourteen, she is old enough to know that only old maids object to swearing. She wants Hugh and Graham to know that she, personally, doesn't.

She wants too, to let Hugh know that she has picked up his reference to Helen of Troy. That she has read a little of
The Iliad
, even if it was in an English translation. But it would be abrupt, strange, to say that obvious thing. Instead, she makes a leap, blurts out something that's meant to be provocative, but that falls even on her own ears gauchely.

“Alice is going to marry Mr. Defoe,” she says.

Graham laughs, but Hugh frowns. “Why?”

“Why not?” Graham says. “She could do worse.”

“Defoe isn't a gentleman,” Hugh says. They seem to have forgotten she's there, Sidonie thinks. Hugh has flushed darker than Sidonie does.

“Gentleman?” Graham mocks. “No, if that word means anything, which I sincerely doubt, I suppose he isn't. But he is a goer.”

“He's rather a little fascist,” Hugh mutters.

Graham laughs again. “So are you, if I remember some of your rants a year or two ago. But if you mean he's going to change the way things are done around here, you're probably right, and they probably need changing. And what more would you want for a girl like Alice than to be married to someone who'll be a name in the community?”

“Alice should go to college,” Hugh says. “Get some training.”

“What for?” Graham says. “She'll only marry some local and keep house, run the WI teas, that sort of thing. Her face and her manner will be all she needs.”

“She's more than pretty,” Hugh says, in the stubborn way Sidonie recognizes.

Graham narrows his eyes. “Think so?” he says. Then, “Maybe you're right.”

Later, later, Sidonie will watch Graham and Alice sitting together, and will see that they look alike: they have the same high-nosed, symmetrical profiles, the same full lower lip and curved chin, the same expression — one that is self-contained, what Mother would call snooty. They could be siblings. It occurs to her at once that they look aristocratic, and that she understands what aristocratic means: it is the assumption of ownership (of the beach) coupled with a disdain, a detachment. For neither of them really cares, she thinks. They take the beach as their own, but do not love it, as she does, with her affinity for the water, her ability to become inebriated in the intensity of blues, or as Masao does, with his boy's enjoyment of play, or even as sociable Hugh, despite his sensitivity to the sun.

And Sidonie will wonder, for the first time, why it hasn't occurred to everyone (meaning her mother and Mrs. Inglis) that Alice might marry Graham. Not Hugh: he's too young, too boyish, too enthusiastic, too bumbling. But Graham: he'd be perfect. And now that he has come back, he seems older, tougher. All that searching for a husband for Alice, and there was Graham right there all the time.

It hasn't occurred to Sidonie, yet, that Mrs. Inglis and Mother, let alone Graham and Alice, must have thought of the possibility, and for their own reasons, decided against it.

But on this day on the beach, Sidonie is aware only of the rightness of Graham and Alice making a match. Alice, the most beautiful girl in the community: smart, stylish, graceful, respectable: a princess, if there ever was one. And Graham Inglis: privileged, educated, owner of Meccano sets and encyclopedias, hardened, mysterious: a seasoned knight.

She had not known then that Graham was ill. Had that been the impediment?

One day Mr. Defoe appears on their beach; up to that point Sidonie has never noticed his absence, taking it for granted that the beach is exclusive to the few Marshall's Landing families. But one day he is there, in baggy chinos, white shirt.

“Now I know your secret,” he says. “I've been going to Wood Lake; I didn't know about this little Shangri-La.” He isn't speaking to anyone in particular, but Sidonie feels like he's making an accusation. Alice looks at him with her eyes slightly closed, like a sleepy cat, and he spreads a tartan car blanket and sits down between her and Mrs. Inglis. Alice, Sidonie notices, seems suddenly a little smaller, and the red-and-white bathing suit somehow frivolous, silly, with Mr. Defoe there.

Mr. Defoe doesn't take off his street clothes for a long time. When he finally does, he steps out of them almost shyly, as if he wished someone would hold a towel around him. But once he's standing in his trunks, she notices that the hair on his chest, like the hair on his forearms, is black, all the way up to his throat. She wants to giggle again at the incongruity: the black body hair, like a bear's pelt, the sandy crop that glints red-gold in the sun. Mr. Defoe is bigger, too, than he looks clothed. His legs and chest are full and muscled: he makes Graham and Hugh both seem mere boys. It gives Sidonie a funny feeling when he pulls Alice up by the hand and leads her to the water. Alice looks frail, childish, in comparison. And Sidonie has the sudden impression that Alice is being abducted; she has to resist the urge to fling herself at Alice's ankles and cling to her heroically.

There is no horseplay with Mr. Defoe. He swims out strongly, like Graham, but not so far, slowing now and then so Alice can catch up with him, but not slowing enough that she can keep pace. Out in the lake, they stop swimming and tread water, facing each other. They're talking, but softly; the words don't carry. Walt wades in from practicing somersaults and stares at them curiously.

“They're going to
kiss
,” he says. They don't kiss. But Sidonie thinks that there is something in the way they're talking — or rather the way Mr. Defoe is talking to Alice, and Alice is holding her head slightly averted, her gaze downturned submissively, that seems more intimate, more revealing, than kissing would be. She thinks of how, the first evening he came to dinner, she had imagined Mr. Defoe as a rather fierce and prickly creature to be caught in the little net made by Alice and Mother and Mrs. Inglis. Now she feels a shiver, as if something tentacled and clawed were coiled about Alice out there in the water.

But silly. It's only Mr. Defoe.

In the evening,
Alice goes out with Mr. Defoe, dressed in her blue poplin with the tiny pleats and crinoline. Alice in the cab of Mr. Defoe's truck, her full skirts spread over the seat, her white hands clasped in her lap, her pale golden waves of hair shining.

Late August:
on the way up the hill from the store, Sidonie hears a truck pull up behind her. Hop in, Mr. Defoe says. Sidonie jumps up, steps on the running board, swings her legs in. She is wearing pleated shorts, a white cotton shirt tied at the midriff. She leans back in the seat, admires her own long tanned legs, her flat stomach. She is as tall as Alice and slimmer. Sometimes, not looking at herself in the mirror, but glancing down at her own legs or catching sight of her profile, her own lean shadow reflected in a shop window, she thinks: I am almost beautiful. I have as pretty a figure as Alice. She is golden brown and her skin shines. She leans back into the seat and takes up with her long legs the space that Alice's skirts usually occupy. Pushes her shoulder blades into the seat back, leans her head back.

When she rides with Mr. Defoe and Alice, she has to scrunch near the door but today it is
her
seat. The sun comes in the open door windows and makes white patches on her thighs, glints off Mr. Defoe's arm hair. Mr. Defoe drives as all of the men do, left arm hooked over the door through the open window; right hand resting lightly on the steering wheel. When he steers, he uses the first two fingers only; it's a gesture the men have, to drive with as little apparent effort as possible.

When Mr. Defoe turns off along Bond Road instead of following the usual route to Beauvoir, she only assumes that he has another errand to run, one that will take so little time that he doesn't bother asking her if she minds the detour. When he turns into the old Enderby place, she assumes only that he's taken the wrong driveway.

Nobody lives here, she thinks, but doesn't say. Grown-up men don't like to be corrected by young girls.

The truck stops between the house with its smashed windows and the leaning shed. She sits, still trying to guess what Mr. Defoe's errand is. Doesn't think. Doesn't think to be especially afraid. Doesn't think to run, though she could still likely have jumped out of the truck cab and bolted down the Enderby's long lilac-lined driveway, at this point. She is the fastest girl in grade nine. Doesn't wonder, when Mr. Defoe gets out of the truck and comes around to her side. Doesn't run when Mr. Defoe opens the passenger door and pulls her toward him with a quick yank on her wrist and knee, so that she slips sideways, her head and shoulders lurching into the driver's end of the bench, her legs falling off the passenger end, out the open door.

Struggles, then, because she's being touched, a hand slipped up under her shirt, squeezing her breasts, the tender tips of her breasts where the growing is. She squirms and struggles, but she's bent backwards over the edge of the seat, off balance. Tries to scream, but Mr. Defoe's mouth is over hers, pressing her lips painfully against her teeth. His mouth right over hers, and his — oh, disgusting! — his tongue pushing into her mouth.

She tries to kick and claw and bite, but his hands, his mouth, the weight of his body are all so much stronger than hers that she feels only her own puniness. The more she struggles, the harder she is held. Her wrists are gripped in one of his hands; she thinks the bones will be crushed.

But even then, even then, she does not feel alarmed enough: doesn't guess what is coming, while the button of her waistband is plucked from its opening and her shorts are tugged in two moves down her legs.

Then, being touched
there
, the leg opening of her underpants stretched out and herself touched there, and then a swift impaling, a sharp little twist somewhere she hasn't felt sensation before. She thinks: that is his
finger
. Mr. Defoe's finger
inside her
.

The world slipping sideways: how can she walk in it again, so invaded? How can she walk out in the world again, now that Mr. Defoe with his dry red skin and his grin has put his finger inside her? She will shrivel and die with the shame, the exposure.

She thinks that she will faint, but she does not faint, and it all takes a long time, perhaps because she continues to struggle. Her underpants and shorts are yanked down further, and off. She is pulled out of the truck, struggling, yelping, onto the grass (thick with pineapple plant and daisies, for it has not been mowed in years) and then there is more of tongue in her mouth and sucking of her breast tips (ugh, ugh: she thinks of grown-up women feeding babies, and is appalled at this perversion) and more of the finger thrusting in her vitals, and slaps and her pigtail yanked hard, once, when she tries to get her knees up, and then blunt warm flesh against her private parts,
pushing
, and then inner sharp tearing like being cut with scissors over and over.

How long that takes: the pain over and over. And then a kind of groan from Mr. Defoe, and the stopping, and hot wet between her thighs like her period, and his saying: “There, you've been asking for that for a long time, haven't you?”

She had gotten up and walked home then, and he had not tried to stop her.

After that she could not think, and then she had begun to think too much.

She had thought: that is why girls aren't supposed to catch rides with strange men.

She had thought: but Mr. Defoe isn't supposed to be a stranger.

She had thought: Mr. Defoe must have felt very safe, to do that. And she herself must be very powerless: much more than she would have guessed.

All the hints and innuendoes she had not understood fell into place. She thought: what if I have a baby? And then, after she knew she would not: that was lucky.

She thought: that is what Mr. Defoe will do to Alice when they are married. (Perhaps he already had? No; if he could do that to Alice, he surely would not have bothered with herself.)

She thought — no, felt — how will I walk out in the world, now that Mr. Defoe has done this to me?

She thought: well, it is not the end of the world. The world makes a big fuss about this, but it is not the end of the world.