The Fall of Alice K. (19 page)

“Hmong parents think if a guy and girl are together that they're together for only one reason.”

Alice didn't ask him to explain.

Most of the time when Nickson and Alice were together, they did no more than share notes with each other until they felt they had accomplished enough, and then they reached for each other's hands the way they did the first time in Miss Den Harmsel's room and swam in each other's eyes. Anyone looking at them would have seen wax statues, their eyes locked as if they were hypnotized. It all felt so safe, and it was nothing that her parents or his mother could disapprove of even if they did see it. How different they were from the silly couples at school that were always giggling and groping each other. Alice and Nickson did none of that in the first weeks of their realization.

But something huge and fragile hovered between them, like a presence that was bigger than both of them, and neither did anything to break it. The flower of romance had budded, and they could not resist watering it with kind words and total attentiveness. They heard each other say, “That's what I was thinking too” and “I know exactly what you mean.” Often their harmony went beyond agreeing with each other, and they would say the exact same words at the same time.

In Alice's mind, what she and Nickson were nurturing was mutual respect, and it was only natural that the roots of mutual respect would reach for the sunlight of their touch. Alice ran the tips of her fingers lightly over his arms, and when she did, she watched the excited goose bumps sparkle to the surface like budding leaves opening and trembling in the breeze. His hands moved naturally to her cheekbones. He'd run his fingers lightly down to the point of her chin, and when he touched her neck lightly, a small tremor moved down her back.

When they left Miss Den Harmsel's room, Alice would assure herself that when she moved back into the rest of her life, everything would be the same and she would be back in her old familiar world, but Nickson didn't really leave her when they parted company. Her body and mind remained charged up all day as she replayed every moment that they had spent together and anticipated the next moments when they would
be together again. Everything she looked at, whether the dull tan of the school hallways or the falling oak leaves along the streets of Dutch Center, had a bright intensity. Her senses were hyper-alert.

“Have you been watching a lot of TV?” Lydia asked her.

“That's a silly question. Why on earth did you ask that?”

“You ought to see the way you walk lately.”

“What?”

“You're starting to walk more like a model than a farm girl.”

“Like a model?” she said and tried to put a tone of disgust in her voice.

“Yes,” said Lydia, “like a model who is trying to show off her ass.”

That night when Alice went to the Vangs' house for debate, she wore a disguise of modest slacks and a modest blouse, and she didn't wear lipstick or a smile that suggested she was too happy to see Nickson. She tried to walk like neither a farm girl nor a model but like a serious student—one with a folder of debate material in her hand. As usual, Lia nodded and said “Hello, Alice,” and retreated quietly to her sewing room.

Alice suspected Mai knew that Nickson and she had more going on between them than folders of research papers. Her smile and enthusiasm when Alice came into their house told Alice that Mai not only knew but approved.

Another night when Alice arrived, Mai was cleaning up in the kitchen. The kitchen looked different from the last time: now some of Lia's herbs hung by rubber bands on a wire strung over the sink. The sight of the bulky kitchen knives made Alice shudder, though the items Mai had out on the counter didn't—but they did look strange: fish sauce, oyster sauce, ground chili pepper, ginger, a package of MSG, and
sriracha.
What was
sriracha?

“You hungry?” asked Mai.

“No thanks, just ate,” said Alice.

“I'm going to go to the Redemption Library,” said Mai. “Don't work too hard, you guys.” A minute later Alice heard their Toyota drive away. At the same time, from Lia's workroom came the soft whirring sound of her sewing machine. This had become Mai and Lia's regular routine: they cleared out.

Alice laid her folder on the table, sat down, and started her close study of Nickson.

“Let's go for a walk first,” he said.

His eyebrows took flight in her chest. She couldn't keep her lips from smiling.

“Why not,” she said.

They were kissing before they got past the squirrel trap. In her mind, Alice had practiced this moment, and now that it was happening, it was easier than she thought it would be, with her bending down and his reaching up. Alice didn't have much experience kissing a man, but she knew this was good. She knew this was as good as it could be. His kiss had the life of his eyebrows, the intensity of his eyes, and the warmth of his voice. When they paused, she held him with his chin between her breasts and her chin on top of his smooth thick hair. In this pause, they noticed that the kitchen light shone on them through the window and that they were risking exposure to Lia from inside the house and to the whole world outside.

“You smell so good,” he said.

Alice put her face down into his thick dark hair. “So do you,” she said.

“Let's walk,” he said.

They walked away from Main Street and toward the outskirts of town. There wasn't much traffic on the wide asphalt side streets, but every car that passed them slowed down. Small-town curiosity, but each time it happened, Alice tensed up. Then one car that met them did a U-turn at the intersection behind them. It came speeding back and someone in the backseat rolled down his window and yelled, “Goddamn spic!”

In one quick reflexive move Nickson thrust his fist in their direction: “Go to hell!”

The car did not slow down.

The movement from heaven to hell had been quick. “Don't swear,” said Alice without thinking, and the voice she heard coming from her mouth was her mother's.

“I'll never run from those bastards again,” he said. “Never.”

“Those weren't the same guys,” said Alice, though she hadn't seen them clearly enough to know for sure. But of course they weren't: some jerks were just jerks who needed an outlet for their ignorance and stupidity.

“I don't care who they were,” he said. “They're all the same.”

Alice still did not see any anger or panic in his face and his breathing had not quickened, but there was a deliberate movement in his steps. His feet were coming down especially hard.

“Just jerks,” said Alice. “Don't let them get to you.” She reached for his arm. “Let's go back to your house.”

When her hand touched his forearm, it was rock hard. His whole body was ready to act.

When they sat down at the kitchen table again, Alice's feet kept moving under the table, but Nickson looked calm. Steady but coiled, she thought. His brow was furrowed and his eyebrows were not moving. Although she did not know what he was thinking or feeling, and she had never before seen the Nickson who had exploded outside, she felt her own discomfort transform into a feeling of allegiance. This was no ordinary person. He had a quiet and mysterious depth, but he was also a man of action when he needed to be. No hesitation. He was so sure of himself, and this was a comfort. She could feel protected with him, and she would be his ally in any way she had to. Yes, she understood that anger. She knew that anger, perhaps better than Nickson could have realized. If she was going to align herself with someone who was always in danger of outside attacks, she should learn to prepare herself too to protect him as much as he would protect her. She could do push-ups in her room. She could carry bales of hay with only one hand. She could practice kicking when she was doing chores. If she prepared her body, she wouldn't need her anger, only her controlled strength. That's what she saw in Nickson: controlled strength.

They tried focusing on the debate papers they had laid out. They sat quietly for a while, their arms resting on top of the papers. The sweet vibrations between them were not there.

“We have to stop what we're doing,” said Nickson.

“Debate?”

“No. This other part. We have to stop.”

“What other part? We haven't really started anything,” she said.

They sat staring without reaching to touch. Tension filled the space between, and Alice did not know what feelings might be living inside the tension. Was Nickson feeling that he had to protect her from more scenes
like the one on the street? Was he losing his feelings for her because she had talked like a prude outside?

“ What's wrong?” she said and put her hand down on the table where he could reach to touch it.

“You're too good for me,” he said.

“Don't say that,” she said in a hushed voice. “Don't ever say that.”

He hesitated, looking at her hand. He did not look up. His hand reached out for hers, and for a moment its gentleness had returned.

“I feel ashamed,” he said.

“No,” said Alice. “No. Not ever.”

“All right,” he said, but Alice couldn't tell if he meant it.

20

A near-full moon was rising and the sky was clear as Alice set off for home in the 150. Instead of going down Highway 75 and taking the most direct route home, she chose the gravel roads—and she chose to take them slowly. She needed to decompress. She needed to assure and comfort herself that something essential had not been lost between her and Nickson, and what better way to do it than under the golden light of the moon?

She rolled down her window and looked out at the farmland and buildings that lay before her. The countryside around Dutch Center was like a patchwork quilt, laid out in 640-acre sections with an intersection every mile. She could count miles by counting the spaces between clusters of farm lights spread out across the landscape, layer upon layer, for the seven miles that she could see to the horizon. The moonlight still cast its own version of light, a blue and soft illumination that made the distant barns appear as silhouettes and the corn and soybean fields closer to her look like a sea of frozen ripples. She would be able to see the road in this light, so she turned off the headlights.

As she drove down the first mile of gravel road outside town, she couldn't help but imagine that Nickson was beside her, absorbing the half-light with her. This was the kind of light they needed, just enough so that they could see out but no one would be able to see in. Like a one-way mirror. What she and Nickson needed was a one-way mirror to look out at all the people of Dutch Center without the burden of having them look back. This was the kind of privacy that would save them from another scene of fools yelling insults at them.

Driving with her lights turned off also saved her from the dangers of cornfield corners because she'd be able to see the headlights of any cross-traffic at what could otherwise be dangerous intersections. But what if
there was another driver on the road, enjoying the moonlight with the headlights turned off the way she was? The question struck her as a joke, but she still stopped at the next intersection where cornfields obstructed the view.

When her grandfather was a child, there would have been a one-room schoolhouse at this intersection, the way there were once one-room schoolhouses every two miles. The schoolhouses had long since been torn down and the one-acre school grounds plowed up and turned into fields of corn or soybeans, but she saw a landscape echo of that one-acre plot—or thought she did. The corn grew taller on the one-acre school ground that was only grass for all those decades that children played on them.

It wasn't only her moonlit view that told her where she was. She smelled the ethanol plant before she saw it. She smelled the distinct difference between approaching cattle feedlots and approaching hog feedlots—and, worst of all, an approaching turkey-raising operation. It was even worse than the large chicken factories with their thousands of defecating chickens. She zigzagged home, turning every mile and, at one point, choosing a mile where all of the farm buildings had been removed. This gave her a whole mile of nothing but the odors of ripening corn and roadside grass.

She turned down another road that would add two miles to her drive home, but at this point she knew she was delaying the moment when she would enter the hailstorm zone. When she did enter that zone, she saw that other farmers had done what her father had done—harvested the battered corn and turned it into silage. These fields were nothing but corn stubble now. Barren fields, and at the sight of them her mood changed.

She hated the reminder of the hailstorm, but instead of images of her father sternly and quietly accepting what the Almighty had delivered to them, Bible quotations started blasting at her like scoldings, but they were scoldings directed at Rev. Prunesma. “Seek and ye shall find!” Why didn't Rev. Prunesma use that text when he was talking about Seekers and Dwellers? Wasn't “seek and ye shall find” a commandment from God? And what about “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found?” The Bible was full of orders to
seek.
The Rev just chose to emphasize what fit his narrow-minded agenda. The Rev's mind could be a cave dweller. Why am I getting angry now? she asked herself. Why?

When she took the last gravel-road corner to their farm, her foot hit the gas pedal hard. She put the spurs to the 150 just to hear its terrific groan of acceleration, a sound and rush of speed that would set her troubled spirit free. Even if the reverend and her mother would try to control her, even if the cowardly racists on the streets of Dutch Center tried to ruin her friendship with Nickson, she had this. She swerved as she accelerated, just to show herself and the moonlight that she could fishtail without losing control. Gravel sprayed from the rear tires, and the front end of the 150 pointed toward the ditch for a split-second before she whipped the wheel and brought it easily back on-center. Alice knew how
not
to overcorrect. A controlled recklessness, yes! Oh, she had practiced this stunt before, though the first time had been with her father's supervision on snow in the middle of the farmyard. He taught her how to bring the pickup out of a skid. Gravel was easier than snow, and she gunned it one more time just to hear the big tires spit gravel.