The Fall of Alice K. (20 page)

Her mind weaved toward Miss Den Harmsel's class as she drove on the yard and parked the 150. Miss Den Harmsel had talked about metaphors in
Macbeth.
She had looked straight at Alice when she read the lines, “I have begun to plant thee, and will labor / To make thee full of growing.” Alice had gotten another A on a quiz. She knew Miss Den Harmsel was proud of her, and Alice loved the fact that Miss Den Harmsel was taking some credit for her success.

Alice thought of Nickson as she remembered those lines. She was falling in love, really falling in love, for the first time in her life, but the night had shown how fragile everything could be and how easily the perfect could be soiled by the ugly world around them. Now he was ashamed of what she admired in him. It was all so complicated, but the feeling she had in her chest was a pure and throbbing ache with no shades of doubt in it. She would live up to her heart's demand and shower him with so much approval and admiration that all of his fears would disappear.

She turned the headlights back on as she drove onto the yard. The dangers of the drive home had not been the dangers of driving in the dark. Driving in the dark had turned some lights on in her mind. She needed to be brave and take some risks. She would honor her love for Nickson. They would be driving in the dark together, but her love was clear-sighted. All she needed was control over what she was doing, whatever maneuvering
was necessary to show him how much she cared about him without frightening him away.

Aldah was asleep and her parents were watching TV when she walked into the kitchen. Her father usually cleaned up around his swivel chair, but he had left a glossy brochure sitting out.
Raising Chinchillas for Fun and Profit.
The brochure had it all, including order forms for cages and chinchilla food, which appeared to be a combination of alfalfa hay cubes, whole grain supplements, and pellets. Inside the brochure, her father had a sheet of paper. In his orderly manner, he had made columns of “expenses” and “reasonable expectation.” In temperament, chinchillas were supposed to be exceptionally friendly, gentle, and curious. He had highlighted those three words. Chinchillas had other irresistible virtues: because their fur was so thick they were free of parasites, and because their diet was vegetarian, they didn't create bad odors. Alice pondered that logic: cattle and pigs were vegetarians too, but the hog and cattle yards didn't exactly smell like lavender bubble bath.

Under his calculation columns in which he concluded that he could make forty thousand dollars a year on chinchillas, her father had written the names of chinchilla fur retailers: Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale's, and Kaufman Furs. He was hoping to go big-time. A chinchilla fur poncho sold for $7,495. A scarf sold for $349. How could he go wrong?

Alice laid the brochure back where she had found it and said good-night to her parents. When she went to the bathroom, she found her father's wet work socks drying on the toilet lid. She lifted the lid and saw the muddy water. He had washed his work socks in the toilet water and laid them on the lid to dry. Just how far was he going to go to save a buck? She flushed the toilet and bent over the tub to start a cold bath for herself.

The events of the night faded from the stage of her mind. Give me a stage with only one person on it, she thought. Give me a simple world where I can love Nickson and he can love me back without all the foolish nonsense of the rest of the world cluttering things up.

The next morning the chinchilla brochure and her father's calculations were in the garbage. It was a start: at least one ridiculous item had been taken from the stage. But her father. How many false illusions was his brain holding? Or were chinchillas her mother's idea?

21

Seeing Nickson moving through the hallways the next day, Alice couldn't tell whether he was returning to his loving self. He looked beautiful and content in Miss Den Harmsel's room, but he was more reserved. Still, he had an amazing ability to wear an expression that gave no signals as to how he felt. But this was always true of him: it was hard to tell if he was happy, or worried, or scared, or sad—but, like now, he always looked attentive, like someone listening to and watching the world without judgment.

Miss Den Harmsel had put up black-and-white photographs along the top of the chalkboard—an entire row of the actress Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth in different scenes from the play. The look in her eyes in every photograph was cold and detached. Alice looked at Nickson and offered him what she hoped he would see as a loving and accepting expression. He touched her hands when he passed debate materials across the desk, but there was no hint that he was feeling what she felt. His eyes did not look into hers and his lips did not look like lips that were eager to meet hers. The emptiness between them felt like a missed opportunity: Miss Den Harmsel's room had as much privacy as she had felt driving the 150 through the moonlit countryside.

She didn't push him, though an ache in her chest could easily have moved up into her eyes. If she cried now he might withdraw even more. She would control her attraction and move slowly and patiently. He was not cold in response to her measured movements, but he seemed to imitate them. At one point, he looked up and smiled, but he did not try to touch her. His eyebrows did not dance when he looked at her. He was being very, very careful.

When she left school that afternoon the ache in her chest felt like
a vacancy that Nickson was unwilling to fill right now. It was a dull, sad ache—but she would not let this bad feeling grow. Nickson hadn't dumped her, after all, and she had no good reason to let her heart break.

At home, she faced a different vacancy. If their house was not empty, it was hollow.

It was not as if her mother had stopped functioning, but Alice had noticed that she was working like somebody who was getting her house in order. She had paid the bills. She had put the spices in alphabetical order. Alice saw a stack of envelopes addressed to various relatives. Alice had no idea what she was writing, but it no doubt had something to do with her fear of what the new millennium would bring. Meanwhile, her father was like cement that was setting harder every day. Watching his increasing rigidity made Alice feel rigid. Aldah played with her dolls. She watched television; she coaxed Alice to read to her. She ate.

But now Alice was alone in this soundless space, like a place abandoned. Was this a foretaste of what lay ahead for their farm? Again, there was a note written by her father: Aldah's health once again. But Alice smelled a rat. Her parents were off doing something that they didn't want her to know about, most likely looking for ways to earn extra money. This time the note told her to check the hogs' water. That was suspicious too. The hoglots were her father's territory, and she guessed that he wanted her to get used to dealing with the hogs as well as the steers. He was expanding her chores so that he could work elsewhere.

Alice stood in front of the bathroom mirror before going outside and looked at the face that Nickson looked at. She looked at the lips that Nickson had kissed only last night. Her lips were swollen, and she wondered if anyone at school had noticed. Lydia of course would have noticed, but she had not said anything. Nickson must have noticed and remembered, but he hadn't given any indication that he remembered that delicious moment as much as she did. Of course, he was being sensible and cautious, and she knew she should be too. She could let her heart rampage with desire, but she should keep her hands firmly on the wheel of self-control.

She tried to imagine what Nickson must have been going through as a foreigner in this jungle of white faces and blond hair. She couldn't even imagine being in a community of Baptists or Mormons or Catholics.
How much tougher it would be to be the only blond, white person in a community of Asians. Or African Americans. Or Mexicans. Nickson was much more confident as the only male Asian at Midwest than she could fathom being if the tables were turned. Coping skills, that's what they were. Nickson had major coping skills as the shortest, darkest-skinned, darkest-haired guy at Midwest. Oh, but there had to be a vulnerable person behind his outward confidence. He had to fear the judgment of the whole community if they thought he, the total outsider, was stealing the heart of one of their own.

She tried to assure herself that Nickson's feelings for her had not changed. He was just afraid of showing them. She would honor that fear by concentrating on debate when she was with him. If he was thinking about debate and not worrying about her feelings, his own fears would have a chance to calm down. Together they would study and practice until they were an unbeatable team. She would help him. She would teach him everything she knew, and slowly he would relax and show his love for her again. She knew it was there. It had to be there.

In the meantime, they would still have their respect for each other. They would have what no other couples at Midwest had: that beautiful synchronicity when they'd say the same thing at the same time.

Right now, doing chores would be a perfect way to take away her own worries. She remembered how her father used work to cleanse himself of distress. When her grandmother, her father's mother, died, her father went out after the funeral with a hand scythe and swiped away weeds from the fences for three hours without pausing. He had come back with blistered hands and a comforted heart.

Alice slipped on her tennis shoes and headed out the door, already feeling the head-and-heart-clearing power of work.

The late-afternoon October air on the farm was quiet but moist. She walked toward the hog feedlots with a stealthy determination. The modernized feedlots were probably not fully paid for, but they were state-of-the-art facilities that had big cement slabs with metal grates suspended a few inches over the concrete. The slabs sloped slightly so that, as the pigs walked around, the manure under their feet oozed through the grates and muddled its way downhill toward the huge holding tank.

These modern feedlots were the scene of their biggest money loss
in 1998, but her father had reinvested in hogs on a smaller, safer scale. They no longer had sows with baby pigs. Instead, her father had bought isowean pigs when they were fourteen pounds, and now they were being fattened for market. Her father would have done the math and calculated that feeding little pigs for market could be more profitable than raising sows and overseeing the births of all those litters. The feeder hogs were babcocks, white and lean animals that would produce the tasteless pork that everybody wanted. They were now at about one hundred fifty pounds—another hundred pounds to go before market. The hogs spoke in friendly little grunts as Alice approached. “Oi, oi, oi, oi,” they said.

“Oi, oi, oi, oi,” she answered. “Why aren't you oi-eating eating eating and making us lots of oi-money money money?”

“Oi, oi, oi, oi,” they said agreeably and looked up at her from under their flapped ears.

The hog feeding operation included three separate concrete slabs, each forty feet by thirty feet with a corrugated metal shed at one end where they could find shelter from bad weather. Alice walked down to the far lot, the one where her father had thrown a few old tires and a log chain. These were materials for the mean chewers to chew on. There were some cannibals in that far lot. Getting some cannibals in the mix was the risk of buying pigs instead of raising them. Her father probably hadn't put this possibility into his calculations, but here they were. Something had gone awry in the breeding, some York blood where it didn't belong or something, and the result was an assortment of renegade hogs interspersed among the mild-mannered ones. A few bad apples, but these bad apples had teeth and no qualms about eating their peaceful neighbors rather than eating with them.

Giving the chewers something to chew on was a workable solution. Alice didn't think of the cannibals as evil. They just had a compulsion to chew things to bits. Her father called them chewers, though somebody else might have called them shredders. The Krayenbraaks weren't the only hog feeders who had to deal with cannibals, and different farmers used different distractions to keep them from killing each other. One farmer put bowling balls in his pen because it was hard for the hogs to cannibalize a bowling ball. Hard and round, the bowling balls kept slipping away as they tried to bite them. The evasive and slimy globes interested the
cannibals so much that they practically turned the hoglot into a bowling alley. The rolling balls also forced the gooey manure through the grates to hasten its journey to the manure holding tank. Her father didn't have any bowling balls, but he did have these old tires and a log chain.

Alice leaned against the fence of the hoglot. Most of the animals looked peaceful and content, but two chewers were going at an old truck tire, ripping at it like a couple of toddlers with a magazine. Alice had to admire their energy and wondered if they had been doing this all day. Then she saw one sickly smaller pig lying against the fencing in a puddle of manure that had not worked its way through the grates. His skinny white body was totally slathered with manure. The animal looked disgusting, but she couldn't take her eyes off him as his chest kept moving in steady breaths. She was not about to let this sickly pig turn into another corpse. She was not about to give in to the forces that were descending on the world.

She leaned over the fence and looked more closely into the eyes of the pig. The part of any pig that looked most like a human being was the eyes—those big lashes and the shape. The eyes of this pig were very much alive, almost as if it were sending her a message. His eyes shone like little beacons of hope from the grim reality of the rest of his body.

Two chewers were still chomping at the old tire some distance away, but then the biggest of them looked in Alice's direction where she stood studying the manure-covered pig. The chewer started in their direction. At first, Alice thought it was simply curious about her and expecting that she might be delivering some special feed, but when it got closer Alice saw that it was interested only in the sickly pig. There was something ominous in the slushy thunking of its approaching feet on the murky grate. It didn't look angry or aggressive, but it did have a clear purpose. Alice didn't have anything handy to bat the threat away, but she thought the army-green glaze on the sickly pig would be enough protection. The chewer walked over, nudged the sickly pig for a response, and then took a nasty chomp at the rear flank. The muscles in the hindquarter contracted, but the victim didn't squeal. He looked back over his shoulder. He was ready to let the chewer devour him from the hindquarter forward, just give up and be done with it.