The Fall of Alice K. (35 page)

Alice swung up the consul of the 150 so that it became part of the seat. Mai hopped behind the seat, and Aldah slid between Alice and Nickson.
A family outing.

35

When they walked through the mini-mall food court, they strolled past Perfect Pizza, but Alice didn't glance inside.

Mai wanted to go to Variety Paradise where her mother's work was sold. Alice didn't even know about this. Hmong products in Dutch Center? Why not?—half of the things she bought in Dutch Center were made in China.

“Mom has been pumping it out,” said Mai.

The owner of Variety Paradise had put up a sign:

“During the first two weeks, they hardly sold anything,” said Mai. “Then Mom started making bookmarks out of pieces of old parachutes that she has. And she started making eyeglass cases. Then she started doing some story cloths that weren't traditional Hmong.”

The Vang products were the first visible items inside Variety Paradise. The prominent piece was a large story cloth four feet square with thirty separate little scenes. The owner had it displayed on an enormous easel.

Mai pointed to the scenes: “Look, here is a shaman—see the altar—and over here they're cooking a pig for a celebration. Look how big the pig is—it's too big for the pot they're cooking it in! And over here, this is a wedding celebration. Wow. I don't know what Mother was thinking of
over here—I think this is a war thing, but over here, look, this is a planting scene, and over here the harvest. Uh, look at these tigers over here. Mom likes to do tigers. Aren't these amazing?”

It was Aldah who leaned in most closely.

“Don't touch,” said Alice.

“Don't touch, David,” she said. She did not touch the fabric with her fingers, but she did lean in so closely that she touched it with her nose. Mai leaned toward the images too. Like Aldah, she seemed transfixed by them, and didn't pull back. Alice followed their example and leaned in to look closely too.

“She must have worked on this a month before we came to Dutch Center,” said Mai, “but a lot of this stuff she finished after we moved here. Dutch Center has been good for all of us.”

It was as if Mai already knew and was inviting Alice into her family.

The owner of Variety Paradise walked over with a salesperson smile. Mai and Nickson recognized her and smiled over their extended hands. Alice kept looking at the Vang display. On a small table was a stack of more, smaller story cloths, but these were not Hmong scenes. Some depicted tulips, windmills, pigs, and gambrel-roofed barns—and churches, one of them strangely resembling the First Reformation Church of Dutch Center.

The owner told them she had sold six of the new story cloths depicting Dutch and rural scenes. “People are gobbling them up. I'm not sure what she's showing with this one over here—this huge sun rising over a dark foreground. Is it religious?”

“I'm not sure,” said Mai. “She told me it was supposed to represent a new day coming. Maybe the millennium? I'm not sure.”

Lia obviously worked with great speed—but—as Nickson had told Alice—she also worked on Sundays to the voiced displeasure of some people in the church.

“I can't wait for the nativity scenes and Christmas tree designs she's finishing now,” said the owner. “They will be very popular. I'm sure I'll sell them as fast as your mother can make them—and if she ever gets enough of them made so that she can take them to the annual craft show, oh boy, look out.”
Community acceptance.

Alice grappled with contradictory notions in her mind: was Mai
trying to show that her family was capable of being a private enterprise success story, or was she showing Alice just how high a fence she would have to climb to enter their world? Or, Alice wondered, am I just reading too much into an enthusiastic person celebrating the work of her mother?

Some peccaries of resentment also nipped at Alice: Weren't the Vangs a charity case of their church? Wasn't it the church that was making their well-being possible? Free house, free tuition, free house furnishings, and now were they making bundles of money on the side?

“Your mother does beautiful work. You must be very proud.”

“She's the best,” said Nickson.

“Oh, come on,” said Mai, “you said Alice was the best.”

They both chuckled nervously at that remark, but then Mai saw Alice's unease. “We're just teasing, Alice. I think you're just as wonderful as Nickson does.” She put an arm around Nickson and gave him a pull toward Alice.

Aldah was leaning over a stack of story cloths. Before Alice could stop her, she picked one up. “Buy,” she said.

It was a forty-dollar choice. “I can't. We just came to look.”

“Mom will give her something,” said Mai. “You don't have to buy anything from us.”

It was happening: she was becoming part of their family. She was part of them and they were part of her. She looked at Nickson and felt that it would be beautiful to tell him right then and there, before going back to the Vang house to tell Lia too. Alice was part of their family and they didn't even know it—but she couldn't tell them just then. She couldn't. She would have to tell Nickson alone, but not now. She would need to be alone with him, and it would have to be the right time and place. It would be a ritualistic moment, a grand announcement that would be the beginning of their life together. The comfortable feeling she found when she went to see Aldah at Children's Care was happening again. How could I ever have imagined that getting pregnant before I was married would be an unimaginable horror? It wasn't. As she stood with Aldah and Nickson and Mai, she felt deeply at peace with herself and the world—even though she knew that some tough conversations lay ahead. She'd have to adjust her plans for the future, of course. None
of this worried her at that moment. She could not imagine an unhappy outcome from the news of the day.

The attendant was waiting with her senseless smile when Alice dropped Aldah off at Children's Care. Alice sensed her inadequacy as a caretaker and distrusted her easy acceptance of Aldah's David. A real professional should have been able to extract that phantom the way a good dentist might extract somebody's extra tooth.

The 150 did not offer its usual comfort as Alice drove toward home. She had constructed a beautiful fantasy in seeing Aldah and the Vangs, but the sweet fantasy was fading quickly. It's just the medication, she assured herself, the mood swings Lydia had warned her about, but she couldn't stop the dark feelings from descending around her. Pieces of herself turned against her. First her throat, which gave little gasps. Her forehead started to swim away. Her hands grew limp but vibrated. A rock replaced her stomach.

The day was turning into a roller coaster of emotions. Alice aimed the 150 straight for the refuge of the barn.

She moved past the steers and looked up at the swallows' cup-shaped nests made of mud and grass that were empty though still firmly in place on the large beams. They looked like the most permanent and stable things in her world right now—and they were empty. She climbed up into the haymow where, immediately, two sparrows came like fluttering dust balls past her face, landed on windowsills and were gone again, bouncing through the air and disappearing somewhere beyond a stack of bales. Then they reappeared as if to give Alice a second look. She recognized one as a male, with the black patch on its throat, and the other smaller one as a female. It was not courting season and Alice wondered if she was standing close to their nest and they were trying to draw her away. She walked through a corridor of stacked bales and looked for what might be their nest, but she knew they could nest almost anywhere in the haymow, sometimes burrowing between bales and calling it a home until the bales were moved.

She sat down on a hay bale and the grim truth of her life settled on her: she was pregnant, and only the woman at Walmart and Aldah knew it. She got up and climbed onto the bales where she and Nickson had made love, put her hands over her uterus, and began to tremble.

She no longer felt like sharing the news with anyone. She didn't want to talk to anyone, she didn't want to see anyone. She wanted to find a box, crawl inside, wrap herself up and pretend that she had never been born, that she would float around in friendly silent fluid forever. She wished she were her own fetus, and she didn't want to talk to any human beings, not even Nickson, and least of all her parents.

She forced herself to stop the self-pity and to think about what she should do next, but her mind betrayed her and snagged her in vile thoughts. There was nothing beautiful about her life. There was nothing beautiful about her pregnant body. She hated the long, skinny nuisance of it. She hated the life she was living inside this long and skinny contraption. As she held her hands over the silent stranger inside her, she hated it too. She felt
benauwd,
boxed in. Trapped and scared. It didn't feel like fear of her parents' punishment or fear of her classmates' ridicule. It wasn't even fear of what the church would do. It was horror of what she was. Crying would be such a cheap response. Babies cried. She felt more like lashing out at somebody or something. No crying, but her body shook like somebody naked in the snow. She stood erect on the platform of bales and imagined that she was Joan of Arc about to be consumed by flames.

She was interrupted by the return of the sparrows, the short bursting sounds of their bursting flight as they bounced through the air and then landed and perched on the long draping rope beneath the peak. They studied her in their twitchy way. The muted vibration of their ruffling and the quick nodding of their little heads. They were such harmless sojourners on earth, little messengers of goodwill, equipped with nothing so attractive as the brilliant colors of butterflies, but with such a simple and uncomplicated existence. One chirped what to Alice sounded like an ironically cheerful chirp.

She raised her hand and waved to them. “Got any good ideas?” she asked.

They rocked jerkily on the rope, the male chirped a few quick chirps, and they both flew off.

When she sat back down on the hay, she reached for one of the stalks of alfalfa and started nibbling its leaves. She tried to focus on the smells and sounds of the barn, which was probably all that the
sparrows knew of their simple world; but lines from
Hamlet
came parading through her mind. The fat king, Claudius, spoke to her. His insufferable wife, Gertrude, spoke to her. Claudius because he was a hypocrite like Alice Marie Krayenbraak. She was her own “smiling, damned villain.” Oh yes, she was indeed her own villain, but not a smiling one. She thought of Claudius's wisdom in his villainy: “Oh Gertrude, Gertrude, / When sorrows come they come not single spies, But in battalions.”

“‘Aye, there's the rub,' Nancy chafed.”

Alice laughed the deep and pathetic laugh of someone who saw her own foolishness, but she was her only audience. She thought of Claudius's battalion of sorrows. The collapse of her family's farm was a mere foot soldier in this battalion. Her mother's screwed-up mental state was barely a drill sergeant. But, oh the truth of her womb: this was a veritable Napoléon's army and what she had in defense was the unarmed peasant of her flimsy self.

In her blissful blindness she had not prayed sincerely for two weeks. Was what was happening to her God's idea of tough love? Had he sent her mother to catch them in the haymow as a final warning? Her mother as the archangel Gabriel. Or her mother as Amos, the prophet of doom with his declaration that their sins would catch up with them.

Alice wanted to argue with God. Resolved: That Alice Krayenbraak should discover God's love in her life through the earthly means that God provides her.

“Mock not that ye be not mocked” came spiking into her mind. Her proposition was a mockery of God's love and she knew it. If you want to find God's love, the counterarguments began, feed the poor, visit the sick, honor your father and mother, care for the planet, visit the homeless, deny the needs of your own sinful flesh. Obey the Ten Commandments! She could see the judge's scorecards, and she was not in the winner's column.

If she couldn't pray in this sacred space, where could she pray? She did not want to pray for forgiveness for actions that were the most beautiful and loving moments of her life. Praying to deny love seemed wrong. She wanted to pray in a detached and thoughtful way. She wanted to have a conversation with God. Alone in the haymow, she folded her
hands and closed her eyes. She waited for the right words to come to her. Instead, her mind gave her more words of the villainous king Claudius: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

She looked up and around the haymow for a message. She stood and listened, but there was no movement and not a flutter of sound.

PART IV

36

It was cold and getting colder. When Alice looked outside at the brutal winds whipping topsoil off the barren fields across the road from the Krayenbraak farm, she could almost see the broad and ruthless arm of the Lord sweeping the earth clean for the millennium. She took another one of her mother's Valium before going outside to do the morning chores and coming to the table for breakfast.

The thermostat in the house was set at fifty, and it felt as if even their old and sturdy farmhouse was preparing for a time when familiar warmth would no longer be an option. Her mother wore her down parka in the kitchen and had her gloves on at the breakfast table, and, while her father wore his sober and inscrutable expression that suggested nothing was abnormal, he still had on a sweatshirt. Alice defied the circumstantial evidence of a cold world by washing her hands and face in cold water and wearing only her jeans and a light cotton shirt to the table.