The Fall of Alice K. (40 page)

“And I still have another two thousand,” he said.

“My dad put away money for me too,” said Alice.

He sat speechless for a moment. Then he told Alice that she shouldn't be bothered by Lydia. She didn't count as much as her parents. He said, “Your parents shouldn't reject you. You're family.”

“But you're afraid your mother is going to reject
you.
”

“No, I'm not. I just don't want to put any more weight on her shoulders.”

“What if your mother did reject you when you told her? Then what?”

“My mother couldn't reject me.”

“What do you mean, she couldn't?”

“Mothers don't reject their sons because they got somebody pregnant. It's not done.”

“I don't get it.”

“I know it.”

“My parents don't seem to have any trouble sending me out of the house.”

“You don't understand,” he said. “We could even live at our house if we wanted to. She'd have to let us if that's what we wanted. She might not talk to us much.”

“So you're saying a mother can't punish her son if he does something she doesn't like?”

“It's hard to explain.”

“I'll live anywhere with you. But there's my parents. They wouldn't let me.”

“I figured that.”

“Nickson, what do you want to do? I want to do whatever you want to do.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

“I should talk to my uncles,” he said.

“They'd come over here just to talk to you?”

“If they knew it was important, sure. But maybe I should go over there.”

“Is this what you meant by needing time to think?”

“Yes,” said Nickson. “Yes, it is.”

Alice stared out the window of the 150 over the snowless frozen lawns through the stark branches of ash trees into the gray sky. When the whole world was being remade, everything she'd planned and assumed upended, turned over, scrambled, shuffled, when none of the pieces fit together the way she once thought they did.

“Nickson, what do you think we would be doing if I wasn't pregnant ?”

“Figuring out how to be together.”

“And next year? What would have happened next year when I was in college?”

“Maybe you'd go to Redemption with Mai until I finished high school. Then maybe we would go to the same college somewhere else.”

“You've been thinking these things?”

“From the start. When you went with Mai to the pizza place, you know. That was it. I knew you were the one.”

“That's when you said you wanted to go out for debate.”

“I wanted our minds to come together.”

“You went out for debate so you could be with me?”

“So I could be with you. Your mind. Your spirit. You have that fearless thing. I need to be with someone who is fearless.”

Alice studied him. His face looked so strong just then. He was the one who looked fearless and determined. “Rev. Prunesma said some things,” said Alice. “He tried to tell me Hmong men don't like women in charge.”

“Not in charge. Fearless. That night when Mai and I came back from dealing with those thugs, when I saw you at the table, how brave you were, I started loving you. I knew that if a time came like right now, you'd do what we have to do.”

She waited to see what he meant.

“I should talk to the elders. Hear them out, you know. I'm going to phone them, but it would be even better if we went to Saint Paul together. I think if the men in my family saw you, they'd approve. They'd have some questions.”

“Like whether I really loved you?”

“They'd be curious whether you're expecting a boy or a girl.”

“What difference would that make?”

“Never mind.”

Alice's mind came into focus. Some things needed to be figured out step-by-step by gathering evidence and coming to a conclusion. Had he really suggested that they leave? Leave their worlds? Leave Dutch Center? Leave everything? Loving Nickson was not a question, but the suggestion to leave was not something that fit her analysis kit.

“You could just take off?”

“You and me. We could just show up. We've both got some money, right?”

“And your mom?

“She'd just have to understand, that's all.”

“And Mai?”

“She'd understand, no problem.”

“If we just took off, we'd be losers, admitting that we can't deal with things here.”

“You run, that's not losing.”

“Fleeing is admitting defeat.”

“Sometimes you have to flee to get what you need. Pull back. Let the problem fly on by. We're not a problem to each other. Your parents are the problem. And that minister, Rev. Prune.”

The idea to pick up and leave came into Alice's mind differently from what she might have expected. All of her fantasies, including the ones before she met Nickson, meant leaving Dutch Center and becoming that new person she could so easily imagine—a woman who was educated, respectable, and sophisticated—free from the stains of farm life, free from the narrow-minded bonds of her church, free from her mother's judgment, soaring off like a beautiful swallow into the infinite skies of possibility.

“I can't think like that,” she said. “I just can't.”

Alice didn't understand her own fear at that moment. She felt the way she did the first time she walked to the edge of the high diving board at the local sandpit swimming spot. She had thought she would run and cannonball fifteen feet down to the cold spring water; but when she had looked down, an unfamiliar fear held her back. She was there again, inside that sudden, recoiling fear.

“The only world I've ever known is right here,” she said. “What problems I have I'm going to have to deal with right here before I move on.”

“Sounds like
you
need some time.”

“Yes,” she said in a whimper, “I need time.”

They agreed that they would not talk to anyone about what they might do next. They'd go about living their lives as normally as they could for a few days.

Alice took a different road home, turning down roads that would take her into the least familiar territory she could find between Dutch Center and the Krayenbraak farm, leaving the main highway and sticking to the gravel roads. There was little snow on the ground, and a stiff wind churned dirt up into the air, a mist of frozen black particles that gave a hissing sound against the radiator of the 150.

More than once she came within a hundred yards of a barn or pasture where she and Nickson had made love, and each time had a quick fantasy that she was looking at the very spot where she conceived. She
had a moment of confusion when she came to an intersection four miles from home. She remembered the intersection, but a whole set of farm buildings was missing since the last time she had driven by in October. The Steenema place. It had been abandoned for two years, but people had once lived in the house and kept a pony in the red barn. The red barn, the chicken coop, the hog house, the metal machine shed, and the skinny white house were all gone now. She called back the images in her mind: that thick horse-shaped grove gone. It was gone! Even the fences along the road were gone—and there wasn't any rubble anywhere. There weren't any stacks of lumber to be burned; there wasn't even any crippled machinery from the present or the past. She stopped and stared at the absence. It was as if a skillful surgeon had stooped down and removed a tumor and sewn the earth back up without leaving a hint of a scar.

Maybe there was another way of looking at it. The earth was wiped clean for a fresh beginning. A birth instead of a death. A cycle of things. The earth would come alive again and flourish with mile-long rows of soybeans. Mile-long rows of corn. But who would be the new landowners and where would they live? Who would be the new stewards of the earth? The question shouldn't have bothered her but it did. It shouldn't have been her sorrow but it was.

The sadness of not seeing what once was there entered her as a sadness about what she no longer was. It was a painful embarrassment to admit her own changes: not only had her unbridled behavior brought this pregnancy upon herself, but some part of her must have wished for it. With the admission that this was something she secretly wanted came a second flush, but this flush was not of embarrassment. It was an odd feeling of satisfaction that being pregnant made her safe by having something that her mother could not criticize out of her. Her father couldn't pray it away, Rev. Prunesma couldn't preach it away, and Lydia couldn't mock it away. And if the farm collapsed in a whimper tomorrow with creditors descending like scavenging crows from every direction, she would still hold a whole world with the hope of the future growing inside her.

The nuisance of common sense confronted the defiantly satisfied feeling: How could she be a mother and a college student at the same time? How could she have it all? Couldn't the same brain that gave her
straight-As at Midwest show her a way? She wouldn't be the first person to graduate from college with a four-year-old, and Nickson was so smart. He'd do his fair share. And colleges had married-student housing units.

She turned around at the next intersection and drove back to the space where the entire farmyard had been wiped off the face of the earth. She let her feeling of sadness return. She waited it out. As whiffs of frozen black earth rose into the air, she said to herself
Yes.
This is what new beginnings look like.

But when she got home, the thermostat was still set at fifty degrees, and her mother was bent over the kitchen counter dressed in her blue down parka that now had grease stains on the sleeves. Alice walked past her without comment and went to her room to change into her work clothes. She put on a loose sweatshirt, but when she planted herself in front of the electrical panel to feed the steers, she still bumped her swollen left breast on the control lever. She left the churning augers and the feasting steers, walked inside the barn, took off her coat, and removed her bra and put it in her pocket. She wouldn't ask her parents to buy her a larger one. She would wear loose sweaters and go without a bra if she had to.

She went back out to watch the steers finish their dinner. Miss Den Harmsel had told them that most Emily Dickinson poems could be sung to the tune of familiar hymns. She sang to the steers “I heard a fly buzz when I died” to the tune of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

Her parents were waiting for her when she got back to the house.

“You are not obeying us,” said her father. “We know you can finish the fall semester. Before you start showing. And then you know what you'll have to do. We've made arrangements.”

Alice knew he was mouthing what was really her mother's plan, so she did not answer him.

“We can't stop you from seeing him while you're in school,” said her mother, “but we know you're seeing him after school. Give your father the pickup keys.”

“What's going on?”

“Your mother will drive you to school in the morning and pick you up right afterwards.”

“Whatever you have to do,” said Alice. Then she turned on her father
and gave him a look that was as frozen as the look he had given her. “Why aren't you in bed getting some sleep? You have to be at work at midnight, remember?”

In some bizarre attempt at bringing the family closer together—or maybe to give them the chance to keep their eyes on Alice more of the time—her parents decided that they would have supper together at five o'clock and her father would put off going to bed until after supper.

They all wore their coats at the supper table. Alice kept her eyes open during family devotions. Her mother caught her at it but didn't say anything because she had been just as guilty as Alice. Her father's opening and closing prayers were rich in pleas for forgiveness and guidance. When he looked up, there was a distant look in his eyes and his complexion didn't look right. When he stood up, the controlled and upright figure was not there as he sluggishly walked toward the living room in a way that was much more like her mother's manner than his. He stopped and put his hand to his face.

“What's wrong, Albert?” asked Alice's mother.

“Pain in my jaw,” he said. “Hope it's not an abscessed tooth.”

“That's all we need,” said her mother.

“Feeling kind of dizzy too,” he said.

“You'd better get some sleep.”

He made his way toward their bedroom: he'd be getting less than six hours of sleep before going to work at the dairy.

Alice and her mother stood across the table staring at each other.

“Have a good look,” said her mother.

“I am.” Alice stared her straight on in the eyes.

“This is the mother who has tried to lead you through the darkness of the world,” her mother said. Her voice was sonorous. She spoke as if in a trance, as if she were the medium for some otherworldly vision: “God knows I did not want you to be part of the darkness. I wanted you to live in light and to be a light unto others. Please sit,” she said.

Her mother sat down on one side of the table, and Alice sat on the other.

“I wanted you to survive it all,” said her mother. “I wanted you to separate yourself from the dying world and to give life to whatever remains behind. I prayed that you would listen to me and that I would
be the voice of wisdom that prepared you. I prayed that you would be one who would remain standing in the next world, whatever that world might be. But we are what we are,” she said and leveled a look that to Alice felt hateful.