The Fall of Alice K. (41 page)

She went on for what Alice assumed was her planned conclusion: “Being a realist is not just a matter of seeing things as they really are; it's also a matter of seeing what the outer appearance tells about the inner workings. ‘The soul exists and does the body make.' That's not from the Bible, but there's some truth in it. When I first saw your outbreak of acne, I knew that it was a warning that something was deeply wrong inside. With your thoughts and desires. We cannot hide what we are. It comes to the surface. That's true with me too. I know that. When I look at myself clearly, I see an emptiness. I can say it is because I never knew my beloved son David, and his absence leaves a hollowness in me that will follow me to the grave. I can say it is because Aldah has always been outside the possibilities of my guidance. But I don't blame you for what I am. And for what I am not.”

Her speech made Alice feel weary and sad. “Thank you, Mother. So just exactly what do you expect me to do? What do you want?”

“Nothing, really. I only hope that you will see who you are, what you have become, and learn humility.”

Again, Alice said, “Thank you,” but what was she thanking? Her mother's loss of respect for her? Her mother's judgment?

Alice heated a kettle of water and went to the bathroom to give herself a sponge bath. She crawled into bed fully clothed with her journal and
The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson.

As a true-believing twelve-year-old she had read the Bible every night before going to sleep and had become obsessed with the Proverbs of Solomon, copying down verses in purple and pink ink. Her very favorite she had highlighted over and over in different colors of ink so that it stood on the page like a rainbow of truth: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pitchers of silver.” Other quotations from Proverbs followed in smaller print:

Take fast hold of instruction.

Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister.

Wisdom is better than rubies.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.

She had also liked the verse that said, “Give not sleep to thine eyes” and thought that it meant that she should stay awake as long as possible to please God.

All God had given her for that allegiance was a habit of sleeplessness.

Now Emily Dickinson looked like a better prospect than either the Proverbs of Solomon or her mother as her new Scriptures of Wisdom. Single lines spoke to her and she wrote them down:

Emily Dickinson was cold comfort, but after her mother, she was still comfort.

41

Alice was awakened at eleven thirty by her mother's screaming: “Albert! Albert!”

When Alice got downstairs, her mother was kneeling over the motionless figure of her father on the living room floor. She had a rolled-up coat under his head and was staring into his eyes, which looked distant and blank. Alice saw her father's chest moving, though his breathing sounded desperate.

“Call an ambulance and get me some aspirins,” her mother said in a harsh but calm voice.

Alice rehearsed her words as she ran into the kitchen for the phone. “We need an ambulance! This is Alice Krayenbraak at the Albert Krayenbraak farm. My father has had some kind of stroke or heart attack. He's barely conscious. We're at fire number 8763. Yes, 8763. North of town, a mile off 75.”

“Stay on the line.” After a few seconds the voice was back with quick questions: Was there a regular pulse? What color was his face? Was his breathing steady?

Alice didn't know the answers to any of the questions, and could only tell her that he was breathing. The dispatcher said an ambulance was on its way but she'd stay on the line while Alice checked to see if she could give more information.

“He's still breathing,” said her mother.

“Dad, can you say something?”

He didn't say anything.

The reality and unreality of the moment, its haziness and its clarity, the slow motion of it, the long image of her father lying faceup on the living room floor, the disinfectant smell from the dairy that never left his
clothing, his strange breathing, the stern resolve on her mother's face, but its wrinkles, her aging, the shape of her loose breasts under her shirt, her blue anklets and black denim pants, and her father—the way his eyelids were not quite closed—like somebody faking sleep.

Alice told the dispatcher that he was breathing and had a pulse, and that he looked awfully pale.

Alice's mother was softly slapping her father's cheek. “Albert,” she said, “can you swallow? Can you take these aspirin?”

She lifted his head and he swallowed the two aspirins with a few sips of water.

Within an hour they knew that her father had suffered a heart attack. The doctor came into the waiting room to tell Alice and her mother that Albert was in the intensive care unit but was going to live.

“There was significant physiological impairment,” said the doctor, “but he is stable.”

They would not be able to see him for several hours and they had better not leave the hospital, “in case there were new symptoms of complications.”

The dairy operation would have to function without her father's supervision that night. He already had reached coherence and told the doctor about his work duties. “It will be all right,” he said. “Those Mexicans are never sick. Moses will take over.”

The doctors would be doing a surgical procedure that involved putting a stent in her father's heart, and he'd be able to go home in a day or two if the procedure went well and he showed no other threatening signs.

In the meantime, Alice at least had the keys to the 150 again, and she used them to leave the hospital and to drive to Children's Care to get Aldah. She didn't bother telling her mother, but when she returned with Aldah forty-five minutes later, her mother looked furiously displeased for only a second, then nodded as if to say, “Yes, of course, this is only right.”

Alice was convinced that it was the right thing to do, but she had no idea how Aldah would react. She had warned her on the way to the hospital that their father was sick, and Aldah nodded as if she understood fully why they were going to see him, but she seemed in no way distressed by the news.

Aldah looked at the tube running into her father's nose and at the
needle taped to the top of his hand. She slowly approached her sleeping father where he lay, dressed in a white hospital gown.

“Don't touch him,” said their mother, who stood up and walked to the bedside as if to protect her husband from their daughter's possible misbehavior.

“Don't touch,” Aldah repeated but walked up closely and stared at her father's face. Then, disobeying her mother, she did reach out to his hand, but so slowly that her mother must not have seen a need to stop her. Aldah touched, then rubbed her fingers lightly over his.

“Touch gentle,” she said.

Alice stood beside her, then reached to touch their father's hand too.

“Gently,” said Alice and touched his hand.

Aldah imitated her. “Touch gentle, David,” she said.

Their father's eyes opened and he turned his head slightly in their direction. His face remained expressionless, and Alice could not determine if he was seeing them. His hand reached to rub the dry spittle in the corners of his mouth.

“That's enough,” said their mother. “Let him rest.”

As they prepared to leave, Alice waited to see if her mother would try to have a sweet moment with Aldah. She watched both of them, Aldah to see if she would make an advance toward their mother, and their mother to see if she would make an advance toward Aldah. They both did say good-bye but they said it in the way a person might say good-bye to someone they saw casually every day—and these two had not seen each other for two weeks.

Alice drove back to Children's Care, assuring Aldah all the while that their father would be all right and that he'd come to visit her as soon as he was well.

“I visit him,” said Aldah.

“Yes, and he will visit you. When he's all better. All right?”

“All right,” said Aldah, whose eyes lit up as they drove up to Children's Care. Aldah was happy to be back at her new home.

There had been the sound of the ambulance siren going down Main Street of Dutch Center, so Alice assumed the grapevine would have told everyone about her father's heart attack and that many people at Midwest would already know about it.

She assumed she'd talk to Nickson first and tell him what she knew, but it was Lydia who was waiting for Alice when she drove up to Midwest. She ran out to the 150 as Alice got out. Alice knew that her heart had already forgiven Lydia for being such a total bitch the last time they had seen each other, but the look on Lydia's face was neither a look of apology nor happiness. It was a desperate look.

“So sorry to hear about your dad,” said Lydia. She held Alice's arm and looked intensely into her eyes. “But there's something else I have to tell you. It's terribly important and I'm so sorry to tell you after what you've been going through with your dad.”

“What? What is it?”

“Let's get inside the pickup,” she said.

When they did, Lydia took her arm again. “The acne medication!” she said. “You've got to stop taking it right now!”

In a desperate apology, Lydia explained to Alice that the medication was dangerous for pregnant women and that it could do terrible damage to the fetus.

“Why didn't you tell me?” asked Alice. “You just gave them to me in a baggy. There weren't any warnings on a baggy!”

“Because the package they come in has these ugly pictures with an ex over a stick-woman's pregnant tummy. Never in a million years did I think you'd get pregnant.”

They cried together and the windows of the 150 steamed up.

“You'll probably be all right,” said Lydia. “Just stop taking them.”

“I will,” said Alice, “even though my acne isn't totally gone. Look at these ugly lumps.”

“They've faded a lot already,” said Lydia. “I was going to tell you how good you were looking.”

“If I did something to the baby, I'll never forgive myself. I couldn't do that to Nickson either. He doesn't deserve that. I just can't think about this, Lydia. I just can't.”

“You could get an abortion and tell people you had a miscarriage,” said Lydia. “You've just had to deal with your dad's thing. You don't need any more problems.”

Lydia's suggestion was not as biting as it might have been because the thought of an abortion had actually crossed Alice's mind before Lydia's
news about the medication, but only briefly. She had weighed the idea, but she also had come to a quick conclusion. “No,” she said. “I couldn't do that.”

“Because you think it's murder?”

“I don't know if it's murder, but I do know the fetus is something different from me. We don't even have the same blood type. I couldn't do it.”

“Because of your parents?”

“Because of Nickson. I wouldn't throw away his baby.”

“His baby?”

“Our baby.”

They left the 150 and headed for the front door of the school. “I'm not going to tell Nickson about this,” said Alice.

“I wouldn't,” said Lydia. “You'll probably be all right.”

“It's not me I'm worried about.”

Nickson had also been waiting for Alice and they quickly slipped off together into the math classroom before the others got there. “Sorry to hear about your dad,” he said.

“He's going to be all right.”

“Don't blame yourself,” he said.

What a strange thing for him to say, Alice thought, especially since she now had a much bigger worry for which she might have to blame herself. They had only a few minutes together, and this was no place to ask him whether he'd told his mother and Mai that she was pregnant. She wanted to embrace him, and she could see the same desire in his eyes, but every moment had a new seriousness to it. Everything in her life fought against the quick urges that once had seemed so simple and sweet.

“I have the keys to the pickup again,” she said as they parted, but she couldn't think of what to add. He simply nodded, as if knowing that seeing each other would be a possibility again.

Miss Den Harmsel's class was starting in a few minutes, and Alice converged with Lydia as they walked toward the classroom. “Let's be great for her today,” said Lydia.

“I'm ready,” said Alice.

Miss Den Harmsel was there, but so was a “practice teacher,” a young man named Vic Uitenboomgaars. He was young and slick, a Redemption
College senior education major. Miss Den Harmsel introduced him as “one of Redemption's best” and someone who had a double major in English Education and Speech/Drama.

He swirled around the classroom and spoke in a loud effeminate voice and acted as if he was born to be in the classroom, or on stage. By the end of the class they knew that he would be leading the class twice a week.

In her generous way, Miss Den Harmsel was allowing Mr. Vic to give his touch to the curriculum by teaching contemporary fiction on his two days each week. The class would return to Emily Dickinson on Miss Den Harmsel's days.

“I need you as my friend more than ever,” Alice said to Lydia after class.

“Nothing can happen to change that,” said Lydia. “I just hope that you'll figure out a way to go to college and become everything you can become. You've got it all, Alice, you've got it all: brains, wit, ambition, looks, personality—you name it.”