After Alice (2 page)

She watches Justin's profile, as always, covertly. Does he look like anyone? Besides Cynthia and her family, of course?

Her grandnephew is wearing a shirt and tie, the cashmere sweater she has given him for Christmas under his overcoat. His hair is smooth, becomingly cut. Very appropriate, she thinks, approvingly. None of that baggy denim and fleece that young men seem to favour this decade. The costume of a spurious anti-establishment pose. No; Justin looks proper, grown-up, a mature eighteen-year-old. And he seems to be a very good driver. She ought to relax.

Now they are climbing from the highway up the steep ridgeback hill. The narrow black road glitters. On either side, the spindly hedge of saskatoon berry, waxberry, Oregon grape clambers the bank, the stripped boughs like dark scratches against the snow.

She recognizes this road, which has changed very little in forty years. This is the landscape of her childhood. She doesn't recognize the name of the streets in the neighbourhood where Stephen lives, which Cynthia is reading from the map. Squirrel, Marmot, Badger. The lesser fauna of the dry Interior. Stephen lives on Jackrabbit.
Jackrabbit
.

It must be a new development. She has left it to Cynthia to navigate, though it's awkward for Cynthia, who is in the back seat, and has to see their faces to lip-read. She perhaps should have taken the back seat herself, but in Cynthia's small Japanese import, there is not really enough legroom for her except in the front. Cynthia must lean forward between the seats like a child, trying to read the infrequent road signs.

“Is your seatbelt fastened?” she asks Cynthia.

“Yes, Auntie Sid.”

“Mother!” Justin says, then, mockingly, “Have you washed your hands and buttoned your coat?”

Cheeky boy. “Perhaps you ought to slow down,” she tells Justin.

“What is the Feast of Epiphany, anyway?” Justin asks, cocking her a grin. So he has noticed too. A sponge for information: a boy after her own heart, her grand nephew.

He adds, “I didn't think we went in for this stuff. And
do
I want to know my cousins?”

“You see?” Cynthia complains in her flat, guttural voice. “You set a bad example, Auntie Sid, and then I have to deal with him.”

It's an old subject of discussion.

She says, “There's nothing wrong with celebrating holidays, Justin. Rituals are important. . . .”

“Yeah, yeah,” Justin says, impatiently.

Another thing: she objects to “Auntie Sid.” She had always been called Sidonie, emphasis on the first syllable. She had been named after a harpist, Sidonie Goosens, whom Father saw perform in Vienna in 1921. Sidonie had been astonished to hear, in 2004, that her namesake had just died. She had been still living in Montreal, and listening to CBC 2, when she heard the announcement. How could Sidonie Goosens have been still alive, in 2004? It couldn't be the same woman, she had thought. But it was: Sidonie Goosens had lived to be a hundred and five. She had come out of retirement to perform when she was in her nineties. “Imagine that,” Tom Allen had said, in his sweet, erudite, conversational voice. Sidonie had taken her namesake's longevity as a good omen.

The car takes a tight bend and fishtails. She grabs the door handle. Cynthia yelps from the back seat.

Cynthia herself ought to be driving. But she has had her license hardly any longer than Justin. In Montreal, Cynthia had not bothered to learn to drive.

“You might want to slow down,” Sidonie says, as mildly as she can. “There are more hairpin turns on this road.”

“Sorry,” Justin says blandly.

She should have driven them herself.

Then from the bank of bleached orchard grasses flanking the road, an apparition rises: a slim-waisted woman in a long, fluttering white dress — a nightgown? — arms taut behind her, as if bound at the wrists, head with its fluttering pale hair flung backward in a posture of desperation. In the few seconds she's caught in the headlights, the woman dashes, jerkily, away from the road, toward the rows of winter-stripped apple trees, flings herself against a lower limb, clings.

It's only as the car passes, as the headlight beam glides on, sucking all light with it, as her angle of vision shifts, as the beams of the vehicle behind them catch the white flash again, that Sidonie, her neck cranked sharply around, comprehends.

A long strip of white plastic — perhaps the torn packaging of an insulation batt — blown from a construction site. A twisted strip of white plastic, caught in a gust from a passing car. That's all.

Justin, at the wheel, says, “What was
that
! I thought it was a white deer for a second!” Sidonie's heart an earth compressor, thudding.

Her nephew Stephen will be forty-seven this year: is that right? Yes; he was born in November of 1959. A middle-aged man now. (How has that happened, that her nephew, her sister's son, can be forty-seven? And she hasn't seen him since his wedding, which must have been more than twenty years ago.)

Of course, Stephen is much changed. He has less hair, his face has blurred, as if a wax model of a face had been pressed with a warm hand; he is fleshier. But also, somehow, he has soured. He looks a little morose, disappointed, ashamed, even as he opens the door and stands smiling. Hangdog, her mother would have said. He has the thick, beetle-like torso of a man who has performed physical labour for thirty years. The set mouth of someone who had hoped for a different life, perhaps.

Stephen is wearing his hair long, over his ears, though it is receding in front, and a graphic T-shirt with gothic lettering, images of skulls and flames. Rock music is playing from a sound system somewhere in the house, and can be heard, or rather not quite heard, in disharmonic counterpoint to the conversations, to the voices of the guests, and of Stephen and Cynthia.

And here's Debbie, Stephen's wife, who has surely nearly doubled in size in the last twenty years. She looks alarmingly hot, though the house is cool to Sidonie's skin. Debbie's face is red, and the tendrils of curled hair on her forehead are damp. Sidonie stiffens as Debbie moves closer, her arms stretching out. She does not enjoy being hugged.

But Debbie's skin, when she embraces Sidonie, is surprisingly cool and dry, and she smells lightly of vanilla.

“So you've come back here after over forty years!” Debbie says. “That's amazing!”

How is it amazing, she wants to ask, but does not.

They are not permitted to join the rest of the guests right away, but are shepherded into a sort of library, where she is introduced to Stephen's children, her grandnephew and niece. They are grown — the boy is in his mid-twenties; the girl around Justin's age — but they seem graceless, diffident. They have a Slavic look, from Debbie's family, no doubt: coarse, dirty-blond hair (though the girl's is dyed black, with light roots), broad cheekbones, pale, slightly almond-shaped eyes. The two of them, brother and sister, look askance at Justin. None of the three of them speaks.

The conversation quickly devolves onto the subject of the children, Stephen and Debbie's offspring and Justin, their resemblances, their accomplishments, their plans. She asks the girl if she is planning on taking courses at the university after she graduates from high school. Her grandniece turns bored, black-outlined eyes toward her. (Hostile? Or just wary?)

“Maybe,” the girl says. “I want to go somewhere else, though.”

“What are you planning on studying?” Sidonie asks.

A flicker of something in the pale eyes. “I don't know,” she says. “I mean, I'm still trying to decide. I don't know if I'll go.”

Stephen says, “It's a lot of money if you want to go somewhere else. You need to pull up your grades, get a couple of scholarships. Maybe get a part-time job.”

The girl (what is her name?) sighs as if Stephen has suggested she take on a shift at the mines, and surreptitiously plugs small earphones into her ears. One of the new small, flat digital music devices protrudes from the pocket of her jeans.

Justin has been reading the back of a DVD package, but is at last paying attention to the conversation. He appears about to speak to his cousin, but then closes his lips, turns away. She does not blame him; it is tough going, making conversation with these two.

“And Alex?” Sidonie asks. “What program are you in?”

Alex, with his shaggy hair, his beard, his baggy jeans and plaid flannel shirt, is possibly out of university already. But she has not heard that he has entered a profession.

Stephen says, “Oh, Alex is taking a break from university.”

“Dropped out, you mean,” his sister says spitefully. Apparently she can hear them, in spite of the earplugs.

“Well, now,” Stephen says, carefully, “Alex hasn't found something he's interested in yet.”

“Except sitting in his room all day downloading songs,” the girl says.

Justin's eyes widen; an only child, he has not experienced sibling hostility, she thinks. Sibling rivalry. The unconscious urge to destroy the nest-mate.

Once, she remembers, as a child made to pick up stones in the garden, she had lobbed a fist-sized rock backward, underhand, meaning to hit the clothes-line post, but instead clipping her sister Alice squarely on the chin. She'd stood up straight, then, gaping. Couldn't have done that again if she'd tried; she'd laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. Then Alice was on her, kneeling on her back, seizing her two braids like reins in one hand and whacking her face up and down into the mud. Alice, five years older than her, and much larger — there was no resisting Alice.

Alice'd had three stitches, Dr. Knox driving out from town to do the job. A little white scar, ever after, in the von Täler chin-dimple.

The appalling feeling of the grit in her teeth, of the clay-slime on her lips. Though when she was younger still, she had cheerfully eaten dirt, according to Alice.

She thinks that Justin feels rather afraid of his older cousin, Alex, who has a beefy body, bushy hair and beard.

Alex says, “I actually have a temporary job at the city recycling yard.” His voice is oddly high; he coughs and it drops an octave. “I work the chipper. Chip up the Christmas trees and prunings.”

Again, the guarded eyes, the impression of withholding, of caution. Wary, like his sister.

Debbie and Steve smile, stiffly. She realizes then that this is one of those social occasions — she has experienced them with her staff — in which the shy parents display the children as currency. Transactional.

Perhaps not wariness, then, but ambivalence. As if their real lives might be going on elsewhere. As if they're waiting for something worth their real attention.

Or perhaps they're just embarrassed.

“Is it dangerous?” Justin asks, of the chipper, and then flushes, but Alex grins.

“If you're stupid, it is,” he says.

That comment seems to finish the conversation. What is wrong with these children — these not-really-children-anymore? They seem disconnected from something. Dependent, perhaps, and resenting the cage of their dependence.

At the girl's age, she had already been in university for a couple of years. By the time she was Alex's age, she had finished her first degree, was married, working at her doctoral studies. Had settled to the business of life. It makes her anxious, this disconnection. This indirection.

They move from the library into a roomful of strangers: just the sort of thing she likes to avoid. Stephen and Debbie hover near her a little nervously. Are they afraid of what she will say? She has nothing to say. The conversation is about cooking and house decorating, as it would be (to be fair) at a party given by one of her younger colleagues back in Montreal. Or rather, the conversation is about television shows about cooking and house decorating. The first names of celebrity decorators and builders and chefs are invoked. Someone tells an incident involving a friend who had her house revamped as part of a television series. There is much interest in this anecdote, as if this television personality were an important political or religious figure. (She remembers the Anglican Archbishop visiting Marshall's Landing in the 50s. The general mood of self-improvement that had preceded, and succeeded, the visit. There is something of that in the tone of this conversation.)

The new religion of the middle classes, she thinks. Consumerism dressed up in a deceptive new costume of aesthetics, even environmentalism. More than one of her colleagues has carted off a whole kitchen's worth of appliances and cabinets to the landfill to make room for new, environmentally-friendly fittings.

Stephen's new house is quite grand; inside all is light and gloss: the ceilings high, the walls painted deep serious shades, the mouldings wide and elaborate, the dark hardwood floors glistening. The furniture and cabinetry, the fixtures and collections all oversized and authoritative, public, almost. Nineteen-forties mobster, her husband Adam would have said.

She has seen this style before in the homes of colleagues. New money. She is surprised and perhaps a little disappointed at the normalcy of the house. But what had she expected: something like the shack Stephen and Cynthia's parents, Alice and Buck, had lived in, in Horsefly? They have moved forward, Stephen and Debbie. There is nothing in this house to betray the past, or Stephen's family history. They have worked hard; they have achieved things.

There is no sign of the type of talk she remembers from her childhood, of local politics, fruit yields, machinery on the part of the men, gossip and disapprobation of the neighbours, by the women. But neither has anyone become drunk, and nobody has shouted or swung at anyone else.

What had she expected?

She drifts back into the library. An odd room. What she had taken for floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are actually repositories for row on row of VHS and DVD cases. There must be thousands of titles. A set of cabinets houses several electronic machines with winking blue lights. A semicircle of high-backed, overstuffed leather chairs — rather
Star Trek
— with cup-holders in the arms, confronts the cabinets. No doubt a large screen lurks somewhere, for the viewing of these various media. Yes, there, at the juncture of the wall and ceiling, an aperture.