After Alice (43 page)
Such a strange assortment of garments; she would never, before this year, have considered wearing these things together. But she can see that the effect is salubrious, the sizes and colours of the rectangles made by the various items form a pleasing arrangement. And leaving her bedroom, she sees the zebrawood beads, a peace-offering, a traveller's present from Justin, hanging from the row of hooks. Their satin texture, their warmth and weight pass through her imagination: dare she? She puts them on. Yes? Yes. There. She feels somehow robed, hallowed.
They have had by Christmas of 2008 much more than the normal amount of snow, and much colder temperatures. By all predictions, this winter of 08/09 will be more intense than those of the last ten or twelve years. Sidonie, wading through the new drifts from her car, feels buoyant, elated. It is a winter from her childhood, clean, airy, a clear demarcation in the year. She tries to form a ball in her driving gloves, but the snow is too dry to stick; then Fearon, who's shoveling the courtyard, forms a loose missile with his bare hands and heaves it at her, overhand. She has to hold up her bag of wrapped presents to gain safe passage.
The gifts have been mostly for the children, a custom of both von Tälers and Kleinholzes. But there are some gifts for the adults too: practical and promissory. A goat for Ingrid: it will arrive in spring, but she receives a card with a photo of its mother, a pretty black-and-white Nubian. A separator for Debbie, to make cheese; also represented by a photo cut from a brochure.
Four large filing cabinets for Sidonie: these represented by a bill of sale from the auction house. A black iron object, called a spider, for Kevin, who handles it almost reverently.
“It's an antique,” Alex says. “From Quebec. I found it on eBay, after six months of looking.”
For Tasha (whose friend
is
Dawn, not Don), keys to the elderly three-quarter ton pickup that Alex has used to take vegetables to the market all summer and fall.
“Since you've been driving it for the past few months anyway,” Alex says. “But I'll need it to haul manure in spring.”
Sidonie has not known what to give anyone, and has resorted to distributing a pair of thick wool socks to each person. She has found out that her neighbour, she of the flat-faced dog and the casseroles, possesses a large bureau full of socks that she has knit, and that she sells for charity: for Stephen Lewis's African grandmothers, she says. Sidonie has chosen for each family member: heavy grey merino, self-striped, lacy and patterned. A pair for everyone.
It would have been better if she had knit them herself, she thinks, but she has not. She never learned how to knit, though she had been given yarn and needles as a child, shown over and over. Her hands refused to pick it up; she had never got past awkward. And Alice had been so adept that Sidonie had been let off the hook. It is her brain wiring, really, she supposes, that has not got that aptitude. She does not use that layer of processing as well. She had traded it early for the ability to manipulate abstract things. Could she have learned, if she had tried harder? Would her brain have developed differently?
It is Cynthia who has given the best gift: she has found a company that will print and bind books, and provides a computer template to put them together, and Cynthia has, over the last year, created a scrapbook of photographs (captioned, dated) out of the albums in Sidonie's files, the albums that Justin has painstakingly reassembled, and had a copy made for each of them. “But how did you do this?” Sidonie asks, and Cynthia explains about scanning the photos, choosing the coloured borders and titles. But the books are very professional-looking; Cynthia has a gift.
Here are Mother and Father, looking, at last, like what they were; an intelligent and disapproving Scotswoman, an expansive and indulgent middle-European burgher. And another photograph, looking like what they also were: North American orchardists of the mid-century. There are photos of parties, of children â Alice and Sidonie, Hugh, Graham, Walter and Karl, Masao. There are photographs of the house, of small trees, of pets. Photographs of groups of people at weddings, at dedications of buildings, on the beach.
And here is Alice, in a white dress and tiara, shaking hands with Princess Margaret. How funny; Sidonie remembers that dress so distinctly that just seeing this image of it she can feel the texture of the cotton whipcord, the batiste lining, bought in Vancouver; hear the sound of the shears, the rumbling whir of the Singer. She sees the dress growing slowly on the dining-room table. Alice pressing out seams, picking out basting, for hours and hours. The bodice recut three times before the fit satisfied her. It had been almost bridal, the most perfect thing seen in Marshall's Landing. Mrs. Inglis had loaned Alice a pair of white kid slingbacks; Miss Robinson, a strand of real pearls. They had all looked at the dress, not touching it, awed. Mother had put on a white glove and turned the dress hem up to show the perfect stitching, the secret finished seams.
And Alice, wearing the dress, the short white gloves, her hair a smooth blonde chignon, her little hat, her slim white perfect self, her attending princesses, standing on the carpet to wait for the real princess.
In the photo you don't see this. You see a very pretty slim girl, with an uncertain smile, a wisp of escaping hair, a homemade dress that strains a bit at the armhole seam. A provincial beauty, dimmed by Princess Margaret's professional coif and couture, her formal bearing.
A little death, though she knows photographs do not always tell the truth.
They have all become
a little older, a little more worn, in three years, Sidonie sees, looking around the table. Alex has lost his baby face, looks grimmer. Ingrid has put on weight, carries a lushness that for the first time truly recalls her paternal grandmother. Justin, just off the plane, is very thin, as well as bearded. (He's picked up some intestinal parasite, Cynthia tells Sidonie.) He looks harder: he is harder. He does not make such an effort to be polite. His hair has darkened, too: she does not see in him her golden boy. She is punctured with loss, but she does not speak of this. Justin is not hers; has never been.
But relief, mixed with the loss.
Steve and Debbie, Kevin and Celeste, look simply tired. They have worked hard for people in their late forties. The enterprise has, overall, lost money. They will not see a profit for a year or two yet.
Only Tasha looks pleased with herself, paying exaggerated attention to the short, sulky, red-haired young woman sitting beside her: a ruffian if Sidonie ever saw one. Dawn. What had her parents thought, naming her that? She is dressed with exaggerated butchness, her hair aggressively spiky, her speech deliberately tough. What dreams of femininity has she disrupted, or is she demonstrating against?
There are arguments, after the joviality of the gifts. Hugh accuses Alex and Kevin of working Ingrid too hard; Debbie and Cynthia exchange words over Justin's appearance; the boys squabble over a new electronic game; Kevin yells at them and Celeste yells at Kevin.
Sidonie, sitting between Celeste's aunt Edith and Tasha's friend, has to hold up the ends of two conversations, which, she begins to realize, would be volatile if mixed. Edith is telling a slightly obscene and mocking story about her transgendered nephew, while Dawn is complaining about the line-ups at the liquor store where she works on “Indian cheque day.” Sidonie is human insulation. She is tickled. It is an amusing job.
Kevin cuts into the luscious dark cake, which is distributed in great, heavy slices: they are a family of fruitcake-eaters, rare, perhaps, in the world. The cake, Sidonie thinks, is like a geological sample, a chunk of earth, rich with geological time, or at least historical time: a midden of what their families have desired, found, made, over half a century or more. There are walnuts from the Sage and Plum tree, the Beauvoir tree; there are almonds and raisins from Italy; there is good wheat from the prairies, and the whole soaked in Bosnian apricot brandy, a gift from Debbie's parents.
They toast with a thimble each of ice wine, Hahnenschrei's first vintage of ice wine, a gift from their neighbours George and Katya.
“
Late Bloomer
,” Sidonie reads from the label, and Steve asks, “What is ice wine, anyway?”
“It's made from grapes left on the vine until after the first frost,” Kevin says. “The frost concentrates the sugars, which are high, anyway, for the grapes being left longer.”
The wine is satin, cool, sweet as lilies.
“It tastes purple,” says Cashiel, who, like his brother, has been given a thimbleful.
“It tastes like I imagined wine would taste, when I was a child,” Cynthia says.
“A toast,” Debbie says, surprisingly, “to late bloomers.”
There is a knock
at the house door, but nobody hears it for a while. In the end, it is Sidonie, getting up to use the washroom, who hears and answers it. She moves through the sea of boots that lie dripping, scattered, on the new tile floor in the hallway, stooping to line up a few pairs, to clear a path. Through the sidelight, she can see that there are no additional cars in the drive, but that someone has made a path on foot down the driveway. She can hear stamping on the other side of the door, snow being cleared from boots. A throat-clearing cough: a man's. Through the patterned glass of the sidelight she can see the blurred figure of a man of around medium height. Light, or grey hair. Not bulky enough to be one of the Rilkes. Who is it, walking up their drive on Christmas Day?
The old door sticks at the tile, swollen a little with the snow. Stephen will need to plane it a little, just on the lower left. She tugs at it. “Just a second,” she calls. “The door is stuck.”
She kicks through the jumble of Kodiaks and Columbias, braces her foot against the jamb, gets a better grip. Now. Now. She pulls harder, and the door bursts open.
Thanks to Evalyne Hillaby Smith and to Harold Rhenisch for their stories and details of life in the Okanagan in the 1940s and 1950s. (All factual errors are my own.) Thanks also to Carolyn Ives, Leigh Matthews, Rachel Nash, Patsy Alford, and Annette Dominik, who read early versions of the manuscript, and to Peg Hasted and Susie Safford for talking me through first chapter revisions late in the process. Anne Nothof refined the book with her clear editing skills.
A sabbatical leave from Thompson Rivers University gave me time to complete the first drafts. The Lake Country Museum provided many story triggers in its collection of artifacts and archives.
Karen Hofmann
lives in Kamloops, B.C. She has been published in
Arc
,
Prairie Fire
,
The Malahat Review
, and
The Fiddlehead
. Her book
Water Strider
was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Prize at the 2009 BC Book Awards, and “The Burgess Shale” was shortlisted for the 2012 CBC Short Story Prize.
After Alice
is her first novel.