After Alice (5 page)

She will be, she calculates, out of commission for six weeks. The pain, at first, is excruciating, but more so, the thought of being immobile. She is able to hobble around her house with crutches; can even manage the stairs, clutching the railing, hopping. But she can't drive her car, which has standard transmission. She can't go out walking along the little lake.

Stupid. Stupid.

Cynthia has said: call anytime. But she does not call. She will not be supplicant. She will tough it out.

She lasts five days.

Justin calls her. (Cynthia can hear a little, can lip-read, but can't manage on the phone.) “You must be out of groceries.”

She is, she admits painfully, nearly out of groceries. And other things, too: toilet paper, reading material. But she will not bother Cynthia, who works such long hours. She can wait until the weekend. She is making things more difficult, she knows, but cannot stop herself from this demurring.

But no: here is Cynthia, within a couple of hours, with Justin, carrying bags of lettuce and lemons and hothouse tomatoes; steaks and eggs; a loaf of crusty, chewy, acidic bread, which Sidonie tears into, wolf-like, when they have barely left.

She is subjected to the indignity of Cynthia poking through her refrigerator and cupboards, scolding, not so much as a potato in here! But this officiousness is amusing, too: it seems only a few years ago that their roles had been reversed. She herself, or more likely Adam, scolding: how will you take care of yourself? Do you think food magically appears in the cupboards?

Cynthia says, “I've signed you up for the local paper to be delivered.”

No no no. “I don't need it, thanks. I get
The Globe and Mail
.”

But Cynthia has turned her face, pretending not to hear.

Her neighbour knocks on her front door, the classic casserole dish in her hands. She has avoided this neighbour: the woman in the other half of the duplex, whom she sees often coming down her mirror-steps, carrying one of those flat-faced, owl-eyed, blonde dogs that look at you like autistic children. (Is it her imagination, or does this woman always leave her house just as she does herself? Does she watch from behind those sheer drapes for another human being to appear?)

“Beef and noodle,” the woman says. “I hope you're not vegetarian?”

“No,” Sidonie says. “I am not.”

“I didn't think so,” her neighbour says. “I can smell meat cooking sometimes.”

The irritation of being watched: she feels herself grimace.

“Your daughter and grandson, I see them come visit,” the woman says.

“My niece and grandnephew.”

“Oh? Right then. It looks like you have someone taking care of you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that's good. Your grandnephew, he's a nice-looking boy. I couldn't think who he reminded me of. Then it came to me, in the checkout at Safeway. He's the image of that young actor, what d'you call him, that Leonardo.”

Sidonie shifts her weight. She will need to put down her crutches to receive the casserole dish, but she will not invite her neighbour over the threshold if she can help it.

“He's at the university, is he? What a nice-looking boy he is, and so polite.”

“Yes.” The exposure. She wonders perversely: is Justin too polite? Is it a bad sign?

“Here,” her neighbour says. “I'll just put it in your kitchen for you.” And she kicks off her rubber clogs, moves through the doorway and past Sidonie, jostling the door open a little as she goes with her elbow, bustling down the hallway in her stockinged feet to the kitchen, as if she knows exactly where it is. Of course she does. Her house is a mirror image of this one.

Then she leaves, pulling the door shut behind her carefully, and Sidonie breathes again. There's something almost too chipper about her neighbour. Too casual. A prairie accent. She is not used to the informality of the West, now. Familiar, that's the word. She does not like having a stranger whisk through her house like that. She does not like the thought of someone making her way, on the other side of the walls, around a space that is a mirror-image of her house. She will admit this. It makes her occupancy of her semidetached house seem even more random, unintentional than it already does.

But the casserole is tasty, laced with sour cream and paprika, juicy with mushrooms.

The things she has had shipped from Montreal — the contents of her apartment — do not fill up the rooms of her new house, and neither do they seem to belong in it. Her odd bits of furniture, her rugs and pictures, which in her Montreal flat had seemed rich, layered, polyphonous, organic, seem here only unrelated and shabby. Light and openness have disconnected objects from one another, so that the effect has been unpacked, disassembled. Her tables and chairs and rugs are stranded; the house looks like a sparsely-stocked second-hand store. She hasn't even hung her pictures, for when she took them out of their crates, they had seemed too dark, too strong, and yet too small to hang on the pale walls.

She could get rid of all her furniture and pictures, buy new. Or she could tear out the kitchen, with its pale cabinets, its cold fauxmarble surfaces, put in something darker, more sober. Paint the interior some deeper, more substantial colour, to suit her furnishings. Such waste, though, to dismantle an almost-new house. And the exterior, which she may not alter, would be disharmonic.

She doesn't know how to make this house seem right, intentional.

Her sister, Alice, had known that sort of thing. It had been her province. Alice won competitions in the sewing of piles of flowered flour sacks into ruffled café curtains and slipcovers with coordinating piped cushions. Sidonie had not been able to sew a straight seam. And it had been Clara who had arranged the furniture and pictures in Sidonie's Montreal flat. Clara and Anita, her sisters-in-law: they had descended on her, after she had left their brother, and had struggled and heaved, thumped and shaken her new place into that richly-coloured and textured nest. Clara had taken her down to Jaymar to buy that sofa, for Adam had insisted on keeping the le Corbusier pieces. Clara had dickered with Adam for the other furniture, the Barcelona chairs, the Eames lamps; Sidonie wouldn't have bothered. And Anita had selected the paintings and photographs out of the collection that Sidonie and Adam — but mostly Adam — had bought, over their twenty years together. Anita had selected the ones that she thought would do for Sidonie, an assortment that Adam had agreed to relinquish, and Anita had painted the walls of Sidonie's new apartment oxblood and teal and plum.

While Sidonie had sat and watched, passive, dazed, exhausted by the effort of having left Adam, dazed and exhausted perhaps by the change itself.

Strange to think that time is twenty years in the past.

In the blue winter light of her new house, her flat in Montreal seems in retrospect a jeweled tent, a Shangri-la from which she has been evicted. Though she has chosen that eviction, chosen exile.

Perhaps she needs Clara and Anita here to orchestrate her new place. She misses Clara, whom she saw weekly in Montreal — Clara with her indefatigable willingness to analyze any subject, to test it with anecdote and counteridea, to joke about it and weep over it, to wear it down to a few bright shreds. Clara, always arriving with a box of éclairs, a new book, tickets to the play that everyone would be talking about. She misses Anita, too; Anita, cut from the same cloth as Adam and Clara, but always a little mysterious; quiet, then surprising. Anita, who out of silence made a pronouncement that had one thinking for days. Anita who, looking at a picture, a building, a street scene, would point out the object or pattern that suddenly shifted the whole into a new frame.

She needs Clara and Anita here to make sense of her domestic arrangements, her new neighbourhood. To define and delineate them.

Though she had wanted to get away from Clara and Anita. Had wanted to escape.

Perhaps. Perhaps she will admit that. Otherwise, it is all like shipwreck. Arctic shipwreck. She is Franklin, marooned by bad decisions and hubris. A ship in ice; a stone, half-buried in frozen mud.

She has not enough warmth to light her life up on her own. It is chill; a cold hearth. It has been a mistake, this house.

It has been a mistake to come back. No, not a mistake: too inconsequential a word, implying that there will be other mistakes, other opportunities. It has been a grievous error, the sort of error that, as she grows older, she realizes cannot be undone, contrary to the reassurances, in her youth, of articles in popular magazines, of Sunday School teachers. Miss Erskine, with her tweed skirts and knee socks, her shapeless sweaters — jumpers, she called them — the heavy soft valise of her breasts resting on her abdomen, even though she must have been young, in her late twenties or early thirties at most. Daphne Erskine, with her smooth, earnest girl's face, her overbite, her thin, straight, beige hair. She'd be dead now. Or would she? Perhaps not; she had not been that much older than Sidonie. Miss Erskine, Sunday School teacher and Girl Guide leader: the two roles blended into one, somehow, with Jesus asking after the state of their fingernails and teaching Good Sportsmanship, and Lady Baden-Powell inquiring after the state of their souls. Miss Erskine, all fuzzy layers of woolen vests, saying,
Girls, there is no mistake you
can't undo
. An odd idea for the sister of a Protestant vicar, surely.

But this error that has cost her too much, in its enacting, to reverse, and that will thus bend and distort the rest of her life, will strew small and large items of regret along her path from now on. She can't go back; she has retired from her profession, sold her apartment, accepted farewell gifts from her friends and colleagues, and ignored the advice of those closest to her. She has bought a house, moved her furniture and books across the country. There is no going back. It is an irreversible error.

Clara calls, says,
“You sound like you're waiting for something. Not living your life. What are you waiting for?”

The bone in her foot to heal, obviously.

“No, before your accident, even, you've had this tone. You're just marking time.”

“I'm waiting for spring,” Sidonie says.

Clara makes a disapproving tongue click down four thousand kilometres of optic fibre cable. (Or is it all microwaves, now?) “You're willing to spend half of the year waiting for the weather to change? Does everyone do that, out there?”

“No,” Sidonie says. “Some ski.”

“Or maybe you are procrastinating over something,” Clara says.

Clara, her conscience, who has been keeping tabs on her, keeping her on a leash, these decades; who has hung tight to Sidonie, even after Adam let go his hold.

Sidonie thinks, not for the first time, that possibly it was to move further out of Clara's range that she has moved back, after all these years.

She doesn't try to explain what she is doing with her days.

Her other former sister-in-law, Anita, telephones a day later: obviously Clara has put her up to it. “But I approve of you having some downtime,” she says. She believes that Sidonie has fallen intentionally, as a way of leaving the rat race. “It's all about the mind-body connection. Have you thought of trying yoga?”

But her body has betrayed her; she does not want to pay it attention. She does not tell her former sisters-in-law how she fills her time; she does not quite know herself. Before her accident, she had filled two hours a day marching around the little lake, her boots bristling with spikes and springs, ski poles probing for hidden ice. She had marched around the lake, a forced march, staving off stagnation. Now she hasn't even that.

What she should be doing, in fact, is working. She has work: chores not completed when she left the Institute. Books she has been asked to read and review for journals. An article she is supposed to be writing for JASC, a conference paper with a near deadline. She had made a good start, too, rattling through a couple of unfinished reports in the first few weeks in the fall. She had thought: at this rate, I'll be at loose ends in about twenty-one months. But since then, she has been unable to submerge in her work. She limps about the house, picking objects up and replacing them, checks her email, follows esoteric and irrelevant internet links. She has not written more than a few hundred words.

Why should it be difficult? She has read and digested and written all of her adult life. She has produced dozens of articles and conference papers, and two books. She has years of research material to write up, still: has looked forward for years to a fallow period, a break from the endless jostling and chatter of work to be able to write it all up. She is no undergraduate to be stymied by the empty page (or screen).

The sorting of data, the assembling of information, of observations, into meaningful order, the selecting and presenting that is required, seem all beyond her just now. It is as if a break has opened between one part of her brain and the other. A new stoppage somewhere in the processing room. She has the material, but she cannot seem to conceive of a use for it, a way of disseminating it. Her mind lies unproductive, stalled.

She gazes out of the window, which needs cleaning; she glances at the clock. (It seems always to be four p.m., surely the most useless time of day.) She stumps around on her crutches. She opens the refrigerator and shuts it. She checks her email. She looks at various internet sites that sell classical recordings. It is shameful, to be in this state. She is guilty of sloth.

Sidonie's mother would have found chores for her to do. She had been a great believer in manual labour. Neither Sidonie nor Alice had ever dared admit to boredom. When they had free time, they escaped, made themselves scarce, in order to have the luxury of dawdling, of lallygagging. Or Sidonie had: she can't speak for Alice, can't swear now to Alice ever seeking solitude. Though she surely must have tried to escape chores. Even Alice must have occasionally ducked chores.