The Fall of Alice K. (45 page)

Her finale was the hardest to listen to:

“I know we Dutch Calvinists are just a small speck in the larger culture,” she said, “but we could easily become a shot of adrenaline into the bulging greedy veins of corporate America. We are being swallowed by the ruthless Right Wing with all of its corporate clout and in return we are giving it legitimacy with our quiet but seasoned religious fervor. I fear that when Jesus said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,' Satan said, ‘All righty' then slipped behind Jesus and went straight into the first Dutch Reformation Church he could find. That clever Evil One started in the church basement, helped himself to some Christmas candy, and sauntered up to the pulpit on a sugar high with his smiley devilish face and started preaching distrust and suspicion of anyone who was not aligned with corporate America. Ignorance was the Evil One's pal. The only thing worse than ignorance is confident ignorance—and that's what we see today: people brainwashed into a state of ignorance. Keep them distracted with sports and television and feed them hate-filled drivel on talk radio, make them suspicious of legitimate newspapers, get them all thinking in the same direction so that their ideas are so uniform that nobody questions their nonsense!”

Oh Lydia, Oh Lydia, Oh Lydia, Alice thought inside her blushing head.

“Make immigrants the enemy! Make the
New York Times
the enemy! Make science the enemy! Oh, those evil scientists with their global warming theories. Evil, evil science! Get folks so scared that their only refuge is the gospel of American Capitalism and Militarism. The Mighty Dollar and The Mighty Sword! And when the Evil One had polluted everybody into greed and hate-filled conformity, he went up into the steeple. That's where he is today, in the highest church steeples, surveying his kingdom.”

Lydia stopped, her face red with excitement. She smiled. “But with God's grace,” she concluded, “we will not lift our faces to the false god of Mammon this Christmas. Instead, we will worship the Prince of Peace and be among the righteous who flourish like a green leaf.”

Several teachers went up to Lydia and shook her hand after chapel. Some of them were even smiling. Alice was the only student who approached her.

“Wow,” said Alice, “that was something.”

“Too much?”

“You were great, but what did you think you were doing ?”

“I was trying to be real,” said Lydia.

“I love you for that, but don't you think some students will think you're a hypocrite in your talk about Mammon? It's not as if your family is poor.”

“
Van zij die veel krijgen, wordt veel verwacht,
” said Lydia. “That's my father's motto. It means, ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.' Can you keep a secret?”

“You know I can,” said Alice.

“My father is a big anonymous donor. He's paying for the Vangs' house rent. He's paying Mai's tuition. He subsidizes the housing expenses for Mexican immigrants. By the time he's finished giving, we don't have all that much left.”

Alice was speechless for a moment. “I had no idea,” she said. “That's wonderful. But I wonder if some students will still think you're a hypocrite.”

“Let them. I don't care.”

“You really don't, do you?”

“I really don't.”

Alice went looking for Nickson, hoping to ask him what he thought of Lydia's chapel speech. She couldn't find him. She looked for him again at lunch, but Lydia told her that he wasn't in the class they had together. Nickson wasn't in school. Alice told the principal she needed to miss her afternoon classes, and, as a model student in his eyes, he immediately gave her permission. Alice drove straight to the Vangs, hoping that Nickson had stayed home to think about what they should do and that he would answer the door when she knocked. It was Lia who answered the door. She started to bow, then gestured Alice inside. She gave Alice the kind of look that needed no translation.

“Nickson not here,” she said. “He back to Saint Paul.”

“Thank you,” said Alice and went back to the 150, drove one block, pulled over and parked. Numbness. I'm in shock, she told herself. This doesn't make sense. This isn't possible. No, he couldn't leave without telling me what he was going to do. Impossible. But he was gone. Nickson was gone.

She tried to hold the rage back, pushing at it with reason. He must have had a good reason to leave, but why didn't he talk to her first? Why didn't he explain? Reason kept struggling for a foothold, but rage kept shoving itself forward, relentlessly, a force that would not be stopped until it burst through to the surface.

“Why!” she screamed at the windshield of the 150.

She drove away, fast. I am beside myself, she reasoned with herself. I need to think, but some other part of her had taken over and she pushed the 150 seventy miles an hour down the gravel road. She hit the railroad track at sixty and came down hard enough to make dust puff down from the ceiling. The 150 made an awkward front-end bounce but did not betray her with swerves or skids. She took the puff of ceiling dust as a call back to reality and slowed down, but not by much.

She drove straight to the cattle feedlots over the frozen knobby ground and skidded to a stop in a spray of icy dust. She was going to do chores in her school clothes. So what? And she'd wear these same clothes to school tomorrow smelling like a manure pile. That would make people keep their distance.

Did she spook a few skittish Limousins when she fed the cattle ? She spooked a few skittish Limousins.

She yelled at the steers as they crowded up to the bunks. Those four-legged chunks of fat. “Here, gain four pounds a day!” she yelled at them when she threw the auger switch. As she watched them bump and shove to get at the feed troughs, she thought that if these useless fat blobs weren't castrated already, she'd castrate them now. With her bare hands and a tin-shears. A dull tin-shears.

When Alice was finished with chores and walked in the house, her mother looked pleased, probably because she could see how distraught Alice was. Then the phone rang, and her mother answered.

“It's for you,” she said. “It's that Hmong girl.”

Alice almost refused to take it, but when she did she wanted to scream into the phone. Mai spoke before she could say anything: “I hope you didn't misunderstand Mom this afternoon. She said you looked upset when you left.”

“Upset? Upset?” Her voice was rising. “Mai, how could he just up and leave like this?”

For the first time since she got the news of Nickson's departure, she felt like crying—and she did: “Mai,” she sobbed. “How could he? How could he?”

“Just listen,” said Mai. “I was afraid that's what you were thinking.”

Alice listened while Mai gave the story: Nickson told the whole family what was happening, that Alice had gotten pregnant. Lia was angry, really angry at first. Then she had gotten on the phone with their Saint Paul relatives, and one of the uncles had calmed her down. Calmed her down and then jumped in the car and drove nonstop to Dutch Center.

“Nickson needed to spend some time with the men of the family,” said Mai, “and my mom agreed.”

After that, Mai explained a lot of things. Lia needed a man in the household too, and Nickson had played that role. She explained why the whole family had come to Dutch Center, rather than just Mai by herself to go to Redemption. Nickson had been on the edge of “big trouble,” in Saint Paul, whatever that meant—and Alice didn't ask. Mai's getting a scholarship to Redemption had solved several problems at once: if the whole family went together, it was a way of getting Nickson away from the people who were getting him into trouble, and Lia would still have a man in the household.

Nickson had gone back to Saint Paul to talk with his uncles, one of whom was the clan leader.

“Nickson really does need his uncles to be involved,” said Mai. “It's our families that aren't married yet.”

Alice couldn't think of any quotations from Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson to fit that moment. She did know that she was falling totally back in love with Nickson as quickly as love had evaporated at the thought that he had simply deserted her without warning. He was exactly what she thought he was: a noble and honorable person, a beautiful man. Here she was—seventeen, unwed, and pregnant—and she felt incredibly happy. How could she ever have doubted him, even for a horrible second? She felt foolish. Never again, she said to herself, never again will I question this beautiful man.

When she got off the phone, she walked back into the kitchen where her mother was standing.

“I heard part of that conversation,” she said. “He's already run out on you, hasn't he?”

“He's coming back,” said Alice. “He went to Saint Paul to talk to his uncles.”

Alice did not tell her mother about the marriage of families.

“If he left once, he'll leave again,” said her mother. “You don't want to stay connected to him. It will ruin your life. Are you listening to me ?”

“I am always listening to you, Mother. Always.”

That night Alice woke up at 2:00 a.m. from what she thought was a bad dream, but it wasn't: it was an aching pain in her abdomen. She knew this pain: it felt as if she was starting her period—but that could not be. She went down to the bathroom. There was blood, but she already knew about breakthrough bleeding. She had heard that this was not uncommon, and she was not alarmed. She would take several deep breaths and let her body relax. She would rest peacefully until the bleeding stopped. This was probably a response to the strain she had been under. The pain turned up its volume as she waited in the bathroom, and then the pain became excruciating, but only briefly. In a minute, it was over, a dark red blob floated in the toilet bowl.

“‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,'” she said aloud to herself. She stared at the fetus that turned over like a
small bloody fish in the toilet bowl. She stared at what might have been her child. She thought of fishing it out to see if she could determine its sex. Instead, she said aloud, “It's over.”

Numbness was her body's way of holding back the feelings of sorrow and relief that came together in her chest, and when relief stepped forward it was countered by shame with its taunting proposition that she never cared about the fetus in the first place which meant that her love for Nickson was not real which meant their baby would not have been the product of love but of foolish lust which meant that she was a terrible person which meant that her mother was right all the time and that her pride had produced everything else that was happening which meant that she deserved both the pregnancy and the loss she was staring at right now. She deserved it all, and she wasn't sure whether the Evil One or Almighty God was smiling at her predicament or if she had been their joint project. Either way, she was getting what was coming to her.

She thought of the moment in the drugstore when she had learned that she was pregnant. The horror of the realization had been so simple; it had only one dimension. This was different. Now she felt a condensation of all the emotions that had followed: after the shock and pain of knowing had come the blessing of knowing. The creation of life was the greatest miracle on earth, and she had become part of that miracle. The hard part of telling the world was already behind her, and the hardest part now would have been preparing to care for the miracle that had been growing inside her. She was even ready for the scorn and mockery of classmates who didn't like her: the ones who would enjoy the fact that the mighty honor-student Alice had been brought down. She had moved beyond the fear of embarrassment and become more of a realist than her mother could ever have been. The baby would have been a blessing to her—and to Nickson, and to Aldah. She had fantasies of Aldah holding her baby and loving her. She imagined a baby girl with dark hair like Nickson's and a sharp chin like her own. All of the memories, all of the scattered experiences, compacted themselves into a clenched fist. She thought of her mother's dire predictions for the millennium. It was starting to make sense: December 31 stood there like a dam against which her whole life was pressing. December 31 was a sign that read The End, because, for Alice, it was—and she was the single cause.

The cramping returned, and she quietly groaned through the last of it. She stared once more at what might have been, and then flushed it down the toilet. Her legs were shaky as she climbed the stairs back to her bedroom. She stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself. She saw her mother's sad eyes, she saw her mother's slack jaw, and she saw her slumping shoulders.

She had occasional spasms of pain throughout the night, but she did manage to get some sleep. In the morning she felt exhausted. And hopelessly sad.

Lydia, she thought, you were right: I should have gotten an abortion. If I had, all I'd have now is guilt, and I know how to deal with guilt.

The Vangs were early risers, so she called Mai before seven.

“Mai, I had a miscarriage. It's over.” Mai didn't respond. “Mai, it's over,” said Alice. “I'm not pregnant anymore.”

“I heard you,” said Mai. “Did you save the placenta?”

“Mai, it was much too early for a placenta. Just a blob. Have you talked to Nickson?”

“Yes,” she said. “He told me to tell you he loves you.”

“He did? He called you to tell you that? Why didn't he call me ?”

“He didn't think it would be all right to call your house.”

Alice asked Mai for Nickson's number in Saint Paul. As soon as they hung up, Alice called the Saint Paul number. Someone answered who barely spoke English, but she recognized the name Nickson when Alice repeated it. “Not here, not here.”