The Fall of Alice K. (23 page)

“Stop it,” said Lydia. She briskly put the coat on and stood defiantly wearing it. “You forget they're the real Dutch? They can handle shit.”

The conversation had not really ended, and Alice had not really talked about what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk more about their moms' friendship and if maybe Lydia's mother was as crazy as Alice's. Birds of a feather and all. And Nickson. She wanted to tell Lydia that she was in love with Nickson and afraid that she'd drive him away if she moved too fast. She wanted Lydia's advice about how to charm him without scaring him.

As she drove home, Alice thought about Lydia and her family. In spite of their occasional spats, Lydia had always seemed like a refuge from their fellow students whom Alice could not respect, and she had seemed like a refuge from Alice's family. She had not exactly been a refuge of peace. Maybe sometimes church could be that, maybe sometimes Aldah, maybe sometimes Miss Den Harmsel's class, but Lydia had been a real soul mate. She had been a safe place for the Seeker in Alice to find friendly company. But now it felt as if Lydia might be outside comfortable boundaries for even the Seeker in Alice.

23

The bad hogyard smell followed Alice back to the Krayenbraak farm where it had begun. It was less strong than it had been in the morning, like a fading headache—almost gone but not quite, a lingering dull throb of hog manure.

After parking the 150, her first stop was the basement. She opened the washing machine where she had thrown her dirty clothes the night before. She reached up and felt the hot water pipe, then walked over to the hot water heater and threw the switch. She waited until she heard the water bubbling in the quick-recovery unit and turned off the switch before her father would have a chance to notice that she had defiantly sucked up one more dollar's worth of energy. She threw her school clothes in with the work clothes that had already been washed once in cold water. She put them all on one more super-cycle with two cups of laundry soap. She'd dry them with a triple application of scented fabric softener.

“‘What these clothes need is some good fabric softener,' Nancy said Bouncily.”

That gave her a chuckle, even though Lydia was not around to enjoy that Nancy Swifty. Then she turned grimly back to the work that she had to do. She felt as if she was sprinkling perfume on a murky green sea from the rotting pit of hell itself. “Purify!” she commanded and pointed her finger at the dryer. And then she laughed at herself. “I am one piece of work.”

While she waited in the basement, she decided to see if her mother had added any survival food to her supplies. Two more heavy boxes had been added. Inside were quart-sized cans of pork-and-beans, and twenty more cans of Spam. Alice considered taking a can of Spam upstairs to see what life after the end of the world would be like.

But she still needed deeper cleansing than she needed food of any kind and decided to use whatever hot water might be left to take a good bath.

She added a heavy dose of bubble bath to the water that was fast becoming lukewarm. Would this do it? She wanted to be sure. She took a full bottle of hydrogen peroxide and emptied it into the bathtub. If her father could use it for a mouthwash, it had to be safe for the rest of a person's body. She crawled into the tub that was hissing with bubbles and could feel the hydrogen peroxide solution sizzling the filth from the pores of her skin.

“Will all great Neptune's ocean?” she said—but couldn't think of a Nancy Swifty to complete it.

She soaked in the cleansing solution and, as the cleansing bubbles bubbled around her, she sang in a way that Handel himself would have appreciated: “And it shall pur-i-fy-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye-aye.”

When she got out of the tub, she sniffed her armpits and hands. She sniffed her shoulders. So far as she could tell, she was scentless. What a glorious condition for the human body! A sweet neutrality of air. Odorlessness! What a fine word! Her Dutch ancestors were right about one thing: cleanliness really was next to godliness! To remove the stench of the body was to set the spirit free! She started drying herself but remembered what her social studies teacher said: “Every solution creates a new problem.” The new problem was her hair. The hydrogen peroxide had taken issue with her hair's natural color. She was normally a darkish blond, with her pubic hair quite a bit darker. Now her pubic hair was the color of the cigarette stain on her great uncle's fingers. And her head—what color was this? Her normally long blond hair had turned a color not found in nature—at least not found in nature until now.

No one ever thought or said Alice Marie Krayenbraak was stupid. Until now. And she was first in line. “Alice Marie Krayenbraak, how could you have been so stupid!”

She did not understand the force that drove her to do what she did next, but she invited Aldah to go with her to feed the steers. It felt like an attraction to peace, an urge not unlike the urge she sometimes felt on Sunday mornings when she walked into church in search of Something
or Someone soothing and forgiving. Her sister's company as sedative against the trials of the world?

“I don't think it would be a good idea for Aldah to go out there with all those moving gears,” said her mother.

“Aldah is becoming a woman, remember?” Alice argued. “She needs to learn how to keep herself safe in the world.”

“ What have you done with your hair!” Aldah looked too, but did not show her mother's shock.

“It doesn't stink anymore,” said Alice.

“Another one of your brainy solutions? Well, live with it.”

Alice held out her hand to Aldah. “Come,” she said.

“You'd better take better care of her than you take care of yourself,” said her mother. “If anything happens, you're responsible.”

“Agreed,” said Alice and led Aldah toward the cattle feedlot. As they walked, Aldah stared at Alice's hair. She reached toward it.

“You may touch it when we get to the silo,” said Alice. And she did let Aldah touch her hair. Alice sat down on a hay bale so that Aldah could come close, look close, and touch the transformed straw stack on Alice's head. Aldah touched it gently at first, then put both hands into it and ran her fingers through it as if she were looking for the secret of the transformation.

“You like it?” asked Alice, raising her eyebrows to indicate to Aldah that she was looking for approval rather than judgment.

“Yes,” said Aldah. “Nice hair,” she said. “Pritty hair.”

“Thank you, my special person,” said Alice and pulled her sister sweetly to her chest.

“Aldah?” said Aldah, pointing at Alice's hair. “Aldah?” she said again, still pointing.

“You want hair like this?”

“Yes. Aldah hair.”

“You have your own hair. But you may touch my hair whenever you want to, all right?”

“All right,” said Aldah and touched Alice's hair.

When Alice put her own hand to her hair, she thought it felt like steel wool. She wondered if it would get brittle and break off in tiny shreds. “My hair is funny,” said Alice. “Don't you think my hair looks funny?”

Aldah touched it again. “Yes,” she said. “Funny hair,” and giggled.

When they came in from chores, her father stared at her hair but didn't say anything. Alice assumed that her mother had warned him, not to excuse Alice for what she had done, but to make a case for how foolish her behavior could be. She knew her mother: she would secretly celebrate the little hair debacle by talking about it behind her back.

“Nothing serious,” said her father.

He wasn't talking about her hair. He was still talking about Aldah, and Aldah knew it: she put her hand over her stomach and groaned a little. Aldah was performing for her parents' attention.

“Drink this,” said her mother.

Aldah took a few sips, then looked up at Alice and smiled the smile she knew would get sympathy—or was it simply a conspiratorial smile of understanding?

“I drink more water,” said Aldah. She took another small sip.

“So I heard. Good for you.”

“I can read,” she said.

“Of course you can, my special person.”

“Let me sit on your lap.”

Alice pulled her big body up. Aldah stroked Alice's hair without comment. This was as normal as their house would ever get. Alice sniffed the air around her and liked what she didn't smell.

After supper Alice told her parents that she needed to work on debate. Both her mother and father looked limp and exhausted, so her timing was good. Her mother was sagging again. Her father looked as if he was sagging with her. Alice left the three of them with the TV set holding them in numb communion.

But by the time she tried to get online, Aldah must have deserted her parents and had the phone line tied up with her usual talk with Roger. Alice waited fifteen minutes before going down to ask her to please finish her conversation.

When her mother heard the gentle request, she stomped into the room.

“What's the problem?” she demanded.

“I need to use my computer,” said Alice. “I have a lot of work to do.”

“It's time for you to stay away from that computer,” she said. “You are spending too much time with that thing. It will ruin your brain.”

“You don't even know how to use a computer,” said Alice.

“And you can be sure I never will. You need to stay away from that thing. Get used to getting along without it. Get used to getting along without a lot of things.”

Alice was actually hoping to see something more in her mother than the usual simpleminded naysayer. After all, she'd already had her put-down fun of the day around the little issue of her oats-straw hair! Was this a woman whom Lydia's mom could regard as intelligent? It made her worry about Lydia's mom, that well-read librarian!

“Computers hardly take any electricity,” said Alice. “I can show you the data.”

“Data. Don't tell me about data. Half the scientists in the world are worried that computers won't work when the clock strikes twelve, you know when.”

“We talked about that in school, Mother. They've worked through that problem. It's not going to happen.”

“Maybe not at a literal level,” she said. “Maybe not at a literal level.”

“Whatever that's supposed to mean.”

“There are bigger issues around computers, what they do to your brain. Computers can distort your sense of space and time. They're a pathway to a life of unrealities.”

Her mother talking about unrealities? That was a joke.

“They're a shortcut to reality. A paradise of knowledge at our fingertips.”

“A false prophet's idea of paradise.”

Aldah heard their exchange and hung up the phone. She looked at Alice, not at her mother, to see if everything was all right.

“All done,” said Aldah and walked quietly into the living room and sat with her father in front of the TV. Her mother joined them. Alice looked at them, all three of them taken in by a rerun of a
Hogan's Heroes.
Now there's an unreality for you, Alice thought, and set off for her bedroom to deal with the reality of Miss Den Harmsel's assignment.

Someone had been spending time at Alice's computer—papers on her desk moved, the mouse in a different place, and the user's manual
with a paperclip marking a page. Whoever had been up here had put things away neatly—but not exactly as she had left them. She booted up and checked the history of sites visited. Agriculture sites. Her father had been upstairs at the computer. Alice didn't know what he was looking for, but she knew he was up to something.

Later when she tried to sleep she lay awake and watched the minutes change on her clock. Then the hour changed. It was 1:00 a.m. She got out of bed, looked at her long naked self with its new color highlights in the mirror, and got dressed. If her father was doing his own research online without telling her, there must have been something that he wasn't talking about. The most likely place to discover anything was in his basement office.

Alice was Spider-Woman making her way downstairs. She stretched her arms to put equal pressure on both banisters. She put her stockinged feet down slowly on the spot that was least likely to squeak on the outer edge of each step. She whispered her way down to her father's office.

The overhead fluorescent lighting in her father's office did not reveal one speck of dust on the oak schoolhouse desk and sturdy chair, not one speck of dust on the two black metal filing cabinets or the one lonely metal folding chair. Even here, her father was Spartan and tidy.

Beneath this sheen, she would look for the truth, no matter how messy that truth might be. If her father was doing research, he was doing research to protect the family from something.

The top drawer of one filing cabinet had folders dating back to the early nineties. Alice picked out a 1992 folder labeled “Dairy.” She was ten when they went out of the dairy business. The twenty Holstein cows whose milk had been what her father called their “social security”—a steady though modest income they could count on through long periods of no income while the cattle and hogs were fattened for market.

Her father's calculations told the story. The “costs” and “income” columns showed that they lost $5,600 by milking twenty cows back in 1992—and that didn't figure in any labor costs.

Looking at these columns was like watching her childhood walk up the chute onto that large semi when those beautiful Holsteins were loaded. Her father had said that the big milk-processing companies no longer would drive out to their farm, that their milking operation
was just too small and that the big company only served much larger dairies. As a ten-year-old she had believed her father, but now she saw a bigger reason—and probably the real one—why they had gone out of the dairy business. It was no longer their social security, it was a money-sucking leech.