The Fall of Alice K. (25 page)

For ten minutes Alice and Nickson quietly highlighted important
information in what they were reading—yellow for negative and red for affirmative. They did focus on their work, but often they would make the same suggestion at the same time. They were so much in sync that it registered as a pleasant pain for Alice. This was the kind of painful distraction she invited her mind to make. They'd stare at each other, though neither would say with their voices what thoughts lay behind the eyes. They started to smile at each other, and then checked themselves. They were breathing like two metronomes set at the same speed.

When he reached for an article, their hands brushed and his energy scurried up her arm like a centipede.

“We've really been getting a lot done,” she said.

He laid his hand on her palm.

“That's because I love you.”

“Don't,” she said before she could understand what he had said and long before she could understand how her body and mind were reacting to words she so rarely had heard in her life, not even from her grandparents who, if they did say anything like that, she didn't remember it. She never heard those words from her parents, though she used them with Aldah, so she must have heard them somewhere, but from her parents? If her parents ever did say those words, they would have been used as a weapon to get her to do or not do something and she had repressed the memory long ago. Behind the absence of those words, she knew there was history, more than family history—a long tradition of
zeg maar niks
—better to be silent than cheapen what were nearly sacred words by using them over something as preposterous as having a crush on somebody who was of a different tradition, from a different race, and who was eight inches shorter than she was.

She stared at him. “I love you too,” she said.

Her eyes looked down. Her eyes looked out the window. Her eyes looked up at the clock. “I feel cold,” she said. “Is it cold in here?”

“It's chilly,” he said.

“We'd better go.”

He nodded, and his eyes said nothing. “Okay.”

She sat on her hands as he gathered strewn articles from the table. His eyebrows fluttered when he glanced at her, but she didn't move. She
stood up, and he walked around the table toward her. If he was uncomfortable, he was hiding his discomfort behind that easy shuffle with the shoulders giving a small twist with each step. When he stopped in front of her, she didn't reach out for him, but she didn't move either. She stood towering over him, his eyes level with her breasts, and he did not turn his eyes from them. The idea of kissing him just then seemed painful. It seemed ludicrous. She would be a large mother bird bending her neck to feed her young.

“That word,” she said. “Love.” But she couldn't think of anything more to say.

He looked up at her eyes and grinned his small gentle grin.

“I didn't know I was going to say that,” he said. She saw how beautiful his face was, his complexion smoother than hers had ever been, his dark eyes more intense—and probably sincere—than her own. And those lips, those gorgeous full lips.

“I didn't either,” said Alice.

“I think I meant it. Is that all right?”

His unease told Alice that he wasn't afraid that he didn't really mean it. His discomfort told Alice that he knew he did mean it.

“I think I meant it too,” she said. They both stood silent, as if stunned by the implications of their mutual declaration. Finally, Alice said, “Love isn't a bad thing.”

“I know it,” he said.

Alice's mind tried to find a rational framework to process the meaning of what they had said to each other. It needed to fit inside a notion of herself as living normally, not as someone who was losing her bearings and skidding in directions over which she no longer had control.

“It doesn't really have to change anything, does it?” she said.

“I don't think so,” he said.

“We can still be friends too,” she said.

“Even better friends,” he said.

“We could meet for debate again,” she said before she knew she was going to say it. “Is that all right? I mean after school? Like tonight?” but after she said those words they didn't sound innocent as they played back in her mind.

“I wish we could,” he said.

Alice felt a wave of relief fighting with a wave of disappointment. “You can't?”

“No. I have to be with my family tonight. Big family thing,” he said. “Lots of folks. I have to help get ready.”

“Is November first a Hmong holiday?”

“Not sure,” said Nickson, “but lots of folks are coming because my mom is sick.”

“Oh no!” said Alice. “Something serious?”

“She's depressed. Really depressed.” He stared at Alice for a moment. “You've got to keep this secret.”

“I don't think you can keep a big family gathering secret in Dutch Center,” said Alice.

“No. You've got to keep the secret that she's not really sick. Just depressed. I don't think we could have gotten a shaman to come down here just because our mom was feeling depressed. So we lied. Mai and I did. We told our family that she's had a bad fever and has been vomiting. We lied quite a bit, but it got the gang together. They're all coming down. A big deal. A clan thing.”

“A clan thing?”

“Yeah, a clan thing. We're going to do an old-fashioned healing ritual for my mom.”

Alice did not want to show her ignorance by asking for an explanation.

“I won't talk about it,” said Alice.

“Thanks.”

After school, Lydia caught Alice exiting the front door. She had the magic medication that would supposedly make Alice's excessive makeup unnecessary.

“Here,” she said, and held out a baggie of pills. “I went home at noon to get them. Start taking them immediately and give them a few weeks to do their work. That's how long they took for me.”

She handed Alice the baggie, which Alice took quickly and put in her pocket. This must look like a drug deal, she thought. Even worse, she was accepting
charity
from her wealthy friend. What next? Lydia was going through her purse, and Alice soon learned
what next.

“These would look better on you than they do on me,” said Lydia,
and handed Alice another baggie, this one filled with facial creams and lipsticks.

“You deserve to look like your glamorous self, even through this pimply time,” she said. “Use these to get you through the next few weeks.”

Yet one more gift from her friend. Alice didn't like to have others see Lydia giving her handouts, but she quickly took this baggie too and slipped it under her arm.

Beggars can't be choosers, she thought to herself as she drove away.

25

It was as if the love Alice felt for Nickson had invited God's love to come into her heart, and praying came easily for her that night. A pure and purifying heavenly love moved through her, a wave of joy that carried with it beautiful images—and among them was the image of Miss Den Harmsel. Alice could see her face and hear her voice, and Alice realized how much joy Miss Den Harmsel had given to her and to her life. Not only in the classroom but in the memories she carried from the classroom, and even into the haymow where she kept the books that Miss Den Harmsel had recommended for summer reading.

The advanced placement lit class was the third class Alice had taken with her—one her sophomore year, one last year, and now the most challenging of all. It wasn't just her tall and stately presence in the classroom that came to Alice's mind but the elegant and unpretentious steady beauty of her mind: her devotion to something bigger and less concrete than any petty bodily needs. When she thought of Miss Den Harmsel, she thought of her desire for knowing the world, the way she aspired toward a paradise of knowledge.

Even when sitting in the classroom with Nickson working on debate, Miss Den Harmsel's presence was always there. A glance at her handwriting on the chalkboard. The model of the Globe Theatre. Miss Den Harmsel was what God was showing Alice of the unsoiled in the world. Her love of knowledge was a broad umbrella of love, and as Alice found her prayer flowing through her mind, it was a prayer of thanksgiving for God's love and a request for knowledge to understand the world and to know what was right.

She credited the prayer when she woke up the next morning with a warm sense of peacefulness: the efficacy of prayer. But when she got
to school the big Vang gathering of the night before had the grapevine sizzling. Town kids were talking about how the Vang house had been surrounded by cars with Minnesota license plates.

“It looked like a used Honda and Toyota car lot,” one of them said.

There wouldn't have been much of a fuss—even the most reserved people in Dutch Center had a high tolerance for noisy family reunions—if it hadn't been for the pig. The laughing and loud talking didn't bother the neighbors. Even the gong and drumming and rattling that people said sounded like a first grader's hand rattle hadn't troubled them enough to sound any alarms. It was only when they had heard a gurgling pig squeal coming from the back entrance of the Vang house that they called the police.

No one was arrested. Fortunately for the Vangs, two of the regulars on the Dutch Center police force had grown up on farms, so the puddle of pig blood on the back steps did not alarm them. The police were also accustomed to calls that might involve charges of animal cruelty. They warned the Vangs that it was not legal to slaughter an animal within the city limits without a special permit, and that if they did get a permit for the next celebration, they would have to use a stungun to knock the pig out before cutting its throat. They could borrow or rent a stungun from one of the area slaughterhouses.

The police had less trouble with the event than Alice's mother did. She chose the kitchen as her usual place to strike.

“Just like in the Old Testament,” she said, “these people were sacrificing animals to a pagan god.” The dull, heavy chisel of her voice. Alice couldn't tell if she was in a drugged state or menacingly alert.

This might have been a good time to side with her mother. Siding with her would have helped create a safety zone between her and the Vangs. It would have helped her keep a lid on a relationship that was getting increasingly sticky: with so many little complications at every turn, some part of her knew that she was, as her mother might say, “courting disaster.” The peace of last night's prayer could not be a prelude to a shouting match with her mother.

Alice's head and heart spun in many directions at once. If she joined her mother in her sentiments against the Vangs, it would be so much easier for her heart to begin the great release that might be necessary. She
could love Nickson the way she loved Lydia, as a friend. Wasn't friendship love the least dangerous and most lasting of all? Equilibrium is what she needed. She needed a heart whose desires were balanced, not one that moved blindly in only one direction.

But her mother was being so unfair in her attack. “What you say is simply not true!” Alice said. “It's their tradition—like us and our pig roasts.”

“We don't cut pig throats on the steps of our back porch.”

There was a slicing quickness to her mother's responses that triggered in Alice a quick change into debate mode: “It's not as if they have a barn where they could to it.”

“You should be able to see trouble brewing. I see it.” Her mother walked across the room. Her walk was confident, her movements sharp. “Waves of disastrous implications are surrounding you. You'd have to be blind not to see trouble brewing.”

“You always see something brewing. You didn't see anything brewing when they started coming to our church.”

“That's before they started making a party out of killing a pig. That's godless, heathen behavior.” She put her hands on her hips and faced Alice. “Nobody heard any hymn singing coming from that house.”

“Maybe God's a good interpreter,” said Alice.

“Don't get smart with me,” she said and gave Alice her cold stare. She pulled out the big guns of the Scripture: “‘No one comes to the Father except through Me,'” she said with a ministerial finality.

“Right,” said Alice. “But the ‘me' in that text is not
you.
” She lifted a finger to her mother on the
you.
“Judge not that ye be not judged.”

“Oh, you're so clever, clever, clever, aren't you?” she said. “Even the Devil can quote Scriptures.”

“You ought to know.”

Alice saw her mother's eyes pick an aiming spot on her face. Her mother wanted to slap her, but she had seen Alice often enough on the volleyball and basketball courts. Her mother would know that the long arms hanging at Alice's sides had springs in them. She would know that Alice wouldn't hit her back, but she also would know that Alice could catch any slap she threw.

Alice could feel bile burning in her throat. It no longer made sense
to worry about skidding with her affection for Nickson when the real evil of her life—the dark hopelessness—was not coming from Nickson and his family but from her mother. Nobody could make her think bad thoughts and speak harsh words the way her mother could.

Through the resentment came the awful thought that her mother might be right. Did Lydia's mother see wisdom as well as intelligence in her mother? And what had Miss Den Harmsel heard about her mother? Alice already knew part of her mother's educational background: she had graduated from college, all right, and become a grade school teacher before she met Alice's father. The cold voice that Alice heard from her mother was hardly the voice of a kind grade school teacher. Still, that didn't mean she was wrong about the foolishness of Alice's relationship with Nickson. Of course, just because her mother was cruel didn't mean she was wrong. Trouble
was
brewing but it had not yet reached the boiling point, and continuing with Nickson in anything but a safe friendship would lead to the disaster her mother warned about.