The Fall of Alice K. (31 page)

Nickson stood and stared. He looked up at the barn rope that hung just below the rail that once conveyed huge fist-shaped sling loads of hay through the large haymow door. He stared up at the opening into the metal cupola with its terraced bands of moonlight.

“This is something,” he said simply. “This is really something.”

“Yes.”

He stared at the window frame of light on the raised column of hay bales.

“It looks like a throne,” he said.

“We don't have to hurry,” she said. He followed her up onto the bales. On their knees and holding each other's faces in their hands, they kissed gently, then lay down on the blanket and undressed each other.

“I've never been in a place like this before,” he said.

She ran her hand through the forest of his hair and put her lips to the paradise of his moonlit flesh. Alice was lost in the history they were adding to this haymow because she did not hear what was most immediate—not the sounds of steers walking below them, not the sounds of the wind rattling the windows, but the sounds of someone on the ladder.

“I thought so.”

The sound could have been nothing. It could have been an auditory phantom, but it was a real human voice cutting through their lovemaking
breaths. They startled, stopped, listened, and then looked quickly in the direction of the voice, and there it was: the pop-up silhouette of her mother's head and shoulders, the black cutout like something propped up at the entrance to a Halloween party. The tragic thrust of it. Its comic silliness.

Only her head and shoulders were showing, but she saw everything. And as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

“Conscience does make cowards of us all,” Shakespeare wrote. When Alice saw her mother's head and shoulders, her conscience did not make her feel like a coward.

“Get out of here!” she yelled.

Nickson rolled over quickly, as if he thought she was talking to him.

Nickson and Alice were Adam and Eve grabbing the fig leaves of their clothing, but the face and shoulders were gone faster than the serpent into its hole. A jack-in-the-box performance.

Scrambling cattle sounds from below, the slamming of the barn door, like a shotgun blast—and then silence.

The empty space that surrounded them was larger than Alice could ever have remembered it.

“Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

A moment of pounding silence, both frozen in place as if fearing that the phantom would reappear.

“That was really her, wasn't it?”

“Yes, that was really her.”

Again they froze in silence.

Nickson brushed alfalfa leaves from his knee. “Is she gone?”

“Not far enough.”

Nickson took a deep, resolute breath, and then he said, “That wasn't right.”

More anger than fear, more excitement than horror, more defiance than despair. Alice looked at Nickson, and when she saw that he had not faded, she put her hands on his shoulders, pushed him onto his back, and lunged on him.

Afterwards, he said, “Now what should we do?”

“You're so calm,” she said.

“I know it.”

He laid her shirt over her shoulders. She sat trembling on their blanket with her arms clutching her knees to her chin. Nickson rubbed her head gently.

“It could have been worse,” he said.

“How?”

“It could have been
my
mother.”

They grabbed each other, pulled themselves hard against each other's bodies and giggled like crazy people, her tears bouncing from his shoulder like drops of uncontrollable laughter.

“Well, that's that,” said Alice.

“You said that right,” said Nickson.

Nickson had told Alice that a person should never feel totally trapped. Even if people think they have you cornered, don't let them believe that they do. Act as if you're not trapped. You're trapped only when you act trapped. He said when he ran from the thugs in the alley, he was just looking for a place to set the tacos before he turned around and kicked their asses. She was ready to believe him. “Just kidding,” he had said. “I was running for the streetlight so they could see I wasn't what they wanted to see.”

“They called you a spic.”

“Yeah, I'm not a spic.”

“Nobody should be called a spic,” she had said.

“Right,” he had said, “but I still wanted them to see who and what they thought they were going to beat up. They knew as soon as they had me down, you know, but then they couldn't stop. They had to show off to each other, and when something like that gets started it doesn't know how to stop. When I never said ‘ouch' and I just kept looking them in the face while they beat on me, they knew they weren't winning. They knew if they ever tried it again they'd be dead.”

Alice had reached over and pulled Nickson against her breasts. “Oh Nickson, please,” she had said. “Don't talk like that.” Then she had asked him, “Why were they so stupid as to go to Perfect Pizza afterwards?”

“They had to show how brave they were, you know. They didn't prove it to me, and they knew it.”

The times Alice saw Nickson in tough fixes he would startle and then immediately calm down—his whole body looking comfortable and
relaxed and his breathing slow and deep. Something in him was a warrior. He was as controlled as she was when she was debating in front of an audience.

Nickson was calm now as they dressed. Alice tried to absorb his composure, the way his hands took each item of clothing so carefully, the way he examined it before putting it on, and then how he turned to her to see if she needed help.

“I guess we don't have much to be afraid of after that, do we?” she said.

“Think she'll be waiting with your dad outside? We better be ready for that.”

“No, no,” said Alice. “That's not how my mother operates.”

She wasn't waiting for them when they left the barn. They got into the 150 and drove slowly off the yard with the headlights on. It was all over. The worst had happened. It was a relief that gave Alice a feeling of invulnerability.

After she dropped Nickson off and was driving back to the farm, she no longer felt invulnerable. Her leg muscles tightened and she felt chilled. This was going to be a bad scene. It wasn't her mother she was afraid of so much as her father. She could already hear his voice. He would say, “I can't tell you how disappointed I am in you.”

Her father's disappointment—that would be the deepest cut.

But her mother wasn't waiting up for her. Nor was her father. So far as she could tell, they were both asleep and would be until they got up to go to work.

Alice took her half tablet of medication and went up to her room with a practiced normalcy to her step, took one long look at herself in the mirror to see if she was still the same person, and fell into bed, leaving her clothes a wrinkled puddle on the floor.

She lay in bed awake and heard her parents get up at eleven thirty to go to work. They didn't call her downstairs. She knew her mother's tactics: she'd give Alice the silent treatment until she got so upset with herself that she'd crumble. Seeing Alice disintegrate in shame would give her mother a sense of accomplishment. But Alice was not about to crumble. No matter what happened, she had Nickson's love, and nothing her mother did could threaten that. She fell asleep with a renewed
feeling of calm. There was nothing to pray about. She felt no need to confess anything to anyone, not even God.

The next morning when her parents got home from their evening of work neither of them talked to Alice, and neither of them acted as if anything unusual had happened. Her mother had breakfast on the table but was not in the kitchen when Alice finished morning chores with her father. She left for school without seeing her mother again—and she wouldn't, until that evening.

32

When Alice came in from afternoon chores it was after five o'clock. Her mother should have been asleep, but she was wide awake and sitting on a chair in the kitchen, her arms folded across her chest, her feet planted on the floor. She was waiting like a patient cougar on a branch. Her eyes did not look blank but had an attack intensity. She wore a loose denim gray shirt with long sleeves and sloppy loose black slacks. She had nothing on her feet and her toes looked like knobby claws. Still, she looked tired and depleted, like someone who was worn out but still ready to take her last stand against someone—and Alice knew that someone was Alice Marie Krayenbraak.

“I haven't been sleeping,” she said in a taunting voice, “and I think you know why not.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“You've given me too much pain.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

The taunting voice became accusatory: “You're not sorry anything.”

“Anything that keeps you awake makes me sorry.”

“You're the sorry one.”

Her mother's lips were dry, with little flakes of skin peeling back where they came together. The wrinkles in her upper lip had gotten deeper. The look on her face was one of total revulsion.

“How stupid do you think we are?”

“I never said you were stupid.”

“You're stupid if you thought we wouldn't notice how somebody always rolls up the seat belt on the passenger side. Looks like somebody doesn't know what to do with his hands. Looks like somebody is pretty
nervous about what he is doing. Looks like somebody has a guilty conscience. Not the driver. The passenger.”

“Dad didn't say anything about rolled-up seat belts.”

“Your father's worries are bigger than rolled-up seat belts.”

“Why don't you just spit it out, get it over with?”

“All right.” She stood up and faced Alice. “I started staying awake when I knew you were driving away after we went to bed. I've been listening to you drive off every night and come back home two or three hours later. I lie awake every night praying for you, praying that you'll change your ways before it's too late.”

Alice looked up at the praying-hands painting on the wall, then at the plaque that was left over from when her grandparents lived there: “We Get Too Soon Old And Too Late Smart.” She walked into the living room and sat down on the couch. It was almost six o'clock and she could hear her father's deep breathing coming from her parents' bedroom.

Her mother followed her and stood facing her. “Don't you have a conscience anymore?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I am quitting my job,” said her mother. “The smell is killing me, and so is your behavior. I'll be home at night from now on.” She pointed her finger at Alice and said, “And so will you.”

“Whatever you have to do,” said Alice. Her mother was watching Alice's face.

“I was not surprised at what I saw last night,” she said. “I know what kind of girl you've become. I don't want you hanging out with those people. None of them.”

“It's not their fault.”

“So you're that kind of girl now?”

“Whatever you need to think, Mother. Just don't blame Nickson.”

“He doesn't look like us and he doesn't think like us. At least he must be squirming about what he's doing. Rolling up seat belts.”

“He said you're friendly to him when he sees you downtown.”

“I don't judge people until they do something that deserves judging. At least he seems to be uncomfortable about what you're doing. Or is that just a Hmong thing?”

Alice looked up at her mother. “Don't go there, Mother.”

“You think I'm a bigot.”

“I told you not to go there.”

“I'm a realist. The surface of things says a lot about what's going on under the surface. Realists look for the deeper reality.”

“Realists don't quit work when things are bad.”

“The money I was making was not enough to save us. Your father is preparing to sell everything. Now are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied? I'm not the reason this farm is in trouble!”

“Things will get worse. The prophets foretold these bad days.”

“What prophet, Al Gore?”

“You really have made no progress, have you?”

“I don't see that you believe in progress.”

“I believe in progress, all right.” She transformed into her formal mode, lifting her chin as if she were about to address a multitude. “The natural progress of actions bringing results. We all make our own beds. Do you understand that kind of progress? Progress, progression, one thing leading to another. You should progress in your seeing what your behavior will lead to, not submit to your uncontrollable, uncontrollable—”

“Stop it, Mother! You're a stuck record.”

“You should get ready for things to get worse—because they will.”

“‘Things will get worse, things will get worse.' All right, things have gotten worse. So what's worse than worse?”

Her parents' bedroom door opened and her father stepped into the living room. He wore his long white nightgown and looked like a bedraggled ghost.

“Agnes, what are you doing out of bed?”

“I needed to tell Alice that I was quitting work,” she said in a voice that was suddenly and surprisingly pleasant.

Her father appeared to have no idea of the topic of their discussion. Had Alice's mother not told her father about last night? Could she possibly be keeping her knowledge of Nickson and her from him?

“Oh,” he said, and headed toward the bathroom.

Alice stood up and looked at her mother with what must have been the most quizzical look her mother had ever seen on her face. “Mother,” she whispered, “didn't you tell him?”