The Fall of Alice K. (33 page)

The only exception was her first B on a quiz in Miss Den Harmsel's class. Yes, it was a B, but it had an assuring note: “Alice. I assume the demands at home have been very great for you. Don't worry about this one B; I'm certain you'll make up for it on the next quiz.”

The morning market report announced that hog and cattle prices were going up. The world was sending messages of hope: she was in love and their farm was going to be saved from ruin.

How different her life was from other people's. Her mother's wrinkled misery. Her father's cold resolve to press forward, press forward. Other students at Midwest were so often tied in knots of trivial encounters, kicking their stuck lockers, sneering at cafeteria food, snapping at their friends for the slightest of insults. Whatever Lydia had with her new boyfriend or boyfriends, she didn't have what Alice and Nickson had. Lydia's eyes looked so empty that Alice guessed she had already grown tired of her own reckless life, though Lydia was more than eager to show Alice that she had gotten an A+ on the quiz on which Alice had gotten a B.

“Good for you,” said Alice. “Me? I just got my first B of the year.”

Lydia repressed her glee over her own A+. “One B won't destroy your grade,” she said, “any more than one pimple would destroy your beautiful complexion.”

“Still not much change,” said Alice and pointed at her cheeks that were covered with their usual heavy makeup.

“It takes a while,” said Lydia, “but your face is an A+ and I'm sure your grades will soon be A+ again too.”

They stood smiling at each other, and Alice hoped Lydia wouldn't use the pause as a transition to go on a political rant. She didn't. Instead, she asked, “Have you been hearing from any of the colleges where we applied?”

“Oh, yes,” said Alice, “but I haven't followed up on anything yet. There's plenty of time.”

“Not really,” said Lydia.

There was another pause, but this one was not filled with mutual smiling.

“You're putting it off because of Nickson, aren't you?” said Lydia. She must have seen Alice's intense squinting at the question. “Don't look at me like that: I'm happy for you and Nickson.”

“You're right,” said Alice. “I've got to get at that. I didn't even open the letter from Stanford, but I don't think I'd want to live in earthquake country.”

“At least answer them,” said Lydia. “Major League love shouldn't hold you back, you know.”

Lydia was peeling back too many layers with her comments, and Alice couldn't decide if Lydia was trying to warn her that her “Major League love,” as she called it, was a choice that was interfering with her determination to be somebody in the world, someone bigger and more accomplished than the bonds of Dutch Center would ever allow her. Loving Nickson had to be a better choice than the way Lydia was playing the field. How was she managing to keep her academic focus while dillydallying around with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who crossed her seductive path! But, no, she would not confront Lydia. She wouldn't even argue with her. As uncomfortable as Lydia had just made her, something told Alice that she needed Lydia more now than ever. To keep her heart in balance. To keep her mind focused. And to cover for her if the need arose.

That Sunday Alice read the church bulletin to see the interesting coincidence that the title of Rev. Prunesma's sermon was “Love Love Love.”
His text was John 15:12, “This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.” Alice watched the Vangs come in and sit in their usual pew and felt that her love joined them all together.

The Rev chose to complicate the topic by talking about three different kinds of love. He liked to demonstrate his knowledge of Greek and Latin, defining each word as a way of explicating the text.

He gave the least time to
Eros,
which, he said, of course gave us the word
erotic.

“Eros, if left to its own designs,” he declared, “is destructive. Fleshly love. Bodily desire. Eros is like a young and untrained horse that is turned loose. If there is no bridle, if there are no fences, Eros will gallop out of control to its own destruction.”

Alice felt relieved: her and Nickson's love was much more than unbridled desire.

The Rev went on to
Filial,
which, he explained, was inside our word for
family
and was probably what God meant by
brotherly love.
He talked for several minutes about the brotherly love of Jesus's disciples and of the brotherly love that members of the church showed with mutual concern for each other. “Filial love is what children show by obeying their parents,” he concluded.

Yes, Alice thought. This is the kind of love Nickson had for his mother.

But what Rev. Prunesma really wanted to celebrate was the third kind of love,
Caritas,
the kind of love that Jesus brought to earth. Selfless love. This was the grandest love of them all, and his gestures became broader and broader and his face redder and redder as he extolled this greatest of Christian virtues. “But,” he warned, “it is only through God's love that we depraved sinners can even imagine the beauty of
caritas.
If we show it to others, it is only because the Lord God Almighty, through the sacrifice of his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, has instilled that love within us.”

Love love love,
Alice thought as the Rev preached on. She and Nickson had the gift of all three kinds.

There was no intimidation in the sermon and no triggers for remorse or guilt. The whole sermon was an invitation to celebrate the beauty of love and to accept the deep comfort and security it could give against all the torments of the world.

Out of respect for her parents, Alice did not try to talk with Nickson after church. This was his time to be with family too. It had been some time since she felt so good about one of Rev. Prunesma's sermons.

She was buoyed by the feeling of abundant love until the next morning, when, for no reason she could name, she felt bushwhacked. At first it was a mere twinge of fear: if her love for Nickson was so wonderful, why couldn't she talk to anyone about it? Why was it such a secret? She tried to imagine telling people that she was in love with Nickson but could only imagine mocking and scornful responses, and the imagined voices made her angry.

That morning when she arrived at school, her fear turned into a dark sadness that started when she saw Nickson with the “bad boys.” The days when she was seeing Nickson had been filled with explosive moments of seeing the beautiful, but, at that moment, she had an implosive moment of seeing the ugly: the Slouchers must have been where the marijuana was coming from. What if Nickson was the dealer? What if he had brought a large supply with him from Saint Paul? And their big celebration: what if other members of his clan had brought huge supplies of marijuana that Nickson was now selling? What if Lia's story cloth business was just a cover for Nickson's drug operation? What if Nickson was giving Mai drug money to buy condoms? What if this whole romance thing was a sham and she was a fool? What if she and Nickson were the wild colts of Eros intent on their own destruction? What if her mother was right?

And what if this awful change of mood is what her mother experienced all the time, chemicals running wild in her body, making her need Valium just to remain calm enough to function in the world? No matter how much she vowed never to be like her mother, the curse of being her offspring was like having wiring that channeled every impulse in her being to imitate her.

No, she thought. No—but she could feel her body temperature drop, and with it her good mood plunged. When she saw her classmates, she had no desire to talk to them. Her neck muscles were tightening, and she could hardly swallow. She stood in front of the women's room mirror, and her own face scared her. Her face looked like a fun-house mirror had distorted her features. Her cheeks moved in dizzying waves and her eyes looked unfamiliar and blank. She felt as if she was looking into the eyes of
a stranger in a face that was malleable and changing, with her flesh swimming on her cheekbones. Looking at herself made her want to vomit. It was even worse than that: some force inside her was erupting and she felt as if she was being disemboweled, and it was all happening so fast. Only twenty-four hours ago her heart had been riding through the sky on a soft cloud of love.

Her body's eruptions rose from her stomach to her heart and continued upward to lodge in her mind, screaming: look what you have done with your life! She was seventeen and having sex with a man from a different race who carried a gun, who hung out with shady characters, and who had introduced her to drugs! She had been so busy with the desires of her flesh that she had neglected the life of her mind! As Lydia had reminded her with an innocent enough question, she had not even followed up on her college applications!

Alice came to the terror of full realization: something had forced common sense right out of her and she had veered out of control. No, it was not the wide path of destruction that Rev. Prunesma could talk about, and it wasn't the narrow path of salvation. Worse than Shakespeare's “primrose path of dalliance,” she had followed a pathless path of confusion and selfishness. This was worse than being thrown into a den of lions. This was bootless desperation.

But why should she entirely blame herself? Her mother had successfully trapped her with her sickness and smothered her with her pessimism. Oh, and her father, good old controlled Albert, with his neat little rows of failure. Rigid as her father was, there was something limp about him. She wouldn't blame Aldah, but raising her as Alice had done didn't give her much of a chance for friendships with normal boyfriends. Bubbly Mai didn't help either. She was probably a Linda Tripp, blabbing the news of Nickson and Alice's sexual adventures to anyone who would listen: “Four condoms a night! That's my brother! And how about that Dutch princess!” Har har har: “If you're not Dutch, you're not much.”

She wrapped her hands around her shoulders and pulled. I will pull myself together, she thought. I will, and this will pass. I'll hit bottom and then come back up. But her dark thoughts kept digging in and shaping her day. She avoided Nickson and asked to be excused from the last class, but being alone in the women's room only made her feel worse. The
terrible way she was feeling—she couldn't hide this from Lydia. If she ever needed her best friend's support, she needed it now.

She caught Lydia after school and told her that she was feeling terrible.

“I just can't shake it,” she said. “I just can't shake it.”

“I should have told you,” said Lydia. “This happens on the medication. Don't blame yourself; it's just a chemical thing and your bad mood will pass. Trust me.”

34

Alice drove the 150 slowly, waiting for some comfort from the sad and purring engine. Oh yes, Miss Den Harmsel, she thought to herself, I am quite aware of the irony of seeking comfort from a combustion engine rather than from God or Shakespeare, or even a sensible life.

Her unemployed mother was home. Her mother's chronic anger always filled the house, sometimes mildly like a thin layer of dust that Alice could brush off easily, but more often like anhydrous ammonia—so astringent that it hurt to breathe in her presence. If she was in her astringent mode now, Alice would be ready to match her. But her mother chose not to show what form of anger lurked behind her eyes. She just studied Alice like a hog buyer looking for flaws. The punishment of silence had not stopped, but her mother looked like the victim of her own agenda: her black mood had made black circles under her eyes. The only white was the pale skin that was emerging in the early winter weather. She looked thinner every day. Occasionally in the past week Alice had seen her out in the roadside ditch, wearing dark sunglasses and snipping dead flowers and weeds for a winter bouquet which she'd then stuff, crackling, into large vases in the living room. Was she creating images of herself? More likely she was growing more and more silent and looking darker and darker as a way to punish Alice. Mostly, she appeared to be celebrating the death of things. Alice felt like giving her a serving of her own hoarded Spam.

Whether sensing Alice's dark mood and wanting to escape it or wanting to guard her own darkness in the privacy of her own company, her mother announced that she needed to run to town and would be right back. Her father was gone too, though he'd be back soon to go to bed. Alice was suddenly alone in the house, with only her own dark mood to
keep her company. She imagined that the way she felt was probably how her mother felt most of the time. Without a second's thought, she went into her parents' bedroom and straight to her mother's drug supply. She shook out four Valium and put three in her pocket in case she'd need them later, walked to the kitchen and swallowed one, along with another half tablet of her acne medication. She'd level a chemical assault on the outer and inner blemishes in one fell swoop.

When Alice started to get dressed for her evening chores, her dark mood was upstaged by a painful constriction on the skin of her breasts. She looked down to see the bulging presence of her breasts forcing themselves over her brassiere. This had to be part of her anguish for the day, but then she realized that not only were her breasts swollen, but she was a week overdue.

Or was she? She walked to her wall calendar and paged back to the previous month. She stared long and hard at the Sunday her period had begun. No mistake: she was eight days overdue. This had never happened before: she was as regular as her and Lydia's clock before Lydia went on the pill. The thought that she might be pregnant was a call back to reality. The dark mood left and she went into clear-thinking mode. Nickson was too careful for this to happen. Then she remembered the night the condom almost slipped off and how they hadn't worried at the time, but now she tried to remember exactly which night that was. She thought she did remember it and checked the date to see when in her cycle that might have occurred. Thanks mostly to Lydia's mother whose sex education of Lydia had been passed on directly to Alice, they both knew about
mittelschmerz.
They both knew about ovulation and when it was likely to occur.