Alice Bliss (8 page)

“Let her see you. Go slow,” Edna says.

“What’s her name?” Alice asks.

“Goldie.”

“Hi, Goldie,” Alice says, stroking her nose.

“Can I hold one?” Ellie asks.

“As soon as they’re done nursing, they’ll be climbing all over you.”

Ellie is petting the baby goats and Alice joins her while Angie, Edna, and Hank watch them.

“They’re so cute. Can we bring one home?”

“They’re gonna get big, Ellie.”

“I don’t care.”

“We’ve picked out two names for the babies so far,” Edna says. “Blondie and Walden. Got any good ideas for the third kid?”

Ellie considers.

“What kind of goats are they?” Alice asks.

“LaManchas. Milk goats from Spain. They’re friendly, easy to handle, and great producers. You like goat’s milk?” Hank asks.

“I don’t know, I’ve never tried it.”

“I like it,” Ellie announces.

“You’ve never had it either!”

“I can just tell.”

“Can you tell who’s who?” Angie asks.

“The gray one is Walden. The sandy colored one is Blondie. And the one with the white feet needs a name.”

“Niblets,” Ellie says.

“Niblets it is.” Hank laughs.

“Really?”

The kids finish nursing and, just like Edna said, they climb all over the girls, nibbling their fingers, rubbing their heads against them. Ellie is giggling.

“I can’t believe how soft they are,” Alice says.

“Hi, Niblets,” Ellie whispers into the white-footed kid’s ear, as she hugs him against her.

“We’ve got baby lambs and new chicks, too, if you want to see them,” Hank says.

“Maybe later,” Ellie says, in a dreamy voice.

“C’mon in the house when you’re ready. Just be sure to latch the stall door.”

Alice looks up and smiles at her mom; just a wide-open uncomplicated happy kid smile. Angie bursts into a laugh.

“They’re great, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. Really great.”

Hank puts his arm around Angie’s shoulder as the grown-ups turn to leave the barn.

“I made pineapple upside down cake,” Edna calls back to them. “And you can try some goat’s milk when you come inside.”

Matt’s letters are finally starting to arrive. Sometimes in a bunch, sometimes just one for Angie. He writes Angie every day he’s not out on patrol.

Ellie collects the mail from the mailbox after school and puts everything on the hall table. Alice and Ellie never open anything until Angie gets home, no matter how tempting. After work, Angie pours herself a glass of wine and they all sit in the living room to open the letter, or letters if they’re lucky. If there’s only one, one for Mom, she’ll read the sections she feels she can share or things Dad asks her to tell them.

 

 

 

The part of the letter Angie won’t read, or can’t read, or can’t trust herself to give voice to, says:

 

Later, when Alice slips the letter out of the envelope and reads it as fast as she can, the words, no, the feelings, the impossibly intense feelings burn into her. It’s like opening a bedroom door.

Three weeks after Matt ships out Ellie gets the stool so she can reach Matt’s shelf of favorite books. First up: his leather-bound college dictionary.

She brings this to the breakfast table and announces she’s going to read the dictionary while Daddy is gone. Alice is thinking,
yeah, right,
as Ellie opens Webster’s Dictionary, Second Edition, reads the inscription from Dad’s mom wishing him good luck in college, and begins at the beginning, right there on page one. While eating Cheerios. Ellie gets up and digs a pink notebook out of her school backpack and begins noting down superfascinating words.

Ellie’s current teacher is a dictionary nut. She purportedly has hundreds of dictionaries, though this does not sound remotely credible to Alice. Where do you put them? What do you do with them? What, exactly, is the point? She tries to imagine perky Mrs. Baker, who is not even five feet tall, saying to her husband, “I’m just going to curl up with a good dictionary.”

But none of this matters to Ellie, the annoying little autodidact. She is eating up the
A
’s like they are the elixir of knowledge, like this is a book with a plot, an action adventure, mystery, crime thriller, page turner, can’t-put-it-down-exciting read.

“Ellie,” Alice can’t resist saying, “Dad
used
the dictionary, he didn’t read it.”

“How do you know what Daddy did or didn’t do in college?”

“If she wants to read the dictionary, let her read the dictionary,” Angie chimes in.

“You don’t think it’s a little—”

“Mrs. Baker says there can be ineffable joy in pursuing the absurd.”

Both Alice and Angie turn to stare at Ellie and think, simultaneously—if that’s possible—where does she come up with this stuff? and, Ellie and Mrs. Baker were made for each other.

“You want to know my new favorite word?” Ellie asks.

As if they could say no.

“
Sesquipedalian
, which means ‘
long word
.’ I’m collecting them: long, rare words.”

Angie is making sandwiches for a change, Alice notices, as she opens the paper to international news. It’s just PB & J, but still. And then she sees the headline.

“Gram’s taking you two for haircuts after school today.”

“Finally!” Ellie says.

Alice closes the paper, folds it in half.

“She’ll pick you up here at four thirty.”

“I have practice.”

“I know exactly what I want. I have a picture,” Ellie announces.

“You’ll just have to get out of practice a little early, Alice.”

“You’re gonna be surprised, Mom,” Ellie sings.

“I don’t need a haircut.”

“Just a trim.”

“I don’t need a trim.”

“Do you know how long it took me to get the two of you an appointment when Gram was available?”

“Ellie could still go.”

“You’re both going. End of discussion.”

“But, Mom—”

Henry arrives, shouting, “Good morning, Mrs. Bliss!” As they head out the door, Alice grabs the front section of the paper. She passes up Henry’s invitation to come to the auditorium while he plays piano and instead sits on the front steps and watches all the students and teachers arriving at school. Does everyone have a secret life, she wonders? Is everyone carrying an impossible, unbearable secret?

Students stream up the steps and into the building past the army recruiter’s table, the baseball bake sale table, and the lone ninth-grade girl passing out fliers for the pep rally. When the stream becomes a trickle she gets up, dusts off the back of her pants, and heads into school, down the hall, past the principal’s office, on her way to the stairs to her homeroom. She suddenly notices that everything is worn: the linoleum, the paint on the edges of the doors, the ceiling is cracked and veined. When she glances into the principal’s office she can see Mrs. Bradley; even Mrs. Bradley looks worn as she pulls her sky blue sweater over her soft stomach and then leans over to search for a file in the file cabinet. Alice is trying to remember—didn’t somebody tell her that one of Mrs. Bradley’s kids died of cancer when they were little? Yet here she is every day.

Mr. Fisher, who actually knows every single kid in all four grades in the high school by name, steps out from his office to ask Mrs. Bradley for something and before he speaks, his forehead is creased in a frown. He is pinching the bridge of his nose, as though to relieve pressure or pain. Both of them look pale and drained. And there it is again: worn.

Mr. Fisher straightens his slumped shoulders, leans both fists on Mrs. Bradley’s desk, and says something that makes her laugh. You can tell he used to be a football player; he’s got that low to the ground swagger to his walk even though he’s now too chubby and about fifteen years too old to pull that off particularly well.

Alice’s legs are feeling so heavy she’s not sure she’ll be able to walk up the flight of stairs to her homeroom. Maybe she could just head on down the first floor hall to the nurse’s office and ask to lie down. Or back out the door and down the street to Gram’s apartment, or all the way home. Suddenly she just wants to lie down on the floor. She crosses to the wall and leans against a locker. She manages to slide along the wall to a seated position before she falls down. She’s thinking she should bend her knees; she should fold herself up so no one will notice her, but her legs are ignoring her. She grabs fistfuls of her dad’s shirt as she wraps her arms around herself, trying to hold on to something solid. She’s having trouble breathing. She thinks she might scream or throw up or pass out. She thinks that not one of these options is a good one.

The National Guard and marine recruiters are folding up their tables, packing their brochures into boxes, chatting and laughing and greeting students they seem to already know by name. Their uniforms, their boots, their bearing, everything about them seems to be shouting at her to pull herself together.

Bells start ringing; she’s missed homeroom entirely. How did that happen? Doors are being flung open and she can hear hundreds of feet coming down the hallways above her and all around her. She brings her hands up to her ears to drown out the sound.

A crowd eddies around her, edging closer. No one approaches her, no one kneels down to ask if she’s okay. Some kids gawk and move on, others hang on waiting to see how this will play out. Alice keeps her hands clamped over her ears so she can’t hear their comments.

The principal has put on his suit jacket and straightened his tie. He is moving down the hallway at the fastest clip he is capable of with the school nurse in tow, the very small, very shy Miss Lambert. They are pushing through the crowds of students, and Mr. Fisher is reminding them to
Keep moving! Get to class!
The students reluctantly break up to let him through, and most of them head off to class. A few just draw back slightly to watch from a safer distance. No one is saying much. Mr. Fisher raises his voice and sends the stragglers on their way.

Somehow Henry is there and he is talking to the principal, gesturing and standing up straight, and even from where she sits on the floor barely daring to look at him through her lashes, Alice can tell he is being very, very convincing.

But this is a fleeting impression when what floods her mind’s eye is a road called Highway 10, fifteen miles west of Baghdad, a road she has Googled in the school’s computer lab and watched and contemplated, a road her father undoubtedly travels on.

Henry manages to get her to the nurse’s office and settled onto a cot. He’s about to leave when she hands him the clipping from the
Democrat and Chronicle
that has been burning a hole in her pocket. He bends his head to read the article.

He carefully folds the paper into a tiny square and puts it into his back pocket.

“Alice, you’ve gotta stop reading the papers.”