The Fall of Alice K. (10 page)

Alice savored the prospect and had both thick texts lying on her desk, used copies that cost only four dollars each and which, for some reason, the bookstore manager had set aside for her.

Alice put her hand on the Shakespeare text and waited for Miss Den Harmsel as she distributed a printed study guide.

Why would anyone want to waste their time on a basketball court with insulting morons from public schools when you could spend time in the presence of a Miss Den Harmsel! Alice thought. Public schools didn't have anybody like Miss Den Harmsel. Miss Den Harmsel was a scholar and elevated students with her high expectations. She acted as if knowing the classics was a birthright that no educated Christian should resist. “Get wisdom. Get understanding,” she often said. She was quoting the Bible: Proverbs.

“If you know Dickinson and Shakespeare, you're ready to understand all literature,” she began. “Irony is at the heart of both comedy and tragedy,” she said. “Shakespeare and Dickinson knew that.”

It was strange that Miss Den Harmsel would appreciate irony but never speak ironically herself. Ironically, she probably knew that.

11

Miss Den Harmsel assigned
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
the entire play, for the first week.

“We're starting out with the light stuff,” she said. “The only tough part will be the Elizabethan English. Read the footnotes, my diligent ones.” She said those words with such respect that even those inclined to be less diligent took note.

After filling their minds with Miss Den Harmsel's passionate rendering of her favorite passages from the play, Lydia and Alice had lunch together.

The cafeteria was a testimonial to Dutch frugality and efficiency. The space served as chapel in the mornings, as theater and choir room in the afternoons or evenings, and, magically, as cafeteria at noon when tables and serving counters appeared at 11:45 and disappeared at 12:45.

Alice and Lydia stood in the honor student line, picked up their pizza, walked over to the honor student table, sat down, and silently said grace.

Alice wanted to read snippets from
A Midsummer Night's Dream
as they ate.

“Yes!” said Lydia. “Let's read it loud and freak everybody out. What ho!”

Her loud and sassy voice carried over to other tables and made heads turn. If Alice's height drew others' attention, Lydia's voice and dress drew even more attention. She was
different
in ways that Alice probably would never be. Even her last name, Laats, separated her from most people in the community. Even though Laats was a Dutch name, there was only one “Laats” in the phone book.

At home Alice had followed her father's interest in the history of the
Dutch in America. The way Alice found private reading time in the haymow, her father found it in his basement office. One of his favorite books was a large tattered book that was an early 1900s
Atlas
of Groningen County. It contained historical texts, maps, family photographs, photographs of early churches and schools—and advertisements: pages and pages of advertisements that probably made publication of this huge book possible. Alice had quietly dipped into the book herself and found pictures of her own ancestors. She had studied the picture of her great-great-grandfather and her grandmother Krayenbraak and pondered the grim austerity of their expressions. Variations of that grim expression characterized most of the portraits. Some of the men hid their grimacing faces behind heavy beards and mustaches, but there was a ferocity in the eyes that was chilling. It was impossible to tell if the fierce expressions were the result of straining to keep their eyes open for the camera or if there was something more foreboding in their lives. The women in their long and dark stylish dresses that they must have put on for the photographer looked even more tormented—and always the high collars tight around their necks. Was that to hide necks that might be considered too erotic? But the mouths—so grim, so sad.

If her mother had been alive back then, she would have looked like one of these grim women. There were no more than three detectable smiles among the hundreds of photographs. Maybe the photographer was ugly, Alice had mused to herself, and they felt disgusted to look at him. More likely these people simply were not happy. They looked like a lesson plan in pessimism. Maybe her father was looking for a way to accept the present by viewing the grim legacy recorded in these photographs. Maybe he was using a kind of logic that said: when you look at how bad things must have been back then, the present looks pretty good.

Now her best friend sitting across from her was someone who was the real thing, the living Dutch at the end of the twentieth century. It was hard to imagine that Lydia's family had roots that connected to the Dutch Alice found in the
Atlas.
The Dutch who had come to America in the nineteenth century were evidently a whole different breed from the people like the Laats who had come late in the twentieth century. Theirs was not a name that appeared in the old
Atlas.

After Lydia's family moved from Canada to Dutch Center, her father became a realtor and insurance salesman, and her mother was the town librarian. Alice knew the whole family spoke Dutch fluently, though Lydia rarely used Dutch words, no doubt because she did not want to break her image of a totally Americanized young woman. Still, there was something different about the Laats: her father always wore a suit and tie, and her mother had a wonderful flair about her that had rubbed off on Lydia. The whole Laats family had a confident manner that made them seem almost foreign, which they actually were, but sometimes their confidence came across as naive. They could act like people who couldn't even imagine that others would be suspicious of them or speak ill of them. Alice envied that confidence in Lydia and hoped that someday she could equal it.

Lydia's playful wit was also hard to beat. When Alice saw that telltale smirk on Lydia's face across the table from her, she knew there'd probably be a Nancy Swifty before they looked at Shakespeare. Nancy Swifties were Lydia's idea and dated back to their sophomore year. She had discovered Tom Swifties (“‘Doctor, are you sure the surgery was a complete success?' Tom asked halfheartedly”), but she didn't like the fact that Tom Swifties were always about men.

“What we need are some
Nancy
Swifties.”

Alice agreed. That's how it started, and it was Lydia who kept the Nancy Swifty fires burning. She was verging toward a chuckle before she told the one she was storing up. The pizza they were eating was Canadian bacon and pineapple, what kids were calling “sweet swine.”

Lydia delivered a Nancy Swifty: “‘Where's the pineapple?' Nancy asked
dole
fully.”

They leaned toward each other, groaning in unison.

“Not bad,” said Alice. “Not Shakespeare, but not bad. Now how about some Shakespeare?”

Lydia held her pizza in one hand and paged through the play with her other. “Here's a sweet passage,” she said. “It could be about us.” She read in a voice that sounded very much like Miss Den Harmsel's: “‘So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition; / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; / So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.'”

“That's between two women?”

“Indeed 'tis, madam, though I don't think the whole speech is sweet.”

“Here's one I like,” said Alice. “‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains.'”

“Cool. Miss Den Harmsel liked that one too. How about this one? ‘A wise prince seeks a woman tall and fair'?” she said in a Miss Den Harmselian voice.

“Where's that?”

Lydia had that look on her face, and then she couldn't hold her laugh. Her cheeks bulged while her shoulders and breasts bounced.

“You made that up, didn't you! Didn't you!”

“Nevah nevah. From the pure of soul the pure of tongue.”

“Dos't thy tongue betray thee, lady?”

“I'd smite it off, I would,” she said.

Alice held up a half slice of pizza and threatened her. Lydia held up a piece of her pizza in the same manner. “Aye, me lady,” she said, “woulds't thou make of me a pizza face?”

“A face of many colors,” said Alice. Lydia guffawed. Alice guffawed. Now many faces from other tables turned toward them as if surprised to hear something unexpected from the honor students' table: food fights or any kind of bad behavior.

Lydia did one of her quick mood changes and looked at Alice seriously: “There's something I've got to tell you,” she said. “Better from me than from someone else. Word is out there that you're not doing any sports this year. The jocks are pissed, so they're calling you ‘Barbie Doll.'”

They united in a mocking, sneering laugh.

“I wish you hadn't told me that,” said Alice.

“Better than ‘ass and a beanpole.'”

“Not much,” said Alice.

“Who cares?” said Lydia. “They're all jerks.”

Alice agreed, but she'd still have to look at them every day. “Barbie? Barbie?”

“Sorry,” said Lydia.

Alice knew it had to be something other than her physical dimensions that invited the Barbie label. For one thing, she was too tall to fit into a Barbie box, and her biggest bulges were on her biceps and buttocks,
not her chest. The tall skinny girl with muscles and buns, that was Alice. Hardly the profile of a Barbie Doll!

So Alice knew the jocks didn't call her Barbie because she looked like Barbie, and they didn't call her Barbie just because she wasn't going out for sports. They called her Barbie because they were scared of her, and they were scared of her because they knew she was both smarter than they were and more than their match in the sports department if she wanted to be. What really got to them was that they knew she did not like or respect them one bit. There were times when she and Lydia would hear them talking in the hallways and chuckled at—correction: mocked—their “I done's” and “We was's.” In the case of the jocks, fear transformed into
profound dislike.
Alice skipped over the fear factor and went straight for the
profound dislike:
she thought they were lamebrains, and she didn't need to be scared of them to feel that way. Some truths were self-evident. But she had always kept her feelings to herself and didn't call them names behind their backs. Barbie. How dare they, really! Actually, if even one of them had reminded Alice of Ken, she might have smiled at him and asked him if he'd like to play a game of Scrabble.

“I hope I didn't ruin your first day back at school,” said Lydia.

“This isn't exactly what I was hoping for, but, really, it's not your fault.”

Alice had known from her dull headache earlier in the day that her period might be starting soon. Now the evidence collected in her abdomen, a slight ache that quickly transformed into a wrenching pain, what Alice imagined as two snakes wrapping themselves together and trying to squeeze the life out of each other.

“Oh, my God,” she said. She squinted and folded her arms, each hand clutching the elbow of the other arm.

“Have we just changed the subject?”

“You might say that,” Alice groaned. “Have you got a quarter?”

Of all times for a Nancy Swifty, Lydia had one: “‘Is that a period I see?' Nancy questioned.”

“Stop,” said Alice. “This really hurts. Don't make me laugh.”

Lydia stared at her and winced too. One of the beauties of her friendship with Lydia was that Lydia knew when it was time for the humor to
stop and when the quick exchanges of their minds needed to give way to the greater needs of the moment.

“You've got bad cramps, don't you?” Lydia asked without a hint of humor in her voice.

“Really really really bad,” said Alice.

Alice saw in Lydia's expression that she was absorbing the misery, maybe from her own memories of this pain, but now her big blue eyes were sending out a steady stream of empathy.

“I'd take half your pain if I could,” she said.

“I know,” said Alice. “I think you already have.”

They exited for the women's room.

“Here's a quarter,” said Lydia.

Lydia stood outside the booth to wait for Alice. A minute passed and then Lydia asked, “Are you all right in there?”

“I'm all right,” said Alice. “I just want to stay here for a while until the pain lets up a bit. Let's read some Shakespeare.”

“You're kidding.”

But Alice wasn't kidding: she opened her Shakespeare book and laid it on the floor. She came to a passage that fit the moment. She pounded on the wall of her stall and read, “‘Thou wall, O wall, O Sweet and lovely wall, / Show me thy chink to blink through with mine eyne!'”

“You're amazing,” said Lydia, “Where's that?”

“Page eighteen.” Alice read another line: “‘O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss.'”

“You're funny,” said Lydia. “May I laugh now?”

“Laugh all you want,” said Alice.

There was a pause on Lydia's side of the wall as she seemed to be paging through her Shakespeare text. Then a sweet but dramatic version of Lydia's stage voice floated through the air: “‘Thinks't thou this pain upon all womanhood befalls?'”

Alice knew that was a Lydia creation, not Shakespeare's. She quickly considered some follow-up line that would rhyme with “befalls”: “beach balls, death shawls, overalls, cat calls, bathroom walls”—and then the perfect line leapt into her mind: “Until the voice of motherhood upon us calls.”

“Jackpot! Jackpot!” screamed Lydia. “That was a rhymed couplet!”