The Fall of Alice K. (11 page)

Alice stepped smiling from the stall. “‘We're a rhymed couplet,' Nancy said identically.”

They stood and looked at each other the way mutual winners in a big sports event look at each other after the game. Their glee smothered Alice's pain and they hugged each other tight.

“Do you realize what we just did together?” asked Alice.

“We made some Nancy Swifties and some other funnies.”

“And a rhymed couplet à la Shakespeare.”

“And we did it fast.”

“I know. My brain works like a smooth machine when I'm with you.”

“Greased lightning. We inspire each other.”

“I know. We're both really smart. I couldn't say that to anyone but you.”

“I wouldn't put up with it from anyone but you.”

“We're the only two in this school who could have done that.”

“I know. Don't tell anyone.”

“I won't,” said Alice. “Too big a price to pay.”

“But there is something else I have to tell you,” said Lydia. “Remember how last year we often started our periods on the same day?”

“It was a pretty bizarre coincidence,” said Alice. “Sort of a sisterly thing, you think? Are you getting symptoms now? Am I making you start your period?”

“Afraid not,” said Lydia. “I'll be on a different schedule this month because I've gone on the pill.”

Alice absorbed the announcement. She whispered, as if she was afraid that someone might overhear: “You're going on the pill?”

Alice trusted Lydia more than anyone, but she already knew that Lydia had not been totally open with her about the fact that she had been seeing the same guy since July, a twenty-year-old who was attending the vocational college in Shellhorn about twenty miles from Dutch Center.

“You look shocked,” said Lydia.

“I am shocked. I knew you were seeing somebody, but I had no idea you were heading in that direction. Who is it?”

“Randy Ver Sloot.”

“Do your folks know?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you going to tell them?”

“Of course not.”

“What if your mom finds the pills?”

“My mom doesn't snoop in my room.”

“What if you forget to take one?”

“I won't,” she said.

“Whew,” said Alice. “This is a big one.”

“You're not going to disown me, are you?”

“I just wasn't expecting anything like this while you were still in high school. And with this guy Ralph.”

“Randy. Would you rather I hadn't told you?”

“Is he a Christian?”

“Yes,” she said. “He didn't go to Christian schools, but he was raised American Reformed.”

“At least he's allowed to go to movies on Sundays,” said Alice.

“You've heard of Marvin Ver Sloot, right?”

“Yes,” said Alice. “Implement business, right?”

“That's Randy's dad.”

Alice didn't know what more to say to the person who had been her best friend since grade school. Alice always assumed Lydia would go on to become something great. A doctor. A college professor. A lawyer or business executive or something. One of her fantasies was that Lydia would one day run for governor and Alice would be her main lawyer / adviser. She couldn't think of Randy as a step in the direction of that future. Going to a vocational college. To be what? The idea of Lydia with Randy made Alice feel nauseated, and it wasn't a menstrual nausea. She had lost her. She had lost Lydia.

“Two lovely berries moulded on one stem?”

Her friendship with Lydia really had been like that, the core of them joined more deeply than anyone else could possibly understand. Their friendship had stood outside the calluses on her farm-girl hands, outside the stench of the cattle and hog feedlots, outside the cold water of the bathroom at home, outside her mother's criticism, even outside the constant needs of her sister Aldah. The way they could laugh together. The way they could challenge each other in playful word games or in understanding difficult passages in literature. Together, each of them was a bigger person than when they were by themselves.

Lydia's announcement made Alice feel as if everything they had given to each other with their friendship might be gone forever. If Lydia was a lovely berry hanging next to Alice on the same stem, one of them had just ripened and fallen to the ground. Her best friend was having sex with somebody who was learning how to fix lawn mowers!

“Tell me again what those two books were that Miss Den Harmsel assigned you for the summer,” said Alice.

“History stuff,” said Lydia. “I think they'd bore you.”

“I could lend you
Beloved
and
The Grapes of Wrath,
” said Alice.

“No, that's all right,” said Lydia. “I've already read them.”

12

Alice wandered into the old redbrick core of the school after lunch, past Miss Den Harmsel's room and down the granite-floored corridors and along the walls that still had the original dark-wood moldings and down the narrower marble stairways with the wooden handrails that were dark and smooth from hands passing over them for almost a hundred years. The old section of the school did not give her the comfort of the haymow, or even of the cab of the 150, but it always felt like a good place to put herself together and to get grounded when the ground was shifting beneath her.

The old section with its old classrooms was where the most serious classes were taught—advanced calc, AP English, and senior chem. To leave the old section was to enter the more raucous wider hallways with their slamming steel locker doors and loudmouthed students. As she wound her way through the noisier hallways, she saw a few of the jocks, but they couldn't keep eye contact with her—that shifting unease in their whole body, their feigned attention to something else, anything else. They really
were
scared of her. Losing them was no loss at all. But Lydia. First Aldah, and now Lydia.

In the noisy hallways after sixth period Alice saw the dark hair of Nickson bobbing at shoulder-level of the students around him. She did not see his face, whether it said he was scared, carefree, angry, or totally content. It was hard to imagine contentment for him: the only bird of a feather he might find at Midwest was the adopted Korean girl named Sarah Vande Kamp. Alice tried to imagine a day when half the students at Midwest would have dark hair and tan skin and when a rainbow sea of sounds and colors would obliterate the bigotry of Dutch Center—and probably of her own parents. By that time she would already be
gone, away from Dutch Center and swimming in her own sea of many colors.

As she walked alone toward the 150 after school, she saw Nickson again. He was talking to the notorious
bad boys
of Midwest. It looked as if the dopers were reaching out to Nickson. Even worse, he grinned and swayed with them in a little brotherhood circle. These guys were worse than the jocks. They were a little gang that Lydia and Alice had labeled “the Slouchers.”

“Hey, Nickson!” Alice yelled.

He stepped away from the Slouchers and walked toward her, the seat of his pants hanging loose as an old sow's jowls.

Alice felt a tantalizing warmth as he walked toward her. She felt as if she was protecting the vulnerable, even though he looked confident in his easy swaying steps. And he looked so different from all the blond hair and white faces swarming out of the swinging front doors of Midwest.

“Sorry I couldn't talk longer after church,” said Alice.

“That's all right,” he said. “Your folks were waiting.”

“Want a ride home?”

The question made his eyebrows jump in surprise, but he said, “Sure.” His eyes lit at the sight of the 150: “Yo,” he said, “nice wheels,” and got in.

“Your Toyota station wagon looks like a good vehicle,” said Alice.

“It's all right,” he said. “Sits low compared to this baby.”

Alice could see his profile in her peripheral vision as she drove. He was looking straight ahead, though he may have had peripheral vision too. Alice glanced down at her knees as she drove and wondered what they looked like from his position. She put her right hand down on the seat between them and turned a corner using only her left hand to steer. She knew she was trying to show off just a bit, though she couldn't tell if he was impressed with her casual driving skill.

A few minutes later Alice pulled up behind the Vangs' Toyota station wagon. She thought she saw an apparition. She refocused her eyes. It was no apparition. Someone had put that awful bumper sticker on the rear bumper of the Vangs' station wagon: “If You're Not Dutch, You're Not Much.”

Alice looked over at Nickson, but he just smiled.

“I know it's not funny,” said Alice.

“It's pretty lame,” he said, but he was still smiling.

They both stepped out. Alice walked around to the front of the pickup, but Nickson walked toward the house.

Feeling her temper rise at a time like this felt perfectly right. She felt righteous indignation and a justifiable feeling that somebody should be punished. She didn't touch the bumper sticker. The police would need it for evidence.

“Alice!” It was Mai, standing on the front steps of their house.

“Mai.” Alice pointed at the bumper sticker. “I just can't believe it,” she said. “I apologize for whatever jerk did this.”

Mai walked toward the evidence. “Oh that?” she said. She was wearing jeans, an oversized gray T-shirt, and flip-flops. Strands of dark hair swirled around her bright face. Everything about her was animated.

The blue-and-white bumper sticker glistened. This time Alice did not stand in front of the evidence, and she didn't rip it off.

“I'm going to get them for doing this,” she said. Her lips tightened. She was on the basketball court with nobody to elbow.

“Oh, you don't like it?” said Mai.

“Don't like it?”

“I put it on yesterday before driving to campus,” she said. “What a hoot.”

“
You
put that bumper sticker on your own station wagon?”

“Yep,” she said. “Now all the minority students at Redemption want one—but I'm the only one with a bumper to put it on. Most are putting one on their dorm room doors or wrapping them around their backpacks. They only cost three dollars, two for five.”

This was a turnaround Alice wasn't expecting, and she was getting an education in a subject she didn't understand. “Isn't this a little twisted?” she said.

“In a good way?”

“You seem to be enjoying it, so I would say yes,” said Alice. “The more I think about it, yes, in a very good way. You have a perverse sense of humor.”

“But you get it, huh.”

“It caught me off guard, but I get it.”

Mai's playful grin had as much sparkle as her eyes. She was probably as smart as she was funny.

“Come inside, see our house.”

“If there are more bumper stickers in your house, I'll really think you're twisted.”

“No more bumper stickers,” said Mai, “but you'll probably find other reasons to think we're twisted.”

The screened porch had a small bench-swing suspended on chains from the porch ceiling. Several potted plants sat on the porch sill facing south. Two were in clay pots, but others were in gallon plastic ice cream buckets. There weren't any marigolds or begonias. Next to the door was a heaping scramble of sandals, quite a contrast to the work shoes and rubber boots that cluttered the porch on the farm. Alice took off her shoes and added them to the stack.

The living room furniture was ordinary Goodwill American, but the biggest piece after the dining room table was the TV set, which was so big it blocked one of the living room windows. It was turned on with the sound off. The walls were a dull, rental-house green and beige, but the room came to life with many potted plants that made the place smell like some kind of greenhouse that cheated Midwest weather. Photographs of family members took up most of two walls in the living room. There didn't seem to be a plan in the photo arrangement—except that the older men were in the middle and everyone else was spread out around them like leaves that had grown from the stable trunks of those men. Some of the older men were in army uniforms that were not American. Women were in most of the color photographs and wore elaborate dresses that fluttered with color and necklaces that looked like silver-chain bibs—and the whole dress ensemble was topped off with a purple turban. Not even the wildest getup at the tulip festival could match these colors. God help them if they ever wore clothes like these on the streets of Dutch Center.

The house had a small footprint but surprising space—besides the dining-living-room area, it had three bedrooms, two baths, and a tiny kitchen. One of the bedrooms had been turned into Mother Lia's workroom. She was sitting down and leaning over a humming sewing machine. Stacks of colorful fabric were layered on modular metal shelves around her.

“Here are some story cloths that Mom has finished,” said Mai and
placed her hand on a stack of rectangular cloths that had red, yellow, and green animal figures stitched onto a blue cloth. At the sound of her daughter's voice, Lia got up and spoke to Mai in a strange voice that made Alice think of a cat meowing.

“Our mother wants to give you something to eat.”

Lia was already leading the way to the kitchen. A huge rice cooker sat on the kitchen counter with its little red light glowing. The kitchen didn't smell at all like the farm kitchen, which, more often than not, smelled like mushroom soup or bacon. This kitchen smelled like a spice rack with the caps off. At the kitchen table sat Nickson with the Dutch Center telephone directory. He looked up, and for the first time Alice really looked at his eyes. Dark, bright eyes alert to everything. There was more of his sister Mai in him than she first realized.