The fall of alice k, p.34
The Fall of Alice K., page 34
“You mean that?”
“I mean that,” he said. “What about you? Are you praying? Are you ready for the future?”
“I’m working on it,” she said. “When you’re down here by yourself, what are you really looking for?”
He told her. For the next hour he told her.
Alice’s father liked to talk about “our people” as if they were still some kind of distinct group. On the surface, they weren’t. The Dutch descendants might have kept a trace of the stone-facedness that she saw in the portraits of the early settlers, but in most settings they blended in. Until that telltale saying grace in public places.
Her father’s interest in history was a mystery, but she was trying to understand it. For a while, she thought he believed that connecting to their roots would somehow bring them out of the financial disaster that had come upon them. She was wrong. That was not it at all.
When her father looked at the history of the Dutch in Iowa, he saw the history of humble country people seeking lives of piety in a sinful world that forever tempted God’s people with the frivolous lures of “spelen, zuiperijen en zwelgerijen”—gambling, boozing, and sensual indulgence.
He seemed to relish those Dutch words, though Alice did not know how good his pronunciation was. Alice knew that what her father was reading was the real stuff. This was the thinking that made its way down through the generations. Phony and godless optimism of the Enlightenment? No wonder such indulgent attitudes toward the self led to spelen, zuiperijen en zwelgerijen! Still, her father could talk like a scholar, like a learned philosopher or historian. Alice knew how rare he was. He was an old breed: the thinking, learned farmer. But right then, it occurred to Alice that her father’s study of history was his way of accepting the worst.
One thing that attracted Alice to the Vangs was that they didn’t seem to have the same sense of sin that the people of her tradition had. Mai could date wildly but clearly took all the precautions against sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy and gave no indication that she thought she was doing anything wrong. Alice still puzzled over how easily she could move beyond the scene at Perfect Pizza, and to move on without guilt for slapping those guys and without fear of their retaliation. Nickson didn’t show much remorse about his drug life either. He simply accepted what he had done as something he had to do at the moment. If either of them ever experienced guilt, it was more over whether they measured up to the needs of their family than to the demands of God. It seemed to Alice that they were more afraid of offending their ancestors than of offending The Almighty. She sometimes both admired and resented Mai and Nickson’s freedom from guilt. They just didn’t have it. Things happened and they moved on.
Nickson and Mai didn’t worry about money either, maybe because they never knew what it would be like to lose what the Krayenbraaks were losing. Alice tried to imagine explaining to Nickson what this loss meant. If the past followed the Vangs through ancient wars with China, through war with the Communists in Laos, through the hard life in refugee camps, something of the distant past was living in Alice’s family too. Perhaps her father’s interest in history was his way of finding out who they once were so that he would find even one reason to have hope in the present.
Some of the Krayenbraak troubles must have looked silly to the Vangs. The Hmong had known starvation hundreds of times. They had had to move to survive hundreds of times. The idea of feeling that everything was at stake just because of losing the family farm must have seemed to them self-indulgent. Who did the Krayenbraaks think they were—so privileged that ownership of land would forever be a given? Even if they lost the farm, Alice couldn’t imagine that they would starve—or even have to go on food stamps. This wasn’t the Great Depression, and they would not be that destitute. The very worst thing that could happen would be that they’d have to live on her mother’s hoarded supply of Spam and pork and beans for a year and continue to bathe in cold water.
Alice never thought they were people in a high place. They were just an average farm family with the average conveniences of a nice house with all the amenities, a pickup, a car, and all the farm equipment necessary for working the fields and feeding the cattle and pigs. Nothing out of the ordinary. But she also knew that to her father, losing the farm wasn’t just losing the land and equipment. Losing his money wasn’t losing money. To him, the loss was bigger and deeper than that. Material loss was no more significant than the loss of his hair, just a superficial thing. Nor was it anything so simple as pride. He, like thousands of other farmers, had lost face years ago when it was becoming clear that sooner or later corporations, not individuals, would own most of the land in Iowa, even Groningen County. To her father, losing the farm was losing everything that history bequeathed to a person. It was losing the gift of the past. Memories of his father and grandfather were painful to him, as if he felt they were looking down from heaven with disappointed eyes. He had failed to uphold their legacy. So much had been given to him, and now he had not earned the gifts of the past. For a poor man to fail was one thing. For a person who had been so blessed to fail was quite another. She was confident that she understood her father and what he was going through.
“We’ll never lose everything,” she said to him.
“No, no,” he said, “of course not.” He held up the old Atlas. “This is what we are losing,” he said. “All of it.”
“But you don’t seem troubled. You seem so accepting of things.”
“I’m trying,” he said.
Through the entire conversation, he had not said one word about her pregnancy and what he wanted her to do next.
44
Lydia was scheduled to give a chapel speech. Alice couldn’t imagine why Lydia had been asked, though it occurred to her that it might have been Miss Den Harmsel’s suggestion. Or it may have been the principal’s way of warming Lydia up for giving the valedictorian address next spring. In some ways, it was a relief to think that Lydia might be the valedictorian: it would save Alice from the embarrassment of being denied the role because she had gotten pregnant. Alice still felt some jealousy: she could easily have been the one to give a chapel speech before news was out that she was pregnant.
Lydia was dressed in bright green and red Christmas colors as she walked up to the lectern. She looked brilliant. She looked beautiful. She smiled brightly as she adjusted the direction of the microphone. She looked as if she had practiced in front of an adoring mirror!
“This is a privilege” were her first words. “I am honored to share some thoughts with all of you this morning.”
Please, Lydia, Alice thought to herself. Don’t give a political harangue.
Lydia had chosen two short Scriptural texts, Matthew 6, verse 24—“Ye cannot serve God and mammon”—and Proverbs 11, verse 28—“He that trusteth in his riches shall fall: but the righteous shall flourish as a branch.”
“The rich are inheriting the earth,” she began. “I apologize for sounding so political, but I have prayed about this. I believe we are at a crossroads in this country as the millennium is upon us, and I believe this is especially true for us at Midwest Christian and in the Dutch Center community. As some of you know, my parents were born in the Netherlands. Dutch was my first language. My mother’s favorite expression is ‘Hoge bomen vangen veel wind’—‘tall trees catch a lot of wind,’ which in Proverbs reads, ‘Whoever trusts in his riches will fall.’
“My friends, I believe money and the use of money to control our minds is the biggest threat to the well-being of our country as we enter the twenty-first century.”
Lydia, you big hypocrite, Alice thought. Everybody here knows your parents are rich!
Lydia didn’t stop. She went on to talk about corporate power and greed. She attacked Rush Limbaugh. Alice’s last hope was that Lydia would not start naming politicians like Steve Forbes and George W. Bush. But she did—both of them. And not in a very respectful way. She called George Bush a bumbling rich boy who was born with a silver foot in his mouth. Alice could feel tension growing in the students around her. Lydia was building a wall of alienation around herself.
Her finale was the hardest to listen to:
“I know we Dutch Calvinists are just a small speck in the larger culture,” she said, “but we could easily become a shot of adrenaline into the bulging greedy veins of corporate America. We are being swallowed by the ruthless Right Wing with all of its corporate clout and in return we are giving it legitimacy with our quiet but seasoned religious fervor. I fear that when Jesus said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ Satan said, ‘All righty’ then slipped behind Jesus and went straight into the first Dutch Reformation Church he could find. That clever Evil One started in the church basement, helped himself to some Christmas candy, and sauntered up to the pulpit on a sugar high with his smiley devilish face and started preaching distrust and suspicion of anyone who was not aligned with corporate America. Ignorance was the Evil One’s pal. The only thing worse than ignorance is confident ignorance—and that’s what we see today: people brainwashed into a state of ignorance. Keep them distracted with sports and television and feed them hate-filled drivel on talk radio, make them suspicious of legitimate newspapers, get them all thinking in the same direction so that their ideas are so uniform that nobody questions their nonsense!”
Oh Lydia, Oh Lydia, Oh Lydia, Alice thought inside her blushing head.
“Make immigrants the enemy! Make the New York Times the enemy! Make science the enemy! Oh, those evil scientists with their global warming theories. Evil, evil science! Get folks so scared that their only refuge is the gospel of American Capitalism and Militarism. The Mighty Dollar and The Mighty Sword! And when the Evil One had polluted everybody into greed and hate-filled conformity, he went up into the steeple. That’s where he is today, in the highest church steeples, surveying his kingdom.”
Lydia stopped, her face red with excitement. She smiled. “But with God’s grace,” she concluded, “we will not lift our faces to the false god of Mammon this Christmas. Instead, we will worship the Prince of Peace and be among the righteous who flourish like a green leaf.”
Several teachers went up to Lydia and shook her hand after chapel. Some of them were even smiling. Alice was the only student who approached her.
“Wow,” said Alice, “that was something.”
“Too much?”
“You were great, but what did you think you were doing ?”
“I was trying to be real,” said Lydia.
“I love you for that, but don’t you think some students will think you’re a hypocrite in your talk about Mammon? It’s not as if your family is poor.”
“Van zij die veel krijgen, wordt veel verwacht,” said Lydia. “That’s my father’s motto. It means, ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’ Can you keep a secret?”
“You know I can,” said Alice.
“My father is a big anonymous donor. He’s paying for the Vangs’ house rent. He’s paying Mai’s tuition. He subsidizes the housing expenses for Mexican immigrants. By the time he’s finished giving, we don’t have all that much left.”
Alice was speechless for a moment. “I had no idea,” she said. “That’s wonderful. But I wonder if some students will still think you’re a hypocrite.”
“Let them. I don’t care.”
“You really don’t, do you?”
“I really don’t.”
Alice went looking for Nickson, hoping to ask him what he thought of Lydia’s chapel speech. She couldn’t find him. She looked for him again at lunch, but Lydia told her that he wasn’t in the class they had together. Nickson wasn’t in school. Alice told the principal she needed to miss her afternoon classes, and, as a model student in his eyes, he immediately gave her permission. Alice drove straight to the Vangs, hoping that Nickson had stayed home to think about what they should do and that he would answer the door when she knocked. It was Lia who answered the door. She started to bow, then gestured Alice inside. She gave Alice the kind of look that needed no translation.
“Nickson not here,” she said. “He back to Saint Paul.”
“Thank you,” said Alice and went back to the 150, drove one block, pulled over and parked. Numbness. I’m in shock, she told herself. This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t possible. No, he couldn’t leave without telling me what he was going to do. Impossible. But he was gone. Nickson was gone.
She tried to hold the rage back, pushing at it with reason. He must have had a good reason to leave, but why didn’t he talk to her first? Why didn’t he explain? Reason kept struggling for a foothold, but rage kept shoving itself forward, relentlessly, a force that would not be stopped until it burst through to the surface.
“Why!” she screamed at the windshield of the 150.
She drove away, fast. I am beside myself, she reasoned with herself. I need to think, but some other part of her had taken over and she pushed the 150 seventy miles an hour down the gravel road. She hit the railroad track at sixty and came down hard enough to make dust puff down from the ceiling. The 150 made an awkward front-end bounce but did not betray her with swerves or skids. She took the puff of ceiling dust as a call back to reality and slowed down, but not by much.
She drove straight to the cattle feedlots over the frozen knobby ground and skidded to a stop in a spray of icy dust. She was going to do chores in her school clothes. So what? And she’d wear these same clothes to school tomorrow smelling like a manure pile. That would make people keep their distance.
Did she spook a few skittish Limousins when she fed the cattle ? She spooked a few skittish Limousins.
She yelled at the steers as they crowded up to the bunks. Those four-legged chunks of fat. “Here, gain four pounds a day!” she yelled at them when she threw the auger switch. As she watched them bump and shove to get at the feed troughs, she thought that if these useless fat blobs weren’t castrated already, she’d castrate them now. With her bare hands and a tin-shears. A dull tin-shears.
When Alice was finished with chores and walked in the house, her mother looked pleased, probably because she could see how distraught Alice was. Then the phone rang, and her mother answered.
“It’s for you,” she said. “It’s that Hmong girl.”
Alice almost refused to take it, but when she did she wanted to scream into the phone. Mai spoke before she could say anything: “I hope you didn’t misunderstand Mom this afternoon. She said you looked upset when you left.”
“Upset? Upset?” Her voice was rising. “Mai, how could he just up and leave like this?”
For the first time since she got the news of Nickson’s departure, she felt like crying—and she did: “Mai,” she sobbed. “How could he? How could he?”
“Just listen,” said Mai. “I was afraid that’s what you were thinking.”
Alice listened while Mai gave the story: Nickson told the whole family what was happening, that Alice had gotten pregnant. Lia was angry, really angry at first. Then she had gotten on the phone with their Saint Paul relatives, and one of the uncles had calmed her down. Calmed her down and then jumped in the car and drove nonstop to Dutch Center.
“Nickson needed to spend some time with the men of the family,” said Mai, “and my mom agreed.”
After that, Mai explained a lot of things. Lia needed a man in the household too, and Nickson had played that role. She explained why the whole family had come to Dutch Center, rather than just Mai by herself to go to Redemption. Nickson had been on the edge of “big trouble,” in Saint Paul, whatever that meant—and Alice didn’t ask. Mai’s getting a scholarship to Redemption had solved several problems at once: if the whole family went together, it was a way of getting Nickson away from the people who were getting him into trouble, and Lia would still have a man in the household.
Nickson had gone back to Saint Paul to talk with his uncles, one of whom was the clan leader.
“Nickson really does need his uncles to be involved,” said Mai. “It’s our families that aren’t married yet.”
Alice couldn’t think of any quotations from Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson to fit that moment. She did know that she was falling totally back in love with Nickson as quickly as love had evaporated at the thought that he had simply deserted her without warning. He was exactly what she thought he was: a noble and honorable person, a beautiful man. Here she was—seventeen, unwed, and pregnant—and she felt incredibly happy. How could she ever have doubted him, even for a horrible second? She felt foolish. Never again, she said to herself, never again will I question this beautiful man.
When she got off the phone, she walked back into the kitchen where her mother was standing.
“I heard part of that conversation,” she said. “He’s already run out on you, hasn’t he?”
“He’s coming back,” said Alice. “He went to Saint Paul to talk to his uncles.”
Alice did not tell her mother about the marriage of families.
“If he left once, he’ll leave again,” said her mother. “You don’t want to stay connected to him. It will ruin your life. Are you listening to me ?”
“I am always listening to you, Mother. Always.”
That night Alice woke up at 2:00 a.m. from what she thought was a bad dream, but it wasn’t: it was an aching pain in her abdomen. She knew this pain: it felt as if she was starting her period—but that could not be. She went down to the bathroom. There was blood, but she already knew about breakthrough bleeding. She had heard that this was not uncommon, and she was not alarmed. She would take several deep breaths and let her body relax. She would rest peacefully until the bleeding stopped. This was probably a response to the strain she had been under. The pain turned up its volume as she waited in the bathroom, and then the pain became excruciating, but only briefly. In a minute, it was over, a dark red blob floated in the toilet bowl.
“‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions,’” she said aloud to herself. She stared at the fetus that turned over like a small bloody fish in the toilet bowl. She stared at what might have been her child. She thought of fishing it out to see if she could determine its sex. Instead, she said aloud, “It’s over.”
