Read After Alice for Free Online Page A

her pictures, for when she took them out of their crates, they had seemed too dark, too strong, and yet too small to hang on the pale walls.
    She could get rid of all her furniture and pictures, buy new. Or she could tear out the kitchen, with its pale cabinets, its cold fauxmarble surfaces, put in something darker, more sober. Paint the interior some deeper, more substantial colour, to suit her furnishings. Such waste, though, to dismantle an almost-new house. And the exterior, which she may not alter, would be disharmonic.
    She doesn’t know how to make this house seem right, intentional.
    Her sister, Alice, had known that sort of thing. It had been her province. Alice won competitions in the sewing of piles of flowered flour sacks into ruffled café curtains and slipcovers with coordinating piped cushions. Sidonie had not been able to sew a straight seam. And it had been Clara who had arranged the furniture and pictures in Sidonie’s Montreal flat. Clara and Anita, her sisters-in-law: they had descended on her, after she had left their brother, and had struggled and heaved, thumped and shaken her new place into that richly-coloured and textured nest. Clara had taken her down to Jaymar to buy that sofa, for Adam had insisted on keeping the le Corbusier pieces. Clara had dickered with Adam for the other furniture, the Barcelona chairs, the Eames lamps; Sidonie wouldn’t have bothered. And Anita had selected the paintings and photographs out of the collection that Sidonie and Adam — but mostly Adam — had bought, over their twenty years together. Anita had selected the ones that she thought would do for Sidonie, an assortment that Adam had agreed to relinquish, and Anita had painted the walls of Sidonie’s new apartment oxblood and teal and plum.
    While Sidonie had sat and watched, passive, dazed, exhausted by the effort of having left Adam, dazed and exhausted perhaps by the change itself.
    Strange to think that time is twenty years in the past.
    In the blue winter light of her new house, her flat in Montreal seems in retrospect a jeweled tent, a Shangri-la from which she has been evicted. Though she has chosen that eviction, chosen exile.
    Perhaps she needs Clara and Anita here to orchestrate her new place. She misses Clara, whom she saw weekly in Montreal — Clara with her indefatigable willingness to analyze any subject, to test it with anecdote and counteridea, to joke about it and weep over it, to wear it down to a few bright shreds. Clara, always arriving with a box of éclairs, a new book, tickets to the play that everyone would be talking about. She misses Anita, too; Anita, cut from the same cloth as Adam and Clara, but always a little mysterious; quiet, then surprising. Anita, who out of silence made a pronouncement that had one thinking for days. Anita who, looking at a picture, a building, a street scene, would point out the object or pattern that suddenly shifted the whole into a new frame.
    She needs Clara and Anita here to make sense of her domestic arrangements, her new neighbourhood. To define and delineate them.
    Though she had wanted to get away from Clara and Anita. Had wanted to escape.
    Perhaps. Perhaps she will admit that. Otherwise, it is all like shipwreck. Arctic shipwreck. She is Franklin, marooned by bad decisions and hubris. A ship in ice; a stone, half-buried in frozen mud.
    She has not enough warmth to light her life up on her own. It is chill; a cold hearth. It has been a mistake, this house.
    It has been a mistake to come back. No, not a mistake: too inconsequential a word, implying that there will be other mistakes, other opportunities. It has been a grievous error, the sort of error that, as she grows older, she realizes cannot be undone, contrary to the reassurances, in her youth, of articles in popular magazines, of Sunday School teachers. Miss Erskine, with her tweed skirts and knee socks, her shapeless sweaters — jumpers, she called them — the