But there were no tornadoes that day, only the slow-sweeping
hum of traffic on the Avenue, and the whining of someone’s cat in
the alleyway behind.
She imagined the city viewed from the distant and cold safety of
those mountains: an amethyst nestled between jagged rock and
then rudely cracked open to reveal its dazzling, purply brilliance.
That day it still lay under a coating of snow as it spread below the
cushion of the mountains. Noisy, complicated, hurried. No different
from any other city except through its unique relationship with that
arc of mountains and their rugged, protective stance.
The city streets were not so white though. Alice sat and pushed
herself up from the mattress and could just see through the buildings
to the buses making their way up and down 16th Street. Not so
white where it’s been trampled by shoppers and commuters on
their way to offices and stores. The snow turns grey and forbidding
there, and slush builds up around the bases of street lamps. The fairy
lights on the mall wait for the night to twinkle wearily under the
weight of melting snowflakes. And life waits; it waits for that moment,
that sudden dawning of the summer day when everyone can once
again boast to tourists and relatives living in New York and Perth
that their Denver sun sets on blue sky 300 days in every year.
Alice would have done it whether Stefan approved or not.
She knew he could not even bring himself to say the word. And he
was persuasive in his argument to love and cherish her forever, as
he held her in the bath and cried.
“If only,” he said.
If only had come in the shape of an amethyst ring. He had
searched second-hand shops for something he could afford. When
Alice saw it, she had smiled and said, ”It’s
lovely.” They had sipped from a six-pack of
summer coolers and squeezed into their
window alcove to watch the street.
She cried too, of course. There was no
stopping her some days. Sitting on the covers
of their bed, alone. Holding herself, and
rocking. “I’m sorry,” she would say. “I’m
sorry. Next time, I promise.” But nobody was
listening, she feared. There was no one there
to listen. And to such a poor apology.
“You don’t even want to give it a chance!”
Stefan had said to her when he found her
crying on the toilet. “Why can’t you be happy
for God’s sake?”
Some days she spent the whole of the morning lying in the bath
after Stefan had gone off to do his work. She would let out some of
the water every half hour or so and refill the tub with hot. She would
fall asleep for 25 minutes at a time and awake drowsy and
confused and not quite sure what she was doing there.
Often she wandered down to the second-hand book shop on
the corner and sat on the floor flipping through books on natural
childbirth and macrobiotics and imagining she could do this;
sometimes she looked at travel guides. She had even stoppeddrinking coffee in case it affected the baby. In case she changed
her mind. The occasional can of Mountain Dew was a luxury
now and she tried yoga techniques for pregnant woman, when
she had never done yoga before.
“Just give it the weekend, okay?” Stefan had said as they
drove south to a rental cottage in the mountains.
She stared unfocused from the car window and tried to smile.
Stefan smiled and rubbed her knee. “You’ll see,” he said.
“You’ll see.”
She never did. But she heard when Stefan shouted at her after
she’d darted through the front door and only just made it to the
bathroom before throwing up her lunch. And she felt it when he
tried to pull her from the bed the next morning by her feet, saying the
sickness was all in her head and if she just got up, god damn it, she
would be alright.
Alice wanted her mother so badly that weekend, she thought
she might actually die. She couldn’t tell whether the pain was in
her heart or in her belly, but she lay there cold on the old cottage
bed and groaned and cried and rocked from side to side.
Stefan paced the room in front of her, yelling and pleading
with her to stop. “Other women do it,” he said. “Other women do
it. Why can’t you?”
Alice didn’t know why. But she thought death would have been
better. So part ofher lay there trying to die.
On the way back to the city, he stopped and left her in the car, to
walk through the Garden of the Gods. He held up his hand as she
went to get out of the car with him. She watched him wander off.
He came back to the car with wet eyes as the sun was leaving
its mark on the huge red boulders that defined
the pathways of the park. They sat silent the
rest of the way back.
Alice awoke once again from her dreams,
to the sounds of shouting coming up through
the drainpipe that lay beyond the wall at the
head of the bed. Stefan was not back yet and
it was past 10pm. Downstairs the card game
had finally turned nasty. She could hear an
American declaring that no queer college-
boy could tell him that he should never have
done what he’d done. Alice sat up in bed and
turned on the light.
When Stefan came in 15 minutes later,
Alice noticed that the building was silent for the
first time that night. They lay side by side and Stefan fell straight to
sleep after asking about her evening. “Oh I just read and watched
some telly. And slept.”It’s all too easy, she thought.It’s just too easy.
But Alice stayed awake, eyes open, until just before dawn.
Three weeks later, Alice sat and finished her can of Mountain
Dew. Stefan walked in and picked up the last of their luggage.
She got up and placed the empty can on the table.
He turned to her as he struggled with her bags. “Have you done
a final check? You always leave something behind,” he said.E“Alice
wanted herMOTHER
SO BADLY,she thought
she might
actually die”FICTION
94