I dragged the stepladder up from the basement, hoping it would reach. (The ceilings in that old house of ours were ridiculously high.) On a shelf in the garden shed I found a box of plasterer’s putty and mixed myself up a large sticky batch which I spread the length of the ceiling crack, using a spatula from the kitchen drawer, and moving the ladder forward foot by foot. I’d never done this kind of work before, but I read the directions on the box carefully and made a neat job of it. I’ve always been exceptionally neat.
“Very neat presentation” was what my professors wrote on the bottoms of my term papers, also “well focused” and “full of verve.”
In half an hour the plaster was dry, and I sanded it smooth, letting the fine grains drift down on top of my head and into my face, breathing in the chalky dust, tasting it on my tongue. I did not find the sensation disagreeable, quite the contrary. By four o’clock that afternoon I had painted the entire ceiling, using a roller attached to an extension handle, and just before going to bed that night I gave the whole thing a second coat.
Then I lay down in the dark, possibly a little drunk from the heavy latex fumes that swirled downward and converged in midair with a mad proleptic wafting up of happiness. Sleep came quickly; I welcomed it; I was eager for morning; I wanted to wake up to the early light and observe, freshly, the transformation I had brought about.
This really happened. This event, this revelation! Not one of the various members of my family raised the least objection to my determination to repair and paint my bedroom ceiling. No one even challenged me as to why I needed the ladder, why I was scrounging around in the shed for a paint roller, whether this act of mine was a momentary whim or a charged metaphoric gesture. This surprised me, the general air of permission. My mother, of course, was preoccupied with the weekly gardening column she was writing for the local newspaper (Mrs. Green Thumb was the byline she used). My younger brother and sister looked on with interest, perhaps even a tincture of envy — why hadn’t they thought of improving their ceilings! — and Cousin Beverly, who had moved in with us a year earlier, gave me a hand spreading newspapers on the carpet and some useful advice about how to reach into the difficult corner angles. As for my father, had he still been alive, he might have discouraged me from assigning myself a dull and messy task, particularly on my first day home, though I can’t help thinking he would have understood the impulse driving me forward.
In one day I had altered my life: my life, therefore, was alterable.
This simple axiom did not cry out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin; I could feel its pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination, and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own will. My eyes would open in the morning to a smooth white field of possibility. The ceiling that had taunted me was shrunk now to a memory of a memory. It wasn’t just that I had covered it over. I had erased it. It was as though it had never existed.
I next made up my mind to grow kind. I was not a kind person, but I believed I could learn.
First I burned my old diaries in the fireplace and also the letters I had written home during my year away at college, letters full of gush and artifice. My mother caught me at this, and expressed concern. You may regret it, she said, you may want to look back and see what you were like at ten or twelve or sixteen years of age.
But I knew I wouldn’t need the diaries or letters to prod my remembrance. I had grown up a mean, bossy little kid. I was selfish.
I liked to hurt people’s feelings. I addressed my sister, Joan, as Miss Sneakypants and my brother, Warren, as Pimplenose. I ordered Cousin Beverly around as though she were an indentured servant and complained about the way her little girl cried in her early months; it was only colic, but I managed to suggest she was being mishandled or maybe there was brain damage or something.
I was forever clipping out dieting articles for my mother and reading them aloud to her in a cool disingenuous voice, and invariably I referred to the newspaper she wrote for as “that parochial rag.” I remember the way I was. People like to think of memory as a lowlying estuary, but my memories of myself are more like a ruffed-up lake, battering against the person I became. A nice person. A thoughtful person.
I paid attention; I listened hard to the motor clicking on and off in my head; it was like doing beads, it was very intricate work. I entered the summer of 1956 a girl and came out a woman. Women, I learned, needed to be bloody, but they didn’t need to be mean.
The reverberations in my family were surprisingly minor, like the offhand ringing of distant chimes — as though all these years I’d been given the benefit of the doubt: Alice’s gained in maturity, they said. Alice’s a real young lady now. Alice’s come into her own.
Alice’s calmed down. Alice’s got rid of that chip on her shoulder, come down off her high horse, lost her rough edges. But then Alice always was a lump of butter underneath, wasn’t she? Why, she’s turned out to be a regular darling. Oh, you can count on Alice, you always could.
Well!
Here is a diagram of our family structure before and after my father’s death.
Before he departed (brain tumor, malignant) we were such a sweet little family: two loving parents and three healthy children.
Our father was Director of the Agricultural Institute where his work on hybrid grains was universally recognized (honorary degrees from Guelph and the University of Iowa), and after his retirement, never one to be idle, he wrote a weekly horticultural column for the Ottawa Recorder. My mother was a full twenty-three years younger than my father; that age-gap became her hobby and profession, being a young wife to an older husband — it kept her girlish, made her a kind of tenant in the tower of girlhood.
There she remained, safe, looked after. She stayed home and looked after her children and sewed and cleaned the house — even though she could have afforded help — and did the garden. That garden of hers, it functioned like a kind of trope in her daily life, and in ours too. She made suppers — roasted meat, boiled vegetables, pies and puddings or molded Jello things for dessert. These meals were planned, they didn’t just happen. Our family sat down at a table that was set. My mother was always concocting new centerpieces, she was part of that mid-century squadron of women who believed in centerpieces. We children had agreeable table manners. We kept our voices low. Always, after the dishes, Joanie and Warren and I got down to our homework without reminding.
We took piano lessons on Wednesday evening from a woman named Myrna Rassmussen, the Royal Raspberry we called her behind her back — and the mildness of this epithet says a lot about who we were and what we were capable of. On Saturdays we went for family walks — no one else we knew went for family walks — and were taught by our parents, but unobtrusively, how to identify the various shrubs, trees, plants, and flowers that grew in our neighborhood or in the woods of the Experimental Farm.
After my father died — and even during the months following his diagnosis — things changed fast. Supper was late, or else early.
Sometimes it was served in the kitchen instead of the dining room, and we had things like corned beef hash out of a can or toasted cheese sandwiches. My mother never seemed to take her apron off, we had to remind her or she would have dashed out of the house like that. She got way behind on the vacuuming. Everything.