She will have to open them.
Perhaps she should be thinking in terms of museum archives. The contents of the boxes will document a time long past and could be valuable. She wonders if she should worry about the age of the contents; perhaps they will crumble, disintegrate, as soon as air enters the container?
She remembers this particular box: this one with the Ogopogo Apples logo pasted on. She has seen it many times, in the attic of her parents' house, and had once or twice rifled through it, removing â and, she hopes, replacing â contents. Borrowing. It appears to contain the bulk of Alice's dozen or so years of schoolwork: her arithmetic and spelling sheets, her coloured maps and pages of numbered notes and exercises, as well as her essays and stories. All with grades of A or above 90%: that was Alice. Even the very early pieces distinguished by the very neat printing and conventional spelling.
She supposes that she could give the box to Cynthia as it is. Let Cynthia sort it out, and keep the more personal, the more expressive work, if she chooses. It's not her duty to compensate, now, for Mother's idolatrous archiving.
To be fair, there had been a similar box of her own infantile emanations, also kept by Mother in the attic. She has to admit that. Her mother had kept her work, too. She herself had burned it, in the late fall of 1973, driving out into a suburb of Montreal where she and Adam sometimes walked along the river. She had built a small, efficient bonfire, using newspaper, matches, fireplace kindling bought from a hardware store. Not easy for urban dwellers to burn things, she had realized. Nobody had real fireplaces anymore. But the fire had caught quickly, thanks to her training in the Girl Guides and Hugh's Hiking Club, and she had burned that box, with its contents, down to grey ash before anyone had noticed the small fire on the river bank.
A satisfying personal ceremony, and one she has never regretted. The objects of the past are contaminated; they hold the dust of all mistakes. She would burn up the lot of this, if she hadn't promised it to Cynthia and now Hugh.
She pages through relics, replaces them in their boxes. Moves on.
A trunkful of Alice's dresses. These had not been packed by Sidonie, hurriedly, with most of Alice's other things, in the days after Alice's death, but by someone else, earlier. The dresses have been folded, meticulously, with twists of tissue in the folds, more tissue and plastic bags around the dresses. Mothballs in the trunk, at one time; there's still a faint odour of naphtha. A professional job, almost museum quality; no evidence of mildew or vermin or even discolouration. Who had done this, archived the clothes so well? Mother, likely; Alice herself wouldn't have been bothered.
She doesn't unseal the bags, doubting that she'll be able to repack them as well. Through the tissue, the plastic, she sees swatches of fabric, and with almost no hesitation, her memory fills in the rest. Blue broadcloth, mint-green poplin, white piqué. Candy-pink madras plaid, blue gingham, blue seersucker.
Dresses that Alice had made herself: the last years she was at home, the dining room table was perpetually covered with pattern tissue and fabric yardage, as if it were the back room of a dressmaker's shop. And the dresses were lovely, were confections. All with fitted bodices, full skirts: that was the style. Only the necklines and sleeves and collars changed, and Alice drew and adapted these constantly. It was a serious business. Women's magazines elaborated at length on the correct choice of neckline for face shape. The collars and necklines all had names: Peter Pan, portrait, sweetheart. A whole culture of neck openings.
And Alice's clothes were so much a product of her imagination and labour that they might be justly seen as an extension of her. Though they were also the taste of that particular era. Art and packaging at once. Well, that might say something about a woman's lot. She must remember to ask Clara about it. Clara will explain it to her.
She ought to just pass this trunk on to Cynthia, intact. Cynthia will be charmed to receive something so pretty, so benign, from Alice. She ought to have thought of the dresses before, ought to have searched them out and given them to Cynthia. That might have been enough to satisfy her, might have forestalled this whole quest.
Cynthia can have the trunk of dresses. Cynthia can take responsibility for letting in the destructive air.
But if she herself were to undo these sealed bags, preserved in the dry desert air for these fifty years, what would come out? Would they smell of Alice? Would she recognize that smell?
Pandora's box: that was a story Father told her. The moral, he said, was that curiosity could get you into a lot of trouble. But Clara says the real moral of the story is that good and ill are inseparable in human experience. It's not Greek at all, but probably Zoroastrian, by way of the Persians, Clara says.
If she opens any of these bags, she will be in trouble, Sidonie knows.
She takes her X-Acto knife, makes a swift incision across the brittle membrane.
Mrs. Inglis says
that she has found a husband for Alice. This, Sidonie, straddling the tall wooden stool, her legs twisted around the stool's legs, her skirt half up her thighs, overhears. Her mother and Mrs. Inglis are in the parlour with tea, Sidonie perched at the kitchen counter doing homework. The curtain between the kitchen and dining room is napped wine-purple flannel, through which anything can be heard.
Husband: this is a verb, Sidonie knows, and she imagines her mother and Mrs. Inglis do not know that. A verb meaning to cultivate or till, to manage prudently, to use or spend wisely. She sees that these meanings of the word are also apropos.
Sidonie's mother makes a sound like a slow bubble rising in stew â a cross between a sigh and a sputter. Then her voice, high and pinched, as if she were letting it out carefully, the way you let the dog out without letting flies in: “Oh?”
Sidonie sways a little over her geography homework, hums randomly under her breath. Important to keep moving, to not set up a sound of stillness, of listening, that might trickle into the other room, where her mother, narrow, but somehow slack, in print rayon, and Mrs. Inglis, a taut bolster in her cotton shirt and gabardine skirt, sit on the sofa.
Mrs. Inglis says, “Cecil is bringing in a new manager. He's from the States â went to agriculture college. He was overseas, but he hasn't got family. He was engaged, apparently, though it was broken off. Cecil's cousin knows the fellow's aunt, so we don't need to worry on those fronts.”
Sidonie wonders if any of Mrs. Inglis's statements would qualify as non sequiturs. That is a term she has just learned. It's a useful word. It sounds like what it means: something shadowy, gimpy, loitering on the edge of what is open and frank. The sequiturs standing in their group, casual, dressed in their clean uniforms â togas, maybe â with their spears all polished. Then the non sequiturs, lurking, spurned, for good reason. They make her uneasy, these unspoken connections between things. They are shifty, dangerous. They don't play by the rules.
She hums, pencils in Skeena River on her map. As she writes, she hears the words pronounced in Mrs. Inglis's fruity vowels, feels their stickiness, as if they are globs of preserves falling from a spoon.
“Respectable,” Sidonie's mother says, and Sidonie can hear the sound of her mouth again opening so briefly to let the words out. Respectable is not a sticky word, from her mother's mouth. It is a white wall, with a small stained-glass window, like at church. It means, Sidonie knows, going to church, but the right one, not the tiny Catholic one by the highway, nor the painted wooden one where the Lutherans meet and sing loudly and seriously, their somber German words spilling out when the doors are left open on hot Sundays in July. Though that is almost respectable.
Respectable is Mrs. Inglis and Mr. Inglis, who came from England and owned one of the big orchards, and hired workers, and their two sons, Graham and Hugh, and the Protherows and Wentworths, the Smithsons and the Elliots and Erskines. Respectable is also Sidonie's family, though they live in a smaller house than the Inglises, and had a smaller orchard, and though Sidonie's father is not English, because he comes from a titled family, and her mother's parents are Scottish. Respectable is also Dr. MacKenzie, and Miss Thompson and Mrs. Clare, who runs the Ladies' Hospital Auxiliary, and the principal, Mr. Ramsay, who are all Scottish. To a certain extent, it is the German-speaking families that moved here after the war: the Knopfs and Kruegers, the Rilkes and Getzkes and Gormanns.
It is not the Dubrinskys and McCarthys and Platts who are Catholic and have the butcher's store, or the Indians who sell salmon and berries door-to-door in the fall, or the American tourists who stay at the Kal-Oka campground in the summer, and buy the turtles Sidonie and Walt catch in Wood Lake, only to let them go, or the orchard workers who live in the camp up the hill, with its tiny cabins you can see from the road, and the irrigation duct running by on its trestle legs. It is not, somehow, the Japanese farmers who grow beautiful glossy cucumbers and cabbages on the rich black bottom land, though everyone is respectful of them.
Respectable also means being married to someone with white skin and wearing a hat and speaking the Queen's English and a lot of other things that Sidonie can't identify and wouldn't seem to matter, taken on their own, but add up to something important. Alcohol consumption; the colour of women's dresses and hairstyles and their voices, especially outside; what is growing in the front yard; what is taken for lunch by children, and what teenagers do on Friday evenings. All of those things: hard to identify, but easy to recognize, both by the respectable and the not. Some of the immigrant families, for example, have learned English and dress like Canadians and plant proper flowers in front of their houses, while some do not. Sidonie doesn't understand why people who are not respectable don't try harder to become so; after all, it is preferable; more opportunities are available. If, for example, Mrs. Platt were to tidy her hair, stitch up the torn hem on her rayon dress, and press that dress, or better still, exchange it for one in a quiet grey or navy print, she might be included in the Women's Institute meetings, and wouldn't that be nicer for her?
Some parts of being respectable can be helped, but some, like being English as opposed to Indian, cannot. They are simply an accident of birth. That is perhaps not fair, Sidonie can see, but on the other hand, if people have bad genetic traits, they can't cut the mustard. That is a metaphor that Mr. Inglis uses; Hugh Inglis has explained to Sidonie, who doesn't always understand metaphors, that it means “can be relied on to do appropriate things in work or social situations.” Sidonie has been learning about genetics in biology class; about Gregor Mendel, who was Austrian. She understands that genes can be passed on, and she can see, in the families in Marshall's Landing, that genes are important. That if you have certain sets of genes from your ancestry, you are more likely to be feckless and dirty, to steal things and fail at math. That is obvious.
It is good to be respectable, because then you will work hard and have good manners and a clean house, and bad things will not happen to you.
And Alice, who not only belongs to this protected and circumspect circle, but is a star, a princess: crowned Lady of the Lake, and voted Most Likely to Succeed in her graduating class, must marry someone of equal stature: someone who will fit in. This is difficult, because there are not very many boys Alice's age here of equal stature.
Sidonie's mother says, “Alice is going to the secretarial college at the coast in the fall,” which is news to Sidonie, and on second thought, probably not true. Her mother's voice is all minced up and dry, like the feed cakes that Alice's friend Bonnie gives her horse in the winter. Sidonie can see, in her imagination, her mother's lips pushed out, finicky and velvet, over the words. That is because Alice has disappointed, and Mother is upset and embarrassed. Alice has not fulfilled her potential so far. She has gone to Victoria College on a scholarship, with the idea that she will get her degree and/or meet a nice college boy, but neither has happened. Here Alice is back home, nineteen years old and not even engaged.
Secretarial college? Is it true? Father and Mother have said that Alice won't go back to college, because it was so expensive for her to live in Victoria for a year, and she didn't apply herself. Her marks were not very good. Mother said that Alice should have done the teacher's training program, which was only one year; she could be finished and getting a job. But Father had said that a degree would give Alice more opportunities, and Alice had not wanted to be a teacher.
Sidonie doesn't know what grades Alice got; Alice isn't saying. She is sullen when the topic of college comes up; she says that it was all nonsense, anyway. But Alice isn't happy to be home; she says, repeatedly, that she is bored, that this is a nothing place.
If she is to go to secretarial college, she might be happy. She might be nicer to Sidonie.
Sidonie untangles her legs from the stool quickly, with the sudden thought that she will find Alice, tell her this bit of news. Before she reaches the door, though, she remembers: she should hold still, see if she can learn more. Alice will only be annoyed with Sidonie if she is brought half a tale. And â Sidonie has almost forgotten â there is the matter of the husband whom Mrs. Inglis has found for Alice. Of course it's a joke; Mrs. Inglis has said many times that Alice is too young to be thinking of getting married. It's just her way of teasing Mother, who is very worried about what will become of Alice. But still: interesting to hear about the proposed husband, the newcomer. Perhaps he will be suitable: be handsome and sophisticated, and will fall in love with Alice. It is not just any man who can appreciate Alice, or whom Alice would be interested in. She is not, for example, interested in boys her own age, or in the slightly older fellows with their work-hardened forearms, their sunburned necks, their lingering accents, who moved to Marshall's Landing after the war and drink up their wages. For a man to appeal to Alice, he must be not only flawless, but exotic. And Mrs. Inglis knows that.