After Alice by Karen Hofmann Read Free Book Online

papers, and two books. She has years of research material to write up, still: has looked forward for years to a fallow period, a break from the endless jostling and chatter of work to be able to write it all up. She is no undergraduate to be stymied by the empty page (or screen).
    The sorting of data, the assembling of information, of observations, into meaningful order, the selecting and presenting that is required, seem all beyond her just now. It is as if a break has opened between one part of her brain and the other. A new stoppage somewhere in the processing room. She has the material, but she cannot seem to conceive of a use for it, a way of disseminating it. Her mind lies unproductive, stalled.
    She gazes out of the window, which needs cleaning; she glances at the clock. (It seems always to be four p.m., surely the most useless time of day.) She stumps around on her crutches. She opens the refrigerator and shuts it. She checks her email. She looks at various internet sites that sell classical recordings. It is shameful, to be in this state. She is guilty of sloth.
    Sidonie’s mother would have found chores for her to do. She had been a great believer in manual labour. Neither Sidonie nor Alice had ever dared admit to boredom. When they had free time, they escaped, made themselves scarce, in order to have the luxury of dawdling, of lallygagging. Or Sidonie had: she can’t speak for Alice, can’t swear now to Alice ever seeking solitude. Though she surely must have tried to escape chores. Even Alice must have occasionally ducked chores.
    Plucking stones from her mother’s garden plot, she remembered as the azimuth of childhood ennui and ill-usage. Blue clay lay below the loam, below the thin topsoil coaxed with its yearly feedings of compost and rotted horse manure. The blue clay spat up stone after stone, dribbles of granite, quartz-speckled eggs, which they must gather in galvanized tin buckets, spring after spring, gumbo agglomerating on gumboots, bent-over back seizing, leaping sixty years forward in its cramps and spasms. Cold-stiffened fingers bruised by the stones; nails, already chewed and chipped, further reduced to splinters. And the stones never stopped surfacing. Father, striding by in his leather breeches that never wore out, his knit-by-mother wool socks, his boots: Ah, the labours of Hercules, girls! Good work, good work!
    Her mother, like the medieval Christian monks, like the Buddhists, had believed in the efficacy of manual work as a grounding exercise. And she herself has designed experiments in manual activity for specific kinds of developmental issues. Digital manipulation, the working of the palms and fingers in sand boxes and sinks, miniature gardens, Lego and Meccano sets. Standard ideas in her field, now, but she had been a pioneer researcher. And she had been unique in prescribing goals, so that the activities resembled work, rather than open-ended play. (She wonders, now, briefly, if anyone has used her ideas in conjunction with large motor stimulation — labour, in other words — and has given subjects large plots of earth to dig up, floors to scrub. Probably some ethical difficulties there. People of her parents’ generation, of course, had no qualms about child labour.)
    But her mother, her father: they would not have, had not, recognized much of what she has been engaged in as work . Is that the issue? She had produced a lot of work at the Institute. She had kept on target. She had kept her division on target, ahead of target, month after month (however the junior staff might complain). She and her team had designed and tested and created computer models for dozens of experiments each year, and these experiments had been performed, and knowledge gained.
    She has designed experiments to test the learning, which is to say the memory, of mice and men and mutant fruit flies, of monkeys and dolphins, newborn humans and those with senile dementia. She has seen her