After Alice by Karen Hofmann Read Free Book Online Page A

experiment designs used to discover the growth of neuron paths in flatworms, fireflies, houseflies and helmetless bicycle-accident victims. She has provided the means to test hundreds of premises, and dozens of potential therapeutic remedies. She has seen, as a result of her work, cautious results of reversal (more precisely, adaptation to) profound brain trauma. She has seen results of her work used to etch, with lasers, unhappy memories in the brains of fruit flies.
    Work of the eyes and brain: of the head. Had she limited herself too much, there? She has practiced the discipline of putting ideas to paper, of assembling and compiling information for decades; it is in her bones. Are her bones now rejecting it? For they refuse to move into the rhythm of reading and writing. She feels this resistance as an actual stiffness, she notices: an inability to flex muscles, to bend, to incline: a disinclination. She is unproductive, unable to move forward.
    It does not make sense: she has time now to work, and she does not work. Perhaps she has needed the pressure of the group, after all? But she had been a loner, an intellectual coureur de bois . (That was not her term: her director, Dr. Haephestes, had used it, beaming with apparent genuineness, in his speech at her retirement dinner in the fall. She is not sure now that the term was meant entirely as praise.) She had led teams, given direction. (She had not been particularly good at working in a team, but she had led teams.) Is it that she misses her assistants, her researchers and technicians, the way a paraplegic misses limbs?
    She has been happy, since her move, only when working, she realizes. And now she does not work.
    Is she wallowing? She is wallowing. Accidie . Another sin.
    â€œI have a question,” her niece Cynthia announces, in her thickened speech. They are eating at a popular franchise restaurant off the highway, in the strip that extends now ten kilometres north from the city. It’s noisy, and Sidonie has to lean forward to understand her. (Perhaps she is starting to lose her own hearing?) She has been expecting a question or request. Cynthia doesn’t often take lunches during the week; she says she doesn’t have time. She is an art teacher at an elementary school, and expected to do extracurricular things at noon hour. And here it’s a Wednesday, and she has asked to meet Sidonie for lunch.
    Cynthia, in her late thirties, looks younger, as women of her generation seem to do. Prolonged adolescence: women in their forties dress like teenagers. Well-off women, at least. Entering the restaurant, Sidonie had seen her first from the back, her shoulder-length blonde hair, her puffy silvery parka, her slim, low-slung jeans, and had not recognized her. Had thought she was a young girl, at first.
    â€œGo ahead,” she says. A habit of Cynthia’s childhood, to announce formally that she has a question, before asking it. Even if the question is minor. Perhaps it is something she was taught at her school for the deaf; an aid to being understood more precisely.
    â€œThe question is about my mother,” Cynthia says.
    She is wearing a very thin T-shirt with an odd screen-printed image of the moon, and a lot of silver jewelry — three chains, one with a silver arrow pendant, one with a bluish translucent stone, and a silver bracelet set also with semi-precious blue stones. Cynthia is fond, Sidonie notices, of a certain kind of hand-made, artisanal costume jewelry.
    â€œYes; go ahead.” She keep her voice calm; doesn’t show irritation at her niece, who is fiddling with her fork. Why can’t Cynthia ever broach a subject naturally? It is not as if she ever says no. You spoil her , Clara has said, on many occasions. You don’t have to make everything up to her . But apparently she does.
    â€œI wanted to ask you,” Cynthia asks, “if you’ve thought some more about letting me look at my mother’s