"L. Timmel Duchamp - The World and Alice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

noticing her and taking her seriously (which she did), but simply because someone who was in and of
herself a place could create the illusion of belonging for anyone her field of gravity touched. She
wondered how many people who didn't belong in the world soothed their suspicions that they didn't by
finding people who are places and establishing orbits around them.

Someone, she thought, should do a study.

3.

Every family has its canon of stories, and in Alice's family, the story of her premature birth on the very
border of viability ranked. Every time the story was told, her mother or father or uncle or aunt would say,
"We were afraid we were going to lose you, Alice. We didn't know if you would make it. The doctor
said you wouldn't." At this point in the story's narration, when she was young, Alice would hide her head
in her grandmother's lap, aware of everyone staring at her. And then she would think, They know I don't
belong. Once she overheard her Aunt Nola commenting to her grandfather on Alice's shocking
skinniness and abnormal bashfulness. "I bet it has something to do with her being so premature. She was
always too thin. All those weeks in that incubator, Pa, and her hardly weighing so much as a pound. It's
marked her, anybody can see that. It don't matter how much potato soup Ma gets her to eat, everything
just runs through her. She'll always be a skinny runt with arms and legs like toothpicks."

Nola had been eleven when Alice was born, and around the time Alice started kindergarten she'd been
an Elvis Presley fan, always talking on the square black bakelite telephone and drinking Pepsi-Cola,
which riddled her teeth with cavities. She wore bobby socks and loafers until she graduated from high
school and orange lipstick and blue suede pumps with three-inch heels when she went to work for the
phone company. Carefully closing and locking the bathroom door, Alice would examine and handle her
aunt's special paraphernalia--eyelash curlers, auburn eyebrow pencils, and tweezers. Unlike her aunt's
lipstick and compact, which she carried in her purse and often left out in open sight, these were kept
hidden in a drawer, secret implements too private to be spoken of. And yet everyone in the family knew
about Alice's spastic colon and what the doctor had said after she'd endured all the tests he'd ordered.
Her aunt and others explained all that they didn't understand about her as something to do with her colon.
Every time she heard them talking about it, she'd have to double over because her colon would start
spazzing and twisting around in her belly like a snake tying itself up in knots.

She carried Nola's comment around with her, tucked away in one of the many mental pockets she used
to reserve items needing thorough examination and handling. Eventually it provided her with the key to
theorizing her out-of-placeness. In its essence, her theory was simple. She had not been meant to be
born, to survive, to live in this world. There had been a mistake somewhere. She articulated it, of course,
in the passive voice, to avoid implicating God. For although she attended church every Sunday and a
parochial school with religious lessons every weekday, she could not manage to speak the thought, even
to herself, that God had not intended her to be born, much less the idea that medical technology had
thwarted God's intention. Her teachers did their best to instruct her that God knew who she was and
everything about her, but Alice, with all her lack of heft, found the idea preposterous. From about the age
of eight she had grasped that "God's Will" signified anything and everything that happened or,
occasionally, a special interpretation of reality. Her teachers talked often about how God's Will
determined everything that ever happened to sparrows. Once she raised her hand and said, "Mrs.
Covington, does that go for ants and flies and worms, too? Does God care for them, also?" Mrs.
Covington's mouth twitched into a sickly rictus of a smile. "God cares for all his creatures, Alice."

"And rattlesnakes? And mosquitoes? And crocodiles? What about rabid dogs? And what about Cain? If
God cared about Cain, why did he look down on his fruits and vegetables and praise Abel's stinky old