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

dead animals--"

But Mrs. Covington had had enough. She told Alice that asking those kinds of questions came very close
to mocking God and assigned her five extra Bible verses to learn by heart. Alice obediently memorized
the verses, but Mrs. Covington's disapproval imbued with special clarity her understanding that God was
capricious and arbitrary, which was why His Will generally meant very unpleasant things for everybody
all around. So although she would not put it past God to have Willed her not to be born, for as long as
she believed in God (i.e., until about the age of seventeen) she believed that in fact he had changed His
Mind about bringing her into existence, probably at the last second, and had then forgotten to alter His
Plan so as to make the change fit into the Greater Scheme of Things. He might notice how every sparrow
in the world fared, but she felt virtually certain she had slipped under His radar.

Alice's grandfather might declare he was mad at God after her grandmother died, but Alice understood
that God's willing a death had to be a different kind of exercise of will than letting someone slip into the
world who shouldn't have. And yet the idea of a forgetful God, who knew what every sparrow, worm,
and fly was doing, made no sense to her. In her very first religion class in the first grade they'd had to
memorize the attributes of God, one of which was omniscience. Every year Alice tested her new teacher.
"Does God ever make mistakes?" The answer, always the same, got frostier and frostier as Alice rose
through the grades.

By seventh grade, she knew better than to ask.

4.

When her grandmother died, Alice found herself alone and bereft of a massy body to orbit, weighing
barely enough to sustain consciousness of, much less presence in, the world. She often drifted away, her
heft so tenuous that between one heartbeat and the next she slipped briefly out of the world to a place
that held, to her untutored perception, only images, a jumble subject to shifting as swiftly and
unpredictably as the tiles in her cardboard and plastic kaleidoscope.

Her grandmother lingered in her dreams for months. Repeatedly Alice wakened into happiness that
shattered in the inevitable moment of remembering, taunting her with a loss she could explain to no one,
teaching her that her dreams were false. Her grandmother had known she didn't belong, had noticed and
hadn't had to lie about it. To everyone else, she was just nervous. High-strung. Overly sensitive. In need
of lightening up: everyone agreed.

On Sunday afternoons at the cemetery, Alice helped her grandfather snip the soft velvety grass and tend
the brave, bright petunias and geraniums surrounding the gravestone that lay flush to the earth. The stone
never seemed right to her; its pink and gray surface held such a polish that it resembled a mirror on which
had been stamped her grandmother's name and dates in unsuitably ornate characters, not a signifier either
of loss or of who the woman buried there had been. Still, other than a few photographs and keepsakes, it
was all that remained of her.

Alice needed to attend the grave alone, to visit without the distraction of others' presence and without the
pressure of having always to give way to someone else's grief for a woman so many had loved. So Alice
became devious. She learned how to fool the adults surveilling her whereabouts, which buses to take,
and how to cross the four-lane highway; and she acquired an indifference to walking or bicycling several
miles in one day, which previously had been beyond her.

Although the stone radiated cold even when the sun beat down on it, Alice needed to lay her head on it,