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

needed to thrust her fingers into the grass, right into the ground. Being in touch with the grave, she
sensed, kept her from drifting out of the world into the other place that so often beckoned to her, where
nothing had heft, where everything constantly moved and collided in a chaos devoid of meaning. She
hoped that making the physical link would bring her into contact with some small trace of her
grandmother remaining in the world, which she thought might be possible simply because her
grandmother had had more heft than anyone she had ever known.
On her grandmother's birthday almost a year and a half after her death, Alice lay, as she often did, with
her head on the stone and her fingers dug into the sod. The rays of the sun soaked into the side of her
face, dazzling her with a red brilliance that warmed and penetrated the closed, thin lids of her eyes. She
visualized a yellow sheet cake decorated with sugary white icing, festooned with small pink roses and
sixty-five candles, and remembered how because her grandmother had had asthma, she had always
needed Alice to help blow out her candles. "Happy birthday to you," she sang softly. "Happy birthday to
you. Happy birthday dear Grandma, happy birthday to you." But though she had her eyes closed,
pretending, Alice knew there was no birthday cake, no candles, no birthday at all, even though it was
May first. Her heart ached. She sighed, and her sigh turned into a sob. "If only I could be with you
always," she said. "I hate it here without you. Hate it hate it hate it." Her eyes streamed. "I'm tired of
being here by myself, Gramma. I want to go home with you. Please. Let me come to you. You know I
don't belong here."

"Alice?"

That voice! Alice squeezed her eyes more tightly shut.

"Alice, I want you to listen to me."

Alice grew aware of the pulse of blood pumping through her veins--in her wrists, in her throat, in her
belly, in her temples. The sound of it thudded in her ears like a hammer that knew nothing about stopping.
She thought that if she opened her eyes her vision would be swimming in blood.

"Alice? That is you, isn't it?"

Alice opened her eyes and sat up. The sun blinded her. She held her hand to her forehead to shield her
eyes. "Gramma?" A woman stood nearby. She had gray hair and wrinkles in her face, and she had the
right voice; but she was wearing pants, her hair was wrong, and she wasn't as pillowy and large as her
grandmother. Death, Alice thought, might change people. Might make them look a little different.
Younger, healthier, thinner. And who could it be if not her grandmother? She frowned up at the woman,
uncertain.

"Alice, Alice. Who else would be here on May first?" The woman knelt and held open her arms. "Come
to me, little Apple. Come give me a hug."

Alice did not hesitate. The only persons who ever called her "Apple" were her grandmother and
grandfather. She nestled close, her head tucked into the hollow of the old woman's throat. The arms, the
bosom, the lap were not her grandmother's, nor was the old woman's smell. But all of these were good,
all surprisingly intimate and familiar. This woman wasn't her grandmother but offered some trace of her. A
trace sadly without heft, but better than nothing of her grandmother at all.

Alice the Older held the girl in her arms and laid kisses in the fine, tangled hair that smelled of sun and
earth and Prell shampoo. The slightness of Alice the Younger made an ache stir in her belly. Sentimental
old fool. You're indulging in narcissism here, even if you didn't expect to find her in this place,