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

even if you'd forgotten all about this moment.

She had expected this visit to the town she had grown up in, a place where no one of her blood had lived
for so many years now, to kindle old memories and feelings long laid to rest. But nothing looked familiar.
Her grandparents' house had been torn down. The house on Wolf Road and two of its neighbors had
been replaced by condos. The Lutheran school was gone. And there were no cornfields anywhere. Only
the river remained, dirty and muddy as it had always been, its dam the familiar site of her longest-running
recurring dream. It had seemed reasonable to visit the town since her travel had brought her so close, but
the only intimate memory left physically standing seemed to be the small, no longer used graveyard
surrounded on three sides by used car lots and fast-food franchises.

Though she hadn't remembered the encounter before she had stepped into the graveyard, as soon as she
saw that small girl flung down over the grave she recalled first how she used to come here, alone, and
then the conversation she once thought she had had with her dead grandmother. The girl now talked
softly into her shoulder, murmuring her longing, her need, her desperate sense of wrongness. Alice the
Older closed her eyes and hid from the dazzle; she concentrated on the girl. Alice had never had a child.
And this child--she knew this child as no mother could. She imagined taking her with her--out of the girl's
proper time. But she knew that doing so could not be right. It might possibly create a temporal paradox.
And if that happened, how then could she become the person she was now?

Alice reeled under an attack of vertigo. Listening to the little girl, she remembered that she had always
thought she didn't belong anywhere, that her very being had been a mistake. The little girl spoke of that.
And of premature birth and incubators....

When the sun began to sink in the sky, Alice the Older told the little girl to go back, go back home to
Wolf Road. "You have to stay in your world," she said. "But remember, little Apple, remember that
there's a reason for that. A reason I can't take you with me. So go back now, go back to your world."

The little girl cried; the little girl resisted. Finally, though, she left, and a cold breeze ruffled the tall,
unmowed weeds growing carelessly between the gravestones. Alice's pulse beat in her throat. She saw
that the place where the girl had been was no longer manicured, that the flowers had vanished. And her
grandmother's headstone now lay between two others, all three of them markers of burials Alice had
attended at different times of her life. Alice swallowed, as though to rid herself of the heaviness in her
chest by ridding her throat of the lump that emotional constraint had put there, and read the inscription
chiseled into the polished pink granite. All around her, the weeds ruffled under the whip of the wind.
Alice imagined that one good gust would blow her away, into the other dimension where she had long
imagined she really belonged. They call abandoned towns ghost towns. But what do you call an
abandoned graveyard?

Alice could not remember whether Alice the Younger had gotten in trouble for getting home so late. But
she did know that she had never told a soul about the meeting.

5.

Away at college, Alice found friends and fell in love and married. And for a while she believed that her
problem had been simply a case of social alienation, of having grown up in an environment too small and
parochial to accommodate her differences in personality, perspective, and imagination. Blooming, she
convinced herself that the thin stalk of her psyche thrusting up from the world's roots, however tenuously,
anchored her in the world's soil, thin and poor as it might be.