6.
They looked like a young couple hurrying down the street, late perhaps for some dinner reservation, some concert in the dark basement of a neon-suffused bar. Alice was keenly aware of this as she led the sweet-faced soldier through the grimy alleys of the central lower city. Was it simply the happiness implied by couplehood, or was it some warm Claude-centric vibration of her heart that made her bask so blissfully in the idea?
She could already see what her mother would think-- the moment she brought Claude home, she knew, such suspicions would fall on her head. He looked every inch a soldier, and a pretty, beguiling soldier at that; he would flash red danger signs at her mother. Claude was safe for her; she knew that now; but her mother would hardly believe. She had set her heart firmly against all things manly and uniformed in response to pain, and pain never listens to reason.
Not that Alice was in love or anything, she reminded herself. It was just nice to know that she would be safe with Claude if she did. The defense was necessary in case her mother got upset over his mere presence. That was all. Really truly. Honest.
She led him down a narrow street and under the accidental roof of a fallen sheet of corrugated metal, stepping around the pile of excrement-- human or canine, she did not want to know-- mired near the filthy graffiti-covered concrete wall. "Watch your step," she said. "It gets nasty under here."
Claude's carefully neutral expression melted away as they rounded a corner and came upon a huge garden surrounded by a wooden fence. Vines of tiny white wildflowers just beginning to bloom wound their way over dry wintry lawn and around beds of more traditional shoots, barely poking out of the hard wintry ground, waiting to unfurl their secret colors until true spring. Framed by a dirt path was a small, but blissfully clean, cottage. The soldier stared at it with visible relief.
"Where did you think I lived?" teased Alice. "In a run-down low-rent apartment with a leaky roof?"
"Something like that. It's that sort of town..."
She put her hands on her hips in mock indignation. "Oh, and I suppose I'm 'that' sort of girl?"
"No! I didn't mean..."
"Suuuure. Does your foot taste good, Mr. Claude?" She smiled to make sure he knew it had been a joke as they walked in the door. "I'm home, Mom!"
Alice's mother paused at the foot of the staircase, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders like a blanket; when she saw her guest, her eyes turned the hardness of diamond, and her lips curved upwards in an equally chiseled smile.
"This is Claude-- my Ibodyguard/I," Alice stressed as she bent to unlace her boots.
The smile escaped instantly. "Bodyguard...? Were you followed again? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I had Claude with me," she pointed out, glad to turn criticism into advantage.
Her eyes softening a little, Alice's mother nodded and thanked him. "Just excuse me one moment-- I'll be right back."
While her mother was upstairs, Alice shot Claude a nervous glance. "I'm sorry if she seems a bit cold..." If only she could explain the family paranoia, she thought-- she had said nothing about it earlier, not wanting her new friend to think he was unwelcome. It had put off the awkwardness, but now she realized that he might feel more unwelcome with no explanation at all.
"It's no problem."
She nodded, grateful, and bit her lip. "Um. So. What are you going to do now?"
"Well..." He let out a low filtered sigh, and scrubbed his fingers through his messy hair. "Is Sector 7 far from here? I want to go to Tiffany's bar..."
Alice felt for one instant as though a board had been yanked from beneath her feet, releasing her into icy water. Then it was all right; the water was fine; she had never expected anything else but this. ISo he has a girlfriend. No problem. I guess nothing romantic will happen, after all. I'll just be his friend-- that's all I wanted anyway, right?/I
Unless, of course... "Is Tiffany... you know, a Igirl/I?" She realized after she said this how moronic it sounded-- obviously Tiffany was a girl; she had meant "a girl worthy of consideration as such"-- a girl whose very girlness was not just incidental, but of dire importance to Claude's relationship with her. She thought she might amend her statement, but anything she now might say would probably sound even sillier.
"Yeah." Predictably.
"A girl... friend?"
Claude's ears turned delicate pink, and he shook his head violently. "No way!"
She could not suppress a laugh, both amused and delighted. "You don't have to get that upset." This ex-soldier was so young, so sweet, an authentically naive boy-- exactly the opposite of what her mother must surmise. The very thought of a girlfriend made him blush. How had that innocence even survived boot camp, she wondered, let alone taken him through the ranks? She might have been expected to blush herself-- after all, she was a lady-- but from Claude it was a surprise. "Well, that's... nice."
He was too wonderful to simply walk away. She made her decision. "Let's see... Sector 7? I'll show you the way."
"You gotta be kidding. Put yourself in danger again? After I just got you out of it?"
"Sorry to crumple your accomplishments." She shrugged, trying to hide her nervousness, and wondered how much she could get away with telling him and yet keep her secret. "I'm used to danger."
"Used to it?" He stared for a moment, then, seeming to read the truth of this in the mysteries of her eyes, his expression changed to one of slow, sly acceptance. "Well, I don't know," he taunted, "getting help from a girl..."
"A girl! What do you mean by that?" she scoffed, angrily tossing back her beribboned braid with the edge of a lace-dripped sleeve. "You expect me to just sit by and listen, after hearing you say something like that? Is that how it is, huh?"
"Yeah, that's how it is."
"Now you're never getting rid of me."
He grinned.
"Mom!" called Alice. "I'm taking Claude to Sector 7. I'll be back in a while."
The floorboards creaked under her mother's approach and descent. "But, dear..."
She was met by two pairs of determined glowing eyes.
Alice's mother sighed. "I give up. You never listen once you've made up your mind." She shook her head as if to warn Alice that she'd never be a lady if she carried on so. "But if you must go, why don't you go tomorrow? It's getting late now."
She wanted to say no, to insist on leaving immediately; she felt a fear-- almost a certainty-- that if she did not leave with Claude now, she would never get out of that house. The morning would bring different moods, different inhibitions; she would not be emboldened by Claude's company; she would wimp out and accede to her mother's demand, or worse. There had to be some confidence in her mother's tolerant face; otherwise she would never have yielded to Alice's request so easily. But her mother stood there, implacably fixing her with that expression that would tolerate no dissent-- that confidence that said she knew she was right, was entitled to be right through hard experience and pain, and that if Alice was a good daughter, a grateful daughter, she would nod and say, half-believing, "Yeah, you're right, Mom," which she found herself doing before she could find the heart to defy.
Her mother nodded, satisfied. "Alice, please go and make the bed."
Something was most certainly wrong, she thought as she shuffled dutifully up the stairs to tidy up the guest room.
When she met Claude at the top of the staircase, he had the look of distance in his eyes. He was going to betray her, but it wasn't his fault; it was her subversive mother who would wreck everything. Her mother didn't know Claude, didn't understand him the way Alice did. Alice had... well, she had spent the day with him; and it didn't sound like much but it was everything in truth. She watched him walk past her down the hallway, and wondered whether she should say anything-- but to drag him into the struggle between herself and her mother was unfair. Not here, not now. He needed rest. But-- but--
"Claude..."
He turned to look at her.
Hoping she would see him again, she murmured, "Good night."
Downstairs, her mother was waiting for her with frustration steaming from her ears and nose like an unattended kettle. "Alice."
"What?" She tried to sound surprised. IWho, me?/I
"I don't want you going with him."
"Mom, it's just for the day. I'll be safe with him, obviously, and he'll walk me home. He just needs a guide-- he's from Nibelheim--"
"I know where he's from: Trouble."
"He's not trouble," she hissed, verging on hysteria; yet she could not speak too loud. "You don't know him."
"I might as well: I know what he's like. Oh, he's Inice/I enough. He doesn't know what he'll do to you, Alice."
"He won't hurt me--"
"A boy like that will hurt you without realizing it. He doesn't know what it does to a wife and family, to go off and leave them alone and get killed."
With that statement, Mrs. Elmyra Gainsborough lost her case. For she was wrong, crucially and completely wrong, and Alice knew it. The wall of fear and seclusion she had tried to build around her daughter crumbled to the ground, irreparably broken: like so much dust, signifying only the past.
"That isn't true." Alice splayed her hands at her sides with the welling emotion of her triumph and insistence. "He knows that more than anything else. He spent the whole afternoon telling me about Ihis/I family-- how his father left him and his mother for the army, simply deserted them and never came back-- how crushed he was-- how he's spent his whole life trying to do over what his father did, but to do it Iright./I" She leaned forward as she spoke, pinning her mother to the wall with truth like darts. "If Claude did ride off into the sunset with me-- which isn't even what's happening, mind-- he would drop Ieverything/I for his family. You know nothing. You simply cannot pass judgment on someone when you simply Ido not know./I"
Alice's mother looked suddenly tired and frail-- and shrewish. "What are you accusing me of?" she whined. "Alice Rose Gainsborough, don't you dare go up those steps! Don't you dare--!"
From the upstairs hallway, Alice could hear her mother quietly weeping.
They looked like a young couple hurrying down the street, late perhaps for some dinner reservation, some concert in the dark basement of a neon-suffused bar. Alice was keenly aware of this as she led the sweet-faced soldier through the grimy alleys of the central lower city. Was it simply the happiness implied by couplehood, or was it some warm Claude-centric vibration of her heart that made her bask so blissfully in the idea?
She could already see what her mother would think-- the moment she brought Claude home, she knew, such suspicions would fall on her head. He looked every inch a soldier, and a pretty, beguiling soldier at that; he would flash red danger signs at her mother. Claude was safe for her; she knew that now; but her mother would hardly believe. She had set her heart firmly against all things manly and uniformed in response to pain, and pain never listens to reason.
Not that Alice was in love or anything, she reminded herself. It was just nice to know that she would be safe with Claude if she did. The defense was necessary in case her mother got upset over his mere presence. That was all. Really truly. Honest.
She led him down a narrow street and under the accidental roof of a fallen sheet of corrugated metal, stepping around the pile of excrement-- human or canine, she did not want to know-- mired near the filthy graffiti-covered concrete wall. "Watch your step," she said. "It gets nasty under here."
Claude's carefully neutral expression melted away as they rounded a corner and came upon a huge garden surrounded by a wooden fence. Vines of tiny white wildflowers just beginning to bloom wound their way over dry wintry lawn and around beds of more traditional shoots, barely poking out of the hard wintry ground, waiting to unfurl their secret colors until true spring. Framed by a dirt path was a small, but blissfully clean, cottage. The soldier stared at it with visible relief.
"Where did you think I lived?" teased Alice. "In a run-down low-rent apartment with a leaky roof?"
"Something like that. It's that sort of town..."
She put her hands on her hips in mock indignation. "Oh, and I suppose I'm 'that' sort of girl?"
"No! I didn't mean..."
"Suuuure. Does your foot taste good, Mr. Claude?" She smiled to make sure he knew it had been a joke as they walked in the door. "I'm home, Mom!"
Alice's mother paused at the foot of the staircase, a quilt wrapped around her shoulders like a blanket; when she saw her guest, her eyes turned the hardness of diamond, and her lips curved upwards in an equally chiseled smile.
"This is Claude-- my Ibodyguard/I," Alice stressed as she bent to unlace her boots.
The smile escaped instantly. "Bodyguard...? Were you followed again? Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I had Claude with me," she pointed out, glad to turn criticism into advantage.
Her eyes softening a little, Alice's mother nodded and thanked him. "Just excuse me one moment-- I'll be right back."
While her mother was upstairs, Alice shot Claude a nervous glance. "I'm sorry if she seems a bit cold..." If only she could explain the family paranoia, she thought-- she had said nothing about it earlier, not wanting her new friend to think he was unwelcome. It had put off the awkwardness, but now she realized that he might feel more unwelcome with no explanation at all.
"It's no problem."
She nodded, grateful, and bit her lip. "Um. So. What are you going to do now?"
"Well..." He let out a low filtered sigh, and scrubbed his fingers through his messy hair. "Is Sector 7 far from here? I want to go to Tiffany's bar..."
Alice felt for one instant as though a board had been yanked from beneath her feet, releasing her into icy water. Then it was all right; the water was fine; she had never expected anything else but this. ISo he has a girlfriend. No problem. I guess nothing romantic will happen, after all. I'll just be his friend-- that's all I wanted anyway, right?/I
Unless, of course... "Is Tiffany... you know, a Igirl/I?" She realized after she said this how moronic it sounded-- obviously Tiffany was a girl; she had meant "a girl worthy of consideration as such"-- a girl whose very girlness was not just incidental, but of dire importance to Claude's relationship with her. She thought she might amend her statement, but anything she now might say would probably sound even sillier.
"Yeah." Predictably.
"A girl... friend?"
Claude's ears turned delicate pink, and he shook his head violently. "No way!"
She could not suppress a laugh, both amused and delighted. "You don't have to get that upset." This ex-soldier was so young, so sweet, an authentically naive boy-- exactly the opposite of what her mother must surmise. The very thought of a girlfriend made him blush. How had that innocence even survived boot camp, she wondered, let alone taken him through the ranks? She might have been expected to blush herself-- after all, she was a lady-- but from Claude it was a surprise. "Well, that's... nice."
He was too wonderful to simply walk away. She made her decision. "Let's see... Sector 7? I'll show you the way."
"You gotta be kidding. Put yourself in danger again? After I just got you out of it?"
"Sorry to crumple your accomplishments." She shrugged, trying to hide her nervousness, and wondered how much she could get away with telling him and yet keep her secret. "I'm used to danger."
"Used to it?" He stared for a moment, then, seeming to read the truth of this in the mysteries of her eyes, his expression changed to one of slow, sly acceptance. "Well, I don't know," he taunted, "getting help from a girl..."
"A girl! What do you mean by that?" she scoffed, angrily tossing back her beribboned braid with the edge of a lace-dripped sleeve. "You expect me to just sit by and listen, after hearing you say something like that? Is that how it is, huh?"
"Yeah, that's how it is."
"Now you're never getting rid of me."
He grinned.
"Mom!" called Alice. "I'm taking Claude to Sector 7. I'll be back in a while."
The floorboards creaked under her mother's approach and descent. "But, dear..."
She was met by two pairs of determined glowing eyes.
Alice's mother sighed. "I give up. You never listen once you've made up your mind." She shook her head as if to warn Alice that she'd never be a lady if she carried on so. "But if you must go, why don't you go tomorrow? It's getting late now."
She wanted to say no, to insist on leaving immediately; she felt a fear-- almost a certainty-- that if she did not leave with Claude now, she would never get out of that house. The morning would bring different moods, different inhibitions; she would not be emboldened by Claude's company; she would wimp out and accede to her mother's demand, or worse. There had to be some confidence in her mother's tolerant face; otherwise she would never have yielded to Alice's request so easily. But her mother stood there, implacably fixing her with that expression that would tolerate no dissent-- that confidence that said she knew she was right, was entitled to be right through hard experience and pain, and that if Alice was a good daughter, a grateful daughter, she would nod and say, half-believing, "Yeah, you're right, Mom," which she found herself doing before she could find the heart to defy.
Her mother nodded, satisfied. "Alice, please go and make the bed."
Something was most certainly wrong, she thought as she shuffled dutifully up the stairs to tidy up the guest room.
When she met Claude at the top of the staircase, he had the look of distance in his eyes. He was going to betray her, but it wasn't his fault; it was her subversive mother who would wreck everything. Her mother didn't know Claude, didn't understand him the way Alice did. Alice had... well, she had spent the day with him; and it didn't sound like much but it was everything in truth. She watched him walk past her down the hallway, and wondered whether she should say anything-- but to drag him into the struggle between herself and her mother was unfair. Not here, not now. He needed rest. But-- but--
"Claude..."
He turned to look at her.
Hoping she would see him again, she murmured, "Good night."
Downstairs, her mother was waiting for her with frustration steaming from her ears and nose like an unattended kettle. "Alice."
"What?" She tried to sound surprised. IWho, me?/I
"I don't want you going with him."
"Mom, it's just for the day. I'll be safe with him, obviously, and he'll walk me home. He just needs a guide-- he's from Nibelheim--"
"I know where he's from: Trouble."
"He's not trouble," she hissed, verging on hysteria; yet she could not speak too loud. "You don't know him."
"I might as well: I know what he's like. Oh, he's Inice/I enough. He doesn't know what he'll do to you, Alice."
"He won't hurt me--"
"A boy like that will hurt you without realizing it. He doesn't know what it does to a wife and family, to go off and leave them alone and get killed."
With that statement, Mrs. Elmyra Gainsborough lost her case. For she was wrong, crucially and completely wrong, and Alice knew it. The wall of fear and seclusion she had tried to build around her daughter crumbled to the ground, irreparably broken: like so much dust, signifying only the past.
"That isn't true." Alice splayed her hands at her sides with the welling emotion of her triumph and insistence. "He knows that more than anything else. He spent the whole afternoon telling me about Ihis/I family-- how his father left him and his mother for the army, simply deserted them and never came back-- how crushed he was-- how he's spent his whole life trying to do over what his father did, but to do it Iright./I" She leaned forward as she spoke, pinning her mother to the wall with truth like darts. "If Claude did ride off into the sunset with me-- which isn't even what's happening, mind-- he would drop Ieverything/I for his family. You know nothing. You simply cannot pass judgment on someone when you simply Ido not know./I"
Alice's mother looked suddenly tired and frail-- and shrewish. "What are you accusing me of?" she whined. "Alice Rose Gainsborough, don't you dare go up those steps! Don't you dare--!"
From the upstairs hallway, Alice could hear her mother quietly weeping.