Read Online After Alice by Karen Hofmann - Free Book Online Page A

somewhat more of an interest in his calls. She can see that if she pays too much attention, she will step over some invisible line, and then the existence of Hugh will begin to take up too much of her time.
    The time she divides, now, between randomly springboarding between Internet sites — videos and blogs and obscure articles — and hanging out with Justin in malls and cafés. She has become a disaffected youth, to use the term popular in her own youth. Which had been not at all disaffected.
    â€œI’ll be out next month,” Hugh says. “April at the latest.”
    Her microwave oven beeps for the third time. How long has she got before the ragout dries out? Should she just say to Hugh, I’m cooking my dinner right now; I’ll ring you back?
    She finds cooking only for herself boring and pointless: she does not think much about food. The refrigerator that came with the townhouse has a capacious lower freezer drawer in which she keeps neat stacks of prepared entrées in plastic and cardboard boxes, from the frozen food section of Safeway. They can be warmed quickly in the microwave, and are not at all unpleasant, though of course they do not compare with the meals she was accustomed to in Montreal, which she usually bought at the deli on her way home. Every two weeks, she buys a dozen different entrées and stores them: it’s much more logical for one person than obtaining ingredients and cooking.
    It is true that when Cynthia and Justin have come for dinner, Sidonie has had to buy great quantities of dishes. She sees that mini-meals might not be a feasible option if she were to have guests on a regular basis. Her cupboards, though, contain the necessities: coffee, wine, olives. Apples in the refrigerator, and cheese. And packages of pre-washed lettuce and greens. (Her mother’s astonishment and disapproval if she were to see a handful of baby arugula and butter lettuce leaves packaged in a cellophane tub and sold for six dollars.) But how convenient, how easy, to open the tub and mound the leaves on a plate. How easy it is to be nutritionally virtuous, with vegetables already washed, sorted, and de-bugged.
    She knows what it means, too, that she doesn’t cook her own meals, that she eats raw things, or food pre-cooked and packaged. She has read her Lévi-Strauss.
    â€œWell, I thought I’d just touch base with you,” Hugh says, and then, adds, surprisingly, “A happy St. Valentine’s Day to you,” before he rings off, finally. But she has not been paying attention, the past few minutes, to his call. It is too late for the ragout; it’s lukewarm, and reheating it creates a sticky, scorched, rubbery mess. She eats a few bites, puts the rest in the trash, makes some toast, feeling unsatisfied and a little aggrieved. She could heat another meal, but the spoiling of the first makes another seem distasteful.
    She should cook food for herself. All this packaged food is likely very high in preservatives. There is something wrong with it. It will rot her insides, give her cancer. The packaging — which is Styrofoam, she notices, though disguised with some sort of black colouring (and is that also carcinogenic? It looks as if it might be) — will not break down in the landfill. (Does the landfill still lie to the west, off the back road, an old alkali pond shedding sprays of effluvia and gulls? Or has it filled up, now, with Styrofoam packaging and disposable diapers?)
    In her youth, before the landfill, everyone had to deal with their own garbage. But there hadn’t been so much then. Less packaging, less of everything. Anything combustible went into the boiler, anything organic into the compost. Everything that could be clothing or container or conveyance recycled. Broken things ended up in the attic, or, if they couldn’t be mended in any scheme of winter ingenuity, in the gulley to the north of the house. (What a midden that gulley must be now