Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

“Not far to go,” he said encouragingly, and took her arm, and supported her the rest of the way up the sidewalk and up the steps and across the verandah as if she were a Chinese lady (I had just been reading The Good Earth, from the town library) for whom walking is a rare and unnatural activity. My mother and I who had exchanged no greetings with Nile followed, and in the dark hall my mother said, “Well now, welcome!” and Uncle Bill helped Nile off with her coat and said to me, “Here now, you take this and hang it up. Hang it up someplace by itself. Don’t hang it up next to any barn jackets!” Touching the fur, my mother said to Nile, “You ought to go out to our farm, you could see some of these on the hoof.” Her tone was jocose and unnatural.

  “She means foxes,” Uncle Bill told Nile. “Like your coat is made from.” He said to us, “I don’t think she even knew that fur come off a creature’s back. She thought they manufactured them right in the store!” Nile meanwhile looked amazed and unhappy as someone who had never even heard of foreign countries, and who is suddenly whisked away and deposited in one, with everybody around speaking an undreamt-of language. Adaptability could not be one of her strong points. Why should it be? It would put in question her own perfection. She was perfect, and younger than I had thought at first, maybe only twenty-two or three. Her skin was without a mark, like a pink teacup, her mouth could have been cut out of burgundy-coloured velvet, and pasted on. Her smell was inhumanly sweet and her fingernails—I saw this with shock, delight, and some slight misgiving, as if she might have gone too far—were painted green, to match her clothes.

  “It’s a very handsome coat,” said my mother, with more dignity.

  Uncle Bill looked at her regretfully. “Your husband’ll never make any money this end of the business, Addie, its all controlled by Jews. Now, have you got such a thing as a cup of coffee in the house? Get me and my little wife warmed up?”

  The trouble was, we didn’t have such a thing. My mother and Fern Dogherty drank tea, which was cheaper, and Postum in the mornings. My mother led everybody into the dining room and Nile sat down and my mother said, “Wouldn’t you like a hot cup of tea? I am absolutely out of coffee.”

  Uncle Bill took this in stride. No tea, he said, but if she was out of coffee he would get some coffee. “Have you got any grocery stores in this town?” he said to me. “You must have one or two grocery stores in this town. Big town like this, it’s got street lights even, I saw them. You and me’ll get in the car and go and buy some groceries, leave these two sister-in-laws to get acquainted.”

  I floated beside him, in this big cream and chocolate clean-smelling car, down River Street, down Mason Street, down the main street of Jubilee. We parked in front of the Red Front Grocery behind a team and sleigh.

  “This a grocery store?”

  I did not commit myself. Suppose I said it was, and then it had none of things he wanted?

  “Your Momma shop here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Then I guess it has to be good enough for us.”

  From that car I saw the team and sleigh, with sacks of feed on it, and the Red Front Grocery, and the whole street, differently. Jubilee seemed not unique and permanent as I had thought but almost makeshift, and shabby; it would barely do.

  The store had just been turned into a self-serve, the first in town. The aisles were too narrow for carts but there were baskets you carried over your arm. Uncle Bill wanted a cart. He asked if there were any other stores in town where carts were available and was told there were none. When this was settled he went up and down the aisles calling out the names of things. He behaved as if nobody else was in the store at all, as if they only came to life when he called to ask them something, as if the store itself was not real but had been thrown together the moment he said he needed one.

  He bought coffee and canned fruit and vegetables and cheese and dates and figs and pudding mixes and macaroni dinners and hot chocolate powders and tinned oysters and sardines. “Do you like this?” he kept saying “Do you like these here? You like raisins? You like corn flakes? You like ice cream? Where do they keep the ice cream? What flavour do you like? Chocolate? You like chocolate the best?” Finally I was afraid to look at anything, or he would buy it.

  He stopped in front of the Selrite window where there were bins of bulk candy. “You like candy, I bet. What do you want? Licorish? Fruit jellies? Candy peanuts? Let’s get a mixture, let’s get all three. That going to make you thirsty, all those candy peanuts? We better find some pop.”

  That was not all. “Have you got a bakeshop in this town?” he said, and I took him to McArter’s Bakery where he bought two dozen butter tarts and two dozen buns with glazed sugar and nuts on top, and a coconut cake half a foot high. This was exactly like a childish story I had at home in which a little girl manages to get her wishes granted, one a day for a week and they all turn out of course to make her miserable. One wish was to have everything she had ever wanted to eat. I used to get that out and read the description of the food over again for pure pleasure, ignoring the punishments which soon followed, inflicted by supernatural powers always on the lookout for greed. But I saw now that too much really might be too much. Even Owen might in the end have been depressed by this idiot largesse, which threw the whole known system of rewards and delights out of kilter.

  “You’re like a fairy godfather,” I said to Uncle Bill. I meant this to sound unchildish, slightly ironic; also in this exaggerated way I meant to express the gratitude I was afraid I did not sufficiently feel. But he took it as the simplest childishness, repeating it to my mother when we got home.

  “She says I’m a fairy godfather, but I had to pay cash!”

  “Well I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all this, Bill. You’ll have to take some home.”

  “We never drove up here from Ohio to buy our groceries. You put them away. We don’t need them. As long as I got my chocolate ice cream for dessert I don’t care what else I’ve got or haven’t got. My sweet tooth has never gone sour on me. But I lost some weight, you know. I lost thirty pounds since last summer.”

  “You are not a case for war relief yet.”

  My mother removed the tablecloth with its day-old tea and ketchup stains and spread a fresh one, the one she called the Madeira cloth, her wedding-present best.

  “You know I was a runt at one time. I was a skinny baby. When I was two years old I nearly died of pneumonia. Momma pulled me through and she started feeding me and feeding me. I never got any exercise for a long time and I got fat.”

  “Momma,” he said with a gloomy kind of luxuriance. “Wasn’t she some sort of a saint on earth? I tell Nile she ought to have known her.”

  My mother gave Nile a startled look (had these two sisters-in-law been getting acquainted?) but did not say whether she thought this would have been a good idea.

  I said to Nile, “Do you want a plate with birds on it or the one with flowers?” I just wanted to make her speak.

  “I don’t care,” she said faintly, looking down at her green nails as if they were talismans to keep her in this place.

  My mother cared. “Put plates on the table that match, we’re not so impoverished that we don’t own a set of dishes!”

  “Do you wear Nile green because your name is Nile?” I said, still prodding. “Is that colour Nile green?” I thought she was an idiot, and yet I frantically admired her, was grateful for every little colourless pebble of a word she dropped. She reached some extreme of feminine decorativeness, perfect artificiality, that I had not even known existed; seeing her. I understood that I would never be beautiful.

  “It’s just a coincidence my name is Nile.” (She might even have said coincidence.) “It was my favourite colour long before I even heard there was a colour Nile green.”

  “I didn’t know you could get green nail-polish.”

  “You have to order it in.”

  “Momma hoped we would stay on the farm the way we were raised,” said Uncle Bill, following his own thoughts.


  “I wouldn’t wish it on anybody to live on a farm like that. You couldn’t raise chickweed on it.”

  “The financial aspect isn’t always the only thing, Addie. There’s the being closer to Nature. Without all this—you know, running around, doing what isn’t good for you, living high. Forgetting about Christianity. Momma felt it was a good life.”

  “What is so good about Nature? Nature is just one thing preying on another all the way down the line. Nature is just a lot of waste and cruelty, maybe not from Nature’s point of view but from a human point of view. Cruelty is the law of Nature.”

  “Well I don’t mean like that, Addie. I don’t mean wild animals and all like that. I mean like our life we had at home, where we didn’t have too many of the comforts, I’ll grant you that, but we had a simple life and hard work and fresh air and a good spiritual example in our Momma. She died young, Addie. She died in pain.”

  “Under anesthetic,” my mother said. “So strictly speaking I hope she did not die in pain.”

  During supper she told Uncle Bill about her encyclopedia-selling.

  “I sold three sets last fall,” was what she said, though actually she had sold one and was still working on two fairly promising cases. “There is money in the country now, you know, it is due to the war.”

  “You won’t make no money peddling to farmers,” said Uncle Bill, hanging low over his plate and eating steadily, as old people do. He looked old. “What did you say you’re selling?”

  “Encyclopedias. Books. They are a very fine set. I would have given my right arm to have had a set of books like these around the house when I was a child.” This was perhaps the fiftieth time I had heard her make that statement.

  “You got your education. I did without. That didn’t stop me. You won’t sell books to farmers. They got too much sense. They are tight with their money. Money is not in things like that. It is in property. Money is in property and investments if you know what you are doing.” He began a long story, with complicated backtracking and correcting himself on details, about buying and selling houses. Buying, selling, buying, building, rumours, threats, perils, safety. Nile did not listen at all but pushed the canned corn around on her plate, spearing the kernels one at a time with her fork—a childish game not even Owen could have got away with. Owen himself said not one word but ate with his gum on his thumbnail; my mother had not noticed. Fern Dogherty was not there; she had gone to see her mother in the County Hospital. My mother listened to her brother with a look that was a mixture of disapproval and participatory cunning.

  Her brother! This was the thing, the indigestible fact. This Uncle Bill was my mother’s brother, the terrible fat boy, so gifted in cruelty, so cunning, quick, fiendish, so much to be feared. I kept looking at him, trying to pull that boy out of the yellowish man. But I could not find him there. He was gone, smothered, like a little spotted snake, once venomous and sportive, buried in a bag of meal.

  “Remember the caterpillars how they used to get on the milkweed?”

  “Caterpillars?” said my mother disbelievingly. She got up and brought a little brass-handled brush and pan, also a wedding present. She began to sweep the crumbs from the cloth.

  “They come on the milkweed in the fall. They’re after the milk, you know—the juice in it. They drink it all up and get fat and sleepy and go into their cocoon. Well, she found one was on the milkweed and she brought it into the house—”

  “Who did?”

  “Momma did, Addie. Who else would take the trouble? It was away before your time. She found this one and brought it in and she set it up above the door where I couldn’t get at it. I wouldn’t have meant any harm but I was like boys are. It went into its cocoon and it stayed in all winter. I forgot about it was there. Then we were all sitting after our dinner on Easter Sunday—Easter Sunday but it was a blizzard out—and Momma says, ‘Look!’ Look, she says so we looked and up above the door was that thing beginning to stir. Just thinning out the cocoon, just pulling and working it from the inside, getting tired and letting up and going to work again. It took it half an hour, forty minutes maybe, and we never quit watching. Then we saw the butterfly come out. It was like the cocoon just finally weakened, fell off like an old rag. It was a yellow butterfly, little spotty thing. Its wings all waxed down. It had to work some to get them loosed up. Works away on one, works away, flutters it up. Works away on the other. Gets that up, takes a little fly. Momma says, ‘Look, at that. Never forget. That’s what you saw on Easter.’ Never forget. I never did, either.”

  “What became of it?” said my mother neutrally.

  “I don’t remember that. Wouldn’t last long, weather like it was. It was a funny thing to see, though—works away on one wing, works away on the other. Takes a little fly. First time it ever used its wings.” He laughed, with a note of apology, the first and last we were to hear from him. But then he appeared tired, vaguely disappointed, and folded his hands over his stomach from which came dignified, necessary digestive noises.

  That was in the same house. The same house where my mother used to find the fire out and her mother at prayer and where she took milk and cucumbers in the hope of getting to heaven.

  Uncle Bill and Nile stayed all night, sleeping on the front room couch which could be pulled out and made into a bed. Those long, perfumed, enamelled limbs of Nile’s lay down so close to my uncle’s dragging flesh, his smell. I did not imagine anything more they might have to do, because I thought the itchy hot play of sex belonged to childhood, and was outgrown by decent adults, who made their unlikely connection only for the purpose of creating a child.

  Sunday morning, as soon as they had eaten breakfast, they went away, and we never saw either of them again.

  Some days later my mother burst out to me, “Your Uncle Bill is a dying man.”

  It was nearly suppertime, she was cooking sausages. Fern was not home from work yet. Owen had just come in from hockey practice and was dumping his skates and stick in the back hall. My mother cooked sausages until they were hard and shiny and very dark on the outside; I had never eaten them any other way.

  “He is a dying man. He was sitting here Sunday morning when I came down to put the kettle on and he told me. He has a cancer.”

  She continued rolling the sausages around with a fork and she had the crossword puzzle from the newspaper torn out, half done, on the counter beside the stove. I thought of Uncle Bill going downtown and buying butter tarts and chocolate ice cream and cake, and coming home and eating. How could he do it?

  “He always had a big appetite,” said my mother, as if her thoughts ran along the same lines, “and the prospect of death doesn’t seem to have diminished it. Who knows? Maybe with less eating he would have lived to be old.”

  “Does Nile know?”

  “What does it matter what she knows. She only married him for a meal ticket. She’ll be well off.”

  “Do you still hate him?”

  “Of course I don’t hate him,” said my mother quickly and with reserve. I looked at the chair where he had sat. I had a fear of contamination, not of cancer but of death itself.

  “He told me he had left me three hundred dollars in his will.”

  After that, what was there to do but get down to realities?

  “What are you going to spend it on?”

  “No doubt something will occur to me when the time comes.”

  The front door opened, Fern coming in.

  “I could always send away for a box of Bibles.”

  Just before Fern came in one door and Owen came in the other there was something in the room like the downflash of a wing or knife, a sense of hurt so strong, but quick and isolated, vanishing.

  “There is an Egyptian god with four letters,” said my mother, frowning at the crossword, “that I know I know, and I cannot think of it to save my soul.”

  “Isis.”

  “Isis is a goddess, I’m surprised at you.”

  Soon after this the snow began to melt, the Wawanas
h river over flowed its banks, and carried away road signs and fence posts and henhouses, and receded; the roads became more or less navigable, and my mother was out again in the afternoons. One of my father’s aunts—it never matters which—said, “Now. She will miss her writing to the newspapers.”

  Age of Faith

  When we lived in that house at the end of the Flats Road, and before my mother knew how to drive a car, she and I used to walk to Town; Town being Jubilee, a mile away. While she locked the door I had to run to the gate and look up and down the road and make sure there was nobody coming. Who could there ever be, on that road, besides the mailman and Uncle Benny? When I shook my head no she would hide the key under the second post of the verandah, where the wood had rotted and made a little hole. She believed in burglars.

  Turning our backs on the Grenoch Swamp, the Wawanash River, and some faraway hills, both bare and wooded, which though not ignorant of the facts of geography I did sometimes believe to be the end of the world, we followed the Flats Road which was not much more, at this end, than two wheel-tracks, with a vigorous growth of plantain and chickweed down the middle. My mind would be on burglars. I saw them black and white, with melancholy dedicated faces, professional clothes. I imagined them waiting somewhere not too far away, say in those ferny boggy fields along the edge of the swamp, waiting and holding in their minds the most exact knowledge of our house and everything in it. They knew about the cups with butterfly handles, painted gold; my coral necklace which I thought ugly and scratchy but had been taught to consider valuable, since it had been sent from Australia by my father’s Aunt Helen on her trip around the world; a silver bracelet bought by my father for my mother before they were married; a black bowl with Japanese figures painted on it, very peaceful to look at, a wedding present; and my mother’s greenish-white Laocoon inkwell awarded for highest marks and general proficiency when she graduated from high school—the serpent so cunningly draped around the three male figures that I could never discover whether there were or were not marble genitals underneath. Burglars coveted these things, I understood, but would not move unless we gave them cause, by our carelessness. Their knowledge, their covetousness, made each thing seem confirmed in its value and uniqueness. Our world was steadfastly reflected in burglar minds.