by Alice Munro
Mr. Chamberlain drove off the road, following a track that ended soon, in a field half gone to brush. The stopping of the car, cessation of that warm flow of sound and motion in which I had been suspended, jarred me a little. Events were becoming real.
“Let’s take a little walk down to the creek.”
He got out on his side, I got out on mine. I followed him, down a slope between some hawthorn trees, in bloom, yeasty-smelling. This was a travelled route, with cigarette packages, a beer bottle, a Chiclet box lying on the grass. Little trees, bushes closed around us.
“Why don’t we call a halt here?” said Mr. Chamberlain in a practical way. “It gets soggy down by the water.”
Here in the half-shade above the creek I was cold, and so violently anxious to know what would be done to me that all the heat and dancing itch between my legs had gone dead, numb as if a piece of ice had been laid to it. Mr. Chamberlain opened his jacket and loosened his belt, then unzipped himself. He reached in to part some inner curtains, and “Boo!” he said.
Not at all like marble David’s, it was sticking straight out in front of him, which I knew from my reading was what they did. It had a sort of head on it, like a mushroom, and its colour was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an elbow or a knee. It did not seem frightening to me, though I thought this might have been what Mr. Chamberlain intended, standing there with his tightly watching look, his hands holding his pants apart to display it. Raw and blunt, ugly coloured as a wound, it looked to me vulnerable, playful and naive, like some strong snouted animal whose grotesque simple looks are some sort of guarantee of good will. (The opposite of what beauty usually is.) It did not bring back any of my excitement, though. It did not seem to have anything to do with me.
Still watching me, and smiling, Mr. Chamberlain placed his hand around this thing and began to pump up and down, not too hard, in a controlled efficient rhythm. His face softened; his eyes, still fixed on me, grew glassy. Gradually, almost experimentally he increased the speed of his hand; the rhythm became less smooth. He crouched over, his smile opened out and drew the lips back from his teeth and his eyes rolled slightly upward. His breathing became loud and shaky, now he worked furiously with his hand, moaned, almost doubled over in spasmodic agony. The face he thrust out at me, from his crouch, was blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick, and those sounds coming out of his mouth, involuntary, last-ditch human noises, were at the same time theatrical, unlikely. In fact the whole performance, surrounded by calm flowering branches, seemed imposed, fantastically and predictably exaggerated, like an Indian dance. I had read about the body being in extremities of pleasure, possessed, but these expressions did not seem equal to the terrible, benighted effort, deliberate frenzy, of what was going on here. If he did not soon get to where he wanted to be, I thought he would die. But then he let out a new kind of moan, the most desperate and the loudest yet; it quavered as if somebody was hitting him on the voice box. This died, miraculously, into a peaceful grateful whimper, as stuff shot out of him, the real whitish stuff, the seed, and caught the hem of my skirt. He straightened up, shaky, out of breath, and tucked himself quickly back inside his trousers. He got out a handkerchief and wiped first his hands then my skirt.
“Lucky for you? Eh?” He laughed at me, though he still had not altogether got his breath back.
After such a convulsion, such a revelation, how could a man just put his handkerchief in his pocket, check his fly, and start walking back—still somewhat flushed and bloodshot—the way we had come?
The only thing he said was in the car, when he sat for a moment composing himself before he turned the key.
“Quite a sight, eh?” was what he said.
The landscape was post-coital, distant and meaningless. Mr. Chamberlain may have felt some gloom too, or apprehension, for he made me get down on the floor of the car as we reentered town, and then he drove around and let me out in a lonely place, where the road dipped down near the CNR station. He felt enough like himself, however, to tap me in the crotch with his fist, as if testing a coconut for soundness.
That was a valedictory appearance for Mr. Chamberlain, as I ought to have guessed it might be. I came home at noon to find Fern sitting at the dining room table, which was set for dinner, listening to my mother calling from the kitchen over the noise of the potato masher.
“Doesn’t matter what anybody says. You weren’t married. You weren’t engaged. It’s nobody’s business. Your life is your own.”
“Want to see my little love letter?” said Fern, and fluttered it under my nose.
Dear Fern, Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I am taking off this evening in my trusty Pontiac and heading for points west. There is a lot of the world I haven’t seen yet and no sense getting fenced in. I may send you a postcard from California or Alaska, who knows? Be a good girl as you always were and keep licking those stamps and steaming open the mail, you may find a hundred-dollar-bill yet. When Mama dies I will probably come home, but not for long. Cheers, Art.
The same hand that had written: Del is a bad girl.
“Tampering with the mails is a Federal offense,” said my mother, coming in. “I don’t think that is very witty, what he says.”
She distributed canned carrots, mashed potatoes, meat loaf. No matter what the season, we ate a heavy meal in the middle of the day.
“Looks like it hasn’t put me off my food, anyway,” said Fern, sighing. She poured ketchup. “I could have had him. Long ago, if I’d wanted. He even wrote me letters mentioning marriage. I should have kept them, I could have breach-of-promised him.”
“A good thing you didn’t,” said my mother spiritedly, “or where would you be today?”
“Didn’t what? Breached-of-promised him or married him?” “Married him. Breach-of-promise is a degradation to women.” “Oh, I wasn’t in danger of marriage.”
“You had your singing. You had your interest in life.”
“I was just usually having too good a time. I knew enough about marriage to know that’s when your good times stop.”
When Fern talked about having a good time she meant going to dances at the Lakeshore Pavilion, going to the Regency Hotel in Tupperton for drinks and dinner, being driven from one roadhouse to another on Saturday night. My mother did try to understand such pleasures, but she could not, any more than she could understand why people go on rides at a fair, and will get off and throw up, then go on rides again.
Fern was not one to grieve, in spite of her acquaintance with opera. Her expressed feeling was that men always went, and better they did before you got sick of them. But she grew very talkative; she was never silent.
“As bad as Art was,” she said to Owen, eating supper. “He wouldn’t touch any yellow vegetable. His mother should have taken the paddle to him when he was little. That’s what I used to tell him.”
“You’re built the opposite from Art,” she told my father. “The trouble with getting his suits fitted was he was so long in the body, short in the leg. Ransom’s in Tupperton was the only place that could fit him.”
“Only one time I saw him lose his temper. At the Pavilion when we went to a dance there, and a fellow asked me to dance, and I got up with him because what can you do, and he put his face down, right away down on my neck. Guzzling me up like I was chocolate icing! Art said to him, if you have to slobber don’t do it on my girl friend, I might want her myself! And he yanked him off. He did so!”
I would come into a room where she was talking to my mother and there would be an unnatural, waiting silence. My mother would be listening with a trapped, determinedly compassionate, miserable face. What could she do? Fern was her good, perhaps her only, friend.
But there were things she never thought she would have to hear. She may have missed Mr. Chamberlain.
“He treated you shabbily,” she said to Fern, against Fern’s shrugs and ambiguous laugh. “He did. He did.
My estimation of a person has never gone down so fast. But nevertheless I miss him when I hear them trying to read the radio news.”
For the Jubilee station had not found anybody else who could read the news the way it was now, full of Russian names, without panicking, and they had let somebody call Bach Batch on “In Memoriam,” when they played “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It made my mother wild.
I had meant to tell Naomi all about Mr. Chamberlain, now it was over. But Naomi came out of her illness fifteen pounds lighter, with a whole new outlook on life. Her forthrightness was gone with her chunky figure. Her language was purified. Her daring had collapsed. She had a new delicate regard for herself. She sat under a tree with her skirt spread around her, watching the rest of us play volleyball, and kept feeling her forehead to see if she was feverish. She was not even interested in the fact that Mr. Chamberlain had gone, so preoccupied was she with herself and her illness. Her temperature had risen to over a hundred and five degrees. All the grosser aspects of sex had disappeared from her conversation and apparently from her mind although she talked a good deal about Dr. Wallis, and how he had sponged her legs himself, and she had been quite helplessly exposed to him, when she was sick.
So I had not the relief of making what Mr. Chamberlain had done into a funny, though horrifying, story. I did not know what to do with it. I could not get him back to his old role, I could not make him play the single-minded, simple-minded, vigorous, obliging lecher of my daydreams. My faith in simple depravity had weakened. Perhaps nowhere but in daydreams did the trapdoor open so sweetly and easily, plunging bodies altogether free of thought, free of personality, into self-indulgence, mad bad licence. Instead of that, Mr. Chamberlain had shown me, people take along a good deal—flesh that is not overcome but has to be thumped into ecstasy, all the stubborn puzzle and dark turns of themselves.
In June there was the annual strawberry supper on the lawns behind the United Church. Fern went down to sing at it, wearing the flowered chiffon dress my mother had helped her make. It was now very tight at the waist. Since Mr. Chamberlain had gone Fern had put on weight, so that she was not now soft and bulgy but really fat, swollen up like a boiled pudding, her splotched skin not shady any more but stretched and shiny.
She patted herself around the midriff. “Anyway they won’t be able to say I’m pining, will they? It’ll be a scandal if I split the seams.”
We heard her high heels going down the sidewalk. On leafy, cloudy, quiet evenings under the trees, sounds carried a long way. Sociable noise of the United Church affair washed as far as our steps. Did my mother wish she had a hat and a summer sheer dress on, and was going? Her agnosticism and sociability were often in conflict in Jubilee, where social and religious life were apt to be one and the same. Fern had told her to come ahead. “You’re a member. Didn’t you tell me you joined when you got married?”
“My ideas weren’t formed then. Now I’d be a hypocrite. I’m not a believer.”
“Think all of them are?”
I was on the verandah reading Arch of Triumph, a book I had got out of the Library. The Library had been left some money and had bought a supply of new books, mostly on the recommendation of Mrs. Wallis the doctor’s wife, who had a college degree but not perhaps the tastes the Council had been counting on. There had been complaints, people had said it should have been left up to Bella Phippen, but only one book—The Hucksters—had actually been removed from the shelves. I had read it first. My mother had picked it up and read a few pages and been saddened.
“I never expected to see such a use made of the printed word.” “It’s about the advertising business, how corrupt it is.”
“That’s not the only thing is corrupt, I’m afraid. Next day they will be telling about how they go to the toilet, why do they leave that out? There isn’t any of that in Silas Marner. There isn’t in the classic writers. They were good writers, they didn’t need it.”
I had turned away from my old favourites, Kristin Lavransdatter, historical novels. I read modern books now. Somerset Maugham. Nancy Mitford. I read about rich and titled people who despised the very sort of people who in Jubilee were at the top of society—druggists, dentists, storekeepers. I learned names like Balenciaga, Schiaparelli. I knew about drinks. Whisky and soda. Gin and tonic. Cinzano, Benedictine, Grand Marnier. I knew the names of hotels, streets, restaurants, in London, Paris, Singapore. In these books people did go to bed together, they did it all the time, but the descriptions of what they were up to there were not thorough, in spite of what my mother thought. One book compared having sexual intercourse to going through a train tunnel (presumably if you were the whole train) and blasting out into a mountain meadow so high, so blest and beautiful you felt as if you were in the sky. Books always compared it to something else, never told about it by itself.
“You can’t read there,” my mother said. “You can’t read in that light. Come down on the steps.”
So I came, but she did not want me to read at all. She wanted company.
“See, the lilacs are turning. Soon we’ll be going out to the farm.” Along the front of our yard, by the sidewalk, were purple lilacs gone pale as soft, delicate scrub-rags, rusty specked. Beyond them the road, already dusty, and banks of wild blackberry bushes growing in front of the boarded-up factory, on which we could still read the big, faded, vainglorious letters: MUNDY PIANOS.
“I’m sorry for Fern,” my mother said. “I’m sorry for her life.”
Her sad confidential tone warned me off.
“Maybe she’ll find a new boy friend tonight.”
“What do you mean? She’s not after a new boy friend. She’s had enough of all that. She’s going to sing ‘Where’er You Walk.’ She’s got a lovely voice, still.”
“She’s getting fat.”
My mother spoke to me in her grave, hopeful, lecturing voice. “There is a change coming I think in the lives of girls and women.
Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals. He shall hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force, a little closer than his dog, a little dearer than his horse. Tennyson wrote that. It’s true. Was true. You will want to have children, though.”
That was how much she knew me.
“But I hope you will—use your brains. Use your brains. Don’t be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being—distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does.”
“There is birth control nowadays,” I reminded her, and she looked at me startled, though it was she herself who had publicly embarrassed our family, writing to the Jubilee Herald-Advance that “prophylactic devices should be distributed to all women on public relief in Wawanash County, to help them prevent any further increase in their families.” Boys at school had yelled at me, “Hey, when is your Momma giving out the proplastic devices?”
“That is not enough, though of course it is a great boon and religion is the enemy of it as it is of everything that might ease the pangs of life on earth. It is self-respect I am really speaking of. Self-respect.”
I did not quite get the point of this, or if I did get the point I was set up to resist it. I would have had to resist anything she told me with such earnestness, such stubborn hopefulness. Her concern about my life, which I needed and took for granted, I could not bear to have expressed. Also I felt that it was not so different from all the other advice handed out to women, to girls, advice that assumed being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for, whereas men were supposed to be able to go out and take on all kinds of experiences and shuck off what they didn’t want and come back proud. Without even thinking about it, I had decided to do the same.
Baptizing
In our third year at high school Naomi switched to Commercial; suddenly freed from Latin, Physics
, Algebra, she mounted to the third floor of the school where under the sloping roof typewriters clacked all day and the walls were hung with framed maxims preparing one for life in the business world. Time and Energy are my Capital; if I Squander them, I shall get no Other. The effect, after the downstairs classrooms with their blackboards covered with foreign words and abstract formulae, their murky pictures of battles and shipwrecks and heady but decent mythological adventures, was that of coming into cool ordinary light, the real and busy world. A relief to most. Naomi liked it.
In March of that year she got a job in the office of the Creamery. She was through with school. She told me to come and see her after four o’clock. I did, without much idea of what I was getting into. I thought Naomi would make a face at me from behind the counter. I was going to put on my quavery old-lady voice and say to her, “What is the meaning of this? Yesterday I bought a dozen eggs here and they was every one rotten!”
The office was in a low stucco addition, built on to the front of the old Creamery. There were fluorescent lights and new metal filing cabinets and desks—the sort of surroundings in which I felt instinctively out-of-place—and an efficient noise of typewriters and an adding machine. Two girls besides Naomi were working there; I found out later their names were Molly and Carla. Naomi’s nails were coral; she had done her hair quite successfully; she was wearing a pink and green plaid skirt and pink sweater. New. She smiled at me and waggled her fingers above the typewriter in minimal greeting, then went on typing at a great rate and conducting a gay, disjointed, incomprehensible conversation with her coworkers. After several minutes of this she called to me that she would be through at five o’clock. I said I had to go home. I felt that Molly and Carla were looking at me, at the ink on my bare red hands, my slipping woollen kerchief, wild hair, schoolgirlish pile of books.
Well-groomed girls frightened me to death. I didn’t like to even go near them, for fear I would be smelly. I felt there was a radical difference, between them and me, as if we were made of different substances. Their cool hands did not mottle or sweat, their hair kept its calculated shape, their underarms were never wet—they did not know what it was to have to keep their elbows pinned to their sides to hide the dark, disgraceful halfmoon stains on their dresses—and never, never would they feel that little extra gush of blood, little bonus that no Kotex is going to hold, that will trickle horrifyingly down the inside of the thighs. No indeed; their periods would be discreet; nature served and did not betray them. Nor would my coarseness ever be translated into their fineness; it was too late, the difference lay too deep for that. But what about Naomi? She had been like me; once she had had an epidemic of warts on her fingers; she had suffered from Athlete’s Foot; we had hidden in the Girls’ Toilet together when we had the curse at the same time and were afraid to do Tumbling—one at a time, in front of the rest of the class—afraid of some slipping or bleeding, and too embarrassed to ask to be excused. What was this masquerade she was going in for now, with her nail polish, her pastel sweater?
