Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

  She was soon great friends with Molly and Carla. Her conversation, when she came over to my house or summoned me to hers, was full of their diets, skin-care routines, hair-shampooing methods, clothes, diaphragms (Molly had been married for a year and Carla was to be married in June). Sometimes Carla came to Naomi’s house when I was there; she and Naomi always talked about washing, either washing their sweaters or washing their underclothes or washing their hair. They would say, “I washed my cardigan!” “Did you? Did you wash it cold or lukewarm?” “Lukewarm but I think it’s all right.” “What did you do about the neck?” I would sit there thinking how grubby my sweater was and that my hair was greasy and my brassiere discoloured, one strap held on with a safety pin. I would have to get away, but when I got home I would not sew my brassiere-strap on or wash my sweater. Sweaters I washed always shrank, anyway, or the neckline sagged; I knew I did not take enough trouble with them but I had a fatalistic feeling that they would shrink or sag whatever I did. Sometimes I did wash my hair, and did it up on horrible steel curlers that prevented me from sleeping; in fact I could spend hours, now and then, in front of a mirror, painfully plucking my eyebrows, looking at my profile, shading my face with dark and light powder, to emphasize its good points and minimize the bad, as recommended in the magazines. It was sustained attention I was not capable of, though everything from advertisements to F. Scott Fitzgerald to a frightening song on the radio—the girl that I marry will have to be, as soft and pink as a nursery—was telling me I would have to, have to, learn. Love is not for the undepilated.

  As for hair washing: about this time I started to read an article in a magazine, on the subject of the basic difference between the male and female habits of thought, relating chiefly to their experience of sex (the title of the article made you think it would tell a great deal more about sex than it actually did). The author was a famous New York psychiatrist, a disciple of Freud. He said that the difference between the male and female modes of thought were easily illustrated by the thoughts of a boy and girl, sitting on a park bench, looking at the full moon. The boy thinks of the universe, its immensity and mystery; the girl thinks, “I must wash my hair.” When I read this I was frantically upset; I had to put the magazine down. It was clear to me at once that I was not thinking as the girl thought; the full moon would never as long as I lived remind me to wash my hair. I knew if I showed it to my mother she would say, “Oh, it is just that maddening male nonsense, women have no brains.” That would not convince me; surely a New York psychiatrist must know. And women like my mother were in the minority, I could see that. Moreover I did not want to be like my mother, with her virginal brusqueness, her innocence. I wanted men to love me, and I wanted to think of the universe when I looked at the moon. I felt trapped, stranded; it seemed there had to be a choice where there couldn’t be a choice. I didn’t want to read any more of the article but was drawn back to it as I would be drawn back when I was younger to a certain picture of a dark sea, a towering whale, in a book of fairy stories; my eyes nervously jumped across the page, starting at such assertions as: For a woman, everything is personal; no idea is of any interest to her by itself, but must be translated into her own experience; in works of art she always sees her own life, or her daydreams. Finally I took the magazine out to the garbage-pail, ripped it in half, stuffed it inside, tried to forget it. Afterwards when I would see an article in a magazine called “Femininity—It’s Making a Comeback!” or a quiz for teenagers with the heading “Is Your Problem That You’re Trying To Be a Boy?” I would turn the page quickly as if something was trying to bite me. Yet it had never occurred to me to want to be a boy.

  Through Molly and Carla, and through her new position as a working girl, Naomi was becoming part of a circle in Jubilee that neither she nor I had really known existed. This circle took in the girls who worked in stores and in offices and the two banks, as well as some girls, married, who had recently left their jobs. If they were not married and did not have boy friends they went to dances together. They went bowling together in Tupperton. They gave showers for each other, for getting married and having babies (this latter was a new custom, offending some older ladies in town). Their relations with each other, though full of scandalous confidences, were yet hedged about with all kinds of subtle formalities, courtesies, proprieties. It was not like school; no savagery, meanness, no crude language, but always a complicated network of feuds obliquely referred to, always some crisis—a pregnancy, an abortion, a jilting—which they all knew about and talked about but guarded as their secret, keeping it away from the rest of the town. The most innocent, or consoling and flattering things they said might mean something else. They were tolerant of what most people in town would think of as moral lapses in each other, but quite intolerant of departures in dress and hair style, and people not cutting the crusts off sandwiches, at showers.

  As soon as she started getting pay-cheques Naomi began to do what it seemed all these girls did, until they got married. She went around to various stores and had them put things away for her, which she would pay for at so much a month. In the hardware store she had a whole set of pots and pans put away, in the jewellery store a case of silverware, in the Walker Store a blanket and set of towels and a pair of linen sheets. This was all for when she would get married and start housekeeping; it was the first I knew that she planned on anything so definite. “You have to get started sometime,” she said irritably. “What are you going to get married with, two plates and an old dishrag?”

  On Saturday afternoons she wanted me to go round to the stores with her while she made her payments and looked at her future possessions, and talked about why, like Molly, she was going to go in for waterless cooking and how you could tell the quality of sheets by the number of threads to the square inch. I was amazed and intimidated by her as her boring and preoccupied new self. It seemed as if she had got miles ahead of me. Where she was going I did not want to go, but it looked as if she wanted to; things were progressing for her. Could the same be said for me?

  What I really wanted to do on Saturday afternoons was stay home and listen to the Metropolitan Opera. This habit dated from the time when we had Fern Dogherty boarding with us, and she and my mother used to listen. Fern Dogherty had left Jubilee, she had gone to work in Windsor, and she wrote us vague infrequent cheerful letters, about going across to Detroit to a night club, going to the races, singing with the Light Opera Society, having a good time. Naomi said of her, “That Fern Dogherty was just a joke.” She was speaking from her new vantage-point. She and all these other girls were firmly set towards marriage; older women who had not married, whether they were perfect old maids or discreet adventuresses, like Fern, could not expect any sympathy from them. How was she a joke? I wanted to know, troublesomely, but Naomi opened her pale, bright, protruding eyes at me and repeated, “A joke, she was just a joke!” like someone dispensing, in the face of fumbling heresies, self-evident handsome pieces of dogma.

  My mother did not pay much attention to the opera any more. She knew the characters and the plot and could recognize the famous arias; there was nothing more to learn. Sometimes she was out; she still kept going on her encyclopedia rounds; people who had already bought a set had to be talked into buying the yearly supplements. But she was not well. At first she had been plagued by a whole series of uncommon ailments—a plantar’s wart, an eye infection, swollen glands, ringing in the ears, nosebleeds, a mysterious scaly rash. She kept going to the doctor. Things would clear up but something else would start. What was really happening was a failure of energy, a falling back, that nobody would have looked for. It was not steady. She would still sometimes write a letter to the paper; she was trying to teach herself astronomy. But sometimes she would go and lie on her bed and call me to put a quilt over her. I would always do it too carelessly; she would call me back and make me tuck it in at the knees, around the feet. Then she would say, in a petulant, put-on, childish voice, “Kiss Mother.” I would drop one dry, stingy kiss o
n her temple. Her hair was getting quite thin. The exposed white skin of the temple had an unhealthy suffering look that I disliked.

  I preferred to be by myself, anyway, when I listened to Lucia di Lammermoor, Carmen, La Traviata. Certain passages in the music excited me so that I could not sit still but would have to get up and walk round and round the dining room, singing in my head with the voices on the radio, hugging myself and squeezing my elbows. My eyes filled with tears. Swiftly formed fantasies boiled up in me. I pictured a lover, stormy circumstances, doomed throbbing glory of our passion. (It never occurred to me that I was doing what the article said women did, with works of art.) Voluptuous surrender. Not to a man but to fate, really, to darkness, to death. Yet I loved most of all Carmen, at the end. Et laisser moi passer! I hissed it between my teeth; I was shaken, imagining the other surrender, more tempting, more gorgeous even than the surrender to sex—the hero’s, the patriot’s, Carmen’s surrender to the final importance of gesture, image, self-created self.

  Opera made me hungry. When it was over I went into the kitchen and made fried-egg sandwiches, stacks of soda-crackers held together with honey and peanut butter, and a rich, secret, sickening mixture of cocoa, corn syrup, brown sugar, coconut and chopped walnuts, which had to be eaten with a spoon. Greedy eating first appeased then made me gloomy, like masturbating. (Masturbating. Naomi and I used to read in her mother’s books how peasants in Eastern Europe did it with carrots and ladies in Japan used weighted spheres, and you could tell habitual masturbators by the dull look in their eyes and liverish cast of their skin, and we went around Jubilee looking for symptoms, thinking the whole thing so outlandish, so funny, so revolting—everything we found out about sex making it seem more and more like a carnival for us to laugh or get sick at, or as we used to say, laugh ourselves sick. And now we would never talk about this at all.) Sometimes after eating a lot I would fast for a day or two and drink a large dose of Epsom salts in warm water, thinking the calories wouldn’t take hold if I could rush everything through in a hurry. I didn’t get really fat, just large enough, solid enough, that I loved to read books where the heroine’s generous proportions were tenderly, erotically, described, and was worried by books where desirable women were always slim; for comfort, I would say to myself the line from the poem about “mistresses with great, smooth, marbly, limbs.” I liked that; I liked the word mistress, a full-skirted word, with some ceremony about it; a mistress should not be too slim. I liked looking at the reproduction of Cezanne’s “Bathers” in the Art Supplement of the encyclopedia, then at myself naked in the glass. But the insides of my thighs quivered; cottage cheese in a transparent sack.

  Meanwhile, Naomi looked around, to see what possibilities there were.

  A man named Bert Matthews, unmarried, twenty-eight or-nine years old, with a worried, jovial face and hair like a fur cap pushed back on his wrinkled scalp, came regularly into the office of the Creamery. He was a poultry inspector. Naomi told me, with disgust, the things he would say to Molly and Carla. He was always asking Molly if she was pregnant yet, sneaking around to get a look at her stomach in profile, and giving Carla advice about her forthcoming honeymoon. He called Naomi “butter-tart.” He would honk the horn of his car at her on the street, and slow down, and she would turn away, saying, “Oh, Good Lord, save me from that idiot!” She would frown dreamily at her reflection in store windows.

  Bert Matthews bet her ten dollars she would not be allowed to meet him at the Gay-la Dance Hall. Naomi meant to go. She said it was for the ten dollars, and to show him. It was true her mother would not have allowed her to go there, but her mother was out of town, on a nursing case, and she did not have to worry about her father. “Him,” she always said, “he’s senile.” She seemed to enjoy the clinical sound of that word. He spent his time in his own room with the Bible and his religious literature, sorting out prophecies.

  Naomi wanted me to go with her, and stay at her house all night, telling my mother we were going to the Lyceum Theatre. I felt I had no choice but to do this, not particularly because it was something Naomi wanted me to do, but because I truly hated and feared the Gay-la Dance Hall.

  The Gay-la Dance Hall was half a mile north of town, on the highway. It was covered with chocolate-coloured imitation logs and the windows had no glass, just board shutters closed tight in the daytime, propped open for a dance. When I used to drive that way with my mother she would say, “Well, take a look at Sodom and Gomorrah!” She was referring to a sermon that had been preached in the Presbyterian Church comparing the Gay-la Dance Hall to those places and predicting a similar fate. My mother had pointed out at the time that the comparison was not valid, because what Sodom and Gomorrah went in for was unnatural practices. (Fern Dogherty, to whom she explained this, said comfortably and mysteriously, “Well, natural or unnatural, doesn’t that depend?”) My mother was in an uneasy position; on principle she had to ridicule the stand of the Presbyterian Church, and yet the very sight of the Gay-la Dance Hall touched her, as I could tell, with the same cold blight felt by Presbyterians. And I saw it the same way she did—with its blind windows, in its scabby littered field, all a black and rumoured place.

  In the pine woods behind, French safes were scattered like old snakeskins, everybody said.

  We walked out the highway on a Friday night, in our flowered, full-skirted dresses. I had done my best; I had washed, shaved, deodorized, done up my hair. I wore a crinoline, harsh and scratchy on the thighs, and a long-line brassiere that was supposed to compress my waist but which actually pinched my midriff and left a little bulge beneath that I had to tighten my plastic belt over. I had the belt pulled in to twenty-five inches, and was sweating underneath it. I had slapped beige makeup like paint over my throat and face; my mouth was a red, and nearly as thickly painted, as an icing-flower on a cake. I wore sandals, which collected the gravel of the roadside. Naomi was in high heels. It was June by this time, the air warm, soft, whining and trembling with bugs, the sky like a peach skin behind the black pines, the world rewarding enough, if only it had not been necessary to go to dances.

  Naomi went ahead of me across the unpaved haphazard parking lot, up the steps lit by a single yellow bulb. If she was afraid, like me, she did not show it. I kept my eyes on her disdainful high heels, her biscuit-pale, muscular, purposeful bare legs. Men and boys hung around the steps. I could not see their faces, and did not look. I just saw their cigarettes or belt buckles or bottles glinting in the dark. To get past the soft and easy, surely contemptuous, strangely dreaded things they were saying I tried to stop my hearing, the way you can hold your breath. What had happened to my old confidence—false confidence of the early days of buffoonery and superiority? It was every bit gone; I would think with nostalgia and disbelief of how bold I had been, for instance with Mr. Chamberlain.

  A fat old woman stamped our hands with purple ink.

  Naomi found her way at once to Bert Matthews who was standing near the dancing platform. “Well I never expected to see you here,” she said. “Did your Momma let you out?”

  Bert Matthews took her up to dance. The dancing went on on a wooden platform about two feet high, the railing strung with coloured lights, which also climbed the four posts at the corners and hung on two crossing diagonal strings above the dancers, making the platform something like a lighted ship floating above the earth and sawdust floor. Except for these lights and the light from a window open on a sort of kitchen, from which they sold hot dogs, hamburgers, soft drinks and coffee, the place was dark. People stood around in dim huddles, the sawdust underfoot was wet and smelly with spilled drinks. A man stood in front of me, holding out a paper cup. I thought he had mistaken me for somebody else, and shook my head. Then I wished I had taken it. He might have stayed beside me and asked me to dance.

  After two dances Naomi came back, bringing with her Bert Matthews and another man, thin, foxy, red faced and red haired. He stood with his head thrust forward, his long body curved like a comma. This man did not as
k me to dance but took my hand when the music started and pulled me on to the platform. To my alarm he turned out to be a fancy, inventive dancer, continually throwing me away from him and snatching me back, flipping himself around, snapping his fingers, doing all this without a smile, indeed with a dead-serious, hostile expression. As well as trying to follow his dancing I had to try somehow to follow his conversation, for he talked too, during those brief unpredictable parts of the dance when we were close enough to each other. He was talking with a Dutch accent, which was not real. At this time Dutch immigrants had taken up a few farms around Jubilee, and their accent, its warm and innocent sound, was to be heard in certain local jokes and catch-phrases. “Dance me loose,” he said, using one of these phrases, and rolling his eyes at me imploringly. I did not know what he meant; surely I was dancing him, or he was dancing himself, as loose as anybody could do? Everything he said was like this; I heard the words but could not figure out the meaning; he might have been joking, but his face remained so steadily unsmiling. But he rolled his eyes, this grotesque way, and called me “baby” in a cold languishing voice, as if I were somebody altogether different from myself; all I could think of to do was get some idea of this person he thought he was dancing with and pretend to be her—somebody small, snappy, bright, flirtatious. But everything I did, every movement and expression with which I tried to meet him, seemed to be too late; he would have gone on to something else.