by Alice Munro
We danced until the band took a break. I was glad it was over and glad he had stayed with me; I had been afraid he might recognize how inadequate I was and just whirl on to somebody else. He pulled me off the platform and over to the kitchen window where we were pushed about in the crowd until he could buy two paper cups of ginger ale.
“Drink some,” he ordered, abandoning his Dutch accent and sounding tired and practical. I drank some of mine. “Of both,” he told me. “I never drink ginger ale.” We were moving across the floor. I could make out faces now and I saw people I knew and smiled at them, tentatively proud of being here, proud that a man had me in tow. We reached Bert and Naomi and Bert took out a flask of whisky and said, “Well, corporal, what can I do for you?” He poured some into both cups. Naomi smiled at me glassily like a swimmer just come out of the water. I was warm and thirsty. I drank down my rye and ginger ale in three or four large gulps.
“Good Christ,” said Bert Matthews.
“She drinks like a fish,” said Naomi, pleased with me.
“Then she don’t need the ginger ale,” said Bert, and poured rye into my cup. I drank it down, wanting to increase my new prestige, and not actually minding the taste so much. Bert began to complain that he didn’t want to dance any more. He said he had a lame back. The man I was with—whose name, then or later, I learned to be Clive—let out a startling, rattling, machine-gun laugh and feinted with his fist at Bert’s belt buckle.
“Howdja get a lame back, eh, howdja get a lame back?”
“Well I was just layin’ there, officer,” said Bert in a high whiney voice, “and she come up and sat down on me, what could I do about that?”
“Don’t be filthy,” said Naomi happily.
“What’s filthy? What did I say? You want to rub my back, honey?
N’omi, rub my back?”
“I don’t care about your stupid back, go out and buy some liniment.” “Will you rub it on me, h’m—” sniffing in Naomi’s hair—“rub it on me good?”
The coloured lights had gone blurry, they were moving up and down like stretched elastic bands. People’s faces had undergone a slight, obscene enlargement across the cheeks; it was as if I was looking at faces reflected on a curved polished surface. Also the heads seemed large, out of proportion to the bodies; I imagined them— though I did not really see them—detached from bodies, floating smoothly on invisible trays. This was the height of my drunkenness, as far as alteration of perceptions went. While I was experiencing it Clive went to buy hot dogs, wrapped in paper napkins, and a case of ginger ale, and we all left the dance hall and I got into the back seat of a car with Clive. He put his arm around me and rather roughly tickled my armoured midriff. We drove along the highway at what seemed to be great speed, Bert and Clive singing, with falsetto harmonies, “I don’t care if the sun don’ shine, I git my lovin’ in the evenin’ ti-ime.” The windows were all down, the wind and stars rushed by. I felt happy. I was no longer responsible for anything. I am drunk, I thought. We entered Jubilee; I saw the buildings along the main street and it seemed they had a message for me, something concerning the temporary, and playful, and joyously improbable nature of the world. I had forgotten about Clive. He bent over and pressed his face against mine and stuffed his tongue, which seemed enormous, wet, cold, crumpled, like a dishrag, into my mouth.
We had stopped behind the Brunswick Hotel.
“This is where I live,” said Bert. “This is my happy home.”
“We can’t get in,” said Naomi. “They won’t let you take girls in your room.”
“Wait and see.”
We went in a back door, up some stairs, down a corridor at the end of which shone a bubble-shaped container of red liquid, utterly beautiful to me in my present state. We entered a bedroom and sat down, in sudden hot light, apart from each other. Bert sat, and later lay, on the bed. Naomi sat on the chair and I on a ripped hassock, our skirts properly spread. Clive sat on the cold radiator but got up at once to fit a screen in the window, then pour us all more whisky, mixing it with the ginger ale he had bought. We ate the hot dogs. I knew it had been a mistake stopping the car, coming inside. My happiness was leaking away and, though I drank more and hoped it would come back, I only felt bloated, thick in the body, particularly in the fingers and toes.
Clive said to me sharply, “You believe in equal rights for women?” “Yes.” I tried to get my wits together, encouraged, and feeling some sense of obligation, at the prospect of a discussion.
“You believe in capital punishment for women, too?”
“I don’t believe in capital punishment at all. But if you are going to have it—yes, for women.”
Quick as a bullet Clive said, “You believe women should be hung like men?”
I laughed hard, unhappily. Responsibility was coming back.
That started Bert and Clive telling jokes. Every joke would start off seriously, and would continue so for quite a time, like a reflective or instructive anecdote, so that you had to be always on guard, not to be left stupidly gaping when the time came to laugh. I was afraid that if I did not laugh at once I would give the impression of being too naive to understand the joke, or of being offended by it. In many of these jokes as in the first one it was necessary for Naomi or me to supply the straight lines, and the way to do this, so as not to feel foolish as I had that time was to answer in a reluctant, exasperated, but still faintly tolerant way, to follow the joke with narrowed eyes and a slight smile as if you knew what was coming. Between jokes Bert said to Naomi, “Come on the bed with me.”
“No thanks. I’m happy where I am.” She refused to have any more to drink, and flicked cigarette ashes in the hotel glass.
“What have you got against beds? That’s where you get more bounce to the ounce.”
“Go ahead and bounce, then.”
Clive was never still. He had to jump around the room, shadow-boxing, illustrating his jokes, lunging at Bert on the bed, until finally Bert jumped up too and they pretended to be fighting, taking little close-in punches at each other, bouncing up from their knees, laughing. Naomi and I had to pull our feet back.
“Pair of morons,” Naomi said.
Bert and Clive finished up by putting their arms around each other’s shoulders and facing us formally, as from a stage.
“I can see by your outfit you must be a cowboy—” Bert said, and Clive sang back, “I can see by your outfit that you’re a cowboy too—”
“You can see by our outfits that we are both cowboys—” “Hey Rastus,” said Bert spookily.
“Yas?”
“Is yo’ fo’ years old or is yo’ five?”
“Ah don’ know. Ah don’ know if Ah is fo’ years old or five.”
“Hey Rastus? Yo’ know ‘bout women?”
“No-o.”
“Yo’ is fo’.”
We laughed but Naomi said, “That was in the Kinsmen’s Minstrel
Show at Tupperton, I heard that before.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, and got up. I must have been still drunk, after all. Ordinarily I would never have said that in front of men.
“You have my permission,” said Bert magnanimously. “You go right ahead. You have my permission to leave the room. Go right down the hall and go in the door where it says—” He peered at me closely and then stuck his face almost into my chest—“ah, I can see now—Ladies.”
I found the bathroom and used it without closing the door, later remembering. On my way back to the room I saw the bubble of red liquid, and a light beyond it, at the end of the corridor. I walked towards it past the door of Bert’s room. Past the light there was a door, open because of the warm night, on to the fire escape. We were on the third, or top, floor of the hotel. I stepped outside, tripped and nearly fell over the railing, then recovered, bent down and with great difficulty removed my sandals, which I blamed for making me trip. I walked down the steps, all the way. There was a drop of about six feet at the bottom. I threw my shoes down first
, feeling clever to have thought of that, then sat on the bottom step, let myself down as far as I could and jumped, landing on hard dirt, in the alley between the hotel and the radio station. Putting my shoes on, I was bewildered; I had really meant to go back to the room. I could not think where to go now. I had forgotten all about our house on River Street and thought we were living out on the Flats Road. At last I remembered Naomi’s house; with careful planning I thought I could get to it.
I walked along the wall of the Brunswick Hotel bumping up against the brick, came out at the back of it and walked along the Diagonal Road—first starting in the wrong direction, and having to turn around—and crossed the main street not looking either way, but it was late, there were no cars anywhere. I could not see the time on the blurry moon of the Post Office clock. Once off the main street I decided to walk on the grass, on people’s front yards, because the sidewalk was hard. I took off my shoes again. I thought I must tell everybody about this discovery, that the sidewalk hurt and the grass was soft. Why had nobody ever thought of this before? I came to Naomi’s house on Mason Street, and forgetting that we had left the back door unlocked went up the front steps, tried to open the front door, failed, and knocked, politely at first then harder and louder. I thought Naomi must be inside, and would hear me and come to let me in.
No lights went on, but the door did open. Naomi’s father in a night-shirt, with his bare legs and white hair, glowed in the dark of the hall like a risen corpse. I said, “Naomi—” and then I remembered. I turned and stumbled down the steps and headed towards River Street, which I had also remembered at the same time. There I was more prudent. I lay down in the verandah swing and fell asleep, in deep engulfing swirls of light and darkness, helplessness, belched smell of hot dogs.
Naomi’s father did not go back to bed. He sat in the kitchen in the dark until Naomi came home and then he got his belt and beat her on the arms, legs, hands, wherever he could hit. He made her get down on her knees on the kitchen floor and pray to God that she would never taste liquor again.
As for me, I woke chilled, sick, aching in the early dawn, got off the verandah in time and vomited in a patch of burdocks at the side of the house. The back door had been open all the time. I ducked my head and hair in the kitchen sink, trying to get rid of the smell of whisky, and climbed safely up to bed. I told my mother, when she woke up, that I had got sick at Naomi’s house and come home in the night. All day I lay in bed with a pounding headache, rocking stomach, great weakness, a sense of failure and relief. I felt redeemed by childish things—my old Scarlett O’Hara lamp, the blue and white metal flowers that held back my limp dotted curtains. I read The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
Through my window I could see low weedy meadows beyond the CNR tracks, purply with June grass. I could see a bit of the Wawanash
River, still fairly high, and the silvery willow trees. I dreamed a nineteenth-century sort of life, walks and studying, rectitude, courtesy, maidenhood, peacefulness.
Naomi came up to my room and said in a harsh whisper, “Christ, I could just about kill you for walking out on everybody.”
“I got sick.”
“Sick my bally old foot. Who do you think you are? Clive is not an idiot you know. He has a good job. He’s an insurance adjustor. Who do you want to go out with? High school boys?”
Then she showed me her welts and told me about her father.
“If you had’ve come home with me he probably would’ve been ashamed to do that. How the hell did he know I was out, anyway?”
I never said. Neither did he. Perhaps he had got it muddled up or thought I was some sort of apparition. Naomi was going out with Bert Matthews again next weekend. She did not care.
“He can beat me till he’s blue in the face. I have to have a normal life.”
What was a normal life? It was the life of the girls in the Creamery office, it was showers, linen and pots and pans and silverware, that complicated feminine order; then, turning it over, it was the life of the Gay-la Dance Hall, driving drunk at night along the black roads, listening to men’s jokes, putting up with and warily fighting with men and getting hold of them, getting hold—One side of that life could not exist without the other, and by undertaking and getting used to them both a girl was putting herself on the road to marriage. There was no other way. And I was not going to be able to do it. No. Better Charlotte Brontë.
“Get up and get dressed and come downtown with me. It’ll do you good.”
“I feel too sick.”
“You are a big baby. What do you want to do, crawl in a hole the rest of your life?”
Our friendship faded from that day. We became strangers to each other’s houses. We would meet on the street next winter, she in her new fur-trimmed coat and I with my great pile of school-books, and she would bring me up-to-date on her life. Usually she was going out with someone I had never heard of, someone from Porterfield or Blue River or Tupperton. Bert Matthews she had quickly left behind. His role, it turned out, was to take young girls out for the first time; he was only after young inexperienced girls, though he never really bothered them, or got them in trouble, for all his talk. Clive had been in a car accident, she told me, and had to have one leg amputated below the knee. “No wonder, they all drink like fish and drive like fools,” she said. She spoke with a maternal sort of resignation, pride even, as if to drink like a fish and drive like a fool was somehow the proper thing, deplorable but necessary. After a while she stopped giving me these progress reports. We met in Jubilee and all we said to each other was hello. I felt that she had moved as far beyond me, in what I vaguely and worriedly supposed to be the real world, as I in all sorts of remote and useless and special knowledge, taught in schools, had moved beyond her.
I got a’s at school. I never had enough of them. No sooner had I hauled one lot of them home with me than I had to start thinking of the next. They did seem to me tangible, and heavy as iron. I had them stacked around me like barricades, and if I missed one I could feel a dangerous gap.
In the main hall of the high school, around the Honour Roll of those former students killed in action in 1914-18, and 1939-45, were hung wooden shields, one for each grade; inserted in these shields were little silver name-tags bearing the names of those who had come first in marks each year, until they faded into jobs and motherhood. My name was there, though not for every year. Sometimes I was beaten by Jerry Storey. His IQ was the highest ever seen in Jubilee High School or in any high school in Wawanash County. The only reason I ever got ahead of him at all was that his preoccupation with science made him impatient and sometimes completely forgetful of those subjects he referred to as “memory work” (French and History), and English Literature, which he seemed to regard fretfully as some kind of personal insult.
Jerry Storey and I drifted together. We talked in the halls. We developed, gradually, a banter, vocabulary, range of subject matter that was not shared with anybody else. Our names appeared together in the tiny, mimeographed, nearly illegible school paper. Everyone seemed to think that we were perfectly suited to each other; we were called “The Brains Trust” or “The Quiz Kids” with a certain amount of semi-tolerant contempt, which Jerry knew how to bear better than
I. We were depressed at being paired off like the only members of some outlandish species in a zoo, and we resented people thinking we were alike, for we did not think so. I thought that Jerry was a thousand times more freakish, less attractive than I was, and it was plain that he thought putting my brains and his in the same category showed no appreciation of categories; it was like saying Toscanini and the local bandmaster were both talented. What I possessed, he told me frankly when we discussed the future, was a first-rate memory, a not unusual feminine gift for language, fairly weak reasoning powers and almost no capacity for abstract thought. That I was immeasur-ably smarter than most people in Jubilee should not blind me, he said, to the fact that I would soon reach my limits in the intellectually competitive world outside (“The same goes f
or myself,” he added severely. “I always try to keep a perspective. I look pretty good at Jubilee High School. How would I look at M.I.T.?” In talking of his future he was full of grand ambitions, but was careful to express them sarcastically, and fence them round with sober self-admonitions.)
I took his judgement like a soldier, because I did not believe it. That is, I knew it was all true, but I still felt powerful enough, in areas that I thought he could not see, where his ways of judging could not reach. The gymnastics of his mind I did not admire, for people only admire abilities similar to, though greater than, their own. His mind to me was like a circus tent full of dim apparatus on which, when I was not there, he performed stunts which were spectacular and boring. I was careful not to let him see I thought this. He was truthful in telling me what he thought about me, apparently; I had no intention of being so with him. Why not? Because I felt in him what women feel in men, something so tender, swollen, tyrannical, absurd; I would never take the consequences of interfering with it: I had an indifference, a contempt almost, that I concealed from him. I thought that I was tactful, even kind; I never thought that I was proud.
We went to movies together. We went to school dances, and danced badly, self-consciously, irritated with each other, humiliated by the disguise of high school sweethearts which we had somehow felt it necessary to adopt, until we found that the way to survive the situation was to make fun of it. Parody, self-mockery, were our salvation. At our best we were cheerful, comfortable, sometimes cruel comrades, rather like a couple who have been married for eighteen years. He called me Eggplant, in honour of a dreadful dress I had, a purply-wine coloured taffeta, made over from one Fern Dogherty had left behind. (We were suddenly poorer than usual, due to the collapse of the silver fox business after the war.) I had hoped, while my mother was altering it, that the dress would turn out to be all right, would even show a voluptuous sheen on my rather wide hips, like the Rita Hayworth dress in the ads for Gilda; when I put it on I tried to tell myself that this was so, but as soon as Jerry made a face and gulped exaggeratedly and said in a squeaky, delighted voice, “Eggplant!” I knew the truth. Immediately I tried to find it as funny as he did, and nearly succeeded. On the street we improvised further.
