Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

  I ran home barelegged through the cold streets. I was furious now, to think of myself naked on that bed. Nobody to look at me but Jerry, giggling and scared and talking dialect. That was who I had to take my offerings. I would never get a real lover.

  The next day at school Jerry came up to me carrying a brown paper bag.

  “I beg yo’ pardon, lady,” he said softly in his Pogodialect, “I think I got one of yo’ personal-type possessions.”

  It was my garter belt, of course. I stopped hating him. Walking down John Street hill after school we transformed the night before into a Great Comic Scene, something jerky and insane from a silent movie.

  “I was yanking you down the stairs and you were yanking just as hard the other way—”

  “I didn’t know what you were going to do with me. I thought you were going to throw me out on the street like the woman taken in adultery—”

  “You should have seen the look on your face when I pushed you down in the cellar.”

  “You should have seen yours when you heard your mother’s voice.” “Most inopportune, Mamma,” said Jerry, trying out an English accent which we also used sometimes, “but it just so happens that I have a young female person here unclothed on my bed. I was about to perform an exploratory—”

  “You were about to perform nothing.”

  “Well.”

  So we left it, and oddly enough got on after this fiasco much better than before. We treated each other’s bodies now with a mixture of wariness and familiarity, and no longer made demands. No more long hopeless embraces, no more tongues in the mouth. And we had other things to think about; we got the forms to fill out for scholarship exams, we got the calendars from several universities, we began looking forward to June, when we would write the examinations, with pleasure and dread. Nothing we had come up against in our lives equalled in importance those examinations, sent from the Department of Education, sealed; the Principal of the High School would break the seal in front of our eyes. To say we studied does not half describe the training we put ourselves into; we submitted ourselves like athletes. It was not just high marks we wanted, not just to win the scholarships and get into university; it was the highest possible marks: glory, glory, the top of the pinnacled A’s, security at last.

  I would shut myself up in the front room, after supper. Spring was coming, the evenings were getting longer; I turned the lights on later. But I noticed nothing, only noticed, without being aware of it, the things in that room, which was my cell or chapel. The faded pattern of the rug, straw-coloured at the seams, the old unworkable radio, big as a tombstone, with dials promising Rome and Amsterdam and Mexico City, the mossy ferned chesterfield and the two pictures—one of the Castle of Chillon, dark out of the pearly lake, and the other of a little girl lying on two unmatched chairs, in a rosy light, parents weeping in the shadows behind and a doctor beside her looking tranquil, but not optimistic. All this which I stared at so often, fixing verbs, dates, wars, phyla, in my mind, took on a significance, an admonitory power, as if all these ordinary shapes and patterns of things were in fact the outward form of the facts and relationships which I had mastered, and which, once I had mastered them, came to seem lovely, chaste, and obedient. From this room I would go out pale, exhausted, incapable of thought as a nun after hours of prayer or a lover, maybe, after punishing devotions, and I would wander down to the main street, to Haines’s Restaurant, where Jerry and I would have agreed to meet at ten o’clock. Under the fanlights of amber glass we would drink coffee and smoke, talk a little, surfacing slowly, able to understand and approve each other’s haggard, hardened looks.

  My need for love had gone underground, like a canny toothache.

  That spring there was to be a Revival Meeting in the Town Hall. Mr. Buchanan our history teacher stood at the top of the stairs, at school, handing out buttons which said, Come to Jesus. He was an elder of the Presbyterian Church, not the Baptist, which was in the forefront of all the arrangements for the Revival; but all the churches in town, with the exception of the Catholic and possibly the Anglican—so small it couldn’t matter—were giving their support. All over the country revivals were becoming respectable again.

  “You wouldn’t care for one of these, Del,” said Mr. Buchanan, not interrogatively, in his flat mournful voice. Tall, dry, and skinny, hair parted in the middle in the style of a turn of-the-century cyclist— which he was old enough to have been—half his stomach cut away for ulcers, he smiled at me with that faint twitching irony he usually kept for some historical personage (Parnell would be a good example) who cut a fine figure for a while but did overreach himself, in the end. So I felt obliged, out of contrariness, to say, “Yes. I’d like one, thank you very much.”

  “Are you going to that?” Jerry said. “Sure.”

  “What for?”

  “Scientific curiosity.”

  “There are things there is no point in being curious about.”

  The revival was held upstairs in the Town Hall, where we used to do the school operettas. This was the first week in May; the weather had suddenly turned warm. It would do this, right after the annual flood. Before eight o’clock the hall was already crowded. It was the same sort of crowd you would see at the Twelfth of July parade, or the Kinsmen’s Fair—a good number of town people, but many more from the country. Mud-splashed cars were parked all along the main street and up the side streets. Some men wore hot black suits, some women wore hats. There were other men in clean overalls and women in loose print dresses, running shoes on their feet, arms bare, big and rosy as hams, holding quilt-wrapped babies. Old men and women, who had to be supported and guided into chairs. Unearthed from country kitchens, they wore clothes that seemed to have grown mould. I wondered if you could tell by looking at them what part of the country they came from. Jerry and I, watching from the Science Room windows the loading of the three school buses—gaudy old rickety buses that looked as if they should be rocking over some mountain road in South America, live chickens flapping out the windows—used to play this game, talking like sociologists, in elegant prudish tones.

  “From Blue River they are well-dressed and quite respectable looking. Lots of industrious Dutch out there. They have been to the dentist.”

  “Almost on an urban level.”

  “From St. Augustine they are run-of-the-mill. Farm Folk. They have big yellow teeth. They look as if they eat a lot of oatmeal porridge.”

  “From Jericho Valley they are moronic and potentially criminal. Their IQ never breaks a hundred. They have cross-eyes, clubfeet—”

  “Cleft palates—”

  “Hump shoulders—”

  “It’s the inbreeding that does it. Fathers sleep with daughters.

  Grandfathers sleep with granddaughters. Brothers sleep with sisters. Mothers sleep with fathers—” “Mothers sleep with fathers?”

  “Oh, its downright terrible what they get up to out there.”

  The seats were all filled. I stood at the back, behind the last row of chairs. People were still coming in, crowding down the sides of the hall, filling up the space behind me. Boys sat up on the windowsills. The windows were up as high as they would go and still it was very hot. The low sun was shining on the old cracked and stained, plastered and wainscoted walls. I had never known it was so shabby, that hall.

  Mr. McLaughlin from the United Church did the opening prayer. His son Dale had run away from home, long ago. Where was he now? Cutting grass on a golf course, the last anybody heard. I felt as if I had lived a lifetime in Jubilee, people going away and coming back, marrying, starting their lives, while I kept on going to school. There was Naomi with the girls from the Creamery. They had all done their hair the same way, tied in two little bunches behind the ears, and they wore bows.

  Four Negroes, two men and two women, walked on to the stage, and their was a craning of necks, a hush of appreciation. Many people in the hall, including me, had never seen a Negro before, any more than we had seen a giraffe or a skyscraper o
r an ocean liner. One man was thin and prune-black, dried up, with a powerful, frightening voice; he was the bass. The tenor was fat and yellow-skinned, smiling, munificent. Both women were plump and well-girdled, coffee-coloured, splendidly dressed in emerald green, electric blue. Sweat oiled their necks and faces when they sang. During their song the revival preacher, recognizable by his face which had been plastered on telephone poles and stuck in store windows for weeks—but smaller, tireder, greyer than that picture would suggest—came modestly on stage and stood behind the reading stand, turning toward the singers with an expression of tender enjoyment, lifting his face, in fact, as if their singing fell on it like rain.

  A young man, boy, on the other side of the hall was looking at me steadily. I did not think I had seen him before, He was not very tall, dark-skinned; a bony face with deep eye-sockets, long slightly hollowed cheeks, a grave, unconsciously arrogant expression. At the end of the Negroes’ singing he moved from where he had been standing under the windows and disappeared in the crowd at the back of the hall. I thought at once that he was coming to stand beside me. Then I thought what nonsense; like a recognition in an opera, or some bad, sentimental, deeply stirring song.

  Everybody rose, twitched cotton away from sweaty backsides, began to sing the first hymn.

  Into a tent where a gypsy boy lay Dying alone at the end of the day News of Salvation we carried; said he Nobody ever has told it to me—

  I desperately wished that he would come. I concentrated my whole self into a kind of white prayer, willing him to show up beside me even while I told myself, Now he’s going round behind me, now he’s heading for the door, he’s going down the stairs—

  A change in the level of voices behind me told me he was there. People had drawn aside, there was a space with a body in it but no singing. I smelled the thin hot cotton shirt, sunburnt skin, soap and machine oil. My shoulder was grazed by his arm (it is like fire, just as they say) and he slipped into place beside me.

  We both looked straight ahead at the stage. The Baptist minister had introduced the revivalist, who began to talk in a friendly, conversational way. After a little while I rested my hand on the back of the chair in front of me. A little girl was sitting there bent forward, picking a scab off her knee. He put his hand on the back of the chair about two inches from mine. Then it seemed as if all sensation in my body, all hope, life, potential, flowed down into that one hand.

  The revivalist, who had started off so mildly, behind the reading stand, gradually worked himself up, and began pacing back and forth across the stage, his tone growing more and more intense, despairing, grief-stricken. Every so often he would emerge from his grief and whirl around, to roar like a lion directly into the audience. He painted a picture of a rope bridge, such as he had seen, he said, in his missionary days in South America. This bridge, frail and swaying, hung over a bottomless canyon and the canyon was filled with fire. It was the River of Fire, the River of Fire down below, in which were drowning, but never drowned, all that yelping, shrieking, blaspheming, tortured horde he now enumerated—politicians and gangsters, gamblers and drinkers and fornicators and movie stars and financiers and unbelievers. Each one of us, he said, had our own individual rope bridge, swaying over the inferno, tied up at the banks of Paradise on the other side. But Paradise was just what we could not hear or see, sometimes could not even imagine, for the roarings and writhings in the pit, and the fumes of sin it sent up all round us. What was that bridge called? It was The Lord’s Grace. The Lord’s Grace, and it was wonderfully strong; but every sin of ours, every word and act and thought of sin put a little nick in that rope, frayed that rope a little bit more—

  And some of your ropes can’t take much more! Some of your ropes are almost past the point of no return. They are frayed out with sin, they are eaten away with sin, they are nothing left but a thread! Nothing but a thread is holding you out of Hell! You all know, every single last one of you knows what condition your own bridge is in! One more nibble at the fruits of Hell, one more day and night of sin, and once that rope is broken you haven’t got another! But even a thread can hold you, if you want! God didn’t pass all his miracles back in the Bible days! No, I can tell you from my heart and from my own experience He is passing them here and now, and in the midst of us. Catch ahold of him and hold right on till the Day of Judgement, and you need fear no Evil.

  Ordinarily I would have been interested in listening to this and in seeing how people were taking it. For the most, calmly and pleasurably, no more disturbed than if he had been singing them a lullaby. Mr. McLaughlin, sitting on the stage, kept a suave downcast face; it was not his kind of exhortation. The Baptist minister had a broad, impressario’s smile. Old people in the audience would sing out, “Amen!” and rock themselves gently. Movie stars and politicians and fornicators gone beyond rescue; it seemed, for most people, a balmy comfortable thought. The lights were on now; bugs came in at the windows, just those few early bugs. You could hear now and then a quick, apologetic slap.

  But my attention was taken up with our two hands on the back of the chair. He moved his hand slightly. I moved mine. Again. Until skin touched lightly, vividly, drew away, came back, stayed together, pressed together. Now then. Our little fingers rubbing delicately against one another, his gradually overlapping mine. Hesitation; my hand spreading out a bit, his little finger touching my fourth finger, the fourth finger captured, and so on, by stages so formal and inevitable, with such reticence and certainty, his hand covering mine. When this was achieved he lifted it from the chair and held it between us. I felt angelic with gratitude, truly as if I had come out on another level of existence. I felt no further acknowledgement was needed, no further intimacy possible.

  The last hymn.

  I love to tell the story,

  ’Twill be my theme in Glory, To tell the old, old story—

  The Negroes led us, all of them except the little black man exhorting, drawing out voices upwards with their arms. Singing, people swayed together. A sharp green smell of sweat, like onions, smell of horse, pig manure, feeling of being caught, bound, borne away; tired, mournful happiness rising like a cloud. I had refused the hymn-sheets which Mr. Buchanan and other churchmen were handing out but I remembered the words and sang. I would have sung anything.

  But when the hymn was over he dropped my hand and moved away, joining a crowd of people who were all going down to the front of the hall, responding to an invitation to make a decision for Jesus, sign a pledge or renew a pledge, put some stamp of accomplishment on the evening. It did not occur to me that he meant to do this. I thought he had gone to look for somebody. There was great confusion and I lost him in a moment. I turned and found my way out of the hall, down the stairs, looking around several times to see if I could see him (but ready to pretend I was looking for somebody else, if I saw him looking at me). I loitered up the main street, looking in windows. He did not come.

  This was on a Friday evening. All weekend the thought of him stayed in my mind like a circus net spread underneath whatever I had to think about at the moment. I was constantly letting go and tumbling into it. I would try to recreate the exact texture of his skin, touching my own, try to remember accurately the varying pressure of his fingers. I would spread my hand out in front of me, surprised at how little it had to tell me. It was noncommittal as those objects in museums that have been handled by kings. I would analyze that smell, sorting out its familiar and unfamiliar elements. I would picture him as I first saw him across the hall, because I never really saw him after he came to stand beside me. His dark, wary, stubborn face. His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

  I did not know his name, or where he came from, or whether I would ever see him again.

  Monday, after school, I walked down John Str
eet hill with Jerry. A horn honked at us, and from an old truck, dusty with chaff, this face looked out. It was in no way changed or diminished by daylight.

  “The encyclopedias,” I said to Jerry. “He’s got some money for Mother. I have to talk to him. You go on.”

  Dizzy at this expected, yet unhoped-for reappearance, solid intrusion of the legendary into the real world, I got into the truck.

  “I thought you would be going to school.”

  “I’m almost through,” I said hastily. “I’m in Grade Thirteen.” “Lucky I saw you. I have to get back to the lumber yard. Why didn’t you wait up for me the other night?”

  “Where did you go?” I said, as if I hadn’t seen him.

  “I had to go down the front. There was so many people down there.”

  I realized then that “had to go down the front” meant he had gone to sign a pledge card, or be saved by the revivalist. It was typical of him that he did not say this in any more definite way. He never would explain, unless he had to. What I got out of him about himself, that first afternoon in the truck, and later, was a string of simple facts, offered usually in reply to questions. His name was Garnet French, he lived on a farm out past Jericho Valley but worked here in Jubilee, in the lumber yard. He had spent four months in jail, two years ago, for his part in a terrible fight outside the Porterfield beer parlour, in which a man had lost an eye. In jail he had been visited by a Baptist minister who had converted him. He had quit school after Grade Eight but had been allowed to start a couple of high school courses in jail because he thought he might go to Bible College and become a Baptist minister himself. He spoke of this goal without urgency now. He was twenty-three years old.

  The first thing he asked me to go to was a meeting of the Baptist Young People’s Society. Or perhaps he never asked me, just said, “All right, I’ll pick you up after supper,” and drove down our street that short distance and led me, dazed and silent, into the last place in Jubilee, except possibly the whorehouse, where I ever expected to be.