Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

  This was what I was going to do every Monday night all spring and into the summer—sit in a pew halfway back in the Baptist church, never getting used to it, always amazed and lonely as somebody thrown up in a shipwreck. He never asked me if I wanted to be there, what I thought of it once I was there, anything. He did say once, “I would probably have landed back in jail if it hadn’t been for the Baptist church. That’s all I know, that’s good enough for me.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Because I got in the habit of fighting and drinking like that.” On the back of Baptist pews were pieces of old gum, silvery-black and hard as iron. The church smelled sour, like a kitchen washed down with grey scrub-water, scrub-rags drying out behind the stove. The Young People were not all young. There was a woman named Caddie McQuaig who worked in Monk’s Butcher Shop, slapping chunks of raw meat into the grinder, hacking away with a big saw at a leg of beef, wrapped in a bloody white apron, hefty and jovial as Dutch Monk himself. Here she was in a flowered organdy dress, scrubbed hands on the pump-organ, red neck bared by her shingled hair, meek and attentive. There was a pair of short, monkey-faced brothers from the country, Ivan and Orrin Walpole, who did gymnastic tricks. And a big-busted, raw-faced girl who had worked with Fern Dogherty in the Post Office; Fern always called her Holy Betty. Girls from the Chainway Store, with their dusty Chainway pallor, lowest-paid, lowest on the social scale of all girls who worked in stores in Jubilee. One of them, I could not remember which, was supposed to have had a baby.

  Garnet was the President. Sometimes he would lead a prayer, beginning in a firm mannerly voice, “Our Heavenly Father—” The early heat of May had disappeared, and cold spring rain washed down the windows. I had that strange and confident sensation of being in a dream from which I would presently wake up. At home on the table in the front room lay my open books and the poem, “Andrea del Sarto,” which I had been reading before I came out, and which was still going through my head:

  A common greyness silvers everything, All in a twilight, you and I alike—

  After what was called the worship service we would go down to the basement of the church where there was a ping-pong table. Ping-pong games would be organized, Caddie McQuaig and one of the Chainway girls would unwrap sandwiches brought from home and make cocoa on a hotplate. Garnet taught people to play ping-pong, encouraged the Chainway girls who seemed to have hardly enough strength to lift the bat, joked with Caddie McQuaig who would become as boisterous, once she got down to the basement, as she was in the butcher shop.

  “I worry about you sitting there on that little organ stool, Caddie.” “What’d you say? What do you worry about?”

  “You sitting there on that little organ stool. Looks too small for you.”

  “You think it’s in danger of disappearing?” Her loud outraged delighted voice, face red as fresh meat.

  “Why, Caddie, I never thought any such thing,” said Garnet, with a regretful, downcast face.

  I smiled at everybody but was jealous, appalled, waiting only for all this to end, the cocoa cups to be washed, the church lights put out,

  Garnet to lead me out to the truck. Then we would drive down that muddy road that led past Pork Childs’ place (“I know Pork, he’ll loan me a chain and get me out if I get stuck,” Garnet said, and the thought of being on these equal terms, social terms, with Pork Childs who was of course a Baptist, produced in me that quiet, now very familiar, sinking of the heart). Presently nothing mattered. The unreality, long-drawnout embarrassment and tedium of the evening vanished in the cab of the truck, in the smell of its old split seats, and poultry feed, the sight of Garnet’s rolled-up sleeves and bare forearms, of his hands, loose and alert on the wheel. Black rain on the closed windows sheltered us. Or if the rain was over we would roll down the windows and feel the rank soft air near the invisible river, smell mint crushed under the truck wheels, where we pulled off the road to park. We nosed deep into the bushes, which scratched against the hood. The truck stopped with a last little bump that seemed a signal of achievement, permission, its lights, cutting weakly into the density of night, went out, and Garnet turned to me always with the same sigh, the same veiled and serious look, and we would cross over, going into a country where there was perfect security, no move that would not bring delight, disappointment was not possible. Only when I was sick, with a fever, had I ever before had such a floating feeling, feeling of being languid and protected and at the same time possessing unlimited power. We were still in the approaches to sex, circling, back-tracking, hesitating, not because we were afraid or because we had set any sort of prohibition on “going too far” (such explicitness, in that country, and with Garnet, was next to unthinkable) but because we felt an obligation as in the game of our hands on the back of the chair, not to hurry, to make shy, formal, temporary retreats in the face of so much pleasure. That very word, pleasure, had changed for me; I used to think it a mild sort of word, indicating a rather low-key self-indulgence; now it seemed explosive, the two vowels in the first syllable spurting up like fireworks, ending on the plateau of the last syllable, its dreamy purr.

  I would go home from these sessions by the river and not be able to sleep sometimes till dawn, not because of unrelieved sexual tension, as might be expected, but because I had to review, could not let go of, those great gifts I had received, gorgeous bonuses—lips on the wrists, the inside of the elbow, the shoulders, the breasts, hands on the belly, the thighs, between the legs. Gifts. Various kisses, tongue-touchings, suppliant and grateful noises. Audacity and revelation. The mouth closed frankly around the nipple seemed to make an avowal of innocence, defencelessness not because it imitated a baby’s but because it was not afraid of absurdity. Sex seemed to me all surrender—not the woman’s to the man but the person’s to the body, an act of pure faith, freedom in humility. I would lie washed in these implications, discoveries, like somebody suspended in clear and warm and irresistibly moving water, all night.

  Garnet took me also to baseball games, sometimes played too soon after rain. These took place in the evening, in the fairgrounds out at the end of the Diagonal Road, and in the neighbouring towns. Garnet was the first baseman on the Jubilee team. The players wore red and grey uniforms. The ballparks all had rickety bleachers, board fences painted with old soft-drink and cigarette ads. The bleachers were never more than a third full. Old men came—the same old men who were always sitting on the long bench in front of the hotel, or who played checkers, in the summer, on the painted cement checkerboard behind the Cenotaph, who walked out to inspect the Wawanash River in flood every spring and stood nodding and commenting as if they had brought it up themselves. Boys ten or eleven years old sat in the grass over by the fence, smoking. The sun would often come out after a long gloomy day, and lie across the field in tranquil bars of gold. I sat with the women—a few girl friends and young wives, who would scream and bounce up and down on the bleachers. I never could scream. I was mystified by baseball as by the Baptist church, but it did not make me uncomfortable. I liked to think of this male ritual as the prelude to ours.

  I still studied, other evenings. I learned things, I had not forgotten how. But I would fall into daydreams lasting half an hour. I still met Jerry at Haines’s Restaurant.

  “What are you going out with that Neanderthal for?”

  “What do you mean Neanderthal? He’s Cro-Magnon,” I said, in cheerful shameful treachery.

  But Jerry did not have many thoughts to spare for me. Decisions about his future were heavy on him. “If I go to McGill—” he said. “On the other hand, if I go to Toronto—” The scholarships he was likely to win had to be taken into account, and he had to look ahead too; which university would give him the best chance of getting into a top American graduate school? I took an interest. I looked at the calendars, compared the alternatives with him, turning over in my mind the melting details of my last meeting with Garnet.

  “You’re still going to university, aren’t you?”

  “Wh
y wouldn’t I be?”

  “You better be careful, in that case. I’m not being sarcastic. I’m not

  jealous. I’m thinking of your own good.”

  My mother thought of it too. “I know who the Frenches are. Out beyond Jericho Valley. That’s the poorest godforsaken backwoods you ever hope to see.” I didn’t tell her about Baptist Young People’s but she found out. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “I think you must have softening of the brain.”

  I said roughly, “Can’t I go where I like?”

  “You’ve gone addled over a boy. You with your intelligence. Do you intend to live in Jubilee all your life? Do you want to be the wife of a lumber-yard worker? Do you want to join the Baptist Ladies Aid?”

  “No!”

  “Well I’m only trying to open your eyes. For your own good.” When Garnet came to our house she treated him with courtesy, asked him questions about the lumber business. He called her Ma’am, just as Jerry and I would do in our parodies of country people. “Well I don’t really know so much about that end of it, Ma’am,” he would say, polite and self-possessed. Any attempt at this kind of general conversation, any attempt to make him think in this way, to theorize, make systems, brought a blank, very slightly offended and superior look into his face. He hated people using big words, talking about things outside of their own lives. He hated people trying to tie things together. Since these had been great pastimes of mine, why did he not hate me? Perhaps I successfully hid from him what I was like. More likely, he rearranged me, took just what he needed, to suit himself. I did that with him. I loved the dark side, the strange side, of him, which I did not know, not the regenerate Baptist; or rather, I saw the Baptist, of which he was proud, as a mask he was playing with that he could easily discard. I tried to get him to tell me about the fight outside the Porterfield beer parlour, about being in jail. I would pay attention to the life of his instincts, never to his ideas.

  I tried to make him tell me why he had come over to me that night at the Revival meeting.

  “I liked your looks.”

  That was all the declaration I was going to get.

  Nothing that could be said by us would bring us together; words were our enemies. What we knew about each other was only going to be confused by them. This was the knowledge that is spoken of as “only sex,” or “physical attraction.” I was surprised, when I thought about it—am surprised still—at the light, even disparaging tone that is taken, as if this was something that could be found easily, every day.

  He took me out to see his family. It was a Sunday afternoon. The examinations began on Monday. I said I had meant to study, and he said, “You can’t do that. Momma has already killed two chickens.”

  The person who could study was in fact already lost, locked away. I could not have made sense of any book, put one word after another, with Garnet in the room. It was all I could do to read the words on a billboard, when we were driving. It was the very opposite of going out with Jerry, and seeing the world dense and complicated but appallingly unsecretive; the world I saw with Garnet was something not far from what I thought animals must see, the world without names.

  I had driven the road to Jericho Valley before, with my mother. In some places it was just wide enough for the truck. Wild roses brushed the cab. We drove for miles through thick bush. There was a field full of stumps. I remembered that, remembered my mother saying, “One time it was all like that, all this country. They haven’t progressed here much beyond the pioneer stage. Maybe they’re too lazy. Or the land isn’t worth it. Or a combination of both.”

  Skeletons of a burned-out house and barn.

  “You like our house?” Garnet said.

  His real house was down in a hollow, with big trees around so close you could not get a look at it as a whole house; what you could see were the brown-shingled, faded gables and the verandah, which had been painted yellow so long ago the paint was just streaks now on the splintered wood. As we drove into the yard, and swung around, there was a great fluttery eruption of chickens, and two big dogs came yapping, leaping up at the open windows of the truck.

  Two girls, about nine and ten years old, were jumping up and down on a set of bedsprings that had been sitting in the yard long enough to whiten the grass. They stopped and stared. Garnet led me past and did not introduce me to them. He did not introduce me to anybody. Members of his family would appear—I was not sure which were members of his immediate family and which were uncles, aunts, cousins—and would start talking to him, looking sideways at me. I found out their names sometimes by listening to them talk to each other, and they never called me by name at all.

  There was a girl I thought I had seen at the High School. She was barefoot and brilliantly made up and swinging moodily around one of the verandah posts. “Look at Thelma!” Garnet said. “When Thelma puts on lipstick, she uses up a whole tube. Any guy that kissed her, he’d get stuck. He wouldn’t ever be able to haul himself away.” Thelma filled her rouged and powdered cheeks with air, let it out with a crude sound.

  Out came a short, round, angry-looking woman wearing running shoes without laces. Her ankles were swollen so that her legs looked perfectly round, like drainpipes. She was the first person to speak to me directly. “You’re the daughter of the encyclopedia lady. I know your Momma. Can’t you find any place to sit down?” She pushed a little boy and a cat out of a rocker and stood by it till I had seated myself. She herself sat down on the top step, and began yelling instructions and reproofs at everybody.

  “Shut them chickens up in the back! Get me some lettuce and green onions and radishes out of the garden! Lila! Phyllis! Quit that jumping up and down! Can’t you think of anything better to do? Boyd, get out of that truck! Get him out of that truck! He put it in gear the other day and it rolled across the yard and missed this verandah by inches.”

  She took a package of tobacco and some cigarette papers out of her apron pockets.

  “I’m not a Baptist lady, I enjoy a cigarette now and then. Are you a Baptist?”

  “No. I go with Garnet.”

  “Garnet got going to it after his trouble—you know about

  Garnet’s trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well he got into it after his trouble and I never said it’s not a good thing for him, but has some strict ideas. We all used to be—we are— United, but it’s quite a distance to drive and I’m at work sometimes, Sunday’s not any different day in a hospital.” She told me she worked in the Porterfield Hospital, as a nurses aide. “Me and Garnet, we mainstay the family,” she said. “Farms like this is no place to make a living.” She told me about accidents, a poisoned child who had been brought into the hospital recently turned as black as shoe polish, a man with a crushed hand, a boy who got a fishhook in his eye. She told me about an arm that was hanging from the elbow by a strip of skin. Garnet had disappeared. In the corner of the verandah sat a man in overalls, vast and yellow as a Buddha, but with no such peaceful expression. He kept raising his eyebrows and showing his teeth in an immediately fading grin. At first I thought this was a sardonic commentary on the stories about the hospital; later I realized it was a facial tic.

  The girls had stopped jumping on the bedsprings and come to hang around their mother, supplying her with details she might miss. The boys fell into a fight in the yard, rolling over and over on the hard dirt, savage, silent, their bare backs as brown and smooth as bark is, on the inside. “I’ll go and get a kettle of boiling water!” the mother warned. “I’ll scald the hide off you!” One of the girls said, “Would she like to see the creek?”

  She meant me. They took me down to the creek, a trickle of brown water among the flat white stones. They showed me where it came to in the spring. One year it had flooded the house. They took me to the haymow to look at a family of kittens, orange and black, that did not have their eyes open yet. They took me through the empty stable and showed me how the barn was propped up with makeshift beams and poles. “If we ever get a big wind
storm this barn is going to fall down.”

  They skipped through the stable making up a song: This old barn is falling down, falling down—

  They showed me through the house. The rooms were large, high-ceilinged, sparsely and strangely furnished. There was a brass bed in what seemed to be the living room, and piles of clothes and quits in the corners, on the floor, as if the family had just moved in. Many windows were uncurtained. Sunlight came into the high rooms through the barely moving trees, so the walls were covered with leafy floating shadows. They showed me the marks the flood water had left on the walls, and some pictures from magazines they had cut out and tacked up. These were of movie stars, and ladies in lovely ethereal dresses advertising sanitary napkins.

  In the kitchen the mother was washing vegetables “How’d you like to live here, eh? It looks pretty plain to anybody from town, but we always get enough to eat. The air’s lovely, in summer anyway, lovely and cool down by the creek. Cool in the summer, protected in the winter. Its the best situated house I know of.”

  All the linoleum was black and bumpy, just islands of the old pattern left, under the table, by the windows where it didn’t get so much wear. I smelled that grey smell of stewing chicken.

  Garnet opened the screen door, stood dark against the glare of the back yard. He had a pair of work pants on, no shirt.

  “I’ve got something to show you.”

  We went out on the back porch, his sisters too, and he made me look up. Carved on the underside of one of the roof-beams of the porch was a list of girls’ names, each one with an X after it. “Garnet’s girl friends!” one of the sisters cried, and they giggled rapturously, but Garnet read out in a serious voice,

  “Doris McIver! Her father owned a sawmill, up past Blue River. Still does. If I had’ve married her, I would’ve been rich!”

  “If that’s any way to get rich!” said his mother, who had followed as far as the screen door.