by Alice Munro
She sat down heavily on her bed, her bum making a big hollow. I remembered that mattress, how when I stayed all night we would always roll into the middle and wake up kicking and butting each other.
“I’m pregnant you know. Don’t look at me with that stupid look. Everybody does it. Its just everybody isn’t unlucky enough to get pregnant. Everybody does it. Its getting to be just like saying hello.” With her feet on the floor she lay back on the bed, put her hands behind her head and squinted at the light. “That lamp is full of bugs.”
“I know. I’ve done it too,” I said.
She sat up. “You have? Who with? Jerry Storey. He wouldn’t know how. Garnet?”
“Yes.”
She flopped back. “Well, how did you like it?” She sounded suspicious.
“Fine.”
“It gets better as it goes along. The first time it hurt me so bad.
That wasn’t Scott, either. He had a thing on, you know. Hurt! We should have had some Vaseline. Where are you going to get Vaseline, out in the bush in the middle of the night? Where did it happen to you the first time?”
I told her about the peonies, the blood on the ground, the cat killing a bird. We lay on our stomachs across the bed and told everything, scandalous details. I even told Naomi, all this time later, about Mr. Chamberlain, and how that was the first one I had ever seen, and what he did with it. I was rewarded with her pounding the bed with her fist, laughing and saying, “Jesus, I never yet saw anybody do that!” After some time, though, she grew gloomy again, and raised herself on the bed to look down at her stomach.
“You’re lucky yet. You better start using something. You better be careful. Nothing is sure, anyway. Those rotten old safes split sometimes. When I first knew I was pregnant I took quinine. I took slippery elm and damn laxative and jujubes and I sat in a mustard bath till I thought I was going to turn into a hot dog. Nothing works.”
“Didn’t you ask your mother?”
“That was her idea, the mustard bath. She doesn’t know as much as she lets on.”
“You don’t have to get married. You could go to Toronto—” “Sure, stick me in a Salvation Army home. Praise Jesus!” she quavered, and added somewhat inconsistently in view of the mustard and quinine, “Anyway I wouldn’t think it was right to give my baby up to strangers.”
“All right, but if you don’t want to get married—”
“Oh, who says I don’t want to? I’ve collected all this stuff, I might as well get married. You always get depressed when you’re first pregnant, its hormones. I’ve got the most god-awful constipation as well.”
She walked me out to the sidewalk. She stood there looking up and down the street, hands on her hips, stomach pushing out her old plaid skirt. I could see her married, a bossy, harassed, satisfied young mother out looking for her children, to call them in to bed or braid their hair or otherwise interfere with them. “Good-bye nonvirgin,” she said affectionately.
When I was halfway up the block, under the street light, she yelled, “Hey Dell” and came running clumsily after me, panting and laughing, and when she got close she put her hands up on either side of her mouth and said in a shouting whisper, “Don’t trust withdrawal either!”
“I won’t!”
“The bastards never get it out in time!”
Then we each walked in our own directions, turning around and waving two or three times, with mocking exaggeration, as we used to.
Garnet and i went to Third Bridge to swim, after supper. We made love first, in the long grass, after scouting around for a while to find a place free of thistles, then walked awkwardly holding on to each other down a path meant for one person, stopping and kissing along the way. The quality of kisses changed a good deal, from before to after; at least Garnet’s did, going from passionate to consolatory, pleading to indulgent. How quickly he came back, after crying out the way he did, and turning his eyes up and throbbing all over and sinking into me like a shot gull! Sometimes when he had barely got his breath back I would ask him what he was thinking and he would say, “I was just figuring out how I could fix that muffler—” But this time he said, “About when would we get married.”
Naomi was married now, living in Tupperton. We were past the peak of summer. Mountain ash berries were out. The river had gone down, after weeks with little rain, revealing lush peninsulas of water-weeds that looked as if they would be solid enough to walk on.
We walked into the water, sinking in mud until we reached the pebbly, sandy bottom. The results of the examinations had become known that week. I had passed. I had not won my scholarship. I had not received a single first-class mark.
“Would you like to have a baby?”
“Yes,” I said. The water which was almost as warm as the air touched my sore prickled buttocks. I was weak from making love, I felt myself warm and lazy, like a big cabbage spreading, as my back my arms my chest went down into the water, like big cabbage leaves loosening and spreading on the ground.
Where would such a lie come from? It was not a lie.
“You have to join the church first,” he said shyly. “You have to get baptized.”
I fell on the water, arms spread. Bluebottles made their quivering, directly horizontal flights on a level with my eyes.
“You know how they do it in our church? Baptizing?”
“How?”
“Dunk you right under the water. They got a tank behind the pulpit, covered up. That’s where they do it. But its better to do it in a river, several at one time.”
He threw himself into the water and swam after me, trying to catch hold of one foot.
“When are you going to get it done? Could be this month.”
I turned on my back and floated, kicking water in his face.
“You have to get saved sometime.”
The river was still as a pond; you couldn’t tell to look at it which way the current was going. It held the reflection of the opposite banks, Fairmile Township, dark with pine and spruce and cedar bush.
“Why do I have to?”
“You know why.”
“Why?”
He caught up to me and grabbed me by the shoulders, pushed me gently up and down in the water. “I ought to baptize you now and get the job over with. I ought to baptize you now.”
I laughed.
“I don’t want to be baptized. Its no good if I don’t want to be baptized.” Though it would have been so easy, just a joke, to give in, I was not able to do it. He kept saying, “Baptize you!” and bobbing me up and down, with less and less gentleness, and I kept refusing, laughing, shaking my head at him. Gradually, with the struggle, laughing stopped, and the wide, determined, painful grins on our faces hardened.
“You think you’re too good for it,” he said softly.
“I don’t!”
“You think you’re too good for anything. Any of us.”
“I don’t!”
“Well get baptized then!” He pushed me right under the water, taking me by surprise. I came up spluttering and blowing my nose.
“Next time you won’t get out so easy! I’m going to keep you down till you say you’ll do it! Say you’ll get baptized or I’ll baptize you anyway—”
He pushed me down again but this time I was expecting it. I held my breath and fought him. I fought strongly and naturally, as anybody does, held down in the water, and without thinking much about who was holding me. But when he let me come up just long enough to hear him say, “Now say you’ll do it,” I saw his face streaming with water I had splashed over him and I felt amazement, not that I was fighting with Garnet but that anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over me. I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be frightened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was—in play, that I meant to keep him sewed up in his golden lover’s skin forever, even if five minutes before I had talked about marrying him. This was clear as day to me,
and I opened my mouth to say whatever would make it clear to him, and I saw that he knew it all already; this was what he knew, that I had somehow met his good offerings with my deceitful offerings, whether I knew it or not, matched my complexity and play-acting to his true intent.
You think you’re too good for it.
“Say you’ll do it then!” His dark, amiable but secretive face broken by rage, a helpless sense of insult. I was ashamed of this insult but had to cling to it, because it was only my differences, my reservations, my life. I thought of him kicking and kicking that man in front of the Porterfield beer parlour. I had thought I wanted to know about him but I hadn’t really, I had never really wanted his secrets or his violence or himself taken out of the context of that peculiar and magical and, it seemed now, possibly fatal game.
Suppose in a dream you jumped willingly into a hole and laughed while people threw soft tickling grass on you, then understood when your mouth and eyes were covered up that it was no game at all, or if it was, it was a game that required you to be buried alive. I fought underwater exactly as you would fight in such a dream, with a feeling of desperation that was not quite immediate, that had to work upward through layers of incredulity. Yet I thought that he might drown me. I really thought that. I thought that I was fighting for my life.
When he let me come up again he tried the conventional baptizing position, bending me backwards from the waist, and this was a mistake. I was able to kick him low in the belly—not in the genitals though I would not have cared, I did not know or care where I kicked—and these kicks were strong enough to make him lose his hold and stagger a bit and I got away. As soon as there was a yard of water between us the absurdity and horror of our fight became plain and it could not be resumed. He did not come towards me. I walked slowly safely out of the water which at this time of year was not much more than armpit-deep, anywhere. I was shaking, gasping, drinking air.
I dressed at once in the shelter of the truck, with difficulty making my legs go through the legs of my shorts, trying to hold my breath to steady myself, so I could do up the buttons of my blouse.
Garnet called me.
“I’ll give you a ride home.”
“I want to walk.”
“I’ll come and pick you up Monday night.”
I didn’t answer. I guessed this was said for courtesy. He would not come. If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, but as it was we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more.
I started walking along the track that led to the road and after a while walking calmed me down and strengthened me; my legs were not so terribly weak. I walked down the Third Concession, which came out at the Cemetery Road. I had about three and a half miles to walk altogether.
I cut through the Cemetery. It was getting dark. August was as far away from midsummer as April, a fact always hard to remember. I saw a boy and girl—I could not make out who they were—lying on the clipped grass over by the Mundy mausoleum, on whose dark cement walls Naomi and I had once written an epitaph that we had made up, and thought wicked and hilarious, and that I could no longer fully remember.
Here lies the bodies of lots of Mundys
Who died from peeing in their soup on Sundays—
I looked at these lovers lying on the graveyard grass without envy or curiosity. As I walked on into Jubilee I repossessed the world. Trees, houses, fences, streets, came back to me, in their own sober and familiar shapes. Unconnected to the life of love, uncoloured by love, the world resumes its own, its natural and callous importance. This is first a blow, then an odd consolation. And already I felt my old self— my old devious, ironic, isolated self—beginning to breathe again and stretch and settle, though all around it my body clung cracked and bewildered, in the stupid pain of loss.
My mother was already in bed. When I had failed to win the scholarship something she had never questioned—her hopes of the future, through her children—had collapsed. She was faced with the possibility that Owen and I would do nothing and become nothing after all, that we were mediocre, or infected with the dreaded, proud, scared perversity of my father’s family. There was Owen, living out on the Flats Road, saying “turrible” and “drownded” and using Uncle Benny’s grammar, saying he wanted to quit school. There was I going out with Garnet French and refusing to talk about it, and not getting the scholarship.
“You will have to do what you want,” she said bitterly.
But was that so easy to know? I went out to the kitchen, turned on the light, and made myself a big mixture of fried potatoes and onions and tomatoes and eggs, which I ate greedily and sombrely out of the pan, standing up. I was free and I was not free. I was relieved and I was desolate. Suppose, then, I had never wakened up? Suppose I had let myself lie down and be baptized in the Wawanash river?
I entertained this possibility off and on, as if it still existed—along with the leafy shade and waterstains in his house, and the bounty of my lover’s body—for many years.
He did not come on Monday. I waited to see if he would. I combed my hair and waited, classically, behind the curtains in our front room. I did not know what I would do if he came; the ache of wanting to see his truck, his face, swallowed up everything else. I thought of walking past the Baptist Church, to see if the truck was there. If I had done that, if it had been there, I might have walked on inside, rigid as a sleepwalker. I did get as far as our verandah. I was crying, I noticed, whimpering in a monotonous rhythm the way children do to celebrate a hurt. I turned around, went back into the hall to look in the dim mirror at my twisted wet face. Without diminishment of pain I observed myself; I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering. I said into the mirror a line from Tennyson, from my mother’s Complete Tennyson that was a present from her old teacher, Miss Rush. I said it with absolute sincerity, absolute irony.
He cometh not, she said.
From “Mariana,” one of the silliest poems I had ever read. It made my tears flow harder. Watching myself still, I went back to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee and brought it into the dining room where the city paper was still lying on the table. My mother had torn the crossword out and taken it up to bed. I opened it up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. Cities existed; telephone operators were wanted; the future could be furnished without love or scholarships. Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.
Garnet French, Garnet French, Garnet French. Real Life.
Epilogue: The Photographer
“This town is rife with suicides,” was one of the things my mother would say, and for a long time I carried this mysterious, dogmatic statement around with me, believing it to be true—that is, believing that Jubilee had many more suicides than other places, just as Porterfield had fights and drunks, that its suicides distinguished the town like the cupola on the Town Hall. Later on my attitude towards everything my mother said became one of skepticism and disdain, and I argued that there were, in fact, very few suicides in Jubilee, that certainly their number could not exceed the statistical average, and I would challenge my mother to name them. She would go methodically along the various streets of the town, in her mind, saying, “—hanged himself, while his wife and family were at church—went o
ut of the room after breakfast and shot himself in the head—” but there were not really so many; I was probably closer to the truth than she was.
There were two suicides by drowning, if you counted Miss Farris my old teacher. The other one was Marion Sherriff, on whose family my mother, and others, would linger with a touch of pride, saying, “Well, there is a family that has had its share of Tragedy!” One brother had died an alcoholic, one was in the Asylum at Tupperton, and Marion had walked into the Wawanash River. People always said she walked into it, though in the case of Miss Farris they said she threw herself into it. Since nobody had seen either of them do it, the difference must have come from the difference in the women themselves, Miss Farris being impulsive and dramatic in all she did, and Marion Sherriff deliberate and take-your-time.
At least that was how she looked in her picture, which was hanging in the main hall of the High School, above the case containing the
Marion A. Sherriff Girls Athletic Trophy, a silver cup taken out each year and presented to the best girl athlete in the school, then put back in, after having that girl’s name engraved on it. In the picture Marion Sherriff was holding a tennis racket and wearing a white pleated skirt and a white sweater with two dark stripes around the V of the neck. She had her hair parted in the middle, pinned unbecomingly back from the temples; she was stocky and unsmiling.
“Pregnant, naturally,” Fern Dogherty used to say, and Naomi said, everybody said, except my mother.
“That was never established. Why blacken her name?”
“Some fellow got her in trouble and walked out on her,” said Fern positively. “Otherwise why drown herself, a girl seventeen?”
A time came when all the books in the Library in the Town Hall were not enough for me, I had to have my own. I saw that the only thing to do with my life was to write a novel. I picked on the Sherriff family to write it about; what had happened to them isolated them, splendidly, doomed them to fiction. I changed the family name from Sherriff to Halloway, and the dead father from a storekeeper to a judge. I knew from my reading that in the families of judges, as of great landowners, degeneracy and madness were things to be counted on. The mother I could keep just as she was, just as I used to see her in the days when I went to the Anglican Church, and she was always there, gaunt and superb, with her grand trumpeting supplications. I moved them out of their house, though, transported them from the mustard-coloured stucco bungalow behind the Herald-Advance building, where they had always lived and where even now Mrs. Sheriff kept a tidy lawn and picked-clean flowerbeds, and into a house of my own invention, a towered brick house with long narrow windows and a porte-cochère and a great deal of surrounding shrubbery perversely cut to look like roosters, dogs and foxes.
