Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

  Nobody knew about this novel. I had no need to tell anybody. I wrote out a few bits of it and put them away, but soon I saw that it was a mistake to try to write anything down; what I wrote down might flaw the beauty and wholeness of the novel in my mind.

  I carried it—the idea of it—everywhere with me, as if it were one of those magic boxes a favoured character gets hold of in a fairy story: touch it and his troubles disappear. I carried it along when Jerry Storey and I walked out on the railway tracks and he told me that some day, if the world lasted, newborn babies could be stimulated with waves of electricity and would be able to compose music like Beethoven’s, or like Verdi’s, whatever was wanted. He explained how people could have their intelligence and their talents and preferences and desires built into them, in judicious amounts; why not?

  “Like Brave New World?” I asked him, and he said, what was that? I told him, and he answered chastely, “I don’t know, I never read fiction.”

  I just kept hold of the idea of the novel, and felt better; it seemed to make what he said unimportant even if true. He began to sing sentimental songs with a German accent and tried goose-stepping along the rails, falling off as I knew he would.

  “Be-lieff me if all those en-dearing jung tcharms—”

  In my novel I had got rid of the older brother, the alcoholic; three tragic destinies were too much even for a book, and certainly more than I could handle. The younger brother I saw as gentle and loving, with an offensive innocence about him; pink freckled face, defenceless fattish body. Bullied at school, unable to learn arithmetic or geography, he would be happy once a year, when he was allowed to ride round and round on the merry-go-round at the Kinsmen’s Fair, beatifically smiling. (I got this of course from Frankie Hall, that grown idiot who used to live out on the Flats Road, and was dead by now; he was always let ride free, all day long, and would wave at people with a royal negligence, though he never acknowledged anybody at any other time.) Boys would taunt him about his sister, about— Caroline! Her name was Caroline. She came ready-made into my mind, taunting and secretive, blotting out altogether that pudgy Marion, the tennis-player. Was she a witch? Was she a nymphomaniac? Nothing so simple!

  She was wayward and light as a leaf and she slipped along the streets of Jubilee as if she was trying to get through a crack in an invisible wall, sideways. She had long black hair. She bestowed her gifts capriciously on men—not on good-looking young men who thought they had a right to her, not on sullen high school heroes, athletes, with habits of conquest written on their warm-blooded faces, but on middle-aged weary husbands, defeated salesmen passing through town, even, occasionally, on the deformed and mildly deranged. But her generosity mocked them, her bittersweet flesh, the colour of peeled almonds, burned men down quickly and left a taste of death. She was the sacrifice, spread for sex on mouldy uncomfortable tombstones, pushed against the cruel bark of trees, her frail body squashed into the mud and hen-dirt of barnyards, supporting the killing weight of men, but it was she, more than they, who survived.

  One day a man came to take photographs at the High School. She saw him first shrouded in his photographer’s black cloth, a hump of grey-black, shabby cloth behind the tripod, the big eye, the black accordion pleating of the old-fashioned camera. When he came out, what did he look like? Black hair parted in the middle, combed back in two wings, dandruff, rather narrow chest and shoulders and a pasty, flaky skin—and in spite of his look of scruffiness and ill health, a wicked fluid energy about him, a bright unpitying smile.

  He had no name in the book. He was always called The Photographer. He drove around the country in a high square car whose top was of flapping black cloth. The pictures he took turned out to be unusual, even frightening. People saw that in his pictures they had aged twenty or thirty years. Middle-aged people saw in their own features the terrible, growing, inescapable likeness of their dead parents; young fresh girls and men showed what gaunt or dulled or stupid faces they would have when they were fifty. Brides looked pregnant, children adenoidal. So he was not a popular photographer, though cheap. However no one liked to refuse him business; everybody was afraid of him. Children dropped into the ditches when his car was coming along the road. But Caroline ran after him, she tramped the hot roads looking for him, she waited and waylaid him and offered herself to him without the tender contempt, indifferent readiness she showed to other men, but with straining eagerness and hope and cries. And one day (when she could already feel her womb swollen like a hard yellow gourd in her belly), she found the car overturned beside a bridge, overturned in a ditch beside a dry creek. It was empty. He was gone. That night she walked into the Wawanash River.

  That was all. Except that after she died her poor brother, looking at the picture the Photographer had taken of his sister’s high school class, saw that in this picture Caroline’s eyes were white.

  I had not worked out all the implications of this myself, but felt they were varied and powerful.

  For this novel I had changed Jubilee, too, or picked out some features of it and ignored others. It became an older, darker, more decaying town, full of unpainted board fences covered with tattered posters advertising circuses, fall fairs, elections, that had long since come and gone. People in it were very thin, like Caroline, or fat as bubbles. Their speech was subtle and evasive and bizarrely stupid; their platitudes crackled with madness. The season was always the height of summer—white, brutal heat, dogs lying as if dead on the sidewalks, waves of air shuddering, jelly-like, over the empty highway. (But how, then—for niggling considerations of fact would pop up, occasionally, to worry me—how then was there going to be enough water in the Wawanash River? Instead of moving, head bowed, moonlight-naked, acquiescent, into its depths, Caroline would have to lie down on her face as if she was drowning herself in the bathtub.)

  All pictures. The reasons for things happening I seemed vaguely to know, but could not explain; I expected all that would come clear later. The main thing was that it seemed true to me, not real but true, as if I had discovered, not made up, such people and such a story, as if that town was lying close behind the one I walked through every day.

  I did not pay much attention to the real Sherriffs, once I had transformed them for fictional purposes. Bobby Sherriff, the son who had been in the Asylum, came home for a while—it seemed this was something that had happened before—and was to be seen walking around Jubilee chatting with people. I had been close enough to him to hear his soft, deferential, leisurely voice, I had observed that he always looked freshly barbered, talcumed, wore clothes of good quality, was short, stout, and walked with that carefree air of enjoyment affected by those who have nothing to do. I hardly connected him with my mad Halloway brother.

  Jerry Storey and I coming back from our walks could see Jubilee so plainly, now the leaves were off the trees; it lay before us in a not very complicated pattern of streets named after battles and ladies and monarchs and pioneers. Once as we walked over the trestle a car full of people from our class at school passed underneath, hooting at us, and I did have a vision, as if from outside, of how strange this was— Jerry contemplating and welcoming a future that would annihilate Jubilee and life in it, and I myself planning secretly to turn it into black fable and tie it up in my novel, and the town, the people who really were the town, just hooting car horns—to mock anybody walking, not riding, on a Sunday afternoon—and never knowing what danger they were in from us.

  Every morning, starting about the middle of July, the last summer I was in Jubilee, I would walk downtown between nine and ten o’clock. I would walk as far as the Herald-Advance building, look in their front window, and walk home. I was waiting for the results of the departmental examinations which I had written in June. The results would come to us in the mail but they always came to the paper a day or so in advance, and were taped up in the front window. If they had not come in the morning mail, they would not come that day. Every morning when I saw that there was no sheet of paper in the window, nothing
but the potato shaped like a pigeon that Pork Childs had dug up in his garden, and which sat on the windowsill waiting for the double squash and deformed carrot and enormous pumpkin which would surely join it later, I felt reprieved. I could be at peace for one more day. I knew I had done badly in those exams. I had been sabotaged by love, and it was not likely I would get the scholarship which for years I and everybody else had been counting on, to carry me away from Jubilee.

  One morning after I had gone down to the Herald-Advance I walked past the Sheriffs’ house instead of going back up the main street as I usually did, and Bobby Sherriff surprised me, standing by the gate, saying, “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Could I persuade you to step into my yard and try a piece of cake? Said the spider to the fly, eh?” His good manners were humble and, I thought, ironic. “Mother went to Toronto on the six o’clock train so I thought well, I’m up anyway, why don’t I try and bake a cake?”

  He held the gate open. I did not know how to get out of it. I followed him up the steps.

  “Its nice and cool on the porch here. Sit over here. Would you like a glass of lemonade? I’m an expert at making lemonade.”

  So I sat on the porch of the Sherriffs’ house, rather hoping that nobody would go by and see me, and Bobby Sherriff brought me a piece of cake on a small plate, with a proper cake fork, and an embroidered napkin. He went back inside and brought me a glass of lemonade with ice cubes, mint leaves and a maraschino cherry. He apologized for not bringing both the cake and the lemonade at once, on a tray; he explained to me where the trays were in the cupboard, under a great pile of plates, so that it was difficult to get one out, and he would rather be sitting here with me, he said, than down on his knees poking around in some dark old cupboard. Then he apologized for the cake, saying he was not a great baker, it was just that he liked to try some recipe once in a while, and he did feel he shouldn’t offer me a cake without icing, but he had never mastered the art of making icing, he relied on his mother for that, so here it was. He said he hoped I liked mint leaves in my lemonade—as if most people were very fussy about this, and you never could tell whether they would take it into their heads to throw the mint leaves out. He behaved as if it was a great act of courtesy, of unlooked-for graciousness on my part, to sit here, to eat and drink at all.

  There was a strip of carpet on the porch floorboards, which were wide, had cracks between, and were painted grey. It looked like an old hall carpet, too worn for inside. There were two brown wicker chairs, with faded, lumpy cretonne cushions, which we were sitting on, and a round wicker table. On the table was something like a china mug, or vase, with no flowers in it, but a tiny Red Ensign, and a Union Jack. It was one of those souvenirs that had been sold when the King and Queen visited Canada in 1939; there were their youthful, royal faces, shedding kind light, as at the front of the Grade Eight classroom in the Public School. Such an object on the table did not mean that the Sheriffs were particularly patriotic. These souvenirs could be found in plenty of houses in Jubilee. That was just it. The ordinariness of everything brought me up short, made me remember. This was the Sheriffs’ house. I could see a little bit of the hallway, brown and pink wallpaper, through the screen door. That was the doorway through which Marion had walked. Going to school. Going to play tennis. Going to the Wawanash River. Marion was Caroline. She was all I had had, to start with; her act and her secrecy. I had not even thought of that when I first entered the Sheriffs’ yard, or while I sat waiting on the porch for Bobby to bring me my cake. I had not thought of my novel. I hardly ever did think of it, any more. I never said to myself that I had lost it, I believed that it was carefully stored away, to be brought out some time in the future. The truth was that some damage had been done to it that I knew could not be put right. Damage had been done; Caroline and the other Halloways and their town had lost authority; I had lost faith. But I did not want to think about that, and did not.

  But now I remembered with surprise how I had made it, the whole mysterious and as it turned out unreliable structure rising from this house, the Sheriffs, a few poor facts, and everything that was not told.

  “I know you,” said Bobby Sherriff shyly. “Didn’t you think I knew who you were? You’re the girl who’s going to university, on scholarships.”

  “I haven’t got them yet.”

  “You’re a clever girl.”

  And what happened, I asked myself, to Marion? Not to Caroline.

  What happened to Marion? What happened to Bobby Sherriff when he had to stop baking cakes and go back to the Asylum? Such questions persist, in spite of novels. It is a shock, when you have dealt so cunningly, powerfully, with reality, to come back and find it still there. Would Bobby Sherriff give me a clue now, to madness? Would he say, in his courteous conversational voice, “Napoleon was my father”? Would he spit through a crack in the floorboards and say, “I’m sending rain over the Gobi Desert”? Was that the sort of thing they did?

  “You know I went to college. The University of Toronto. Trinity College. Yes.”

  “I didn’t win any scholarships,” he went on in a minute, as if I had asked. “I was an average student. Mother thought they might make a lawyer out of me. It was a sacrifice to send me. The Depression, you know how nobody had any money in the Depression. Now they seem to. Oh, yes. Since the War. They’re all buying. Fergus Colby, you know, down at Colby Motors, he was showing me the list he’s got, people putting their names down to get the new Oldsmobiles, new Chevrolets.”

  “When you go to college you must look after your diet. That is very important. Anybody at college tends to eat a lot of starchy food, because it is filling and cheap. I knew a girl who used to cook in her room, she lived on macaroni and bread. Macaroni and bread! I blame my own breakdown on the food I was eating. There was no nourishment for the brain. You have to nourish the brain if you want to use the brain. What’s good for that are the B vitamins. Vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin B12. You’ve heard of those, haven’t you? You get them in unpolished rice, unrefined flour—am I boring you now?”

  “No,” I said guiltily. “No, no.”

  “I must beg your pardon if I do. I get carried away on this subject,

  I know it. Because I think my own problems—all my own problems since my young days—are related to undernourishment. From studying so hard and not replenishing the brain. Of course I did not have a first-rate brain to begin with, I never claimed that.”

  I kept watching him attentively so he would not ask me again if he was boring me. He wore a soft, well pressed yellow sport shirt, open at the neck. His skin was pink. He did resemble, distantly, Caroline’s brother that I had made him into. I could smell his shaving lotion. Odd to think that he shaved, that he had hair on his face like other men, and a penis in his pants. I imagined it curled up on itself, damp and tender. He smiled at me sweetly, reasonably talking; could he read what I was thinking? There must be some secret to madness, some gift about it, something I didn’t know.

  He was telling me how rats, even, refused to eat white flour, because of the bleach, the chemicals that were in it. I nodded, and past his head saw Mr. Fouks come out the back door of the Herald-Advance building, empty a wastebasket into an incinerator, and plod back in. That back wall had no windows in it; it had certain stains, chipped bricks, a long crack running down diagonally, starting a bit before the middle and ending up at the bottom corner next to the Chainway store.

  At ten o’clock the banks would open, the Canadian Bank of Commerce and the Dominion Bank across the street. At twelve-thirty, a bus would go through the town, southbound from Owen Sound to London. If anybody wanted to get on it there would be a flag out in front of Haines’s Restaurant.

  Bobby Sherriff talked about rats and white flour. His sister’s photographed face hung in the hall of the high school, close to the persistent hiss of the drinking fountain. Her face was stubborn, unrevealing, lowered so that shadows had settled in her eyes. People’s lives, in Jubilee as
elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable—deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum.

  It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his History, I would want to write things down.

  I would try to make lists. A list of all the stores and businesses going up and down the main street and who owned them, a list of family names, names on the tombstones in the Cemetery and any inscriptions underneath. A list of the titles of movies that played at the Lyceum Theatre from 1938 to 1950, roughly speaking. Names on the Cenotaph (more for the first World War than for the second). Names of the streets and the pattern they lay in.

  The hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking. And no list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every

  last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting.

  At present I did not look much at this town.

  Bobby Sherriff spoke to me wistfully, relieving me of my fork, napkin and empty plate.

  “Believe me,” he said, “I wish you luck in your life.”