Dance of the Happy Shades

by Alice Munro

  A TRIP TO THE COAST

  The place called Black Horse is marked on the map but there is nothing there except a store and three houses and an old cemetery and a livery shed which belonged to a church that burned down. It is a hot place in summer, with no shade on the road and no creek nearby. The houses and the store are built of red brick of a faded, gingery colour, with a random decoration of grey or white bricks across the chimneys and around the windows. Behind them the fields are full of milkweed and goldenrod and big purple thistles. People who are passing through, on their way to the Lakes of Muskoka and the northern bush, may notice that around here the bountiful landscape thins and flattens, worn elbows of rock appear in the diminishing fields and the deep, harmonious woodlots of elm and maple give way to a denser, less hospitable scrub-forest of birch and poplar, spruce and pine—where in the heat of the afternoon the pointed trees at the end of the road turn blue, transparent, retreating into the distance like a company of ghosts.

  May was lying in a big room full of boxes at the back of the store. That was where she slept in the summer, when it got too hot upstairs. Hazel slept in the front room on the chesterfield and played the radio half the night; her grandmother still slept upstairs, in a tight little room full of big furniture and old photographs that smelled of hot oilcloth and old women’s woollen stockings. May could not tell what time it was because she hardly ever woke up this early. Most mornings when she woke up there was a patch of hot sun on the floor at her feet and the farmers’ milk trucks were rattling past on the highway and her grandmother was scuttling back and forth from the store to the kitchen, where she had put a pot of coffee and a pan of thick bacon on the stove. Passing the old porch couch where May slept (its cushions still smelled faintly of mould and pine) she would twitch automatically at the sheet, saying, “Get up now, get up, do you think you’re going to sleep till dinner-time? There’s a man wants gas.”

  And if May did not get up but clung to the sheet, muttering angrily, her grandmother would come through next time with a little cold water in a dipper, which she dumped in passing on her granddaughter’s feet. Then May would jump up, pushing her long switch of hair back from her face, which was sulky with sleepiness but not resentful; she accepted the rule of her grandmother as she accepted a rain squall or a stomach ache, with a tough, basic certainty that such things would pass. She put on all her clothes under her nightgown, with her arms underneath free of the sleeves; she was eleven years old and had entered a period of furious modesty during which she refused to receive a vaccination on her buttocks and screamed with rage if Hazel or her grandmother came into a room where she was dressing—which they did, she thought, for their own amusement and to ridicule the very idea of her privacy. She would go out and put gas in the car and come back wide awake, hungry; she would eat for breakfast four or five toast sandwiches with marmalade, peanut butter and bacon.

  But this morning when she woke up it was just beginning to be light in the back room; she could just make out the printing on the cardboard boxes. Heinz Tomato Soup, she read, Golden Valley Apricots. She went through a private ritual of dividing the letters into threes; if they came out evenly it meant she would be lucky that day. While she was doing this she thought she heard a noise, as if someone was moving in the yard; a marvellous uneasiness took hold of her body at the soles of her feet and made her curl her toes and stretch her legs until she touched the end of the couch. She had a feeling through her whole body like the feeling inside her head when she was going to sneeze. She got up as quietly as she could and walked carefully across the bare boards of the back room, which felt sandy and springy underfoot, to the rough kitchen linoleum. She was wearing an old cotton nightgown of Hazel’s, which billowed out in a soft, ghostly way behind her.

  The kitchen was empty; the clock ticked watchfully on the shelf above the sink. One of the taps dripped all the time and the dishcloth was folded into a little pad and placed underneath it. The face of the clock was almost hidden by a yellow tomato, ripening, and a can of powder that her grandmother used on her false teeth. Twenty to six. She moved towards the screen door; as she passed the breadbox one hand reached in of its own accord and came out with a couple of cinnamon buns which she began to eat without looking at them; they were a little dry.

  The back yard at this time of day was strange, damp and shadowy; the fields were grey and all the cobwebbed, shaggy bushes along the fences thick with birds; the sky was pale, cool, smoothly ribbed with light and flushed at the edges, like the inside of a shell. It pleased her that her grandmother and Hazel were out of this, that they were still asleep. Nobody had spoken for this day yet; its purity astonished her. She had a delicate premonition of freedom and danger, like a streak of dawn across that sky. Around the corner of the house where the woodpile was she heard a small dry clattering sound.

  “Who’s there?” said May in a loud voice, first swallowing a mouthful of cinnamon bun. “I know you are there,” she said.

  Her grandmother came around the house carrying a few sticks of kindling wrapped in her apron and making private unintelligible noises of exasperation. May saw her come, not really with surprise but with a queer let-down feeling that seemed to spread thinly from the present moment into all areas of her life, past and future. It seemed to her that any place she went her grandmother would be there beforehand: anything she found out her grandmother would know already, or else could prove to be of no account.

  “I thought it was somebody in the yard,” she said defensively. Her grandmother looked at her as if she were a stovepipe and came ahead into the kitchen.

  “I didn’t think you would of got up so early,” May said. “What’d you get up so early for?”

  Her grandmother didn’t answer. She heard everything you said to her but she didn’t answer unless she felt like it. She set to work making a fire in the stove. She was dressed for the day in a print dress, a blue apron rubbed and dirty across the stomach, an unbuttoned, ravelling, no-colour sweater that had belonged once to her husband, and a pair of canvas shoes. Things dangled on her in spite of her attempts to be tidy and fastened up; it was because there was no reasonable shape to her body for clothes to cling to; she was all flat and narrow, except for the little mound of her stomach like a four-months’ pregnancy that rode preposterously under her skinny chest. She had knobby fleshless legs and her arms were brown and veined and twisted like whips. Her head was rather big for her body and with her hair pulled tightly over her skull she had the look of an under-nourished but maliciously intelligent baby.

  “You go on back to bed,” she said to May. May went instead to the kitchen mirror and began combing her hair and twisting it around her finger to see if it would go into a page-boy. She had remembered that it was today Eunie Parker’s cousin was coming. She would have taken Hazel’s curlers and done her hair up, if she thought she could do that without her grandmother knowing.

  Her grandmother closed the door of the front room where Hazel was asleep. She emptied out the coffee pot and put in water and fresh coffee. She got a pitcher of milk out of the icebox, sniffed at it to make sure it was still all right and lifted two ants out of the sugar bowl with her spoon. She rolled herself a cigarette on a little machine she had. Then she sat at the table and read yesterday’s newspaper. She did not speak another word to May until the coffee had perked and she had dampered the fire and the room was almost as light as day.

  “You get your own cup if you want any,” she said.

  Usually she said May was too young to drink coffee. May got herself a good cup with green birds on it. Her grandmother didn’t say anything. They sat at the table drinking coffee, May in her long nightgown feeling privileged and ill at ease. Her grandmother was looking around the kitchen with its stained walls and calendars as if she had to keep it all in sight; she had a rather sly abstracted look.

  May said conversationally, “Eunie Parker has her cousin coming today. Her name is Heather Sue Murray.”

  Her grandmother did not pay an
y attention. Presently she said, “Do you know how old I am?”

  May said, “No.”

  “Well take a guess.”

  May thought and said, “Seventy?”

  Her grandmother did not speak for so long that May thought this was only another of her conversational blind alleys. She said, informatively, “This Heather Sue Murray has been a Highland dancer ever since she was three years old. She dances in competitions and all.”

  “Seventy-eight,” her grandmother said. “Nobody knows that, I never told. No birth certificate. Never took the pension. Never took relief.” She thought a while and said, “Never was in a hospital. I got enough in the bank to cover burial. Any headstone will have to come out of charity or bad conscience of my relatives.”

  “What do you want a headstone for?” May said sullenly, picking at the oilcloth at a spot where it was worn through. She did not like this conversation; it reminded her of a rather mean trick her grandmother had played on her about three years ago. She had come home from school and found her grandmother lying on that same couch in the back room where she slept now. Her grandmother lay with her hands dropped at her sides, her face the colour of curdled milk, her eyes closed; she wore an expression of pure and unassailable indifference. May had tried saying “Hello” first and then “Grandma” more or less in her everyday voice; her grandmother did not flick a muscle in her usually live and agitated face. May said again, more respectfully, “Grandma” and bending over did not hear the shallowest breath. She put out her hand to touch her grandmother’s cheek, but was checked by something remote and not reassuring in that cold shabby hollow. Then she started to cry, in the anxious, bitten-off way of someone who is crying with no one to hear them. She was afraid to say her grandmother’s name again; she was afraid to touch her, and at the same time afraid to take her eyes off her. However, her grandmother opened her eyes. Without lifting her arms or moving her head she looked up at May with a contrived, outrageous innocence and a curious spark of triumph. “Can’t a person lay down around here?” she said. “Shame to be such a baby.”

  “I never said I wanted one,” her grandmother said. “Go and get some clothes on,” she said coldly, as May experimentally stuck one shoulder up through the loose neck of her nightgown. “Unless you think you are one of them Queens of Egypt.”

  “What?” said May looking at her shoulder splotched un-pleasantly with peeling sunburn.

  “Oh, one of them Queens of Egypt I understand they got at the Kinkaid Fair.”

  When May came back to the kitchen her grandmother was still drinking coffee and looking at the want-ad section of the city paper, as if she had no store to open or breakfast to cook or anything to do all day. Hazel had got up and was ironing a dress to wear to work. She worked in a store in Kinkaid which was thirty miles away and she had to leave for work early. She tried to persuade her mother to sell the store and go and live in Kinkaid which had two movie theatres, plenty of stores and restaurants and a Royal Dance Pavilion; but the old woman would not budge. She told Hazel to go and live where she liked but Hazel for some reason did not go. She was a tall drooping girl of thirty-three, with bleached hair, a long wary face and on oblique resentful expression emphasized by a slight cast, a wilful straying of one eye. She had a trunk full of embroidered pillowcases and towels and silverware. She bought a set of dishes and a set of copper-bottomed pots and put them away in her trunk; she and the old woman and May continued to eat off chipped plates and cook in pots so battered they rocked on the stove.

  “Hazel’s got everything she needs to get married but she just lacks one thing,” the old woman would say.

  Hazel drove all over the country to dances with other girls who worked in Kinkaid or taught school. On Sunday morning she got up with a hangover and took coffee with aspirin and put on her silk print dress and drove off down the road to sing in the choir. Her mother, who said she had no religion, opened up the store and sold gas and ice cream to tourists.

  Hazel hung over the ironing-board yawning and tenderly rubbing her blurred face and the old woman read out loud, “Tall industrious man, thirty-five years old, desires make acquaintance woman of good habits, non-smoker or drinker, fond of home life, no triflers please.”

  “Aw, Mom,” Hazel said.

  “What’s triflers?” May said.

  “Man in prime of life,” the old woman read relentlessly, “desires friendship of healthy woman without encumbrances, send photograph first letter.”

  “Aw cut it out, Mom,” Hazel said.

  “What’s encumbrances?” May said.

  “Where would you be if I did get married?” Hazel said gloomily with a look on her face of irritable satisfaction.

  “Any time you want to get married you can get.”

  “I got you and May.”

  “Oh, go on.”

  “Well I have.”

  “Oh, go on,” the old woman said with disgust. “I look after my ownself. I always have.” She was going to say a lot more, for this speech was indeed a signpost in her life, but the moment after she had energetically summoned up that landscape which was coloured vividly and artlessly like a child’s crayon drawing, and presented just such magical distortions, she shut her eyes as if oppressed by a feeling of unreality, a reasonable doubt that any of this had ever existed. She tapped with her spoon on the table and said to Hazel, “Well you never had such a dream as I had last night.”

  “I never do dream anyway,” Hazel said.

  The old woman sat tapping her spoon and looking with concentration at nothing but the front of the stove.

  “Dreamt I was walking down the road,” she said. “I was walking down the road past Simmonses’ gate and I felt like a cloud was passing over the sun, felt cold, like. So I looked up and I seen a big bird, oh, the biggest bird you ever saw, black as that stove top there, it was right over me between me and the sun. Did you ever dream a thing like that?”

  “I never dream anything,” Hazel said rather proudly.

  “Remember that nightmare I had when I was sleeping in the front room after I had the red measles?” May said. “Remember that nightmare?”

  “I’m not talking about any nightmare,” the old woman said.

  “I thought there was people in coloured hats going round and round in that room. Faster and faster so all their hats was blurred together. All the rest of them was invisible except they had on these coloured hats.”

  Her grandmother put her tongue out to lick off some specks of dry tobacco that were stuck to her lips, then got up and lifted the stove lid and spat into the fire. “I might as well talk to a barn wall,” she said. “May, put a coupla sticks in that fire I’ll fry us some bacon. I don’t want to keep the stove on today any longer’n I can help.”

  “It’s going to be hotter today than it was yesterday,” Hazel said placidly. “Me and Lois have a bargain on not to wear any stockings. Mr. Peebles says a word to us we’re going to say what do you think they hired you for, going around looking at everybody’s legs? He gets embarrassed,” she said. Her bleached head disappeared into the skirt of her dress with a lonesome giggle like the sound of a bell rung once by accident, then caught.

  “Huh,” the old woman said.

  May and Eunie Parker and Heather Sue Murray sat in the afternoon on the front step of the store. The sun had clouded over about noon but it seemed the day got even hotter then. You could not hear a cricket or a bird, but there was a low wind; a hot, creeping wind came through the country grass. Because it was Saturday hardly anyone stopped at the store; the local cars drove on past, heading for town.

  Heather Sue said, “Don’t you kids ever hitch a ride?”

  “No,” May said.

  Eunie Parker her best friend for two years said, “Oh, May wouldn’t even be allowed. You don’t know her grandmother. She can’t do anything.”

  May scuffed her feet in the dirt and ground her heel into an ant hill. “Neither can you,” she said.

  “I can so,” Eunie said. “I ca
n do what I like.” Heather Sue looked at them in her puzzled company way and said, “Well what is there to do here? I mean what do you kids do?”

  Her hair was cut short all around her head; it was coarse, black, and curly. She had that Candy Apples lipstick on and it looked as if she shaved her legs.

  “We go to the cemetery,” May said flatly. They did, too. She and Eunie went and sat in the cemetery almost every afternoon because there was a shady corner there and no younger children bothered them and they could talk speculatively without any danger of being overheard.

  “You go where?” Heather Sue said, and Eunie scowling into the dirt at their feet said, “Oh, we do not. I hate that stupid cemetery,” she said. Sometimes she and May had spent a whole afternoon looking at the tombstones and picking out names that interested them and making up stories about the people who were buried there.

  “Gee, don’t give me the creeps like that,” Heather Sue said. “It’s awfully hot, isn’t it? If I was at home this afternoon, I guess me and my girl friend would be going to the pool.”

  “We can go and swim at Third Bridge,” Eunie said.

  “Where is that?”

  “Down the road, it’s not far. Half a mile.”

  “In this heat?” Heather Sue said.

  Eunie said, “I’ll ride you on my bike.” She said to May in an overly gay and hospitable voice, “You get your bike too, come on.”

  May considered a moment and then got up and went into the store, which was always dark in the daytime, hot too, with a big wooden clock on the wall and bins full of little sweet crumbling cookies, soft oranges, onions. She went to the back where her grandmother was sitting on a stool beside the ice-cream freezer, under a big baking-powder sign that had a background of glittering foil, like a Christmas card.

  May said, “Can I go swimming with Eunie and Heather Sue?”

  “Where you going to go swimming?” her grandmother said, almost neutrally. She knew there was only one place you could go.