by Alice Munro
One night I got into his bed and he did not take his eyes from his book or move or speak a word to me even when I crawled out and returned to my own bed, where I fell asleep almost at once because I think I could not bear the shame of being awake.
In the morning he got into my bed and all went as usual.
I come up against blocks of solid darkness.
She learned, she changed. Age was a help to her. Drink also.
And when he got used to her, or felt safe from her, his feelings took a turn for the better. He talked to her readily about what he was interested in and took a kinder comfort from her body.
On the night before the operation they lay side by side on the strange bed, with all available bare skin touching—legs, arms, haunches.
II
Liza told Warren that a woman named Bea Doud had phoned from Toronto and asked if they—that is, Warren and Liza—could go out and check on the house in the country, where Bea and her husband lived. They wanted to make sure that the water had been turned off. Bea and Ladner (not actually her husband, said Liza) were in Toronto waiting for Ladner to have an operation. A heart bypass. “Because the pipes might burst,” said Liza. This was on a Sunday night in February during the worst of that winter’s storms.
“You know who they are,” said Liza. “Yes, you do. Remember that couple I introduced you to? One day last fall on the square outside of Radio Shack? He had a scar on his cheek and she had long hair, half black and half gray. I told you he was a taxidermist, and you said, ‘What’s that?’ ”
Now Warren remembered. An old—but not too old—couple in flannel shirts and baggy pants. His scar and English accent, her weird hair and rush of friendliness. A taxidermist stuffs dead animals. That is, animal skins. Also dead birds and fish.
He had asked Liza, “What happened to the guy’s face?” and she had said, “W.W. Two.”
“I know where the key is—that’s why she called me,” Liza said. “This is up in Stratton Township. Where I used to live.”
“Did they go to your same church or something?” Warren said.
“Bea and Ladner? Let’s not be funny. They just lived across the road.
“It was her gave me some money.” Liza continued, as if it was something he ought to know, “To go to college. I never asked her. She just phones up out of the blue and says she wants to. So I think, Okay, she’s got lots.”
When she was little, Liza had lived in Stratton Township with her father and her brother Kenny, on a farm. Her father wasn’t a farmer. He just rented the house. He worked as a roofer. Her mother was already dead. By the time Liza was ready for high school—Kenny was a year younger and two grades behind her—her father had moved them to Carstairs. He met a woman there who owned a trailer home, and later on he married her. Later still, he moved with her to Chatham. Liza wasn’t sure where they were now—Chatham or Wallaceburg or Sarnia. By the time they moved, Kenny was dead—he had been killed when he was fifteen, in one of the big teenage car crashes that seemed to happen every spring, involving drunk, often unlicensed drivers, temporarily stolen cars, fresh gravel on the country roads, crazy speeds. Liza finished high school and went to college in Guelph for one year. She didn’t like college, didn’t like the people there. By that time she had become a Christian.
That was how Warren met her. His family belonged to the Fellowship of the Saviour Bible Chapel, in Walley. He had been going to the Bible Chapel all his life. Liza started going there after she moved to Walley and got a job in the government liquor store. She still worked there, though she worried about it and sometimes thought that she should quit. She never drank alcohol now, she never even ate sugar. She didn’t want Warren eating a Danish on his break, so she packed him oat muffins that she made at home. She did the laundry every Wednesday night and counted the strokes when she brushed her teeth and got up early in the morning to do knee bends and read Bible verses.
She thought she should quit, but they needed the money. The small-engines shop where Warren used to work had closed down, and he was retraining so that he could sell computers. They had been married a year.
In the morning, the weather was clear, and they set off on the snowmobile shortly before noon. Monday was Liza’s day off. The plows were working on the highway, but the back roads were still buried in snow. Snowmobiles had been roaring through the town streets since before dawn and had left their tracks across the inland fields and on the frozen river.
Liza told Warren to follow the river track as far as Highway 86, then head northeast across the fields so as to half-circle the swamp. All over the river there were animal tracks in straight lines and loops and circles. The only ones that Warren knew for sure were dog tracks. The river with its three feet of ice and level covering of snow made a wonderful road. The storm had come from the west, as storms usually did in that country, and the trees along the eastern bank were all plastered with snow, clotted with it, their branches spread out like wicker snow baskets. On the western bank, drifts curled like waves stopped, like huge lappings of cream. It was exciting to be out in this, with all the other snowmobiles carving the trails and assaulting the day with such roars and swirls of noise.
The swamp was black from a distance, a long smudge on the northern horizon. But close up, it too was choked with snow. Black trunks against the snow flashed by in a repetition that was faintly sickening. Liza directed Warren with light blows of her hand on his leg to a back road full as a bed, and finally hit him hard to stop him. The change of noise for silence and speed for stillness made it seem as if they had dropped out of streaming clouds into something solid. They were stuck in the solid middle of the winter day.
On one side of the road was a broken-down barn with old gray hay bulging out of it. “Where we used to live,” said Liza. “No, I’m kidding. Actually, there was a house. It’s gone now.”
On the other side of the road was a sign, “Lesser Dismal,” with trees behind it, and an extended A-frame house painted a light gray. Liza said that there was a swamp somewhere in the United States called Great Dismal Swamp, and that was what the name referred to. A joke.
“I never heard of it,” said Warren.
Other signs said “No Trespassing,” “No Hunting,” “No Snowmobiling,” “Keep Out.”
The key to the back door was in an odd place. It was in a plastic bag inside a hole in a tree. There were several old bent trees—fruit trees, probably—close to the back steps. The hole in the tree had tar around it—Liza said that was to keep out squirrels. There was tar around other holes in other trees, so the hole for the key didn’t in any way stand out. “How did you find it, then?” Liza pointed out a profile—easy to see, when you looked closely—emphasized by a knife following cracks in the bark. A long nose, a down-slanting eye and mouth, and a big drop—that was the tarred hole—right at the end of the nose.
“Pretty funny?” said Liza, stuffing the plastic bag in her pocket and turning the key in the back door. “Don’t stand there,” she said. “Come on in. Jeepers, it’s cold as the grave in here.” She was always very conscientious about changing the exclamation “Jesus” to “Jeepers” and “Hell” to “help,” as they were supposed to do in the Fellowship.
She went around twirling thermostats to get the baseboard heating going.
Warren said, “We aren’t going to hang around here, are we?”
“Hang around till we get warmed up,” said Liza.
Warren was trying the kitchen taps. Nothing came out. “Water’s off,” he said. “It’s O.K.”
Liza had gone into the front room. “What?” she called. “What’s O.K.?”
“The water. It’s turned off.”
“Oh, is it? Good.”
Warren stopped in the front-room doorway. “Shouldn’t we ought to take our boots off?” he said. “Like, if we’re going to walk around?”
“Why?” said Liza, stomping on the rug. “What’s the matter with good clean snow?”
Warren was not a person who noticed muc
h about a room and what was in it, but he did see that this room had some things that were usual and some that were not. It had rugs and chairs and a television and a sofa and books and a big desk. But it also had shelves of stuffed and mounted birds, some quite tiny and bright, and some large and suitable for shooting. Also a sleek brown animal—a weasel?—and a beaver, which he knew by its paddle tail.
Liza was opening the drawers of the desk and rummaging in the paper she found there. He thought that she must be looking for something the woman had told her to get. Then she started pulling the drawers all the way out and dumping them and their contents on the floor. She made a funny noise—an admiring cluck of her tongue, as if the drawers had done this on their own.
“Christ!” he said. (Because he had been in the Fellowship all his life, he was not nearly so careful as Liza about his language.) “Liza? What do you think you’re doing?”
“Nothing that is remotely any of your business,” said Liza. But she spoke cheerfully, even kindly. “Why don’t you relax and watch TV or something?”
She was picking up the mounted birds and animals and throwing them down one by one, adding them to the mess she was making on the floor. “He uses balsa wood,” she said. “Nice and light.”
Warren did go and turn on the television. It was a black-and-white set, and most of its channels showed nothing but snow or ripples. The only thing he could get clear was a scene from the old series with the blond girl in the harem outfit—she was a witch—and the J.R. Ewing actor when he was so young he hadn’t yet become J.R.
“Look at this,” he said. “Like going back in time.”
Liza didn’t look. He sat down on a hassock with his back to her. He was trying to be like a grownup who won’t watch. Ignore her and she’ll quit. Nevertheless he could hear behind him the ripping of books and paper. Books were being scooped off the shelves, torn apart, tossed on the floor. He heard her go out to the kitchen and yank out drawers, slam cupboard doors, smash dishes. She came back to the front room after a while, and a white dust began to fill the air. She must have dumped out flour. She was coughing.
Warren had to cough, too, but he did not turn around. Soon he heard stuff being poured out of bottles—thin, splashing liquid and thick glug-glug-glugs. He could smell vinegar and maple syrup and whisky. That was what she was pouring over the flour and the books and the rugs and the feathers and fur of the bird and animal bodies. Something shattered against the stove. He bet it was the whisky bottle.
“Bull’s-eye!” said Liza.
Warren wouldn’t turn. His whole body felt as if it was humming, with the effort to be still and make this be over.
Once, he and Liza had gone to a Christian rock concert and dance in St. Thomas. There was a lot of controversy about Christian rock in the Fellowship—about whether there could even be such a thing. Liza was bothered by this question. Warren wasn’t. He had gone a few times to rock concerts and dances that didn’t even call themselves Christian. But when they started to dance, it was Liza who slid under, right away, it was Liza who caught the eye—the vigilant, unhappy eye—of the Youth Leader, who was grinning and clapping uncertainly on the sidelines. Warren had never seen Liza dance, and the crazy, slithery spirit that possessed her amazed him. He felt proud rather than worried, but he knew that whatever he felt did not make the least difference. There was Liza, dancing, and the only thing he could do was wait it out while she tore her way through the music, supplicated and curled around it, kicked loose, and blinded herself to everything around her.
That’s what she’s got in her, he felt like saying to them all. He thought that he had known it. He had known something the first time he had seen her at the Fellowship. It was summer and she was wearing the little summer straw hat and the dress with sleeves that all the Fellowship girls had to wear, but her skin was too golden and her body too slim for a Fellowship girl’s. Not that she looked like a girl in a magazine, a model or a show-off. Not Liza, with her high, rounded forehead and deep-set brown eyes, her expression that was both childish and fierce. She looked unique, and she was. She was a girl who wouldn’t say, “Jesus!” but who would, in moments of downright contentment and meditative laziness, say, “Well, fuck!”
She said she had been wild before becoming a Christian. “Even when I was a kid,” she said.
“Wild in what way?” he had asked her. “Like, with guys?”
She gave him a look, as if to say, Don’t be dumb.
Warren felt a trickle now, down one side of his scalp. She had sneaked up behind him. He put a hand to his head and it came away green and sticky and smelling of peppermint.
“Have a sip,” she said, handing him a bottle. He took a gulp, and the strong mint drink nearly strangled him. Liza took back the bottle and threw it against the big front window. It didn’t go through the window but it cracked the glass. The bottle hadn’t broken—it fell to the floor, and a pool of beautiful liquid streamed out from it. Dark-green blood. The window glass had filled with thousands of radiating cracks, and turned as white as a halo. Warren was standing up, gasping from the liquor. Waves of heat were rising through his body. Liza stepped delicately among the torn, spattered books and broken glass, the smeared, stomped birds, the pools of whisky and maple syrup and the sticks of charred wood dragged from the stove to make black tracks on the rugs, the ashes and gummed flour and feathers. She stepped delicately, even in her snowmobile boots, admiring what she’d done, what she’d managed so far.
Warren picked up the hassock he had been sitting on and flung it at the sofa. It toppled off; it didn’t do any damage, but the action had put him in the picture. This was not the first time he’d been involved in trashing a house. Long ago, when he was nine or ten years old, he and a friend had got into a house on their way home from school. It was his friend’s aunt who lived in this house. She wasn’t home—she worked in a jewelry store. She lived by herself. Warren and his friend broke in because they were hungry. They made themselves soda-cracker-and-jam sandwiches and drank some ginger ale. But then something took over. They dumped a bottle of ketchup on the tablecloth and dipped their fingers in, and wrote on the wallpaper, “Beware! Blood!” They broke plates and threw some food around.
They were strangely lucky. Nobody had seen them getting into the house and nobody saw them leaving. The aunt herself put the blame on some teenagers whom she had recently ordered out of the store.
Recalling this, Warren went to the kitchen looking for a bottle of ketchup. There didn’t seem to be any, but he found and opened a can of tomato sauce. It was thinner than ketchup and didn’t work as well, but he tried to write with it on the wooden kitchen wall. “Beware! This is your blood!”
The sauce soaked into or ran down the boards. Liza came up close to read the words before they blotted themselves out. She laughed. Somewhere in the rubble she found a Magic Marker. She climbed up on a chair and wrote above the fake blood, “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
“I should have got out more stuff,” she said. “Where he works is full of paint and glue and all kinds of crap. In that side room.”
Warren said, “Want me to get some?”
“Not really,” she said. She sank down on the sofa—one of the few places in the front room where you could still sit down. “Liza Minnelli,” she said peacefully. “Liza Minnelli, stick it in your belly!”
Was that something kids at school sang at her? Or something she made up for herself?
Warren sat down beside her. “So what did they do?” he said. “What did they do that made you so mad?”
“Who’s mad?” said Liza, and hauled herself up and went to the kitchen. Warren followed, and saw that she was punching out a number on the phone. She had to wait a little. Then she said, “Bea?” in a soft, hurt, hesitant voice. “Oh, Bea!” She waved at Warren to turn off the television.
He heard her saying, “The window by the kitchen door.… I think so. Even maple syrup, you wouldn’t believe it.… Oh, and the beautiful big front window, they threw so
mething at that, and they got sticks out of the stove and the ashes and those birds that were sitting around and the big beaver. I can’t tell you what it looks like.…”
He came back into the kitchen, and she made a face at him, raising her eyebrows and setting her lips blubbering as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. Then she went on describing things, commiserating, making her voice quiver with misery and indignation. Warren didn’t like watching her. He went around looking for their helmets.
When she had hung up the phone, she came and got him. “It was her,” she said. “I already told you what she did to me. She sent me to college!” That started them both laughing.
But Warren was looking at a bird in the mess on the floor. Its soggy feathers, its head hanging loose, showing one bitter red eye. “It’s weird doing that for a living,” he said. “Always having dead stuff around.”
“They’re weird,” Liza said.
Warren said, “Do you care if he croaks?”
Liza made croaking noises to stop him being thoughtful. Then she touched her teeth, her pointed tongue to his neck.
III
Bea asked Liza and Kenny a lot of questions. She asked them what their favorite TV shows and colors and ice-cream flavors were, and what kind of animals they would be if they could turn into animals, and what was the earliest thing they remembered. “Eating boogers,” said Kenny. He did not mean to be funny.
Ladner and Liza and Bea all laughed—Liza the loudest. Then Bea said, “You know, that’s one of the earliest things I can remember myself!”
She’s lying, Liza thought. Lying for Kenny’s sake, and he doesn’t even know it.
“This is Miss Doud,” Ladner had told them. “Try to be decent to her.”
