by Alice Munro
The dog barks from time to time, but not urgently. Maybe she wants to come in and have company. But Juliet has never had a dog—a dog in the house would be a witness, not a companion, and would only make her feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps the dog is barking at exploring deer, or a bear, or a cougar. There has been something in the Vancouver papers about a cougar—she thinks it was on this coast—mauling a child.
Who would want to live where you have to share every part of outdoor space with hostile and marauding animals?
Kallipareos. Of the lovely cheeks. Now she has it. The Homeric word is sparkling on her hook. And beyond that she is suddenly aware of all her Greek vocabulary, of everything which seems to have been put in a closet for nearly six months now. Because she was not teaching Greek, she put it away.
That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all.
The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember.
That is what happens.
And even if it’s not put away, even if you make your living from it, every day? Juliet thinks of the older teachers at the school, how little most of them care for whatever it is that they teach. Take Juanita, who chose Spanish because it goes with her Christian name (she is Irish) and who wants to speak it well, to use it in her travels. You cannot say that Spanish is her treasure.
Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.
The Tia Maria has worked in a certain way with the coffee. It makes her feel careless, but powerful. It enables her to think that Eric, after all, is not so important. He is someone she might dally with. Dally is the word. As Aphrodite did, with Anchises. And then one morning she will slip away.
She gets up and finds the bathroom, then comes back and lies down on the couch with the quilt over her—too sleepy to notice Corky’s hairs on it, or Corky’s smell.
When she wakes it is full morning, though only twenty past six by the kitchen clock.
She has a headache. There is a bottle of aspirin in the bathroom—she takes two, and washes herself and combs her hair and gets her toothbrush from her bag and brushes her teeth. Then she makes a fresh pot of coffee and eats a slice of homemade bread without bothering to heat or butter it. She sits at the kitchen table. Sunlight, slipping down through the trees, makes coppery splashes on the smooth trunks of the arbutus. Corky begins to bark, and barks for quite a long time before the truck turns into the yard and silences her.
Juliet hears the door of the truck close, she hears him speaking to the dog, and dread comes over her. She wants to hide somewhere (she says later, I could have crawled under the table, but of course she does not think of doing anything so ridiculous). It’s like the moment at school before the winner of the prize is announced. Only worse, because she has no reasonable hope. And because there will never be another chance so momentous in her life.
When the door opens she cannot look up. On her knees the fingers of both hands are interwoven, clenched together.
“You’re here,” he says. He is laughing in triumph and admiration, as if at a most spectacular piece of impudence and daring. When he opens his arms it’s as if a wind has blown into the room and made her look up.
Six months ago she did not know this man existed. Six months ago, the man who died under the train was still alive, and perhaps picking out the clothes for his trip.
“You’re here.”
She can tell by his voice that he is claiming her. She stands up, quite numb, and sees that he is older, heavier, more impetuous than she has remembered. He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay.
—
It turns out that Eric was not taken so much by surprise as he pretended. Ailo phoned him last night, to warn him about the strange girl, Juliet, and offered to check for him as to whether the girl had got on the bus. He had thought it somehow right to take the chance that she would do so—to test fate, maybe—but when Ailo phoned to say that the girl had not gone he was startled by the joy he felt. Still, he did not come home right away, and he did not tell Christa, though he knew he would have to tell her, very soon.
All this Juliet absorbs bit by bit in the weeks and months that follow. Some information arrives accidentally, and some as the result of her imprudent probing.
Her own revelation (of nonvirginity) is considered minor.
Christa is nothing like Ailo. She does not have wide hips or blond hair. She is a dark-haired, thin woman, witty and sometimes morose, who will become Juliet’s great friend and mainstay during the years ahead—though she will never quite forgo a habit of sly teasing, the ironic flicker of a submerged rivalry.
SOON
Two profiles face each other. One the profile of a pure white heifer, with a particularly mild and tender expression, the other that of a green-faced man who is neither young nor old. He seems to be a minor official, maybe a postman—he wears that sort of cap. His lips are pale, the whites of his eyes shining. A hand that is probably his offers up, from the lower margin of the painting, a little tree or an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels.
At the upper margin of the painting are dark clouds, and underneath them some small tottery houses and a toy church with its toy cross, perched on the curved surface of the earth. Within this curve a small man (drawn to a larger scale, however, than the buildings) walks along purposefully with a scythe on his shoulder, and a woman, drawn to the same scale, seems to wait for him. But she is hanging upside down.
There are other things as well. For instance, a girl milking a cow, within the heifer’s cheek.
Juliet decided at once to buy this print for her parents’ Christmas present.
“Because it reminds me of them,” she said to Christa, her friend who had come down with her from Whale Bay to do some shopping. They were in the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Christa laughed. “The green man and the cow? They’ll be flattered.”
Christa never took anything seriously at first, she had to make some joke about it. Juliet wasn’t bothered. Three months pregnant with the baby that would turn out to be Penelope, she was suddenly free of nausea, and for that reason, or some other, she was subject to fits of euphoria. She thought of food all the time, and hadn’t even wanted to come into the gift shop, because she had spotted a lunchroom.
She loved everything in the picture, but particularly the little figures and rickety buildings at the top of it. The man with the scythe and the woman hanging upside down.
She looked for the title. I and the Village.
It made exquisite sense.
“Chagall. I like Chagall,” said Christa. “Picasso was a bastard.”
Juliet was so happy with what she had found that she could hardly pay attention.
“You know what he is supposed to have said? Chagall is for shopgirls,” Christa told her. “So what’s wrong with shopgirls? Chagall should have said, Picasso is for people with funny faces.”
“I mean, it makes me think of their life,” Juliet said. “I don’t know why, but it does.”
She had already told Christa some things about her parents—how they lived in a curious but not unhappy isolation, though her father was a popular schoolteacher. Partly they were cut off by Sara’s heart trouble, but also by their subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network, which nobody around them listened to. By Sara’s making her own clothes—sometimes ineptly—from Vogue patterns, instead of Butterick. Even by the way they preserved some impre
ssion of youth instead of thickening and slouching like the parents of Juliet’s schoolfellows. Juliet had described Sam as looking like her—long neck, a slight bump to the chin, light-brown floppy hair—and Sara as a frail pale blonde, a wispy untidy beauty.
—
When Penelope was thirteen months old, Juliet flew with her to Toronto, then caught the train. This was in 1969. She got off in a town twenty miles or so away from the town where she had grown up, and where Sam and Sara still lived. Apparently the train did not stop there anymore.
She was disappointed to get off at this unfamiliar station and not to see reappear, at once, the trees and sidewalks and houses she remembered—then, very soon, her own house, Sam and Sara’s house, spacious but plain, no doubt with its same blistered and shabby white paint, behind its bountiful soft-maple tree.
Sam and Sara, here in this town where she’d never seen them before, were smiling but anxious, diminished.
Sara gave a curious little cry, as if something had pecked her. A couple of people on the platform turned to look.
Apparently it was only excitement.
“We’re long and short, but still we match,” she said.
At first Juliet did not understand what was meant. Then she figured it out—Sara was wearing a black linen skirt down to her calves and a matching jacket. The jacket’s collar and cuffs were of a shiny lime-green cloth with black polka dots. A turban of the same green material covered her hair. She must have made the outfit herself, or got some dressmaker to make it for her. Its colors were unkind to her skin, which looked as if fine chalk dust had settled over it.
Juliet was wearing a black minidress.
“I was wondering what you’d think of me, black in the summertime, like I’m all in mourning,” Sara said. “And here you’re dressed to match. You look so smart, I’m all in favor of these short dresses.”
“And long hair,” said Sam. “An absolute hippy.” He bent to look into the baby’s face. “Hello, Penelope.”
Sara said, “What a dolly.”
She reached out for Penelope—though the arms that slid out of her sleeves were sticks too frail to hold any such burden. And they did not have to, because Penelope, who had tensed at the first sound of her grandmother’s voice, now yelped and turned away, and hid her face in Juliet’s neck.
Sara laughed. “Am I such a scarecrow?” Again her voice was ill controlled, rising to shrill peaks and falling away, drawing stares. This was new—though maybe not entirely. Juliet had an idea that people might always have looked her mother’s way when she laughed or talked, but in the old days it would have been a spurt of merriment they noticed, something girlish and attractive (though not everybody would have liked that either, they would have said she was always trying to get attention).
Juliet said, “She’s so tired.”
Sam introduced the young woman who was standing behind them, keeping her distance as if she was taking care not to be identified as part of their group. And in fact it had not occurred to Juliet that she was.
“Juliet, this is Irene. Irene Avery.”
Juliet stuck out her hand as well as she could while holding Penelope and the diaper bag, and when it became evident that Irene was not going to shake hands—or perhaps did not notice the intention—she smiled. Irene did not smile back. She stood quite still but gave the impression of wanting to bolt.
“Hello,” said Juliet.
Irene said, “Pleased to meet you,” in a sufficiently audible voice, but without expression.
“Irene is our good fairy,” Sara said, and then Irene’s face did change. She scowled a little, with sensible embarrassment.
She was not as tall as Juliet—who was tall—but she was broader in the shoulders and hips, with strong arms and a stubborn chin. She had thick, springy black hair, pulled back from her face into a stubby ponytail, thick and rather hostile black eyebrows, and the sort of skin that browns easily. Her eyes were green or blue, a light surprising color against this skin, and hard to look into, being deep set. Also because she held her head slightly lowered and twisted her face to the side. This wariness seemed hardened and deliberate.
“She does one heck of a lot of work for a fairy,” Sam said, with his large strategic grin. “I’ll tell the world she does.”
And now of course Juliet recalled the mention in letters of some woman who had come in to help, because of Sara’s strength having gone so drastically downhill. But she had thought of somebody much older. Irene was surely no older than she was herself.
The car was the same Pontiac that Sam had got secondhand maybe ten years ago. The original blue paint showed in streaks here and there but was mostly faded to gray, and the effects of winter road salt could be seen in its petticoat fringe of rust.
“The old gray mare,” said Sara, almost out of breath after the short walk from the railway platform.
“She hasn’t given up,” said Juliet. She spoke admiringly, as seemed to be expected. She had forgotten that this was what they called the car, though it was the name she had thought up herself.
“Oh, she never gives up,” said Sara, once she was settled with Irene’s help in the backseat. “And we’d never give up on her.”
Juliet got into the front seat, juggling Penelope, who was beginning again to whimper. The heat inside the car was shocking, even though it had been parked with the windows down in the scanty shade of the station poplars.
“Actually I’m considering—,” said Sam as he backed out, “I’m considering turning her in for a truck.”
“He doesn’t mean it,” shrieked Sara.
“For the business,” Sam continued. “It’d be a lot handier. And you’d get a certain amount of advertising every time you drove down the street, just from the name on the door.”
“He’s teasing,” Sara said. “How am I going to ride around in a vehicle that says Fresh Vegetables? Am I supposed to be the squash or the cabbage?”
“Better pipe down, Missus,” Sam said, “or you won’t have any breath left when we reach home.”
After nearly thirty years of teaching in the public schools around the county—ten years in the last school—Sam had suddenly quit and decided to get into the business of selling vegetables, full-time. He had always cultivated a big vegetable garden, and raspberry canes, in the extra lot beside their house, and they had sold their surplus produce to a few people around town. But now, apparently, this was to change into his way of making a living, selling to grocery stores and perhaps eventually putting up a market stall at the front gate.
“You’re serious about all this?” said Juliet quietly.
“Darn right I am.”
“You’re not going to miss teaching?”
“Not on your Nelly-O. I was fed up. I was fed up to the eyeballs.”
It was true that after all those years, he had never been offered, in any school, the job of principal. She supposed that was what he was fed up with. He was a remarkable teacher, the one whose antics and energy everyone would remember, his Grade Six unlike any other year in his pupils’ lives. Yet he had been passed over, time and again, and probably for that very reason. His methods could be seen to undercut authority. So you could imagine Authority saying that he was not the sort of man to be in charge, he’d do less harm where he was.
He liked outdoor work, he was good at talking to people, he would probably do well, selling vegetables.
But Sara would hate it.
Juliet did not like it either. If there was a side to be on, however, she would have to choose his. She was not going to define herself as a snob.
And the truth was that she saw herself—she saw herself and Sam and Sara, but particularly herself and Sam—as superior in their own way to everybody around them. So what should his peddling vegetables matter?
Sam spoke now in a quieter, conspiratorial voice.
“What’s her name?”
He meant the baby’s.
“Penelope. We’re never going to call her Penny. Penelope.”
“No, I mean—I mean her last name.”
“Oh. Well, it’s Henderson-Porteous I guess. Or Porteous-Henderson. But maybe that’s too much of a mouthful, when she’s already called Penelope? We knew that but we wanted Penelope. We’ll have to settle it somehow.”
“So. He’s given her his name,” Sam said. “Well, that’s something. I mean, that’s good.”
Juliet was surprised for a moment, then not.
“Of course he has,” she said. Pretending to be mystified and amused. “She’s his.”
“Oh yes. Yes. But given the circumstances.”
“I forget about the circumstances,” she said. “If you mean the fact that we’re not married, it’s hardly anything to take into account. Where we live, the people we know, it is not a thing anybody thinks about.”
“Suppose not,” said Sam. “Was he married to the first one?”
Juliet had told them about Eric’s wife, whom he had cared for during the eight years that she had lived after her car accident.
“Ann? Yes. Well, I don’t really know. But yes. I think so. Yes.”
Sara called into the front seat, “Wouldn’t it be nice to stop for ice cream?”
“We’ve got ice cream in the fridge at home,” Sam called back. And added quietly, shockingly, to Juliet, “Take her into anyplace for a treat, and she’ll put on a show.”
The windows were still down, the warm wind blew through the car. It was full summer—a season which never arrived, as far as Juliet could see, on the west coast. The hardwood trees were humped over the far edge of the fields, making blue-black caves of shade, and the crops and the meadows in front of them, under the hard sunlight, were gold and green. Vigorous young wheat and barley and corn and beans—fairly blistering your eyes.
Sara said, “What’s this conference in aid of? In the front seat? We can’t hear back here for the wind.”
Sam said, “Nothing interesting. Just asking Juliet if her fellow’s still doing the fishing.”
