Alice Munro's Best

by Alice Munro

  I turned to remind him of this, but found myself looking at the line his heart was writing. Not that there seemed to be anything wrong, any difference in the beeps and points. But it was there.

  He saw where I was looking. “Unfair advantage,” he said.

  “It is,” I said. “I’m going to have to get hooked up too.”

  We laughed, we kissed formally; I left. At least he hadn’t asked me about Nichola, I thought.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON I didn’t go to the hospital, because my father was having some more tests done, to prepare for the operation. I was to see him in the evening instead. I found myself wandering through the Bloor Street dress shops, trying on clothes. A preoccupation with fashion and my own appearance had descended on me like a raging headache. I looked at the women in the street, at the clothes in the shops, trying to discover how a transformation might be made, what I would have to buy. I recognized this obsession for what it was but had trouble shaking it. I’ve had people tell me that waiting for life-or-death news they’ve stood in front of an open refrigerator eating anything in sight – cold boiled potatoes, chili sauce, bowls of whipped cream. Or have been unable to stop doing crossword puzzles. Attention narrows in on something – some distraction – grabs on, becomes fanatically serious. I shuffled clothes on the racks, pulled them on in hot little changing rooms in front of cruel mirrors. I was sweating; once or twice I thought I might faint. Out on the street again, I thought I must remove myself from Bloor Street, and decided to go to the museum.

  I remembered another time, in Vancouver. It was when Nichola was going to kindergarten and Judith was a baby. Nichola had been to the doctor about a cold, or maybe for a routine examination, and the blood test revealed something about her white blood cells – either that there were too many of them or that they were enlarged. The doctor ordered further tests, and I took Nichola to the hospital for them. Nobody mentioned leukemia but I knew, of course, what they were looking for. When I took Nichola home I asked the babysitter who had been with Judith to stay for the afternoon and I went shopping. I bought the most daring dress I ever owned, a black silk sheath with some laced-up arrangement in front. I remembered that bright spring afternoon, the spike-heeled shoes in the department store, the underwear printed with leopard spots.

  I also remembered going home from St. Paul’s Hospital over the Lions Gate Bridge on the crowded bus and holding Nichola on my knee. She suddenly recalled her baby name for bridge and whispered to me, “Whee – over the whee.” I did not avoid touching my child – Nichola was slender and graceful even then, with a pretty back and fine dark hair – but realized I was touching her with a difference, though I did not think it could ever be detected. There was a care – not a withdrawal exactly but a care – not to feel anything much. I saw how the forms of love might be maintained with a condemned person but with the love in fact measured and disciplined, because you have to survive. It could be done so discreetly that the object of such care would not suspect, any more than she would suspect the sentence of death itself. Nichola did not know, would not know. Toys and kisses and jokes would come tumbling over her; she would never know, though I worried that she would feel the wind between the cracks of the manufactured holidays, the manufactured normal days. But all was well. Nichola did not have leukemia. She grew up – was still alive, and possibly happy. Incommunicado.

  I could not think of anything in the museum I really wanted to see, so I walked past it to the planetarium. I had never been to a planetarium. The show was due to start in ten minutes. I went inside, bought a ticket, got in line. There was a whole class of schoolchildren, maybe a couple of classes, with teachers and volunteer mothers riding herd on them. I looked around to see if there were any other unattached adults. Only one – a man with a red face and puffy eyes, who looked as if he might be here to keep himself from going to a bar.

  Inside, we sat on wonderfully comfortable seats that were tilted back so that you lay in a sort of hammock, attention directed to the bowl of the ceiling, which soon turned dark blue, with a faint rim of light all around the edge. There was some splendid, commanding music. The adults all around were shushing the children, trying to make them stop crackling their potato-chip bags. Then a man’s voice, an eloquent professional voice, began to speak slowly, out of the walls. The voice reminded me a little of the way radio announcers used to introduce a piece of classical music or describe the progress of the Royal Family to Westminster Abbey on one of their royal occasions. There was a faint echo-chamber effect.

  The dark ceiling was filling with stars. They came out not all at once but one after another, the way the stars really do come out at night, though more quickly. The Milky Way appeared, was moving closer; stars swam into brilliance and kept on going, disappearing beyond the edges of the sky-screen or behind my head. While the flow of light continued, the voice presented the stunning facts. A few light-years away, it announced, the sun appears as a bright star, and the planets are not visible. A few dozen light-years away, the sun is not visible, either, to the naked eye. And that distance – a few dozen light-years – is only about a thousandth part of the distance from the sun to the center of our galaxy, one galaxy, which itself contains about two hundred billion suns. And is, in turn, one of millions, perhaps billions, of galaxies. Innumerable repetitions, innumerable variations. All this rolled past my head too, like balls of lightning.

  Now realism was abandoned, for familiar artifice. A model of the solar system was spinning away in its elegant style. A bright bug took off from the earth, heading for Jupiter. I set my dodging and shrinking mind sternly to recording facts. The mass of Jupiter two and a half times that of all the other planets put together. The Great Red Spot. The thirteen moons. Past Jupiter, a glance at the eccentric orbit of Pluto, the icy rings of Saturn. Back to Earth and moving in to hot and dazzling Venus. Atmospheric pressure ninety times ours. Moonless Mercury rotating three times while circling the sun twice; an odd arrangement, not as satisfying as what they used to tell us – that it rotated once as it circled the sun. No perpetual darkness after all. Why did they give out such confident information, only to announce later that it was quite wrong? Finally, the picture already familiar from magazines: the red soil of Mars, the blooming pink sky.

  When the show was over I sat in my seat while the children clambered across me, making no comments on anything they had just seen or heard. They were pestering their keepers for eatables and further entertainments. An effort had been made to get their attention, to take it away from canned pop and potato chips and fix it on various knowns and unknowns and horrible immensities, and it seemed to have failed. A good thing too, I thought. Children have a natural immunity, most of them, and it shouldn’t be tampered with. As for the adults who would deplore it, the ones who promoted this show, weren’t they immune themselves to the extent that they could put in the echo-chamber effects, the music, the churchlike solemnity, simulating the awe that they supposed they ought to feel? Awe – what was that supposed to be? A fit of the shivers when you looked out the window? Once you know what it was, you wouldn’t be courting it.

  Two men came with brooms to sweep up the debris the audience had left behind. They told me that the next show would start in forty minutes. In the meantime, I had to get out.

  “I WENT TO THE show at the planetarium,” I said to my father. “It was very exciting – about the solar system.” I thought what a silly word I had used: exciting. “It’s like a slightly phony temple,” I added.

  He was already talking. “I remember when they found Pluto. Right where they thought it had to be. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,” he recited. “Jupiter, Saturn, Nept – no, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was just as glad he hadn’t heard what I said about the phony temple. I had meant that to be truthful, but it sounded slick and superior. “Tell me the moons of Jupiter.”

  “Well, I don’t know the new ones. There’s a bunch of new ones, isn’t there?”

&nbs
p; “Two. But they’re not new.”

  “New to us,” said my father. “You’ve turned pretty cheeky now I’m going under the knife.”

  “‘Under the knife.’ What an expression.”

  He was not in bed tonight, his last night. He had been detached from his apparatus, and was sitting in a chair by the window. He was bare-legged, wearing a hospital dressing gown, but he did not look self-conscious or out of place. He looked thoughtful but good-humored, an affable host.

  “You haven’t even named the old ones,” I said.

  “Give me time. Galileo named them. Io.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “The moons of Jupiter were the first heavenly bodies discovered with the telescope.” He said this gravely, as if he could see the sentence in an old book. “It wasn’t Galileo named them, either; it was some German. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. There you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “Io and Europa, they were girlfriends of Jupiter’s, weren’t they? Ganymede was a boy. A shepherd? I don’t know who Callisto was.”

  “I think she was a girlfriend too,” I said. “Jupiter’s wife – Jove’s wife – changed her into a bear and stuck her up in the sky. Great Bear and Little Bear. Little Bear was her baby.”

  The loudspeaker said that it was time for visitors to go.

  “I’ll see you when you come out of the anesthetic,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  When I was at the door, he called to me, “Ganymede wasn’t any shepherd. He was Jove’s cupbearer.”

  WHEN I LEFT THE planetarium that afternoon, I had walked through the museum to the Chinese garden. I saw the stone camels again, the warriors, the tomb. I sat on a bench looking toward Bloor Street. Through the evergreen bushes and the high grilled iron fence I watched people going by in the late-afternoon sunlight. The planetarium show had done what I wanted it to after all – calmed me down, drained me.I saw a girl who reminded me of Nichola. She wore a trenchcoat and carried a bag of groceries. She was shorter than Nichola – not really much like her at all – but I thought that I might see Nichola. She would be walking along some street maybe not far from here – burdened, preoccupied, alone. She was one of the grown-up people in the world now, one of the shoppers going home.

  If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing.

  I meant to get up and go over to the tomb, to look at the relief carvings, the stone pictures, that go all the way around it. I always mean to look at them and I never do. Not this time, either. It was getting cold out, so I went inside to have coffee and something to eat before I went back to the hospital.

  THE PROGRESS OF LOVE

  I GOT A CALL at work, and it was my father. This was not long after I was divorced and started in the real-estate office. Both of my boys were in school. It was a hot enough day in September.

  My father was so polite, even in the family. He took time to ask me how I was. Country manners. Even if somebody phones up to tell you your house is burning down, they ask first how you are.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Not so good, I guess,” said my father, in his old way – apologetic but self-respecting. “I think your mother’s gone.”

  I knew that gone meant dead. I knew that. But for a second or so I saw my mother in her black straw hat setting off down the lane. The word gone seemed full of nothing but a deep relief and even an excitement – the excitement you feel when a door closes and your house sinks back to normal and you let yourself loose into all the free space around you. That was in my father’s voice too – behind the apology, a queer sound like a gulped breath. But my mother hadn’t been a burden – she hadn’t been sick a day – and far from feeling relieved at her death, my father took it hard. He never got used to living alone, he said. He went into the Netterfield County Home quite willingly.

  He told me how he found my mother on the couch in the kitchen when he came in at noon. She had picked a few tomatoes, and was setting them on the windowsill to ripen; then she must have felt weak, and lain down. Now, telling this, his voice went wobbly – meandering, as you would expect – in his amazement. I saw in my mind the couch, the old quilt that protected it, right under the phone.

  “So I thought I better call you,” my father said, and he waited for me to say what he should do now.

  MY MOTHER PRAYED on her knees at midday, at night, and first thing in the morning. Every day opened up to her to have God’s will done in it. Every night she totted up what she’d done and said and thought, to see how it squared with Him. That kind of life is dreary, people think, but they’re missing the point. For one thing, such a life can never be boring. And nothing can happen to you that you can’t make use of. Even if you’re wracked by troubles, and sick and poor and ugly, you’ve got your soul to carry through life like a treasure on a platter. Going upstairs to pray after the noon meal, my mother would be full of energy and expectation, seriously smiling.

  She was saved at a camp meeting when she was fourteen. That was the same summer that her own mother – my grandmother – died. For a few years, my mother went to meetings with a lot of other people who’d been saved, some who’d been saved over and over again, enthusiastic old sinners. She could tell stories about what went on at those meetings, the singing and hollering and wildness. She told about one old man getting up and shouting, “Come down, O Lord, come down among us now! Come down through the roof and I’ll pay for the shingles!”

  She was back to being just an Anglican, a serious one, by the time she got married. She was twenty-five then, and my father was thirty-eight. A tall good-looking couple, good dancers, good cardplayers, sociable. But serious people – that’s how I would try to describe them. Serious the way hardly anybody is anymore. My father was not religious in the way my mother was. He was an Anglican, an Orangeman, a Conservative, because that’s what he had been brought up to be. He was the son who got left on the farm with his parents and took care of them till they died. He met my mother, he waited for her, they married; he thought himself lucky then to have a family to work for. (I have two brothers, and I had a baby sister who died.) I have a feeling that my father never slept with any woman before my mother, and never with her until he married her. And he had to wait, because my mother wouldn’t get married until she had paid back to her own father every cent he had spent on her since her mother died. She had kept track of everything – board, books, clothes – so that she could pay it back. When she married, she had no nest egg, as teachers usually did, no hope chest,sheets, or dishes. My father used to say, with a sombre, joking face, that he had hoped to get a woman with money in the bank. “But you take the money in the bank, you have to take the face that goes with it,” he said, “and sometimes that’s no bargain.”

  THE HOUSE WE lived in had big, high rooms, with dark-green blinds on the windows. When the blinds were pulled down against the sun, I used to like to move my head and catch the light flashing through the holes and cracks. Another thing I liked looking at was chimney stains, old or fresh, which I could turn into animals, people’s faces, even distant cities. I told my own two boys about that, and their father, Dan Casey, said, “See, your mom’s folks were so poor, they couldn’t afford TV, so they got these stains on the ceiling – your mom had to watch the stains on the ceiling!” He always liked to kid me about thinking poor was anything great.

  WHEN MY FATHER was very old, I figured out that he didn’t mind people doing new sorts of things – for instance, my getting divorced – as much as he minded them having new sorts of reasons for doing them.

  Thank God he never had to know about the commune.

  “The Lord never intended,” he used to say. Sitting around with the other old men in the Home, in the long, dim porch behind the spirea bushes, he
talked about how the Lord never intended for people to tear around the country on motorbikes and snowmobiles. And how the Lord never intended for nurses’ uniforms to be pants. The nurses didn’t mind at all. They called him “Handsome,” and told me he was a real old sweetheart, a real old religious gentleman. They marvelled at his thick black hair, which he kept until he died. They washed and combed it beautifully, wet-waved it with their fingers.

  Sometimes, with all their care, he was a little unhappy. He wanted to go home. He worried about the cows, the fences, about who was getting up to light the fire. A few flashes of meanness – very few. Once, he gave me a sneaky, unfriendly look when I went in; he said, “I’m surprised you haven’t worn all the skin off your knees by now.”

  I laughed. I said, “What doing? Scrubbing floors?”

  “Praying!” he said, in a voice like spitting.

  He didn’t know who he was talking to.

  I DON’T REMEMBER my mother’s hair being anything but white. My mother went white in her twenties, and never saved any of her young hair, which had been brown. I used to try to get her to tell what color brown.

  “Dark.”

  “Like Brent, or like Dolly?” Those were two workhorses we had, a team.

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t horsehair.”

  “Was it like chocolate?”

  “Something like.”

  “Weren’t you sad when it went white?”

  “No. I was glad.”

  “Why?”

  “I was glad that I wouldn’t have hair anymore that was the same color as my father’s.”

  Hatred is always a sin, my mother told me. Remember that. One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk. I was struck by that and meant to try it, but knew I shouldn’t waste the milk.

  ALL THESE THINGS I remember. All the things I know, or have been told, about people I never even saw. I was named Euphemia, after my mother’s mother. A terrible name, such as nobody has nowadays. At home they called me Phemie, but when I started to work, I called myself Fame. My husband, Dan Casey, called me Fame. Then in the bar of the Shamrock Hotel, years later, after my divorce, when I was going out, a man said to me, “Fame, I’ve been meaning to ask you, just what is it you are famous for?”