Alice Munro's Best

by Alice Munro

  After Mrs. Willets her heart had been dry, and she had considered it might always be so. And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.

  MR. MCCAULEY DIED about two years after Johanna’s departure. His funeral was the last one held in the Anglican church. There was a good turnout for it. Sabitha – who came with her mother’s cousin, the Toronto woman – was now self-contained and pretty and remarkably, unexpectedly slim. She wore a sophisticated black hat and did not speak to anybody unless they spoke to her first. Even then, she did not seem to remember them.

  The death notice in the paper said that Mr. McCauley was survived by his granddaughter Sabitha Boudreau and his son-in-law Ken Boudreau, and Mr. Boudreau’s wife Johanna, and their infant son Omar, of Salmon Arm, B.C.

  Edith’s mother read this out – Edith herself never looked at the local paper. Of course, the marriage was not news to either of them – or to Edith’s father, who was around the corner in the front room, watching television. Word had got back. The only news was Omar.

  “Her with a baby,” Edith’s mother said.

  Edith was doing her Latin translation at the kitchen table. Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi –

  In the church she had taken the precaution of not speaking to Sabitha first, before Sabitha could not speak to her.

  She was not really afraid, anymore, of being found out – though she still could not understand why they hadn’t been. And in a way, it seemed only proper that the antics of her former self should not be connected with her present self – let alone with the real self that she expected would take over once she got out of this town and away from all the people who thought they knew her. It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her – it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her. For where, on the list of things she planned to achieve in her life, was there any mention of her being responsible for the existence on earth of a person named Omar?

  Ignoring her mother, she wrote, “You must not ask, it is forbidden for us to know –”

  She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished off with a chill of satisfaction, “– what fate has in store for me, or for you –”

  SAVE THE REAPER

  THE GAME THEY played was almost the same one that Eve had played with Sophie, on long dull car trips when Sophie was a little girl. Then it was spies – now it was aliens. Sophie’s children, Philip and Daisy, were sitting in the backseat. Daisy was barely three and could not understand what was going on. Philip was seven, and in control. He was the one who picked the car they were to follow, in which there were newly arrived space travellers on their way to the secret headquarters, the invaders’ lair. They got their directions from the signals offered by plausible-looking people in other cars or from somebody standing by a mailbox or even riding a tractor in a field. Many aliens had already arrived on earth and been translated – this was Philip’s word – so that anybody might be one. Gas station attendants or women pushing baby carriages or even the babies riding in the carriages. They could be giving signals.

  Usually Eve and Sophie had played this game on a busy highway where there was enough traffic that they wouldn’t be detected. (Though once they had got carried away and ended up in a suburban drive.) On the country roads that Eve was taking today that wasn’t so easy. She tried to solve the problem by saying that they might have to switch from following one vehicle to another because some were only decoys, not heading for the hideaway at all, but leading you astray.

  “No, that isn’t it,” said Philip. “What they do, they suck the people out of one car into another car, just in case anybody is following. They can be like inside one body and then they go schlup through the air into another body in another car. They go into different people all the time and the people never know what was in them.”

  “Really?” Eve said. “So how do we know which car?”

  “The code’s on the license plate,” said Philip. “It’s changed by the electrical field they create in the car. So their trackers in space can follow them. It’s just one simple little thing, but I can’t tell you.”

  “Well no,” said Eve. “I suppose very few people know it.”

  Philip said, “I am the only one right now in Ontario.”

  He sat as far forward as he could with his seat belt on, tapping his teeth sometimes in urgent concentration and making light whistling noises as he cautioned her.

  “Unh-unh, watch out here,” he said. “I think you’re going to have to turn around. Yeah. Yeah. I think this may be it.”

  They had been following a white Mazda, and were now, apparently, to follow an old green pickup truck, a Ford. Eve said, “Are you sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “You felt them sucked through the air?”

  “They’re translated simultaneously,” Philip said. “I might have said ‘sucked,’ but that’s just to help people understand it.”

  What Eve had originally planned was to have the headquarters turn out to be in the village store that sold ice cream, or in the playground. It could be revealed that all the aliens were congregated there in the form of children, seduced by the pleasures of ice cream or slides and swings, their powers temporarily in abeyance. No fear they could abduct you – or get into you – unless you chose the one wrong flavor of ice cream or swung the exact wrong number of times on the designated swing. (There would have to be some remaining danger, or else Philip would feel let down, humiliated.) But Philip had taken charge so thoroughly that now it was hard to manage the outcome. The pickup truck was turning from the paved county road onto a gravelled side road. It was a decrepit truck with no topper, its body eaten by rust – it would not be going far. Home to some farm, most likely. They might not meet another vehicle to switch to before the destination was reached.

  “You’re positive this is it?” said Eve. “It’s only one man by himself, you know. I thought they never travelled alone.”

  “The dog,” said Philip.

  For there was a dog riding in the open back of the truck, running back and forth from one side to the other as if there were events to be kept track of everywhere.

  “The dog’s one too,” Philip said.

  THAT MORNING, when Sophie was leaving to meet Ian at the Toronto airport, Philip had kept Daisy occupied in the children’s bedroom. Daisy had settled down pretty well in the strange house – except for wetting her bed every night of the holiday – but this was the first time that her mother had gone off and left her behind. So Sophie had asked Philip to distract her, and he did so with enthusiasm (happy at the new turn events had taken?). He shot the toy cars across the floor with angry engine noises to cover up the sound of Sophie’s starting the real rented car and driving away. Shortly after that he shouted to Eve, “Has the B.M. gone?”

  Eve was in the kitchen, clearing up the remains of breakfast and disciplining herself. She walked into the living room. There was the boxed tape of the movie that she and Sophie had been watching last night.

  The Bridges of Madison County.

  “What does mean ‘B.M.’?” said Daisy.

  The children’s room opened off the living room. This was a cramped little house, fixed up on the cheap for summer rental. Eve’s idea had been to get a lakeside cottage for the holiday – Sophie’s and Philip’s first visit with her in nearly five years and Daisy’s first ever. She had picked this stretch of the Lake Huron shore because her parents used to bring her here with her brother when they were children. Things had changed – the cottages were all as substantial as suburban houses, and the rents were out of sight. This house half a mile inland from the rocky, unfavored north end of the usable beach had been the best she could manage. It stood in the middle of a cornfield. She had told the children what her father had once told her – that at night you could hear the corn growing.

  Every day when Sophie took Daisy’s hand-washed sheets off the line, she had to shake out the corn bugs.

  �
��It means ‘bowel movement,’” said Philip with a look of sly challenge at Eve.

  Eve halted in the doorway. Last night she and Sophie had watched Meryl Streep sitting in the husband’s truck, in the rain, pressing down on the door handle, choking with longing, as her lover drove away. Then they had turned and had seen each other’s eyes full of tears and shook their heads and started laughing.

  “Also it means ‘Big Mama,’” Philip said in a more conciliatory tone. “Sometimes that’s what Dad calls her.”

  “Well then,” said Eve. “If that’s your question, the answer to your question is yes.”

  She wondered if he thought of Ian as his real father. She hadn’t asked Sophie what they’d told him. She wouldn’t, of course. His real father had been an Irish boy who was travelling around North America trying to decide what to do now that he had decided not to be a priest. Eve had thought of him as a casual friend of Sophie’s, and it seemed that Sophie had thought of him that way too, until she seduced him. (“He was so shy I never dreamed it would take,” she said.) It wasn’t until Eve saw Philip that Eve could really picture what the boy had looked like. Then she saw him faithfully reproduced – the bright-eyed, pedantic, sensitive, scornful, fault-finding, blushing, shrinking, arguing young Irishman. Something like Samuel Beckett, she said, even to the wrinkles. Of course as the baby got older, the wrinkles tended to disappear.

  Sophie was a full-time archaeology student then. Eve took care of Philip while she was off at her classes. Eve was an actress – she still was, when she could get work. Even in those days there were times when she wasn’t working, or if she had daytime rehearsals she could take Philip along. For a couple of years they all lived together – Eve and Sophie and Philip – in Eve’s apartment in Toronto. It was Eve who wheeled Philip in his baby carriage – and, later on, in his stroller – along all the streets between Queen and College and Spadina and Ossington, and during these walks she would sometimes discover a perfect, though neglected, little house for sale in a previously unknown to her two-block-long, tree-shaded, dead-end street. She would send Sophie to look at it; they would go round with the real-estate agent, talk about a mortgage, discuss what renovations they would have to pay for, and which they could do themselves. Dithering and fantasizing until the house was sold to somebody else, or until Eve had one of her periodic but intense fits of financial prudence, or until somebody persuaded them that these charming little side streets were not half so safe for women and children as the bright, ugly, brash, and noisy street that they continued to live on.

  Ian was a person Eve took even less note of than she had of the Irish boy. He was a friend; he never came to the apartment except with others. Then he went to a job in California – he was an urban geographer – and Sophie ran up a phone bill which Eve had to speak to her about, and there was a change altogether in the atmosphere of the apartment. (Should Eve not have mentioned the bill?) Soon a visit was planned, and Sophie took Philip along, because Eve was doing a summer play in a regional theater.

  Not long afterwards came the news from California. Sophie and Ian were going to get married.

  “Wouldn’t it be smarter to try living together for a while?” said Eve on the phone from her boarding house, and Sophie said, “Oh, no. He’s weird. He doesn’t believe in that.”

  “But I can’t get off for a wedding,” Eve said. “We run till the middle of September.”

  “That’s okay,” said Sophie. “It won’t be a wedding wedding.”

  And until this summer, Eve had not seen her again. There was the lack of money at both ends, in the beginning. When Eve was working she had a steady commitment, and when she wasn’t working she couldn’t afford anything extra. Soon Sophie had a job, too – she was a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Once Eve was just about to book a flight, when Sophie phoned to say that Ian’s father had died and that he was flying to England for the funeral and bringing his mother back with him.

  “And we only have the one room,” she said.

  “Perish the thought,” said Eve. “Two mothers-in-law in one house, let alone in one room.”

  “Maybe after she’s gone?” said Sophie.

  But that mother stayed till after Daisy was born, stayed till they moved into the new house, stayed eight months in all. By then Ian was starting to write his book, and it was difficult for him if there were visitors in the house. It was difficult enough anyway. The time passed during which Eve felt confident enough to invite herself. Sophie sent pictures of Daisy, the garden, all the rooms of the house.

  Then she announced that they could come, she and Philip and Daisy could come back to Ontario this summer. They would spend three weeks with Eve while Ian worked alone in California. At the end of that time he would join them and they would fly from Toronto to England to spend a month with his mother.

  “I’ll get a cottage on the lake,” said Eve. “Oh, it will be lovely.” “It will,” said Sophie. “It’s crazy that it’s been so long.” And so it had been. Reasonably lovely, Eve had thought. Sophie hadn’t seemed much bothered or surprised by Daisy’s wetting the bed. Philip had been finicky and standoffish for a couple of days, responding coolly to Eve’s report that she had known him as a baby, and whining about the mosquitoes that descended on them as they hurried through the shoreline woods to get to the beach. He wanted to be taken to Toronto to see the Science Centre. But then he settled down, swam in the lake without complaining that it was cold, and busied himself with solitary projects – such as boiling and scraping the meat off a dead turtle he’d lugged home, so he could keep its shell. The turtle’s stomach contained an undigested crayfish, and its shell came off in strips, but none of this dismayed him.

  Eve and Sophie, meanwhile, developed a pleasant, puttering routine of morning chores, afternoons on the beach, wine with supper, and late-evening movies. They were drawn into half-serious speculations about the house. What could be done about it? First strip off the living-room wallpaper, an imitation of imitation-wood panelling. Pull up the linoleum with its silly pattern of gold fleurs-de-lis turned brown by ground-in sand and dirty scrub water. Sophie was so carried away that she loosened a bit of it that had rotted in front of the sink and discovered pine floorboards that surely could be sanded. They talked about the cost of renting a sander (supposing, that is, that the house was theirs) and what colors they would choose for the paint on the doors and woodwork, shutters on the windows, open shelves in the kitchen instead of the dingy plywood cupboards. What about a gas fireplace?

  And who was going to live here? Eve. The snowmobilers who used the house for a winter clubhouse were building a place of their own, and the landlord might be happy to rent it year-round. Or maybe sell it very cheaply, considering its condition. It could be a retreat, if Eve got the job she was hoping for, next winter. And if she didn’t, why not sublet the apartment and live here? There’d be the difference in the rents, and the old-age pension she started getting in October, and the money that still came in from a commercial she had made for a diet supplement. She could manage.

  “And then if we came in the summers we could help with the rent,” said Sophie.

  Philip heard them. He said, “Every summer?”

  “Well you like the lake now,” Sophie said. “You like it here now.”

  “And the mosquitoes, you know they’re not as bad every year,” Eve said. “Usually they’re just bad in the early summer. June, before you’d even get here. In the spring there are all these boggy places full of water, and they breed there, and then the boggy places dry up, and they don’t breed again. But this year there was so much rain earlier, those places didn’t dry up, so the mosquitoes got a second chance, and there’s a whole new generation.”

  She had found out how much he respected information and preferred it to her opinions and reminiscences.

  Sophie was not keen on reminiscence either. Whenever the past that she and Eve had shared was mentioned – even those months after Philip’s birth that Eve thought of as some of the
happiest, the hardest, the most purposeful and harmonious, in her life – Sophie’s face took on a look of gravity and concealment, of patiently withheld judgments. The earlier time, Sophie’s own childhood, was a positive minefield, as Eve discovered, when they were talking about Philip’s school. Sophie thought it a little too rigorous, and Ian thought it just fine.

  “What a switch from Blackbird,” Eve said, and Sophie said at once, almost viciously, “Oh, Blackbird. What a farce. When I think that you paid for that. You paid.”

  Blackbird was an ungraded alternative school that Sophie had gone to (the name came from “Morning Has Broken”). It had cost Eve more than she could afford, but she thought it was better for a child whose mother was an actress and whose father was not in evidence. When Sophie was nine or ten, it had broken up because of disagreements among the parents.

  “I learned Greek myths and I didn’t know where Greece was,” said Sophie. “I didn’t know what it was. We had to spend art period making antinuke signs.”

  Eve said, “Oh, no, surely.”

  “We did. And they literally badgered us – they badgered us – to talk about sex. It was verbal molestation. You paid.”

  “I didn’t know it was as bad as all that.”

  “Oh well,” said Sophie. “I survived.”

  “That’s the main thing,” Eve said shakily. “Survival.”

  SOPHIE’S FATHER WAS from Kerala, in the southern part of India. Eve had met him, and spent her whole time with him, on a train going from Vancouver to Toronto. He was a young doctor studying in Canada on a fellowship. He had a wife already, and a baby daughter, at home in India.

  The train trip took three days. There was a half-hour stop in Calgary. Eve and the doctor ran around looking for a drugstore where they could buy condoms. They didn’t find one. By the time they got to Winnipeg, where the train stopped for a full hour, it was too late. In fact – said Eve, when she told their story – by the time they got to the Calgary city limits, it was probably too late.