by Alice Munro
He was travelling in the day coach – the fellowship was not generous. But Eve had splurged and got herself a roomette. It was this extravagance – a last-minute decision – it was the convenience and privacy of the roomette that were responsible, Eve said, for the existence of Sophie and the greatest change in her, Eve’s, life. That, and the fact that you couldn’t get condoms anywhere around the Calgary station, not for love or money.
In Toronto she waved goodbye to her lover from Kerala, as you would wave to any train acquaintance, because she was met there by the man who was at that time the serious interest and main trouble in her life. The whole three days had been underscored by the swaying and rocking of the train – the lovers’ motions were never just what they contrived themselves, and perhaps for that reason seemed guiltless, irresistible. Their feelings and conversations must have been affected, too. Eve remembered these as sweet and generous, never solemn or desperate. It would have been hard to be solemn when you were dealing with the dimensions and the projections of the roomette.
She told Sophie his Christian name – Thomas, after the saint. Until she met him, Eve had never heard about the ancient Christians in southern India. For a while when she was in her teens Sophie had taken an interest in Kerala. She brought home books from the library and took to going to parties in a sari. She talked about looking her father up, when she got older. The fact that she knew his first name and his special study – diseases of the blood – seemed to her possibly enough. Eve stressed to her the size of the population of India and the chance that he had not even stayed there. What she could not bring herself to explain was how incidental, how nearly unimaginable, the existence of Sophie would be, necessarily, in her father’s life. Fortunately the idea faded, and Sophie gave up wearing the sari when all those dramatic, ethnic costumes became too commonplace. The only time she mentioned her father, later on, was when she was carrying Philip, and making jokes about keeping up the family tradition of flyby fathers.
NO JOKES LIKE that now. Sophie had grown stately, womanly, graceful, and reserved. There had been a moment – they were getting through the woods to the beach, and Sophie had bent to scoop up Daisy, so that they might move more quickly out of range of the mosquitoes – when Eve had been amazed at the new, late manifestation of her daughter’s beauty. A full-bodied, tranquil, classic beauty, achieved not by care and vanity but by self-forgetfulness and duty. She looked more Indian now, her creamed-coffee skin had darkened in the California sun, and she bore under her eyes the lilac crescents of a permanent mild fatigue.
But she was still a strong swimmer. Swimming was the only sport she had ever cared for, and she swam as well as ever, heading it seemed for the middle of the lake. The first day she had done it she said, “That was wonderful. I felt so free.” She didn’t say that it was because Eve was watching the children that she had felt that way, but Eve understood that it didn’t need to be said. “I’m glad,” she said – though in fact she had been frightened. Several times she had thought, Turn around now, and Sophie had swum right on, disregarding this urgent telepathic message. Her dark head became a spot, then a speck, then an illusion tossed among the steady waves. What Eve feared, and could not think about, was not a failure of strength but of the desire to return. As if this new Sophie, this grown woman so tethered to life, could be actually more indifferent to it than the girl Eve used to know, the young Sophie with her plentiful risks and loves and dramas.
“WE HAVE TO GET that movie back to the store,” Eve said to Philip.
“Maybe we should do it before we go to the beach.”
Philip said, “I’m sick of the beach.”
Eve didn’t feel like arguing. With Sophie gone, with all plans altered, so that they were leaving, all of them leaving later in the day, she was sick of the beach, too. And sick of the house – all she could see now was the way this room would look tomorrow. The crayons, the toy cars, the large pieces of Daisy’s simple jigsaw puzzle, all swept up and taken away. The storybooks gone that she knew by heart. No sheets drying outside the window. Eighteen more days to last, by herself, in this place.
“How about we go somewhere else today?” she said.
Philip said, “Where is there?”
“Let it be a surprise.”
EVE HAD COME home from the village the day before, laden with provisions. Fresh shrimp for Sophie – the village store was actually a classy supermarket these days, you could find almost anything – coffee, wine, rye bread without caraway seeds because Philip hated caraway, a ripe melon, the dark cherries they all loved, though Daisy had to be watched with the stones, a tub of mocha-fudge ice cream, and all the regular things to keep them going for another week.
Sophie was clearing up the children’s lunch. “Oh,” she cried. “Oh, what’ll we do with all that stuff?”
Ian had phoned, she said. Ian had phoned and said he was flying into Toronto tomorrow. Work on his book had progressed more quickly than he had expected; he had changed his plans. Instead of waiting for the three weeks to be up, he was coming tomorrow to collect Sophie and the children and take them on a little trip. He wanted to go to Quebec City. He had never been there, and he thought the children should see the part of Canada where people spoke French.
“He got lonesome,” Philip said.
Sophie laughed. She said, “Yes. He got lonesome for us.”
Twelve days, Eve thought. Twelve days had passed of the three weeks. She had had to take the house for a month. She was letting her friend Dev use the apartment. He was another out-of-work actor, and was in such real or imagined financial peril that he answered the phone in various stage voices. She was fond of Dev, but she couldn’t go back and share the apartment with him.
Sophie said that they would drive to Quebec in the rented car, then drive straight back to the Toronto airport, where the car was to be turned in. No mention of Eve’s going along. There wasn’t room in the rented car. But couldn’t she have taken her own car? Philip riding with her, perhaps, for company. Or Sophie. Ian could take the children, if he was so lonesome for them, and give Sophie a rest. Eve and Sophie could ride together as they used to in the summer, travelling to some town they had never seen before, where Eve had got a job.
That was ridiculous. Eve’s car was nine years old and in no condition to make a long trip. And it was Sophie Ian had got lonesome for – you could tell that by her warm averted face. Also, Eve hadn’t been asked.
“Well that’s wonderful,” said Eve. “That he’s got along so well with his book.”
“It is,” said Sophie. She always had an air of careful detachment when she spoke of Ian’s book, and when Eve had asked what it was about she had said merely, “Urban geography.” Perhaps this was the correct behavior for academic wives – Eve had never known any.
“Anyway you’ll get some time by yourself,” Sophie said. “After all this circus. You’ll find out if you really would like to have a place in the country. A retreat.”
Eve had to start talking about something else, anything else, so that she wouldn’t bleat out a question about whether Sophie still thought of coming next summer.
“I had a friend who went on one of those real retreats,” she said. “He’s a Buddhist. No, maybe a Hindu. Not a real Indian.” (At this mention of Indians Sophie smiled in a way that said this was another subject that need not be gone into.) “Anyway, you could not speak on this retreat for three months. There were other people around all the time, but you could not speak to them. And he said that one of the things that often happened and that they were warned about was that you fell in love with one of these people you’d never spoken to. You felt you were communicating in a special way with them when you couldn’t talk. Of course it was a kind of spiritual love, and you couldn’t do anything about it. They were strict about that kind of thing. Or so he said.”
Sophie said, “So? When you were finally allowed to speak what happened?”
“It was a big letdown. Usually the person you thought you’d
been communicating with hadn’t been communicating with you at all. Maybe they thought they’d been communicating that way with somebody else, and they thought –”
Sophie laughed with relief. She said, “So it goes.” Glad that there was to be no show of disappointment, no hurt feelings.
Maybe they had a tiff, thought Eve. This whole visit might have been tactical. Sophie might have taken the children off to show him something. Spent time with her mother, just to show him something. Planning future holidays without him, to prove to herself that she could do it. A diversion.
And the burning question was, Who did the phoning?
“Why don’t you leave the children here?” she said. “Just while you drive to the airport? Then just drive back and pick them up and take off. You’d have a little time to yourself and a little time alone with Ian. It’ll be hell with them in the airport.”
Sophie said, “I’m tempted.”
So in the end that was what she did.
Now Eve had to wonder if she herself had engineered that little change just so she could get to talk to Philip.
(Wasn’t it a big surprise when your dad phoned from California?
He didn’t phone. My mom phoned him.
Did she? Oh I didn’t know. What did she say?
She said, “I can’t stand it here, I’m sick of it, let’s figure out some plan to get me away.”)
EVE DROPPED HER voice to a matter-of-fact level, to indicate an interruption of the game. She said, “Philip. Philip, listen. I think we’ve got to stop this. That truck just belongs to some farmer and it’s going to turn in someplace and we can’t go on following.”
“Yes we can,” Philip said.
“No we can’t. They’d want to know what we were doing. They might be very mad.”
“We’ll call up our helicopters to come and shoot them.”
“Don’t be silly. You know this is just a game.”
“They’ll shoot them.”
“I don’t think they have any weapons,” said Eve, trying another tack. “They haven’t developed any weapons to destroy aliens.”
Philip said, “You’re wrong,” and began a description of some kind of rockets, which she did not listen to.
WHEN SHE WAS a child staying in the village with her brother and her parents, Eve had sometimes gone for drives in the country with her mother. They didn’t have a car – it was wartime, they had come here on the train. The woman who ran the hotel was friends with Eve’s mother, and they would be invited along when she drove to the country to buy corn or raspberries or tomatoes. Sometimes they would stop to have tea and look at the old dishes and bits of furniture for sale in some enterprising farm woman’s front parlor. Eve’s father preferred to stay behind and play checkers with some other men on the beach. There was a big cement square with a checkerboard painted on it, a roof protecting it but no walls, and there, even in the rain, the men moved oversized checkers around in a deliberate way, with long poles. Eve’s brother watched them or went swimming unsupervised – he was older. That was all gone now – the cement, even, was gone, or something had been built right on top of it. The hotel with its verandas extending over the sand was gone, and the railway station with its flower beds spelling out the name of the village. The railway tracks too. Instead there was a fake-old-fashioned mall with the satisfactory new supermarket and wineshop and boutiques for leisure wear and country crafts.
When she was quite small and wore a great hair bow on top of her head, Eve was fond of these country expeditions. She ate tiny jam tarts and cakes whose frosting was stiff on top and soft underneath, topped with a bleeding maraschino cherry. She was not allowed to touch the dishes or the lace-and-satin pincushions or the sallow-looking old dolls, and the women’s conversations passed over her head with a temporary and mildly depressing effect, like the inevitable clouds. But she enjoyed riding in the backseat imagining herself on horseback or in a royal coach. Later on she refused to go. She began to hate trailing along with her mother and being identified as her mother’s daughter. My daughter, Eve. How richly condescending, how mistakenly possessive, that voice sounded in her ears. (She was to use it, or some version of it, for years as a staple in some of her broadest, least accomplished acting.) She detested also her mother’s habit of dressing up, wearing large hats and gloves in the country, and sheer dresses on which there were raised flowers, like warts. The oxford shoes, on the other hand – they were worn to favor her mother’s corns – appeared embarrassingly stout and shabby.
“What did you hate most about your mother?” was a game that Eve would play with her friends in her first years free of home.
“Corsets,” one girl would say, and another would say, “Wet aprons.”
Hair nets. Fat arms. Bible quotations. “Danny Boy.”
Eve always said. “Her corns.”
She had forgotten all about this game until recently. The thought of it now was like touching a bad tooth.
Ahead of them the truck slowed and without signalling turned into a long tree-lined lane. Eve said, “I can’t follow them any farther, Philip,” and drove on. But as she passed the lane she noticed the gateposts. They were unusual, being shaped something like crude minarets and decorated with whitewashed pebbles and bits of colored glass. Neither one of them was straight, and they were half hidden by goldenrod and wild carrot, so that they had lost all reality as gateposts and looked instead like lost stage props from some gaudy operetta. The minute she saw them Eve remembered something else – a whitewashed outdoor wall in which there were pictures set. The pictures were stiff, fantastic, childish scenes. Churches with spires, castles with towers, square houses with square, lopsided, yellow windows. Triangular Christmas trees and tropical-colored birds half as big as the trees, a fat horse with dinky legs and burning red eyes, curly blue rivers, like lengths of ribbon, a moon and drunken stars and fat sunflowers nodding over the roofs of houses. All of this made of pieces of colored glass set into cement or plaster. She had seen it, and it wasn’t in any public place. It was out in the country, and she had been with her mother. The shape of her mother loomed in front of the wall – she was talking to an old farmer. He might only have been her mother’s age, of course, and looked old to Eve.
Her mother and the hotel woman did go to look at odd things on those trips; they didn’t just look at antiques. They had gone to see a shrub cut to resemble a bear, and an orchard of dwarf apple trees.
Eve didn’t remember the gateposts at all, but it seemed to her that they could not have belonged to any other place. She backed the car and swung around into the narrow track beneath the trees. The trees were heavy old Scotch pines, probably dangerous – you could see dangling half-dead branches, and branches that had already blown down or fallen down were lying in the grass and weeds on either side of the track. The car rocked back and forth in the ruts, and it seemed that Daisy approved of this motion. She began to make an accompanying noise. Whoppy. Whoppy. Whoppy.
This was something Daisy might remember – all she might remember – of this day. The arched trees, the sudden shadow, the interesting motion of the car. Maybe the white faces of the wild carrot that brushed at the windows. The sense of Philip beside her – his incomprehensible serious excitement, the tingling of his childish voice brought under unnatural control. A much vaguer sense of Eve – bare, freckly, sun-wrinkled arms, gray-blond frizzy curls held back by a black hairband. Maybe a smell. Not of cigarettes anymore, or of the touted creams and cosmetics on which Eve once spent so much of her money. Old skin? Garlic? Wine? Mouthwash? Eve might be dead when Daisy remembered this. Daisy and Philip might be estranged. Eve had not spoken to her own brother for three years. Not since he said to her on the phone, “You shouldn’t have become an actress if you weren’t equipped to make a better go of it.”
There wasn’t any sign of a house ahead, but through a gap in the trees the skeleton of a barn rose up, walls gone, beams intact, roof whole but flopping to one side like a funny hat. There seemed to be pieces
of machinery, old cars or trucks, scattered around it, in the sea of flowering weeds. Eve had not much leisure to look – she was busy controlling the car on this rough track. The green truck had disappeared ahead of her – how far could it have gone? Then she saw that the lane curved. It curved; they left the shade of the pines and were out in the sunlight. The same sea foam of wild carrot, the same impression of rusting junk strewed about. A high wild hedge to one side, and there was the house, finally, behind it. A big house, two stories of yellowish-gray brick, an attic story of wood, its dormer windows stuffed with dirty foam rubber. One of the lower windows shone with aluminum foil covering it on the inside.
She had come to the wrong place. She had no memory of this house. There was no wall here around mown grass. Saplings grew up at random in the weeds.
The truck was parked ahead of her. And ahead of that she could see a patch of cleared ground where gravel had been spread and where she could have turned the car around. But she couldn’t get past the truck to do that. She had to stop, too. She wondered if the man in the truck had stopped where he did on purpose, so that she would have to explain herself. He was now getting out of the truck in a leisurely way. Without looking at her, he released the dog, which had been running back and forth and barking with a great deal of angry spirit. Once on the ground, it continued to bark, but didn’t leave the man’s side. The man wore a cap that shaded his face, so that Eve could not see his expression. He stood by the truck looking at them, not yet deciding to come any closer.
Eve unbuckled her seat belt.
“Don’t get out,” said Philip. “Stay in the car. Turn around. Drive away.”
“I can’t,” said Eve. “It’s all right. That dog’s just a yapper, he won’t hurt me.”
“Don’t get out.”
