Alice Munro's Best

by Alice Munro

  What Clark balked at was tearing up the carpet, which was the same in every room and the thing that she had most counted on replacing. It was divided into small brown squares, each with a pattern of darker brown and rust and tan squiggles and shapes. For a long time she had thought these were the same squiggles and shapes, arranged in the same way, in each square. Then when she had had more time, a lot of time, to examine them, she decided that there were four patterns joined together to make identical larger squares. Sometimes she could pick out the arrangement easily and sometimes she had to work to see it.

  She did this when it was raining outside and Clark’s mood weighted down all their inside space, and he did not want to pay attention to anything but the computer screen. But the best thing to do then was to invent or remember some job to do in the barn. The horses would not look at her when she was unhappy, but Flora, who was never tied up, would come and rub against her, and look up with an expression that was not quite sympathy – it was more like comradely mockery – in her shimmering yellow-green eyes.

  Flora had been a half-grown kid when Clark brought her home from a farm where he had gone to bargain for some horse tackle. The people there were giving up on the country life, or at least on the raising of animals – they had sold their horses but failed to get rid of their goats. He had heard about how a goat was able to bring a sense of ease and comfort into a horse stable and he wanted to try it. They had meant to breed her someday but there had never been any signs of her coming into heat.

  At first she had been Clark’s pet entirely, following him everywhere, dancing for his attention. She was quick and graceful and provocative as a kitten, and her resemblance to a guileless girl in love had made them both laugh. But as she grew older she seemed to attach herself to Carla, and in this attachment she was suddenly much wiser, less skittish – she seemed capable, instead, of a subdued and ironic sort of humor. Carla’s behavior with the horses was tender and strict and rather maternal, but the comradeship with Flora was quite different, Flora allowing her no sense of superiority.

  “Still no sign of Flora?” she said, as she pulled off her barn boots. Clark had posted a Lost Goat notice on the Web.

  “Not so far,” he said, in a preoccupied but not unfriendly voice. He suggested, not for the first time, that Flora might have just gone off to find herself a billy.

  No word about Mrs. Jamieson. Carla put the kettle on. Clark was humming to himself as he often did when he sat in front of the computer.

  Sometimes he talked back to it. Bullshit, he would say, replying to some challenge. Or he would laugh – but could not remember what the joke was, when she asked him afterwards.

  Carla called, “Do you want tea?” and to her surprise he got up and came into the kitchen.

  “So,” he said. “So, Carla.”

  “What?”

  “So she phoned.”

  “Who?”

  “Her Majesty. Queen Sylvia. She just got back.”

  “I didn’t hear the car.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you did.”

  “So what did she phone for?”

  “She wants you to go and help her straighten up the house. That’s what she said. Tomorrow.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her sure. But you better phone up and confirm.”

  Carla said, “I don’t see why I have to, if you told her.” She poured out their mugs of tea. “I cleaned up her house before she left. I don’t see what there could be to do so soon.”

  “Maybe some coons got in and made a mess of it while she was gone. You never know.”

  “I don’t have to phone her right this minute,” she said. “I want to drink my tea and I want to have a shower.”

  “The sooner the better.”

  Carla took her tea into the bathroom, calling back, “We have to go to the laundromat. Even when the towels dry out they smell moldy.”

  “We’re not changing the subject, Carla.”

  Even after she’d got in the shower he stood outside the door and called to her.

  “I am not going to let you off the hook, Carla.”

  She thought he might still be standing there when she came out, but he was back at the computer. She dressed as if she was going to town – she hoped that if they could get out of here, go to the laundromat, get a takeout at the cappuccino place, they might be able to talk in a different way, some release might be possible. She went into the living room with a brisk step and put her arms around him from behind. But as soon as she did that a wave of grief swallowed her up – it must have been the heat of the shower, loosening her tears – and she bent over him, all crumbling and crying.

  He took his hands off the keyboard but sat still.

  “Just don’t be mad at me,” she said.

  “I’m not mad. I hate when you’re like this, that’s all.”

  “I’m like this because you’re mad.”

  “Don’t tell me what I am. You’re choking me. Start supper.”

  That was what she did. It was obvious by now that the five o’clock person wasn’t coming. She got out the potatoes and began to peel them, but her tears would not stop and she could not see what she was doing. She wiped her face with a paper towel and tore off a fresh one to take with her and went out into the rain. She didn’t go into the barn because it was too miserable in there without Flora. She walked along the lane back to the woods. The horses were in the other field. They came over to the fence to watch her. All of them except Lizzie, who capered and snorted a bit, had the sense to understand that her attention was elsewhere.

  IT HAD STARTED when they read the obituary, Mr. Jamieson’s obituary. That was in the city paper, and his face had been on the evening news. Up until the year before, they had known the Jamiesons only as neighbors who kept to themselves. She taught Botany at the college forty miles away, so she had to spend a good deal of her time on the road. He was a poet.

  Everybody knew that much. But he seemed to be occupied with other things. For a poet, and for an old man – perhaps twenty years older than Mrs. Jamieson – he was rugged and active. He improved the drainage system on his place, cleaning out the culvert and lining it with rocks. He dug and planted and fenced a vegetable garden, cut paths through the woods, looked after repairs on the house.

  The house itself was an odd-looking triangular affair that he had built years ago, with some friends, on the foundation of an old wrecked farmhouse. Those people were spoken of as hippies – though Mr. Jamieson must have been a bit old for that, even then, before Mrs. Jamieson’s time. There was a story that they grew marijuana in the woods, sold it, and stored the money in sealed glass jars, which were buried around the property. Clark had heard this from the people he got to know in town. He said it was bullshit.

  “Else somebody would have got in and dug it up, before now. Somebody would have found a way to make him tell where it was.”

  When they read the obituary Carla and Clark learned for the first time that Leon Jamieson had been the recipient of a large prize, five years before his death. A prize for poetry. Nobody had ever mentioned this. It seemed that people could believe in dope money buried in glass jars, but not in money won for writing poetry.

  Shortly after this Clark said, “We could’ve made him pay.”

  Carla knew at once what he was talking about, but she took it as a joke.

  “Too late now,” she said. “You can’t pay once you’re dead.”

  “He can’t. She could.”

  “She’s gone to Greece.”

  “She’s not going to stay in Greece.”

  “She didn’t know,” said Carla more soberly.

  “I didn’t say she did.”

  “She doesn’t have a clue about it.”

  “We could fix that.”

  Carla said, “No. No.”

  Clark went on as if she had not spoken.

  “We could say we’re going to sue. People get money for stuff like that all the time.”

 
“How could you do that? You can’t sue a dead person.”

  “Threaten to go to the papers. Big-time poet. The papers would eat it up. All we have to do is threaten and she’d cave in.”

  “You’re just fantasizing,” Carla said. “You’re joking.”

  “No,” said Clark. “Actually, I’m not.”

  Carla said she did not want to talk about it anymore and he said okay.

  But they talked about it the next day, and the next and the next. He sometimes got notions like this that were not practicable, which might even be illegal. He talked about them with growing excitement and then – she wasn’t sure why – he dropped them. If the rain had stopped, if this had turned into something like a normal summer, he might have let this idea go the way of the others. But that had not happened, and during the last month he had harped on the scheme as if it was perfectly feasible and serious. The question was how much money to ask for. Too little, and the woman might not take them seriously, she might be inclined to see if they were bluffing. Too much might get her back up and she might become stubborn.

  Carla had stopped saying that it was a joke. Instead she told him that it wouldn’t work. She said that for one thing, people expected poets to be that way. So it wouldn’t be worth paying out money to cover it up.

  He said that it would work if it was done right. Carla was to break down and tell Mrs. Jamieson the whole story. Then Clark would move in, as if it had all been a surprise to him, he had just found out. He would be outraged, he would talk about telling the world. He would let Mrs. Jamieson be the one who first mentioned money.

  “You were injured. You were molested and humiliated and I was injured and humiliated because you are my wife. It’s a question of respect.”

  Over and over again he talked to her in this way and she tried to deflect him but he insisted.

  “Promise,” he said. “Promise.”

  THIS WAS BECAUSE of what she had told him, things she could not now retract or deny.

  Sometimes he gets interested in me?

  The old guy?

  Sometimes he calls me into the room when she’s not there?

  Yes.

  When she has to go out shopping and the nurse isn’t there either.

  A lucky inspiration of hers, one that instantly pleased him.

  So what do you do then? Do you go in?

  She played shy.

  Sometimes.

  He calls you into his room. So? Carla? So, then?

  I go in to see what he wants.

  So what does he want?

  This was asked and told in whispers, even if there was nobody to hear, even when they were in the neverland of their bed. A bedtime story, in which the details were important and had to be added to every time, and this with convincing reluctance, shyness, giggles, dirty, dirty. And it was not only he who was eager and grateful. She was too. Eager to please and excite him, to excite herself. Grateful every time it still worked.

  And in one part of her mind it was true, she saw the randy old man, the bump he made in the sheet, bedridden indeed, almost beyond speech but proficient in sign language, indicating his desire, trying to nudge and finger her into complicity, into obliging stunts and intimacies. (Her refusal a necessity, but also perhaps strangely, slightly disappointing, to Clark.)

  Now and then came an image that she had to hammer down, lest it spoil everything. She would think of the real dim and sheeted body, drugged and shrinking every day in its rented hospital bed, glimpsed only a few times when Mrs. Jamieson or the visiting nurse had neglected to close the door. She herself never actually coming closer to him than that.

  In fact she had dreaded going to the Jamiesons’, but she needed the money, and she felt sorry for Mrs. Jamieson, who seemed so haunted and bewildered, as if she was walking in her sleep. Once or twice Carla had burst out and done something really silly just to loosen up the atmosphere. The kind of thing she did when clumsy and terrified first-time horseback riders were feeling humiliated. She used to try that too when Clark was stuck in his moods. It didn’t work with him anymore. But the story about Mr. Jamieson had worked, decisively.

  THERE WAS NO way to avoid the puddles in the path or the tall soaked grass alongside it, or the wild carrot which had recently come into flower. But the air was warm enough so that she didn’t get chilly. Her clothes were soaked through as if by her own sweat or the tears that ran down her face with the drizzle of rain. Her weeping petered out in time. She had nothing to wipe her nose on – the paper towel now soggy – but she leaned over and blew it hard into a puddle.

  She lifted her head and managed the long-drawn-out, vibrating whistle that was her signal – Clark’s too – for Flora. She waited a couple of minutes and then called Flora’s name. Over and over again, whistle and name, whistle and name.

  Flora did not respond.

  It was almost a relief, though, to feel the single pain of missing Flora, of missing Flora perhaps forever, compared to the mess she had got into concerning Mrs. Jamieson, and her seesaw misery with Clark. At least Flora’s leaving was not on account of anything that she – Carla – had done wrong.

  AT THE HOUSE, there was nothing for Sylvia to do except to open the windows. And to think – with an eagerness that dismayed without really surprising her – of how soon she could see Carla.

  All the paraphernalia of illness had been removed. The room that had been Sylvia and her husband’s bedroom and then his death chamber had been cleaned out and tidied up to look as if nothing had ever happened in it. Carla had helped with all that during the few frenzied days between the crematorium and the departure for Greece. Every piece of clothing Leon had ever worn and some things he hadn’t, including gifts from his sisters that had never been taken out of their packages, had been piled in the backseat of the car and delivered to the Thrift Shop. His pills, his shaving things, unopened cans of the fortified drink that had sustained him as long as anything could, cartons of the sesame seed snaps that at one time he had eaten by the dozens, the plastic bottles full of the lotion that had eased his back, the sheepskins on which he had lain – all of that was dumped into plastic bags to be hauled away as garbage, and Carla didn’t question a thing. She never said, “Maybe somebody could use that,” or pointed out that whole cartons of cans were unopened. When Sylvia said, “I wish I hadn’t taken the clothes to town. I wish I’d burned them all up in the incinerator,” Carla had shown no surprise.

  They cleaned the oven, scrubbed out the cupboards, wiped down the walls and the windows. One day Sylvia sat in the living room going through all the condolence letters she had received. (There was no accumulation of papers and notebooks to be attended to, as you might have expected with a writer, no unfinished work or scribbled drafts. He had told her, months before, that he had pitched everything. And no regrets.)

  The south-sloping wall of the house was made up of big windows. Sylvia looked up, surprised by the watery sunlight that had come out – or possibly surprised by the shadow of Carla, bare-legged, bare-armed, on top of a ladder, her resolute face crowned with a frizz of dandelion hair that was too short for the braid. She was vigorously spraying and scrubbing the glass. When she saw Sylvia looking at her she stopped and flung out her arms as if she was splayed there, making a silly gargoyle-like face. They both began to laugh. Sylvia felt this laughter running all through her like a playful stream. She went back to her letters as Carla resumed the cleaning. She decided that all of these kind words – genuine or perfunctory, the tributes and regrets – could go the way of the sheepskins and the crackers.

  When she heard Carla taking the ladder down, heard boots on the deck, she was suddenly shy. She sat where she was with her head bowed as Carla came into the room and passed behind her on her way to the kitchen to put the pail and the cloths back under the sink. Carla hardly halted, she was quick as a bird, but she managed to drop a kiss on Sylvia’s bent head. Then she went on whistling something to herself.

  That kiss had been in Sylvia’s mind ever since. I
t meant nothing in particular. It meant Cheer up. Or Almost done. It meant that they were good friends who had got through a lot of depressing work together. Or maybe just that the sun had come out. That Carla was thinking of getting home to her horses. Nevertheless, Sylvia saw it as a bright blossom, its petals spreading inside her with tumultuous heat, like a menopausal flash.

  Every so often there had been a special girl student in one of her botany classes – one whose cleverness and dedication and awkward egotism, or even genuine passion for the natural world, reminded her of her young self. Such girls hung around her worshipfully, hoped for some sort of intimacy they could not – in most cases – imagine, and they soon got on her nerves.

  Carla was nothing like them. If she resembled anybody in Sylvia’s life, it would have to be certain girls she had known in high school – those who were bright but never too bright, easy athletes but not strenuously competitive, buoyant but not rambunctious. Naturally happy.

  “WHERE I WAS, this little village, this little tiny village with my two old friends, well, it was the sort of place where the very occasional tourist bus would stop, just as if it had got lost, and the tourists would get off and look around and they were absolutely bewildered because they weren’t anywhere. There was nothing to buy.”

  Sylvia was speaking about Greece. Carla was sitting a few feet away from her. The large-limbed, uncomfortable, dazzling girl was sitting there at last, in the room that had been filled with thoughts of her. She was faintly smiling, belatedly nodding.

  “And at first,” Sylvia said, “at first I was bewildered too. It was so hot. But it’s true about the light. It’s wonderful. And then I figured out what there was to do, and there were just these few simple things but they could fill the day. You walk half a mile down the road to buy some oil and half a mile in the other direction to buy your bread or your wine, and that’s the morning, and you eat some lunch under the trees and after lunch it’s too hot to do anything but close the shutters and lie on your bed and maybe read. At first you read. And then it gets so you don’t even do that. Why read? Later on you notice the shadows are longer and you get up and go for a swim.