The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  The rinkie-dinks could be busy or idle around parts of the rink, climbing the wall ladders, walking along the benches, even running along the platform, which had no guardrail, under the roof openings. Sometimes they would wiggle through these openings onto the roof, and get back in the same way. Some of the time, of course, they skated. They got in for nothing.

  So did Sam and Edgar and Callie, soon enough. They came along when the skating was well under way and the rink full and noisy. Close to one corner of the building were some cherry trees, and a very light person could climb one of these trees and drop onto the roof. Then this very light, bold, and agile person could scramble along the roof and crawl through one of the openings and jump to the platform underneath, risking a fall to the ice below and broken bones or even death. But boys risked that all the time. From the platform you could climb down a wall ladder, then work your way around the benches and slip over the wall of the passage made for shovelling out snow. Then it was a matter of crouching in the shadow, watching for the right moment, unhooking the snow door, and letting in the two who were waiting outside: Sam and Edgar, who lost no time putting on their skates and taking to the ice.

  Why did others not manage the same trick, Sam might be asked on those occasions, years and years later, when he chose to tell the story, and he always said maybe they did, he wouldn’t know about it. The rinkie-dinks of course could have opened the door to any number of friends, but they were not disposed to do so, being quite jealous of their own privileges. And few of the night skaters were small enough and light and quick and brave enough to get in through the roof. Children might have tried it, but they skated on Saturday afternoons and didn’t have the advantage of darkness. And why was Callie not noticed? Well, she was very quick, and she was never careless; she waited her time. She wore a ragged, ill-fitting set of clothes—breeches, windbreaker, cloth cap. There were always boys around who were dressed in cast-off raggedy clothes. And the town was just big enough that not every face could be placed instantly. There were two public schools, and a boy from one, noticing her, would just think she went to the other.

  Sam’s wife once asked, “How did you persuade her?” Callie—what was in it for Callie, who never owned a pair of skates?

  “Callie’s life was work,” Sam said. “So anything that wasn’t work—that was a thrill for her.” But he wondered—how did they persuade her? It must have been a dare. Making friends with Callie at first had been something like making friends with a testy and suspicious little dog, and later on it had been like making friends with the twelve-year-old she looked to be. At first she wouldn’t stop work to look at them. They admired the needlework picture she was making, of green hills and a round blue pond and a large sailboat, and she pulled it to her chest as if they were making fun of her. “Do you make the pictures up yourself?” said Sam, meaning it as a compliment, but she was incensed.

  “You send away for them,” she said. “You send to Cincinnati.”

  They persisted. Why? Because she was a little slavey, forever out of things, queer-looking, undersized, and compared to her they were in the mainstream, they were fortunate. They could be mean or kind to her as they pleased, and it pleased them to be kind. Also, it was a challenge. Jokes and dares were what finally disarmed her. They brought her tiny lumps of coal wrapped in chocolate papers. She put dried thistles under their sheets. She told them she had never refused a dare. That was the secret of Callie—she would never say that anything was too much for her. Far from being oppressed by all the work she had to do, she gloried in it. One night, when Sam was doing his accounting at the dining-room table, she thrust a school notebook under his nose.

  “What’s this, Callie?”

  “I don’t know!”

  It was her scrapbook, and pasted in it were newspaper items about herself. The newspaper had invited people to enter into competitions. Who could do the most bound buttonholes in eight hours? Who could can the most raspberries in a single day? Who had crocheted the most amazing number of bedspreads, tablecloths, runners, and doilies? Callie, Callie, Callie, Callie Kernaghan, again and again. In her own estimation, she was no slavey but a prodigy pitying the slothful lives of others.

  It was only on Monday nights that they could go skating, because that was the night Miss Kernaghan played bingo at the Legion Hall. Callie kept her boy’s clothes in the woodshed. They came from a ragbag of things belonging to Mrs. Cruze, who had brought it with her from her old home, intending to make quilts, but never got around to it. All except the cap. That had belonged to Adam Delahunt, who put it in a bundle of things he gave to Callie to save for the Missionary Society, but Miss Kernaghan told Callie just to put those things down in the cellar, in case.

  Callie could have slipped off from the skating rink as soon as her job was done—she could have walked out by the main entrance and nobody would have bothered her. But she never did. She climbed over the top of the benches, walked along testing the boards for springiness, climbed partway up one of the ladders, and swung out on one hand, one foot, hanging over the partition and watching the skaters. Edgar and Sam never stopped skating till the moon was turned off and the music stopped and the other lights came on. Sometimes they raced each other, darting in and out among the sedate couples and rows of unsteady girls. Sometimes they showed off, gliding down the ice with their arms spread. (Edgar was the more gifted skater, though not so ruthless a racer—he could have done fancy skating, if boys did it then.) They never skated with girls, but that wasn’t so much because they were scared to ask as that they didn’t want to be kept to anybody else’s measure. Callie waited for them outside when the skating was over, and they walked home together, three boys. Callie didn’t do any ostentatious whistling or snowballing to show she was a boy. She had a scuffling boy’s walk, thoughtful but independent, alert for possibilities—a fight or an adventure. Her heavy, rough black hair was stuffed up under the cloth cap, and kept it from being too big for her head. Without the hair around it, her face looked less pale and scrunched up—that spitting, mocking, fierce look she sometimes had was gone and she looked sober and self-respecting. They called her Cal.

  They came into the house the back way. The boys went upstairs and Callie changed her clothes in the icy woodshed. She had ten minutes or so to get the evening lunch on the table.

  When Sam and Edgar lay in bed in the dark on Monday nights after skating, they talked more than was usual. Edgar was apt to bring up the name of Chrissie Young, his girlfriend last year, at home. Edgar claimed to be sexually experienced. He said he had done it to Chrissie last winter, when they went tobogganing after dark and ran into a snowdrift. Sam didn’t think this was possible, given the cold, their clothing, the brief time before other tobogganers caught up with them. But he wasn’t sure, and, listening, he grew restless and perhaps jealous. He mentioned other girls, girls who had been at the skating rink wearing short flared skirts and little fur-trimmed jackets. Sam and Edgar compared what they had seen when these girls twirled around or when one of them fell on the ice. What would you do to Shirley, or Doris, Sam asked Edgar, and quickly passed on, in a spirit of strangely mixed ridicule and excitement, to ask him what he would do to other girls and women, more and more unlikely, caught where they couldn’t defend themselves. Teachers at the business college—mannish-looking Miss Lewisohn, who taught accounting, and brittle Miss Parkinson, who taught typing. The fat woman in the post office, the anemic blonde in Eaton’s Order Office. Housewives who showed off their behinds in the back yard, bending over clothes baskets. The grotesque nature of certain choices excited them more than the grace and prettiness of girls who were officially admired. Alice Peel was dismissed almost perfunctorily—they tied her to her bed and ravished her on their way down to supper. Miss Verne was spread quite publicly on the stairs, having been caught exciting herself with her legs around the newel post. They spared old Mrs. Cruze—they had some limits, after all. What about Miss Kernaghan, with her rheumatism, her layers of rusty clothes, her queer pai
nted mouth? They had heard stories, everybody had. Callie was supposed to be the child of a Bible salesman, a boarder. They imagined the Bible salesman doing it in place of themselves, plugging old Miss Kernaghan. Over and over, the Bible salesman rams her, tears her ancient bloomers, smears her hungry mouth, drives her to croaks and groans of the most extreme need and gratification.

  “Callie, too,” said Edgar.

  What about Callie? The joys of the game stopped for Sam when she was mentioned. The fact that she, too, was female came to him as an embarrassment. You would think he had discovered something disgusting and pitiable about himself.

  Edgar didn’t mean that they should just imagine what could be done to Callie.

  “We could get her to. I bet we could.”

  Sam said, “She’s too small.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  That persuading Sam does remember, and it was accomplished by dares, which makes him think the skating-rink adventure must have been managed the same way. A Saturday morning when the winter was nearly over, when the farmers’ sleighs, driven over the packed snow, grated on patches of bare ground as they passed Kernaghan’s house. Callie coming up the attic stairs with the wet mop, scrub pail, dust rags. She kicked the rag rug down the stairs so that she could shake it out the door. She stripped the beds of the flannelette sheets, with their intimate, cozy smell. No fresh air enters the Kernaghan house. Outside the windows are the storm windows. This is the time and place for Callie’s seduction.

  That is not a suitable word for it. Callie cross and impatient at first, keeping at her work, then sullen, then oddly tractable. Taunting her with being scared was surely the effective tactic. They must have known, by then, her real age, but they still treated her as if she were an imp to be cajoled—didn’t think of stroking or flattering her as if she were a girl.

  Even with her cooperation, it was nothing like as easy as they had imagined. Sam became convinced that the story about Chrissie was a lie, even though Edgar was invoking Chrissie’s name at the moment.

  “Come on,” Edgar said. “I’ll show you what I do to my girlfriend. Here’s what I do to Chrissie.”

  “I bet,” said Callie sourly, but she let herself be pulled down on the narrow mattress. The elastic of her winter bloomers had left red rings around her legs and waist. A flannel vest, buttoned over an undershirt, her brown ribbed stockings, held up by long, lumpy suspenders. Nothing but the bloomers was taken off. Edgar said the suspenders were hurting him and went to undo them, but Callie cried out, “Leave those alone!” as if they were what she had to protect.

  Something very important is missing from Sam’s memory of that morning—blood. He has no doubt of Callie’s virginity, remembering Edgar’s struggles, then his own, such jabbing and prodding and bafflement. Callie lay beneath them each in turn, half-grudging, half-obliging, putting up with them and not complaining that anything hurt. She would never do that. But she would not do anything, specifically, to help.

  “Open your legs,” said Edgar urgently.

  “They’re open already.”

  The reason he doesn’t remember blood is probably that there wasn’t any. They did not get far enough. Callie was so thin her hipbones stood up, yet she seemed quite extensive to Sam, and unwieldy and complicated. Cold and sticky where Edgar had wet her, dry otherwise, with unexpected bumps and flaps and blind alleys—a leathery feel to her. When he thought of this afterward, he still wasn’t sure that he had found out what girls were like. It was as if they had used a doll or a compliant puppy. When he got off her, he saw that she had goose bumps where her skin was bare, all around that tuft of dead-looking hair. Also, that their wet had soaked one stocking. Callie wiped herself with the dust rag—granted, it looked to be a clean one—and said it reminded her of when somebody blew their nose.

  “You’re not mad?” said Sam, meaning partly that, and partly, you won’t tell?“Did we hurt you?”

  Callie said, “It would take a lot more than that stupid business to hurt me.”

  There was no more skating after that. The weather got too mild.

  Miss Kernaghan’s rheumatism was worse. There was more work than ever for Callie. Edgar got tonsillitis and stayed home from classes. Sam, on his own at the business college, realized how much he had come to enjoy it. He liked the noise of the typewriters—the warning of the bells, the carriages banging back. He liked ruling the account-book pages with a straight pen, making the prescribed heavy and fine lines. He especially liked figuring out percentages and quickly adding up columns of numbers, and dealing with the problems of Mr. X and Mr. B, who owned a lumberyard and a chain of hardware stores, respectively.

  Edgar was out of school nearly three weeks. When he came back, he had fallen behind in everything. His typing was slower and sloppier than it had been at Christmastime, he smeared ink on the ruler, and he could not understand interest tables. He seemed listless, he grew discouraged, he stared out the window. The lady teachers were somewhat softened by his looks—he was lighter and paler since his illness; even his hair seemed fairer—and he got away with this indolence and ineptitude for a while. He made some efforts, occasionally tried to do homework with Sam, or went to the typing room at noon to practice. But no improvement lasted, or was enough. He took days off.

  While he was sick, Edgar had received a get-well card. It showed a green dragon in striped pajamas propped up in bed. On the front of the card were the words “Sorry to Hear your Tail is Draggon,” and inside “Hope that Soon, You’ll have it Waggon.” Down at the bottom, in pencil, was written the name Chrissie.

  But Chrissie was in Stratford, training to be a nurse. How would she know Edgar was sick? The envelope, with Edgar’s name on it, had come through the mail but had a local postmark.

  “You sent it,” Edgar said. “I know it’s not her.”

  “I did not,” said Sam truthfully.

  “You sent it.” Edgar was hoarse and feverish and racked with disappointment. “You didn’t even write in ink.”

  “How much money have we got in the bank?” Edgar wanted to know. This was early May. They had enough to pay their board until the end of the term.

  Edgar had not been to the college for several days. He had been to the railway station, and he had asked the price of a oneway ticket to Toronto. He said he meant to go alone if Sam wouldn’t go with him. He was wild to get away. It didn’t take long for Sam to find out why.

  “Callie might have a baby.”

  “She isn’t old enough,” said Sam. Then he remembered that she was. But he explained to Edgar that he was sure they hadn’t been sufficiently thorough.

  “I’m not talking about that time,” said Edgar, in a sulky voice.

  That was the first Sam knew about what had been going on when Edgar stayed away from school. But Sam misunderstood again. He thought Callie had told Edgar that she was in trouble. She hadn’t. She hadn’t given him any such information or asked for anything or made any threats. But Edgar was frightened. His panic seemed to be making him half sick. They bought a package of cake doughnuts at the grocery store and sat on the stone wall in front of the Anglican church to eat them. Edgar took one bite and held the doughnut in his hand.

  Sam said that they had only five more weeks at college.

  “I’m not going back there anyway. I’m too far behind,” said Edgar.

  Sam did not say that he had pictured himself lately working in a bank, a business-college graduate. He saw himself in a three-piece suit in the tellers’ cage. He would have grown a mustache. Some tellers became bank managers. It had just recently occurred to him that bank managers did not come into the world ready-made. They were something else first.

  He asked Edgar what kind of jobs they could get in Toronto.

  “We could do stunts,” Edgar said. “We could do stunts on the sidewalk.”

  Now Sam saw what he was up against. Edgar was not joking. He sat there with one bite out of his doughnut and proposed this way of making a living in Toronto. Stunts on t
he sidewalk.

  What about their parents? This only started crazier plans.

  “You could tell them I was kidnapped.”

  “What about the police?” said Sam. “The police go looking for anybody that’s kidnapped. They’d find you.”

  “Then don’t tell them I’m kidnapped,” Edgar said. “Tell them I saw a murder and I have to go into hiding. Tell them I saw a body in a sack pushed off the Cedar Bush Bridge and I saw the men that did it and later I met them on the street and they recognized me. Tell them that. Tell them not to go to the police or say anything about it, because my life is at stake.”

  “How did you know there was a body in the sack?” said Sam idiotically. “Don’t talk anymore about it. I have to think.”

  But all the way back to Kernaghan’s Edgar did nothing but talk, elaborating on this story or on another, which involved his having been recruited by the government to be a spy, having to dye his hair black and change his name.

  They got to the boarding house just as Alice Peel and her fiance, the policeman, were coming out the front door.

  “Go round the back,” said Edgar.