by Alice Munro
In the midst of this sits Edgar, like a polished ornament, seldom moving, Of the three of them, he has kept his looks the best. He had the most to keep. He is tall, frail, beautifully groomed and dressed. Callie shaves him. She washes his hair every day, and it is white and glistening like the angel hair on Christmas trees. He can dress himself, but she puts everything out for him—trousers, socks, and matched tie and pocket handkerchief, soft shirts of deep blue or burgundy, which set off his pink cheeks and his hair.
“He had a little turn,” says Callie. “Four years ago in May. He didn’t lose his speech or anything, but I took him to the doctor and he said yes, he’s had a little turn. But he’s healthy. He’s good.”
Callie has given Sam permission to take Edgar for a walk. She spends her days in the store. Edgar is waiting upstairs in front of the television set. He knows Sam, seems glad to see him. He nods readily when Sam says, “Just get your overcoat on. Then we’re off.” Sam brings a new, light-gray overcoat and a gray cap from the closet, then, on second thought, a pair of rubbers to protect Edgar’s shining shoes.
“Okay?” says Sam, but Edgar makes a gesture, meaning, “Just a moment.” He is watching a handsome young woman interviewing an older woman. The older woman makes dolls. The dolls are made of dough. Though they are of different sizes, they all have the same expression, which is, in Sam’s opinion, idiotic. Edgar seems to be quite taken with them. Or perhaps it is the interviewer, with her shaggy gold hair.
Sam stands until that’s over. Then the weather comes on, and Edgar motions for him to sit down. That makes sense—to see what the weather is going to be before they start walking. Sam means to head up Orange Street—where a senior citizens’ complex has replaced the skating rink and the cherry trees—and go around to the old Kernaghan house and the Canadian Tire lot. After the weather, Sam stays for the news, because there is something about a new tax regulation that interests him. Commercials keep interrupting, of course, but finally the news is over. Some figure skaters come on. After an hour or so has passed, Sam realizes there is no hope of budging Edgar.
Whenever Sam says anything, Edgar raises his hand, as if to say he’ll have time to listen in a minute. He is never annoyed. He gives everything the same pleased attention. He smiles as he watches the skaters in their twinkly outfits. He seems guileless, but Sam detects satisfaction.
On the false mantel over the electric fireplace is a photograph of Callie and Edgar in wedding clothes. Callie’s veil, in the style of a long-ago time, is attached to a cap trimmed with pearls and pulled down over her forehead. She sits in an armchair with her arms full of roses, and Edgar stands behind, staunch and slender.
Sam knows this picture was not taken on their wedding day. Many people in those days put on their wedding clothes and went to the photographer’s studio on a later occasion. But these are not even their wedding clothes. Sam remembers that some woman connected with the Y.M.C.A. got Callie a dress, and it was a shapeless dull-pink affair. Edgar had no new clothes at all, and they were hastily married in Toronto by a minister neither of them knew. This photograph is meant to give quite a different impression. Perhaps it was taken years later. Callie looks a good deal older than on her real wedding day, her face broader, heavier, more authoritative. In fact, she slightly resembles Miss Kernaghan.
That is the thing that can never be understood—why Edgar spoke up the first night in Toronto and said that he and Callie were going to be married. There was no necessity—none that Sam could see. Callie was not pregnant and, in fact, as far as Sam knows she never became pregnant. Perhaps she really was too small, or not developed in the usual way. Edgar went ahead and did what nobody was making him do, took what he had run away from. Did he feel compunction; did he feel there are things from which there is no escape? He said that he and Callie were going to be married. But that was not what they were going to do—that was not what they were planning, surely? When Sam looked across at them on the train, and all three of them laughed with relief, it couldn’t have been because they foresaw an outcome like this. They were just laughing. They were happy. They were free.
Fifty years too late to ask, Sam thinks. And even at the time he was too amazed. Edgar became a person he didn’t know. Callie drew back, into her sorry female state. The moment of happiness he shared with them remained in his mind, but he never knew what to make of it. Do such moments really mean, as they seem to, that we have a life of happiness with which we only occasionally, knowingly, intersect? Do they shed such light before and after that all that has happened to us in our lives—or that we’ve made happen—can be dismissed?
When Callie comes upstairs, he doesn’t mention the wedding picture. “I’ve got the electrician downstairs,” Callie says. “So I’ve got to go down again and keep an eye on him. I don’t want him sitting smoking a cigarette and charging me.”
He is learning the things not to mention. Miss Kernaghan, the boarding house, the skating rink. Old times. This harping on old times by one who has been away to one who has stayed put is irritating—it is a subtle form of insult. And Callie is learning not to ask him how much his house cost, how much his condominium in Hawaii cost, how much he spent on various vacations and on his daughter’s wedding—in short, she’s learning that she will never find out how much money he has.
He can see another thing she’s wondering about. He sees the question wrinkling further the deep, blue-painted nests around her eyes, eyes that show now a lifetime of fairly successful efforts and calculations.
What does Sam want? That’s what Callie wonders.
He thinks of telling her he might stay until he finds out. He might become a boarder.
“Edgar didn’t seem to want to go out,” Sam says. “He didn’t seem to want to go out after all.”
“No,” says Callie. “No. He’s happy.”
JESSE AND MERIBETH
In high school, I had a tender, loyal, boring friendship with a girl named MaryBeth Crocker. I gave myself up to it, as I did to the warm, shallow, rather murky waters of the Maitland River in summer, when I lay on my back, and just fluttered my hands and feet, and was carried downstream.
This began one day in Music period, when there were not enough songbooks to go around and we were told to double up—boys with boys, of course, and girls with girls. I was looking around for some other girl who didn’t have a special friend to sit with, and MaryBeth slipped into the seat beside me. She was new to the school then; she had come to live with her sister Beatrice, who was a nurse and worked at the local hospital. Their mother was dead; their father had remarried.
MaryBeth was a short girl, rather chubby but graceful, with large eyes that shaded from hazel-green to dark brown, an almond-colored skin free entirely of spots or freckles, and a pretty mouth that often had a slightly perplexed and pouting expression, as if she recalled a secret hurt. I could smell the flowery soap she washed with. Its sweetness penetrated the layers of dust and disinfectant and sweat, the old school smells—the dreamy boredom, the stale anxiety. I felt astonished, almost dismayed, at being chosen. For weeks afterward, I would wake up in the morning knowing I was happy and not knowing why. Then I would remember this moment.
MaryBeth and I often spoke of it. She said that her heart had been pounding as she skittered over to my seat, but she told herself it’s now or never.
In the books I had read all through my childhood, girls were bound two by two in fast friendship, in exquisite devotion. They promised never to tell each other’s secrets or keep anything hidden from each other, or form a deep and lasting friendship with any other girl. Marriage made no difference. They grew up and fell in love and got married, but they remained first in each other’s heart. They named their daughters after each other and were ready to nurse each other through contagious illnesses or perjure themselves in court on each other’s behalf. This was the solemn rigmarole of loyalty, the formal sentimentality that I now wanted, or thought appropriate, and imposed on MaryBeth. We swore and promised and confide
d. She went along with it all; she had a tender nature. She liked to snuggle up when she thought of something sad or frightening, and to hold hands.
That first fall we walked out of town along the railway tracks and told each other all the illnesses or accidents we had had in our lives, what things we were afraid of and what were our favorite colors, jewels, flowers, movie stars, desserts, soft drinks, and ice-cream flavors. We decided how many children we would have and which sex, and what their names would be. Also the color of our husbands’ hair and eyes and what we would like them to do for a living. MaryBeth was afraid of the cows in the fields, and possible snakes along the track. We filled our hands with the silk from burst milkweed pods, the softest-feeling thing there is on earth, then let it all loose to hang on other dry weeds, like bits of snow or flowers.
“That’s what they made parachutes out of in the war,” I told MaryBeth. That wasn’t true, but I believed it.
Sometimes we went to the house where MaryBeth shared a room with Beatrice. We sat on the porch sewing or went up to their room. The house was large, plain, painted yellow, and had an uncared-for look about it. It was just off the main street. The owners were a blind man and his wife, who had a couple of rooms at the back. The blind man sat and peeled potatoes for his wife, or crocheted the doilies and dresser runners that she took around to stores in town and tried to sell.
The girls in the house might dare each other to run down and chat with him when his wife was out. They dared each other to go down in their bras and panties or with nothing on at all. He seemed to guess what kind of game was going on. “Come over here,” he would say. “Come closer, I can’t hear you.” Or, “Come and let me touch your dress. Let me see if I can guess what color it is.”
MaryBeth would never play that game; she hated even to hear about it. She thought some girls were disgusting.
The girls she lived with were always in a ferment. They had feuds and alliances and fits of not speaking. Once, a girl pulled out a clump of another girl’s hair because of an argument over some nail polish.
Brisk and ominous notes were taped to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom:
Sweaters should be dried in a person’s own room because of the stink it makes with wool drying. Attention, A.M. and S.D.
To Whom It May Concern, I have smelled my Evening in Paris on you and I don’t appreciate it. You can buy your own. Sincerely, B.P.
Things were always being washed: stockings and brassieres and garter belts and sweaters—and, of course, hair. You couldn’t turn around in the bathroom without having something flap in your face.
Cooking was done on hot plates. Girls who were saving money to buy things for their hope chests, or to move to the city, cooked Kraft Dinners. Others brought in greasy, delicious-smelling brown bags from the diner around the corner. French fries, hamburgers, jumbo hot dogs, doughnuts. Girls who were dieting cursed and slammed their doors as these smells went up the stairs.
From time to time, MaryBeth’s sister Beatrice was dieting. She drank vinegar to take away her appetite. She drank glycerine to strengthen her fingernails.
“She wants to get a boyfriend—it makes me sick,” MaryBeth said.
When MaryBeth and Beatrice were friends, they borrowed each other’s clothes without asking, cuddled in bed, and told each other how their hair looked from behind. When they weren’t, they stopped speaking. Then MaryBeth would cook up a rich bubbly mess of brown sugar, butter, and coconut on the hot plate, and wave the fragrant saucepan under Beatrice’s nose before she and I commenced eating it with spoons. Or she would go to the store and buy a bag of marshmallows, which she claimed were Beatrice’s favorite thing. The idea was to eat them in front of her. I didn’t like to eat marshmallows raw—their puffy blandness slightly disgusted me—but MaryBeth would pop one into her mouth and hold it there like a cork, sticking her face in front of Beatrice’s. Not quite knowing how to behave at such times, I would go through the closet.
MaryBeth’s father didn’t want her living with him, but he gave her plenty of money for clothes. She had a dark-blue winter coat with a squirrel collar that I thought luxurious. She had many drawstring blouses, a fashion of the time—pink, yellow, mauve, sky blue, lime green. And a coveted armload of silver bangles. Two all-round pleated skirts I remember—navy-blue and white, turquoise and cerise. I looked at all these things with more homage than envy. I dangled the heavy bangles on my fingers, inspected the dainty powder puffs and the eyebrow tweezers. I myself was not allowed to pluck my eyebrows, and had to put on my makeup in the washroom of the Town Hall on the way to school. During the school year, I lived in town with my Aunt Ena, who was strict. All I had for a powder puff was a gritty scrap of flannel, decidedly sordid-looking. Beside MaryBeth, I felt that I was a crude piece of work altogether, with my strong legs and hefty bosom—robust and sweaty and ill-clad, undeserving, grateful. And at the same time, deeply, naturally, unspeakably, unthinkably—I could not speak or think about it—superior.
After the summer holidays, which she spent with her father and stepmother in Toronto, MaryBeth said that we should not walk out on the railway tracks anymore, it might get us a bad reputation. She said that it was the new style to wear a scarf over your hair, even on a sunny day, and she brought back several gauzy squares for this purpose. She told me to choose one, and I chose the pink shading into rose, and she cried admiringly, “Oh, that’s the very prettiest!” So I tried to give it back. We had a pretend-argument, and I ended up keeping it.
She told me about the things there were to buy in Eaton’s and Simpson’s, and how she nearly got her heel stuck in an escalator, and some unkind things her stepmother had said, and the plots of movies she had seen. She had gone on rides at the Exhibition that made her sick, and she had been accosted by a man on a streetcar. He wore a gray suit and a gray fedora and offered to take her to the Riverdale Zoo.
Sometimes now I felt myself slipping away while MaryBeth talked. I felt my thoughts slipping off as they did at school during the explanation of a mathematical problem, or at the beginning of the big prayer before the sermon at church. Not that I wished to be elsewhere, or even to be alone. I understood that this was what friendship was like.
We had decided to change the spelling of our names. Mine was to become Jesse instead of Jessie and hers was to be Meribeth, not MaryBeth. We signed these names to the test papers we turned in at school.
The teacher waved my paper in the air. “I can’t give a mark to this person, because I don’t know who this person is,” she said. “Who is this Jesse?” She spelled the name out loud. “That is a boy’s name. Does anybody here know a boy named Jesse?”
Not a word was said about the name Meribeth. That was typical. MaryBeth was a favorite with everybody, on account of her looks and her clothes and her exotic situation, as well as her soft, flattering voice and polite ways. Rough girls and caustic teachers alike were taken with her. Boys were, too, of course, but she said her sister wouldn’t let her go out with them. I never knew if this was true or not. MaryBeth was adept at small fibs, gentle refusals.
She gave up spelling her name the new way, since I wasn’t to be allowed to change mine. We continued to use the special spelling when we signed our notes to each other or wrote letters in the summer.
When I was halfway through my third year at high school, my Aunt Ena got me a job. I was to work for the Crydermans, two days a week, after school. Aunt Ena knew the Crydermans because she was their cleaning lady. I was to do some ironing and tidying up, and I was to get the vegetables ready for supper.
“That’s dinner, in their books,” Aunt Ena said, in such a flat voice you couldn’t tell whether she censured the Crydermans for affectation, or conceded them a superior position that gave them a right to it, or simply wished to state that whatever they said or did was completely outside of her range of understanding and ought to be outside of mine.
Aunt Ena was my father’s aunt, she was that old. She was the cleaning lady in town rather as a doctor
might be the Doctor, or a music teacher the Music Teacher. She was respected. She didn’t accept leftover food, no matter how delicious, or take home cast-off clothing, no matter how excellent its condition. Many of the women she worked for felt bound to do some sort of hurry-up cleaning before she arrived, and took their own empty liquor bottles out to the garbage. Aunt Ena was not fooled.
She and her daughter, Floris, and her son, George, lived in a narrow, tidy house on a steep street where the houses were close together and so near to the street that you could almost touch the porch railings from the sidewalk. My room was behind the kitchen—a former pantry, with pale-green tongue-in-groove walls. I tried to count the boards as I lay in bed, but always had to give up. In the wintertime, I took all my clothes into bed in the morning and got dressed under the covers. There was no provision for heating a pantry.
Aunt Ena came home worn out from exercising her authority all over town. But she roused herself; she exercised it over us as well. She made us understand—Floris and George and me—that we were all superior people in spite of, or perhaps because of, relative poverty. She made us understand that we had to confirm this every day of our lives by having our shoes cleaned and our buttons sewn on, by not using coarse language, by not smoking (in the case of women), by getting high marks (me), and by never touching alcohol (everybody). Nobody has a good word to say nowadays for such narrowness and proud caution and threadbare decency. I don’t myself, but I didn’t think at the time that I was suffering much from it. I learned how to circumvent some rules and I went along with others, and in general I accepted that even a superiority based on such hard notions was better than no superiority at all. And I didn’t plan to live on there, like George and Floris.
