by Alice Munro
I thought about what was going on at that very moment. The greeting, the look exchanged, the removal of clothing. In what order? Accompanied by what words and caresses? Would they be frenzied or methodical? Would they roll on the bed half-undressed, or proceed as at the doctor’s? I thought the latter way would be more like them.
Take that off. Yes. Now lie down. Open your legs. Calm orders, dumb obedience. Beatrice glazed, submissive. The barber’s apprentice, that scrawny, blotchy-necked fellow, grown imperious, ready to wield his perverse power. Now. Yes. Now.
“One time, a boy asked me to do it,” MaryBeth said. “I nearly got him expelled.” She told me how, in Grade 7, a boy had passed her a note that said, “Do you want to F.?” and she had shown the note to the teacher.
“Somebody wants me to do it,” I said. I was very surprised at myself. I kept my eyes down and did not look at MaryBeth. Who? she said, and what did he say exactly, and where did he say it? When? Was it anybody in our class? Why hadn’t I told her?
She bumped down to the step below me, so that she could look into my face. She put her hands on my knees. “We promised we’d tell each other everything,” she said.
I shook my head.
“It hurts my feelings a lot you haven’t told me.”
I rubbed my lips together as if to hold the secret in. “Actually, he’s in love with me,” I said.
“Jessie! Tell me!”
She promised me the use of her Eversharp pencil until the end of the school year. I did not respond. She said I could use her fountain pen as well. Her Eversharp pencil and her fountain pen, the set.
I had been planning to tease her for a little longer, then to tell her that it was all a joke. I did not even have anybody’s name in my head, in the beginning. I did now, but it was too outrageous. I couldn’t believe that I would ever say it.
“Jessie, I’ll give you a bangle. Not lend. I said give. I’ll give you whichever bangle you want and you can keep it.”
“If I was going to tell his name, I wouldn’t do it for a bangle,” I said.
“I’ll swear to God I won’t tell. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
“Just swear to God.”
“I will. I swear to God, Jessie. I’ve sworn to God.”
“Mr. Cryderman,” I said softly. I felt wonderfully lightened, not burdened, by my lie. “It’s him.”
MaryBeth took her hands off my knees and sat up straight. “He’s old,” she said. “You said he was ugly! He’s married!”
“I never said ugly,” I said. “He’s only thirty-three.”
“You don’t even like him!”
“Sometimes when you fall in love, it starts out that way.”
Once, I knew an old woman who said to me, when talking about her life, that she had spent three years having an affair with Robert Browning. She was not in the least senile; she was a very competent and straightforward old woman. She didn’t say she loved Browning’s writing, or spent all her time reading about him. She didn’t say she had fantasies. “Oh, yes,” she said, “and then there was the three years’ affair I had with Robert Browning.” I waited for her to laugh or add some little explanatory word, but she did not do so. I have to think, then, that the affair she conducted in her imagination was so serious and strenuous that she forbade herself to describe it as imaginary.
The affair I conducted that spring with Mr. Cryderman—in my head, and in front of MaryBeth—may not have been that important in my life, but it kept me busy. There was no more sense of drift and boredom, when MaryBeth and I were together. I had to keep arranging and rearranging things, then fit them into place by means of the bits of information I chose to give out. I consummated the affair but did not tell her, and was glad afterward because I decided to unconsummate it. I couldn’t adequately imagine the sequence of moves or what would be said afterward. I didn’t at all mind the lying. Once I had taken the plunge into falsehood—by saying Mr. Cryderman’s name—falsehood felt wonderfully comfortable.
It wasn’t just by what I told, but by how I looked, that I dramatized what was going on. I did some contrary things. I didn’t pull my belts tight and make up my face and display myself as a youthful temptress. Instead, I took to wearing my hair in braids wrapped around my head, and I left off rouge and lipstick, though I still powdered heavily to make myself look pale. I went to school in a baggy crepe blouse of Aunt Ena’s. I told MaryBeth that Mr. Cryderman had asked me to dress like this and braid my hair. He could not bear the thought of anyone else looking at my hair or seeing the outline of my breasts. He suffered from his burden of love. I, too, suffered. I bowed my shoulders; I had a chastened air. The passions are no light matter, was my message to MaryBeth. Guilt and misgiving and a glowering desire must be seen as my daily companions.
Mr. Cryderman’s, as well. In my imagination, he grew bold. He fondled and whispered, then rebuked himself, groaned, became devout, and kissed my eyelids.
What about the real Mr. Cryderman? Did all this make me tremble when I heard him at the door, lie in wait for him, hope for a sign? Not in the least. When he began to play his role in my imagination, he faded in reality. I no longer hoped for an interesting conversation, or even a nod in the direction of my existence. In my mind, I had improved his looks somewhat—given him a healthier color, rolled back his customary slight sneer to expose a gloomy tenderness. I avoided looking at him in the flesh, so that I would not have to change him all over again.
MaryBeth probed for details but took no pleasure in any of this. She urged me never to surrender. “Couldn’t you tell Mrs. Cryderman on him?” she said.
“It would kill her. She might die anyway when she has the baby.”
“Would you get married if she did?”
“I’m underage.”
“He could wait. If he loves you like he says. He’d need somebody to look after the baby. Would he get all her money?”
Mention of the baby made me think of something real, and unpleasant and embarrassing, that had happened recently at the Crydermans’. Mrs. Cryderman had called me to come and see the baby kicking her. She was lying on the sofa with her robe pulled up, a cushion covering the most private part of her. “There, see!” she cried, and I saw it, not a flutter on the surface but an underground shifting and rolling of the whole blotchy mound. Her navel stuck out like a cork ready to pop. My arms and forehead broke out in a sweat. I felt a hard ball of disgust pushing up in my throat. She laughed and the cushion fell off. I ran to the kitchen.
“Jessie, what are you scared of? I don’t think one of them ever came out that way yet!”
Two more scenes at the Crydermans’.
Mr. Cryderman is home early. He and Mrs. Cryderman are together in the living room when I arrive after school. Mrs. Cryderman still keeps the curtains closed all day, though it’s spring outside, hot May weather. She says this is so nobody can look in and see the shape she’s in.
I come in out of the hot, bright afternoon and find the incense burning in the stuffy, curtained room and the two pale Crydermans giggling and having drinks. He is sitting on the sofa with her feet in his lap.
“Time to join the celebration!” says Mr. Cryderman. “It’s our farewell party! Our fare-thee-well party, Jessie. Farewell, begone, goodbye!”
“Control yourself!” says Mrs. Cryderman, beating her bare heels against his legs. “We aren’t gone yet. We have to wait till the monstrous infant is born.”
Drunk, I think. I had often seen them drinking, but up until now had not been able to spot any interesting alterations in behavior.
“Eric is going to write his book,” says Mrs. Cryderman.
“Eric is going to write his book,” says Mr. Cryderman, in a silly high-pitched voice.
“You are!” says Mrs. Cryderman, drumming her heels some more. “And we are getting out of here the instant the monster is born.”
“Is it really a monster?” says Mr. Cryderman. “Has it got two heads? Can we put it in the freak show and make a lot of money?”<
br />
“We don’t need money.”
“I do.”
“I wish you’d cut that out. I don’t know if it’s got two heads, but it feels as if it’s got fifty feet. It frightened Jessie the other day.”
She tells him how I ran.
“You have to get used to these things, Jessie,” says Mr. Cryderman. “Girls in some parts of the world have a baby or two already by the time they’re your age. You can’t cheat Nature. Little brown girls, practically babies themselves, they’ve got babies.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” says Mrs. Cryderman. “Jessie, be a lamb. You know what gin is, don’t you? Put a little gin in this glass and fill it up with orange juice, so I can get my vitamin C.”
I take her glass. Mr. Cryderman tries to get up, but she holds him down until he says, “Cigarettes. I think they’re in the bedroom.”
When he comes back from the bedroom, he enters the kitchen, not the living room. I’m at the sink, filling up the ice-cube tray.
“Did you find any?” calls Mrs. Cryderman.
“Just checking out here.”
He has a package of cigarettes in his hand, but rummages noisily in the cupboard beside the sink. He presses against me, side to side. He puts his hand on my shoulder, squeezes. He moves that hand across my back, touches my bare neck. I stand with the ice tray in my hands, looking out the window at an old bus parked in the back lane, behind the gospel hall. The words “Calvary Tabernacle” are painted on its side.
Just the tips of Mr. Cryderman’s fingers move on my throat. Their touch is light at first as drops of water. Then heavier. Heavier and heavier, finally stroking my skin as if they would leave furrows.
“Found some.”
When I take Mrs. Cryderman her drink, Mr. Cryderman is sitting in the armchair by the stand-up ashtray.
“Come sit where you were,” she says, in her silly-sweet voice.
“I’m smoking.”
My throat tingles as if it had taken a blow.
The second scene a few days later, on the next regular day of my employment.
Mr. Cryderman is working in the garden. He is in his shirt sleeves, still wearing his tie, hacking away with a hoe at the vines that cover a little tumbledown summerhouse in a corner of the yard. He calls to me warningly, and waits for me to come over to him through the uncut grass. He says that Mrs. Cryderman is not well. The doctor has given her something to put her to sleep, to keep her still and quiet so that the baby won’t be born too soon. He says that I’d better not go inside today.
I am standing a couple of yards away from him. Now he says, “Come over here. Here. There’s something I want to ask you.”
I go closer, with shaking legs, but all he does is point to a vigorous, leafy, red-stalked plant at his feet.
“What is this thing, do you know? Should I dig it up? I can’t tell what’s a weed around here and what isn’t.”
It is a rhubarb plant, familiar to me as grass or dandelions.
“I don’t know,” I say, and at the moment I don’t.
“You don’t know? What good are you to me, Jessie? Isn’t this a queer little hole of a place?” He waves at the summerhouse. “I don’t know what it was built for. Midgets?”
He grabs some vines, tears them loose, and says, “Step in.”
I do. Inside, it is a wonderfully secret place, shady and neglected, with drifts of leafy debris on the bumpy earth floor. It is true that the roof is very low. Both of us have to bend over.
“Are you hot?” asks Mr. Cryderman.
“No.” In fact, chilly waves are passing over me—waves of weakness, physical dismay.
“Yes, you are. You’re all sweaty under that mop of hair.”
He touches my neck in a matter-of-fact way, like a doctor checking the evidence, then moves his hand to my cheek and hairline.
“Even your forehead is sweaty.”
I can smell cigarettes on his fingers, and the inky machinery smell of the newspaper office. All I want is to be equal to this. Ever since Mr. Cryderman touched my throat at the kitchen sink, I have felt that I am seeing the power of my own lies, my own fantasy. I am a person capable of wizardry but helpless. There is nothing to do but submit, submit to the consequences. I am wondering whether the passionate attack will take place here, without further preparation—here in the shelter of the summerhouse, on the earth floor, among the dead leaves and scratchy twigs that perhaps conceal the dead bodies of mice or birds. I do know one thing, and that is that the lovelorn declarations, the delicate pleas and moonings often voiced by Mr. Cryderman in my imagination, are going to have no place on the agenda.
“You think I’m going to kiss you, Jessie?” says Mr. Cryderman. “I have no doubt you’re a handy kisser. No,” he says, as if I’ve specifically asked him. “No, Jessie. Let’s sit down.”
There are boards attached to the summerhouse walls that serve as benches. Some are broken. I sit on one that isn’t, and he sits on another. We lean forward to escape the tough branches that have broken through the latticework walls.
He lays his hand on my knee, on my cotton skirt.
“What about Mrs. Cryderman, Jessie? Do you think she’d be very happy if she could see us now?”
I take this to be a rhetorical question, but he repeats it, and I have to say, “No.”
“Because I did to her what you might like me to do to you, she’s going to have a baby, and she isn’t going to have an easy time of it.”
He strokes my leg through the thin cotton. “You’re an impulsive girl, Jessie. You shouldn’t go inside places like this with men just because they ask you. You shouldn’t be so ready to let them kiss you. I think you’re hot-blooded. Aren’t you? You’re hot-blooded. You’ve got some lessons to learn.”
And this is how things continue—the stroking and the lecturing, coming at me together. He is telling me I’m to blame, while his fingers start up these flutters under my skin, rousing a tender, distant ache. His dry voice reproaches me. His hand rouses and his words shame me, and something in his voice mocks, mocks endlessly, at both these responses. I don’t understand that this isn’t fair. At least, I don’t think of protesting that it isn’t fair. I feel shame all right, and confusion, and longing. But I am not ashamed of what he’s telling me I should be ashamed of. I’m ashamed of being caught out, made foolish, of being so enticed and scolded. And I can’t stop it.
“One thing you will have to learn, Jessie. To consider other people. The reality of other people. It sounds simple but it can be difficult. For you it will be difficult.”
He may be referring to his wife, whom I am not considering. But I understand this differently. Isn’t it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination? It’s true. He has hit the nail on the head, as Aunt Ena is fond of saying. But hitting the nail on the head in a matter like this, in a matter of intimate failure, isn’t apt to make people abashed and grateful and eager to change their ways. Pride hardens, instead, over the nakedly perceived fault. So mine does now. Pride hardens, pride deals with all those craven licks of sweetness, douses the hope of pleasure, the deep-seated glow of invitation. What do I want with anybody who can know so much about me? In fact, if I could wipe him off the face of the earth now, I would.
He feels the change. He takes his hand away and gets up. He tells me to go out ahead of him, to go home. He may have said a couple of cautionary words, in addition, but I was not listening anymore.
On top of this, MaryBeth announced that she did not believe me. “I did at first. I did. But then I started to wonder.”
“We broke off,” I said. “It’s all over.”
“I don’t believe you,” said MaryBeth, in a trembling voice, grieving and shaking her head. “I don’t believe there was anything going on between you and him at all. I had to tell you. Don’t be mad. I had to.”
I didn’t answer her. I walked along quickly. We were on the way to school. We had met as usu
al at the Dominion Bank corner and she had waited three blocks before blurting out what she had to say. She had to trot to keep up with me. Just before we caught up with some other girls—just before I called out their names with a great show of friendliness and good humor—I gave her a bitter look. I gave her the look deserved by a traitor. And I thought she did deserve it. She was wrong—plenty had gone on between me and Mr. Cryderman. She was right, too, of course. But I suppressed all thought of that with ferocious ease. You can feel the same rush of justified anger, whether you are rightfully or wrongfully accused.
Without quite planning to, I took up a policy of not speaking to MaryBeth. When she came up to me in the cloakroom and said softly, “Are we walking home together, Jessie,” I didn’t answer. When she walked along beside me, I pretended she wasn’t there. Examinations had begun, our schedules were disrupted; it was easy to avoid her.
A letter appeared, folded into my French book. I didn’t read it all the way through. She said that I was hurting her, that she couldn’t eat, she cried in bed at night, she got such blinding headaches from crying that she couldn’t see the questions on the examinations and would fail. She apologized, she wished that she had kept her mouth shut; how could she tell me she was sorry when I wouldn’t even speak to her? She knew one thing—she would never have the heart to treat me as I was treating her.
I looked ahead to the end of the letter and saw two intertwined hearts made up of little x’s, with our two names inside. Jesse and Meribeth. I didn’t read any more.
I wanted to get rid of her. I was tired of her complaints and confidences, her pretty face and gentle nature. I had got beyond her, beyond needing anything she had to offer. But there was more to it than that. Her puffy eyes, her stricken looks satisfied something in me. I felt the better for wounding her. No doubt about it. I got back a little of whatever I had lost in the Crydermans’ summerhouse.
A few years after this—not a long time to me now, but a long time then—I was walking down the main street of that town where I had gone to high school. I was a graduate student by then. I had won scholarships and no longer mispronounced Dostoyevsky. Aunt Ena was dead. She sat down and died, just after waxing a floor. Floris was married. It seemed that she had been courted for years, in secret, by the druggist who had the shop next door to the shoe store, but Aunt Ena objected to him: he drank (that is, he drank a little), and was a Catholic. Floris had two baby boys, one right after the other, and she put an auburn rinse on her hair and drank beer with her husband in the evenings. George lived with them. He drank beer, too, and helped look after the babies. Floris was not shy or irritable anymore. She wanted to be friends now; she gave me flowered scarves and costume jewellery which I could not wear, and lotions and lipstick from the drugstore that I was glad of. She asked me to come and visit whenever I liked. Sometimes I did, and the hectic domesticity, the baby-centered chores and pleasures, soon drove me out to walk.
