by Alice Munro
“Then she can’t be all that poor,” Trudy said.
“You can be poor and have rich parents,” Dan said.
“No, you can’t.”
Last summer, Robin went to Richmond Hill for a month’s visit. She came home early. She said it was a madhouse. The oldest child has to go to a special reading clinic, the middle one wets the bed. Genevieve spends all her time in the law library, studying. No wonder. Dan shops for bargains, cooks, looks after the childrern, grows vegetables, drives a taxi on Saturdays and Sundays. He wants to set up a motorcycle-repair business in the garage, but he can’t get a permit; the neighbors are against it.
He told Robin he was happy. Never happier, he said. Robin came home firmly grownup—severe, sarcastic, determined. She had some slight, steady grudge she hadn’t had before. Trudy couldn’t worm it out of her, couldn’t tease it out of her; the time when she could do that was over.
Robin came home at noon and changed her clothes. She put on a light, flowered cotton blouse and ironed a pale-blue cotton skirt. She said that some of the girls from the class might be going around to the funeral home after school.
“I forgot you had that skirt,” said Trudy. If she thought that was going to start a conversation, she was mistaken.
The first time Trudy met Dan, she was drunk. She was nineteen years old, tall and skinny (she still is), with a wild head of curly black hair (it is cropped short now and showing the gray as black hair does). She was very tanned, wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. No brassiere and no need. This was in Muskoka in August, at a hotel bar where they had a band. She was camping with girlfriends. He was there with his fiancée, Marlene. He had taken Marlene home to meet his mother, who lived in Muskoka on an island in an empty hotel. When Trudy was nineteen, he was twenty-eight. She danced around by herself, giddy and drunk, in front of the table where he sat with Marlene, a meek-looking blonde with a big pink shelf of bosom all embroidered in little fake pearls. Trudy just danced in front of him until he got up and joined her. At the end of the dance, he asked her name, and took her back and introduced her to Marlene.
“This is Judy,” he said. Trudy collapsed, laughing, into the chair beside Marlene’s. Dan took Marlene up to dance. Trudy finished off Marlene’s beer and went looking for her friends. “How do you do?” she said to them. “I’m Judy!”He caught up with her at the door of the bar. He had ditched Marlene when he saw Trudy leaving. A man who could change course quickly, see the possibilities, flare up with new enthusiasm. He told people later that he was in love with Trudy before he even knew her real name. But he told Trudy that he cried when he and Marlene were parting.
“I have feelings,” he said. “I’m not ashamed to show them.”Trudy had no feelings for Marlene at all. Marlene was over thirty—what could she expect? Marlene still lives in town, works at the Hydro office, is not married. When Trudy and Dan were having one of their conversations about Genevieve, Trudy said, “Marlene must be thinking I got what’s coming to me.”
Dan said he had heard that Marlene had joined the Fellowship of Bible Christians. The women weren’t allowed makeup and had to wear a kind of bonnet to church on Sundays.
“She won’t be able to have a thought in her head but forgiving,” Dan said.
Trudy said, “I bet.”
This is what happened at the funeral home, as Trudy got the story from both Kelvin and Janet.
The girls from Tracy Lee’s class all showed up together after school. This was during what was called the visitation, when the family waited beside Tracy Lee’s open casket to receive friends. Her parents were there, her married brother and his wife, her sister, and even her sister’s boyfriend who owned the truck. They stood in a row and people lined up to say a few words to them. A lot of people came. They always do, in a case like this. Tracy Lee’s grandmother was at the end of the row in a brocade-covered chair. She wasn’t able to stand up for very long.
All the chairs at the funeral home are upholstered in this white-and-gold brocade. The curtains are the same, the wallpaper almost matches. There are little wall-bracket lights behind heavy pink glass. Trudy has been there several times and knows what it’s like. But Robin and most of these girls had never been inside the place before. They didn’t know what to expect. Some of them began to cry as soon as they got inside the door.
The curtains were closed. Soft music was playing—not exactly church music but it sounded like it. Tracy Lee’s coffin was white with gold trim, matching all the brocade and the wallpaper. It had a lining of pleated pink satin. A pink satin pillow. Tracy Lee had not a mark on her face. She was not made up quite as usual, because the undertaker had done it. But she was wearing her favorite earrings, turquoise-colored triangles and yellow crescents, two to each ear. (Some people thought that was in bad taste.) On the part of the coffin that covered her from the waist down, there was a big heart-shaped pillow of pink roses.
The girls lined up to speak to the family. They shook hands, they said sorry-for-your-loss, just the way everybody else did. When they got through that, when all of them had let the grandmother squash their cool hands between her warm, swollen, freckled ones, they lined up again, in a straggling sort of way, and began to go past the coffin. Many were crying now, shivering. What could you expect? Young girls.
But they began to sing as they went past. With difficulty at first, shyly, but with growing confidence in their sad, sweet voices, they sang:
“Now, while the blossom still clings to the vine,
I’ll taste your strawberries, I’II drink your sweet wine—”
They had planned the whole thing, of course, beforehand; they had got that song off a record. They believed that it was an old hymn.
So they filed past, singing, looking down at Tracy Lee, and it was noticed that they were dropping things into the coffin. They were slipping the rings off their fingers and the bracelets from their arms, and taking the earrings out of their ears. They were undoing necklaces, and bowing to pull chains and long strands of beads over their heads. Everybody gave something. All this jewellery went flashing and sparkling down on the dead girl, to lie beside her in her coffin. One girl pulled the bright combs out of her hair, let those go.
And nobody made a move to stop it. How could anyone interrupt? It was like a religious ceremony. The girls behaved as if they’d been told what to do, as if this was what was always done on such occasions. They sang, they wept, they dropped their jewellery. The sense of ritual made every one of them graceful.
The family wouldn’t stop it. They thought it was beautiful.
“It was like church,” Tracy Lee’s mother said, and her grandmother said, “All those lovely young girls loved Tracy Lee. If they wanted to give their jewellery to show how they loved her, that’s their business. It’s not anybody else’s business. I thought it was beautiful.”
Tracy Lee’s sister broke down and cried. It was the first time she had done so.
Dan said, “This is a test of love.”
Of Trudy’s love, he meant. Trudy started singing, “Please release me, let me go—”
She clapped a hand to her chest, danced in swoops around the room, singing. Dan was near laughing, near crying. He couldn’t help it; he came and hugged her and they danced together, staggering. They were fairly drunk. All that June (it was two years ago), they were drinking gin, in between and during their scenes. They were drinking, weeping, arguing, explaining, and Trudy had to keep running to the liquor store. Yet she can’t remember ever feeling really drunk or having a hangover. Except that she felt so tired all the time, as if she had logs chained to her ankles.
She kept joking. She called Genevieve “Jenny the Feeb.”
“This is just like wanting to give up the business and become a potter,” she said. “Maybe you should have done that. I wasn’t really against it. You gave up on it. And when you wanted to go to Peru. We could still do that.”
“All those things were just straws in the wind,” Dan said.
“I shoul
d have known when you started watching the Ombudsman on TV,” Trudy said. “It was the legal angle, wasn’t it? You were never so interested in that kind of thing before.”
“This will open life up for you, too,” Dan said. “You can be more than just my wife.”
“Sure. I think I’ll be a brain surgeon.”
“You’re very smart. You’re a wonderful woman. You’re brave.”
“Sure you’re not talking about Jenny the Feeb?”
“No, you. You, Trudy. I still love you. You can’t understand that I still love you.”
Not for years had he had so much to say about how he loved her. He loved her skinny bones, her curly hair, her roughening skin, her way of coming into a room with a stride that shook the windows, her jokes, her clowning, her tough talk. He loved her mind and her soul. He always would. But the part of his life that had been bound up with hers was over.
“That is just talk. That is talking like an idiot!” Trudy said. “Robin, go back to bed!” For Robin in her skimpy nightgown was standing at the top of the steps.
“I can hear you yelling and screaming,” Robin said.
“We weren’t yelling and screaming,” Trudy said. “We’re trying to talk about something private.”
“What?”
“I told you, it’s something private.”
When Robin sulked off to bed, Dan said, “I think we should tell her. It’s better for kids to know. Genevieve doesn’t have any secrets from her kids. Josie’s only five, and she came into the bedroom one afternoon—”
Then Trudy did start yelling and screaming. She clawed through a cushion cover. “You stop telling me about your sweet fucking Genevieve and her sweet fucking bedroom and her asshole kids—you shut up, don’t tell me anymore! You’re just a big dribbling mouth without any brains. I don’t care what you do, just shut up!”
Dan left. He packed a suitcase; he went off to Richmond Hill. He was back in five days. Just outside of town, he had stopped the car to pick Trudy a bouquet of wildflowers. He told her he was back for good, it was over.
“You don’t say?” said Trudy.
But she put the flowers in water. Dusty pink milkweed flowers that smelled like face powder, black-eyed Susans, wild sweet peas, and orange lilies that must have got loose from old disappeared gardens.
“So you couldn’t stand the pace?” she said.
“I knew you wouldn’t fall all over me,” Dan said. “You wouldn’t be you if you did. And what I came back to is you.”
She went to the liquor store, and this time bought champagne. For a month—it was still summer—they were back together being happy. She never really found out what had happened at Genevieve’s house. Dan said he’d been having a middle-aged fit, that was all. He’d come to his senses. His life was here, with her and Robin.
“You’re talking like a marriage-advice column,” Trudy said.
“Okay. Forget the whole thing.”
“We better,” she said. She could imagine the kids, the confusion, the friends—old boyfriends, maybe—that he hadn’t been prepared for. Jokes and opinions that he couldn’t understand. That was possible. The music he liked, the way he talked—even his hair and his beard—might be out of style.
They went on family drives, picnics. They lay out in the grass behind the house at night, looking at the stars. The stars were a new interest of Dan’s; he got a map. They hugged and kissed each other frequently and tried out some new things—or things they hadn’t done for a long time—when they made love.
At this time, the road in front of the house was being paved. They’d built their house on a hillside at the edge of town, past the other houses, but trucks were using this street quite a bit now, avoiding the main streets, so the town was paving it. Trudy got so used to the noise and constant vibration she said she could feel herself jiggling all night, even when everything was quiet. Work started at seven in the morning. They woke up at the bottom of a river of noise. Dan dragged himself out of bed then, losing the hour of sleep that he loved best. There was a smell of diesel fuel in the air.
She woke up one night to find him not in bed. She listened to hear noises in the kitchen or the bathroom, but she couldn’t. She got up and walked through the house. There were no lights on. She found him sitting outside, just outside the door, not having a drink or a glass of milk or a coffee, sitting with his back to the street.
Trudy looked out at the torn-up earth and the huge stalled machinery. “Isn’t the quiet lovely?” she said.
He didn’t say anything.
Oh. Oh.
She realized what she’d been thinking when she found his side of the bed empty and couldn’t hear him anywhere in the house. Not that he’d left her, but that he’d done worse. Done away with himself. With all their happiness and hugging and kissing and stars and picnics, she could think that.
“You can’t forget her,” she said. “You love her.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
She was glad just to hear him speak. She said, “You’ll have to go and try again.”
“There’s no guarantee I can stay,” he said. “I can’t ask you to stand by.”
“No,” said Trudy. “If you go, that’s it.”
“If I go, that’s it.”
He seemed paralyzed. She felt that he might just sit there, repeating what she said, never be able to move or speak for himself again.
“If you feel like this, that’s all there is to it,” she said. “You don’t have to choose. You’re already gone.”
That worked. He stood up stiffly, came over, and put his arms around her. He stroked her back.
“Come back to bed,” he said. “We can rest for a little while yet.”
“No. You’ve got to be gone when Robin wakes up. If we go back to bed, it’ll just start all over again.”
She made him a thermos of coffee. He packed the bag he had taken with him before. All Trudy’s movements seemed skillful and perfect, as they never were, usually. She felt serene. She felt as if they were an old couple, moving in harmony, in wordless love, past injury, past forgiving. Their goodbye was hardly a ripple. She went outside with him. It was between four-thirty and five o’clock; the sky was beginning to lighten and the birds to wake, everything was drenched in dew. There stood the big harmless machinery, stranded in the ruts of the road.
“Good thing it isn’t last night—you couldn’t have got out,” she said. She meant that the road hadn’t been navigable. It was just yesterday that they had graded a narrow track for local traffic.
“Good thing,” he said.
Goodbye.
“All I want is to know why you did it. Did you just do it for show? Like your father—for show? It’s not the necklace so much. But it was a beautiful thing—I love jet beads. It was the only thing we had of your grandmother’s. It was your right, but you have no right to take me by surprise like that. I deserve an explanation. I always loved jet beads. Why?”
“I blame the family,” Janet says. “It was up to them to stop it. Some of the stuff was just plastic—those junk earrings and bracelets—but what Robin threw in, that was a crime. And she wasn’t the only one. There were birthstone rings and gold chains. Somebody said a diamond cluster ring, but I don’t know if I believe that. They said the girl inherited it, like Robin. You didn’t ever have it evaluated, did you?”
“I don’t know if jet is worth anything,” Trudy says.
They are sitting in Janet’s front room, making roses out of pink Kleenex.
“It’s just stupid,” Trudy says.
“Well. There is one thing you could do,” says Janet. “I don’t hardly know how to mention it.”
“What?”
“Pray.”
Trudy’d had the feeling, from Janet’s tone, that she was going to tell her something serious and unpleasant, something about herself—Trudy—that was affecting her life and that everybody knew except her. Now she wants to laugh, after bracing herself. She doesn’t know what to say.
<
br /> “You don’t pray, do you?” Janet says.
“I haven’t got anything against it,” Trudy says. “I wasn’t brought up to be religious.”
“It’s not strictly speaking religious,” Janet says. “I mean, it’s not connected with any church. This is just some of us that pray. I can’t tell you the names of anybody in it, but most of them you know. It’s supposed to be secret. It’s called the Circle of Prayer.”
“Like at high school,” Trudy says. “At high school there were secret societies, and you weren’t supposed to tell who was in them. Only I wasn’t.”
“I was in everything going.” Janet sighs. “This is actually more on the serious side. Though some people in it don’t take it seriously enough, I don’t think. Some people, they’ll pray that they’ll find a parking spot, or they’ll pray they get good weather for their holidays. That isn’t what it’s for. But that’s just individual praying. What the Circle is really about is, you phone up somebody that is in it and tell them what it is you’re worried about, or upset about, and ask them to pray for you. And they do. And they phone one other person that’s in the Circle, and they phone another and it goes all around, and we pray for one person, all together.”
Trudy throws a rose away. “That’s botched. Is it all women?”
“There isn’t any rule it has to be. But it is, yes. Men would be too embarrassed. I was embarrassed at first. Only the first person you phone knows your name, who it is that’s being prayed for, but in a town like this nearly everybody can guess. But if we started gossiping and ratting on each other it wouldn’t work, and everybody knows that. So we don’t. And it does work.”
