by Alice Munro
“Like how?” Trudy says.
“Well, one girl banged up her car. She did eight hundred dollars’ damage, and it was kind of a tricky situation, where she wasn’t sure her insurance would cover it, and neither was her husband—he was raging mad—but we all prayed, and the insurance came through without a hitch. That’s only one example.”
“There wouldn’t be much point in praying to get the necklace back when it’s in the coffin and the funeral’s this morning,” Trudy says.
“It’s not up to you to say that. You don’t say what’s possible or impossible. You just ask for what you want. Because it says in the Bible, ‘Ask and it shall be given.’ How can you be helped if you won’t ask? You can’t, that’s for sure. What about when Dan left—what if you’d prayed then? I wasn’t in the Circle then, or I would have said something to you. Even if I knew you’d resist it, I would have said something. A lot of people resist. Now, even—it doesn’t sound too great with that girl, but how do you know, maybe even now it might work? It might not be too late.”
“All right,” says Trudy, in a hard, cheerful voice. “All right.” She pushes all the floppy flowers off her lap. “I’ll just get down on my knees right now and pray that I get Dan back. I’ll pray that I get the necklace back and I get Dan back, and why do I have to stop there? I can pray that Tracy Lee never died. I can pray that she comes back to life. Why didn’t her mother ever think of that?”
Good news. The swimming pool is fixed. They’ll be able to fill it tomorrow. But Kelvin is depressed. Early this afternoon—partly to keep them from bothering the men who were working on the pool—he took Marie and Josephine uptown. He let them get ice-cream cones. He told them to pay attention and eat the ice cream up quickly, because the sun was hot and it would melt. They licked at their cones now and then, as if they had all day. Ice cream was soon dribbling down their chins and down their arms. Kelvin had grabbed a handful of paper napkins, but he couldn’t wipe it up fast enough. They were a mess. A spectacle. They didn’t care. Kelvin told them they weren’t so pretty that they could afford to look like that.
“Some people don’t like the look of us anyway,” he said. “Some people don’t even think we should be allowed uptown. People just get used to seeing us and not staring at us like freaks and you make a mess and spoil it.”
They laughed at him. He could have cowed Marie if he had her alone, but not when she was with Josephine. Josephine was one who needed some old-fashioned discipline, in Kelvin’s opinion. Kelvin had been in places where people didn’t get away with anything like they got away with here. He didn’t agree with hitting. He had seen plenty of it done, but he didn’t agree with it, even on the hand. But a person like Josephine could be shut up in her room. She could be made to sit in a corner, she could be put on bread and water, and it would do a lot of good. All Marie needed was a talking-to—she had a weak personality. But Josephine was a devil.
“I’ll talk to both of them,” Trudy says. “I’ll tell them to say they’re sorry.”
“I want for them to be sorry,” Kelvin says. “I don’t care if they say they are. I’m not taking them ever again.”
Later, when all the others are in bed, Trudy gets him to sit down to play cards with her on the screened veranda. They play Crazy Eights. Kelvin says that’s all he can manage tonight; his head is sore.
Uptown, a man said to him, “Hey, which one of them two is your girlfriend?”
“Stupid,” Trudy says. “He was a stupid jerk.”
The man talking to the first man said, “Which one you going to marry?”
“They don’t know you, Kelvin. They’re just stupid.”
But they did know him. One was Reg Hooper, one was Bud DeLisle. Bud DeLisle that sold real estate. They knew him. They had talked to him in the barbershop; they called him Kelvin. “Hey, Kelvin, which one you going to marry?”
“Nerds,” says Trudy. “That’s what Robin would say.”
“You think they’re your friend, but they’re not,” says Kelvin. “How many times I see that happen.”
Trudy goes to the kitchen to put on coffee. She wants to have fresh coffee to offer Janet when she comes in. She apologized this morning, and Janet said all right, I know you’re upset. It really is all right. Sometimes you think they’re your friend, and they are.
She looks at all the mugs hanging on their hooks. She and Janet shopped all over to find them. A mug with each one’s name. Marie, Josephine, Arthur, Kelvin, Shirley, George, Dorinda. You’d think Dorinda would be the hardest name to find, but actually the hardest was Shirley. Even the people who can’t read have learned to recognize their own mugs, by color and pattern.
One day, two new mugs appeared, bought by Kelvin. One said Trudy, the other Janet.
“I’m not going to be too overjoyed seeing my name in that lineup,” Janet said. “But I wouldn’t hurt his feelings for a million dollars.”
For a honeymoon, Dan took Trudy to the island on the lake where his mother’s hotel was. The hotel was closed down, but his mother still lived there. Dan’s father was dead, and she lived there alone. She took a boat with an outboard motor across the water to get her groceries. She sometimes made a mistake and called Trudy Marlene.
The hotel wasn’t much. It was a white wooden box in a clearing by the shore. Some little boxes of cabins were stuck behind it. Dan and Trudy stayed in one of the cabins. Every cabin had a wood stove. Dan built a fire at night to take off the chill. But the blankets were damp and heavy when he and Trudy woke up in the morning.
Dan caught fish and cooked them. He and Trudy climbed the big rock behind the cabins and picked blueberries. He asked her if she knew how to make a piecrust, and she didn’t. So he showed her, rolling out the dough with a whiskey bottle.
In the morning there was a mist over the lake, just as you see in the movies or in a painting.
One afternoon, Dan stayed out longer than usual, fishing. Trudy kept busy for a while in the kitchen, rubbing the dust off things, washing some jars. It was the oldest, darkest kitchen she had ever seen, with wooden racks for the dinner plates to dry in. She went outside and climbed the rock by herself, thinking she would pick some blueberries. But it was already dark under the trees; the evergreens made it dark, and she didn’t like the idea of wild animals. She sat on the rock looking down on the roof of the hotel, the old dead leaves and broken shingles. She heard a piano being played. She scrambled down the rock and followed the music around to the front of the building. She walked along the front veranda and stopped at a window, looking into the room that used to be the lounge. The room with the blackened stone fireplace, the lumpy leather chairs, the horrible mounted fish.
Dan’s mother was there, playing the piano. A tall, straight-backed old woman, with her gray-black hair twisted into such a tiny knot. She sat and played the piano, without any lights on, in the half-dark, half-bare room.
Dan had said that his mother came from a rich family. She had taken piano lessons, dancing lessons; she had gone around the world when she was a young girl. There was a picture of her on a camel. But she wasn’t playing a classical piece, the sort of thing you’d expect her to have learned. She was playing “It’s Three O’Clock in the Morning.” When she got to the end, she started in again. Maybe it was a special favorite of hers, something she had danced to in the old days. Or maybe she wasn’t satisfied yet that she had got it right.
Why does Trudy now remember this moment? She sees her young self looking in the window at the old woman playing the piano. The dim room, with its oversize beams and fireplace and the lonely leather chairs. The clattering, faltering, persistent piano music. Trudy remembers that so clearly and it seems she stood outside her own body, which ached then from the punishing pleasures of love. She stood outside her own happiness in a tide of sadness. And the opposite thing happened the morning Dan left. Then she stood outside her own unhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonably like love. But it was the same thing, really, when you got outside. What are th
ose times that stand out, clear patches in your life—what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?
She goes into the front hall and listens for any noise from upstairs.
All quiet there, all medicated.
The phone rings right beside her head.
“Are you still there?” Robin says. “You’re not gone?”
“I’m still here.”
“Can I run over and ride back with you? I didn’t do my run earlier because it was so hot.”
You threw the jug. You could have killed me. Yes.
Kelvin, waiting at the card table, under the light, looks bleached and old. There’s a pool of light whitening his brown hair. His face sags, waiting. He looks old, sunk into himself, wrapped in a thick bewilderment, nearly lost to her.
“Kelvin, do you pray?” says Trudy. She didn’t know she was going to ask him that. “I mean, it’s none of my business. But, like for anything specific?”
He’s got an answer for her, which is rather surprising. He pulls his face up, as if he might have felt the tug he needed to bring him to the surface.
“If I was smart enough to know what to pray for,” he says, “then I wouldn’t have to.”
He smiles at her, with some oblique notion of conspiracy, offering his halfway joke. It’s not meant as comfort, particularly. Yet it radiates—what he said, the way he said it, just the fact that he’s there again, radiates, expands the way some silliness can, when you’re very tired. In this way, when she was young, and high, a person or a moment could become a lily floating on the cloudy river water, perfect and familiar.
WHITE DUMP
I .
“I don’t know what color,” says Denise, answering a question of Magda’s. “I don’t really remember any color in this house at all.”
“Of course you don’t,” says Magda sympathetically. “There was no light in the house, so there was no color. There was no attempt. So dreary, I couldn’t believe.”
As well as having the old, deep, light-denying veranda on the Log House torn down, Magda—to whom Denise’s father, Laurence, is now married—has put in skylights and painted some walls white, others yellow. She has hung up fabrics from Mexico and Morocco, and rugs from Quebec. Pine dressers and tables have replaced badly painted junk. There is a hot tub surrounded by windows and greenery, and a splendid kitchen. All this must have cost a lot of money. No doubt Laurence is rich enough now to manage it. He owns a small factory, near Ottawa, that manufactures plastics, specializing in window panels and lampshades that look like stained glass. The designs are pretty, the colors not too garish, and Magda has stuck a few of them around the Log House in inconspicuous places.
Magda is an Englishwoman, not a Hungarian as her name might suggest. She used to be a dancer, then a dancing teacher. She is a short, thick-waisted woman, still graceful, with a smooth, pale neck and a lovely, floating crown of silver-gold hair. She is wearing a plain gray dress and a shawl of muted, flowery colors that is sometimes draped over the settee in her bedroom.
“Magda is style through and through,” Denise said once, to her brother, Peter.
“What’s wrong with that?” said Peter. He is a computer engineer in California and comes home perhaps once a year. He can’t understand why Denise is still so bound up with these people.
“Nothing,” said Denise. “But you go to the Log House, and there is not even a jumble of scarves lying on an old chest. There is a calculated jumble. There is not a whisk or bowl hanging up in the kitchen that is not the most elegant whisk or bowl you could buy.”
Peter looked at her and didn’t say anything. Denise said, “Okay.”
Denise has driven up from Toronto, as she does once or twice every summer, to visit her father and her stepmother. Laurence and Magda spend the whole season here, and are talking of selling the house in Ottawa, of living here year-round. The three of them are sitting out on the brick patio that has replaced part of the veranda, one Sunday afternoon in late August. Magda’s ginger pots are full of late-blooming flowers—geraniums the only ones that Denise can name. They are drinking wine-and-soda—the real drinks will come out when the dinner guests arrive. So far, there have been no preposterous arguments. Driving up here, Denise determined there wouldn’t be. In the car, she played Mozart tapes to steady and encourage herself. She made resolves. So far, so good.
Denise runs a Women’s Centre in Toronto. She gets beaten women into shelters, finds doctors and lawyers for them, goes after private and public money, makes speeches, holds meetings, deals with varied and sometimes dangerous mix-ups of life. She makes less money than a clerk in a government liquor store.
Laurence has said that this is a typical pattern for a girl of affluent background.
He has said that the Women’s Centre is a good idea for those who really need it. But he sometimes wonders.
What does he sometimes wonder?
Frankly, he sometimes wonders if some of those women—some of them—aren’t enjoying all the attention they are getting, claiming to be battered and raped, and so on.
Laurence customarily lays the bait, Denise snaps it up. (Magda floats on top of these conversations, smiling at her flowers.)
Taxpayers’ money. Helping those who won’t help themselves. Get rid of acid rain, we lose jobs; your unions would squawk.
“They’re not my unions.”
“If you vote New Democrat, they’re your unions. Who runs the New Democrats?”
Denise can’t tell if he really believes what he says, or half believes it, or just feels compelled to say these things to her. She has gone out in tears more than once, got into her car, driven back to Toronto. Her lover, a cheerful Marxist from a Caribbean island, whom she doesn’t bring home, says that old men, successful old men, in a capitalist industrial society are almost purely evil; there is nothing left in them but raging defenses and greed. Denise argues with him, too. Her father is not an old man, in the first place. Her father is a good person, underneath.
“I’m sick of your male definitions and airtight male arguments,” she says. Then she says thoughtfully, “Also, I’m sick of hearing myself say ‘male’ like that.” She knows better than to bring up the fact that if she lasts through the argument, her father will give her a check for the Centre.
Today her resolve has held. She has caught the twinkle of the bait but has been able to slip past, a clever innocent-seeming fish, talking mostly to Magda, admiring various details of house renovation. Laurence, an ironic-looking, handsome man with a full gray mustache and soft, thinning gray-brown hair, a tall man with a little sag now to his shoulders and his stomach, has got up several times and walked to the lake and back, to the road and back, has sighed deeply, showing his dissatisfaction with this female talk.
Finally he speaks abruptly to Denise, breaking through what Magda is saying.
“How is your mother?”
“Fine,” says Denise. “As far as I know, fine.”
Isabel lives far away, in the Comox Valley, in British Columbia.
“So—how is the goat farming?”
The man Isabel lives with is a commercial fisherman who used to be a TV cameraman. They live on a small farm and rent the land, or part of it, to a man who raises goats. At some point, Denise revealed this fact to Laurence (she has taken care not to reveal the fact that the man is several years younger than Isabel and that the relationship is periodically “unstable”), and Laurence has ever since insisted that Isabel and her paramour (his word) are engaged in goat farming. His questions bring to mind a world of rural hardship: muddy toil with refractory animals, poverty, some sort of ghastly outdated idealism.
“Fine,” says Denise, smiling.
Usually she argues, points out the error in fact, accuses him of distortion, ill will, mischief.
“Enough counterculture left out there to buy goat milk?”
“I would think so.”
Laurence’s lips twitch under his mustache impatiently.
She keeps on looking at him, maintaining an expression of innocent, impudent cheerfulness. Then he gives an abrupt laugh.
“Goat milk!” he says.
“Is this the new in-joke?” says Magda. “What am I missing? Goat milk?”
Laurence says, “Magda, did you know that on my fortieth birthday Denise took me up in a plane?”
“I didn’t actually fly it,” says Denise.
“My fortieth birthday, 1969. The year of the moon shot. The moon shot was actually just a couple of days after. She’d heard me say I often wished I could get a look at this country from a thousand feet up. I’d go over it flying from Ottawa to Toronto, but I’d never see anything.”
“I only paid enough for him to go up, but as it happened we all went up, in a five-seater,” Denise says. “For the same price.”
“We all went except Isabel,” says Laurence. “Somebody had to bow out, so she did.”
“I made him drive—Dad drive—blindfolded to the airport,” says Denise to Magda. “That is, not drive blindfolded”—they were all laughing—“ride blindfolded, so he wouldn’t know where we were going and it would be a complete surprise.”
“Mother drove,” says Laurence. “I imagine I could have driven blindfolded better. Why did she drive and not Isabel?”
“We had to go in Grandma’s car. The Peugeot wouldn’t take us all, and I had to have us all go to watch you because it was my big deal. My present. I was an awful stage manager.”
“We flew all down the Rideau Lake system,” Laurence says. “Mother loved it. Remember she’d had a bad experience that morning, with the hippies? So it was good for her. The pilot was very generous. Of course he had his wife working. She made cakes, didn’t she?”
Denise says, “She was a caterer.”
“She made my birthday cake,” says Laurence. “That same birthday. I found that out later.”
“Didn’t Isabel?” says Magda. “Didn’t Isabel make the cake?”
“The oven wasn’t working,” says Denise, her voice gone cautionary and slightly regretful.
