by Alice Munro
“Ah,” says Magda. “What was the bad experience?”
When Denise and Peter and their parents arrived at the Log House every summer from Ottawa, the children’s grandmother Sophie would be there already, having driven up from Toronto, and the house would be opened, aired, and cleaned as much as it was ever going to be. Denise would run through all the dim cavelike rooms and hug the lumpy cushions, making a drama out of her delight at being there. But it was a true delight. The house smelled of trodden bits of cedar, never-conquered dampness, and winter mice. Everything was always the same. Here was the boring card game that taught you the names of Canadian wildflowers; here was the Scrabble set with the Y and one of the U’s missing; here were the dreadful irresistible books from Sophie’s childhood, the World War I cartoon book, the unmatched plates, the cracked saucers Sophie used for ashtrays, the knives and forks with their faint, strange taste and smell that was either of metal or of dishwater.
Only Sophie would use the oven. She turned out hard roast potatoes, cakes raw in the, middle, chicken bloody at the bone. She never thought of replacing the stove. A rich man’s daughter, now poor—she was an assistant professor of Scandinavian languages, and through most of her career university teachers were poor—she had odd spending habits. She always packed sandwiches to eat on a train trip, and she had never visited a hairdresser, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of sending Laurence to an ordinary school. She spent money on the Log House grudgingly, not because she didn’t love it (she did) but because her instinct told her to put pots under leaks, to tape around warped window frames, to get used to the slant in the floor that indicated one of the foundation posts was crumbling. And however much she needed money, she wouldn’t have thought of selling off any of her property around the house—as her brothers long ago had sold the property on either side, most profitably, to cottagers.
Denise’s mother and father had a name for Sophie that was a joke between them, and a secret. Old Norse. It seemed that shortly after they had met, Laurence, describing Sophie to Isabel, had said, “My mother isn’t quite your average mom. She can read Old Norse. In fact, she is sort of an Old Norse.”
In the car on the way to the Log House, feeling Sophie’s presence ahead of them, they had played this game.
“Is an Old Norse’s car window ever mended with black tape?”
“No. If an Old Norse window is broken, it stays broken.”
“What is an Old Norse’s favorite radio program?”
“Let’s see. Let’s see. The Metropolitan Opera? Kirsten Flagstad singing Wagner?”
“No. Too obvious. Too elitist.”
“Folk Songs of Many Lands?”
“What is an Old Norse breakfast?” said Denise from the back seat. “Porridge!” Porridge was her own most hated thing.
“Porridge with codfish,” said Laurence. “Never tell Grandma about this game, Denise. Where does an Old Norse spend a summer vacation?”
“An Old Norse never takes a summer vacation,” said Isabel severely. “An Old Norse takes a winter vacation. And goes North.”
“Spitzbergen,” said Laurence. “The James Bay Lowlands.”
“A cruise,” said Isabel. “From Tromso to Archangel.”
“Isn’t there a lot of ice?”
“Well, it’s on an icebreaker. And it’s very dark, because those cruises only run in December and January.”
“Wouldn’t Grandma think it was funny, too?” said Denise. She pictured her grandmother coming out of the house and crossing the veranda to meet them—that broad, strong, speckled old woman, with a crown of yellowish-white braids, whose old jackets and sweaters and skirts had some of the smell of the house, whose greeting was calmly affectionate though slightly puzzled. Was she surprised that they had got here so soon, that the children had grown, that Laurence was suddenly so boisterous, that Isabel looked so slim and youthful? Did she know how they’d been joking about her in the car?
“Maybe,” said Laurence discouragingly.
“In those old poems she reads,” said Isabel, “you know those old Icelandic poems, there is the most terrible gore and hacking people up—women particularly, one slitting her own kids’ throats and mixing the blood in her husband’s wine. I read that. And then Sophie is such a pacifist and Socialist, isn’t it strange?”
Isabel drove into Aubreyville in the morning to get the birthday cake. Denise went with her to hold the cake on the way home. The plane ride was arranged for five in the afternoon. Only Isabel knew about it, having driven Denise to the airport last week. It was all Denise’s idea. She was worrying now about the clouds.
“Those streaky ones are okay,” said Isabel. “It’s the big piled-up white ones that could mean a storm.”
“Cumulus,” Denise said. “I know. Do you think Daddy is a typical Cancer? Home-loving and food-loving? Hangs on to things?”
“I guess so,” said Isabel.
“What did you think when you first met him? I mean, what attracted you? Did you know this was the person you were going to end up married to? I think that’s all so weird.”
Laurence and Isabel had met in the cafeteria of the university, where Isabel was working as a cashier. She was a first-year student, a poor, bright girl from the factory side of town, wearing a tight pink sweater that Laurence always remembered.
(“Woolworth’s,” said Isabel. “I didn’t know any better. I thought the sorority girls were kind of dowdy.”)
The first thing she said to Laurence was “That’s a mistake.” She was pointing to his selection—shepherd’s pie.
Laurence was too embarrassed or too stubborn to put it back. “I’ve had it before and it was okay,” he said. He hung about for a moment after he got his change. “It reminds me of what my mother makes.”
“Your mother must be an awful cook.”
“She is.”
He phoned her that night, having asked around to find out her name. “This is shepherd’s pie,” he said shakily. “Would you go to a movie with me?”
“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” said Isabel, that brash-talking tight-sweatered girl who was certainly going to be a surprise for Sophie. “Sure.”
Denise knew all this by heart. What she was after was something else. “Why did you go out with him? Why did you say, ‘Sure’?”
“He was nice-looking,” said Isabel. “He seemed interesting.”
“Is that all?”
“Well. He didn’t act as if he was God’s gift to women. He blushed when I spoke to him.”
“He often blushes,” said Denise. “So do I. It’s terrible.”
She thought that those two people, Laurence and Isabel, her father and mother, kept something hidden. Something between them. She could feel it welling up fresh and teasing, or lying low and sour, but she could never get to understand what it was, or how it worked. They would not let her.
Aubreyville was a limestone town, built along the river. The old stove foundry, out of which Sophie’s father had made his money, was still there on the riverbank. It had been partly converted into a crafts center, where people blew glass and wove shawls and made birdhouses, which they sold on the premises. The name Vogelsang, the German name that had also appeared on the stoves and had contributed to the downfall of the company during the First World War, could still be read, carved in stone, over the door. The handsome house where Sophie had been born had become a nursing home.
The catering woman lived on one of the new streets of town—the streets that Sophie hated. The street was recently paved, broad and black, with smooth curbs. There were no sidewalks. No trees either, no hedges or fences, just some tiny ornamental shrubs with a wire roll to protect them. Split-level and ranch-style houses alternated. Some of the driveways were paved with the glittering white crushed stone called, around Aubreyville, “white marble.” On one lawn, three spotted plastic deer were resting; at a doorway, a little black boy held up a lantern for coaches. An arrangement of pink-and-gray-speckled boulders prevented people from cross
ing a corner lot.
“Plastic rocks,” said Isabel. “I wonder if they have weights or are stuck into the ground?”
The catering woman brought the cake out to the car. She was a stout, dark-haired, rather pretty woman in her forties, with heavy green eye shadow and a perfect, gleaming, bouffant hairstyle.
“I’ve been on the lookout for you,” she said. “I have to run some pies over to the Legion. You want to take a look at this and see if it’s okay?”
“I’m sure it’s lovely,” said Isabel, getting out her wallet. Denise took the cake box onto her lap.
“I wish I had a girl this size around to help me,” the woman said.
Isabel looked at the two little boys—they were about three and four years old—who were jumping in and out of an inflated wading pool on the lawn. “Are those yours?” she said politely.
“Are you kidding? Those are my daughter’s she dumped on me. I’ve got one married son and one married daughter, and another son—the only time I see him he’s in a motorcycle helmet. I was an early starter.”
Isabel had begun to back the car out of the drive when Denise gave a cry of surprise. “Mom! That’s the pilot!”
A man had come out of the side door and was talking to the catering woman.
“Damn it, Denise, don’t scare me like that!” Isabel said. “I thought it was one of the kids running behind the car.”
“It’s the pilot I was talking to at the airport!”
“He must be her husband. Keep the cake level.”
“But isn’t that strange? On Daddy’s birthday? The woman who made his cake is married to the man who’s going to take him up in the plane. Maybe he is. He’s got a partner. He and his partner give flying lessons and they fly hunters up North in the fall and they fly fishermen to lakes you can only fly to. He told me. Isn’t it strange?”
“It’s only moderately strange in a place the size of Aubreyville. Denise, you have to watch that cake.”
Denise subsided, feeling a little insulted. If a grownup had cried out in surprise, Isabel wouldn’t have shown such irritation. If a grownup had remarked on this strange coincidence, Isabel would have agreed that it was indeed strange. Denise hated it when Isabel treated her like a child. With her grandmother, or Laurence, she expected a certain denseness and inflexibility. Those two were always the same. But Isabel could be confiding, friendly, infinitely understanding, then remote and irritable. And sometimes the more she gave you, the less you felt satisfied. Denise suspected that her father felt that about Isabel, too.
Today Isabel was wearing a long wraparound skirt of Indian cotton—her hippie skirt, Laurence called it—and a dark-blue halter. She was slim and brown—she tanned well, considering she was a redhead—and until you got close to her she looked only about twenty-five. Even close up, she didn’t look more than twenty-nine. So Laurence said. He wouldn’t let her cut her dark-red hair, and he supervised her tan, calling out, “Where are you going,” in a warning, upset voice, when she tried to move into the shade or go up to the house for a little while.
“If I let her, Isabel would sneak off out of the sun every time my back was turned,” Laurence had said to visitors, and Denise had heard Isabel laugh.
“It’s true. I’ve got Laurence to thank. I’d never last long enough on my own to get any kind of a tan. I get the fried-brain feeling.”
“Who cares about fried brains if you’ve got a gorgeous brown body?” said Laurence, in a lordly, farcical way, tap-tapping the smooth stomach bared by Isabel’s bikini.
Those little rhythmic slaps made Denise’s own stomach go queasy. The only way she could keep from yelling out “Stop it!” was to jump up and rush at the lake with her arms spread wide and silly whoops coming out of her mouth.
When Denise saw the catering woman again, more than a year had gone by. It was nearly the end of August, a close, warm, cloudy day, when they were near the end of their summer’s stay at the Log House. Isabel had gone to town on one of that summer’s regular trips to the dentist. She was having some complicated work done in Aubreyville, because she liked the dentist there better than the dentist in Ottawa. Sophie had not been at the Log House since the beginning of summer. She was in Wellesley Hospital, in Toronto, having some tests done.
Denise and Peter and their father were in the kitchen making bacon-and-tomato sandwiches for lunch. There were a few things that Laurence believed he could cook better than anybody else, and one of them was bacon. Denise was slicing tomatoes, and Peter was supposed to be buttering the toast, but was reading his book. The radio was on, giving the noon news. Laurence liked to hear the news several times a day.
Denise went to see who was at the front door. She did not immediately recognize the catering woman, who was wearing a more youthful dress this time—a loose dress with swirls of red and blue and purple “psychedelic” colors—and did not look as pretty. Her hair was down over her shoulders.
“Is your mother home?” this woman said.
“I’m sorry, she’s not here right now,” said Denise, with a dignified politeness she knew to be slightly offensive. She thought the woman was selling something.
“She is not here,” the woman said. “No. She is not here.” Her face was puffy and unsmiling, her lipstick clownishly thick, and her eye makeup blotchy. Her voice was heavy with some insinuation Denise could not grasp. She would not talk that way if she was trying to sell something. Could they owe her money? Had Peter run across her property or bothered her dog?
“My father’s here,” Denise said contritely. “Would you like to talk to him?”
“Your father, yes, I will talk to him,” the woman said, and hoisted her large, shiny red handbag up under her arm. “Why don’t you go and get him, then?”
Denise realized then that this was the same voice that had said, “I wish I had a girl this size to help me.”
“The lady who does catering is at the door,” she said to her father.
“The lady who does catering?” he repeated, in a displeased, disbelieving voice, as if she had invented this lady just to interrupt him.
But he wiped his hands and went off down the hall. She heard him say smoothly, “Yes, indeed, what can I do for you?”
And instead of coming back in a few minutes, he took this woman into the dining room; he shut the dining-room door. Why into the dining room? Visitors were taken into the living room. The bacon, lying on a paper towel, was getting cold.
There was a little window high in the door between the kitchen and the dining room. In the days when Sophie was a little girl, there used to be a cook in the kitchen. The cook could watch the progress of the meal through this window to know when to change the dishes.
Denise raised herself on tiptoe.
“Spy,” said Peter, without looking up from his book. It was a science-fiction book called Satan’s World.
“I just want to know when to make the sandwiches,” Denise said.
She saw that there had been a reason for going into the dining room. Her father was sitting in his usual place, at the end of the table. The woman was sitting in Peter’s usual place, nearest the hall door. She had her purse on the table, and her hands clasped on top of it. Whatever they were talking about demanded a table and straight-backed chairs and an upright, serious position. It was like an interview. Information is being given, questions are being asked, a problem is being considered.
Well, all right, thought Denise. They were talking about a problem. They would finish talking about it, settle it, and it would be over with. Her father would tell the family about it, or not tell them. It would be over.
She turned off the radio. She made the sandwiches. Peter ate his. She waited awhile, then ate hers. They drank Coke, which their father allowed them at lunch. Denise ate and drank too quickly. She sat at the table quietly burping and retasting the bacon, and hearing the terrible sound of a stranger crying in their house.
From the plane on her father’s birthday, they had seen some delicate, almost tran
sparent, mounded clouds in the western sky, and Denise had said, “Thunderclouds.”
“That’s right,” said the pilot. “But they’re a long ways away.”
“It must be pretty dramatic,” said Laurence, “flying in a thunderstorm.”
“Once, I looked out and I saw blue rings of fire around the propellers,” the pilot said. “Round the propellers and the wing tips. Then I saw the same thing round the nose. I put my hand out to touch the glass—this here, the plexiglass—and just as I got within touching distance, flames came shooting out of my fingers. I don’t know if I touched the glass or not. I didn’t feel anything. Little blue flames. One time in a thunderstorm. That’s what they call St. Elmo’s fire.”
“It’s from the electrical discharges in the atmosphere,” called Peter from the back seat.
“You’re right,” the pilot called back.
“Strange,” said Laurence.
“It gave me a start.”
Denise had a picture in her mind of the pilot with cold blue fire shooting out of his fingertips, and that seemed to her a sign of pain, though he had said he didn’t feel anything. She thought of the time she had touched an electric fence. The spurts of sound coming out of the dining room made her remember. Peter went on reading, and they didn’t say anything, though she knew he heard the sound, too.
Magda is in the kitchen making the salad. She is humming a tune from an opera. “Home to Our Mountains.” Denise is in the dining room setting the table. She hears her father laughing on the patio. The guests have arrived—two pleasant, rich couples, not cottagers. One couple comes from Boston, one from Montreal. They have summer houses in Westfield.
Denise hears her father say, “Weltschmerz.” He says it as if in quotation marks. He must be quoting some item they all know about, from a magazine they all read.
I should be like Peter, she thinks. I should stop coming here.
But perhaps it’s all right, and this is happiness, which she is too stubborn, too childish, too glumly political—too mired in a past that everyone else has abandoned—to accept?
