by Alice Munro
“White marble,” said Sophie, quoting. “Pretentious stuff. They’ve put it on all the park paths in Aubreyville, spoiled the park. Glaring.”
Isabel said, “You know we used to have the White Dump? At the school I went to—it was behind a biscuit factory, the playground backed on to the factory property. Every now and then, they’d sweep up these quantities of vanilla icing and nuts and hardened marshmallow globs and they’d bring it in barrels and dump it back there and it would shine. It would shine like a pure white mountain. Over at the school, somebody would see it and yell, ‘White Dump!’ and after school we’d all climb over the fence or run around it. We’d all be over there, scrabbling away at that enormous pile of white candy.”
“Did they sweep it off the floor?” said Peter. He sounded rather exhilarated by the idea. “Did you eat it?”
“Of course they did,” said Denise. “That was all they had. They were poor children.”
“No, no, no,” said Isabel. “We were poor but we certainly had candy. We got a nickel now and then to go to the store. It wasn’t that. It was something about the White Dump—that there was so much and it was so white and shiny. It was like a kid’s dream—the most wonderful promising thing you could ever see.”
“Mother and the Socialists would take it all away in the dead of night,” said Laurence, “and give you oranges instead.”
“If I picture marzipan, I can understand,” said Sophie. “Though you’ll have to admit it doesn’t seem very healthy.”
“It must have been terrible,” said Isabel. “For our teeth, and everything. But we didn’t really get enough to be sick, because there were so many of us and we had to scrabble so hard. It just seemed like the most wonderful thing.”
“White Dump!” said Laurence—who, at another time, to such a story might have said something like “Simple pleasures of the poor!” “White Dump,” he said, with a mixture of pleasure and irony, a natural appreciation that seemed to be exactly what Isabel wanted.
She shouldn’t have been surprised. She knew about Laurence’s delicacy and kindness, as well as she knew his bullying and bluffing. She knew the turns of his mind, his changes of heart, the little shifts and noises of his body. They were intimate. They had found out so much about each other that everything had got cancelled out by something else. That was why the sex between them could seem so shamefaced, merely and drearily lustful, like sex between siblings. Love could survive that—had survived it. Look how she loved him at this moment. Isabel felt herself newly, and boundlessly, resourceful.
If his partner was there, if he and his partner were there together, she could say, “I think we left something yesterday. My mother-in-law thinks she dropped her glasses case. Not her glasses. Just the case. It doesn’t matter. I thought I’d check.”
If he was there alone but came toward her with a blank, pleasant look, inquiring, she might need to have a less trivial reason.
“I just wanted to find out about flying lessons. My husband asked me to find out.”
If he was there alone but his look was not so blank—yet it was still necessary that something should be said—she could say, “It was so kind of you to take everybody up yesterday and they did enjoy it. I just dropped by to thank you.”
She couldn’t believe this; she couldn’t believe it would happen. In spite of her reading, her fantasies, the confidences of certain friends, she couldn’t believe that people sent and got such messages every day, and acted on them, making their perilous plans, moving into illicit territory (which would turn out to be shockingly like, and unlike, home).
In the years ahead, she would learn to read the signs, both at the beginning and at the end of a love affair. She wouldn’t be so astonished at the way the skin of the moment can break open. But astonished enough that she would say one day to her grownup daughter Denise, when they were drinking wine and talking about these things, “I think the best part is always right at the beginning. At the beginning. That’s the only pure part.” “Perhaps even before the beginning,” she said. “Perhaps just when it flashes on you what’s possible. That may be the best.”
“And the first love affair? I mean the first extra love affair?” (Denise suppressing all censure.)“Is that the best, too?”
“With me, the most passionate. Also the most sordid.”
(Referring to the fact that the business was failing, that the pilot asked for, and received, some money from her; also to the grievous scenes of revelation that put an end to the affair and to her marriage, though not to his. Referring, as well, to scenes of such fusing, sundering pleasure that they left both parties flattened, and in a few cases, shedding tears. And to the very first scene, which she could replay in her mind at any time, recalling surprisingly mixed feelings of alarm and tranquillity.
The airport at about nine o’clock in the morning, the silence, sunlight, the dusty distant trees. The small white house that had obviously been hauled here from somewhere else to be the office. No curtains or blinds on its windows. But a piece of picket fence, of all things, a gate. He came out and held the gate open for her. He wore the same clothes that he had worn yesterday, the same light-colored work pants and work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She wore the same clothes that she had worn. Neither heard what the other said, or could answer in a way that made sense.
Too much ease on his part, or any sign of calculation—worse still, of triumph—would have sent her away. But he didn’t make that kind of mistake, probably wasn’t tempted to. Men who are successful with women—and he had been successful; she was to find out that he had been successful some times before, in very similar circumstances—men who are gifted in that way are not so light-minded about it as they are thought to be, and not unkind. He was resolute but seemed thoughtful, or even regretful, when he first touched her. A calming, appreciative touch, a slowly increasing declaration, over her bare neck and shoulders, bare arms and back, lightly covered breasts and hips. He spoke to her—some intimate, serious nonsense—while she swayed back and forth in a response that this touch made just bearable.
She felt rescued, lifted, beheld, and safe.)
After dinner, they played charades. Peter was Orion. He did the second syllable by drinking from an imaginary glass, then staggering around and falling down. He was not disqualified, though it was agreed that Orion was a proper name.
“Space is Peter’s world, after all,” said Denise. Laurence and Isabel laughed. This remark was one that would be quoted from time to time in the household.
Sophie, who never understood the rules of charades—or, at least, could never keep to them—soon gave up the game, and began to read. Her book was The Poetic Edda, which she read every summer, but had been neglecting because of the demands of television. When she went to bed, she left it on the arm of her chair.
Isabel, picking it up before she turned out the light, read this verse:
Seinat er at segia;
svá er nu rádit.
(It is too late to talk of this now: it has been decided.)
ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO
THE BEGGAR MAID
In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.
Fiction/Short Stories
HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE
In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this celebrated collection, Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, and deeply and gl
oriously humane.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN
Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest individuals. Munro evokes the vagaries of love, the tension and deceit that lie in wait under the polite surfaces of society, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories/
THE MOONS OF JUPITER
In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen; there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.
Fiction/Short Stories
OPEN SECRETS
In Open Secrets, Munro uncovers the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished young schoolgirls, indentured frontier brides, an eccentric recluse who finds love at a dinner party, and a Canadian woman fleeing a husband and a lover. These stories resonate with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, confirming Munro as one of the most gifted writers of our time.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
THE PROGRESS OF LOVE
A divorced woman returns to her childhood home and confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, Munro reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK
Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet. A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hope, adversity, and wonder.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
SOMETHING I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU
In these thirteen stories, Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.
Fiction/Literature/Short Stories
ALSO AVAILABLE
Away from Her
Dance of the Happy Shades
Friend of My Youth
Lives of Girls and Women
Selected Stories
Too Much Happiness
Vintage Munro
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
Available wherever books are sold.
www.randomhouse.com
New from
Alice Munro
DEAR LIFE
With this brilliant collection, Munro explores the lives of various inhabitants of the countryside and towns around Lake Huron. In stories about departure, beginnings, accidents, and homecomings both virtual and real, Alice Munro paints a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange and remarkable “dear life” can be.
Available November 2012 from Knopf
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