Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

  Flo will come up and get the tray. She may say, “I see you got your appetite still,” or, “Did you like the chocolate milk, was it enough syrup in it?” depending on how chastened she is feeling, herself. At any rate, all advantage will be lost. Rose will understand that life has started up again, that they will all sit around the table eating again, listening to the radio news. Tomorrow morning, maybe even tonight. Unseemly and unlikely as that may be. They will be embarrassed, but rather less than you might expect considering how they have behaved. They will feel a queer lassitude, a convalescent indolence, not far off satisfaction.

  One night after a scene like this they were all in the kitchen. It must have been summer, or at least warm weather, because her father spoke of the old men who sat on the bench in front of the store.

  “Do you know what they’re talking about now?” he said, and nodded his head toward the store to show who he meant, though of course they were not there now, they went home at dark.

  “Those old coots,” said Flo. “What?”

  There was about them both a geniality not exactly false but a bit more emphatic than was normal, without company.

  Rose’s father told them then that the old men had picked up the idea somewhere that what looked like a star in the western sky, the first star that came out after sunset, the evening star, was in reality an airship hovering over Bay City, Michigan, on the other side of Lake Huron. An American invention, sent up to rival the heavenly bodies. They were all in agreement about this, the idea was congenial to them. They believed it to be lit by ten thousand electric light bulbs. Her father had ruthlessly disagreed with them, pointing out that it was the planet Venus they saw, which had appeared in the sky long before the invention of an electric light bulb. They had never heard of the planet Venus.

  “Ignoramuses,” said Flo. At which Rose knew, and knew her father knew, that Flo had never heard of the planet Venus either. To distract them from this, or even apologize for it, Flo put down her teacup, stretched out with her head resting on the chair she had been sitting on and her feet on another chair (somehow she managed to tuck her dress modestly between her legs at the same time), and lay stiff as a board, so that Brian cried out in delight, “Do that! Do that!”

  Flo was double-jointed and very strong. In moments of celebration or emergency she would do tricks.

  They were silent while she turned herself around, not using her arms at all but just her strong legs and feet. Then they all cried out in triumph, though they had seen it before.

  Just as Flo turned herself Rose got a picture in her mind of that airship, an elongated transparent bubble, with its strings of diamond lights, floating in the miraculous American sky.

  “The planet Venus!” her father said, applauding Flo. “Ten thousand electric lights!”

  There was a feeling of permission, relaxation, even a current of happiness, in the room.

  YEARS LATER, many years later, on a Sunday morning, Rose turned on the radio. This was when she was living by herself in Toronto.

  Well, sir.

  It was a different kind of place in our day. Yes, it was.

  It was all horses then. Horses and buggies. Buggy races up and down the main street on the Saturday nights.

  “Just like the chariot races,” says the announcer’s, or interviewer’s, smooth encouraging voice.

  I never seen a one of them.

  “No, sir, that was the old Roman chariot races I was referring to. That was before your time.”

  Musta been before my time. I’m a hunerd and two years old.

  “That’s a wonderful age, sir.”

  It is so.

  She left it on, as she went around the apartment kitchen, making coffee for herself. It seemed to her that this must be a staged interview, a scene from some play, and she wanted to find out what it was. The old man’s voice was so vain and belligerent, the interviewer’s quite hopeless and alarmed, under its practiced gentleness and ease. You were surely meant to see him holding the microphone up to some toothless, reckless, preening centenarian, wondering what in God’s name he was doing here, and what would he say next?

  “They must have been fairly dangerous.”

  What was dangerous?

  “Those buggy races.”

  They was. Dangerous. Used to be the runaway horses. Used to be a-plenty of accidents. Fellows was dragged along on the gravel and cut their face open. Wouldna matter so much if they was dead. Heh.

  Some of them horses was the high-steppers. Some, they had to have the mustard under their tail. Some wouldn step out for nothin. That’s the thing it is with the horses. Some’ll work and pull till they drop down dead and some wouldn pull your cock out of a pail of lard. Hehe.

  It must be a real interview after all. Otherwise they wouldn’t have put that in, wouldn’t have risked it. It’s all right if the old man says it. Local color. Anything rendered harmless and delightful by his hundred years.

  Accidents all the time then. In the mill. Foundry. Wasn’t the precautions.

  “You didn’t have so many strikes then, I don’t suppose? You didn’t have so many unions?”

  Everybody taking it easy nowadays. We worked and we was glad to get it. Worked and was glad to get it.

  “You didn’t have television.”

  Didn’t have no TV. Didn’t have no radio. No picture show.

  “You made your own entertainment.”

  That’s the way we did.

  “You had a lot of experiences young men growing up today will never have.”

  Experiences.

  “Can you recall any of them for us?”

  I eaten groundhog meat one time. One winter. You wouldna cared for it. Heh.

  There was a pause, of appreciation, it would seem, then the announcer’s voice saying that the foregoing had been an interview with Mr. Wilfred Nettleton of Hanratty, Ontario, made on his hundred and second birthday, two weeks before his death, last spring. A living link with our past. Mr. Nettleton had been interviewed in the Wawanash County Home for the Aged.

  Hat Nettleton.

  Horsewhipper into centenarian. Photographed on his birthday, fussed over by nurses, kissed no doubt by a girl reporter. Flashbulbs popping at him. Tape recorder drinking in the sound of his voice. Oldest resident. Oldest horsewhipper. Living link with our past.

  Looking out from her kitchen window at the cold lake, Rose was longing to tell somebody. It was Flo who would enjoy hearing. She thought of her saying Imagine! in a way that meant she was having her worst suspicions gorgeously confirmed. But Flo was in the same place Hat Nettleton had died in, and there wasn’t any way Rose could reach her. She had been there even when that interview was recorded, though she would not have heard it, would not have known about it. After Rose put her in the Home, a couple of years earlier, she had stopped talking. She had removed herself, and spent most of her time sitting in a corner of her crib, looking crafty and disagreeable, not answering anybody, though she occasionally showed her feelings by biting a nurse.

  Wild Swans

  FLO SAID to watch for White Slavers. She said this was how they operated: an old woman, a motherly or grandmotherly sort, made friends while riding beside you on a bus or train. She offered you candy, which was drugged. Pretty soon you began to droop and mumble, were in no condition to speak for yourself. Oh, help, the woman said, my daughter (granddaughter) is sick, please somebody help me get her off so that she can recover in the fresh air. Up stepped a polite gentleman, pretending to be a stranger, offering assistance. Together, at the next stop, they hustled you off the train or bus, and that was the last the ordinary world ever saw of you. They kept you a prisoner in the White Slave place (to which you had been transported drugged and bound so you wouldn’t even know where you were), until such time as you were thoroughly degraded and in despair, your insides torn up by drunken men and invested with vile disease, your mind destroyed by drugs, your hair and teeth fallen out. It took about three years for you to get to this state. You wouldn’t
want to go home then; maybe couldn’t remember home, or find your way if you did. So they let you out on the streets.

  Flo took ten dollars and put it in a little cloth bag, which she sewed to the strap of Rose’s slip. Another thing likely to happen was that Rose would get her purse stolen.

  Watch out, Flo said as well, for people dressed up as ministers. They were the worst. That disguise was commonly adopted by White Slavers, as well as those after your money.

  Rose said she didn’t see how she could tell which ones were disguised.

  Flo had worked in Toronto once. She had worked as a waitress in a coffee shop in Union Station. That was how she knew all she knew. She never saw sunlight, in those days, except on her days off. But she saw plenty else. She saw a man cut another man’s stomach with a knife, just pull out his shirt and do a tidy cut, as if it was a watermelon not a stomach. The stomach’s owner just sat looking down surprised, with no time to protest. Flo implied that that was nothing, in Toronto. She saw two bad women (that was what Flo called whores, running the two words together, like badminton) get into a fight, and a man laughed at them, other men stopped and laughed and egged them on, and they had their fists full of each other’s hair. At last the police came and took them away, still howling and yelping.

  She saw a child die of a fit too. Its face was black as ink.

  “Well, I’m not scared,” said Rose provokingly. “There’s the police, anyway.”

  “Oh, them! They’d be the first ones to diddle you!”

  She did not believe anything Flo said on the subject of sex. Consider the undertaker.

  A little bald man, very neatly dressed, would come into the store sometimes and speak to Flo with a placating expression.

  “I only wanted a bag of candy. And maybe a few packages of gum. And one or two chocolate bars. Could you go to the trouble of wrapping them?”

  Flo in her mock-deferential tone would assure him that she could. She wrapped them in heavy-duty white paper, so they were something like presents. He took his time with the selection, humming and chatting, then dawdled for a while. He might ask how Flo was feeling. And how Rose was, if she was there.

  “You look pale. Young girls need fresh air.” To Flo he would say, “You work too hard. You’ve worked hard all your life.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” Flo would say agreeably.

  When he went out she hurried to the window. There it was—the old black hearse with its purple curtains.

  “He’ll be after them today!” Flo would say as the hearse rolled away at a gentle pace, almost a funeral pace. The little man had been an undertaker, but he was retired now. The hearse was retired too. His sons had taken over the undertaking and bought a new one. He drove the old hearse all over the country, looking for women. So Flo said. Rose could not believe it. Flo said he gave them the gum and the candy. Rose said he probably ate them himself. Flo said he had been seen, he had been heard. In mild weather he drove with the windows down, singing, to himself or to somebody out of sight in the back.

  “Her brow is like the snowdrift

  Her throat is like the swan …”

  Flo imitated him singing. Gently overtaking some woman walking on a back road, or resting at a country crossroads. All compliments and courtesy and chocolate bars, offering a ride. Of course every woman who reported being asked said she had turned him down. He never pestered anybody, drove politely on. He called in at houses, and if the husband was home he seemed to like just as well as anything to sit and chat. Wives said that was all he ever did anyway but Flo did not believe it.

  “Some women are taken in,” she said. “A number.” She liked to speculate on what the hearse was like inside. Plush. Plush on the walls and the roof and the floor. Soft purple, the color of the curtains, the color of dark lilacs.

  All nonsense, Rose thought. Who could believe it, of a man that age?

  ROSE WAS going to Toronto on the train for the first time by herself. She had been once before, but that was with Flo, long before her father died. They took along their own sandwiches and bought milk from the vendor on the train. It was sour. Sour chocolate milk. Rose kept taking tiny sips, unwilling to admit that something so much desired could fail her. Flo sniffed it, then hunted up and down the train until she found the old man in his red jacket, with no teeth and the tray hanging around his neck. She invited him to sample the chocolate milk. She invited people nearby to smell it. He let her have some ginger ale for nothing. It was slightly warm.

  “I let him know,” Flo said, looking around after he had left. “You have to let them know.”

  A woman agreed with her but most people looked out the window. Rose drank the warm ginger ale. Either that, or the scene with the vendor, or the conversation Flo and the agreeing woman now got into about where they came from, why they were going to Toronto, and Rose’s morning constipation which was why she was lacking color, or the small amount of chocolate milk she had got inside her, caused her to throw up in the train toilet. All day long she was afraid people in Toronto could smell vomit on her coat.

  This time Flo started the trip off by saying, “Keep an eye on her, she’s never been away from home before!” to the conductor, then looking around and laughing, to show that was jokingly meant. Then she had to get off. It seemed the conductor had no more need for jokes than Rose had, and no intention of keeping an eye on anybody. He never spoke to Rose except to ask for her ticket. She had a window seat, and was soon extraordinarily happy. She felt Flo receding, West Hanratty flying away from her, her own wearying self discarded as easily as everything else. She loved the towns less and less known. A woman was standing at her back door in her nightgown, not caring if everybody on the train saw her. They were travelling south, out of the snowbelt, into an earlier spring, a tenderer sort of landscape. People could grow peach trees in their back yards.

  Rose collected in her mind the things she had to look for in Toronto. First, things for Flo. Special stockings for her varicose veins. A special kind of cement for sticking handles on pots. And a full set of dominoes.

  For herself Rose wanted to buy hair-remover to put on her arms and legs, and if possible an arrangement of inflatable cushions, supposed to reduce your hips and thighs. She thought they probably had hair-remover in the drugstore in Hanratty, but the woman in there was a friend of Flo’s and told everything. She told Flo who bought hair dye and slimming medicine and French safes. As for the cushion business, you could send away for it but there was sure to be a comment at the Post Office, and Flo knew people there as well. She also planned to buy some bangles, and an angora sweater. She had great hopes of silver bangles and powder-blue angora. She thought they could transform her, make her calm and slender and take the frizz out of her hair, dry her underarms and turn her complexion to pearl.

  The money for these things, as well as the money for the trip, came from a prize Rose had won, for writing an essay called “Art and Science in the World of Tomorrow.” To her surprise, Flo asked if she could read it, and while she was reading it, she remarked that they must have thought they had to give Rose the prize for swallowing the dictionary. Then she said shyly, “It’s very interesting.”

  She would have to spend the night at Cela McKinney’s. Cela McKinney was her father’s cousin. She had married a hotel manager and thought she had gone up in the world. But the hotel manager came home one day and sat down on the dining-room floor between two chairs and said, “I am never going to leave this house again.” Nothing unusual had happened, he had just decided not to go out of the house again, and he didn’t, until he died. That had made Cela McKinney odd and nervous. She locked her doors at eight o’clock. She was also very stingy. Supper was usually oatmeal porridge, with raisins. Her house was dark and narrow and smelled like a bank.

  The train was filling up. At Brantford a man asked if she would mind if he sat down beside her.

  “It’s cooler out than you’d think,” he said. He offered her part of his newspaper. She said no thanks.


  Then, lest he think her rude, she said it really was cooler. She went on looking out the window at the spring morning. There was no snow left, down here. The trees and bushes seemed to have a paler bark than they did at home. Even the sunlight looked different. It was as different from home, here, as the coast of the Mediterranean would be, or the valleys of California.

  “Filthy windows, you’d think they’d take more care,” the man said. “Do you travel much by train?”

  She said no.

  Water was lying in the fields. He nodded at it and said there was a lot this year.

  “Heavy snows.”

  She noticed his saying “snows,” a poetic-sounding word. Anyone at home would have said “snow.”

  “I had an unusual experience the other day. I was driving out in the country. In fact, I was on my way to see one of my parishioners, a lady with a heart condition—”

  She looked quickly at his collar. He was wearing an ordinary shirt and tie and a dark-blue suit.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m a United Church minister. But I don’t always wear my uniform. I wear it for preaching in. I’m off duty today.

  “Well, as I said, I was driving through the country and I saw some Canada geese down on a pond, and I took another look, and there were some swans down with them. A whole great flock of swans. What a lovely sight they were. They would be on their spring migration, I expect, heading up North. What a spectacle. I never saw anything like it.”