Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  He had not much to say. He offered the gravy, he inquired as to whether I wanted mustard relish or salt and pepper, he followed the conversation by turning his head towards Alfrida or towards me. Every so often he made a little whistling sound between his teeth, a shivery sound that seemed meant to be genial and appreciative and that I thought at first might be a prelude to some remark. But it never was, and Alfrida never paused for it. I have since seen reformed drinkers who behaved somewhat as he did—chiming in agreeably but unable to carry things beyond that, helplessly preoccupied. I never knew whether that was true of Bill, but he did seem to carry around a history of defeat, of troubles borne and lessons learned. He had an air too of gallant accommodation towards whatever choices had gone wrong or chances hadn’t panned out.

  These were frozen peas and carrots, Alfrida said. Frozen vegetables were fairly new at the time.

  “They beat the canned,” she said. “They’re practically as good as fresh.”

  Then Bill made a whole statement. He said they were better than fresh. The color, the flavor, everything was better than fresh. He said it was remarkable what they could do now and what would be done by way of freezing things in the future.

  Alfrida leaned forward, smiling. She seemed almost to hold her breath, as if he was her child taking unsupported steps, or a first lone wobble on a bicycle.

  There was a way they could inject something into a chicken, he told us, there was a new process that would have every chicken coming out the same, plump and tasty. No such thing as taking a risk on getting an inferior chicken anymore.

  “Bill’s field is chemistry,” Alfrida said.

  When I had nothing to say to this she added, “He worked for Gooderhams.”

  Still nothing.

  “The distillers,” she said. “Gooderhams Whisky.”

  The reason that I had nothing to say was not that I was rude or bored (or any more rude than I was naturally at that time, or more bored than I had expected to be) but that I did not understand that I should ask questions—almost any questions at all, to draw a shy male into conversation, to shake him out of his abstraction and set him up as a man of a certain authority, therefore the man of the house. I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. The only observation I had made of couples was of my aunts and uncles and of my mother and father, and those husbands and wives seemed to have remote and formalized connections and no obvious dependence on each other.

  Bill continued eating as if he had not heard this mention of his profession and his employer, and Alfrida began to question me about my courses. She was still smiling, but her smile had changed. There was a little twitch of impatience and unpleasantness in it, as if she was just waiting for me to get to the end of my explanations so that she could say—as she did say—“You couldn’t get me to read that stuff for a million dollars.”

  “Life’s too short,” she said. “You know, down at the paper we sometimes get somebody that’s been through all that. Honors English. Honors Philosophy. You don’t know what to do with them. They can’t write worth a nickel. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?” she said to Bill, and Bill looked up and gave her his dutiful smile.

  She let this settle.

  “So what do you do for fun?” she said.

  A Streetcar Named Desire was being done in a theater in Toronto at that time, and I told her that I had gone down on the train with a couple of friends to see it.

  Alfrida let the knife and fork clatter onto her plate.

  “That filth,” she cried. Her face leapt out at me, carved with disgust. Then she spoke more calmly but still with a virulent displeasure.

  “You went all the way to Toronto to see that filth.”

  We had finished the dessert, and Bill picked that moment to ask if he might be excused. He asked Alfrida, then with the slightest bow he asked me. He went back to the sunporch and in a little while we could smell his pipe. Alfrida, watching him go, seemed to forget about me and the play. There was a look of such stricken tenderness on her face that when she stood up I thought she was going to follow him. But she was only going to get her cigarettes.

  She held them out to me, and when I took one she said, with a deliberate effort at jollity, “I see you kept up the bad habit I got you started on.” She might have remembered that I was not a child anymore and I did not have to be in her house and that there was no point in making an enemy of me. And I wasn’t going to argue—I did not care what Alfrida thought about Tennessee Williams. Or what she thought about anything else.

  “I guess it’s your own business,” Alfrida said. “You can go where you want to go.” And she added, “After all—you’ll pretty soon be a married woman.”

  By her tone, this could mean either “I have to allow that you’re grown up now” or “Pretty soon you’ll have to toe the line.”

  We got up and started to collect the dishes. Working close to each other in the small space between the kitchen table and counter and the refrigerator, we soon developed without speaking about it a certain order and harmony of scraping and stacking and putting the leftover food into smaller containers for storage and filling the sink with hot, soapy water and pouncing on any piece of cutlery that hadn’t been touched and slipping it into the baize-lined drawer in the dining-room buffet. We brought the ashtray out to the kitchen and stopped every now and then to take a restorative, businesslike drag on our cigarettes. There are things women agree on or don’t agree on when they work together in this way—whether it is all right to smoke, for instance, or preferable not to smoke because some migratory ash might find its way onto a clean dish, or whether every single thing that has been on the table has to be washed even if it has not been used—and it turned out that Alfrida and I agreed. Also, the thought that I could get away, once the dishes were done, made me feel more relaxed and generous. I had already said that I had to meet a friend that afternoon.

  “These are pretty dishes,” I said. They were creamy-colored, slightly yellowish, with a rim of blue flowers.

  “Well—they were my mother’s wedding dishes,” Alfrida said. “That was one other good thing your grandma did for me. She packed up all my mother’s dishes and put them away until the time came when I could use them. Jeanie never knew they existed. They wouldn’t have lasted long, with that bunch.”

  Jeanie. That bunch. Her stepmother and the half brothers and sisters.

  “You know about that, don’t you?” Alfrida said. “You know what happened to my mother?”

  Of course I knew. Alfrida’s mother had died when a lamp exploded in her hands—that is, she died of burns she got when a lamp exploded in her hands—and my aunts and my mother had spoken of this regularly. Nothing could be said about Alfrida’s mother or about Alfrida’s father, and very little about Alfrida herself—without that death being dragged in and tacked onto it. It was the reason that Alfrida’s father left the farm (always somewhat of a downward step morally if not financially). It was a reason to be desperately careful with coal oil, and a reason to be grateful for electricity, whatever the cost. And it was a dreadful thing for a child of Alfrida’s age, whatever. (That is—whatever she had done with herself since.)

  If it hadn’t’ve been for the thunderstorm she wouldn’t ever have been lighting a lamp in the middle of the afternoon.

  She lived all that night and the next day and the next night and it would have been the best thing in the world for her if she hadn’t’ve.

  And just the year after that the Hydro came down their road, and they didn’t have need of the lamps anymore.

  The aunts and my mother seldom felt the same way about anything, but they shared a feeling about this story. The feeling was in their voices whenever they said Alfrida’s mother’s name. The story seemed to be a horrible treasure to them, something our family c
ould claim that nobody else could, a distinction that would never be let go. To listen to them had always made me feel as if there was some obscene connivance going on, a fond fingering of whatever was grisly or disastrous. Their voices were like worms slithering around in my insides.

  Men were not like this, in my experience. Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn’t want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.

  So if Alfrida was going to talk about it, I thought, it was a good thing that my fiancé had not come. A good thing that he didn’t have to hear about Alfrida’s mother, on top of finding out about my mother and my family’s relative or maybe considerable poverty. He admired opera and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy—for the squalor of tragedy—in ordinary life. His parents were healthy and good-looking and prosperous (though he said of course that they were dull), and it seemed he had not had to know anybody who did not live in fairly sunny circumstances. Failures in life—failures of luck, of health, of finances—all struck him as lapses, and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle background.

  “They wouldn’t let me in to see her, at the hospital,” Alfrida said, and at least she was saying this in her normal voice, not preparing the way with any special piety, or greasy excitement. “Well, I probably wouldn’t have let me in either, if I’d been in their shoes. I’ve no idea what she looked like. Probably all bound up like a mummy. Or if she wasn’t she should have been. I wasn’t there when it happened, I was at school. It got very dark and the teacher turned the lights on—we had the lights, at school—and we all had to stay till the thunderstorm was over. Then my Aunt Lily—well, your grandmother—she came to meet me and took me to her place. And I never got to see my mother again.”

  I thought that was all she was going to say but in a moment she continued, in a voice that had actually brightened up a bit, as if she was preparing for a laugh.

  “I yelled and yelled my fool head off that I wanted to see her. I carried on and carried on, and finally when they couldn’t shut me up your grandmother said to me, ‘You’re just better off not to see her. You would not want to see her, if you knew what she looks like now. You wouldn’t want to remember her this way.’

  “But you know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me.”

  Then she really did laugh, or make a snorting sound that was evasive and scornful.

  “I must’ve thought I was a pretty big cheese, mustn’t I? She would want to see me.”

  This was a part of the story I had never heard.

  And the minute that I heard it, something happened. It was as if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself.

  She would want to see me.

  The story I wrote, with this in it, would not be written till years later, not until it had become quite unimportant to think about who had put the idea into my head in the first place.

  I thanked Alfrida and said that I had to go. Alfrida went to call Bill to say good-bye to me, but came back to report that he had fallen asleep.

  “He’ll be kicking himself when he wakes up,” she said. “He enjoyed meeting you.”

  She took off her apron and accompanied me all the way down the outside steps. At the bottom of the steps was a gravel path leading around to the sidewalk. The gravel crunched under our feet and she stumbled in her thin-soled house shoes.

  She said, “Ouch! Goldarn it,” and caught hold of my shoulder.

  “How’s your dad?” she said.

  “He’s all right.”

  “He works too hard.”

  I said, “He has to.”

  “Oh, I know. And how’s your mother?”

  “She’s about the same.”

  She turned aside towards the shop window.

  “Who do they think is ever going to buy this junk? Look at that honey pail. Your dad and I used to take our lunch to school in pails just like that.”

  “So did I,” I said.

  “Did you?” She squeezed me. “You tell your folks I’m thinking about them, will you do that?”

  —

  ALFRIDA DID NOT COME to my father’s funeral. I wondered if that was because she did not want to meet me. As far as I knew she had never made public what she held against me; nobody else would know about it. But my father had known. When I was home visiting him and learned that Alfrida was living not far away—in my grandmother’s house, in fact, which she had finally inherited—I had suggested that we go to see her. This was in the flurry between my two marriages, when I was in an expansive mood, newly released and able to make contact with anyone I chose.

  My father said, “Well, you know, Alfrida was a bit upset.”

  He was calling her Alfrida now. When had that started?

  I could not even think, at first, what Alfrida might be upset about. My father had to remind me of the story, published several years ago, and I was surprised, even impatient and a little angry, to think of Alfrida’s objecting to something that seemed now to have so little to do with her.

  “It wasn’t Alfrida at all,” I said to my father. “I changed it, I wasn’t even thinking about her. It was a character. Anybody could see that.”

  But as a matter of fact there was still the exploding lamp, the mother in her charnel wrappings, the staunch, bereft child.

  “Well,” my father said. He was in general quite pleased that I had become a writer, but there were reservations he had about what might be called my character. About the fact that I had ended my marriage for personal—that is, wanton—reasons, and the way I went around justifying myself—or perhaps, as he would have said, weaseling out of things. He would not say so—it was not his business anymore.

  I asked him how he knew that Alfrida felt this way.

  He said, “A letter.”

  A letter, though they lived not far apart. I did feel sorry to think that he had had to bear the brunt of what could be taken as my thoughtlessness, or even my wrongdoing. Also that he and Alfrida seemed now to be on such formal terms. I wondered what he was leaving out. Had he felt compelled to defend me to Alfrida, as he had to defend my writing to other people? He would do that now, though it was never easy for him. In his uneasy defense he might have said something harsh.

  Through me, peculiar difficulties had developed for him.

  There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.

  Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s?

  My father had said that Alfrida was living alone now. I asked him what had become of Bill. He said that all of that was outside of his jurisdiction. But he believed there had been a bit of a rescue operation.

  “Of Bill? How come? Who by?”

  “Well, I believe there was a wife.”

  “I met him at Alfrida’s once. I liked him.”

  “People did. Women.”

  —

  I HAD TO CONSIDER that the rupture might have had nothing to do with me. My stepmother had urged my father into a new sort of life. They went bowling and curling and regularly joined other couples for coffee and doughnuts at Tim Horton’s. She had been a widow for a long time before she married him, and she had many friends from those days who became new friends for him. What had happened with him and Alfrida might have been simply one of the changes, the wearing-out of old attachments, that I understood so well in my own life but did not expect to happen in
the lives of older people—particularly, as I would have said, in the lives of people at home.

  My stepmother died just a little while before my father. After their short, happy marriage they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners. Before either of those deaths Alfrida had moved back to the city. She didn’t sell the house, she just went away and left it. My father wrote to me, “That’s a pretty funny way of doing things.”

  —

  THERE WERE A LOT OF PEOPLE at my father’s funeral, a lot of people I didn’t know. A woman came across the grass in the cemetery to speak to me—I thought at first she must be a friend of my stepmother’s. Then I saw that the woman was only a few years past my own age. The stocky figure and crown of gray-blond curls and floral-patterned jacket made her look older.

  “I recognized you by your picture,” she said. “Alfrida used to always be bragging about you.”

  I said, “Alfrida’s not dead?”

  “Oh, no,” the woman said, and went on to tell me that Alfrida was in a nursing home in a town just north of Toronto.

  “I moved her down there so’s I could keep an eye on her.”

  Now it was easy to tell—even by her voice—that she was somebody of my own generation, and it came to me that she must be one of the other family, a half sister of Alfrida’s, born when Alfrida was almost grown up.

  She told me her name, and it was of course not the same as Alfrida’s—she must have married. And I couldn’t recall Alfrida’s ever mentioning any of her half family by their first names.

  I asked how Alfrida was, and the woman said her eyesight was so bad that she was legally blind. And she had a serious kidney problem, which meant that she had to be on dialysis twice a week.

  “Other than that—?” she said, and laughed. I thought, yes, a sister, because I could hear something of Alfrida in that reckless, tossed laugh.

  “So she doesn’t travel too good,” she said. “Or else I would’ve brought her. She still gets the paper from here and I read it to her sometimes. That’s where I saw about your dad.”