by Alice Munro
But why humiliating? It was not as if she loved him.
It was while she was still seeing Christa’s brother—his name was Gary Lamb—that she ran into Heather, on a downtown street in Vancouver. Juliet and Gary had just come out of a theater where they had seen an early-evening movie, and they were talking about where to go for dinner. It was a warm night in summer, the light still not gone from the sky.
A woman detached herself from a group on the sidewalk. She came straight at Juliet. A thin woman, perhaps in her late thirties. Fashionable, with taffy streaks in her dark hair.
“Mrs. Porteous. Mrs. Porteous.”
Juliet knew the voice, though she would never have known the face. Heather.
“This is incredible,” Heather said. “I’m here for three days and I’m leaving tomorrow. My husband’s at a conference. I was thinking that I don’t know anybody here anymore and then I turn around and see you.”
Juliet asked her where she was living now and she said Connecticut.
“And just about three weeks ago I was visiting Josh—you remember my brother Josh?—I was visiting my brother Josh and his family in Edmonton and I ran into Penelope. Just like this, on the street. No—actually it was in the mall, that humongous mall they have. She had a couple of her kids with her, she’d brought them down to get uniforms for that school they go to. The boys. We were both flabbergasted. I didn’t know her right away but she recognized me. She’d flown down, of course. From that place way up north. But she says it’s quite civilized, really. And she said you were still living here. But I’m with these people—they’re my husband’s friends—and I really haven’t had time to ring you up—”
Juliet made some gesture to say that of course there would not be time and she had not expected to be rung up.
She asked how many children Heather had.
“Three. They’re all monsters. I hope they grow up in a hurry. But my life’s a picnic compared with Penelope’s. Five.”
“Yes.”
“I have to run now, we’re going to see a movie. I don’t even know anything about it, I don’t even like French movies. But it was altogether great meeting you like this. My mother and dad moved to White Rock. They used to see you all the time on TV. They used to brag to their friends that you’d lived in our house. They say you’re not on anymore, did you get sick of it?”
“Something like that.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” She hugged and kissed Juliet, the way everybody did now, and ran to join her companions.
So. Penelope did not live in Edmonton—she had come down to Edmonton. Flown down. That meant she must live in Whitehorse or in Yellowknife. Where else was there that she could describe as quite civilized? Maybe she was being ironical, mocking Heather a bit, when she said that.
She had five children and two at least were boys. They were being outfitted with school uniforms. That meant a private school. That meant money.
Heather had not known her at first. Did that mean she had aged? That she was out of shape after five pregnancies, that she had not taken care of herself? As Heather had. As Juliet had, to a certain extent. That she was one of those women to whom the whole idea of such a struggle seemed ridiculous, a confession of insecurity? Or just something she had no time for—far outside of her consideration.
Juliet had thought of Penelope being involved with transcendentalists, of her having become a mystic, spending her life in contemplation. Or else—rather the opposite but still radically simple and spartan—earning her living in a rough and risky way, fishing, perhaps with a husband, perhaps also with some husky little children, in the cold waters of the Inside Passage off the British Columbia coast.
Not at all. She was living the life of a prosperous, practical matron. Married to a doctor, maybe, or to one of those civil servants managing the northern parts of the country during the time when their control is being gradually, cautiously, but with some fanfare, relinquished to the native people. If she ever met Penelope again they might laugh about how wrong Juliet had been. When they told about their separate meetings with Heather, how weird that was, they would laugh.
No. No. The fact was surely that she had already laughed too much around Penelope. Too many things had been jokes. Just as too many things—personal things, loves that were maybe just gratification—had been tragedies. She had been lacking in motherly inhibitions and propriety and self-control.
Penelope had said that she, Juliet, was still living in Vancouver. She had not told Heather anything about the breach. Surely not. If she had been told, Heather would not have spoken so easily.
How did Penelope know that she was still here, unless she checked in the phone directory? And if she did, what did that mean?
Nothing. Don’t make it mean anything.
She walked to the curb to join Gary, who had tactfully moved away from the scene of the reunion.
Whitehorse, Yellowknife. It was painful indeed to know the names of those places—places she could fly to. Places where she could loiter in the streets, devise plans for catching glimpses.
But she was not so mad. She must not be so mad.
At dinner, she thought that the news she had just absorbed put her into a better situation for marrying Gary, or living with him—whatever it was he wanted. There was nothing to worry about, or hold herself in wait for, concerning Penelope. Penelope was not a phantom, she was safe, as far as anybody is safe, and she was probably as happy as anybody is happy. She had detached herself from Juliet and very likely from the memory of Juliet, and Juliet could not do better than to detach herself in turn.
But she had told Heather that Juliet was living in Vancouver. Did she say Juliet? Or Mother. My mother.
Juliet told Gary that Heather was the child of old friends. She had never spoken to him about Penelope, and he had never given any sign of knowing about Penelope’s existence. It was possible that Christa had told him, and he had remained silent out of a consideration that it was none of his business. Or that Christa had told him, and he had forgotten. Or that Christa had never mentioned anything about Penelope, not even her name.
If Juliet lived with him the fact of Penelope would never surface, Penelope would not exist.
Nor did Penelope exist. The Penelope Juliet sought was gone. The woman Heather had spotted in Edmonton, the mother who had brought her sons to Edmonton to get their school uniforms, who had changed in face and body so that Heather did not recognize her, was nobody Juliet knew.
Does Juliet believe this?
If Gary saw that she was agitated he pretended not to notice. But it was probably on this evening that they both understood they would never be together. If it had been possible for them to be together she might have said to him, My daughter went away without telling me good-bye and in fact she probably did not know then that she was going. She did not know it was for good. Then gradually, I believe, it dawned on her how much she wanted to stay away. It is just a way that she has found to manage her life.
“It’s maybe the explaining to me that she can’t face. Or has not time for, really. You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about what I’ve done wrong. But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug out. Something like purity in her nature. Yes. Some fineness and strictness and purity, some rock-hard honesty in her. My father used to say of someone he disliked, that he had no use for that person. Couldn’t those words mean simply what they say? Penelope does not have a use for me.
Maybe she can’t stand me. It’s possible.
Juliet has friends. Not so many now—but friends. Larry continues to visit, and to make jokes. She keeps on with her studies. The word studies does not seem to describe very well what she does—investigations would be better.
And being short of money, she works some hours a week at the coffee place where she used to spend so much time at the sidewalk tables. She finds this work a good balance for her involvement
with the old Greeks—so much so that she believes she wouldn’t quit even if she could afford to.
She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.
PASSION
Not too long ago, Grace went looking for the Traverses’ summer house in the Ottawa Valley. She had not been in that part of the country for many years, and of course there had been changes. Highway 7 now avoided towns that it used to go right through, and it went straight in places where, as she remembered, there used to be curves. And this part of the Canadian Shield has many small lakes, which the usual sort of map has no room to identify. Even when she had located Little Sabot Lake, or thought she had, there seemed to be too many roads leading into it from the county road, and then, when she had chosen one of those roads, too many paved roads crossing it, all with names that she did not recall. In fact there had not been any street names when she had been here over forty years ago. And there was no pavement. There was just the one dirt road running towards the lake, then the one dirt road running rather haphazardly along the lake’s edge.
Now there was a village. Or a suburb, perhaps you could call it, because she did not see any Post Office or even the most unpromising convenience store. The settlement lay four or five streets deep along the lake, with small houses strung close together on small lots. Some of them were undoubtedly summer places—the windows already boarded up, as was always done for the winter season. But many others showed all the signs of year-round habitation—habitation, in many cases, by people who filled the yards with plastic gym sets and outdoor grills and training bikes and motorcycles and picnic tables, where some of them sat having lunch or beer on this September day which was still warm. And by other people, not so visible—they were students maybe, or old hippies living alone—who put up flags or sheets of tinfoil for curtains. Small, mostly decent, cheap houses, some fixed to withstand the winter, and some not.
Grace would have decided to turn back if she had not seen the octagonal house, with the fretwork along the roof, and the doors in every other wall. The Woodses’ house. She had always remembered it as having eight doors, but it seemed there were only four. She had never been inside to see how, or if, the space was divided into rooms. She didn’t think any of the Travers family had ever been inside, either. The house was surrounded by great hedges, in the old days, and by the sparkling poplar trees that were always rustled by a wind along the shore. Mr. and Mrs. Woods were old—as Grace was now—and had not seemed to be visited by any friends or children. Their quaint original house had now a forlorn, a mistaken, look. Neighbors with their ghetto blasters and their sometimes dismembered vehicles, their toys and washing, were bunched up against either side of it.
It was the same with the Travers house when she found it, a quarter of a mile or so along this road. The road went past it now, instead of ending there, and the houses on either side were only a few feet away from the wraparound deep verandah.
It had been the first house that Grace had ever seen built in this way—one story high, the main roof continuing without a break out over that verandah, on all sides. Later she had seen many like it, in Australia. A style that made you think of hot summers.
You used to be able to run from the verandah across the dusty end of the driveway, across a sandy trampled patch of weeds and wild strawberries, also the Traverses’ property, and then jump—no, actually, wade—into the lake. Now you would hardly be able to see the lake, because of the substantial house—one of the few regular suburban houses here, with a two-car garage—that had been built across that very route.
What was Grace really looking for when she had undertaken this expedition? Maybe the worst thing would have been to get just what she might have thought she was after. Sheltering roof, screened windows, the lake in front, the stand of maple and cedar and balm of Gilead trees behind. Perfect preservation, the past intact, when nothing of the kind could be said of herself. To find something so diminished, still existing but made irrelevant—as the Travers house now seemed to be, with its added dormer windows, its startling blue paint—might be less hurtful in the long run.
And what if you find it gone altogether? You make a fuss. If anybody has come along to listen to you, you bewail the loss. But mightn’t a feeling of relief pass over you, of old confusions or obligations wiped away?
Mr. Travers had built the house—that is, he had it built, as a surprise wedding present for Mrs. Travers. When Grace first saw it, it would have been perhaps thirty years old. Mrs. Travers’ children were widely spaced—Gretchen around twenty-eight or twenty-nine, already married and a mother herself, and Maury twenty-one, going into his last year at college. And then there was Neil, in his midthirties. But Neil was not a Travers. He was Neil Borrow. Mrs. Travers had been married before, to a man who had died. She had earned her living, and supported her child, as a teacher of Business English at a secretarial school. Mr. Travers, when he referred to this time in her life before he met her, spoke of it as a time of hardship almost like penal servitude, something hardly to be made up for by a whole lifetime of comfort, which he would happily provide.
Mrs. Travers herself didn’t speak of it this way at all. She had lived with Neil in a big old house broken up into apartments, not far from the railway tracks in the town of Pembroke, and many of the stories she told at the dinner table were about events there, about her fellow tenants, and the French-Canadian landlord, whose harsh French and tangled English she imitated. The stories might have had titles, like the stories of Thurber’s that Grace had read in The Anthology of American Humor, found unaccountably on the library shelf at the back of her Grade Ten classroom. (Also on that shelf was The Last of the Barons, and Two Years Before the Mast.)
“The Night Old Mrs. Cromarty Got Out on the Roof.” “How the Postman Courted Miss Flowers.” “The Dog Who Ate Sardines.”
Mr. Travers never told stories and had little to say at dinner, but if he came upon you looking, say, at the fieldstone fireplace, he might say, “Are you interested in rocks?” and tell you where each of them had come from, and how he had searched and searched for the particular pink granite, because Mrs. Travers had once exclaimed over a rock like that, glimpsed in a road cut. Or he might show you such not really unusual features as he himself had added to the house design—the corner cupboard shelves swinging outwards in the kitchen, the storage space under the window seats. He was a tall stooped man with a soft voice and thin hair slicked over his scalp. He wore bathing shoes when he went into the water, and though he did not look fat in his usual clothes, he displayed then a pancake fold of white flesh slopping over the top of his bathing trunks.
Grace worked that summer at the hotel at Bailey’s Falls, north of Little Sabot Lake. Early in the season the Travers family had come to dinner there. She had not noticed them—they were not at one of her tables and it was a busy night. She was setting up a table for a new party when she realized that someone was waiting to speak to her.
It was Maury. He said, “I was wondering if you would like to go out with me sometime?”
Grace barely looked up from shooting out the silverware. She said, “Is this a dare?” Because his voice was high and nervous and he stood there stiffly, as if forcing himself. And it was known that sometimes a party of young men from the cottages would dare one another to ask a waitress out. It wasn’t entirely a joke—they really would show up, if accepted, though sometimes they only meant to park, without taking you to a movie or even for coffee. So it was considered rather shameful, rather hard up, for a girl to agree.
“What?” he said painfully, and then Grace did stop and look at him. It seemed to her that she saw the whole of him in that moment, the true Maury. Scared, fierce, innocent, determined.
“Okay,” she said quickly. She might have meant, okay, calm down, I know it’s not a dare, I know you wouldn’t do that. Or, okay, I’ll go out with you. She herself har
dly knew which. But he took it as agreement, and at once arranged—without lowering his voice, or noticing the looks he was getting from diners around them—that he would pick her up after work on the following night.
He did take her to the movies. They saw Father of the Bride. Grace hated it. She hated girls like Elizabeth Taylor in that movie, she hated spoiled rich girls of whom nothing was ever asked but that they wheedle and demand. Maury said that it was only supposed to be a comedy, but she said that was not the point. She could not make clear what the point was. Anybody would think that it was because she worked as a waitress and was too poor to go to college, and that if she wanted anything like that kind of wedding she would have to spend years saving up to pay for it herself. (Maury did think this, and was stricken with respect for her, almost with reverence.)
She could not explain or quite understand that it wasn’t altogether jealousy she felt, it was rage. And not because she couldn’t shop like that or dress like that. It was because that was what girls were supposed to be like. That was what men—people, everybody—thought they should be like. Beautiful, treasured, spoiled, selfish, pea-brained. That was what a girl should be, to be fallen in love with. Then she would become a mother and she’d be all mushily devoted to her babies. Not selfish anymore, but just as pea-brained. Forever.
She was fuming about this while sitting beside a boy who had fallen in love with her because he had believed—instantly—in the integrity and uniqueness of her mind and soul, and had seen her poverty as a romantic gloss on that. (He would have known she was poor not just because of the job she was working at but because of her strong Ottawa Valley accent, of which she was as yet unaware.)
