Runaway

by Alice Munro

  TRESPASSES

  They drove out of town around midnight—Harry and Delphine in the front seat and Eileen and Lauren in the back. The sky was clear and the snow had slid off the trees but had not melted underneath them or on the rocks that jutted out beside the road. Harry stopped the car by a bridge.

  “This’ll do.”

  “Somebody might see us stopped here,” Eileen said. “They might stop to check out what we’re up to.”

  He started to drive again. They turned onto the first little country road, where they all got out of the car and walked carefully down the bank, just a short way, among black lacy cedars. There was a slight crackle to the snow, though the ground underneath was soft and mucky. Lauren was still wearing her pajamas under her coat, but Eileen had made her put on her boots.

  “Okay here?” Eileen said.

  Harry said, “It’s not very far off the road.”

  “It’s far enough.”

  This was the year after Harry had quit his job on a newsmagazine because he was burned out. He had bought the weekly newspaper in this small town which he remembered from his childhood. His family used to have a summer place on one of the little lakes around here, and he remembered drinking his first beer in the hotel on the main street. He and Eileen and Lauren went there for dinner on their first Sunday night in town.

  But the bar was closed. Harry and Eileen had to drink water.

  “How come?” said Eileen.

  Harry raised his eyebrows at the hotel owner, who was also their waiter.

  “Sunday?” he said.

  “No license.” The owner had a thick—and, it seemed, disdainful—accent. He wore a shirt and tie, a cardigan, and trousers that looked as if they had grown together—all soft, rumpled, fuzzy, like an outer skin that was flaky and graying as his real skin must be underneath.

  “Change from the old days,” said Harry, and when the man did not reply he went on to order roast beef all round.

  “Friendly,” Eileen said.

  “European,” said Harry. “It’s cultural. They don’t feel obliged to smile all the time.” He pointed out things in the dining room that were just the same—the high ceiling, the slowly rotating fan, even a murky oil painting showing a hunting dog with a rusty-feathered bird in its mouth.

  In came some other diners. A family party. Little girls in patent shoes and scratchy frills, a toddling baby, a teenaged boy in a suit, half-dead with embarrassment, various parents and parents of parents—a skinny and distracted old man and an old woman flopped sideways in a wheelchair and wearing a corsage. Any one of the women in their flowery dresses would have made about four of Eileen.

  “Wedding anniversary,” Harry whispered.

  On the way out he stopped to introduce himself and his family, to tell them that he was the new fellow at the paper, and to offer his congratulations. He hoped they wouldn’t mind if he took down their names. Harry was a broad-faced, boyish-looking man with a tanned skin and shining light-brown hair. His glow of well-being and general appreciation spread around the table—though not perhaps to the teenaged boy or the old couple. He asked how long those two had been married and was told sixty-five years.

  “Sixty-five years,” cried Harry, reeling at the thought. He asked if he might kiss the bride and did, touching his lips to the long flap of her ear as she moved her head aside.

  “Now you have to kiss the groom,” he said to Eileen, who smiled tightly and pecked the old man on the top of his head.

  Harry asked the recipe for a happy marriage.

  “Momma can’t talk,” said one of the big women. “But let me ask Daddy.” She shouted in her father’s ear, “Your advice for a happy marriage?”

  He wrinkled up his face roguishly.

  “All-eeze keep a foot on er neck.”

  All the grown-ups laughed, and Harry said, “Okay. I’ll just put in the paper that you always made sure to get your wife’s agreement.”

  Outside, Eileen said, “How do they manage to get that fat? I don’t understand it. You’d have to eat day and night to get that fat.”

  “Strange,” said Harry.

  “Those were canned green beans,” she said. “In August. Isn’t that when green beans are ripe? And out here in the middle of the country, where they are supposed to grow things?”

  “Stranger than strange,” he said happily.

  Almost immediately changes came to the hotel. In the former dining room there was a false ceiling put in—paperboard squares supported by strips of metal. The big round tables were replaced by small square tables, and the heavy wooden chairs by light metal chairs with maroon plastic—covered seats. Because of the lowered ceiling, the windows had to be reduced to squat rectangles. A neon sign in one of them said WELCOME COFFEE SHOP.

  The owner, whose name was Mr. Palagian, never smiled or said a word more than he could help to anybody, in spite of the sign.

  Just the same, the coffee shop filled up with customers at noon, or in the later hours of the afternoon. The customers were high school students, mostly from Grade Nine to Grade Eleven. Also some of the older students from the grade school. The great attraction of the place was that anybody could smoke there. Not that you could buy cigarettes if you looked to be under sixteen. Mr. Palagian was strict about that. Not you, he would say, in his thick, dreary voice. Not you.

  By this time he had hired a woman to work for him, and if somebody who was too young tried buying cigarettes from her she would laugh.

  “Who are you kidding, baby face.”

  But someone who was sixteen or over could collect the money from those who were younger and buy a dozen packs.

  Letter of the law, Harry said.

  Harry stopped eating his lunch there—it was too noisy—but he still came in for breakfast. He was hoping that one day Mr. Palagian would thaw out and tell the story of his life. Harry kept a file full of ideas for books and was always on the lookout for life stories. Someone like Mr. Palagian—or even that fat tough-talking waitress, he said—could be harboring a contemporary tragedy or adventure which would make a best seller.

  The thing about life, Harry had told Lauren, was to live in the world with interest. To keep your eyes open and see the possibilities—see the humanity—in everybody you met. To be aware. If he had anything at all to teach her it was that. Be aware.

  Lauren made her own breakfast, usually cereal with maple syrup instead of milk. Eileen took her coffee back to bed and drank it slowly. She didn’t want to talk. She had to get herself in gear to face the day, working in the newspaper office. When she got herself sufficiently in gear—sometime after Lauren went off to school—she got out of bed and had a shower and got dressed in one of her casually provocative outfits. As the fall wore on this was usually a bulky sweater and a short leather skirt and brightly colored tights. Like Mr. Palagian, Eileen managed easily to look different from anybody else in that town, but unlike him she was beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner in the newspaper office was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles.

  They had rented a house at the edge of town. Just beyond their backyard began a vacationland wilderness of rocky knobs and granite slopes, cedar bogs, small lakes, and a transitional forest of poplars, soft maples, tamarack, and spruce. Harry loved it. He said that they might wake up one morning and look out at a moose in the backyard. Lauren came home after school when the sun was already getting low in the sky and the middling warmth of the autumn day was turning out to be a fraud. The house was chilly and smelled of last night’s dinner, of stale coffee grounds and the garbage which it was her job to take out. Harry was making a compost heap—next year he meant to have a vegetable garden. Lauren carried the pail of peelings, apple cores, coffee grounds, leftovers, out to the edge of the woods, from which a moose or a bear might appear. The poplar leaves had turned yellow, the tamaracks held furry orange spikes up against the dark e
vergreens. She dumped the garbage, and shovelled dirt and grass cuttings over it, the way that Harry had shown her.

  Her life was a lot different now from the way it had been just a few weeks ago, when she and Harry and Eileen were driving to one of the lakes to swim in the hot afternoons. Then later in the evenings, she and Harry had gone on adventure walks around the town, while Eileen sanded and painted and wallpapered the house, claiming she could do that faster and better on her own. All that she had wanted Harry to do then was to get all his boxes of papers and his filing cabinet and desk into a ratty little room in the basement, out of her way. Lauren had helped him.

  One cardboard box she picked up was oddly light and it seemed to hold something soft, not like paper, more like cloth or yarn. Just as she said, “What’s this?” Harry saw her holding it and he said, “Hey.” Then he said, “Oh God.”

  He took the box out of her hands and put it into a drawer of the filing cabinet, which he banged shut. “Oh God,” he said again.

  He had hardly ever spoken to her in such a rough and exasperated way. He looked around as if there might have been somebody watching them and clapped his hands on his trousers.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to pick that up.” He put his elbows on the top of the filing cabinet and leaned his forehead on his hands.

  “Now,” he said. “Now, Lauren. I could make up some kind of a lie to tell you, but I am going to tell you the truth. Because I believe that children should be told the truth. At least by the time they’re your age, they should be. But in this case it has got to be a secret. Okay?”

  Lauren said, “Okay.” Something made her wish, already, that he wouldn’t do this.

  “There’s ashes in there,” Harry said. His voice dropped in a peculiar way when he said ashes. “Not ordinary ashes. Cremated ashes of a baby. This baby died before you were born. Okay? Sit down.”

  She sat on a pile of hardcover notebooks that contained Harry’s writing. He raised his head and looked at her.

  “See—what I’m telling you is very upsetting to Eileen and that’s why it has got to be a secret. That’s why you never were told about it, because Eileen cannot stand to be reminded. So now you understand?”

  She said what she had to say. Yes.

  “Okay now—what happened was, we had this baby before we had you. A baby girl, and when the baby was just very tiny Eileen got pregnant. And this was a terrible shock to her because she was just finding out what a terrible lot of work a new baby is and here she was, not getting any sleep and throwing up because she had morning sickness. It wasn’t just morning, it was morning noon and night sickness, and she just did not know how she could face it. Being pregnant. So one night when she was just beside herself she somehow got the idea that she had to get out. And she got in the car and the baby in with her in its cot and it was after dark, raining, and she was driving too fast and she missed a curve. So. The baby wasn’t fixed in properly and it bounced out of the cot. And Eileen had broken ribs and concussion and it looked for a while as if we were going to lose both babies.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “I mean, we had lost the one already. When it bounced out of its cot it was killed. But we didn’t lose the one Eileen was carrying. Because. That was you. You understand? You.”

  Lauren nodded, minimally.

  “So the reason we didn’t tell you this—besides the state of Eileen’s emotions—is that it might not make you feel very welcome. Not in the first circumstances. But you just have to believe me you were. Oh, Lauren. You were. You are.”

  He removed his arm from the filing cabinet and came and hugged her. He smelled of sweat and the wine he and Eileen had drunk at dinner and Lauren felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed. The story didn’t upset her, although the ashes were a little ghoulish. But she took his word for it that it did upset Eileen.

  “Is that what you have the fights about?” she said, in an offhand way, and he let her go.

  “The fights,” he said sadly. “I suppose there could be something about that underlying. Underlying her hysteria. You know I feel bad about all that stuff. I really do.”

  When they went out on their walks he occasionally asked her if she was worried, or sad, about what he had told her. She said, “No,” in a firm, rather impatient, voice, and he said, “Good.”

  Every street had a curiosity—the Victorian mansion (now a nursing home), the brick tower that was all that was left of a broom factory, the graveyard going back to 1842. And for a couple of days there was a fall fair. They watched trucks ploughing one by one through the dirt, pulling a platform loaded with cement blocks which slipped forward, causing the trucks to fishtail, and halt and have their distance measured. Harry and Lauren each picked a truck to cheer for.

  Now it seemed to Lauren that all of that time had a false glow to it, a reckless silly sort of enthusiasm, that did not take any account of the weight of dailiness, or reality, that she had to carry around once school began and the paper started coming out and the weather changed. A bear or a moose was a real wild animal brooding over its own necessities—it was not some kind of thrill. And she would not now jump up and down and scream as she had done at the fairgrounds, cheering for her truck. Somebody from school might see her and think she was a freak.

  Which was close to what they thought anyway.

  Her isolation at school was based on knowledge and experience, which, as she half knew, could look like innocence and priggishness. The things that were wicked mysteries to others were not so to her and she did not know how to pretend about them. And that was what separated her, just as much as knowing how to pronounce L’Anse aux Meadows and having read The Lord of the Rings. She had drunk half a bottle of beer when she was five and puffed on a joint when she was six, though she had not liked either one. She sometimes had a little wine at dinner, and she liked that all right. She knew about oral sex and all methods of birth control and what homosexuals did. She had regularly seen Harry and Eileen naked, also a party of their friends naked around a campfire in the woods. On that same holiday she had sneaked out with other children to watch fathers slipping by sly agreement into the tents of mothers who were not their wives. One of the boys had suggested sex to her and she had agreed, but he could not make any progress and they became cross with each other and later she hated the sight of him.

  This was all a burden to her here—it gave her a sense of embarrassment and peculiar sadness, even of deprivation. And there wasn’t much she could do except remember, at school, to call Harry and Eileen Dad and Mom. That seemed to make them larger, but not so sharp. Their tense outlines were slightly blurred when they were spoken of in this way, their personalities slightly glossed over. Face-to-face with them, she had no technique for making this happen. She couldn’t even acknowledge that it might be a comfort.

  Some girls in Lauren’s class, finding the vicinity of the coffee shop irresistible but not being brave enough to go in, would enter the hotel lobby and make their way to the Ladies Room. There they would spend a quarter or a half hour fixing their own and each other’s hair in different styles, putting on lipstick that they might have stolen from Stedmans, sniffing each other’s necks and wrists, which they had sprayed with all the free trial perfumes in the drugstore.

  When they asked Lauren to go with them she suspected some sort of trick, but agreed anyway, partly because she so disliked going home alone in the ever-shortening afternoons to the house on the edge of the forest.

  As soon as they were inside the lobby a couple of these girls took hold of her and pushed her up to the desk, where the woman from the restaurant was seated on a high stool, working out some figures on a calculator.

  This woman’s name—Lauren already knew it from Harry—was Delphine. She had long fine hair that might be whitish blond or might be really white, because she was not young. She must often have to shake that hair back out of her face, as she did now. Her eyes, behind dark-rimmed glasses, were hooded by purple lids. Her face wa
s broad, like her body, pale and smooth. But there was nothing indolent about her. Her eyes, now lifted, were a light flat blue, and she looked from one girl to another as if no contemptible behavior of theirs would surprise her.

  “This is her,” the girls said.

  The woman—Delphine—now looked at Lauren. She said, “Lauren? You sure?”

  Lauren, bewildered, said yes.

  “Well, I asked them was there anybody at their school called Lauren,” Delphine said—referring to the other girls as if they were already at a distance, shut out of her conversation with Lauren. “I asked them because of something that was found in here. Somebody must’ve dropped it in the coffee shop.”

  She opened a drawer and lifted out a gold chain. Dangling from the chain were the letters that spelled LAUREN.

  Lauren shook her head.

  “Not yours?” said Delphine. “Too bad. I already asked the kids in high school. So I guess I’ll just have to keep it around. Somebody might come back looking for it.”

  Lauren said, “You could put an ad in my dad’s paper.” She did not realize that she should have said just “the paper” until the next day, when she passed a couple of girls in the school hallway and heard a mincing voice say my dad’s paper.

  “I could,” said Delphine. “But then I might get all kinds of people coming in and saying it’s theirs. Lying about what their name was, even. It’s gold.”

  “But they couldn’t wear it,” Lauren pointed out, “if it wasn’t their real name.”

  “Maybe not. But I wouldn’t put it past them to claim it anyway.”

  The other girls had started for the Ladies.

  “Hey you,” Delphine called after them. “That’s out of bounds.”

  They turned around, surprised.

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s out of bounds, that’s how come. You can go and fool around someplace else.”