Runaway

by Alice Munro

  “You never stopped us going in there before.”

  “Before was before and now is now.”

  “It’s supposed to be public.”

  “It is not,” said Delphine. “The one in the town hall is public. So get lost.”

  “I wasn’t referring to you,” she said to Lauren, who was about to follow the others. “I’m sorry the chain wasn’t yours. You check back in a day or two. If nobody shows up to ask about it, I’ll figure, hey, it’s got your name on it, after all.”

  Lauren came back the next day. She did not care about the chain at all, really—she could not imagine going around with your name hanging on your neck. She just wanted to have an errand to do, someplace to go. She could have gone to the newspaper office, but after hearing the way they said my dad’s paper, she didn’t want to do that.

  She had decided not to go in if Mr. Palagian and not Delphine was behind the desk. But Delphine was right there, watering an ugly plant in the front window.

  “Oh good,” Delphine said. “Nobody’s come and asked about it. Give it till the end of the week, I have a feeling it’s going to be yours yet. You can always come in, this time of day. I don’t work the coffee shop in the afternoons. If I’m not in the lobby you just ring the bell, I’ll be around somewhere.”

  Lauren said, “Okay,” and turned to go.

  “You feel like sitting down a minute? I was thinking I’d get a cup of tea. Do you ever drink tea? Are you allowed to? Would you rather have a soft drink?”

  “Lemon-lime,” said Lauren. “Please.”

  “In a glass? Would you like a glass? Ice?”

  “It’s okay just the way it is,” said Lauren. “Thank you.”

  Delphine brought a glass anyway, with ice. “It didn’t seem quite cooled off enough to me,” she said. She asked Lauren where she would rather sit—in one of the worn-down old leather chairs by the window or on a high stool behind the desk. Lauren picked the stool, and Delphine sat on the other stool.

  “Now, you want to tell me what you learned in school today?”

  Lauren said, “Well—”

  Delphine’s wide face broke into a smile.

  “I just asked you that for a joke. I used to hate it, people asking me that. For one thing, I could never remember anything I learned that day. And for another thing, I could do without talking about school when I wasn’t at it. So we skip that.”

  Lauren was not surprised by this woman’s evident wish to be friends. She had been brought up to believe that children and adults could be on equal terms with each other, though she had noticed that many adults did not understand this and it was as well not to press the point. She saw that Delphine was a little nervous. That was why she kept talking without a break, and laughing at odd moments, and why she resorted to the maneuver of reaching into the drawer and pulling out a chocolate bar.

  “Just a little treat with your drink. Got to make it worthwhile to come and see me again, eh?”

  Lauren was embarrassed on the woman’s behalf, though glad to accept the chocolate bar. She never got candy at home.

  “You don’t have to bribe me to come and see you,” she said. “I’d like to.”

  “Oh-ho. So I don’t, don’t I? You’re quite the kid. Okay, then give me that back.”

  She grabbed for the chocolate bar, and Lauren ducked to protect it. Now she laughed too.

  “I meant next time. Next time you don’t have to bribe me.”

  “One bribe is okay, though. That it?”

  “I like to have something to do,” Lauren said. “Not just go on home.”

  “Don’t you go visit your friends?”

  “I don’t really have any. I only started this school in September.”

  “Well. If that bunch that was coming in here is any sample of what you’ve got to pick from, I’d say you’re better off. How do you like this town?”

  “It’s small. Some things are nice.”

  “It’s a dump. They’re all dumps. I have experienced so many dumps in my time you’d think the rats would have ate off my nose by now.” She tapped her fingers up and down her nose. Her nails matched her eyelids. “Still there,” she said doubtfully.

  It’s a dump. Delphine said things like that. She spoke vehemently—she did not discuss but stated, and her judgments were severe and capricious. She spoke about herself—her tastes, her physical workings—as about a monumental mystery, something unique and final.

  She had an allergy to beets. If even a drop of beet juice made its way down her throat, her tissues would swell up and she would have to go to the hospital, she would need an emergency operation so that she could breathe.

  “How’s it with you? You got any allergies? No? Good.”

  She believed a woman should keep her hands nice, no matter what kind of work she had to do. She liked to wear inky-blue or plum fingernail polish. And she liked to wear earrings, big and clattery ones, even at her work. She had no use for the little button kind.

  She was not afraid of snakes, but she had a weird feeling about cats. She thought that a cat must have come and lain on top of her when she was a baby, being attracted to the smell of milk.

  “So what about you?” she said to Lauren. “What are you scared of? What’s your favorite color? Did you ever walk in your sleep? Do you get a tan or a sunburn? Does your hair grow fast or slow?”

  It was not as if Lauren was unused to somebody being interested in her. Harry and Eileen were interested—particularly Harry—in her thoughts and opinions and what she felt about things. Sometimes this interest got on her nerves. But she had never realized that there could be all these other things, arbitrary facts, that could seem delightfully important. And she never got the feeling—as she did at home—that there was any other question behind Delphine’s questions, never the feeling that if she didn’t watch out she would be pried open.

  Delphine taught her jokes. She said she knew hundreds of jokes, but she would only tell Lauren the ones that were fit. Harry would not have agreed that the jokes about people from Newfoundland (Newfies) were fit, but Lauren laughed obligingly.

  She told Harry and Eileen that she was going to a friend’s place, after school. That was not really a lie. They seemed pleased. But because of them she did not take the gold chain with her name when Delphine said she could. She pretended to be concerned that somebody it belonged to might still come looking for it.

  Delphine knew Harry, she brought him his breakfast in the coffee shop, and she could have mentioned Lauren’s visits to him, but apparently she didn’t.

  She sometimes put up a sign—Ring Bell for Service—and took Lauren with her into other parts of the hotel. Guests did stay there once in a while, and their beds had to be made up, their toilets and sinks scrubbed, their floors vacuumed. Lauren was not allowed to help. “Just sit there and talk to me,” Delphine said. “It’s lonesome kind of work.”

  But she was the one who talked. She talked about her life without getting it in any kind of order. Characters appeared and disappeared and Lauren was supposed to know who they were without asking. People called Mr. and Mrs. were good bosses. Other bosses were Old Sowbelly, Old Horse’s Arse (Don’t repeat my language), and they were terrible. Delphine had worked in hospitals (As a nurse? Are you kidding?) and in tobacco fields and in okay restaurants and in dives and in a lumber camp where she cooked and in a bus depot where she cleaned and saw things too gross to talk about and in an all-night convenience store where she was held up and quit.

  Sometimes she was palling around with Lorraine and sometimes Phyl. Phyl had a way of borrowing your things without asking—she borrowed Delphine’s blouse and wore it to a dance and sweated so much she rotted out the underarms. Lorraine had graduated from high school but she made a big mistake when she married the lamebrain she did and now she was surely sorry.

  Delphine could have got married. Some men she had gone out with had done well, some had turned into bums, some she had no idea what had happened to them. She was fond of a bo
y named Tommy Kilbride but he was a Catholic.

  “You probably don’t know what that means for a woman.”

  “It means you can’t use birth control,” Lauren said. “Eileen was a Catholic, but she quit because she didn’t agree. Eileen my mom.”

  “Your mom wouldn’t have to worry anyway, the way it turned out.”

  Lauren did not understand. Then she thought Delphine must be talking about her—Lauren—being an only child. She must think that Harry and Eileen would have liked to have more children after they had her but that Eileen had not been able to have them. As far as Lauren knew, that wasn’t the case.

  She said, “They could’ve had more if they’d wanted. After they had me.”

  “That what you think, eh?” Delphine said jokingly. “Maybe they couldn’t have any. Could have adopted you.”

  “No. They didn’t. I know they didn’t.” Lauren was on the verge of telling about what happened when Eileen was pregnant, but she held back because Harry had made so much of its being a secret. She was superstitious about breaking a promise, though she had noticed that adults often didn’t mind breaking theirs.

  “Don’t look so serious,” Delphine said. She took Lauren’s face in her hands and tapped her blackberry fingernails on her cheeks. “I’m only kidding.”

  The dryer in the hotel laundry was on the blink, Delphine had to hang up the wet sheets and towels, and because it was raining the best place to do that was in the old livery stable. Lauren helped carry the baskets piled with white linen across the little gravelled yard behind the hotel and into the empty stone barn. A cement floor had been put in there, but still a smell seeped through from the earth beneath, or maybe out of the stone-and-rubble walls. Damp dirt, horse hide, rich hints of piss and leather. The space was empty except for the clotheslines and a few broken chairs and bureaus. Their steps echoed.

  “Try calling your name,” said Delphine.

  Lauren called, “Del-phee-een.”

  “Your name. What are you up to?”

  “It’s better for the echo,” said Lauren, and called again, “Del-phee-een.”

  “I don’t like my name,” said Delphine. “Nobody likes their own name.”

  “I don’t not like mine.”

  “Lauren’s nice. It’s a nice name. They picked a nice name for you.”

  Delphine had disappeared behind the sheet she was pinning to the clothesline. Lauren wandered around whistling.

  “It’s singing that really sounds good in here,” Delphine said. “Sing your favorite song.”

  Lauren could not think of a song that was her favorite. That seemed to amaze Delphine, just as she had been amazed when she found out that Lauren did not know any jokes.

  “I have loads,” she said. And she began to sing.

  “Moon River, wider than a mile—”

  That was a song Harry sang sometimes, always making fun of the song, or himself. Delphine’s way of singing it was quite different. Lauren felt the calm sorrow of Delphine’s voice pulling her towards the wavering white sheets. The sheets themselves seemed as if they would dissolve around her—no, around her and Delphine—creating a feeling of acute sweetness. Delphine’s singing was like an embrace, wide-open, that you could rush into. At the same time, its loose emotion gave Lauren a shiver in her stomach, a distant threat of being sick.

  “Waiting round the bend

  My huckleberry friend—”

  Lauren interrupted by catching up a chair with the seat out and scraping its leg along the floor.

  “Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Lauren said resolutely to Harry and Eileen, at the dinner table. “Is there any sort of chance I could be adopted?”

  “Where did you get that idea?” said Eileen.

  Harry stopped eating, raised his eyebrows warningly at Lauren, then began to joke. “If we were going to adopt a kid,” he said, “do you think we’d get one that asked so many nosey questions?”

  Eileen stood up, fiddling with her skirt zipper. The skirt fell down, and then she rolled down her tights and underpants.

  “Look here,” she said. “That ought to tell you.”

  Her stomach, which looked flat when she was dressed, now showed a slight fullness and sag. Its surface, still lightly tanned down to the bikini mark, was streaked with some dead-white tracks that glistened in the kitchen light. Lauren had seen these before but had thought nothing of them—they had just seemed to be a part of Eileen’s particular body, like the twin moles on her collarbone.

  “That is from the skin stretching,” Eileen said. “I carried you way out in front.” She held her hand an impossible distance in front of her body. “So now are you convinced?”

  Harry put his head against Eileen, nuzzled her bare stomach. Then he pulled back and spoke to Lauren.

  “In case you’re wondering why we didn’t have any more, the answer is that you are the only kid we need. You’re smart and good-looking and you have a sense of humor. How could we be sure we’d get another that good? Plus, we are not your average family. We like to move around. Try things, be flexible. We have got one kid who is perfect and adaptable. No need to push our luck.”

  His face, which Eileen could not see, was directing at Lauren a look far more serious than his words. A continued warning, mixed with disappointment and surprise.

  If Eileen had not been there, Lauren would have questioned him. What if they had lost both babies, instead of just the one? What if she herself had never been inside Eileen and was not responsible for those tracks on her stomach? How could she be sure that they had not got her as a replacement? If there was one big thing she hadn’t known about, why could there not be another?

  This notion was unsettling, but it had a distant charm.

  The next time Lauren came into the hotel lobby after school, she was coughing.

  “Come on upstairs,” Delphine said. “I got some good stuff for that.”

  Just as she was putting out the Ring Bell for Service sign Mr. Palagian entered the lobby from the coffee shop. On one foot he wore a shoe and on the other a slipper, slit open to accommodate a bandaged foot. Just about where his big toe must be there was a dried blood spot.

  Lauren thought that Delphine would take the sign down when she saw Mr. Palagian, but she didn’t. All she said to him was, “You better change that bandage when you get a chance.”

  Mr. Palagian nodded but did not look at her.

  “I’ll be down in a bit,” she told him.

  Her room was up on the third floor, under the eaves. Climbing and coughing, Lauren said, “What happened to his foot?”

  “What foot?” said Delphine. “Could be somebody stepped on it, I guess. Maybe with the heel of their shoe, eh?”

  The ceiling of her room sloped steeply on either side of a dormer window. There was a single bed, a sink, a chair, a bureau. On the chair a hot plate with a kettle on it. On the bureau a crowded array of makeup, combs and pills, a tin of tea bags and a tin of hot chocolate powder. The bedspread was of thin tan-and-white striped seersucker, like the ones on the guest beds.

  “Not very fixed up, is it?” Delphine said. “I don’t spend a lot of time here.” She filled the kettle at the sink and plugged in the hot plate, then yanked off the bedspread to remove a blanket. “Get out of that jacket,” she said. “Wrap yourself up warm in this.” She touched the radiator. “It takes all day for any heat to get up here.”

  Lauren did as she was told. Two cups and two spoons were taken out of the top drawer, hot chocolate was measured from the tin. Delphine said, “I only make it with hot water. I guess you’re used to milk. I don’t take milk in tea or anything. I bring it up here, it just goes sour. I don’t have any refrigerator.”

  “It’s fine with water,” said Lauren, though she had never drunk hot chocolate that way. She had a sudden wish to be at home, wrapped up on the sofa and watching TV.

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” said Delphine, in a slightly irritated or nervous voice. “Sit down and get comfort
able. The kettle won’t take long.”

  Lauren sat on the edge of the bed. Suddenly Delphine turned around, grabbed her under the arms—causing her to start coughing again—and hauled her up so that she was sitting with her back against the wall and her feet sticking out over the floor. Her boots were pulled off, and Delphine quickly squeezed her feet, to see if her socks were wet.

  No.

  “Hey. I was going to get you something to fix that cough. Where’s my cough syrup?”

  From the same top drawer came a bottle half-full of amber liquid. Delphine poured out a spoonful. “Open up,” she said. “Doesn’t taste so dreadful.”

  Lauren, when she’d swallowed, said, “Is there whisky in it?”

  Delphine peered at the bottle, which had no label.

  “I don’t see where it says so. Can you see? Are your mommy and daddy going to have a fit if I give you a spoon of whisky for your cough?”

  “Sometimes my dad makes me a toddy.”

  “He does, does he?”

  Now the kettle was boiling and the water was poured into the cups. Delphine stirred hurriedly, mashing the lumps, talking to them.

  “Come on, you buggers. Come on, you.” Pretending to be jolly.

  There was something wrong with Delphine today. She seemed too flustered and excited, maybe angry underneath. Also, she was way too big, too flouncy and glossy, for this room.

  “You look around this place,” she said, “and I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, wow, she must be poor. Why doesn’t she have more stuff? But I don’t accumulate stuff. For the very good reason that I’ve had too many experiences of having to pick up and move on. Just get settled, you find something happens and you have to move on. I save, though. People would be surprised what I’ve got in the bank.”

  She gave Lauren her cup, and settled herself carefully at the head of the bed, the pillow at her back, her stockinged feet on the exposed sheet. Lauren had a particular feeling of disgust about feet in nylon stockings. Not about bare feet, or feet in socks, or feet in shoes, or feet in nylons covered up in shoes, just about feet in nylons out in the open, particularly touching any other cloth. This was just a private queer feeling—like the feeling she had about mushrooms, or cereal slopping around in milk.