Runaway

by Alice Munro

  “Oh God, let’s not do this,” Eileen had said once. “Please, please, let’s stop doing this.” And Harry had answered in a high whining voice that cruelly imitated hers, “You’re the one doing it—you stop.”

  Lauren had got over trying to figure out what the fights were about. Always about a new thing (tonight she lay in the dark and thought it was probably about her going away, about Eileen’s making that decision on her own) and always about the same thing—the thing that belonged to them, that they could never give up.

  She had also got over her idea that there was a tender spot in both of them—that Harry made jokes all the time because he was sad, and Eileen was brisk and dismissive because of something about Harry that seemed to shut her out—and that if she, Lauren, could only explain each of them to the other one, things would get better.

  Next day they would be muted, broken, shamed, and queerly exhilarated. “People have to do this, it’s bad to repress your feelings,” Eileen had once told Lauren. “There’s even a theory that repressing anger gives you cancer.”

  Harry referred to the fights as rows. “Sorry about the row,” he would say. “Eileen is a very volatile woman. All I can say, sweetie—oh God, all I can say is—these things happen.”

  On this night Lauren actually fell asleep before they had really begun to do their damage. Before she was even sure they would do it. The gin bottle hadn’t yet made an appearance when she went away to bed.

  Harry woke her up.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, honey. Could you just get up and come downstairs?”

  “Is it morning?”

  “No. It’s still late at night. Eileen and I want to talk to you. We’ve got something to talk to you about. It’s sort of about what you already know. Come on, now. You want your slippers?”

  “I hate slippers,” Lauren reminded him. She went ahead of him down the stairs. He was still dressed and Eileen was still dressed too, waiting in the hall. She said to Lauren, “There’s somebody else here that you know.”

  It was Delphine. Delphine was sitting on the sofa, wearing a ski jacket over her usual black pants and sweater. Lauren had never seen her in outdoor clothes before. Her face sagged, her skin looked pouchy, her body immensely defeated.

  “Can’t we go in the kitchen?” Lauren said. She didn’t know why, but the kitchen seemed safer. Somewhere less special, and with the table to hold on to if they all sat around it.

  “Lauren wants to go in the kitchen, we’ll go in the kitchen,” Harry said.

  When they were sitting there, he said, “Lauren. I’ve explained that I told you about the baby. About the baby we had before you and what happened to that baby.”

  He waited until Lauren said, “Yes.”

  “May I say something now?” said Eileen. “May I say something to Lauren?”

  Harry said, “Well certainly.”

  “Harry could not stand the idea of another baby,” said Eileen, looking down at her hands in her lap under the tabletop. “He couldn’t stand the idea of all the domestic chaos. He had his writing to do. He wanted to achieve things, so he couldn’t have chaos. He wanted me to have an abortion and I said I would and then I said I wouldn’t and then I said I would, but I couldn’t do it and we had a fight and I got the baby and got in the car, I was going to go to some friends’ place. I wasn’t speeding and I certainly was not drunk. It was just the bad light on the road and the bad weather.”

  “Also the way the carry-cot was not fastened in,” said Harry.

  “But let that go,” he said. “I was not insisting on an abortion. I might have mentioned getting an abortion, but there was no way I would have made you. I didn’t talk about that to Lauren because it would be upsetting for her to hear. It’s bound to be upsetting.”

  “Yes, but it’s true,” Eileen said. “Lauren can take it, she knows it wasn’t like it was her.”

  Lauren spoke up, surprising herself.

  “It was me,” she said. “Who was it if it wasn’t me?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t the one wanted to do it,” Eileen said.

  “You didn’t altogether not want to do it,” said Harry.

  Lauren said, “Stop.”

  “This is just what we promised we would not do,” said Harry. “Isn’t this what we promised we would not do? And we should apologize to Delphine.”

  Delphine had not looked up at anybody while this talk was going on. She had not pulled her chair up to the table. She didn’t seem to notice when Harry said her name. It wasn’t just defeat that kept her still. It was a weight of obstinacy, even disgust, that Harry and Eileen couldn’t notice.

  “I talked to Delphine this afternoon, Lauren. I told her about the baby. It was her baby. I never told you the baby was adopted because it made everything seem worse—that we adopted that baby, and then the way we screwed up. Five years trying, we never thought we’d get pregnant, so we adopted. But Delphine was its mother in the first place. We called it Lauren and then we called you Lauren—I guess because it was our favorite name and also it gave us a feeling we were starting over. And Delphine wanted to know about her baby and she found out we had taken it and naturally she made the mistake of thinking it was you. She came here to find you. It’s all very sad. When I told her the truth she very understandably wanted proof, so I told her to come here tonight and I showed her the documents. She never wanted to steal you away or anything like that, just to make friends with you. She was just lonely and confused.”

  Delphine yanked down the zipper of her jacket as if she wanted to get more air.

  “And I told her we still had—that we never got around to or it never seemed the right time to—” He waved at the cardboard box that was sitting right out on the counter. “So I showed her that too.

  “So tonight as a family,” he said, “tonight while everything is all wide-open, we are going to go out and do this. And get rid of all this—misery and blame. Delphine and Eileen and me, and we want you to come with us—is that all right with you? Are you all right?”

  Lauren said, “I was asleep. I’ve got a cold.”

  “You might as well do as Harry says,” said Eileen.

  Still Delphine never looked up. Harry got the box from the counter and gave it to her. “Maybe you should be the one to carry it,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Everybody is all right,” Eileen said. “Let’s just go.”

  Delphine stood there in the snow, holding the box, so Eileen said, “Should I?” and took it respectfully from her. She opened it up and was going to offer it to Harry, then changed her mind and held it out to Delphine. Delphine lifted out a small handful of ashes, but didn’t take the box to pass it on. Eileen took a handful and gave the box to Harry. When he had got some ashes he was going to hand the box on to Lauren, but Eileen said, “No. She doesn’t have to.”

  Lauren had already put her hands in her pockets.

  There wasn’t any wind, so the ashes just fell where Harry and Eileen and Delphine let them drop, into the snow.

  Eileen spoke as if her throat was sore. “Our Father which art in Heaven—”

  Harry said clearly, “This is Lauren, who was our child and whom we all loved—let’s all say it together.” He looked at Delphine, then Eileen, and they all said, “This is Lauren,” with Delphine’s voice very quiet, mumbling, and Eileen’s full of strained sincerity and Harry’s sonorous, presiding, deeply serious.

  “And we say good-bye to her and commit her to the snow—”

  At the end Eileen said hurriedly, “Forgive us our sins. Our trespasses. Forgive us our trespasses.”

  Delphine got into the back seat with Lauren for the ride into town. Harry had held the door open for her to get into the front seat beside him, but she stumbled past him into the back. Relinquishing the more important seat, now that she was not the bearer of the box. She reached into the pocket of her ski jacket to get a Kleenex and in doing so dragged out something that fell on the floor of the car. She gave an involuntary grun
t, reaching down to locate it, but Lauren had been quicker. Lauren picked up one of the earrings she had often seen Delphine wear—shoulder-length earrings of rainbow beads that sparkled through her hair. Earrings she must have been wearing this evening, but had thought better to stuff away in her pocket. And just the feel of this earring, the feeling of the cold bright beads slithering through her fingers, made Lauren long suddenly for any number of things to vanish, for Delphine to turn back into the person she had been at the beginning, sitting behind the hotel desk, bold and frisky.

  Delphine did not say a word. She took the earring without their fingers touching. But for the first time that evening she and Lauren looked each other in the face. Delphine’s eyes widened and for an instant there was a familiar expression in them, of mockery and conspiracy. She shrugged her shoulders and put the earring in her pocket. That was all—from then on she just looked at the back of Harry’s head.

  When Harry slowed to let her out at the hotel, he said, “It would be nice if you could come and have supper with us, some night when you’re not working.”

  “I’m pretty much always working,” Delphine said. She got out of the car and said, “Good-bye,” to none of them in particular, and stumped along the mushy sidewalk into the hotel.

  On the way home Eileen said, “I knew she wouldn’t.”

  Harry said, “Well. Maybe she appreciated that we asked.”

  “She doesn’t care about us. She only cared about Lauren, when she thought Lauren was hers. Now she doesn’t care about her either.”

  “Well, we care,” said Harry, his voice rising. “She’s ours.”

  “We love you, Lauren,” he said. “I just want to tell you one more time.”

  Hers. Ours.

  Something was prickling Lauren’s bare ankles. She reached down and found that burrs, whole clusters of burrs, were clinging to her pajama legs.

  “I got burrs from under the snow. I’ve got hundreds of burrs.”

  “I’ll get them off you when we get home,” Eileen said. “I can’t do anything about them now.”

  Lauren was furiously pulling the burrs off her pajamas. And as soon as she got those loose she found that they were hanging on to her fingers. She tried to loosen them with the other hand and in no time they were clinging to all the other fingers. She was so sick of these burrs that she wanted to beat her hands and yell out loud, but she knew that the only thing she could do was just sit and wait.

  TRICKS

  I

  I’ll die,” said Robin, on an evening years ago. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready.”

  They were in the screen porch of the dark-green clapboard house on Isaac Street. Willard Greig, who lived next door, was playing rummy at the card table with Robin’s sister, Joanne. Robin was sitting on the couch, frowning at a magazine. The smell of nicotiana fought with a smell of ketchup simmering in some kitchen along the street.

  Willard watched Joanne barely smile, before she inquired in a neutral voice, “What did you say?”

  “I said, I’ll die.” Robin was defiant. “I’ll die if they don’t have that dress ready by tomorrow. The cleaners.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. You’d die?”

  You could never catch Joanne on any remark of that sort. Her tone was so mild, her scorn so immensely quiet, her smile—now vanished—was just the tiny lifting of a corner of her mouth.

  “Well, I will,” said Robin defiantly. “I need it.”

  “She needs it, she’ll die, she’s going to the play,” said Joanne to Willard, in a confidential tone.

  Willard said, “Now, Joanne.” His parents, and he himself, had been friends of the girls’ parents—he still thought of these two as the girls—and now that all of the parents were dead he felt it was his duty to keep the daughters, as much as possible, out of each other’s hair.

  Joanne was now thirty years old, Robin twenty-six. Joanne had a childish body, a narrow chest, a long sallow face, and straight, fine, brown hair. She never tried to pretend she was anything but an unlucky person, stunted halfway between childhood and female maturity. Stunted, crippled in a way, by severe and persisting asthma from childhood on. You didn’t expect a person who looked like that, a person who couldn’t step outside in winter or be left alone at night, to have such a devastating way of catching on to other, more fortunate people’s foolishness. Or to have such a fund of contempt. All their lives, it seemed to Willard, he’d been watching Robin’s eyes fill up with tears of wrath, and hearing Joanne say, “What’s the matter with you now?”

  Tonight Robin had felt only a slight sting. Tomorrow was her day to go to Stratford, and she felt herself already living outside Joanne’s reach.

  “What’s the play, Robin?” Willard asked, to smooth things as much as he could. “Is it by Shakespeare?”

  “Yes. As You Like It.”

  “And can you follow him all right? Shakespeare?”

  Robin said she could.

  “You’re a wonder.”

  For five years Robin had been doing this. One play every summer. It had started when she was living in Stratford, training to be a nurse. She went with a fellow student who had a couple of free tickets from her aunt, who worked on costumes. The girl who had the tickets was bored sick—it was King Lear—so Robin had kept quiet about how she felt. She could not have expressed it anyway—she would rather have gone away from the theater alone, and not had to talk to anybody for at least twenty-four hours. Her mind was made up then to come back. And to come by herself.

  It wouldn’t be difficult. The town where she had grown up, and where, later, she had to find her work because of Joanne, was only thirty miles away. People there knew that the Shakespeare plays were being put on in Stratford, but Robin had never heard of anybody going to see one. People like Willard were afraid of being looked down on by the people in the audience, as well as having the problem of not following the language. And people like Joanne were sure that nobody, ever, could really like Shakespeare, and so if anybody from here went, it was because they wanted to mix with the higher-ups, who were not enjoying it themselves but only letting on they were. Those few people in town who made a habit of seeing stage productions preferred to go to Toronto, to the Royal Alex, when a Broadway musical was on tour.

  Robin liked to have a good seat, so she could only afford a Saturday matinee. She picked a play that was being done on one of her weekends off from the hospital. She never read it beforehand, and she didn’t care whether it was a tragedy or a comedy. She had yet to see a single person there that she knew, in the theater or out on the streets, and that suited her very well. One of the nurses she worked with had said to her, “I’d never have the nerve to do that all on my own,” and that had made Robin realize how different she herself must be from most people. She never felt more at ease than at these times, surrounded by strangers. After the play she would walk downtown, along the river, and find some inexpensive place to eat—usually a sandwich, as she sat on a stool at the counter. And at twenty to eight she would catch the train home. That was all. Yet those few hours filled her with an assurance that the life she was going back to, which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, was only temporary and could easily be put up with. And there was a radiance behind it, behind that life, behind everything, expressed by the sunlight seen through the train windows. The sunlight and long shadows on the summer fields, like the remains of the play in her head.

  Last year, she saw Antony and Cleopatra. When it was over she walked along the river, and noticed that there was a black swan—the first she had ever seen—a subtle intruder gliding and feeding at a short distance from the white ones. Perhaps it was the glisten of the white swans’ wings that made her think of eating at a real restaurant this time, not at a counter. White tablecloth, a few fresh flowers, a glass of wine, and something unusual to eat, like mussels, or Cornish hen. She made a move to check in her purse, to see how much money she had.

  And her purse was not there. The seldom-us
ed little paisley-cloth bag on its silver chain was not slung over her shoulder as usual, it was gone. She had walked alone nearly all the way downtown from the theater without noticing that it was gone. And of course her dress had no pockets. She had no return ticket, no lipstick, no comb, and no money. Not a dime.

  She remembered that throughout the play she had held the purse on her lap, under her program. She did not have the program now, either. Perhaps both had slipped to the floor? But no—she remembered having the bag in the toilet cubicle of the Ladies Room. She had hung it by the chain on the hook that was on the back of the door. But she had not left it there. No. She had looked at herself in the mirror over the washbasin, she had got the comb out to fiddle with her hair. Her hair was dark, and fine, and though she visualized it puffed up like Jackie Kennedy’s, and did it up in rollers at night, it had a tendency to go flat. Otherwise she had been pleased with what she saw. She had greenish-gray eyes and black eyebrows and a skin that tanned whether she tried or not, and all this was set off well by her tight-waisted, full-skirted dress of avocado-green polished cotton, with the rows of little tucks around the hips.

  That was where she had left it. On the counter by the washbasin. Admiring herself, turning and looking over her shoulder to catch sight of the V of the dress at the back—she believed she had a pretty back—and checking that there was no bra strap showing anywhere.