by Alice Munro
“Can I do anything for you?”
They had entered the back storeroom of a shoe store. The man’s voice was icy; terrifying. The Vice Squad. The Police Station. Rose’s dress was undone to the waist.
Once they met in a park, where Rose often took Anna, and pushed her on the swings. They held hands on a bench, under cover of Rose’s wide cotton skirt. They laced their fingers together and squeezed painfully. Then Anna surprised them, coming up behind the bench and shouting, “Boo! I caught you!” Clifford turned disastrously pale. On the way home Rose said to Anna, “That was funny when you jumped out behind the bench. I thought you were still on the swing.”
“I know,” said Anna.
“What did you mean, you’d caught us?”
“I caught you,” said Anna, and giggled, in what seemed to Rose a disturbingly pert and knowledgeable way.
“Would you like a fudgsicle? I would!” Rose said gaily, with thoughts of blackmail and bargains, Anna dredging this up for her psychiatrist in twenty years’ time. The episode made her feel shaky and sick and she wondered if it had given Clifford a distaste for her. It had, but only temporarily.
AS SOON AS IT WAS LIGHT she got out of bed and went to look at the day, to see if it would be good for flying. The sky was clear; no sign of the fog that often grounded planes at this time of year. Nobody but Clifford knew she was going to Powell River. They had been planning this for six weeks, ever since they knew he was going on tour. Patrick thought she was going to Victoria, where she had a friend whom she had known at college. She had pretended, during the past few weeks, to have been in touch with this friend again. She had said she would be back tomorrow night. Today was Saturday. Patrick was at home to look after Anna.
She went into the dining room to check the money she had saved from Family Allowance checks. It was in the bottom of the silver muffin dish. Thirteen dollars. She meant to add that to what Patrick gave her to get to Victoria. Patrick always gave her money when she asked, but he wanted to know how much and what for. Once when they were out walking she wanted to go into a drugstore; she asked him for money and he said, with no more than customary sternness, “What for?” and Rose began to cry, because she had been going to buy vaginal jelly. She might just as well have laughed, and would have, now. Since she had fallen in love with Clifford, she never quarreled with Patrick.
She figured out again the money she would need. The plane ticket, the money for the airport bus, from Vancouver, and for the bus or maybe it would have to be a taxi into Powell River, something left over for food and coffee. Clifford would pay for the hotel. The thought filled her with sexual comfort, submissiveness, though she knew Jerome needed new glasses, Adam needed rubber boots. She thought of that neutral, smooth, generous bed, which already existed, was waiting for them. Long ago when she was a young girl (she was now twenty-three) she had often thought of bland rented beds and locked doors, with such luxuriant hopes, and now she did again, though for a time in between, before and after she was married, the thought of anything connected with sex irritated her, rather in the way Modem Art irritated Patrick.
She walked around the house softly, planning her day as a series of actions. Take a bath, oil and powder herself, put her diaphragm and jelly in her purse. Remember the money. Mascara, face cream, lipstick. She stood at the top of the two steps leading down into the living room. The walls of the living room were moss green, the fireplace was white, the curtains and slipcovers had a silky pattern of gray and green and yellow leaves on a white background. On the mantel were two Wedgwood vases, white with a circlet of green leaves. Patrick was very fond of these vases. Sometimes when he came home from work he went straight into the living room and shifted them around a bit on the mantel, thinking their symmetrical position had been disturbed.
“Has anybody been fooling around with these vases?”
“Well of course. As soon as you leave for work I rush in and juggle them around.”
“I meant Anna. You don’t let her touch them, do you?”
Patrick didn’t like to hear her refer to the vases in any joking way.
He thought she didn’t appreciate the house. He didn’t know, but maybe could guess what she had said to Jocelyn, the first time Jocelyn came here, and they were standing where Rose stood now, looking down at the living room.
“The department store heir’s dream of elegance.”
At this treachery even Jocelyn looked abashed. It was not exactly true. Patrick dreamed of getting much more elegant. And it was not true in the implication that it had all been Patrick’s choice, and that Rose had always held aloof from it. It had been Patrick’s choice, but there were a lot of things she had liked at one time. She used to climb up and polish the glass drops of the dining-room chandelier, using a cloth dipped in water and baking soda. She liked the chandelier; its drops had a blue or lilac cast. But people she admired would not have chandeliers in their dining rooms. It was unlikely that they would have dining rooms. If they did, they would have thin white candles stuck into the branches of a black metal candleholder, made in Scandinavia. Or else they would have heavy candles in wine bottles, loaded with drippings of colored wax. The people she admired were inevitably poorer than she was. It seemed a bad joke on her, after being poor all her life in a place where poverty was never anything to be proud of, that now she had to feel apologetic and embarrassed about the opposite condition—with someone like Jocelyn, for instance, who could say middle-class prosperity so viciously and despisingly.
But if she hadn’t been exposed to other people, if she hadn’t learned from Jocelyn, would she still have liked the house? No. She must have been souring on it, anyway. When people came to visit for the first time Patrick always took them on a tour, pointing out the chandelier, the powder room with concealed lighting, by the front door, the walk-in closets and the louvered doors opening on to the patio. He was as proud of this house, as eager to call attention to its small distinctions, as if he, not Rose, had grown up poor. Rose had been uneasy about these tours from the start, and tagged along in silence, or made deprecating remarks which Patrick did not like.
After a while she stayed in the kitchen, but she could still hear Patrick’s voice and she knew beforehand everything he would say. She knew that he would pull the dining-room curtains and point to the small illuminated fountain—Neptune with a fig-leaf—he had put in the garden, and then he would say, “Now there is our answer to the suburban swimming-pool mania!”
AFTER SHE BATHED she reached for a bottle of what she thought was baby oil, to pour over her body. The clear liquid ran down over her breasts and belly, stinging and burning. She looked at the label and saw that this was not baby oil at all, it was nail polish remover. She scrubbed it off, splashed herself with cold water, towelled desperately, thinking of ruined skin, the hospital; grafts, scars, punishment.
Anna was scratching sleepily but urgently at the bathroom door. Rose had locked it, for this preparation, though she didn’t usually lock it when she took a bath. She let Anna in.
“Your front is all red,” Anna said, as she hoisted herself on to the toilet. Rose found the baby oil and tried to cool herself with it. She used too much, and got oily spots on her new brassiere.
She had thought Clifford might write to her while he was touring, but he did not. He called her from Prince George, and was business-like.
“When do you get into Powell River?”
“Four o’clock.”
“Okay, take the bus or whatever they have into town. Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
“Neither have I. I only know the name of our hotel. You can’t wait there.”
“How about the bus depot? Every town has a bus depot.”
“Okay, the bus depot. I’ll pick you up there probably about five o’clock, and we can get you into some other hotel. I hope to God there’s more than one. Okay then.”
He was pretending to the other members of the orchestra that he was spending the night with friend
s in Powell River.
“I could go and hear you play,” Rose said. “Couldn’t I?”
“Well. Sure.”
“I’d be very inconspicuous. I’d sit at the back. I’ll disguise myself as an old lady. I love to hear you play.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
“Clifford?”
“Yes?”
“You still want me to come?”
“Oh, Rose.”
“I know. It’s just the way you sound.”
“I’m in the hotel lobby. They’re waiting for me. I’m supposed to be talking to Jocelyn.”
“Okay. I know. I’ll come.”
“Powell River. The bus depot. Five o’clock.”
This was different from their usual telephone conversations.
Usually they were plaintive and silly; or else they worked each other up so that they could not talk at all.
“Heavy breathing there.”
“I know.”
“We’ll have to talk about something else.”
“What else is there?”
“Is it foggy where you are?”
“Yes. Is it foggy where you are too?”
“Yes. Can you hear the foghorn?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it a horrible sound?”
“I don’t mind it, really. I sort of like it.”
“Jocelyn doesn’t. You know how she describes it? She says it’s the sound of a cosmic boredom.”
They had at first avoided speaking of Jocelyn and Patrick at all. Then they spoke of them in a crisp practical way, as if they were adults, parents, to be outwitted. Now they could mention them almost tenderly, admiringly, as if they were their children.
THERE WAS NO BUS DEPOT in Powell River. Rose got into the airport limousine with four other passengers, all men, and told the driver she wanted to go to the bus depot.
“You know where that is?”
“No,” she said. Already she felt them all watching her. “Did you want to catch a bus?”
“No.”
“Just wanted to go to the bus depot?”
“I planned to meet somebody there.”
“I didn’t even know there was a bus depot here,” said one of the passengers.
“There isn’t, that I know of,” said the driver. “Now there is a bus, it goes down to Vancouver in the morning and it comes back at night, and it stops at the old men’s home. The old loggers’ home. That’s where it stops. All I can do is take you there. Is that all right?”
Rose said it would be fine. Then she felt she had to go on explaining.
“My friend and I just arranged to meet there because we couldn’t think where else. We don’t know Powell River at all and we just thought, every town has a bus depot!”
She was thinking that she shouldn’t have said my friend, she should have said my husband. They were going to ask her what she and her friend were doing here if neither of them knew the town.
“My friend is playing in the orchestra that’s giving a concert here tonight. She plays the violin.”
All looked away from her, as if that was what a lie deserved. She was trying to remember if there was a female violinist. What if they should ask her name?
The driver let her off in front of a long two-story wooden building with peeling paint.
“I guess you could go in the sunporch, there at the end. That’s where the bus picks them up, anyway.”
In the sunporch there was a pool table. Nobody was playing. Some old men were playing checkers; others watched. Rose thought of explaining herself to them but decided not to; they seemed mercifully uninterested. She was worn out by her explanations in the limousine.
It was ten past four by the sunporch clock. She thought she could put in the time till five by walking around the town.
As soon as she went outside she noticed a bad smell, and became worried, thinking it might come from herself.
She got out the stick cologne she had bought in the Vancouver airport—spending money she could not afford—and rubbed it on her wrists and neck. The smell persisted, and at last she realized it came from the pulp mills. The town was difficult to walk around in because the streets were so steep, and in many places there was no sidewalk. There was no place to loiter. She thought people stared at her, recognizing a stranger. Some men in a car yelled at her. She saw her own reflection in store windows and understood that she looked as if she wanted to be stared at and yelled at. She was wearing black velvet toreador pants, a tight-fitting highnecked black sweater and a beige jacket which she slung over her shoulder, though there was a chilly wind. She who had once chosen full skirts and soft colors, babyish angora sweaters, scalloped necklines, had now taken to wearing dramatic sexually advertising clothes. The new underwear she had on at this moment was black lace and pink nylon. In the waiting room at the Vancouver airport she had done her eyes with heavy mascara, black eyeliner, and silver eyeshadow; her lipstick was almost white. All this was a fashion of those years and so looked less ghastly than it would seem later, but it was alarming enough. The assurance with which she carried such a disguise fluctuated considerably. She would not have dared parade it in front of Patrick or Jocelyn. When she went to see Jocelyn she always wore her baggiest slacks and sweaters. Nevertheless when she opened the door Jocelyn would say, “Hello, Sexy,” in a tone of friendly scorn. Jocelyn herself had become spectacularly unkempt. She dressed exclusively in old clothes of Clifford’s. Old pants that didn’t quite zip up on her because her stomach had never flattened out after Adam, and frayed white shirts Clifford had once worn for performances. Apparently Jocelyn thought the whole business of keeping your figure and wearing makeup and trying to look in any way seductive was sourly amusing, beneath contempt; it was like vacuuming the curtains. She said that Clifford felt the same way. Clifford, reported Jocelyn, was attracted by the very absence of female artifice and trappings; he liked unshaved legs and hairy armpits and natural smells. Rose wondered if Clifford had really said this, and why. Out of pity, or comradeliness; or as a joke?
Rose found a public library and went in and looked at the titles of the books, but she could not pay attention. There was a fairly incapacitating though not unpleasant buzzing throughout her head and body. At twenty to five she was back in the sunporch, waiting.
She was still waiting at ten past six. She had counted the money in her purse. A dollar and sixty-three cents. She could not go to a hotel. She did not think they would let her stay in the sunporch all night. There was nothing at all that she could do except pray that Clifford might still arrive. She did not believe he would. The schedule had been changed; he had been summoned home because one of the children was sick; he had broken his wrist and couldn’t play the violin; Powell River was not a real place at all but a bad-smelling mirage where guilty travelers were trapped for punishment. She wasn’t really surprised. She had made the jump that wasn’t to be made, and this was how she had landed.
Before the old men went in to supper she asked them if they knew of a concert being given that night in the high school auditorium. They answered grudgingly, no.
“Never heard of them giving no concerts here.”
She said that her husband was playing in the orchestra, it was on tour from Vancouver, she had flown up to meet him; she was supposed to meet him here.
Here?
“Maybe got lost,” said one of the old men in what seemed to her a spiteful, knowing way. “Maybe your husband got lost, heh? Husbands always getting lost!”
It was nearly dark out. This was October, and further north than Vancouver. She tried to think what to do. The only thing that occurred to her was to pretend to pass out, then claim loss of memory. Would Patrick ever believe that? She would have to say she had no idea what she was doing in Powell River. She would have to say she didn’t remember anything she had said in the limousine, didn’t know anything about the orchestra. She would have to convince policemen and doctors, be written
about in the newspapers. Oh, where was Clifford, why had he abandoned her, could there have been an accident on the road? She thought she should destroy the piece of paper in her purse, on which she had written his instructions. She thought that she had better get rid of her diaphragm as well.
She was going through her purse when a van parked outside. She thought it must be a police van; she thought the old men must have phoned up and reported her as a suspicious character.
Clifford got out and came running up the sunporch steps. It took her a moment to recognize him.
THEY HAD BEER and hamburgers in one of the hotels, a different hotel from the one where the orchestra was staying. Rose’s hands were shaking so that she slopped the beer. There had been a rehearsal he hadn’t counted on, Clifford said. Then he had been about half an hour looking for the bus depot.
“I guess it wasn’t such a bright idea, the bus depot.”
Her hand was lying on the table. He wiped the beer off with a napkin, then put his own hand over hers. She thought of this often, afterwards.
“We better get you checked in here.”
“Don’t we check in together?”
“Better if it’s just you.”
“Ever since I got here,” Rose said, “it has been so peculiar. It has been so sinister. I felt everybody knew.”
She started telling him, in what she hoped was an entertaining way, about the limousine driver, the other passengers, the old men in the Loggers’ Home. “It was such a relief when you showed up, such a terrible relief. That’s why I’m shaking.” She told him about her plan to fake amnesia and the realization that she had better throw her diaphragm away. He laughed, but without delight, she thought. It seemed to her that when she spoke of the diaphragm his lips tightened, in reproof or distaste.
