by Alice Munro
Her heart would pound also from hauling the laundry, the groceries. The laundromat, the supermarket, the liquor store, were all at the bottom of the hill. She was busy all the time. She always had urgent plans for the next hour. Pick up the resoled shoes, wash and tint her hair, mend Anna’s coat for school tomorrow. Besides her job, which was hard enough, she was doing the same things she had always done, and doing them under harder circumstances. There was a surprising amount of comfort in these chores.
Two things she bought for Anna: the goldfish, and the television set. Cats or dogs were not permitted in the apartment, only birds or fish. One day in January, the second week Anna was there, Rose walked down the hill to meet her, after school, to take her to Woolworth’s to buy the fish. She looked at Anna’s face and thought it was dirty, then saw that it was stained with tears.
“Today I heard somebody calling Jeremy,” Anna said, “and I thought Jeremy was here.” Jeremy was a little boy she had often played with at home.
Rose mentioned the fish.
“My stomach hurts.”
“Are you hungry maybe? I wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee. What would you like?”
It was a terrible day. They were walking through the park, a shortcut to downtown. There had been a thaw, then a freeze, so that there was ice everywhere, with water or slush on top of it. The sun was shining, but it was the kind of winter sunshine that only makes your eyes hurt, and your clothes too heavy, and emphasizes all disorder and difficulty, such as the difficulty now, in trying to walk on the ice. All around were teenagers just out of school, and their noise, their whooping and sliding, the way a boy and girl sat on a bench on the ice, kissing ostentatiously, made Rose feel even more discouraged.
Anna had chocolate milk. The teenagers had accompanied them into the restaurant. It was an oldfashioned place with the high-backed booths of the forties, and an orange-haired owner-cook whom everyone called Dree; it was the shabby reality that people recognized nostalgically in movies, and, best of all, nobody there had any idea that it was anything to be nostalgic about. Dree was probably saving to fix it up. But today Rose thought of those restaurants it reminded her of, where she had gone after school, and thought that she had after all been very unhappy in them.
“You don’t love Daddy,” said Anna. “I know you don’t.”
“Well, I like him,” Rose said. “We just can’t live together, that’s all.” Like most things you are advised to say, this rang false, and Anna said, “You don’t like him. You’re just lying.” She was beginning to sound more competent, and seemed to be looking forward to getting the better of her mother.
“Aren’t you?”
Rose was in fact just on the verge of saying no, she did not like him. If that’s what you want, you can have it, she felt like saying. Anna did want it, but could she stand it? How do you ever judge what children can stand? And actually the words love, don’t love, like, don’t like, even hate, had no meaning for Rose where Patrick was concerned.
“My stomach still hurts,” said Anna with some satisfaction, and pushed the chocolate milk away. But she caught the danger signals, she did not want this to go any further. “When are we getting the fish?” she said, as if Rose had been stalling.
They bought an orange fish, a blue spotted fish, a black fish with a velvety-looking body and horrible bulging eyes, all of which they carried home in a plastic bag. They bought a fish bowl, colored pebbles, a green plastic plant. Both of them were restored by the inside of Woolworth’s, the flashing fish and the singing birds and the bright pink and green lingerie and the gilt-framed mirrors and the kitchen plastic and a large lobster of cold red rubber.
On the television set Anna liked to watch “Family Court,” a program about teenagers needing abortions, and ladies picked up for shoplifting, and fathers showing up after long years away to reclaim their lost children who liked their stepfathers better. Another program she liked was called “The Brady Bunch.” The Brady Bunch was a family of six beautiful, busy, comically misunderstood or misunderstanding children, with a pretty blonde mother, a handsome dark father, a cheerful housekeeper. The Brady Bunch came on at six o’clock, and Anna wanted to eat supper watching it. Rose allowed this because she often wanted to work through Anna’s suppertime. She began putting things in bowls, so that Anna could manage more easily. She stopped making suppers of meat and potatoes and vegetables, because she had to throw so much out. She made chili instead, or scrambled eggs, bacon and tomato sandwiches, wieners wrapped in biscuit dough. Sometimes Anna wanted cereal, and Rose let her have it. But then she would think there was something disastrously wrong, when she saw Anna in front of the television set eating Captain Crunch, at the very hour when families everywhere were gathered at kitchen or dining-room tables, preparing to eat and quarrel and amuse and torment each other. She got a chicken, she made a thick golden soup with vegetables and barley. Anna wanted Captain Crunch instead. She said the soup had a funny taste. It’s lovely soup, cried Rose, you’ve hardly tasted it, Anna, please try it.
“For my sake,” it’s a wonder she didn’t say. She was relieved, on the whole, when Anna said calmly, “No.”
At eight o’clock she began to hound Anna into her bath, into bed. It was only when all this was accomplished—when she had brought the final glass of chocolate milk, mopped up the bathroom, picked up the papers, crayons, felt cutouts, scissors, dirty socks, Chinese checkers, also the blanket in which Anna wrapped herself to watch television, because the apartment was cold, made Anna’s lunch for the next day, turned off her light over her protest—that Rose could settle down with a drink, or a cup of coffee laced with rum, and give herself over to satisfaction, appreciation. She would turn off the lights and sit by the high front window looking out over this mountain town she had hardly known existed a year ago, and she would think what a miracle it was that this had happened, that she had come all this way and was working, she had Anna, she was paying for Anna’s life and her own. She could feel the weight of Anna in the apartment then just as naturally as she had felt her weight in her body, and without having to go and look at her she could see with stunning, fearful pleasure the fair hair and fair skin and glistening eyebrows, the profile along which, if you looked closely, you could see the tiny almost invisible hairs rise, catching the light. For the first time in her life she understood domesticity, knew the meaning of shelter, and labored to manage it.
“What made you want out of marriage?” said Dorothy. She had been married too, a long time ago.
Rose didn’t know what to mention first. The scars on her wrist? The choking in the kitchen, the grubbing at the grass? All beside the point.
“I was just bored,” said Dorothy. “It just bored the hell out of me, to tell you the honest truth.”
She was half-drunk. Rose started to laugh and Dorothy said, “What in hell are you laughing at?”
“It’s just a relief to hear somebody say that. Instead of talking about how you didn’t communicate.”
“Well, we didn’t communicate, either. No, the fact was I was out of my mind over somebody else. I was having an affair with a guy who worked for a newspaper. A journalist. Well, he went off to England, the journalist did, and he wrote me a letter over the Atlantic saying he really truly loved me. He wrote me that letter because he was over the Atlantic, and I was here, but I didn’t have sense enough to know that. Do you know what I did? I left my husband—well, that was no loss—and I borrowed money, fifteen hundred dollars I borrowed from the bank. And I flew to England after him. I phoned his paper, they said he’d gone to Turkey. I sat in the hotel waiting for him to come back. Oh, what a time. I never went out of the hotel. If I went to get a massage or have my hair done I told them where to page me. I kept pestering them fifty times a day. Isn’t there a letter? Wasn’t there a phone call? Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
“Did he ever come back?”
“I phoned again, they told me he’d gone to Kenya. I had started getting the shakes. I saw I had to get hold of myse
lf so I did, in the nick of time. I flew home. I started paying back the bloody bank.”
Dorothy drank vodka, unmixed, from a water tumbler.
“Oh, two or three years later I met him, where was it. It was in an airport. No, it was in a department store. I’m sorry I missed you when you came to England, he said. I said, oh, that’s all right, I managed to have a good time anyway. I was still paying it back. I should’ve told him he was a shit.”
At work Rose read commercials and the weather forecasts, answered letters, answered the telephone, typed up the news, did the voices in Sunday skits written by a local minister, and planned to do interviews. She wanted to do a story on the town’s early settlers; she went and talked to an old blind man who lived above a feed store. He told her that in the old days apples and cherries had been tied to the boughs of pine and cedar trees, pictures taken of them and sent to England. That brought the English immigrants, convinced they were coming to a land where the orchards were already in bloom. When she got back to the station with this story everybody laughed; they had heard it so often before.
She wasn’t forgetting Tom. He wrote; she wrote. Without this connection to a man, she might have seen herself as an uncertain and pathetic person; that connection held her new life in place. For a while it looked as if luck was with them. A conference was set up in Calgary, on radio in rural life, or something of that sort, and the station was sending Rose. All without the least connivance on her part. She and Tom were jubilant and silly on the phone. She asked one of the young teachers across the hall if she would move in and look after Anna. The girl was glad to agree to do it; the other teacher’s boyfriend had moved in, and they were temporarily crowded. Rose went back to the shop where she had bought the bedspread and the pots; she bought a caftan-nightgown sort of robe with a pattern of birds on it, in jewel colors. It made her think of the Emperor’s nightingale. She put a fresh rinse on her hair. She was to go sixty miles by bus, then catch a plane. She would exchange an hour of terror for the extra time in Calgary. People at the station enjoyed scaring her, telling her how the little planes rose almost straight up out of the mountain airport, then bucked and shivered their way over the Rockies. She did think it would not be right to die that way, to crash in the mountains going to see Tom. She thought this, in spite of the fever she was in to go. It seemed too frivolous an errand to die on. It seemed like treachery, to take such a risk; not treachery to Anna and certainly not to Patrick but perhaps to herself. But just because the journey was frivolously undertaken, because it was not entirely real, she believed she would not die.
She was in such high spirits she played Chinese checkers all the time with Anna. She played Sorry, or any game Anna wanted. The night before she was to leave—she had arranged for a taxi to pick her up, at half-past five in the morning—they were playing Chinese checkers, and Anna said, “Oh, I can’t see with these blue ones,” and drooped over the board, about to cry, which she never did, in a game. Rose touched her forehead and led her, complaining, to bed. Her temperature was a hundred and two. It was too late to phone Tom at his office and of course Rose couldn’t phone him at home. She did phone the taxi, and the airport, to cancel. Even if Anna seemed better in the morning, she wouldn’t be able to go. She went over and told the girl who had been going to stay with Anna, then phoned the man who was arranging the conference, in Calgary. “Oh God, yes,” he said. “Kids!” In the morning, with Anna wrapped in her blanket, watching cartoons, she phoned Tom in his office. “You’re here, you’re here!” he said. “Where are you?”
Then she had to tell him.
Anna coughed, her fever went up and down. Rose tried to get the heat up, fiddled with the thermostat, drained the radiators, phoned the landlord’s office and left a message. He didn’t phone back. She phoned him at home at seven o’clock the next morning, told him her child had bronchitis (which she may have believed at the time, but it was not true), told him she would give him one hour to get her some heat or she would phone the newspaper, she would denounce him over the radio, she would sue him, she would find the proper channels. He came at once, with a put-upon face (a poor man trying to make ends meet bedeviled by hysterical women), he did something to the thermostat in the hall, and the radiators started to get hot. The teachers told Rose that he had the hall thermostat fixed to control the heat and that he had never given in to protests before. She felt proud, she felt like a fierce slum mother who had screamed and sworn and carried on, for her child’s sake. She forgot that slum mothers are seldom fierce, being too tired and bewildered. It was her middle-class certainties, her expectations of justice, that had given her such energy, such a high-handed style of abuse; that had scared him.
After two days she had to go back to work. Anna had improved, but Rose was worried all the time. She could not swallow a cup of coffee, for the chunk of anxiety in her throat. Anna was all right, she took her cough medicine, she sat up in bed, crayoning. When her mother came home she had a story to tell her. It was about some princesses.
There was a white princess who dressed all in bride clothes and wore pearls. Swans and lambs and polar bears were her pets, and she had lilies and narcissus in her garden. She ate mashed potatoes, vanilla ice cream, shredded coconut and meringue off the top of pies. A pink princess grew roses and ate strawberries, kept flamingoes (Anna described them, could not think of the name) on a leash. The blue princess subsisted on grapes and ink. The brown princess though drably dressed feasted better than anybody; she had roast beef and gravy and chocolate cake with chocolate icing, also chocolate ice cream with chocolate fudge sauce. What was there in her garden?
“Rude things,” said Anna. “All over the ground.”
This time Tom and Rose did not refer so openly to their disap pointment. They had begun to hold back a little, maybe to suspect that they were unlucky for each other. They wrote tenderly, carefully, amusingly, and almost as if the last failure had not happened.
In March he phoned to tell her that his wife and children were going to England. He was going to join them there, but later, ten days later. So there will be ten days, cried Rose, blotting out the long absence to come (he was to stay in England until the end of the summer). It turned out not to be ten days, not quite, because he was obliged to go to Madison, Wisconsin, on the way to England. But you must come here first, Rose said, swallowing this disappointment, how long can you stay, can you stay a week? She pictured them eating long sunny breakfasts. She saw herself in the Emperor’s nightingale outfit. She would have filtered coffee (she must buy a filter pot) and that good bitter marmalade in the stone jar. She didn’t give any thought to her morning chores at the station.
He said he didn’t know about that, his mother was coming to help Pamela and the children get off, and he couldn’t just pack up and leave her. It would really be so much better, he said, if she could come to Calgary.
Then he became very happy and said they would go to Banff. They would take three or four days’ holiday, could she manage that, how about a long weekend? She said wasn’t Banff difficult for him, he might run into someone he knew. He said no, no, it would be all right. She wasn’t quite so happy as he was because she hadn’t altogether liked being in the hotel with him, in Victoria. He had gone down to the lobby to get a paper, and phoned their room, to see if she knew enough not to answer. She knew enough, but the maneuver depressed her. Nevertheless she said fine, wonderful, and they got calendars at each end of the phone, so that they could figure out which days. They could take in a weekend, she had a weekend coming to her. And she could probably manage Friday as well, and part at least of Monday. Dorothy could do the absolutely necessary things for her. Dorothy owed her some working time. Rose had covered for her, when she was fogged in, in Seattle; she had spent an hour on the air reading household hints and recipes she never believed would work.
She had nearly two weeks to make the arrangements. She spoke to the teacher again and the teacher said she could come. She bought a sweater. She hoped she would not
be expected to learn to ski, in that time. There must be walks they could take. She thought they would spend most of their time eating and drinking and talking and making love. Thoughts of this latter exercise troubled her a bit. Their talk on the phone was decorous, almost shy, but their letters, now that they were sure of meeting, were filled with inflammatory promises. These were what Rose loved reading and writing, but she could not remember Tom as clearly as she wanted to. She could remember what he looked like, that he was not very tall, and spare, with gray waving hair and a long, clever face, but she could not remember any little, maddening things about him, any tone or smell. The thing she could remember too well was that their time in Victoria had not been completely successful; she could remember something between a curse and an apology, the slippery edge of failure. This made her especially eager to try again, to succeed.
She was to leave Friday, early in the morning, taking the same bus and plane she had planned to take before.
Tuesday morning it began to snow. She did not pay much attention. It was wet, pretty snow, coming straight down in big flakes. She wondered if it would be snowing in Banff. She hoped so, she liked the idea of lying in bed and watching it. It snowed more or less steadily for two days, and late Thursday afternoon when she went to pick up her ticket at the travel agency they told her the airport had been closed. She did not show or even feel any worry; she was a bit relieved, that she would not have to fly. How about trains, she said, but of course the train didn’t go to Calgary, it went down to Spokane. She knew that already. Then the bus, she said. They phoned to make sure the highways were open and the buses were running. During that conversation her heart began to pound a bit, but it was all right, everything was all right, the bus was running. It won’t be much fun, they said, it leaves here at half-past twelve, that’s twelve midnight, and it gets into Calgary around 2 p.m. the next day.
