by Alice Munro
“That’s all right.”
“You must really want to get to Calgary,” the grubby young man said. This was a most ramshackle informal travel agency, set up in a hotel lobby outside the door of the beer parlor.
“It’s Banff, actually,” she said brazenly. “And I do.”
“Going to do some skiing?”
“Maybe.” She was convinced he guessed everything. She didn’t know then how commonplace such illicit jaunts were; she thought the aura of sin was dancing round her like half-visible flames on a gas burner.
She went home thinking she would be better off, really, sitting on the bus, getting closer and closer to Tom, than lying in bed unable to sleep. She would just have to ask the teacher to move in tonight.
The teacher was waiting for her, playing Chinese checkers with Anna. “Oh, I don’t know how to tell you,” she said; “I’m so awfully sorry but something’s happened.”
She said her sister had had a miscarriage and was in need of her help. Her sister lived in Vancouver.
“My boyfriend is driving me down tomorrow if we can get through.”
This was the first Rose had heard of any boyfriend, and she immediately suspected the whole story. Some flying chance the girl was off on; she too had smelled love and hope. Somebody’s husband, maybe, or some boy her own age. Rose looked at her once-acned face now rosy with shame and excitement and knew she would never budge her. The teacher went on to embroider her story with talk of her sister’s two little children; both boys, and they had been just longing for a girl.
Rose started phoning, to get somebody else. She phoned students, wives of the men she worked with, who might be able to give her names; she phoned Dorothy who hated children. It was no use. She followed leads that people had given her, though she realized these were probably worthless, given only to get rid of her. She was ashamed of her persistence. At last Anna said, “I could stay here by myself.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I did before. When I was sick and you had to go to work.” “How would you like,” said Rose, and felt a true sudden pleasure at so easy and reckless a solution, “how would you like to come to Banff?”
They packed in a great rush. Fortunately Rose had been to the laundromat the night before. She did not allow herself to think about what Anna would do in Banff, about who would pay for the extra room, about whether Anna would in fact agree to having a separate room. She threw in coloring books and story books and messy kits of do-it-yourself decorations, anything she thought might do for amusement. Anna was excited by the turn of events, not dismayed at the thought of the bus ride. Rose remembered to call ahead of time for the taxi to pick them up at midnight.
They almost got stuck driving down to the bus depot. Rose thought what a good idea it had been to call the taxi half an hour ahead of time, for what was usually a five-minute drive. The bus depot was an old service station, a dreary place. She left Anna on a bench with the luggage and went to buy their tickets. When she came back Anna was drooped over the suitcase, having given way to sleepiness as soon as her mother’s back was turned.
“You can sleep on the bus.”
Anna straightened up, denied being tired. Rose hoped it would be warm on the bus. Perhaps she should have brought a blanket, to wrap around Anna. She had thought of it, but they had enough to carry already, with the shopping bag full of Anna’s books and amusements; it was too much to think of arriving in Calgary straggle-haired, cranky and constipated, with crayons spilling from the bag and a trailing blanket as well. She had decided not to.
There were just a few other passengers waiting. A young couple in jeans, looking cold and undernourished. A poor, respectable old woman wearing her winter hat; Indian grandmother with a baby. A man lying on one of the benches looked sick or drunk. Rose hoped he was just in the bus depot getting warm, not waiting for the bus, because he looked as if he might throw up. Or if he was getting on the bus, she hoped he would throw up now, not later. She thought she had better take Anna to the washroom here. However unpleasant it was, it was probably better than what they had on the bus. Anna was wandering around looking at the cigarette machines, candy machines, drink and sandwich machines. Rose wondered if she should buy some sandwiches, some watery hot chocolate. Once into the mountains, she might wish she had.
Suddenly she thought that she had forgotten to phone Tom, to tell him to meet the bus not the plane. She would do it when they stopped for breakfast.
Attention all passengers waiting for the bus to Cranbrook, Radium Hot Springs, Golden, Calgary. Your bus has been canceled. Bus due to leave here at twelve-thirty has been canceled.
Rose went up to the wicket and said what is this, what happened, tell me, is the highway closed? Yawning, the man told her, “It’s closed past Cranbrook. Open from here to Cranbrook but closed past that. And closed west of here to Grand Forks so the bus won’t even get here tonight.”
Calmly, Rose asked, what were the other buses she could take? “What do you mean, other buses?”
“Well, isn’t there a bus to Spokane? I could get from there to Calgary.”
Unwillingly he pulled out his schedules. Then they both remembered that if the highway was closed between here and Grand Forks, that was no good, no bus would be coming through. Rose thought of the train to Spokane, then the bus to Calgary. She could never do it, it would be impossible with Anna. Nevertheless she asked about trains, had he heard anything about the trains?
“Heard they’re running twelve hours late.”
She kept standing at the wicket, as if some solution was owing to her, would have to appear.
“I can’t do anything more for you here, lady.”
She turned away and saw Anna at the pay phones, fiddling with the coin return boxes. Sometimes she found a dime that way.
Anna came walking over, not running, but walking quickly, in an unnaturally sedate and agitated way. “Come here,” she said, “come here.” She pulled Rose, numb as she was, over to one of the pay phones. She dipped the coin box towards her. It was full of silver. Full. She began scraping it into her hand. Quarters, nickels, dimes. More and more. She filled her pockets. It looked as if the box was refilling every time she closed it, as it might in a dream or a fairy tale. Finally she did empty it, she picked out the last dime. She looked up at Rose with a pale, tired, blazing face.
“Don’t say anything,” she commanded.
Rose told her that they were not going on the bus after all. She phoned for the same taxi, to take them home. Anna accepted the change in plans without interest. Rose noticed that she settled herself very carefully into the taxi, so that the coins would not clink in her pockets.
In the apartment Rose made herself a drink. Without taking off her boots or her coat Anna started spreading the money out on the kitchen table and separating it into piles to be counted.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t be-lieve it.” She was using a strange adult voice, a voice of true astonishment masked by social astonishment, as if the only way she could control and deal with the event was to dramatize it in this way.
“It must be from a long distance call,” said Rose. “The money didn’t go through. I suppose it all belongs to the phone company.”
“But we can’t give it back, can we?” said Anna, guilty and triumphant, and Rose said no.
“It’s crazy,” Rose said. She meant the idea of the money belonging to the phone company. She was tired and mixed-up but beginning to feel temporarily and absurdly light-hearted. She could see showers of coins coming down on them, or snowstorms; what carelessness there was everywhere, what elegant caprice.
They tried to count it, but kept getting confused. They played with it instead, dropping coins ostentatiously through their fingers. That was a giddy time late at night in the rented kitchen on the mountainside. Bounty where you’d never look for it; streaks of loss and luck. One of the few times, one of the few hours, when Rose could truly say she was not at the mercy of past or future,
or love, or anybody. She hoped it was the same for Anna.
Tom wrote her a long letter, a loving humorous letter, mentioning fate. A grieved, relieved renunciation, before he set off for England. Rose didn’t have any address for him, there, or she might have written asking him to give them another chance. That was her nature.
This last snow of the winter was quickly gone, causing some flooding in the valleys. Patrick wrote that he would drive up in June, when school was out, and take Anna back with him for the summer. He said he wanted to start the divorce, because he had met a girl he wanted to marry. Her name was Elizabeth. He said she was a fine and stable person.
And did Rose not think, said Patrick, that it might be better for Anna to be settled in her old home next year, in the home she had always known, to be back at her old school with her old friends (Jeremy kept asking about her) rather than traipsing around with Rose in her new independent existence? Might it not be true—and here Rose thought she heard the voice of the stable girlfriend— that she was using Anna to give herself some stability, rather than face up to the consequences of the path she had chosen? Of course, he said, Anna must be given her choice.
Rose wanted to reply that she was making a home for Anna here, but she could not do that, truthfully. She no longer wanted to stay. The charm, the transparency, of this town was gone for her. The pay was poor. She would never be able to afford anything but this cheap apartment. She might never get a better job, or another lover. She was thinking of going east, going to Toronto, trying to get a job there, with a radio or television station, perhaps even some acting jobs. She wanted to take Anna with her, set them up again in some temporary shelter. It was just as Patrick said. She wanted to come home to Anna, to fill her life with Anna. She didn’t think Anna would choose that life. Poor, picturesque, gypsying childhoods are not much favored by children, though they will claim to value them, for all sorts of reasons, later on.
Anna went to live with Patrick and Elizabeth. She began to take drama and ballet lessons. Elizabeth thought she should have some accomplishments, and keep busy. They gave her the four-poster bed, with a new canopy, and got her a kitten.
Elizabeth made her a nightgown and cap to match the bed. They sent Rose a picture of her sitting there, with the kitten, looking demure and satisfied in the midst of all that flowered cloth.
The spotted fish died first, then the orange one. That was before Anna left. Neither suggested another trip to Woolworth’s, so that the black one should have company. It didn’t look as if it wanted company. Swollen, bug-eyed, baleful and at ease, it commanded the whole fishbowl for its own.
Anna made Rose promise not to flush it down the toilet after she, Anna, was gone. Rose promised, and before she left for Toronto she walked over to Dorothy’s house, carrying the fishbowl, to make her this unwelcome present. Dorothy accepted it decently, said she would name it after the man from Seattle, and congratulated Rose on leaving.
Rose set to work cleaning out the apartment, finding marbles and drawings and some letters by Anna begun—mostly at Rose’s instigation—and never finished, never mailed.
Dear Daddy,
I am fine. Are you? I was sick but I am fine now. I hope you are not sick.
Dear Jeremy,
How tall are you now? I am fine.
Simon’s Luck
Rose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations. She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night family suppers. It’s no good telling herself she wouldn’t be long inside there, chattering and getting drunk, or spooning up the gravy, before she’d wish she was walking the streets. She thinks she could take on any hospitality. She could go to parties in rooms hung with posters, lit by lamps with Coca-Cola shades, everything crumbly and askew; or else in warm professional rooms with lots of books, and brass rubbings, and maybe a skull or two; even in the recreation rooms she can just see the tops of, through the basement windows: rows of beer stems, hunting horns, drinking horns, guns. She could go and sit on lurex-threaded sofas under hangings of black velvet displaying mountains, galleons, polar bears, executed in brushed wool. She would like very much to be dishing up a costly cabinet de diplomate out of a cut-glass bowl in a rich dining room with a big gleaming belly of sideboard behind her, and a dim picture of horses feeding, cows feeding, sheep feeding, on badly painted purple grass. Or she could do as well with batter pudding in the eating nook of a kitchen in a little stucco house by the bus stop, plaster pears and peaches decorating the wall, ivy curling out of little brass pots. Rose is an actress; she can fit in anywhere.
She does get asked to parties. About two years ago, she was at a party in a high-rise apartment building in Kingston. The windows looked out on Lake Ontario and Wolfe Island. Rose didn’t live in Kingston. She lived up-country; she had been teaching drama for two years at a community college. Some people were surprised that she would do this. They did not know how little money an actress might make; they thought that being well-known automatically meant being well-off.
She had driven down to Kingston just for this party, a fact which slightely shamed her. She had not met the hostess before. She had known the host last year, when he was teaching at the community college and living with another girl.
The hostess, whose name was Shelley, took Rose into the bedroom to put down her coat. Shelley was a thin, solemn-looking girl, a true blonde, with nearly white eyebrows, hair long and thick and straight as if cut from a block of wood. It seemed that she took her waif style seriously. Her voice was low and mournful, making Rose’s own voice, her greeting of a moment ago, sound altogether too sprightly in her own ears.
In a basket at the foot of the bed a tortoiseshell cat was suckling four tiny, blind kittens.
“That’s Tasha,” the hosetess said. “We can look at her kittens but we can’t touch them, else she wouldn’t feed them any more.”
She knelt down by the basket, crooning, talking to the mother cat with an intense devotion that Rose thought affected. The shawl around her shoulders was black, trimmed with jet beads. Some beads were crooked, some were missing. It was a genuine old shawl, not an imitation. Her limp, slightly yellowed, eyelet-embroidered dress was genuine too, though probably a petticoat in the first place. Such clothes took looking for.
On the other side of the spool bed was a large mirror, hung suspiciously high, and tilted. Rose tried to get a look at herself when the girl was bent over the basket. It is very hard to look in the mirror when there is another, and particularly a younger, woman in the room. Rose was wearing a flowered cotton dress, a long dress with a tucked bodice and puffed sleeves, which was too short in the waist and too tight in the bust to be comfortable. There was something wrongly youthful or theatrical about it; perhaps she was not slim enough to wear that style. Her reddish-brown hair was dyed at home. Lines ran both ways under her eyes, trapping little diamonds of darkened skin.
Rose knew by now that when she found people affected, as she did this girl, and their rooms coyly decorated, their manner of living irritating (that mirror, the patchwork quilt, the Japanese erotic drawings over the bed, the African music coming from the living room), it was usually because she, Rose, hadn’t received and was afraid she wouldn’t receive the attention she wanted, hadn’t penetrated the party, felt that she might be doomed to hang around on the fringes of things, making judgments.
She felt better in the living room, where there were some people she knew, and some faces as old as her own. She drank quickly at first, and before long was using the newborn kittens as a springboard for her own story. She said that something dreadful had happened to her cat that very day.
“The worst of it is,” she said, “that I never liked my cat much. It wasn’t my idea to have a cat. It was his. He followed me home one day and insisted on being taken in. He was just like some big sneering hulk of an unemployable, set on convincing me I owed him a living. Well, he always had a fondness for the clothes dryer. He li
ked to jump in when it was warm, as soon as I’d taken the clothes out. Usually I just have one load but today I had two, and when I reached in to take the second load out, I thought I felt something. I thought, what do I have that’s fur?”
People moaned or laughed, in a sympathetically horrified way. Rose looked around at them appealingly. She felt much better. The living room, with its lake view, its careful decor (a jukebox, barber-shop mirrors, turn-of-the-century advertisements—Smoke, for your throat’s sake—old silk lampshades, farmhouse bowls and jugs, primitive masks and sculptures), no longer seemed so hostile. She took another drink of her gin and knew there was a limited time coming now when she would feel light and welcome as a hummingbird, convinced that many people in the room were witty and many were kind, and some were both together.
“Oh, no, I thought. But it was. It was. Death in the dryer.”
“A warning to all pleasure seekers,” said a little sharp-faced man at her elbow, a man she had known slightly for years. He taught in the English department of the university, where the host taught now, and the hostess was a graduate student.
“That’s terrible,” said the hostess, with her cold, fixed look of sensitivity. Those who had laughed looked a bit abashed, as if they thought they might have seemed heartless. “Your cat. That’s terrible. How could you come tonight?”
As a matter of fact the incident had not happened today at all; it had happened last week. Rose wondered if the girl meant to put her at a disadvantage. She said sincerely and regretfully that she hadn’t been very fond of the cat and that had made it seem worse, somehow. That’s what she was trying to explain, she said.
