by Alice Munro
This vision did not survive the first two days of being home.
“WOULD YOU LIKE a pudding?” Rose said.
“Oh, I don’t care.”
The elaborate carelessness some people will show, the gleam of hope, on being offered a drink.
Rose made a trifle. Berries, peaches, custard, cake, whipped cream and sweet sherry.
Flo ate half the bowlful. She dipped in greedily, not bothering to transfer a portion to a smaller bowl.
“That was lovely,” she said. Rose had never heard such an admission of grateful pleasure from her. “Lovely,” said Flo and sat remembering, appreciating, belching a little. The suave dreamy custard, the nipping berries, robust peaches, luxury of sherry-soaked cake, munificence of whipped cream.
Rose thought that she had never done anything in her life that came near pleasing Flo as this did.
“I’ll make another soon.”
Flo recovered herself. “Oh well. You do what you like.”
Rose drove out to the County Home. She was conducted through it. She tried to tell Flo about it when she came back.
“Whose home?” said Flo.
“No, the County Home.”
Rose mentioned some people she had seen there. Flo would not admit to knowing any of them. Rose spoke of the view and the pleasant rooms. Flo looked angry; her face darkened and she stuck out her lip. Rose handed her a mobile she had bought for fifty cents in the County Home Crafts Center. Cutout birds of blue and yellow paper were bobbing and dancing, on undetectable currents of air.
“Stick it up your arse,” said Flo.
Rose put the mobile up in the porch and said she had seen the trays coming up, with supper on them.
“They go to the dining room if they’re able, and if they’re not they have trays in their rooms. I saw what they were having.
“Roast beef, well done, mashed potatoes and green beans, the frozen not the canned kind. Or an omelette. You could have a mushroom omelette or a chicken omelette or a plain omelette, if you liked.”
“What was for dessert?”
“Ice cream. You could have sauce on it.” “What kind of sauce was there?” “Chocolate. Butterscotch. Walnut.”
“I can’t eat walnuts.”
“There was marshmallow too.”
OUT AT THE HOME the old people were arranged in tiers. On the first floor were the bright and tidy ones. They walked around, usually with the help of canes. They visited each other, played cards. They had singsongs and hobbies. In the Crafts Center they painted pictures, hooked rugs, made quilts. If they were not able to do things like that they could make rag dolls, mobiles like the one Rose bought, poodles and snowmen which were constructed of Styrofoam balls, with sequins for eyes; they also made silhouette pictures by placing thumbtacks on traced outlines; knights on horseback, battleships, airplanes, castles.
They organized concerts; they held dances; they had checker tournaments.
“Some of them say they are the happiest here they have ever been in their lives.”
Up one floor there was more television watching, there were more wheelchairs. There were those whose heads drooped, whose tongues lolled, whose limbs shook uncontrollably. Nevertheless sociability was still flourishing, also rationality, with occasional blanks and absences.
On the third floor you might get some surprises.
Some of them up there had given up speaking.
Some had given up moving, except for odd jerks and tosses of the head, flailing of the arms, that seemed to be without purpose or control.
Nearly all had given up worrying about whether they were wet or dry.
Bodies were fed and wiped, taken up and tied in chairs, untied and put to bed. Taking in oxygen, giving out carbon dioxide, they continued to participate in the life of the world.
Crouched in her crib, diapered, dark as a nut, with three tufts of hair like dandelion floss sprouting from her head, an old woman was making loud shaky noises.
“Hello Aunty,” the nurse said. “You’re spelling today. It’s lovely weather outside.” She bent to the old woman’s ear. “Can you spell weather?”
This nurse showed her gums when she smiled, which was all the time; she had an air of nearly demented hilarity.
“Weather,” said the old woman. She strained forward, grunting, to get the word. Rose thought she might be going to have a bowel movement. “W-E-A-T-H-E-R.”
That reminded her.
“Whether. W-H-E-T-H-E-R.”
So far so good.
“Now you say something to her,” the nurse said to Rose.
The words in Rose’s mind were for a moment all obscene or despairing.
But without prompting came another.
“Forest. F-O-R-E-S-T.”
“Celebrate,” said Rose suddenly.
“C-E-L-E-B-R-A-T-E.”
You had to listen very hard to make out what the old woman was saying, because she had lost much of the power to shape sounds. What she said seemed not to come from her mouth or her throat, but from deep in her lungs and belly.
“Isn’t she a wonder,” the nurse said. “She can’t see and that’s the only way we can tell she can hear. Like if you say, ‘Here’s your dinner.’ she won’t pay any attention to it, but she might start spelling dinner,
“Dinner,” she said, to illustrate, and the old woman picked it up. “D-I-N-N …” Sometimes a long wait, a long wait between letters.
It seemed she had only the thinnest thread to follow, meandering through that emptiness or confusion that nobody on this side can do more than guess at. But she didn’t lose it, she followed it through to the end, however tricky the word might be, or cumbersome. Finished. Then she was sitting waiting; waiting, in the middle of her sightless eventless day, till up from somewhere popped another word. She would encompass it, bend all her energy to master it. Rose wondered what the words were like, when she held them in her mind. Did they carry their usual meaning, or any meaning at all? Were they like words in dreams or in the minds of young children, each one marvelous and distinct and alive as a new animal? This one limp and clear, like a jellyfish, that one hard and mean and secretive, like a horned snail. They could be austere and comical as top hats, or smooth and lively and flattering as ribbons. A parade of private visitors, not over yet.
SOMETHING WOKE ROSE early the next morning. She was sleeping in the little porch, the only place in Flo’s house where the smell was bearable. The sky was milky and brightening. The trees across the river due to be cut down soon, to make room for a trailer park—were hunched against the dawn sky like shaggy dark animals, like buffalo. Rose had been dreaming. She had been having a dream obviously connected with her tour of the Home the day before.
Someone was taking her through a large building where there were people in cages. Everything was dim and cobwebby at first, and Rose was protesting that this seemed a poor arrangement. But as she went on the cages got larger and more elaborate, they were like enormous wicker birdcages, Victorian birdcages, fancifully shaped and decorated. Food was being offered to the people in the cages and Rose examined it, saw that it was choice; chocolate mousse, trifle, Black Forest Cake. Then in one of the cages Rose spotted Flo, who was handsomely seated on a throne-like chair, spelling out words in a clear authoritative voice (what the words were, Rose, wakening, could not remember) and looking pleased with herself, for showing powers she had kept secret till now.
Rose listened to hear Flo breathing, stirring, in her rubble-lined room. She heard nothing. What if Flo had died? Suppose she had died at the very moment she was making her radiant, satisfied appearance in Rose’s dream? Rose hurried out of bed, ran barefoot to Flo’s room. The bed there was empty. She went into the kitchen and found Flo sitting at the table, dressed to go out, wearing the navy blue summer coat and matching turban hat she had worn to Brian’s and Phoebe’s wedding. The coat was rumpled and in need of cleaning, the turban was crooked.
“Now I’m ready for to go,” Flo said.
“Go where?”
“Out there,” said Flo, jerking her head. “Out to the whattayacallit.
The Poorhouse.”
“The Home,” said Rose. “You don’t have to go today.”
“They hired you to take me, now you get a move on and take me,”
Flo said.
“I’m not hired. I’m Rose. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
“You can make it. I won’t drink it.”
She made Rose think of a woman who had started in labor.
Such was her concentration, her determination, her urgency. Rose thought Flo felt her death moving in her like a child, getting ready to tear her. So she gave up arguing, she got dressed, hastily packed a bag for Flo, got her to the car and drove her out to the Home, but in the matter of Flo’s quickly tearing and relieving death she was mistaken.
SOME TIME BEFORE THIS, Rose had been in a play, on national television. The Trojan Women. She had no lines, and in fact she was in the play simply to do a favor for a friend, who had got a better part elsewhere. The director thought to liven all the weeping and mourning by having the Trojan women go bare-breasted. One breast apiece, they showed, the right in the case of royal personages such as Hecuba and Helen; the left, in the case of ordinary virgins or wives, such as Rose. Rose didn’t think herself enhanced by this exposure—she was getting on, after all, her bosom tended to flop—but she got used to the idea. She didn’t count on the sensation they would create. She didn’t think many people would be watching. She forgot about those parts of the country where people can’t exercise their preference for quiz shows, police-car chases, American situation comedies, and are compelled to put up with talks on public affairs and tours of art galleries and ambitious offerings of drama. She did not think they would be so amazed, either, now that every magazine rack in every town was serving up slices and cutlets of bare flesh. How could such outrage fasten on the Trojan ladies’ sad-eyed collection, puckered with cold then running with sweat under the lights, badly and chalk-ily made-up, all looking rather foolish without their mates, rather pitiful and unnatural, like tumors?
Flo took to pen and paper over that, forced her stiff swollen fingers, crippled almost out of use with arthritis, to write the word Shame. She wrote that if Rose’s father had not been dead long ago he would now wish that he was. That was true. Rose read the letter, or part of it, out loud to some friends she was having for dinner. She read it for comic effect, and dramatic effect, to show the gulf that lay behind her, though she did realize, if she thought about it, that such a gulf was nothing special. Most of her friends, who seemed to her ordinarily hard-working, anxious, and hopeful, people, could lay claim to being disowned or prayed for, in some disappointed home.
Halfway through, she had to stop reading. It wasn’t that she thought how shabby it was, to be exposing and making fun of Flo this way. She had done it often enough before; it was no news to her that it was shabby. What stopped her was, in fact, that gulf; she had a fresh and overwhelming realization of it, and it was nothing to laugh about. These reproaches of Flo’s made as much sense as a protest about raising umbrellas, a warning against eating raisins. But they were painfully, truly, meant; they were all a hard life had to offer. Shame on a bare breast.
Another time, Rose was getting an award. So were several other people. A reception was being held, in a Toronto hotel. Flo had been sent an invitation, but Rose had never thought that she would come. She had thought she should give someone’s name, when the organizers asked about relatives, and she could hardly name Brian and Phoebe. Of course it was possible that she did, secretly, want Flo to come, wanted to show Flo, intimidate her, finally remove herself from Flo’s shade. That would be a natural thing to want to do.
Flo came down on the train, unannounced. She got to the hotel. She was arthritic then, but still moving without a cane. She had always been decently, soberly, cheaply, dressed, but now it seemed she had spent money and asked advice. She was wearing a mauve and purple checked pants suit, and beads like strings of white and yellow popcorn. Her hair was covered by a thick gray-blue wig, pulled low on her forehead like a woollen cap. From the vee of the jacket, and its too-short sleeves, her neck and wrists stuck out brown and warty as if covered with bark. ‘When she saw Rose she stood still. She seemed to be waiting—not just for Rose to go over to her but for her feelings about the scene in front of her to crystallize.
Soon they did.
“Look at the Nigger!” said Flo in a loud voice, before Rose was anywhere near her. Her tone was one of simple, gratified astonishment, as if she had been peering down the Grand Canyon or seen oranges growing on a tree.
She meant George, who was getting one of the awards. He turned around, to see if someone was feeding him a comic line. And Flo did look like a comic character, except that her bewilderment, her authenticity, were quite daunting. Did she note the stir she had caused? Possibly. After that one outburst she clammed up, would not speak again except in the most grudging monosyllables, would not eat any food or drink any drink offered her, would not sit down, but stood astonished and unflinching in the middle of that gathering of the bearded and beaded, the unisexual and the unashamedly un-Anglo-Saxon, until it was time for her to be taken to her train and sent home.
ROSE FOUND THAT WIG under the bed, during the horrifying clean-up that followed Flo’s removal. She took it out to the Home, along with some clothes she had washed or had dry-cleaned, and some stockings, talcum powder, cologne, that she had bought. Sometimes Flo seemed to think Rose was a doctor, and she said, “I don’t want no woman doctor, you can just clear out.” But when she saw Rose carrying the wig she said, “Rose! What is that you got in your hand, is it a dead gray squirrel!?”
“No,” said Rose, “it’s a wig.”
“What?”
“A wig,” said Rose, and Flo began to laugh. Rose laughed too. The wig did look like a dead cat or squirrel, even though she had washed and brushed it; it was a disturbing-looking object.
“My God, Rose, I thought what is she doing bringing me a dead squirrel! If I put it on somebody’d be sure to take a shot at me.”
Rose stuck it on her own head, to continue the comedy, and Flo laughed so that she rocked back and forth in her crib.
When she got her breath Flo said, “What am I doing with these damn sides up on my bed? Are you and Brian behaving yourselves? Don’t fight, it gets on your father’s nerves. Do you know how many gallstones they took out of me? Fifteen! One as big as a pullet’s egg. I got them somewhere. I’m going to take them home.” She pulled at the sheets, searching. “They were in a bottle.”
“I’ve got them already,” said Rose. “I took them home.”
“Did you? Did you show your father?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, that’s where they are then,” said Flo, and she lay down and closed her eyes.
Who Do You Think You Are?
There were some things Rose and her brother Brian could safely talk about, without running aground on principles or statements of position, and one of them was Milton Homer. They both remembered that when they had measles and there was a quarantine notice put up on the door—this was long ago, before their father died and before Brian went to school—Milton Homer came along the street and read it. They heard him coming over the bridge and as usual he was complaining loudly. His progress through town was not silent unless his mouth was full of candy; otherwise he would be yelling at dogs and bullying the trees and telephone poles, mulling over old grievances.
“And I did not and I did not and I did not!” he yelled, and hit the bridge railing.
Rose and Brian pulled back the quilt that was hung over the window to keep the light out, so they would not go blind.
“Milton Homer,” said Brian appreciatively.
Milton Homer then saw the notice on the door. He turned and mounted the steps and read it. He could read. He would go along the main street reading all the signs out loud.
Rose and Brian remembered thi
s and they agreed that it was the side door, where Flo later stuck on the glassed-in porch; before that there was only a slanting wooden platform, and they remembered Milton Homer standing on it. If the quarantine notice was there and not on the front door, which led into Flo’s store, then the store must have been open; that seemed odd, and could only be explained by Flo’s having bullied the Health Officer. Rose couldn’t remember; she could only remember Milton Homer on the platform with his big head on one side and his fist raised to knock.
“Measles, huh?” said Milton Homer. He didn’t knock, after all; he stuck his head close to the door and shouted, “Can’t scare me!” Then he turned around but did not leave the yard. He walked over to the swing, sat down, took hold of the ropes and began moodily, then with mounting and ferocious glee, to give himself a ride.
“Milton Homer’s on the swing, Milton Homer’s on the swing!” Rose shouted. She had run from the window to the stairwell.
Flo came from wherever she was to look out the side window. “He won’t hurt it,” said Flo surprisingly. Rose had thought she would chase him with the broom. Afterwards she wondered: could Flo have been frightened? Not likely. It would be a matter of Milton Homer’s privileges.
“I can’t sit on the seat after Milton Homer’s sat on it!”
“You! You go on back to bed.”
Rose went back into the dark smelly measles room and began to tell Brian a story she thought he wouldn’t like.
“When you were a baby, Milton Homer came and picked you up.” “He did not.”
“He came and held you and asked what your name was. I remember.”
Brian went out to the stairwell.
“Did Milton Homer come and pick me up and ask what my name was? Did he? When I was a baby?”
