by Alice Munro
Recently he and Prue were having dinner at his house. He had made Chicken Kiev, and crème brûlée for dessert. Like most new, serious cooks, he talked about food.
Gordon is rich, by Prue’s—and most people’s—standards. He is a neurologist. His house is new, built on a hillside north of the city, where there used to be picturesque, unprofitable farms. Now there are one-of-a-kind, architect-designed, very expensive houses on half-acre lots. Prue, describing Gordon’s house, will say, “Do you know there are four bathrooms? So that if four people want to have baths at the same time there’s no problem. It seems a bit much, but it’s very nice, really, and you’d never have to go through the hall.”
Gordon’s house has a raised dining area—a sort of platform, surrounded by a conversation pit, a music pit, and a bank of heavy greenery under sloping glass. You can’t see the entrance area from the dining area, but there are no intervening walls, so that from one area you can hear something of what is going on in the other.
During dinner the doorbell rang. Gordon excused himself and went down the steps. Prue heard a female voice. The person it belonged to was still outside, so she could not hear the words. She heard Gordon’s voice, pitched low, cautioning. The door didn’t close—it seemed the person had not been invited in—but the voices went on, muted and angry. Suddenly there was a cry from Gordon, and he appeared halfway up the steps, waving his arms.
“The crème brûlée,” he said. “Could you?” He ran back down as Prue got up and went into the kitchen to save the dessert. When she returned he was climbing the stairs more slowly, looking both agitated and tired.
“A friend,” he said gloomily. “Was it all right?”
Prue realized he was speaking of the crème brûlée, and she said yes, it was perfect, she had got it just in time. He thanked her but did not cheer up. It seemed it was not the dessert he was troubled over but whatever had happened at the door. To take his mind off it, Prue started asking him professional questions about the plants.
“I don’t know a thing about them,” he said. “You know that.”
“I thought you might have picked it up. Like the cooking.”
“She takes care of them.”
“Mrs. Carr?” said Prue, naming his housekeeper.
“Who did you think?”
Prue blushed. She hated to be thought suspicious.
“The problem is that I think I would like to marry you,” said Gordon, with no noticeable lightening of his spirits. Gordon is a large man, with heavy features. He likes to wear thick clothing, bulky sweaters. His blue eyes are often bloodshot, and their expression indicates that there is a helpless, baffled soul squirming around inside this doughty fortress.
“What a problem,” said Prue lightly, though she knew Gordon well enough to know that it was.
The doorbell rang again, rang twice, three times, before Gordon could get to it. This time there was a crash, as of something flung and landing hard. The door slammed and Gordon was immediately back in view. He staggered on the steps and held his hand to his head, meanwhile making a gesture with the other hand to signify that nothing serious had happened, Prue was to sit down.
“Bloody overnight bag,” he said. “She threw it at me.”
“Did it hit you?”
“Glancing.”
“It made a hard sound for an overnight bag. Were there rocks in it?”
“Probably cans. Her deodorant and so forth.”
“Oh.”
Prue watched him pour himself a drink. “I’d like some coffee, if I might,” she said. She went to the kitchen to put the water on, and Gordon followed her.
“I think I’m in love with this person,” he said.
“Who is she?”
“You don’t know her. She’s quite young.”
“Oh.”
“But I do think I want to marry you, in a few years’ time.”
“After you get over being in love?”
“Yes.”
“Well. I guess nobody knows what can happen in a few years’ time.”
WHEN PRUE TELLS about this, she says, “I think he was afraid I was going to laugh. He doesn’t know why people laugh or throw their overnight bags at him, but he’s noticed they do. He’s such a proper person, really. The lovely dinner. Then she comes and throws her overnight bag. And it’s quite reasonable to think of marrying me in a few years’ time, when he gets over being in love. I think he first thought of telling me to sort of put my mind at rest.”
She doesn’t mention that the next morning she picked up one of Gordon’s cufflinks from his dresser. The cufflinks are made of amber and he bought them in Russia, on the holiday he and wife took when they got back together again. They look like squares of candy, golden, translucent, and this one warms quickly in her hand. She drops it into the pocket of her jacket. Taking one is not a real theft. It could be a reminder, an intimate prank, a piece of nonsense.
She is alone in Gordon’s house; he has gone off early, as he always does. The housekeeper does not come till nine. Prue doesn’t have to be at the shop until ten; she could make herself breakfast, stay and have coffee with the housekeeper, who is her friend from olden times. But once she has the cufflink in her pocket she doesn’t linger. The house seems too bleak a place to spend an extra moment in. It was Prue, actually, who helped choose the building lot. But she’s not responsible for approving the plans—the wife was back by that time.
When she gets home she puts the cufflink in an old tobacco tin. The children bought this tobacco tin in a junk shop years ago, and gave it to her for a present. She used to smoke, in those days, and the children were worried about her, so they gave her this tin full of toffees, jelly beans, and gumdrops, with a note saying, “Please get fat instead.” That was for her birthday. Now the tin has in it several things besides the cufflink—all small things, not of great value but not worthless, either. A little enamelled dish, a sterling-silver spoon for salt, a crystal fish. These are not sentimental keepsakes. She never looks at them, and often forgets what she has there. They are not booty, they don’t have ritualistic significance. She does not take something every time she goes to Gordon’s house, or every time she stays over, or to mark what she might call memorable visits. She doesn’t do it in a daze and she doesn’t seem to be under a compulsion. She just takes something, every now and then, and puts it away in the dark of the old tobacco tin, and more or less forgets about it.
Labor Day Dinner
Just before six o’clock in the evening, George and Roberta and Angela and Eva get out of George’s pickup truck—he traded his car for a pickup when he moved to the country—and walk across Valerie’s front yard, under the shade of two aloof and splendid elm trees that have been expensively preserved. Valerie says those trees cost her a trip to Europe. The grass underneath them has been kept green all summer, and is bordered by fiery dahlias. The house is of pale-red brick, and around the doors and windows there is a decorative outline of lighter-colored bricks, originally white. This style is often found in Grey County; perhaps it was a specialty of one of the early builders.
George is carrying the folding lawn chairs Valerie asked them to bring. Roberta is carrying a dessert, a raspberry bombe made from raspberries picked on their own farm—George’s farm—earlier in the summer. She has packed it in ice cubes and wrapped it in dish towels, but she is eager to get it into the freezer. Angela and Eva carry bottles of wine. Angela and Eva are Roberta’s daughters. It has been arranged between Roberta and her husband that they spend the summers with her and George and the school year in Halifax with him. Roberta’s husband is in the Navy. Angela is seventeen, Eva is twelve.
These four people are costumed in a way that would suggest they were going to different dinner parties. George, who is a stocky, dark, barrel-chested man, with a daunting, professional look of self-assurance and impatience (he used to be a teacher), wears a clean T-shirt and nondescript pants. Roberta is wearing faded tan cotton pants and a loose raw-silk top of mud-brick
color—a color that suits her dark hair and pale skin well enough when she is at her best, but she is not at her best today. When she made herself up in the bathroom, she thought her skin looked like a piece of waxed paper that had been crumpled into a tight ball and then smoothed out. She was momentarily pleased with her thinness and had planned to wear a slinky silver halter top she owns—a glamorous joke—but at the last minute she changed her mind. She is wearing dark glasses, and the reason is that she has taken to weeping in spurts, never at the really bad times but in between; the spurts are as unbidden as sneezes.
As for Angela and Eva, they are dramatically arrayed in outfits contrived from a box of old curtains found in the upstairs of George’s house. Angela wears emerald-green damask with long, sun-faded stripes, draped so as to leave one golden shoulder bare. She has cut vine leaves out of the same damask, pasted them on cardboard, and arranged them in her hair. Angela is tall and fair-haired, and embarrassed by her recently acquired beauty. She will go to great trouble to flaunt it, as she does now, and then will redden and frown and look stubbornly affronted when somebody tells her she looks like a goddess. Eva is wearing several fragile, yellowed lace curtains draped and bunched up, and held together with pins, ribbons, and nosegays of wild phlox already drooping and scattering. One of the curtains is pinned across her forehead and flows behind her, like a nineteen-twenties bridal veil. She has put her shorts on underneath, in case anybody should glimpse underpants through the veiling. Eva is puritanical, outrageous—an acrobat, a parodist, an optimist, a disturber. Her face, under the pinned veil, is lewdly painted with green eyeshadow and dark lipstick and rouge and mascara. The violent colors emphasize her childish look of recklessness and valor.
Angela and Eva have ridden here in the back of the truck, stretched out on the lawn chairs. It is only three miles from George’s place to Valerie’s, but Roberta did not think riding like that was safe—she wanted them to get down and sit on the truck bed. To her surprise, George spoke up on their behalf, saying it would be ignominious for them to have to huddle down on the floor in their finery. He said he would drive slowly and avoid bumps; so he did. Roberta was a little nervous, but she was relieved to see him sympathetic and indulgent about the very things—self-dramatization, self-display— that she had expected would annoy him. She herself has given up wearing long skirts and caftans because of what he has said about disliking the sight of women trailing around in such garments, which announce to him, he says, not only a woman’s intention of doing no serious work but her persistent wish to be admired and courted. This is a wish George has no patience with and has spent some energy, throughout his adult life, in thwarting.
Roberta thought that after speaking in such a friendly way to the girls, and helping them into the truck, he might speak to her when he got into the cab, might even take her hand, brushing away her undis-closed crimes, but it did not happen. Shut up together, driving over the hot gravel roads at an almost funereal pace, they are pinned down by a murderous silence. On the edge of it, Roberta feels herself curling up like a jaundiced leaf. She knows this to be a hysterical image. Also hysterical is the notion of screaming and opening the door and throwing herself on the gravel. She ought to make an effort not to be hysterical, not to exaggerate. But surely it is hatred—what else can it be?—that George is steadily manufacturing and wordlessly pouring out at her, and surely it is a deadly gas. She tries to break the silence herself, making little clucks of worry as she tightens the towels over the bombe and then sighing—a noisy imitation sigh meant to sound tired, pleased, and comfortable. They are driving between high stands of corn, and she thinks how ugly the corn looks—a monotonous, coarse-leaved crop, a foolish army. How long has this been going on? Since yesterday morning: she felt it in him before they got out of bed. They went out and got drunk last night to try to better things, but the relief didn’t last.
Before they left for Valerie’s Roberta was in the bedroom, fastening her halter top, and George came in and said, “Is that what you’re wearing?”
“I thought I would, yes. Doesn’t it look all right?”
“Your armpits are flabby.”
“Are they? I’ll put on something with sleeves.”
In the truck, now that she knows he isn’t going to make up, she lets herself hear him say that. A harsh satisfaction in his voice. The satisfaction of airing disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body. That could have been foreseen. She starts humming something, feeling the lightness, the freedom, the great tactical advantage of being the one to whom the wrong has been done, the bleak challenge offered, the unforgivable thing said.
But suppose he doesn’t think it’s unforgivable, suppose in his eyes she’s the one who’s unforgivable? She’s always the one; disasters overtake her daily. It used to be that as soon as she noticed some deterioration she would seek strenuously to remedy it. Now the remedies bring more problems. She applies cream frantically to her wrinkles, and her face breaks out in spots, like a teen-ager’s. Dieting until her waist was thin enough to please produced a haggard look about her cheeks and throat. Flabby armpits—how can you exercise the armpits? What is to be done? Now the payment is due, and what for? For vanity. Hardly even for that. Just for having those pleasing surfaces once, and letting them speak for you; just for allowing an arrangement of hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You don’t stop in time, don’t know what to do instead; you lay yourself open to humiliation. So thinks Roberta, with self-pity—what she knows to be self-pity—rising and sloshing around in her like bitter bile.
She must get away, live alone, wear sleeves.
VALERIE CALLS TO THEM from a darkened window under the vines, “Go on in, go in. I’m just putting on my panty hose.”
“Don’t put on your panty hose!” cry George and Roberta together. You would think from the sound of their voices that all the way over here they had been engaged in tender and lively conversation.
“Don’t put on your panty hose,” wail Angela and Eva.
“Oh, all right, if there’s all that much prejudice against panty hose,” says Valerie behind her window. “I won’t even put on a dress. I’ll come as I am.”
“Not that!” cries George, and staggers, holding the lawn chairs up in front of his face.
But Valerie, appearing in the doorway, is dressed beautifully, in a loose gown of green and gold and blue. She doesn’t have to worry about George’s opinion of long dresses. She is absolved of blame anyway, because you could never say that Valerie is looking to be courted or admired. She is a tall, flat-chested woman, whose long, plain face seems to be crackling with welcome, eager understanding, with humor and intelligence and appreciation. Her hair is thick, gray-black, and curly. This summer she recklessly cut it off, so that all that is left is a curly crewcut, revealing her long, corded neck and the creases at the edge of her cheeks, and her large, flat ears.
“I think it makes me look like a goat,” she has said. “I like goats. I love their eyes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have those horizontal pupils. Bizarre!”
Her children tell her she is bizarre enough already.
Here come Valerie’s children now, as George and Roberta and Angela and Eva crowd into the hall, Roberta saying that she is dripping ice and must get this pretentious concoction into the freezer. First Ruth, who is twenty-five and nearly six feet tall and looks a lot like her mother. She has given up wanting to be an actress and is learning to teach disturbed children. Her arms are full of goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace and dahlias—weeds and flowers all mixed up together—and she throws them on the hall floor with a theatrical gesture and embraces the bombe.
“Dessert,” she says lovingly. “Oh, bliss! Angela, you look incredibly lovely! Eva, too. I know who Eva is. She’s the Bride of Lammermoor!”
Angela will allow, even delight in, such open praise from Ruth, because Ruth is the person she admires most in the world—possibly the only person she admires.
“The Bride of who?” Eva is asking happily.
“The Bride of who?” David, Valerie’s twenty-one-year-old son, a history student, is standing in the living-room doorway, smiling tolerantly and affectionately at the excitement. David is tall and lean, dark-haired and dark-skinned, like his mother and sister, but he is deliberate, low-voiced, never rash. In this household of many delicate checks and balances it is noticeable that the lively, outspoken women defer to David in some ceremonial way, seeming to ask for the gesture of his protection, though protection itself is something they are not likely to need.
When the greetings die down David says, “This is Kimberly,” and introduces them each in turn to the young woman standing under his arm. She is very clean and trim, in a white skirt and a short-sleeved pink shirt. She wears glasses and no makeup; her hair is short and straight and tidy, and a pleasant light-brown color. She shakes hands with each of them and looks each of them in the eye, through her glasses, and though her manner is entirely polite, even subdued, there is a slight feeling of an official person greeting the members of an unruly, outlandish delegation.
Valerie has known both George and Roberta for years. She knew them long before they knew each other. She and George were on the staff of the same Toronto high school. George was head of the art department; Valerie was school counsellor. She knew George’s wife, a jittery, well-dressed women, who was killed in a plane crash in Florida. George and his wife were separated by that time.
And, of course, Valerie knew Roberta because Roberta’s husband, Andrew, is her cousin. They never cared much for each other— Valerie and Roberta’s husband—and each of them has described the other to Roberta as a stick. Andrew used to say that Valerie was a queer-looking stick and utterly sexless, and when Roberta told Valerie that she was leaving him Valerie said, “Oh, good. He is such a stick.” Roberta was pleased to find such sympathy and pleased that she wouldn’t have to dredge up acceptable reasons; apparently Valerie thought his being a stick was reason enough. At the same time Roberta had a wish to defend her husband and to inquire how on earth Valerie could presume to know whether he was a stick or wasn’t. She can’t get over wishing to defend him; she feels he had such bad luck marrying her.
