by Alice Munro
They didn’t mean any harm. They didn’t have the sense to see that something must be wrong. But Marietta never could stand men laughing. There were always places she hated to go past, let alone into, and that was the reason. Men laughing. Because of that, she hated barbershops, hated their smell. (When she started going to dances later on with my father, she asked him not to put any dressing on his hair, because the smell reminded her.) A bunch of men standing out on the street, outside a hotel, seemed to Marietta like a clot of poison. You tried not to hear what they were saying, but you could be sure it was vile. If they didn’t say anything, they laughed and vileness spread out from them—poison—just the same. It was only after Marietta was saved that she could walk right past them. Armed by God, she walked through their midst and nothing stuck to her, nothing scorched her; she was safe as Daniel.
Now she turned and ran, straight back the way she had come. Up the hill, running to get home. She thought she had made a mistake leaving her mother. Why did her mother tell her to go? Why did she want her father? Quite possibly so that she could greet him with the sight of her own warm body swinging on the end of a rope. Marietta should have stayed—she should have stayed and talked her mother out of it. She should have run to Mrs. Sutcliffe, or any neighbor, not wasted time this way. She hadn’t thought who could help, who could even believe what she was talking about. She had the idea that all families except her own lived in peace, that threats and miseries didn’t exist in other people’s houses, and couldn’t be explained there.
A train was coming into town. Marietta had to wait. Passengers looked out at her from its windows. She broke out wailing in the faces of those strangers. When the train passed, she continued up the hill—a spectacle, with her hair uncombed, her feet bare and muddy, in her nightgown, with a wild, wet face. By the time she ran into her own yard, in sight of the barn, she was howling. “Mama!” she was howling. “Mama!”
Nobody was there. The chair was standing just where it had been before. The rope was dangling over the back of it. Marietta was sure that her mother had gone ahead and done it. Her mother was already dead—she had been cut down and taken away.
But warm, fat hands settled down on her shoulders, and Mrs. Sutcliffe said, “Marietta. Stop the noise. Marietta. Child. Stop the crying. Come inside. She is well, Marietta. Come inside and you will see.”
Mrs. Sutcliffe’s foreign voice said, “Mari-et-cha,” giving the name a rich, important sound. She was as kind as could be. When Marietta lived with the Sutcliffes later, she was treated as the daughter of the household, and it was a household just as peaceful and comfortable as she had imagined other households to be. But she never felt like a daughter there.
In Mrs. Sutcliffe’s kitchen, Beryl sat on the floor eating a raisin cookie and playing with the black-and-white cat, whose name was Dickie. Marietta’s mother sat at the table, with a cup of coffee in front of her.
“She was silly,” Mrs. Sutcliffe said. Did she mean Marietta’s mother or Marietta herself? She didn’t have many English words to describe things.
Marietta’s mother laughed, and Marietta blacked out. She fainted, after running all that way uphill, howling, in the warm, damp morning. Next thing she knew, she was taking black, sweet coffee from a spoon held by Mrs. Sutcliffe. Beryl picked Dickie up by the front legs and offered him as a cheering present. Marietta’s mother was still sitting at the table.
Her heart was broken. That was what I always heard my mother say. That was the end of it. Those words lifted up the story and sealed it shut. I never asked, Who broke it? I never asked, What was the men’s poison talk? What was the meaning of the word “vile”?
Marietta’s mother laughed after not hanging herself. She sat at Mrs. Sutcliffe’s kitchen table long ago and laughed. Her heart was broken.
I always had a feeling, with my mother’s talk and stories, of something swelling out behind. Like a cloud you couldn’t see through, or get to the end of. There was a cloud, a poison, that had touched my mother’s life. And when I grieved my mother, I became part of it. Then I would beat my head against my mother’s stomach and breasts, against her tall, firm front, demanding to be forgiven. My mother would tell me to ask God. But it wasn’t God, it was my mother I had to get straight with. It seemed as if she knew something about me that was worse, far worse, than ordinary lies and tricks and meanness; it was a really sickening shame. I beat against my mother’s front to make her forget that.
My brothers weren’t bothered by any of this. I don’t think so. They seemed to me like cheerful savages, running around free, not having to learn much. And when I just had the two boys myself, no daughters, I felt as if something could stop now—the stories, and griefs, the old puzzles you can’t resist or solve.
Aunt Beryl said not to call her Aunt. “I’m not used to being anybody’s aunt, honey. I’m not even anybody’s momma. I’m just me. Call me Beryl.”
Beryl had started out as a stenographer, and now she had her own typing and bookkeeping business, which employed many girls. She had arrived with a man friend, whose name was Mr. Florence. Her letter had said that she would be getting a ride with a friend, but she hadn’t said whether the friend would be staying or going on. She hadn’t even said if it was a man or a woman.
Mr. Florence was staying. He was a tall, thin man with a long, tanned face, very light-colored eyes, and a way of twitching the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile.
He was the one who got to sleep in the room that my mother and I had papered, because he was the stranger, and a man. Beryl had to sleep with me. At first we thought that Mr. Florence was quite rude, because he wasn’t used to our way of talking and we weren’t used to his. The first morning, my father said to Mr. Florence, “Well, I hope you got some kind of sleep on that old bed in there?” (The spare-room bed was heavenly, with a feather tick.) This was Mr. Florence’s cue to say that he had never slept better.
Mr. Florence twitched. He said, “I slept on worse.”
His favorite place to be was in his car. His car was a royal-blue Chrysler, from the first batch turned out after the war. Inside it, the upholstery and floor covering and roof and door padding were all pearl gray. Mr. Florence kept the names of those colors in mind and corrected you if you said just “blue” or “gray.”
“Mouse skin is what it looks like to me,” said Beryl rambunctiously. “I tell him it’s just mouse skin!”
The car was parked at the side of the house, under the locust trees. Mr. Florence sat inside with the windows rolled up, smoking, in the rich new-car smell.
“I’m afraid we’re not doing much to entertain your friend,” my mother said.
“I wouldn’t worry about him,” said Beryl. She always spoke about Mr. Florence as if there was a joke about him that only she appreciated. I wondered long afterward if he had a bottle in the glove compartment and took a nip from time to time to keep his spirits up. He kept his hat on.
Beryl herself was being entertained enough for two. Instead of staying in the house and talking to my mother, as a lady visitor usually did, she demanded to be shown everything there was to see on a farm. She said that I was to take her around and explain things, and see that she didn’t fall into any manure piles.
I didn’t know what to show. I took Beryl to the icehouse, where chunks of ice the size of dresser drawers, or bigger, lay buried in sawdust. Every few days, my father would chop off a piece of ice and carry it to the kitchen, where it melted in a tin-lined box and cooled the milk and butter.
Beryl said she had never had any idea ice came in pieces that big. She seemed intent on finding things strange, or horrible, or funny.
“Where in the world do you get ice that big?”
I couldn’t tell if that was a joke.
“Off of the lake,” I said.
“Off of the lake! Do you have lakes up here that have ice on them all summer?”
I told her how my father cut the ice on the lake every winter and hauled it home, and buried it in sa
wdust, and that kept it from melting.
Beryl said, “That’s amazing!”
“Well, it melts a little,” I said. I was deeply disappointed in Beryl.
“That’s really amazing.”
Beryl went along when I went to get the cows. A scarecrow in white slacks (this was what my father called her afterward), with a white sun hat tied under her chin by a flaunting red ribbon. Her fingernails and toenails—she wore sandals—were painted to match the ribbon. She wore the small, dark sunglasses people wore at that time. (Not the people I knew—they didn’t own sunglasses.) She had a big red mouth, a loud laugh, hair of an unnatural color and a high gloss, like cherry wood. She was so noisy and shiny, so glamorously got up, that it was hard to tell whether she was good-looking, or happy, or anything.
We didn’t have any conversation along the cowpath, because Beryl kept her distance from the cows and was busy watching where she stepped. Once I had them all tied in their stalls, she came closer. She lit a cigarette. Nobody smoked in the barn. My father and other farmers chewed tobacco there instead. I didn’t see how I could ask Beryl to chew tobacco.
“Can you get the milk out of them or does your father have to?” Beryl said. “Is it hard to do?”
I pulled some milk down through the cow’s teat. One of the barn cats came over and waited. I shot a thin stream into its mouth. The cat and I were both showing off.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” said Beryl. “Think if it was you.”
I had never thought of a cow’s teat as corresponding to any part of myself, and was shaken by this indecency. In fact, I could never grasp a warm, warty teat in such a firm and casual way again.
Beryl slept in a peach-colored rayon nightgown trimmed with écru lace. She had a robe to match. She was just as careful about the word “écru” as Mr. Florence was about his royal blue and pearl gray.
I managed to get undressed and put on my nightgown without any part of me being exposed at any time. An awkward business. I left my underpants on, and hoped that Beryl had done the same. The idea of sharing my bed with a grownup was a torment to me. But I did get to see the contents of what Beryl called her beauty kit. Hand-painted glass jars contained puffs of cotton wool, talcum powder, milky lotion, ice-blue astringent. Little pots of red and mauve rouge—rather greasy-looking. Blue and black pencils. Emery boards, a pumice stone, nail polish with an overpowering smell of bananas, face powder in a celluloid box shaped like a shell, with the name of a dessert—Apricot Delight.
I had heated some water on the coal-oil stove we used in summertime. Beryl scrubbed her face clean, and there was such a change that I almost expected to see makeup lying in strips in the washbowl, like the old wallpaper we had soaked and peeled. Beryl’s skin was pale now, covered with fine cracks, rather like the shiny mud at the bottom of puddles drying up in early summer.
“Look what happened to my skin,” she said. “Dieting. I weighed a hundred and sixty-nine pounds once, and I took it off too fast and my face fell in on me. Now I’ve got this cream, though. It’s made from a secret formula and you can’t even buy it commercially. Smell it. See, it doesn’t smell all perfumy. It smells serious.”
She was patting the cream on her face with puffs of cotton wool, patting away until there was nothing to be seen on the surface.
“It smells like lard,” I said.
“Christ Almighty, I hope I haven’t been paying that kind of money to rub lard on my face. Don’t tell your mother I swear.”
She poured clean water into the drinking glass and wet her comb, then combed her hair wet and twisted each strand round her finger, clamping the twisted strand to her head with two crossed pins. I would be doing the same myself, a couple of years later.
“Always do your hair wet, else it’s no good doing it up at all,” Beryl said. “And always roll it under even if you want it to flip up. See?”
When I was doing my hair up—as I did for years—I sometimes thought of this, and thought that of all the pieces of advice people had given me, this was the one I had followed most carefully.
We put the lamp out and got into bed, and Beryl said, “I never knew it could get so dark. I’ve never known a dark that was as dark as this.” She was whispering. I was slow to understand that she was comparing country nights to city nights, and I wondered if the darkness in Netterfield County could really be greater than that in California.
“Honey?” whispered Beryl. “Are there any animals outside?”
“Cows,” I said.
“Yes, but wild animals? Are there bears?”
“Yes,” I said. My father had once found bear tracks and droppings in the bush, and the apples had all been torn off a wild apple tree. That was years ago, when he was a young man.
Beryl moaned and giggled. “Think if Mr. Florence had to go out in the night and he ran into a bear!”
Next day was Sunday. Beryl and Mr. Florence drove my brothers and me to Sunday school in the Chrysler. That was at ten o’clock in the morning. They came back at eleven to bring my parents to church.
“Hop in,” Beryl said to me. “You, too,” she said to the boys. “We’re going for a drive.”
Beryl was dressed up in a satiny ivory dress with red dots, and a red-lined frill over the hips, and red high-heeled shoes. Mr. Florence wore a pale-blue summer suit.
“Aren’t you going to church?” I said. That was what people dressed up for, in my experience.
Beryl laughed. “Honey, this isn’t Mr. Florence’s kind of religion.”
I was used to going straight from Sunday school into church, and sitting for another hour and a half. In summer, the open windows let in the cedary smell of the graveyard and the occasional, almost sacrilegious sound of a car swooshing by on the road. Today we spent this time driving through country I had never seen before. I had never seen it, though it was less than twenty miles from home. Our truck went to the cheese factory, to church, and to town on Saturday nights. The nearest thing to a drive was when it went to the dump. I had seen the near end of Bell’s Lake, because that was where my father cut the ice in winter. You couldn’t get close to it in summer; the shoreline was all choked up with bulrushes. I had thought that the other end of the lake would look pretty much the same, but when we drove there today, I saw cottages, docks and boats, dark water reflecting the trees. All this and I hadn’t know about it. This, too, was Bell’s Lake. I was glad to have seen it at last, but in some way not altogether glad of the surprise.
Finally, a white frame building appeared, with verandas and potted flowers, and some twinkling poplar trees in front. The Wildwood Inn. Today the same building is covered with stucco and done up with Tudor beams and called the Hideaway. The poplar trees have been cut down for a parking lot.
On the way back to the church to pick up my parents, Mr. Florence turned in to the farm next to ours, which belonged to the McAllisters. The McAllisters were Catholics. Our two families were neighborly but not close.
“Come on, boys, out you get,” said Beryl to my brothers. “Not you,” she said to me. “You stay put.” She herded the little boys up to the porch, where some McAllisters were watching. They were in their raggedy home clothes, because their church, or Mass, or whatever it was, got out early. Mrs. McAllister came out and stood listening, rather dumbfounded, to Beryl’s laughing talk.
Beryl came back to the car by herself. “There,” she said. “They’re going to play with the neighbor children.”
Play with McAllisters? Besides being Catholics, all but the baby were girls.
“They’ve still got their good clothes on,” I said.
“So what? Can’t they have a good time with their good clothes on? I do!”
My parents were taken by surprise as well. Beryl got out and told my father he was to ride in the front seat, for the legroom. She got into the back, with my mother and me. Mr. Florence turned again onto the Bell’s Lake road, and Beryl announced that we were all going to the Wildwood Inn for dinner.
“You’re all dresse
d up, why not take advantage?” she said. “We dropped the boys off with your neighbors. I thought they might be too young to appreciate it. The neighbors were happy to have them.” She said with a further emphasis that it was to be their treat. Hers and Mr. Florence’s.
“Well, now,” said my father. He probably didn’t have five dollars in his pocket. “Well, now. I wonder do they let the farmers in?”
He made various jokes along this line. In the hotel dining room, which was all in white—white tablecloths, white painted chairs—with sweating glass water pitchers and high, whirring fans, he picked up a table napkin the size of a diaper and spoke to me in a loud whisper, “Can you tell me what to do with this thing? Can I put it on my head to keep the draft off?”
Of course he had eaten in hotel dining rooms before. He knew about table napkins and pie forks. And my mother knew—she wasn’t even a country woman, to begin with. Nevertheless this was a huge event. Not exactly a pleasure—as Beryl must have meant it to be—but a huge, unsettling event. Eating a meal in public, only a few miles from home, eating in a big room full of people you didn’t know, the food served by a stranger, a snippy-looking girl who was probably a college student working at a summer job.
“I’d like the rooster,” my father said. “How long has he been in the pot?” It was only good manners, as he knew it, to joke with people who waited on him.
“Beg your pardon?” the girl said.
“Roast chicken,” said Beryl. “Is that okay for everybody?”
Mr. Florence was looking gloomy. Perhaps he didn’t care for jokes when it was his money that was being spent. Perhaps he had counted on something better than ice water to fill up the glasses.
The waitress put down a dish of celery and olives, and my mother said, “Just a minute while I give thanks.” She bowed her head and said quietly but audibly, “Lord, bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service, for Christ’s sake. Amen.” Refreshed, she sat up straight and passed the dish to me, saying, “Mind the olives. There’s stones in them.”
