by Alice Munro
“Really?” Eve said. “So how do we know which car?”
“The code’s on the license plate,” said Philip. “It’s changed by the electrical field they create in the car. So their trackers in space can follow them. It’s just one simple little thing, but I can’t tell you.”
“Well no,” said Eve. “I suppose very few people know it.”
Philip said, “I am the only one right now in Ontario.”
He sat as far forward as he could with his seat belt on, tapping his teeth sometimes in urgent concentration and making light whistling noises as he cautioned her.
“Unh-unh, watch out here,” he said. “I think you’re going to have to turn around. Yeah. Yeah. I think this may be it.”
They had been following a white Mazda, and were now, apparently, to follow an old green pickup truck, a Ford. Eve said, “Are you sure?”
“Sure.”
“You felt them sucked through the air?”
“They’re translated simultaneously,” Philip said. “I might have said ‘sucked,’ but that’s just to help people understand it.”
What Eve had originally planned was to have the headquarters turn out to be in the village store that sold ice cream, or in the playground. It could be revealed that all the aliens were congregated there in the form of children, seduced by the pleasures of ice cream or slides and swings, their powers temporarily in abeyance. No fear they could abduct you—or get into you—unless you chose the one wrong flavor of ice cream or swung the exact wrong number of times on the designated swing. (There would have to be some remaining danger, or else Philip would feel let down, humiliated.) But Philip had taken charge so thoroughly that now it was hard to manage the outcome. The pickup truck was turning from the paved county road onto a gravelled side road. It was a decrepit truck with no topper, its body eaten by rust—it would not be going far. Home to some farm, most likely. They might not meet another vehicle to switch to before the destination was reached.
“You’re positive this is it?” said Eve. “It’s only one man by himself, you know. I thought they never travelled alone.”
“The dog,” said Philip.
For there was a dog riding in the open back of the truck, running back and forth from one side to the other as if there were events to be kept track of everywhere.
“The dog’s one too,” Philip said.
THAT morning, when Sophie was leaving to meet Ian at the Toronto airport, Philip had kept Daisy occupied in the children’s bedroom. Daisy had settled down pretty well in the strange house—except for wetting her bed every night of the holiday—but this was the first time that her mother had gone off and left her behind. So Sophie had asked Philip to distract her, and he did so with enthusiasm (happy at the new turn events had taken?). He shot the toy cars across the floor with angry engine noises to cover up the sound of Sophie’s starting the real rented car and driving away. Shortly after that he shouted to Eve, “Has the B.M. gone?”
Eve was in the kitchen, clearing up the remains of breakfast and disciplining herself. She walked into the living room. There was the boxed tape of the movie that she and Sophie had been watching last night.
The Bridges of Madison County.
“What does mean ‘B.M.’?” said Daisy.
The children’s room opened off the living room. This was a cramped little house, fixed up on the cheap for summer rental. Eve’s idea had been to get a lakeside cottage for the holiday—Sophie’s and Philip’s first visit with her in nearly five years and Daisy’s first ever. She had picked this stretch of the Lake Huron shore because her parents used to bring her here with her brother when they were children. Things had changed—the cottages were all as substantial as suburban houses, and the rents were out of sight. This house half a mile inland from the rocky, unfavored north end of the usable beach had been the best she could manage. It stood in the middle of a cornfield. She had told the children what her father had once told her—that at night you could hear the corn growing.
Every day when Sophie took Daisy’s hand-washed sheets off the line, she had to shake out the corn bugs.
“It means ‘bowel movement,’” said Philip with a look of sly challenge at Eve.
Eve halted in the doorway. Last night she and Sophie had watched Meryl Streep sitting in the husband’s truck, in the rain, pressing down on the door handle, choking with longing, as her lover drove away. Then they had turned and had seen each other’s eyes full of tears and shook their heads and started laughing.
“Also it means ‘Big Mama,’” Philip said in a more conciliatory tone. “Sometimes that’s what Dad calls her.”
“Well then,” said Eve. “If that’s your question, the answer to your question is yes.”
She wondered if he thought of Ian as his real father. She hadn’t asked Sophie what they’d told him. She wouldn’t, of course. His real father had been an Irish boy who was travelling around North America trying to decide what to do now that he had decided not to be a priest. Eve had thought of him as a casual friend of Sophie’s, and it seemed that Sophie had thought of him that way too, until she seduced him. (“He was so shy I never dreamed it would take,” she said.) It wasn’t until Eve saw Philip that Eve could really picture what the boy had looked like. Then she saw him faithfully reproduced—the bright-eyed, pedantic, sensitive, scornful, fault-finding, blushing, shrinking, arguing young Irishman. Something like Samuel Beckett, she said, even to the wrinkles. Of course as the baby got older, the wrinkles tended to disappear.
Sophie was a full-time archaeology student then. Eve took care of Philip while she was off at her classes. Eve was an actress—she still was, when she could get work. Even in those days there were times when she wasn’t working, or if she had daytime rehearsals she could take Philip along. For a couple of years they all lived together—Eve and Sophie and Philip—in Eve’s apartment in Toronto. It was Eve who wheeled Philip in his baby carriage—and, later on, in his stroller—along all the streets between Queen and College and Spadina and Ossington, and during these walks she would sometimes discover a perfect, though neglected, little house for sale in a previously unknown to her two-block-long, tree-shaded, dead-end street. She would send Sophie to look at it; they would go round with the real-estate agent, talk about a mortgage, discuss what renovations they would have to pay for, and which they could do themselves. Dithering and fantasizing until the house was sold to somebody else, or until Eve had one of her periodic but intense fits of financial prudence, or until somebody persuaded them that these charming little side streets were not half so safe for women and children as the bright, ugly, brash, and noisy street that they continued to live on.
Ian was a person Eve took even less note of than she had of the Irish boy. He was a friend; he never came to the apartment except with others. Then he went to a job in California—he was an urban geographer—and Sophie ran up a phone bill which Eve had to speak to her about, and there was a change altogether in the atmosphere of the apartment. (Should Eve not have mentioned the bill?) Soon a visit was planned, and Sophie took Philip along, because Eve was doing a summer play in a regional theater.
Not long afterwards came the news from California. Sophie and Ian were going to get married.
“Wouldn’t it be smarter to try living together for a while?” said Eve on the phone from her boarding house, and Sophie said, “Oh, no. He’s weird. He doesn’t believe in that.”
“But I can’t get off for a wedding,” Eve said. “We run till the middle of September.”
“That’s okay,” said Sophie. “It won’t be a wedding wedding.”
And until this summer, Eve had not seen her again. There was the lack of money at both ends, in the beginning. When Eve was working she had a steady commitment, and when she wasn’t working she couldn’t afford anything extra. Soon Sophie had a job, too—she was a receptionist in a doctor’s office. Once Eve was just about to book a flight, when Sophie phoned to say that Ian’s father had died and that he was flying to England fo
r the funeral and bringing his mother back with him.
“And we only have the one room,” she said.
“Perish the thought,” said Eve. “Two mothers-in-law in one house, let alone in one room.”
“Maybe after she’s gone?” said Sophie.
But that mother stayed till after Daisy was born, stayed till they moved into the new house, stayed eight months in all. By then Ian was starting to write his book, and it was difficult for him if there were visitors in the house. It was difficult enough anyway. The time passed during which Eve felt confident enough to invite herself. Sophie sent pictures of Daisy, the garden, all the rooms of the house.
Then she announced that they could come, she and Philip and Daisy could come back to Ontario this summer. They would spend three weeks with Eve while Ian worked alone in California. At the end of that time he would join them and they would fly from Toronto to England to spend a month with his mother.
“I’ll get a cottage on the lake,” said Eve. “Oh, it will be lovely.”
“It will,” said Sophie. “It’s crazy that it’s been so long.”
And so it had been. Reasonably lovely, Eve had thought. Sophie hadn’t seemed much bothered or surprised by Daisy’s wetting the bed. Philip had been finicky and standoffish for a couple of days, responding coolly to Eve’s report that she had known him as a baby, and whining about the mosquitoes that descended on them as they hurried through the shoreline woods to get to the beach. He wanted to be taken to Toronto to see the Science Centre. But then he settled down, swam in the lake without complaining that it was cold, and busied himself with solitary projects—such as boiling and scraping the meat off a dead turtle he’d lugged home, so he could keep its shell. The turtle’s stomach contained an undigested crayfish, and its shell came off in strips, but none of this dismayed him.
Eve and Sophie, meanwhile, developed a pleasant, puttering routine of morning chores, afternoons on the beach, wine with supper, and late-evening movies. They were drawn into half-serious speculations about the house. What could be done about it? First strip off the living-room wallpaper, an imitation of imitation-wood panelling. Pull up the linoleum with its silly pattern of gold fleurs-de-lis turned brown by ground-in sand and dirty scrub water. Sophie was so carried away that she loosened a bit of it that had rotted in front of the sink and discovered pine floorboards that surely could be sanded. They talked about the cost of renting a sander (supposing, that is, that the house was theirs) and what colors they would choose for the paint on the doors and woodwork, shutters on the windows, open shelves in the kitchen instead of the dingy plywood cupboards. What about a gas fireplace?
And who was going to live here? Eve. The snowmobilers who used the house for a winter clubhouse were building a place of their own, and the landlord might be happy to rent it year-round. Or maybe sell it very cheaply, considering its condition. It could be a retreat, if Eve got the job she was hoping for, next winter. And if she didn’t, why not sublet the apartment and live here? There’d be the difference in the rents, and the old-age pension she started getting in October, and the money that still came in from a commercial she had made for a diet supplement. She could manage.
“And then if we came in the summers we could help with the rent,” said Sophie.
Philip heard them. He said, “Every summer?”
“Well you like the lake now,” Sophie said. “You like it here now.”
“And the mosquitoes, you know they’re not as bad every year,” Eve said. “Usually they’re just bad in the early summer. June, before you’d even get here. In the spring there are all these boggy places full of water, and they breed there, and then the boggy places dry up, and they don’t breed again. But this year there was so much rain earlier, those places didn’t dry up, so the mosquitoes got a second chance, and there’s a whole new generation.”
She had found out how much he respected information and preferred it to her opinions and reminiscences.
Sophie was not keen on reminiscence either. Whenever the past that she and Eve had shared was mentioned—even those months after Philip’s birth that Eve thought of as some of the happiest, the hardest, the most purposeful and harmonious, in her life—Sophie’s face took on a look of gravity and concealment, of patiently withheld judgments. The earlier time, Sophie’s own childhood, was a positive minefield, as Eve discovered, when they were talking about Philip’s school. Sophie thought it a little too rigorous, and Ian thought it just fine.
“What a switch from Blackbird,” Eve said, and Sophie said at once, almost viciously, “Oh, Blackbird. What a farce. When I think that you paid for that. You paid.”
Blackbird was an ungraded alternative school that Sophie had gone to (the name came from “Morning Has Broken”). It had cost Eve more than she could afford, but she thought it was better for a child whose mother was an actress and whose father was not in evidence. When Sophie was nine or ten, it had broken up because of disagreements among the parents.
“I learned Greek myths and I didn’t know where Greece was,” said Sophie. “I didn’t know what it was. We had to spend art period making antinuke signs.”
Eve said, “Oh, no, surely.”
“We did. And they literally badgered us—they badgered us—to talk about sex. It was verbal molestation. You paid.”
“I didn’t know it was as bad as all that.”
“Oh well,” said Sophie. “I survived.”
“That’s the main thing,” Eve said shakily. “Survival.”
SOPHIE’S father was from Kerala, in the southern part of India. Eve had met him, and spent her whole time with him, on a train going from Vancouver to Toronto. He was a young doctor studying in Canada on a fellowship. He had a wife already, and a baby daughter, at home in India.
The train trip took three days. There was a half-hour stop in Calgary. Eve and the doctor ran around looking for a drugstore where they could buy condoms. They didn’t find one. By the time they got to Winnipeg, where the train stopped for a full hour, it was too late. In fact—said Eve, when she told their story—by the time they got to the Calgary city limits, it was probably too late.
He was travelling in the day coach—the fellowship was not generous. But Eve had splurged and got herself a roomette. It was this extravagance—a last-minute decision—it was the convenience and privacy of the roomette that were responsible, Eve said, for the existence of Sophie and the greatest change in her, Eve’s, life. That, and the fact that you couldn’t get condoms anywhere around the Calgary station, not for love or money.
In Toronto she waved goodbye to her lover from Kerala, as you would wave to any train acquaintance, because she was met there by the man who was at that time the serious interest and main trouble in her life. The whole three days had been underscored by the swaying and rocking of the train—the lovers’ motions were never just what they contrived themselves, and perhaps for that reason seemed guiltless, irresistible. Their feelings and conversations must have been affected, too. Eve remembered these as sweet and generous, never solemn or desperate. It would have been hard to be solemn when you were dealing with the dimensions and the projections of the roomette.
She told Sophie his Christian name—Thomas, after the saint. Until she met him, Eve had never heard about the ancient Christians in southern India. For a while when she was in her teens Sophie had taken an interest in Kerala. She brought home books from the library and took to going to parties in a sari. She talked about looking her father up, when she got older. The fact that she knew his first name and his special study—diseases of the blood—seemed to her possibly enough. Eve stressed to her the size of the population of India and the chance that he had not even stayed there. What she could not bring herself to explain was how incidental, how nearly unimaginable, the existence of Sophie would be, necessarily, in her father’s life. Fortunately the idea faded, and Sophie gave up wearing the sari when all those dramatic, ethnic costumes became too commonplace. The only time she mentioned her father, later on
, was when she was carrying Philip, and making jokes about keeping up the family tradition of flyby fathers.
NO jokes like that now. Sophie had grown stately, womanly, graceful, and reserved. There had been a moment—they were getting through the woods to the beach, and Sophie had bent to scoop up Daisy, so that they might move more quickly out of range of the mosquitoes—when Eve had been amazed at the new, late manifestation of her daughter’s beauty. A full-bodied, tranquil, classic beauty, achieved not by care and vanity but by self-forgetfulness and duty. She looked more Indian now, her creamed-coffee skin had darkened in the California sun, and she bore under her eyes the lilac crescents of a permanent mild fatigue.
But she was still a strong swimmer. Swimming was the only sport she had ever cared for, and she swam as well as ever, heading it seemed for the middle of the lake. The first day she had done it she said, “That was wonderful. I felt so free.” She didn’t say that it was because Eve was watching the children that she had felt that way, but Eve understood that it didn’t need to be said. “I’m glad,” she said—though in fact she had been frightened. Several times she had thought, Turn around now, and Sophie had swum right on, disregarding this urgent telepathic message. Her dark head became a spot, then a speck, then an illusion tossed among the steady waves. What Eve feared, and could not think about, was not a failure of strength but of the desire to return. As if this new Sophie, this grown woman so tethered to life, could be actually more indifferent to it than the girl Eve used to know, the young Sophie with her plentiful risks and loves and dramas.
“WE have to get that movie back to the store,” Eve said to Philip. “Maybe we should do it before we go to the beach.”
Philip said, “I’m sick of the beach.”
Eve didn’t feel like arguing. With Sophie gone, with all plans altered, so that they were leaving, all of them leaving later in the day, she was sick of the beach, too. And sick of the house—all she could see now was the way this room would look tomorrow. The crayons, the toy cars, the large pieces of Daisy’s simple jigsaw puzzle, all swept up and taken away. The storybooks gone that she knew by heart. No sheets drying outside the window. Eighteen more days to last, by herself, in this place.
