by Alice Munro
When she met Jeffrey here it was still in the back of her mind that she had to concoct some colossal lie to serve her when she got home. And she—they—had to hurry. When Jeffrey said to her that he had decided that they must stay together, that she would come with him to Washington State, that they would have to drop the play because things would be too difficult for them in Victoria, she had looked at him just in the blank way you’d look at somebody the moment that an earthquake started. She was ready to tell him all the reasons why this was not possible, she still thought she was going to tell him that, but her life was coming adrift in that moment. To go back would be like tying a sack over her head.
All she said was “Are you sure?”
He said, “Sure.” He said sincerely, “I’ll never leave you.”
That did not seem the sort of thing that he would say. Then she realized he was quoting—maybe ironically—from the play. It was what Orphée says to Eurydice within a few moments of their first meeting in the station buffet.
So her life was falling forwards; she was becoming one of those people who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex. None of this would happen if it wasn’t for sex.
And yet what’s the great difference there? It’s not such a variable procedure, in spite of what you’re told. Skins, motions, contact, results. Pauline isn’t a woman from whom it’s difficult to get results. Brian got them. Probably anybody would, who wasn’t wildly inept or morally disgusting.
But nothing’s the same, really. With Brian—especially with Brian, to whom she has dedicated a selfish sort of goodwill, with whom she’s lived in married complicity—there can never be this stripping away, the inevitable flight, the feelings she doesn’t have to strive for but only to give in to like breathing or dying. That she believes can only come when the skin is on Jeffrey, the motions made by Jeffrey, and the weight that bears down on her has Jeffrey’s heart in it, also his habits, thoughts, peculiarities, his ambition and loneliness (that for all she knows may have mostly to do with his youth).
For all she knows. There’s a lot she doesn’t know. She hardly knows anything about what he likes to eat or what music he likes to listen to or what role his mother plays in his life (no doubt a mysterious but important one, like the role of Brian’s parents). One thing she’s pretty sure of—whatever preferences or prohibitions he has will be definite.
She slides out from under Jeffrey’s hand and from under the top sheet which has a harsh smell of bleach, she slips down to the floor where the bedspread is lying and wraps herself quickly in that rag of greenish-yellow chenille. She doesn’t want him to open his eyes and see her from behind and note the droop of her buttocks. He’s seen her naked before, but generally in a more forgiving moment.
She rinses her mouth and washes herself, using the bar of soap that is about the size of two thin squares of chocolate and firm as stone. She’s hard-used between the legs, swollen and stinking. Urinating takes an effort, and it seems she’s constipated. Last night when they went out and got hamburgers she found she could not eat. Presumably she’ll learn to do all these things again, they’ll resume their natural importance in her life. At the moment it’s as if she can’t quite spare the attention.
She has some money in her purse. She has to go out and buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo. Also vaginal jelly. Last night they used condoms the first two times but nothing the third time.
She didn’t bring her watch and Jeffrey doesn’t wear one. There’s no clock in the room, of course. She thinks it’s early—there’s still an early look to the light in spite of the heat. The stores probably won’t be open, but there’ll be someplace where she can get coffee.
Jeffrey has turned onto his other side. She must have wakened him, just for a moment.
They’ll have a bedroom. A kitchen, an address. He’ll go to work. She’ll go to the Laundromat. Maybe she’ll go to work too. Selling things, waiting on tables, tutoring students. She knows French and Latin—do they teach French and Latin in American high schools? Can you get a job if you’re not an American? Jeffrey isn’t.
She leaves him the key. She’ll have to wake him to get back in. There’s nothing to write a note with, or on.
It is early. The motel is on the highway at the north end of town, beside the bridge. There’s no traffic yet. She scuffs along under the cottonwood trees for quite a while before a vehicle of any kind rumbles over the bridge—though the traffic on it shook their bed regularly late into the night.
Something is coming now. A truck. But not just a truck—there’s a large bleak fact coming at her. And it has not arrived out of nowhere—it’s been waiting, cruelly nudging at her ever since she woke up, or even all night.
Caitlin and Mara.
Last night on the phone, after speaking in such a flat and controlled and almost agreeable voice—as if he prided himself on not being shocked, not objecting or pleading—Brian cracked open. He said with contempt and fury and no concern for whoever might hear him, “Well then—what about the kids?”
The receiver began to shake against Pauline’s ear.
She said, “We’ll talk—” but he did not seem to hear her.
“The children,” he said, in this same shivering and vindictive voice. Changing the word “kids” to “children” was like slamming a board down on her—a heavy, formal, righteous threat.
“The children stay,” Brian said. “Pauline. Did you hear me?”
“No,” said Pauline. “Yes. I heard you but—”
“All right. You heard me. Remember. The children stay.”
It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain there unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay.
Their car—hers and Brian’s—was still sitting in the motel parking lot. Brian would have to ask his father or his mother to drive him up here today to get it. She had the keys in her purse. There were spare keys—he would surely bring them. She unlocked the car door and threw her keys on the seat and locked the door on the inside and shut it.
Now she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t get into the car and drive back and say that she’d been insane. If she did that he would forgive her, but he’d never get over it and neither would she. They’d go on, though, as people did.
She walked out of the parking lot, she walked along the sidewalk, into town.
The weight of Mara on her hip, yesterday. The sight of Caitlin’s footprints on the floor.
Paw. Paw.
She doesn’t need the keys to get back to them, she doesn’t need the car. She could beg a ride on the highway. Give in, give in, get back to them any way at all, how can she not do that?
A sack over her head.
A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
• • •
THIS is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage, who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world. Say to yourself, You lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has.
And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she�
��s grieving for and not any possible present.
HER children have grown up. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.
Caitlin remembers a little about the summer at the lodge, Mara nothing. One day Caitlin mentions it to Pauline, calling it “that place Grandma and Grandpa stayed at.”
“The place we were at when you went away,” she says. “Only we didn’t know till later you went away with Orphée.”
Pauline says, “It wasn’t Orphée.”
“It wasn’t Orphée? Dad used to say it was. He’d say, ‘And then your mother ran away with Orphée.’”
“Then he was joking,” says Pauline.
“I always thought it was Orphée. It was somebody else then.”
“It was somebody else connected with the play. That I lived with for a while.”
“Not Orphée.”
“No. Never him.”
RICH AS STINK
WHILE the plane was pulling up to the gate on a summer evening in 1974, Karin reached down and got some things out of her backpack. A black beret which she pulled on so it slanted over one eye, a red lipstick which she was able to apply to her mouth by using the window as a mirror—it was dark in Toronto—and a long black cigarette holder which she held ready to clamp between her teeth at the right moment. The beret and the cigarette holder had been filched from the Irma la Douce outfit her stepmother had worn to a costume party, and the lipstick was something she had bought for herself.
She knew that she could hardly manage to look like a grown-up tart. But she would not look like the ten-year-old who had got on the plane at the end of last summer, either.
Nobody in the crowd looked at her twice, even when she stuck the cigarette holder in her mouth and put on a sullen leer. Everybody was too anxious, distraught, delighted, or bewildered. Lots of them seemed to be in costume themselves. Black men swished along in bright robes and little embroidered hats, and old women sat bowed on suitcases with shawls over their heads. Hippies were all in beads and tatters, and she found herself hedged in for a few moments by a group of somber-looking men who wore black hats and had little ringlets dangling down their cheeks.
People waiting to meet passengers were not supposed to get in here, but they did anyway, slipping through the automatic doors. In the crowd on the other side of the baggage carousel Karin spotted her mother, Rosemary, who had not yet seen her. Rosemary was wearing a long dark-blue dress with gold and orange moons on it and had her hair freshly dyed, very black, piled up in a toppling bird’s nest on top of her head. She looked older than she did in Karin’s memory, and a little forlorn. Karin’s glance swept past her—looking for Derek. Derek was easy to find in a crowd because of his height and his shining forehead and his pale, wavy, shoulder-length hair. Also because of his bright steady eyes and satirical mouth, and his ability to stay still. Not like Rosemary, who was twitching and stretching and staring about now in a dazed, discouraged way.
Derek wasn’t standing behind Rosemary, and he wasn’t anywhere nearby. Unless he had gone to the men’s room, he wasn’t there.
Karin removed the cigarette holder and pushed the beret back on her head. If Derek wasn’t there, the joke lost its point. Playing a joke like that on Rosemary would just turn into confusion—when Rosemary looked confused enough, bereft enough, already.
“YOU’RE wearing lip-stick,” Rosemary said, wet eyed and dazzled. She wrapped Karin in her winglike sleeves and her smell of cocoa butter. “Don’t tell me your father lets you wear lipstick.”
“I was going to fool you,” Karin said. “Where’s Derek?”
“Not here,” said Rosemary.
Karin spotted her suitcase on the carousel; she ducked and eeled her way between bodies and dragged it off. Rosemary tried to help her carry it, but Karin said, “Okay. Okay.” They pushed through to the exit doors and past all the waiting people who had not had the nerve or the patience to push inside. They did not speak until they were out in the hot night air and moving towards the parking lot. Then Karin said, “What’s the matter—you two having one of your squalls?”
“Squall” was the name Rosemary and Derek themselves used to describe their fights, which were blamed on the difficulties of working together on Derek’s book.
Rosemary said with dire serenity, “We aren’t seeing each other anymore. We aren’t working together.”
“Really?” said Karin. “You mean you’ve broken up?”
“If people like us can break up,” Rosemary said.
THE lights of cars were still pouring down every road into the city, and at the same time pouring out of it, around the big curving overpasses and in streams underneath them. There was no air-conditioning in Rosemary’s car—not because she couldn’t afford it, but because she did not believe in it—and so the windows had to be open, letting the traffic noise rush in like a river on the gassy air. Rosemary hated driving around Toronto. When she came to the city once a week to see the publisher she worked for, she made the trip on a bus, and at other times she usually had Derek drive her. Karin kept quiet while they got off the airport highway and drove east on 401, and turned, after eighty or so miles of her mother’s jumpy concentration, onto the secondary highway that would take them nearly to where Rosemary lived.
“So has Derek gone away?” Karin said, then “Has he gone off on a trip?”
“Not that I know of,” Rosemary said. “But then I wouldn’t know.”
“How about Ann? Is she still there?”
“Probably,” said Rosemary. “She never goes anywhere.”
“Did he take his stuff and all?”
Derek had brought more things to Rosemary’s trailer than were strictly necessary for the work on his bundles of manuscripts. Books, of course—not just the books that had to be referred to but books and magazines to read during breaks in the work, when he might lie down on Rosemary’s bed. Records to listen to. Clothes, boots to wear if he decided to hike back into the bush, pills for stomach troubles or headaches, even the tools and lumber with which he built a gazebo. His shaving things were in the bathroom, also a toothbrush and his special toothpaste for sensitive gums. His coffee grinder was on the kitchen counter. (A newer, fancier one that Ann had bought sat on the counter of the kitchen in what was still his house.)
“All cleared out,” said Rosemary. She pulled into the lot of a doughnut shop that was still open, on the edge of the first town on this highway.
“Coffee to keep me alive,” she said.
Usually when they stopped at this place Karin stayed with Derek in the car. He wouldn’t drink such coffee. “Your mother is addicted to places like this because of her awful childhood,” he said. He didn’t mean that Rosemary had been taken to places like this but that she had been forbidden to go into them, just as she had been forbidden all fried or sugary food, and kept to a diet of vegetables and slimy porridge. Not because her parents were poor—they were rich—but because they were food fanatics before their time. Derek had known Rosemary only a short while—compared, say, to the years that Karin’s father, Ted, had known her—but he spoke more readily than Ted ever would about her early life and divulged details about it, such as the ritual of weekly enemas, that Rosemary’s own stories left out.
Never, never, in her school-year life, her life with Ted and Grace, would Karin find herself in a place with this horrid smell of scorched sugar and grease and cigarette smoke and rank coffee. But Rosemary’s eyes ranged with pleasure over the selection of doughnuts with cream (spelled “crème”) and jelly filling, with butterscotch and chocolate icing, the crullers and éclairs, and dutchies and filled croissants and monster cookies. She saw no reason for rejecting any of this, except perhaps the fear of getting fat, and she could never believe that such food was not just what everybody was craving.
At the counter—where you were not supposed to sit for more than twenty minutes, accordin
g to the sign—were two very fat women with massive curly hairdos, and between them a thin boyish-looking but wrinkled man, who was talking fast and seemed to be telling them jokes. While the women were shaking their heads and laughing, and Rosemary was picking out her almond croissant, he gave Karin a wink that was lewd and conspiratorial. It made her realize that she was still wearing lipstick. “Can’t resist, eh?” he said to Rosemary, and she laughed, taking this for country friendliness.
“Never can,” she said. “You’re sure?” she said to Karin. “Not a thing?”
“Little girl watching her figure?” that wrinkled man said.
THERE was hardly any traffic north of this town. The air had turned cooler and smelled swampy. The frogs were making such a loud noise in some places that you could hear them over the noise of the car. This two-lane highway wound past stands of black evergreens and the softer darkness of small juniper-spotted fields, farms going back to the bush. Then on a curve the headlights lit up the first jumble of rocks, some of them glittery pink and gray and some a dried-blood red. Soon this was happening more and more often, and in places the rocks, instead of being jumbled and jammed together, were laid as if by hand in thick or thin layers, and these were gray or greenish white. Limestone, Karin remembered. Limestone bedrock, alternating here with the rocks of the Precambrian Shield. Derek had taught her about that. Derek said that he wished he had been a geologist because he loved rocks. But he wouldn’t have loved making money for mining companies. And history drew him too—it was an odd combination. History for the indoor man, geology for the outdoor man, he said, with a solemnity that told her he was making a joke of himself.
What Karin wanted to get rid of now—she wished it would just flow out of the car windows on the rush of midnight air—was her feeling of squeamishness and superiority. About the almond croissant, the bad coffee that Rosemary was sipping almost surreptitiously, and the man at the counter, and even about Rosemary’s youthful hippielike dress and the messy heap of hair. Also she’d like to get rid of her own missing of Derek, the sense that there was space to fill, and a thinning out of possibility. She said out loud, “I’m glad, I’m glad he’s gone.”
