by Alice Munro
Rosemary said, “Are you really?”
“You’ll be happier,” Karin said.
“Yes,” said Rosemary. “I’m getting my self-respect back. You know you don’t realize how much you’ve lost of your self-respect and how much you miss it till you start getting it back. I want you and me to have a really good summer. We could go on little trips, even. I don’t mind driving where it isn’t hairy. We could go hiking back in the bush where Derek took you. I’d like to do that.”
Karin said, “Yeah,” though she wasn’t at all sure that without Derek they wouldn’t get lost. Her thoughts were not really on hiking but on a scene last summer. Rosemary on the bed, rolled up in a quilt, weeping, stuffing handfuls of the quilt and the pillow into her mouth, biting on them in a rage of grief, and Derek sitting at the table where they worked, reading a page of the manuscript. “Can you do anything to quiet your mother?” he said.
Karin said, “She wants you.”
“I can’t cope with her when she’s like this,” said Derek. He laid down the page he’d finished and picked up another. Between pages he looked up at Karin, with a long-suffering grimace. He looked worn out, old and haggard. He said, “I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.”
So Karin went into the bedroom and stroked Rosemary’s back, and Rosemary too said that she was sorry. “What’s Derek doing?” she said.
“Sitting in the kitchen,” said Karin. She didn’t like to say “reading.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I should go in and talk to you.”
“Oh, Karin. I’m so ashamed.”
What had happened to start such a row? Calmed down and cleaned up, Rosemary always said it was the work, disagreements they had about the work. “Then why don’t you quit working on his book?” Karin said. “You’ve got all your other stuff to do.” Rosemary edited manuscripts—that was how she had met Derek. Not because he had submitted his book to the publisher she worked for—he hadn’t done so yet—but because she knew a friend of his and the friend had said, “I know a woman who could be a help to you.” And in a little while Rosemary had moved to the country and into the trailer that was not far from his house, so that she could be closer to him to do this work. At first she kept her apartment in Toronto, but then she let it go, because she was spending more and more time in the trailer. She still did other work but not so much of it, and she managed her one workday a week in Toronto by leaving at six o’clock in the morning and getting home after eleven at night.
“What’s this book about?” Ted had said to Karin.
Karin said, “It’s sort of about the explorer La Salle and the Indians.”
“Is this guy a historian? Does he teach at a university?”
Karin didn’t know. Derek had done a lot of things—he had worked as a photographer; he had worked in a mine and as a surveyor; but as far as his teaching went she thought it had been in a high school. Ann spoke of his work as being “outside the system.”
Ted himself taught at a university. He was an economist.
She didn’t, of course, tell Ted or Grace about the grief brought on, apparently, by disagreements about the book. Rosemary blamed herself. It’s the tension, she said. Sometimes she said it was the menopause. Karin had heard her say to Derek, “Forgive me,” and Derek had said, “Nothing to forgive,” in a voice of cool satisfaction.
At this Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes—he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.
So what did I do this time?
“She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her—Karin—in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.
Sometimes she just got out. She went up the road to see Ann, and Ann always seemed glad that she had come. She never asked Karin why, but if Karin said, “They’re having a stupid fight,” or—later on, when they’d come up with the special word—“They’re having one of their squalls,” she never seemed surprised or displeased. “Derek is very exacting,” she might say, or “Well, I expect they’ll work it out.” But if Karin tried to go further, saying “Rosemary’s crying,” Ann would say, “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?”
But there were other things she would listen to, though sometimes with a smile of reservation. Ann was a sweet-looking, rounded woman with light-gray hair cut in bangs and falling loose over her shoulders. When she talked she often blinked, and didn’t quite meet your eyes (Rosemary said that this was nerves). Also her lips—Ann’s lips—were so thin they almost disappeared when she smiled, always with her mouth closed, in a way of holding something back.
“You know how Rosemary met Ted?” said Karin. “It was at the bus stop in the rain and she was putting on lipstick.” Then she had to backtrack and explain that Rosemary had to put on her lipstick at the bus stop because her parents didn’t know she wore it—lipstick being forbidden by their religion, as well as movies, high heels, dancing, sugar, coffee, and alcohol and cigarettes, it goes without saying. Rosemary was in her first year of college and did not want to look like a religious geek. Ted was a teaching assistant.
“But they already knew who each other were,” Karin said, and explained about their living on the same street. Ted in the gatehouse of the biggest of the rich houses, his father being the chauffeur-gardener and his mother the housekeeper, and Rosemary in one of the more ordinary-rich houses across the street (though the life her parents led in it was not ordinary-rich at all, since they played no games and never went to parties or took a trip and for some reason used an icebox instead of a refrigerator, until the ice company went out of business).
Ted had a car he had bought for a hundred dollars, and he felt sorry for Rosemary and picked her up in the rain.
When Karin was telling this story she remembered her parents telling it, laughing and interrupting each other in their practiced way. Ted always mentioned the price of the car and its make and year (Studebaker, 1947) and Rosemary mentioned the fact that the passenger door would not open and Ted had to get out and let her climb in over the driver’s seat. And he would tell how soon he took her to her first movie—in the afternoon—and the name of the movie was Some Like It Hot, and he came out in broad daylight with lipstick all over his face, because whatever it was that other girls did with lipstick, blot it or powder it or whatever, Rosemary had not learned to do. “She was very enthusiastic,” he always said.
Then they got married. They went to a minister’s house; the minister’s son was a friend of Ted’s. Their parents didn’t know what they were going to do. And right after the ceremony Rosemary started her period and the first thing Ted had to do as a married man was go out and buy a box of Kotex.
“Does your mother know you tell me these things, Karin?”
“She wouldn’t mind. And then her mother had to go to bed when she found out, she felt so awful that they’d got married. If her parents had known she was going to marry an infidel they would have shut her up in this church school in Toronto.”
“Infidel?” said Ann. “Really? What a pity.”
Maybe she meant that it was a pity, after all this trouble, that the marriage hadn’t lasted.
KARIN scrunched down in the seat. Her head bumped Rosemary’s shoulder.
“Does this bother you?” she said.
“No,” said Rosemary.
Karin said, “I’m not really going to sleep. I want to be awake when we turn up into the valley.”
Rosemary started to sing.
“Wake up, wake up, Darlin Cory—”
She sang in a slow, deep voice, imitating Pete Seeger on the record, and the next thing Karin knew the car had stopped; they had climbed the short, rutted bit of road to the trailer and were sitting under the trees outside it.
The light was on over the door. No Derek inside, though. None of Derek’s stuff. Karin didn’t want to move. She squirmed and protested in delicious crankiness, as she could not have done if anybody except Rosemary had been there.
“Out, out,” Rosemary said. “You’ll be in bed in a minute, come on,” she said, tugging and laughing. “You think I can carry you?” When she had pulled Karin out, and got her stumbling towards the door, she said, “Look at the stars. Look at the stars. They’re wonderful.” Karin kept her head down, grumbling.
“Bed, bed,” said Rosemary. They were inside. A faint smell of Derek—marijuana, coffee beans, lumber. And the smell of the closed-up trailer, its carpets and cooking. Karin flopped fully dressed on her narrow bed, and Rosemary flung her last-year’s pajamas at her. “Get undressed or you’ll feel awful when you wake up,” she said. “We’ll get your suitcase in the morning.”
Karin made what seemed to her the greatest effort that could be required in her life, heaved herself to a sitting position, and dragged off her clothes, then pulled on her pajamas. Rosemary was going around opening windows. The last thing Karin heard her say was “That lipstick—what was the idea of that lipstick?” and the last thing she felt was a washcloth’s motherly, ungentle attack on her face. She spat its taste out, revelling in this childishness and in the cool field of the bed beneath her, and her greed for sleep.
• • •
THAT was on Saturday night. Saturday night and early Sunday morning. On Monday morning Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit Ann?” and Rosemary said, “Sure, go ahead.”
They had slept late on Sunday and had not left the trailer all day. Rosemary was dismayed that it was raining. “The stars were out last night, the stars were out when we got home,” she said. “Raining on the first day of your summer.” Karin had to tell her that it was okay, she felt so lazy she didn’t want to go out anyway. Rosemary made her cafe au lait and cut up a melon, which wasn’t quite ripe (Ann would have noticed, but Rosemary didn’t). Then at four o’clock in the afternoon they made a big meal of bacon and waffles and strawberries and fake whipped cream. The sun came out around six, but they were still in their pajamas; the day was destroyed. “At least we didn’t watch television,” Rosemary said. “We’ve got that to congratulate ourselves on.”
“Up till now,” said Karin, and switched it on.
They were sitting amid piles of old magazines that Rosemary had hauled out of the cupboard. These had been in the trailer when she moved in, and she said she was finally going to throw them out—after she had sorted through them to see if there was anything worth keeping. Not much sorting got done because she kept finding things to read aloud. Karin was bored at first but allowed herself to be drawn into this old time, with its quaint advertisements and unbecoming hairstyles.
She noticed the blanket folded and placed on top of the telephone. She said, “Don’t you know how to turn the phone off?”
Rosemary said, “I don’t really want it off. I want to hear it ring and not answer it. To be able to ignore it. I don’t want it too loud, is all.”
But it didn’t ring, all day.
Monday morning the blanket was still over the phone and the magazines were back in the closet, because Rosemary couldn’t decide to throw them out after all. The sky was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining. They got up very late again because they had watched a movie till two in the morning.
Rosemary spread some typed pages out over the kitchen table. Not Derek’s manuscript—that big stack was gone. “Was Derek’s book really interesting?” Karin said.
She had never thought to talk to Rosemary about it before. The manuscript had been just like a big tangled roll of barbed wire that sat all the time on the table, with Derek and Rosemary trying to untangle it.
“Well, he kept changing it,” Rosemary said. “It was interesting but it was confused. First La Salle was all that interested him and then he got onto Pontiac and he wanted to cover too much and he was never satisfied.”
“So you’re glad that you’re rid of it,” said Karin.
“Enormously glad. It was just unending complications.”
“But don’t you miss Derek?”
“The friendship is played out,” said Rosemary in a preoccupied way, bending over a sheet of paper and making a mark on it.
“What about Ann?”
“That friendship, I guess it’s played out too. In fact I’ve been thinking.” She put her pen down. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of here. But I thought I’d wait for you. I didn’t want you to come back and find everything dislocated. But the reason for being here was Derek’s book. Well, it was Derek. You know that.”
Karin said, “Derek and Ann.”
“Derek and Ann. Yes. And now that reason is gone.”
That was when Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit Ann?” And Rosemary said, “Sure, go ahead. We don’t have to make up our minds in a hurry, you know. It’s just an idea I had.”
• • •
KARIN walked up the gravel road and wondered what was different. Aside from the clouds, which were never there in her memories of the valley. Then she knew. There were no cattle pasturing in the fields, and because of this the grass had grown up, the juniper bushes had spread out, you could no longer see the water in the creek.
The valley was long and narrow, with Ann and Derek’s white house at the far end of it. The valley floor was pasture that had been flat and tidy last year with the creek winding cleanly through it. (Ann had rented the land to a man who had Black Angus cattle.) The wooded ridges rose steeply on either side and closed in at the far end, behind the house. The trailer Rosemary rented had originally been put in place for Ann’s parents, who moved down there when the valley filled up with snow in the winter. They had wanted to be nearer to the store, which stood then at the corner of the township road. Now there was nothing but the cement platform with two holes in it where the gas tanks had been and an old bus with flags over the windows, where some hippies were living. They sometimes sat on the platform and waved back solemnly and elaborately to Rosemary as she drove past.
Derek said they had weed growing in the bushes. But he wouldn’t buy from them, not trusting their security.
Rosemary refused to smoke with Derek.
“I’m too turbulent around you,” she said. “I don’t think it would be good.”
“Suit yourself,” said Derek. “It might help.”
Neither would Ann smoke. She said she would feel silly. She had never smoked anything; she didn’t even know how to inhale.
They didn’t know that Derek had let Karin try once. She didn’t know how to inhale either, and he had to teach her. She tried too hard; she inhaled too deeply and had to fight to keep from throwing up. They were out in the barn, where Derek kept all the rock samples he had collected up on the ridges. Derek tried to steady her by telling her to look at the rocks.
“Just look at them,” he said. “Look into them. See the colors. Don’t try too hard. Just look and wait.”
But what calmed her down eventually was the lettering on a cardboard box. There was a pile of cardboard boxes which Ann had packed things in when she and Derek had moved back here from Toronto, a couple of years ago. One of them had a silhouette of a toy battleship on the side, and the word DREADNOUGHT. The first part of the word—DREAD—was in red lettering. The letters shimmered as if written in neon tubing, and issued a command to Karin that had to do with more than the word’s meaning. She had to dismember it and find the words inside.
“What are you laughing at?” Derek said, and she told him what she was doing. The words came tumbling out miraculously.
Read. Red. Dead. Dare. Era. Ear. Are. Add. Adder. “Adder” was the best. It used up all the letters.
“Amazing,” said Derek. “Amazing Karin. Dread the Red Adder.”
He never had to tell her not to mention any of this to her mother or to Ann. When Rosemary kissed her that night she sniffed her hair and laughed and s
aid, “God, the smell of it’s everywhere, Derek’s such a dedicated old pothead.”
This was one of the times when Rosemary was happy. They had been to Derek and Ann’s house to eat supper on the closed-in sun porch. Ann had said, “Come with me, Karin, see if you can help me get the mousse out of the mold.” Karin had followed her, but came back—pretending it was to get the mint sauce.
Rosemary and Derek were leaning across the table teasing each other, making kissing faces. They never saw her.
Maybe it was that same night, leaving, that Rosemary laughed at the two chairs set outside the back door. Two old dark-red metal-tube chairs, with cushions. They faced west, towards the last remnants of the sunset.
“Those old chairs,” said Ann. “I know they’re a sight. They belonged to my parents.”
“They’re not even all that comfortable,” said Derek.
“No, no,” said Rosemary. “They’re beautiful, they’re you. I love them. They just say Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann watching the sunset at the end of the day’s labors.”
“If they can see it through the pea vines,” Derek said.
The next time Karin went out to pick vegetables for Ann, she noticed the chairs were gone. She didn’t ask Ann what had become of them.
ANN’S kitchen was in the basement of the house, just partly underground. You had to go down four steps. Karin did that, and pressed her face against the screen door. The kitchen was a dark room, with bushes growing against its high windows—Karin had never been there when the light was not on. But it wasn’t on now, and at first she thought the room was empty. Then she saw somebody sitting at the table, and it was Ann, but her head was a different shape. She had her back to the door.
She had cut her hair. It was cut short and fluffed out like any gray-haired matron’s. And she was doing something—her elbows moved. She was working in the dim light, but Karin couldn’t see what the work was.
