by Alice Munro
THE skin on her shoulders and on her upper back and on one side of her neck was marred by burning. Derek’s tie had kept the veil back a little from her face and so saved her from the most telling traces. But even when her hair grew long again and she brushed it forward, it could not altogether hide the damage to her neck.
She had a series of skin grafts, and then she looked better. By the time she was in college she could wear a bathing suit.
• • •
WHEN she first opened her eyes in the room in the Belleville hospital, she saw all sorts of daisies. White daisies, yellow and pink and purple daisies, even on the windowsill.
“Aren’t they lovely?” Ann said. “They keep sending them. They keep sending more, and the first ones are still fresh, or at least not ready to throw out. Everywhere they stop on their trip they send some. They ought to be in Cape Breton by now.”
Karin said, “Did you sell the farm?”
Rosemary said, “Karin.”
Karin closed her eyes and tried again.
“Did you think it was Ann?” said Rosemary. “Ann and Derek are off on a trip. I was just telling you. Ann did sell the farm, or anyway she’s going to. That’s a funny thing for you to be thinking about.”
“They’re on their honeymoon,” said Karin. This was a trick—to bring Ann back if it was really her—to make her say, reprovingly, “Oh, Karin.”
“It’s the wedding dress making you think of that,” Rosemary said. “They’re actually on a trip looking for where they want to live next.”
So it was really Rosemary. And Ann on the trip. Ann on the trip with Derek.
“It would have to be a second honeymoon,” Rosemary said. “You never hear about anybody going on their third honeymoon, do you? Or their eighteenth honeymoon?”
It was all right, everybody was in the right place. Karin felt as if she might be the one who had brought this about, through some exhausting effort. She knew she should feel satisfaction. She did feel satisfaction. But it all seemed unimportant in some way. As if Ann and Derek and perhaps even Rosemary were behind a hedge that was too thick and troublesome to climb through.
“I’m here though,” said Rosemary. “I’ve been here all the time. But they won’t let me touch you.”
She said this last thing as if it was a matter for heartbreak.
SHE still says this once in a while.
“What I remember most is that I couldn’t touch you and wondering if you understood.”
Karin says yes. She understood. What she doesn’t bother to say is that back then she thought Rosemary’s sorrow was absurd. It was as if she was complaining about not being able to reach across a continent. For that was what Karin felt she had become—something immense and shimmering and sufficient, ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out, otherwise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. And she herself—Karin—could be stretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.
She came out of that, of course, she came back to being a Karin. Everybody thought she was just the same except for her skin. Nobody knew how she had changed and how natural it seemed to her to be separate and polite and adroitly fending for herself. Nobody knew the sober, victorious feeling she had sometimes, when she knew how much she was on her own.
BEFORE THE CHANGE
DEAR R. My father and I watched Kennedy debate Nixon. He’s got a television since you were here. A small screen and rabbit ears. It sits out in front of the sideboard in the dining room so that there’s no easy way now to get at the good silver or the table linen even if anybody wanted to. Why in the dining room where there’s not one really comfortable chair? Because it’s a while since they’ve remembered they have a living room. Or because Mrs. Barrie wants to watch it at suppertime.
Do you remember this room? Nothing new in it but the television. Heavy side curtains with wine-colored leaves on a beige ground and the net curtains in between. Picture of Sir Galahad leading his horse and picture of Glencoe, red deer instead of the massacre. The old filing cabinet moved in years ago from my father’s office but still no place found for it so it just sits there not even pushed back against the wall. And my mother’s closed sewing machine (the only time he ever mentions her, when he says “your mother’s sewing machine”) with the same array of plants, or what looks like the same, in clay pots or tin cans, not flourishing and not dying.
So I’m home now. Nobody has broached the question as to how long for. I just stuffed the Mini with all my books and papers and clothes and drove here from Ottawa in one day. I had told my father on the phone that I was finished with my thesis (I’ve actually given it up but I didn’t bother telling him that) and that I thought I needed a break.
“Break?” he said, as if he’d never heard of such a thing. “Well. As long as it isn’t a nervous break.”
I said, What?
“Nervous breakdown,” he said with a warning cackle. That’s the way he still refers to panic attacks and acute anxiety and depression and personal collapse. He probably tells his patients to buck up.
Unfair. He probably sends them away with some numbing pills and a few dry kind words. He can tolerate other people’s shortcomings more easily than mine.
There wasn’t any big welcome when I got here, but no consternation either. He walked around the Mini and grunted at what he saw and nudged the tires.
“Surprised you made it,” he said.
I’d thought of kissing him—more bravado than an upsurge of affection, more this-is-the-way-I-do-things-now. But by the time my shoes hit gravel I knew I couldn’t. There was Mrs. B. standing halfway between the drive and the kitchen door. So I went and threw my arms around her instead and nuzzled the bizarre black hair cut in a Chinese sort of bob around her small withered face. I could smell her stuffy cardigan and bleach on her apron and feel her old toothpick bones. She hardly comes up to my collarbone.
Flustered, I said, “It’s a beautiful day, it’s been the most beautiful drive.” So it was. So it had been. The trees not turned yet, just rusting at the edges and the stubble fields like gold. So why does this benevolence of landscape fade, in my father’s presence and in his territory (and don’t forget it’s in Mrs. Barrie’s presence and in her territory)? Why does my mentioning it—or the fact that I mentioned it in a heartfelt not perfunctory way—seem almost in a class with my embracing Mrs. B.? One thing seems to be a piece of insolence and the other pretentious gush.
When the debate was over my father got up and turned off the television. He won’t watch a commercial unless Mrs. B. is there and speaks up in favor, saying she wants to see the cute kid with his front teeth out or the chicken chasing the thingamajig (she won’t try to say “ostrich,” or she can’t remember). Then whatever she enjoys is permitted, even dancing cornflakes, and he may say, “Well, in its own way it’s clever.” This I think is a kind of warning to me.
What did he think about Kennedy and Nixon?
“Aw, they’re just a couple of Americans.”
I tried to open the conversation up a bit.
“How do you mean?”
When you ask him to go into subjects that he thinks don’t need to be talked about, or take up an argument that doesn’t need proving, he has a way of lifting his upper lip at one side, showing a pair of big tobacco-stained teeth.
“Just a couple of Americans,” he said, as if the words might have got by me the first time.
So we sit there not talking but not in silence because as you may recall he is a noisy breather. His breath gets dragged down stony alleys and through creaky gates. Then takes off into a bit of tweeting and gurgling as if there was some inhuman apparatus shut up in his chest. Plastic pipes and colored bubbles. You’re not supposed to take any notice, and I’ll soon be used to it. But it takes up a lot of space in a room. As he would anyway with his high hard stomach
and long legs and his expression. What is that expression? It’s as if he’s got a list of offenses both remembered and anticipated and he’s letting it be known how his patience can be tried by what you know you do wrong but also by what you don’t even suspect. I think a lot of fathers and grandfathers strive for that look—even some who unlike him don’t have any authority outside of their own houses—but he’s the one who’s got it exactly permanently right.
R. Lots for me to do here and no time to—as they say—mope. The waiting-room walls are scuffed all round where generations of patients have leaned their chairs back against them. The Reader’s Digests are in rags on the table. The patients’ files are in cardboard boxes under the examining table, and the wastebaskets—they’re wicker—are mangled all around the top as if eaten by rats. And in the house it’s no better. Cracks like brown hairs in the downstairs washbasin and a disconcerting spot of rust in the toilet. Well you must have noticed. It’s silly but the most disturbing thing I think is all the coupons and advertising flyers. They’re in drawers and stuck under saucers or lying around loose and the sales or discounts they’re advertising are weeks or months or years past.
It isn’t that they’ve abdicated or aren’t trying. But everything is complicated. They send out the laundry, which is sensible, rather than having Mrs. B. still do it, but then my father can’t remember which day it’s due back and there’s this unholy fuss about will there be enough smocks etc. And Mrs. B. actually believes the laundry is cheating her and taking the time to rip off the name tapes and sew them onto inferior articles. So she argues with the deliveryman and says he comes here last on purpose and he probably does.
Then the eaves need to be cleaned and Mrs. B.’s nephew is supposed to come and clean them, but he has put his back out so his son is coming. But his son has had to take over so many jobs that he’s behind etc., etc.
My father calls this nephew’s son by the nephew’s name. He does this with everybody. He refers to stores and businesses in town by the name of the previous owner or even the owner before that. This is more than a simple lapse of memory; it’s something like arrogance. Putting himself beyond the need to keep such things straight. The need to notice changes. Or individuals.
I asked what color of paint he’d like on the waiting-room walls. Light green, I said, or light yellow? He said, Who’s going to paint them?
“I am.”
“I never knew you were a painter.”
“I’ve painted places I’ve lived in.”
“Maybe so. But I haven’t seen them. What are you going to do about my patients while you’re painting?”
“I’ll do it on a Sunday.”
“Some of them wouldn’t care for that when they heard about it.”
“Are you kidding? In this day and age?”
“It may not be quite the same day and age you think it is. Not around here.”
Then I said I could do it at night, but he said the smell the next day would upset too many stomachs. All I was allowed to do in the end was throw out the Reader’s Digests and put out some copies of Maclean’s and Chatelaine and Time and Saturday Night. And then he mentioned there’d been complaints. People missed looking up the jokes they remembered in the Reader’s Digests. And some of them didn’t like modern writers. Like Pierre Berton.
“Too bad,” I said, and I couldn’t believe that my voice was shaking.
Then I tackled the filing cabinet in the dining room. I thought it was probably full of the files of patients who were long dead and if I could clear those files out I could fill it up with the files from the cardboard boxes, and move the whole thing back to the office where it belonged.
Mrs. B. saw what I was doing and went and got my father. Not a word to me.
He said, “Who told you you could go poking around in there? I didn’t.”
R. The days you were here Mrs. B. was off for Christmas with her family. (She has a husband who has been sick with emphysema it seems for half his life, and no children, but a horde of nieces and nephews and connections.) I don’t think you saw her at all. But she saw you. She said to me yesterday, “Where’s that Mr. So-and-so you were supposed to be engaged to?” She’d seen of course that I wasn’t wearing my ring.
“I imagine in Toronto,” I said.
“I was up at my niece’s last Christmas and we seen you and him walking up by the standpipe and my niece said, ‘I wonder where them two are off to?’” This is exactly how she talks and it already sounds quite normal to me except when I write it down. I guess the implication is that we were going somewhere to carry on, but there was a deep freeze on, if you remember, and we were just walking to get away from the house. No. We were getting outside so we could continue our fight, which could only be bottled up for so long.
Mrs. B. started to work for my father about the same time I went away to school. Before that we had some young women I liked, but they left to get married, or to work in war plants. When I was nine or ten and had been to some of my school friends’ houses, I said to my father, “Why does our maid have to eat with us? Other people’s maids don’t eat with them.”
My father said, “You call Mrs. Barrie Mrs. Barrie. And if you don’t like to eat with her you can go and eat in the woodshed.”
Then I took to hanging around and getting her to talk. Often she wouldn’t. But when she did, it could be rewarding. I had a fine time imitating her at school.
(Me) Your hair is really black, Mrs. Barrie.
(Mrs. B.) Everyone in my family is got black hair. They all got black hair and it never ever gets gray. That’s on my mother’s side. It stays black in their coffin. When my grandpa died they kept him in the place in the cemetery all winter while the ground was froze and come spring they was going to put him in the ground and one or other us says, “Let’s take a look see how he made it through the winter.” So we got the fellow to lift the lid and there he was looking fine with his face not dark or caved in or anything and his hair was black. Black.
I could even do the little laughs she does, little laughs or barks, not to indicate that anything is funny but as a kind of punctuation.
By the time I met you I’d got sick of myself doing this.
After Mrs. B. told me all that about her hair I met her one day coming out of the upstairs bathroom. She was hurrying to answer the phone, which I wasn’t allowed to answer. Her hair was bundled up in a towel and a dark trickle was running down the side of her face. A dark purplish trickle, and my thought was that she was bleeding.
As if her blood could be eccentric and dark with malevolence as her nature sometimes seemed to be.
“Your head’s bleeding,” I said, and she said, “Oh, get out of my road,” and scrambled past to get the phone. I went on into the bathroom and saw purple streaks in the basin and the hair dye on the shelf. Not a word was said about this, and she continued to talk about how everybody on her mother’s side of the family had black hair in their coffins and she would, too.
MY father had an odd way of noticing me in those years. He might be passing through a room where I was, and he’d say as if he hadn’t seen me there,
“The chief defect of Henry King,
Was chewing little bits of string—”
And sometimes he’d speak to me in a theatrically growly voice.
“Hello little girl. Would you like a piece of candy?”
I had learned to answer in a wheedling baby-girl voice. “Oh yes sir.”
“Wahl.” Some fancy drawing out of the a. “Wahl. You cahn’t have one.”
And:
“‘Solomon Grundy, born on Monday—’” He’d jab a finger at me to take it up.
“‘Christened on Tuesday—’”
“‘Married on Wednesday—’”
“‘Sick on Thursday—’”
“‘Worse on Friday—’”
“‘Died on Saturday—’”
“‘Buried on Sunday—’”
Then both together, thunderously. “‘And that was the end of S
olomon Grundy!’”
Never any introduction, no comment when these passages were over. For a joke I tried calling him Solomon Grundy. The fourth or fifth time he said, “That’s enough. That’s not my name. I’m your father.”
After that we probably didn’t do the rhyme anymore.
The first time I met you on the campus, and you were alone and I was alone, you looked as if you remembered me but weren’t sure about acknowledging it. You had just taught that one class, filling in when our regular man was sick and you had to do the lecture on logical positivism. You joked about its being a funny thing to bring somebody over from the Theological College to do.
You seemed to hesitate about saying hello, so I said, “The former King of France is bald.”
That was the example you’d given us, of a statement that makes no sense because the subject doesn’t exist. But you gave me a truly startled and cornered look that you then covered up with a professional smile. What did you think of me?
A smart aleck.
R. My stomach is still a little puffy. There are no marks on it, but I can bunch it up in my hands. Otherwise I’m okay, my weight is back to normal or a little below. I think I look older, though. I think I look older than twenty-four. My hair is still long and unfashionable, in fact a mess. Is this a memorial to you because you never liked me to cut it? I wouldn’t know.
Anyway I’ve started going on long walks around town, for exercise. I used to go off in the summers, anywhere I liked. I hadn’t any sense of what rules there might be, or different grades of people. That could have been because of never going to school in town or because of our house being out of town here where it is, down the long lane. Not properly belonging. I went to the horse barns by the racetrack where the men were horse owners or paid horse trainers and the other kids were boys. I didn’t know any names, but they all knew mine. They had to put up with me, in other words, because of whose daughter I was. We were allowed to put down feed and muck out behind the horses. It seemed adventurous. I wore an old golf hat of my father’s and a pair of baggy shorts. We’d get up on the roof and they’d grapple and try to push each other off but me they left alone. The men would periodically tell us to get lost. They’d say to me, “Does your dad know you’re here?” Then the boys started teasing each other and the one teased would make a puking noise and I knew it was about me. So I quit going. I gave up the idea of being a Girl of the Golden West. I went down to the dock and looked at the lake boats, but I don’t think I went so far as dreaming of being taken on as a deckhand. Also I didn’t fool them into thinking I was anything but a girl. A man leaned over and yelled down to me:
