by Alice Munro
“Hey. You got any hair on it yet?”
I almost said, “Pardon?” I wasn’t frightened or humiliated so much as mystified. That a grown-up man with responsible work should be interested in the patchy itchy sprouting in between my legs. Should bother to be disgusted by it, as his voice surely indicated that he was.
The horse barns have been torn down. The road down to the harbor is not so steep. There is a new grain elevator. And new suburbs that could be suburbs anywhere, which is what everybody likes about them. Nobody walks now; everybody drives. The suburbs don’t have sidewalks, and the sidewalks along the old backstreets are unused and cracked and uptilted by frost and disappearing under earth and grass. The long dirt path under the pine trees along our lane is lost now under drifts of pine needles and rogue saplings and wild raspberry canes. People have walked up that path for decades to see the doctor. Out from town on a special short extension of sidewalk along the highway (the only other extension was to the cemetery) and then between the double row of pines on that side of the lane. Because there’s been a doctor living in this house since the end of the last century.
All sorts of noisy grubby patients, children and mothers and old people, all afternoon, and quieter patients coming singly in the evenings. I used to sit out where there was a pear tree trapped in a clump of lilac bushes, and I’d spy on them, because young girls like to spy. That whole clump is gone now, cleaned out to make things easier for Mrs. B.’s nephew’s son on the power mower. I used to spy on ladies who got dressed up, at that time, for a visit to the doctor. I remember the clothes from soon after the war. Long full skirts and cinch belts and puffed-up blouses and sometimes short white gloves, for gloves were worn then in summer and not just to church. Hats not just to church either. Pastel straw hats that framed the face. A dress with light summer flounces, a ruffle on the shoulders like a little cape, a sash like a ribbon round the waist. The cape-ruffle could lift in the breeze, and the lady would raise her hand in a crocheted glove to brush it away from her face. This gesture was like a symbol to me of unattainable feminine loveliness. The wisp of cobweb cloth against the perfect velvet mouth. Not having a mother may have had something to do with how I felt. But I didn’t know anybody who had a mother that looked the way they did. I’d crouch under the bushes eating the spotty yellow pears and worshipping.
One of our teachers had got us reading old ballads like “Patrick Spens” and “The Twa Corbies,” and there’d been a rash of ballad making at school.
I’m going down the corridor
My good friend for to see
I’m going to the lav-a-to-ry
To have myself a pee—
Ballads really tumbled you along into rhymes before you had a chance to think what anything meant. So with my mouth full of mushy pear I made them up.
A lady walks on a long long path
She’s left the town behind.
She’s left her home and her father’s wrath
Her destiny for to find—
When the wasps started bothering me too much I went into the house. Mrs. Barrie would be in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and listening to the radio, until my father called her. She stayed till the last patient had left and the place had been tidied up. If there was a yelp from the office she might give her own little yelping laugh and say, “Go ahead and holler.” I never bothered describing to her the clothes or the looks of the women I’d seen because I knew she’d never admire anybody for being beautiful or well dressed. Any more than she’d admire them for knowing something nobody needed to know, like a foreign language. Good card players she admired, and fast knitters—that was about all. Many people she had no use for. My father said that too. He had no use. That made me want to ask, If they did have a use, what would the use be? But I knew neither one would tell me. Instead they’d tell me not to be so smart.
His Uncle came on Frederick Hyde
Carousing in the Dirt.
He shook him Hard from Side to Side
And Hit him where it Hurt—
If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It’s too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don’t know where, is worse.
• • •
DEAR R., Dear Robin, How do you think I didn’t know? It was right in front of my eyes all the time. If I had gone to school here, I’d surely have known. If I’d had friends. There’s no way one of the high-school girls, one of the older girls, wouldn’t have made sure I knew.
Even so, I had plenty of time in the holidays. If I hadn’t been so bound up in myself, mooching around town and making up ballads, I could have figured it out. Now that I think of it, I knew that some of those evening patients, those ladies, came on the train. I associated them and their beautiful clothes with the evening train. And there was a late-night train they must have left on. Of course there could just as easily have been a car that dropped them off at the end of the lane.
And I was told—by Mrs. B., I think, not by him—that they came to my father for vitamin shots. I know that, because I would think, Now she’s getting her shot, whenever we heard a woman make a noise, and I would be a little surprised that women so sophisticated and self-controlled were not more stoical about needles.
Even now, it has taken me weeks. Through all this time of getting used to the ways of the house, to the point where I would never dream of picking up a paintbrush and would hesitate to straighten a drawer or throw out an old grocery receipt without consulting Mrs. B. (who can never make up her mind about it anyway). To the point where I’ve given up trying to get them even to accept perked coffee. (They prefer instant because it always tastes the same.)
My father laid a check beside my plate. At lunch today, Sunday. Mrs. Barrie is never here on Sundays. We have a cold lunch which I fix, of sliced meat and bread and tomatoes and pickles and cheese, when my father gets back from church. He never asks me to go to church with him—probably thinking that would just give me a chance to air some views he doesn’t care to hear.
The check was for five thousand dollars.
“That’s for you,” he said. “So you’ll have something. You can put it in the bank or invest it how you like. See how the rates are. I don’t keep up. Of course you’ll get the house too. All in the fullness of time, as they say.”
A bribe? I thought. Money to start a little business with, go on a trip with? Money for the down payment on a little house of my own, or to go back to university to get some more of what he has called my unnegotiable degrees.
Five thousand dollars to get rid of me.
I thanked him, and more or less for conversation’s sake I asked him what he did with his money. He said that was neither here nor there.
“Ask Billy Snyder if you’re looking for advice.” Then he remembered that Billy Snyder was no longer in the accounting business; he had retired.
“There’s some new fellow there with a queer name,” he said. “It’s like Ypsilanti, but it’s not Ypsilanti.”
“Ypsilanti is a town in Michigan,” I said.
“It’s a town in Michigan, but it was a man’s name before it was a town in Michigan,” my father said. It seems it was the name of a Greek leader who fought against the Turks early in the 1800s.
I said, “Oh. In Byron’s war.”
“Byron’s war?” said my father. “What makes you call it that? Byron didn’t fight in any war. He died of typhus. Then he’s dead, he’s the big hero, he died for the Greeks and so on.” He said this contentiously, as if I had been one of those responsible for this mistake, this big fuss over Byron. But then he calmed down and recounted for me or recalled for himself the progress of the war against the Ottoman Empire. He spoke of the Porte and I wanted to say that I’ve never been sure if that was an actual gate, or was it Constantinople, or the Sultan’s court? But it’s always best not to inter
rupt. When he starts to talk like this there’s the sense of a truce, or a breathing spell, in an undeclared underground war. I was sitting facing the window, and I could see through the net curtains the heaps of yellow-brown leaves on the ground in the rich generous sunlight (maybe the last of those days we’ll get for a long while by the sound of the wind tonight) and it brought to mind my relief as a child, my secret pleasure, whenever I could get him going, by a question or by accident, on a spiel like this.
Earthquakes, for instance. They happen in the volcanic ridges but one of the biggest was right in the middle of the continent, in New Madrid (pronounced “New Mad-rid,” mind you) in Missouri, in 1811. I know that from him. Rift valleys. Instability that there is no sign of on the surface. Caverns formed in limestone, water under the earth, mountains that given enough time wear away to rubble.
Also numbers. I asked him about numbers once and he said, Well, they’re called the arabic numerals, aren’t they, any fool knows that. But the Greeks could have managed a good system, he went on to say, the Greeks could have done it, only they didn’t have the concept of zero.
Concept of zero. I put that away in my mind like a package on a shelf, to open someday.
If Mrs. B. was with us there was of course no hope of getting anything like this out of him.
Never mind, he would say, eat your meal.
As if any question I asked had an ulterior motive, and I suppose it did. I was angling to direct the conversation. And it wasn’t polite to leave Mrs. B. out. So it was her attitude to what caused earthquakes, or the history of numbers (an attitude not just of indifference but of contempt) that had to be deferred to, had to reign supreme.
• • •
SO we come round to Mrs. B. again. In the present, Mrs. B.
I came in last night at about ten o’clock. I’d been out at a meeting of the Historical Society, or at least at a meeting to try and organize one. Five people showed up and two of them walked with canes. When I opened the kitchen door I saw Mrs. B. framed in the doorway to the back hall—the hall that leads from the office to the washroom and the front part of the house. She had a covered basin in her hands. She was on her way to the washroom and she could have gone on, passing the kitchen as I came in. I would hardly have noticed her. But she stopped in her tracks and stood there, partly turned towards me; she made a grimace of dismay.
Oh-oh. Caught out.
Then she scurried away towards the toilet.
This was an act. The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away. Even the way she held the basin out so that I had to notice it. That was all deliberate.
I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice in the office, talking to a patient. I had seen the office lights on anyway, I had seen the patient’s car parked outside. Nobody has to walk anymore.
I took off my coat and went on upstairs. All I seemed to be concerned about was not letting Mrs. B. have it her way. No questions, no shocked realization. No What is that you have in the basin, Mrs. B., oh what have you and my daddy been up to? (Not that I ever called him my daddy.) I got busy at once rooting around in one of the boxes of books I still hadn’t unpacked. I was looking for the journals of Anna Jameson. I had promised them to the other person under seventy who had been at the meeting. A man who is a photographer and knows something about the history of Upper Canada. He would like to have been a history teacher but has a stammer which prevented him. He told me this in the half hour we stood out on the sidewalk talking instead of taking the more decisive step of going for coffee. As we said good night he told me that he’d like to have asked me for coffee, but he had to get home and spell his wife because the baby had colic.
I unpacked the whole box of books before I was through. It was like looking at relics from a bygone age. I looked through them till the patient was gone and my father had taken Mrs. B. home and had come upstairs and used the bathroom and gone to bed. I read here and there till I was so groggy I almost fell asleep on the floor.
AT lunch today, then, my father finally said, “Who cares about the Turks anyway? Ancient history.”
And I had to say, “I think I know what’s going on here.”
His head reared up and he snorted. He really did, like an old horse.
“You do, do you? You think you know what?”
I said, “I’m not accusing you. I don’t disapprove.”
“Is that so?”
“I believe in abortion,” I said. “I believe it should be legal.”
“I don’t want you to use that word again in this house,” my father said.
“Why not?”
“Because I am the one who says what words are used in this house.”
“You don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand that you’ve got too loose a tongue. You’ve got too loose a tongue and not enough sense. Too much education and not enough ordinary brains.”
I still did not shut up. I said, “People must know.”
“Must they? There’s a difference between knowing and yapping. Get that through your head once and for all.”
• • •
WE have not spoken for the rest of the day. I cooked the usual roast for dinner and we ate it and did not speak. I don’t think he finds this difficult at all. Neither do I so far because everything seems so stupid and outrageous and I’m angry, but I won’t stay in this mood forever and I could find myself apologizing. (You may not be surprised to hear that.) It’s so obviously time that I got out of here.
The young man last night told me that when he felt relaxed his stammer practically disappeared. Like when I’m talking to you, he said. I could probably make him fall in love with me, to a certain extent. I could do that just for recreation. That is the sort of life I could get into here.
DEAR R. I haven’t gone, the Mini wasn’t fit for it. I took it in to be overhauled. Also the weather has changed, the wind has got into an autumn rampage scooping up the lake and battering the beach. It caught Mrs. Barrie on her own front steps—the wind did—and knocked her sideways and shattered her elbow. It’s her left elbow and she said she could work with her right arm, but my father told her it was a complicated fracture and he wanted her to rest for a month. He asked me if I would mind postponing my departure. Those were his words—”postponing my departure.” He hasn’t asked where I’m planning to go; he just knows about the car.
I don’t know where I’m planning to go, either.
I said all right, I’d stay while I could be useful. So we’re on decent speaking terms; in fact it’s fairly comfortable. I try to do just about what Mrs. B. would do, in the house. No tries now at reorganization, no discussion of repairs. (The eaves have been done—when the Mrs. B. relation came I was astonished and grateful.) I hold the oven door shut the way Mrs. B. did with a couple of heavy medical textbooks set on a stool pushed up against it. I cook the meat and the vegetables in her way and never think about bringing home an avocado or bottle of artichoke hearts or a garlic bulb, though I see all those things are now for sale in the supermarket. I make the coffee from the powder in the jar. I tried drinking that myself to see if I could get used to it and of course I could. I clean up the office at the end of every day and look after the laundry. The laundryman likes me because I don’t accuse him of anything.
I’m allowed to answer the phone, but if it’s a woman asking for my father and not volunteering details I’m supposed to take the number and say that the doctor will phone back. So I do, and sometimes the woman just hangs up. When I tell my father this he says, “She’ll likely call again.”
There aren’t many of those patients—the ones he calls the specials. I don’t know—maybe one a month. Mostly he’s dealing with sore throats and cramped colons and bealing ears and so on. Jumpy hearts, kidney stones, sour digestions.
R. Tonight he knocked on my door. He knocked though it wasn’t all the way closed. I was reading. He asked—not in a supplicating way of course, but I would say with a reasonable respect—if I could give him a
hand in the office.
The first special since Mrs. B. has been away.
I asked what he wanted me to do.
“Just more or less to keep her steady,” he said. “She’s young and she’s not used to it yet. Give your hands a good scrub too, use the soap in the bottle in the toilet downstairs.”
The patient was lying flat on the examining table with a sheet over her from the waist down. The top part of her was fully dressed in a dark-blue buttoned-up cardigan and a white blouse with a lace-trimmed collar. These clothes lay loosely over her sharp collarbone and nearly flat chest. Her hair was black, pulled tightly back from her face and braided and pinned on top of her head. This prim and severe style made her neck look long and emphasized the regal bone structure of her white face, so that from a distance she could be taken for a woman of forty-five. Close up you could see that she was quite young, probably around twenty. Her pleated skirt was hung up on the back of the door. The rim of white panties showed, that she had thoughtfully hung underneath it.
She was shivering hard though the office wasn’t cold.
“Now Madeleine,” my father said. “The first thing is we’ve got to get your knees up.”
I wondered if he knew her. Or did he just ask for a name and use whatever the woman gave him?
“Easy,” he said. “Easy. Easy.” He got the stirrups in place and her feet into them. Her legs were bare and looked as if they’d never known a suntan. She was still wearing her loafers.
