by Alice Munro
This was the sort of thing I chose to tell to Ernie, who flushed and said that they should have got it in writing.
Kay and Beverly were a disappointment to me. They worked hard at Modern Languages, but their conversation and preoccupations seemed hardly different from those of girls who might work in banks or offices. They did their hair up in pin curls and painted their fingernails on Saturdays, because that was the night they had dates with their boyfriends. On Sundays they had to soothe their faces with lotion because of the whisker-burns the boyfriends had inflicted on them. I didn’t find either boyfriend in the least desirable, and I wondered how they could.
They said that they had once had some crazy idea of being translators at the United Nations, but now they figured they would teach high school, and with any luck get married.
They gave me unwelcome advice.
I had got a job in the college cafeteria. I pushed a cart around collecting dirty dishes off the tables and wiped the tables clean when they were empty. And I set out food to be picked up from the shelves.
They said that this job was not a good idea.
“Boys won’t ask you out if they see you at a job like that.”
I told Ernie this, and he said, “So, what did you say?”
I told him that I had said I would not want to go out with anybody who would make such a judgment, so what was the problem?
Now I’d hit the right note. Ernie glowed; he chopped his hands up and down in the air.
“Absolutely right,” he said. “That is absolutely the attitude to take. Honest work. Never listen to anybody who wants to put you down for doing honest work. Just go right ahead and ignore them. Keep your pride. Anybody that doesn’t like it, you tell them they can lump it.”
This speech of his, the righteousness and approval lighting his large face, the jerky enthusiasm of his movements, roused the first doubts in me, the first gloomy suspicion that the warning, after all, might have some weight to it.
There was a note under my door saying that Beth wanted to talk to me. I was afraid it would be about my coat hung over the bannister to dry, or my feet making too much noise on the stairs when her husband Blake (sometimes) and the babies (always) had to sleep in the daytime.
The door opened on the scene of misery and confusion in which it seemed that all Beth’s days were passed. Wet laundry—diapers and smelly baby woolens—was hanging from some ceiling racks, bottles in a sterilizer bubbled and rattled on the stove. The windows were steamed up, and soggy cloths or soiled stuffed toys were thrown on the chairs. The big baby was hanging on to the rungs of the playpen and letting out an accusing howl—Beth had obviously just set him in there—and the smaller baby was in the high chair, with some mushy pumpkin-colored food spread like a rash across his mouth and chin.
Beth peered out from all this with a tight expression of superiority on her small flat face, as if to say that not many people could put up with such a nightmare as well as she could, even if the world was too ungenerous to give her the least credit.
“You know when you moved in,” she said, then raised her voice to compete with the big baby, “when you moved in I mentioned to you that there was enough space up there for two?”
Not in the matter of headroom, I was about to say, but she continued right on, informing me that there was another girl moving in. She was going to be there from Tuesdays to Fridays. She would be auditing some courses at the college.
“Blake will get the daybed in tonight. She won’t take up much room. I don’t imagine she’ll bring many clothes—she lives in town. You’ve had it all to yourself for six weeks now, and you’ll still have it that way on weekends.”
No mention of any reduction in the rent.
Nina actually did not take up much room. She was small, and thoughtful in her movements—she never bumped her head against the rafters, as I did. She spent a lot of her time sitting cross-legged on the daybed, her brownish-blond hair falling over her face, a Japanese kimono loose over her childish white underwear. She had beautiful clothes—a camel’s hair coat, cashmere sweaters, a pleated tartan skirt with a large silver pin. Just the sort of clothes you would see in a magazine layout, with the heading: “Outfitting Your Junior Miss for Her New Life on Campus.” But the moment she got back from the college she discarded her costume for the kimono. She usually didn’t bother hanging anything up. I followed the same routine of getting out of my school clothes, but in my case it was to keep the press in my skirt and preserve a reasonable freshness in the blouse or sweater, so I hung everything up carefully. In the evenings I wore a woolly bathrobe. I had eaten an early supper at the college as part of my wages, and Nina too seemed to have eaten, though I didn’t know where. Perhaps her supper was just what she ate all evening—almonds and oranges and a supply of little chocolate kisses wrapped in red or gold or purple foil.
I asked her if she didn’t get cold, in that light kimono.
“Unh-unh,” she said. She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her neck. “I’m permanently warm,” she said, and in fact she was. Her skin even looked warm, though she said that was just her tan, and it was fading. And connected with this skin warmth was a particular odor which was nutty or spicy, not displeasing but not the odor of a body that was constantly bathed and showered. (Nor was I entirely fresh myself, due to Beth’s rule of one bath a week. Many people then bathed no more than once a week, and I have an idea that there was more human smell around, in spite of talcum and the gritty paste deodorants.)
I usually read some book until late at night. I had thought it might be harder to read with someone else in the room, but Nina was an easy presence. She peeled her oranges and chocolates, she laid out games of patience. When she had to stretch to move a card she would sometimes make a little noise, a groan or grunt, as if she complained of this slight adjustment of her body, but took pleasure in it, all the same. Otherwise she was content, and curled up to sleep with the light on anytime she was ready. And because there was no demand or special need for talk we soon began to talk, and tell about our lives.
Nina was twenty-two years old and this was what had happened to her since she was fifteen:
First, she had gotten herself pregnant (that was how she put it) and married the father, who wasn’t much older than she was. This was in a town somewhere out from Chicago. The name of the town was Laneyville, and the only jobs were at the grain elevator or fixing machinery, for the boys, and working in stores for the girls. Nina’s ambition was to be a hairdresser, but you had to go away and train for that. Laneyville wasn’t where she had always lived, it was where her grandmother lived, and she lived with her grandmother because her father had died and her mother got married again and her stepfather had kicked her out.
She had a second baby, another boy, and her husband was supposed to have a job promised in another town, so he went off there. He was going to send for her, but he never did. She left both the children with her grandmother and took the bus to Chicago.
On the bus she met a girl named Marcy who like her was headed for Chicago. Marcy knew a man there who owned a restaurant and would give them jobs. But when they got to Chicago and located the restaurant it turned out he didn’t own it but had only worked there and he had quit some time before. The man who did own it had an empty room upstairs and he let them stay there in return for cleaning the place up every night. They had to use the ladies’ in the restaurant but weren’t supposed to spend much time there in the daytime because it was for customers. They had to wash any clothes that needed it after closing time.
They didn’t sleep hardly at all. They made friends with a barman—he was a queer but nice—in a place across the street and he let them drink ginger ale for free. They met a man there who invited them to a party and from that they got asked to other parties and it was during this time that Nina met Mr. Purvis. It was he in fact who gave her the name Nina. Before that she had been June. She went to live in Mr. Purvis’s place in Chicago.
She was waiting till the r
ight time to bring up the subject of her boys. There was so much room in Mr. Purvis’s house that she was thinking they could live with her there. But when she mentioned it Mr. Purvis told her he despised children. He did not want her to get pregnant, ever. But somehow she did, and she and Mr. Purvis went to Japan to get her an abortion.
Up until the last minute that was what she thought she would do, and then she decided, no. She would go ahead and have the baby.
All right, he said. He would pay her way back to Chicago, and from then on, she was on her own.
She knew her way around a bit by this time, and she went to a place where they looked after you till the baby was born, and you could have it adopted. It was born and it was a girl and Nina named her Gemma and made up her mind to keep her.
She knew another girl who had had a baby in this place and kept it, and she and this girl made an arrangement that they would work shifts and live together and raise their babies. They got an apartment that they could afford and they got jobs—Nina’s in a cocktail lounge—and everything was all right. Then Nina came home just before Christmas—Gemma was then eight months old—and found the other mother half drunk and fooling around with a man and the baby, Gemma, burning up with fever and too sick to even cry.
Nina wrapped her up and got a cab and took her to the hospital. The traffic was all snarled up because of Christmas, and when they finally got there they told her it was the wrong hospital for some reason and sent her off to another hospital, and on the way there Gemma had a convulsion and died.
She wanted to have a real burial for Gemma, not just have her put in with some old pauper who had died (that was what she heard happened with a baby’s body when you didn’t have any money), so she went to Mr. Purvis. He was nicer to her than she had expected, and he paid for the casket and everything and the gravestone with Gemma’s name, and after it was all over he took Nina back. They went on a long trip to London and Paris and a lot of other places to cheer her up. When they got back he shut up the house in Chicago and moved here. He owned some property near here, out in the country, he owned racehorses.
He asked her if she would like to get an education, and she said she would. He said she should just sit in on some courses to see what she would like to study. She told him that she would like to live part of the time just the way ordinary students lived, and dress like them and study like them, and he said he thought that could be managed.
Her life made me feel like a simpleton.
I asked her what was Mr. Purvis’s first name.
“Arthur.”
“Why don’t you call him that?”
“It wouldn’t sound natural.”
Nina was not supposed to go out at night, except to the college for certain specified events, such as a play or a concert or a lecture. She was supposed to eat dinner and lunch at the college. Though as I said, I don’t know whether she ever did. Breakfast was Nescafé in our room, and day-old doughnuts I got to take home from the cafeteria. Mr. Purvis did not like the sound of this but accepted it as part of Nina’s imitation of a college student’s life. As long as she ate a good hot meal once a day and a sandwich and soup at another meal he was satisfied, and this was what he thought she did. She checked what the cafeteria was offering, so she could tell him that she’d had the sausages or the Salisbury steak, and the salmon or the egg salad sandwich.
“So how would he know if you did go out?”
Nina got to her feet, with that little personal sound of complaint or pleasure, and padded to the attic window.
“Come over here,” she said. “And stay behind the curtain. See?”
A black car, parked not right across the street, but a few doors down. A streetlight caught the white hair of the driver.
“Mrs. Winner,” said Nina. “She’ll be there till midnight. Or later, I don’t know. If I went out she’d follow me and hang around wherever I went and follow me back.”
“What if she went to sleep?”
“Not her. Or if she did and I tried anything she’d be awake like a shot.”
Just to give Mrs. Winner some practice, as Nina said, we left the house one evening and took a bus to the city library. From the bus window we watched the long black car having to slow and dawdle at every bus stop, then speed up and stay with us. We had to walk a block to the library, and Mrs. Winner passed us and parked beyond the front entrance, and watched us—we believed—in her rearview mirror.
I wanted to see if I could check out a copy of The Scarlet Letter, which was required for one of my courses. I could not afford to buy one, and the copies from the college library were all out. Also I had an idea of getting a book out for Nina—the sort of book that showed simplified charts of history.
Nina had bought the textbooks for the courses she was auditing. She had bought notebooks and pens—the best fountain pens of that time—in matching colors. Red for Middle-American Pre-Columbian Civilizations, blue for the Romantic Poets, green for Victorian and Georgian English Novelists, yellow for Fairy Tales from Perrault to Andersen. She went to every lecture, sitting in the back row because she thought that was the proper place for her. She spoke as if she enjoyed walking through the Arts building with the throng of other students, finding her seat, opening her textbook at the page specified, taking out her pen. But her notebooks remained empty.
The trouble was, as I saw it, that she had no pegs to hang anything on. She did not know what Victorian meant, or Romantic, or Pre-Columbian. She had been to Japan, and Barbados, and many of the countries in Europe, but she could never have found those places on a map. She wouldn’t have known whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War.
I wondered how these courses had been chosen for her. Did she like the sound of them, had Mr. Purvis thought she could master them, or had he perhaps chosen them cynically, so that she would soon get her fill of being a student?
When I was looking for the book I wanted, I caught sight of Ernie Botts. He had an armful of mysteries, which he had picked up for an old friend of his mother’s. He had told me how he always did that, just as he always played checkers on Saturday mornings with a crony of his father’s out in the War Veterans’ Home.
I introduced him to Nina. I had told him about her moving in, but nothing, of course, about her former or even her present life.
He shook Nina’s hand and said he was pleased to meet her and asked at once if he could give us a ride home.
I was about to say no thanks, we’d get a ride on the bus, when Nina asked him where his car was parked.
“In the back,” he said.
“Is there a back door?”
“Yes, yes. It’s a sedan.”
“No, I didn’t mean that,” said Nina nicely. “I meant in the library. In the building.”
“Yes. Yes, there is,” said Ernie in a fluster. “I’m sorry, I thought you meant the car. Yes. A back door in the library. I came in that way myself. I’m sorry.” Now he was blushing, and he would have gone on apologizing if Nina had not broken in with a kind, even flattering, laugh.
“Well then,” she said. “We can go out the back door. So that’s settled. Thanks.”
Ernie drove us home. He asked if we would like to detour by his place, for a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate.
“Sorry, we’re sort of in a rush,” said Nina. “But thanks for asking.”
“I guess you’ve got homework.”
“Homework, yes,” she said. “We sure do.”
I was thinking that he had never once asked me to his house. Propriety. One girl, no. Two girls, okay.
No black car across the street when we said our thanks and good nights. No black car when we looked through the attic window. In a short time the phone rang, for Nina, and I heard her saying, on the landing, “Oh no, we just went in the library and got a book and came straight home on the bus. There was one right away, yes. I’m fine. Absolutely. Night-night.”
She came swaying and smiling up the stairs.
“Mrs. Winner
’s got herself in hot water tonight.”
Then she made a little leap and started to tickle me, as she did every once in a while, without the least warning, having discovered that I was extraordinarily ticklish.
One morning Nina did not get out of bed. She said she had a sore throat, a fever.
“Touch me.”
“You always feel hot to me.”
“Today I’m hotter.”
It was a Friday. She asked me to call Mr. Purvis, to tell him she wanted to stay here for the weekend.
“He’ll let me—he can’t stand anybody being sick around him. He’s a nut that way.”
Mr. Purvis wondered if he should send a doctor. Nina had foreseen that, and told me to say she just needed to rest, and she’d phone him, or I would, if she got any worse. Well then, tell her to take care, he said, and thanked me for phoning, and for being a good friend to Nina. And then, having started to say good-bye, he asked me if I would care to join him for Saturday night’s dinner. He said he found it boring to eat alone.
