Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

  Then for the first time since he entered the house she thought of her cancer. She thought of how it freed her, put her out of danger.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  “I don’t know. Was I smiling?”

  “I guess you like listening to stories. Want me to tell you a story?”

  “Maybe I’d rather you’d leave.”

  “I will leave. First I’ll tell you a story.”

  He put his hand in a back pocket. “Here. Want to see a picture? Here.”

  It was a photograph of three people, taken in a living room with closed floral curtains as a backdrop. An old man—not really old, maybe in his sixties—and a woman of about the same age were sitting on a couch. A very large younger woman was sitting in a wheelchair drawn up close to one end of the couch and a little in front of it. The old man was heavy and gray haired, with eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, as if he might suffer some chest wheezing, but he was smiling as well as he could. The old woman was much smaller, with dark dyed hair and lipstick, wearing what used to be called a peasant blouse, with little red bows at the wrists and neck. She smiled determinedly, even a bit frantically, lips stretched over perhaps bad teeth.

  But it was the younger woman who monopolized the picture. Distinct and monstrous in her bright muumuu, dark hair done up in a row of little curls along her forehead, cheeks sloping into her neck. And in spite of all that bulge of flesh an expression of some satisfaction and cunning.

  “That’s my mother and that’s my dad. And that’s my sister Madelaine. In the wheelchair.

  “She was born funny. Nothing no doctor or anybody could do for her. And ate like a pig. There was bad blood between her and me since ever I remember. She was five years older than I was and she just set out to torment me. Throwing anything at me she could get her hands on and knockin me down and tryin to run over me with her fuckin wheelchair. Pardon my French.”

  “It must have been hard for you. And hard for your parents.”

  “Huh. They just rolled over and took it. They went to this church, see, and this preacher told them, she’s a gift from God. They took her with them to church and she’d fuckin howl like a fuckin cat in the backyard and they’d say oh, she’s tryin to make music, oh God fuckin bless her. Excuse me again.

  “So I never bothered much with sticking around home, you know, I went and got my own life. That’s all right, I says, I’m not hanging around for this crap. I got my own life. I got work. I nearly always got work. I never sat around on my ass drunk on government money. On my rear end, I mean. I never asked my old man for a penny. I’d get up and tar a roof in the ninety-degree heat or I’d mop the floors in some stinkin old restaurant or go grease-monkey for some rotten cheatin garage. I’d do it. But I wasn’t always up for taking their shit so I wasn’t lasting too long. That shit people are always handing people like me and I couldn’t take it. I come from a decent home. My dad worked till he got too sick, he worked on the buses. I wasn’t brought up to take shit. Okay though—never mind that. What my parents always told me was, the house is yours. The house is all paid up and it’s in good shape and it’s yours. That’s what they told me. We know you had a hard time here when you were young and if you hadn’t had such a hard time you could of got an education, so we want to make it up to you how we can. So then not long ago I’m talking to my dad on the phone and he says, Of course you understand the deal. So I’m what deal? He says, It’s only a deal if you sign the papers you will take care of your sister as long as she lives. It’s only your home if it’s her home too, he says.

  “Jesus. I never heard that before. I never heard that was the deal before. I always thought the deal was, when they died she’d go into a Home. And it wasn’t going to be my home.

  “So I told my old man that wasn’t the way I understood it and he says it’s all sewed up for you to sign and if you don’t want to sign it you don’t have to. Your aunt Rennie will be around to keep an eye on you too so when we’re gone you see you stick to the arrangements.

  “Yeah, my aunt Rennie. She’s my mom’s youngest sister and she is one prize bitch.

  “Anyway he says your aunt Rennie will be keeping an eye on you and suddenly I just switched. I said, Well, I guess that’s the way it is and I guess it is only fair. Okay. Okay, is it all right if I come over and eat dinner with you this Sunday.

  “Sure, he says. Glad you have come to look at it the right way. You always fire off too quick, he says, at your age you ought to have some sense.

  “Funny you should say that, I says to myself.

  “So over I go, and Mom has cooked chicken. Nice smell when I first go into the house. Then I get the smell of Madelaine, just her same old awful smell I don’t know what it is but even if Mom washes her every day it’s there. But I acted very nice. I said, This is an occasion, I should take a picture. I told them I had this wonderful new camera that developed right away and they could see the picture. Right off the bat you can see yourself, what do you think of that? And I got them all sitting in the front room just the way I showed you. Mom she says, Hurry up I have to get back in my kitchen. Do it in no time, I says. So I take their picture and she says, Come on now, let’s see how we look, and I say, Hang on, just be patient, it’ll only take a minute. And while they’re waiting to see how they look I take out my nice little gun and bin-bang-bam I shoot the works of them. Then I take another picture and I went out to the kitchen and ate up some of the chicken and didn’t look at them no more. I kind of had expected Aunt Rennie to be there too but Mom had said she had some church thing. I would of shot her too just as easy. So lookie here. Before and after.”

  The old man’s head was fallen sideways, the old woman’s backwards. Their expressions were blown away. The sister had fallen forward so there was no face to be seen, just her great flowery swathed knees and dark head with its elaborate and outdated coiffure.

  “I could of just sat there feelin good for a week. I felt so relaxed. But I didn’t stay past dark. I made sure I was all cleaned up and I finished off the chicken and I knew I better get out. I was prepared for Aunt Rennie walkin in but I got out of the mood I had been in and I knew I’d have to work myself up to do her. I just didn’t feel like it anymore. One thing my stomach was so full, it was a big chicken. I had ate it all instead of packin it with me because I was scared the dogs would smell it and cut up a fuss when I went by the back lanes like I figured to do. I thought that chicken inside of me would do me for a week. Yet look how hungry I was when I got to you.”

  He looked around the kitchen. “I don’t suppose you got anything to drink here, have you? That tea was awful.”

  “There might be some wine,” she said. “I don’t know, I don’t drink anymore—”

  “You AA?”

  “No. It just doesn’t agree with me.”

  She got up and found her legs were shaking. Of course.

  “I fixed up the phone line before I come in here,” he said. “Just thought you ought to know.”

  Would he get careless and more easygoing as he drank, or would he get meaner and wilder? How could she tell? She found the wine without having to leave the kitchen. She and Rich used to drink red wine every day in reasonable quantities because it was supposed to be good for your heart. Or bad for something that was not good for your heart. In her fright and confusion she was not able to think what that was called.

  Because she was frightened. Certainly. The fact of her cancer was not going to be any help to her at the present moment, none at all. The fact that she was going to die within a year refused to cancel out the fact that she might die now.

  He said, “Hey, this is the good stuff. No screw top. Haven’t you got no corkscrew?”

  She moved towards a drawer, but he jumped up and put her aside, not too roughly.

  “Unh-unh, I get it. You stay away from this drawer. Oh my, lots of good stuff in here.”

  He put the knives on the seat of his chair where she would never be able to grab them and used the c
orkscrew. She did not fail to see what a wicked instrument it could be in his hand but there was not the least possibility that she herself would ever be able to use it.

  “I’m just getting up for glasses,” she said, but he said no. No glass, he said, you got any plastic?

  “No.”

  “Cups then. I can see you.”

  She set down the two cups and said, “Just a very little for me.”

  “And me,” he said, businesslike. “I gotta drive.” But he filled his cup to the brim. “I don’t want no cop stickin his head in to see how I am.”

  “Free radicals,” she said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s something about red wine. It either destroys them because they’re bad or builds them up because they’re good, I can’t remember.”

  She drank a sip of the wine and it didn’t make her feel sick, as she had expected. He drank, still standing. She said, “Watch for those knives when you sit down.”

  “Don’t start kidding with me.”

  He gathered the knives and put them back in the drawer, and sat.

  “You think I’m dumb? You think I’m nervous?”

  She took a big chance. She said, “I just think you haven’t ever done anything like this before.”

  “Course I haven’t. You think I’m a murderer? Yeah, I killed them but I’m not a murderer.”

  “There’s a difference,” she said.

  “You bet.”

  “I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have done the same thing you did.”

  “You never.” He pushed back his chair but did not stand.

  “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to,” she said. “But I did it.”

  “Hell you did. How’d you do it then?”

  “Poison.”

  “What are you talkin about? You make them drink some of this fuckin tea or what?”

  “It wasn’t a them, it was a her. There’s nothing wrong with the tea. It’s supposed to prolong your life.”

  “Don’t want my life prolonged if it means drinkin junk like that. They can find out poison in a body when it’s dead anyway.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true of vegetable poisons. Anyway nobody would think to look. She was one of those girls who had rheumatic fever as a child and coasted along on it, can’t play sports or do anything much, always having to sit down and have a rest. Her dying would not be any big surprise.”

  “What she ever done to you?”

  “She was the girl my husband was in love with. He was going to leave me and marry her. He had told me. I had done everything for him. He and I were working on this house together, he was everything I had. We had not had any children because he didn’t want them. I learned carpentry and I was frightened to get up on ladders but I did it. He was my whole life. Then he was going to kick me out for this useless whiner who worked in the registrar’s office. The whole life we’d worked for was to go to her. Was that fair?”

  “How would a person get poison?”

  “I didn’t have to get it. It was right in the back garden. Here. There was a rhubarb patch from years back. There’s a perfectly adequate poison in the veins of rhubarb leaves. Not the stalks. The stalks are what we eat. They’re fine. But the thin little red veins in the big rhubarb leaves, they’re poisonous. I knew about this, but I have to confess I didn’t know exactly what it would take to be effective so what I did was more in the nature of an experiment. Various things were lucky for me. First, my husband was away at a symposium in Minneapolis. He might have taken her along, of course, but it was summer holidays and she was the junior who had to keep the office going. Another thing, though, she might not have been absolutely on her own, there might have been another person around. And moreover, she might have been suspicious of me. I had to assume that she did not know I knew, and would still think of me as a friend. She had been entertained at my house, we were friendly. I had to count on my husband’s being the kind of person who delays everything and who would tell me to see how I took it but not yet tell her he had done so. So then you say, Why get rid of her? He might still have been thinking both ways?

  “No. He would have kept her on somehow. And even if he didn’t our life was poisoned by her. She poisoned my life so I had to poison hers.

  “I baked two tarts. One had the poison veins in it and one didn’t. Of course I marked the one that didn’t. I drove down to the university and got two cups of coffee and went to her office. Nobody there but her. I told her I’d had to come into town and as I was passing the university grounds I saw this nice little bakery my husband was always praising for their coffee and their baked goods, so I dropped in and bought a couple of tarts and two cups of coffee. Thinking of her all alone when the rest of them got to go on their holidays and me all alone with my husband gone to Minneapolis. She was sweet and grateful. She said it was very boring for her there and the cafeteria was closed so you had to go over to the science building for coffee and they put hydrochloric acid in it. Ha-ha. So we had our little party.”

  “I hate rhubarb,” he said. “It wouldn’t of worked with me.”

  “It did with her. I had to take a chance that it would work fast, before she realized what was wrong and had her stomach pumped. But not so fast she would associate it with me. I had to be out of the way and so I was. The building was deserted and so far as I know to this day nobody saw me arrive or leave. Of course I knew some back ways.”

  “You think you’re smart. You got away scot-free.”

  “But so have you.”

  “What I done wasn’t so underhanded as what you done.”

  “It was necessary to you.”

  “You bet it was.”

  “Mine was necessary to me. I kept my marriage. He came to see that she wouldn’t have been any good anyway. She’d have got sick on him, almost certainly. She was just the type. She’d have been nothing but a burden to him. He saw that.”

  “You better not of put nothing in them eggs,” he said. “You did you’ll be sorry.”

  “Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t want to. It’s not something you’d go around doing regularly. I don’t actually know anything about poison, it was just by chance I had that one little piece of information.”

  He stood up so suddenly that he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting on. She noticed there was not much wine left in the bottle.

  “I need the keys to the car.”

  She couldn’t think for a moment.

  “Keys to the car. Where’d you put them?”

  It could happen. As soon as she gave him the keys it could happen. Would it help her to tell him she was dying of cancer? How stupid. It wouldn’t help at all. Cancer death in the future would not keep her from talking today.

  “Nobody knows what I’ve told you,” she said. “You are the only person I’ve told.”

  A fat lot of good all that might do. The whole advantage she had presented to him had probably gone right over his head.

  “Nobody knows yet,” he said, and she thought, Thank God. He’s on the right track. He does realize. Does he realize?

  Thank God maybe.

  “The keys are in the blue teapot.”

  “Where? What the fuck blue teapot?”

  “At the end of the counter—the lid got broken, so we used it to just throw things in—”

  “Shut up. Shut up or I’ll shut you up for good.” He tried to stick his fist in the blue teapot but it would not go in. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he cried, and he turned the teapot over, and banged it on the counter so that not only the car keys and house keys and various coins and a wad of old Canadian Tire money fell out on the floor, but pieces of blue pottery hit the boards.

  “With the red string on them,” she said faintly.

  He kicked things about for a moment before he picked the proper keys up.

  “So what are you going to say about the car
?” he said. “You sold it to a stranger. Right?”

  The import of this did not come to her for a moment. When it did, the room quivered. “Thank you,” she said, but her mouth was so dry she was not sure any sound came out. It must have, though, for he said, “Don’t thank me yet.

  “I got a good memory,” he said. “Good long memory. You make that stranger look nothin like me. You don’t want them goin into graveyards diggin up dead bodies. You just remember, a word outta you and there’ll be a word outta me.”

  She kept looking down. Not stirring or speaking, just looking at the mess on the floor.

  Gone. The door closed. Still she didn’t move. She wanted to lock the door but she couldn’t move. She heard the engine starting, then die. What now? He was so jumpy, he’d do everything wrong. Then again, starting, starting, turning over. The tires on the gravel. She walked trembling to the phone and found that he had told the truth; it was dead.

  Beside the phone was one of their many bookcases. This one held mostly old books, books that had not been opened for years. There was The Proud Tower. Albert Speer. Rich’s books.

  A Celebration of Familiar Fruits and Vegetables: Hearty and Elegant Dishes and Fresh Surprises, assembled, tested, and created by Bett Underhill.

  Once they had got the kitchen finished Nita had made the mistake for a while of trying to cook like Bett. For a rather short while, because it turned out that Rich did not want to be reminded of all that fuss, and she herself had not enough patience for so much chopping and simmering. But she had learned a few things that surprised her. Such as the poisonous aspects of certain familiar and generally benign plants.

  She should write to Bett.

  Dear Bett, Rich is dead and I have saved my life by becoming you.

  What does Bett care that her life was saved? There’s only one person really worth telling.

  Rich. Rich. Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky.

  She should walk down to the village. There was a police office in the back of the Township Hall.

  She should get a cell phone.