Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

  Now she was unpacking the bag she had with her. Various pads and cloths and flat velour-covered brushes appeared.

  “I’ll need some hot water to warm these up,” she said. “You can heat me some in the kettle.”

  This was a grand house, but there was only cold water on tap, as in my house.

  She had sized me up, apparently, as somebody who was willing to take orders—especially, perhaps, orders given in such a coaxing voice. And she was right, though maybe she didn’t guess that my willingness had more to do with my own curiosity than her charm.

  She was tanned this early in the summer, and her pageboy hair had a copper sheen—something you could get easily nowadays from a bottle, but that was unusual and enviable then. Brown eyes, a dimple in one cheek, such smiling and teasing that you never got a good-enough look at her to say whether she was really pretty, or how old she was.

  Her rump curved out handsomely to the back instead of spreading to the sides.

  I learned right away that she was new in town, married to the mechanic at the Esso station, and that she had two little boys, one four years old and one three. “It took me a while to find out what was causing them,” she said with one of her conspiratorial twinkles.

  She had trained to be a masseuse in Hamilton where they used to live and it turned out to be just the sort of thing she had always had a knack for.

  “Dor-thee?”

  “She’s in the sunroom,” I told her again.

  “I know, I’m just kidding her. Now maybe you don’t know about getting a massage, but when you get one, you got to take off all your clothes. Not such a problem when you’re young, but when you’re older, you know, you can get all embarrassed.”

  She was wrong about one thing, at least as far as I was concerned. About it not being a problem to take off all your clothes when you’re young.

  “So maybe you should skedaddle.”

  This time I took the front staircase while she was busy with the hot water. That way I got a glance in through the open door of the sunroom—which was not much of a sunroom at all, having its windows on three sides all filled up with the fat leaves of catalpa trees.

  There I saw Old Mrs. Crozier stretched out on a daybed, on her stomach, head turned away from me, absolutely naked. A skinny streak of pale flesh. It didn’t look so old as the parts of her that were daily exposed—her brown-freckled dark-veined hands and forearms, her brown-blotched cheeks. This usually covered length of her body was yellow-white, like wood freshly stripped of its bark.

  I sat on the top step and listened to the sounds of the massage. Thumps and grunts. Roxanne’s voice bossy now, cheerful but full of exhortation.

  “Stiff knot here. Oh brother. I’m going to have to whack you one. Just kidding. Aw, come on, just loosen up for me. You know you got a nice skin here. Small of your back, what do they say? It’s like a baby’s bum. Now I gotta bear down a bit, you’re going to feel it here. Take away the tension. Goody girl.”

  Old Mrs. Crozier was making little yelps. Sounds of complaint and gratitude. It went on for quite a while and I got bored. I went back to reading some old Canadian Home Journals that I had found in a hall cupboard. I read recipes and checked on old-time fashions till I heard Roxanne say, “Now I’ll just clean this stuff up and we’ll go upstairs like you decided.”

  Upstairs. I slid the magazines back into their place in the cupboard that would have been coveted by my mother and went into Mr. Crozier’s room. He was asleep, or at least he had his eyes closed. I moved the fan a few inches and smoothed his cover and went and stood by the window twiddling with the blind.

  Sure enough there came a noise on the back stairs, Old Mrs. Crozier with her slow and threatening cane steps, Roxanne running ahead, and calling, “Look out, look out, wherever you are. We’re coming to get you wherever you are.”

  Mr. Crozier had his eyes open now. Beyond his usual weariness was a faint expression of alarm. But before he could pretend to be asleep again Roxanne burst into the room.

  “So here’s where you’re hiding. I just told your stepmom I thought it was about time I got introduced to you.”

  Mr. Crozier said, “How do you do, Roxanne.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “Word gets around.”

  “Fresh fellow you got here,” said Roxanne to Old Mrs. Crozier, who now came stumping into the room.

  “Stop fooling around with that blind,” Old Mrs. Crozier said to me. “Go and fetch me a drink of cool water if you want something to do. Not cold—just cool.”

  “You’re a mess,” said Roxanne to Mr. Crozier. “Who gave you that shave and when was it?”

  “Yesterday,” he said. “I handle it myself as well as I can.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Roxanne. And to me, “When you’re getting her water, how’d you like to heat some up for me and I’ll undertake to give him a decent shave?”

  That was how Roxanne took on this other job, once a week, following the massage. She told Mr. Crozier on that first day not to worry.

  “I’m not going to pound on you like you must have heard me doing to Dorothy-doodle downstairs. Before I got my massage training I used to be a nurse. Well, a nurse’s aide. One of the ones do all the work and the nurses come around and boss you. Anyway, I learned how to make people comfortable.”

  Dorothy-doodle? Mr. Crozier grinned. But the odd thing was that Old Mrs. Crozier just grinned too.

  Roxanne shaved him deftly. She sponged his face and neck and torso and arms and hands. She pulled his sheets around, somehow managing not to disturb him, and she pounded and rearranged his pillows. Talking all the time, pure teasing and nonsense.

  “Dorothy, you’re a liar. You said you had a sick man upstairs and I walk in here and I think, Where’s the sick man? I don’t see a sick man round here. Do I?”

  Mr. Crozier said, “What would you say I am then?”

  “Recovering. That’s what I would say. I don’t say you should be up and running around, I’m not so stupid as all that. I know you need your bed rest. But I say recovering. Nobody sick like you are supposed to be ever looked as good as what you do.”

  I thought this flirtatious prattle insulting. Mr. Crozier looked terrible. A tall man whose ribs had shown like those of somebody fresh from a famine when she sponged him, whose head was bald and whose skin looked as if it had the texture of a plucked chicken’s, his neck corded like an old man’s. Whenever I had waited on him in any way I had avoided looking at him. And this was not really because he was sick and ugly. It was because he was dying. I would have felt something of the same reticence even if he had looked angelically handsome. I was aware of an atmosphere of death in the house, growing thicker as you approached this room, and he was at the center of it, like the host the Catholics kept in the box so power fully called the tabernacle. He was the one stricken, marked out from everybody else, and here was Roxanne trespassing on his ground with her jokes and her swagger and notions of entertainment.

  Inquiring, for instance, as to whether there was a game in the house called Chinese checkers.

  This was perhaps on her second visit, when she asked him what he did all day.

  “Read sometimes. Sleep.”

  And how did he sleep at night?

  “If I can’t sleep I lie awake. Think. Sometimes read.”

  “Doesn’t that disturb your wife?”

  “She sleeps in the back bedroom.”

  “Un-huh. You need some entertainment.”

  “Are you going to sing and dance for me?”

  I saw Old Mrs. Crozier look aside with her odd involuntary grin.

  “Don’t you get cheeky,” said Roxanne. “Are you up to cards?”

  “I hate cards.”

  “Well, have you got Chinese checkers in the house?”

  Roxanne directed this question at Old Mrs. Crozier, who first said she had no idea, then wondered if there might be a board in a drawer of the dining room buffet.

  So I was sent
down to look and came back with the board and the jar of marbles.

  Roxanne set the board up over Mr. Crozier’s legs, and she and I and Mr. Crozier played, Old Mrs. Crozier saying she had never understood the game or been able to keep her marbles straight. (To my surprise she seemed to offer this as a joke.) Roxanne might squeal when she made a move or groan whenever somebody jumped over one of her marbles, but she was careful never to disturb the patient. She held her body still and set her marbles down like feathers. I tried to learn to do the same, because she would widen her eyes warningly at me if I didn’t. All without losing her dimple.

  I remembered Young Mrs. Crozier, Sylvia, saying to me in the car that her husband did not welcome conversation. It tired him out, she said, and when he was tired he could become irritable. So I thought, If ever there was a time for him to become irritable, it is now. Being forced to play a silly game on his deathbed, when you could feel his fever in the sheets.

  But Sylvia must have been wrong. He had developed greater patience and courtesy than she was perhaps aware of. With inferior people—Roxanne was surely an inferior person—he had made himself tolerant, gentle. When all he must want to do was lie there and meditate on the pathways of his life and gear up for his future.

  Roxanne patted sweat off his forehead, saying, “Don’t get excited, you haven’t won yet.”

  “Roxanne,” he said. “Roxanne. Do you know whose name that was, Roxanne?”

  “Hmm?” she said, and I broke in. I couldn’t help it.

  “It was Alexander the Great’s wife’s name.”

  My head was a magpie’s nest lined with such bright scraps of information.

  “Is that so?” said Roxanne. “And who was that supposed to be? Great Alexander?”

  I realized something when I looked at Mr. Crozier at that moment. Something shocking, saddening.

  He liked her not knowing. I could tell. He liked her not knowing. Her ignorance woke a pleasure that melted on his tongue, like a lick of toffee.

  · · ·

  On the first day she had worn shorts, as I did, but the next time and always after that Roxanne wore a dress of some stiff and shiny light green material. You could hear it rustle as she ran up the stairs. She brought a fleecy pad for Mr. Crozier, so he would not develop bedsores. She was dissatisfied with the arrangement of his bedclothes, always, had to put them to rights. But however she scolded, her movements never irritated him, and she made him admit to feeling more comfortable afterwards.

  She was never at a loss. Sometimes she came equipped with riddles. Or jokes. Some of the jokes were what my mother would call smutty and would not allow around our house, except when they came from certain of my father’s relatives who had practically no other kind of conversation.

  These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.

  Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?

  Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?

  The answers always coming with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the audience of having dirty minds.

  And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of jokes I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or milking machines.

  “Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

  The fact that Old Mrs. Crozier snickered shocked me as much as the jokes themselves. I thought that she maybe didn’t get the point but simply enjoyed listening to whatever Roxanne said. She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she’d been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn’t got the wrapping off it yet.

  Mr. Crozier didn’t laugh, but he never laughed, really. He raised his eyebrows, pretending to scold, to find Roxanne outrageous but endearing all the same. This could have been good manners, or gratitude for all her efforts, whatever they might be.

  I myself made sure to laugh, so that Roxanne would not put me down as being full of priggish innocence.

  The other thing she did, to keep things lively, was tell about her life. Coming down from some lost little town in northern Ontario to Toronto to visit her older sister, then getting a job at Eaton’s, first cleaning things up in the cafeteria, then being noticed by one of the managers because she worked fast and was always cheerful, and suddenly finding herself a salesgirl in the glove department. (I thought she made this sound something like being discovered by Warner Brothers.) And who should come in one day but Barbara Ann Scott, the skating star, who bought a pair of elbow-length white kid gloves.

  Meanwhile Roxanne’s sister had so many boyfriends that she would flip a coin to see who she would go out with almost every night, and she employed Roxanne to meet the rejects regretfully at the front door of the rooming house, while she herself and her pick sneaked out the back. Roxanne said maybe that was how she had developed such a gift of the gab. And pretty soon some of the boys she met this way were taking her out on her own, instead of her sister. They did not know her real age.

  “I had me a ball,” she said.

  I began to understand that there were certain talkers—certain girls—whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say, but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling about was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people—people like me—who didn’t concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

  Mr. Crozier sat propped up on his pillows and looked for all the world as if he was happy. Happy just to close his eyes and let her talk, then open his eyes and find her there, like a chocolate bunny on Easter morning. And then with his eyes open follow every twitch of her candy lips and sway of her sumptuous bottom.

  Old Mrs. Crozier would rock slightly back and forth in her curious state of satisfaction.

  The time Roxanne spent upstairs was as long as she spent downstairs, giving the massage. I wondered if she was being paid. If she wasn’t, how could she afford to take the time? And who could be paying her but Old Mrs. Crozier?

  Why?

  To keep her stepson happy and comfortable? I doubted it.

  To keep herself entertained in a curious way?

  One afternoon when Roxanne had left his room, Mr. Crozier said he felt thirstier than usual. I went downstairs to get him some water from the pitcher that was always in the refrigerator. Roxanne was packing up to go home.

  “I never meant to stay so late,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to run into that schoolteacher.”

  I didn’t understand for a moment.

  “You know. Syl-vi-a. She’s not crazy about me either, is she? She ever mention me when she drives you home?”

  I said that Sylvia had never mentioned Roxanne’s name to me, during any of our drives. But why should she?

  “Dorothy says she doesn’t know how to handle him. She says I make him a lot happier than what she does. Dorothy says that. I wouldn’t be surprised she even told her that to her face.”

  I thought of how Sylvia ran upstairs into her husband’s room every afternoon when she got home, before she even spoke to me or her mother-in-law, her face flushed with eagerness and desperation. I wanted to say something about that—I wanted somehow to defend her, but I didn’t know how. And people as confident as Roxanne often seemed to get the better of me, even if it was only by not listening.

  “You sure she never says anything about me?”

  I said again that no, she didn’t. “She’s tired when she gets home.”

  “Yeah. Everybody’s tired. Some just learn to act like they aren’t.”

  I did say something then, to balk her. “I quite like
her.”

  “You qwat like her?” mocked Roxanne.

  Playfully, sharply, she jerked at a strand of the bangs I had recently cut for myself.

  “You ought to do something decent with your hair.”

  Dorothy says.

  If Roxanne wanted admiration, which was her nature, what was it Dorothy wanted? I had a feeling there was mischief stirring, but I could not pin it down. Maybe it was just a desire to have Roxanne in the house, her liveliness in the house, double time.

  Midsummer passed. Water was low in the wells. The sprinkler truck stopped coming and some stores had put up sheets of what looked like yellow cellophane in their windows to keep their goods from fading. Leaves were spotty, grass dry.

  Old Mrs. Crozier kept her garden man hoeing, day after day. That’s what you do in the dry weather, hoe and hoe to bring up any moisture that you can find in the ground underneath.

  Summer school at the college would end after the second week of August, and then Sylvia Crozier would be home every day.

  Mr. Crozier was still glad to see Roxanne, but he often fell asleep. He could fall asleep without letting his head fall back, during one of her jokes or anecdotes. Then after a moment he would be awake, he would ask where he was.

  “Right here, you sleepy noodle. You’re supposed to be paying attention to me. I should bat you one. Or how ’bout I try tickling you instead?”

  Anybody could see how he was failing. There were hollows in his cheeks like an old man’s and the light shone through the tops of his ears as if they were not flesh but plastic. (Though we didn’t say “plastic” then; we said “celluloid.”)

  The last day of my working there, Sylvia’s last day of teaching, was a massage day. Sylvia had to leave early for the college, because of some ceremony, so I walked across town, arriving when Roxanne was already there. Old Mrs. Crozier was also in the kitchen, and they both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was coming, as if I had interrupted them.

  “I ordered them specially,” said Old Mrs. Crozier.

  She must have meant the macaroons sitting in the baker’s box on the table.

  “Yeah, but I told you,” said Roxanne. “I can’t eat that stuff. Not no way no how.”