Lying Under the Apple Tree

by Alice Munro

  She has had enough to eat, now. Her legs ache from standing so long. Mrs. Shantz is beside her, saying, “Have you had a chance to meet any of George’s local friends?”

  She means the young people keeping to themselves in the hall doorway. A couple of nice-looking girls, a young man still wearing a naval uniform, others. Looking at them, Jill thinks clearly that no one is really sorry. Ailsa perhaps, but Ailsa has her own reasons. No one is really sorry George is dead. Not even the girl who was crying in church and looks as if she will cry some more. Now that girl can remember that she was in love with George and think that he was in love with her—in spite of all—and never be afraid of what he may do or say to prove her wrong. And none of them will have to wonder, when a group of people clustered around George has started laughing, whom they are laughing at or what George is telling them. Nobody will have to strain to keep up with him or figure out how to stay in his good graces anymore.

  It doesn’t occur to her that if he had lived George might have become a different person, because she doesn’t think of becoming a different person herself.

  She says, “No,” with a lack of enthusiasm that causes Mrs. Shantz to say, “I know. It’s hard meeting new people. Particularly—if I was you I would rather go and lie down.”

  Jill was almost sure she was going to say “go and have a drink.” But there’s nothing being offered here, only tea and coffee. Jill hardly drinks anyway. She can recognize the smell on someone’s breath, though, and she thought she smelled it on Mrs. Shantz.

  “Why don’t you?” says Mrs. Shantz. “These things are a great strain. I’ll tell Ailsa. Go on now.”

  MRS. SHANTZ is a small woman with fine gray hair, bright eyes, and a wrinkled, pointed face. Every winter she spends a month by herself in Florida. She has money. The house that she and her husband built for themselves, behind the Kirkhams’ house, is long and low and blindingly white, with curved corners and expanses of glass bricks. Dr. Shantz is twenty or twenty-five years younger than she is—a thickset, fresh, and amiable-looking man with a high smooth forehead and fair curly hair. They have no children. It is believed that she has some, from a first marriage, but they don’t come to visit her. In fact the story is that Dr. Shantz was her son’s friend, brought home from college, and that he fell in love with his friend’s mother, she fell in love with her son’s friend, there was a divorce, and here they are married, living in luxurious, close-mouthed exile.

  Jill did smell whiskey. Mrs. Shantz carries a flask whenever she goes to a gathering of which—as she says—she can have no reasonable hopes. Drink does not make her fall about or garble her words or pick fights or throw her arms about people. The truth may be that she’s always a little bit drunk but never really drunk. She is used to letting the alcohol enter her body in a reasonable, reassuring way, so that her brain cells never get soaked or quite dried out. The only giveaway is the smell (which many people in this dry town attribute to some medicine she has to take or even to an ointment that she has to rub on her chest). That, and perhaps a deliberateness about her speech, the way she seems to clear a space around each word. She says things of course which a woman brought up around here would not say. She tells things on herself. She tells about being mistaken every once in a while for her husband’s mother. She says most people go into a tailspin when they discover their mistake, they’re so embarrassed. But some women—a waitress, maybe—will fasten on Mrs. Shantz quite a dirty look, as if to say, What’s he doing wasted on you?

  And Mrs. Shantz just says to them, “I know. It isn’t fair. But life isn’t fair and you might as well get used to it.”

  There isn’t any way this afternoon that she can space her sips properly. The kitchen and even the poky pantry behind it are places where women can be coming and going at any time. She has to go upstairs to the bathroom, and that not too often. When she does that late in the afternoon, a little while after Jill has disappeared, she finds the bathroom door locked. She thinks of nipping into one of the bedrooms and is wondering which one is empty, which occupied by Jill. Then she hears Jill’s voice coming from the bathroom, saying, “Just a minute,” or something like that. Something quite ordinary, but the tone of voice is strained and frightened.

  Mrs. Shantz takes a quick swallow right there in the hall, seizing the excuse of emergency.

  “Jill? Are you all right? Can you let me in?”

  Jill is on her hands and knees, trying to mop up the puddle on the bathroom floor. She has read about the water breaking—just as she has read about contractions, show, transition stage, placenta—but just the same the escape of warm fluid surprised her. She has to use toilet paper, because Ailsa took all the regular towels away and put out the smooth scraps of embroidered linen called guest towels.

  She holds on to the rim of the tub to pull herself up. She unbolts the door and that’s when the first pain astonishes her. She is not to have a single mild pain, or any harbingers or orchestrated first stage of labor; it’s all to be an unsparing onslaught and ripping headlong delivery.

  “Easy,” says Mrs. Shantz, supporting her as well as she can. “Just tell me which room is yours, we’ll get you lying down.”

  Before they even reach the bed Jill’s fingers dig into Mrs. Shantz’s thin arm to leave it black and blue.

  “Oh, this is fast,” Mrs. Shantz says. “This is a real mover and shaker for a first baby. I’m going to get my husband.”

  In that way I was born right in the house, about ten days early if Jill’s calculations were to be relied on. Ailsa had barely time to get the company cleared out before the place was filled with Jill’s noise, her disbelieving cries and the great shameless grunts that followed.

  Even if a mother had been taken by surprise and had given birth at home, it was usual by that time to move her and the baby into the hospital afterwards. But there was some sort of summer flu in town, and the hospital had filled up with the worst cases, so Dr. Shantz decided that Jill and I would be better off at home. Iona after all had finished part of her nurse’s training, and she could take her two-week holiday now, to look after us.

  JILL REALLY knew nothing about living in a family. She had grown up in an orphanage. From the age of six to sixteen she had slept in a dormitory. Lights turned on and off at a specified time, furnace never operating before or beyond a specified date. A long oilcloth-covered table where they ate and did their homework, a factory across the street. George had liked the sound of that. It would make a girl tough, he said. It would make her self-possessed, hard and solitary. It would make her the sort who would not expect any romantic nonsense. But the place had not been run in such a heartless way as perhaps he thought, and the people who ran it had not been ungenerous. Jill was taken to a concert, with some others, when she was twelve years old, and there she decided that she must learn to play the violin. She had already fooled around with the piano at the orphanage. Somebody took enough interest to get her a secondhand, very second-rate violin, and a few lessons, and this led, finally, to a scholarship at the Conservatory. There was a recital for patrons and directors, a party with best dresses, fruit punch, speeches, and cakes. Jill had to make a little speech herself, expressing gratitude, but the truth was that she took all this pretty much for granted. She was sure that she and some violin were naturally, fatefully connected, and would have come together without human help.

  In the dormitory she had friends, but they went off early to factories and offices and she forgot about them. At the high school that the orphans were sent to, a teacher had a talk with her. The words “normal” and “well rounded” came up in the talk. The teacher seemed to think that music was an escape from something or a substitute for something. For sisters and brothers and friends and dates. She suggested that Jill spread her energy around instead of concentrating on one thing. Loosen up, play volleyball, join the school orchestra if music was what she wanted.

  Jill started to avoid that particular teacher, climbing the stairs or going round the block so as not to ha
ve to speak to her. Just as she stopped reading any page from which the words “well rounded” or the word “popular” leapt out at her.

  At the Conservatory it was easier. There she met people quite as un–well rounded, as hard driven, as herself. She formed a few rather absentminded and competitive friendships. One of her friends had an older brother who was in the air force, and this brother happened to be a victim and worshipper of George Kirkham’s. He and George dropped in on a family Sunday-night supper, at which Jill was a guest. They were on their way to get drunk somewhere else. And that was how George met Jill. My father met my mother.

  THERE HAD to be somebody at home all the time, to watch Mrs. Kirkham. So Iona worked the night shift at the bakery. She decorated cakes—even the fanciest wedding cakes—and she got the first round of bread loaves in the oven at five o’clock. Her hands, which shook so badly that she could not serve anybody a teacup, were strong and clever and patient, even inspired, at any solitary job.

  One morning after Ailsa had gone off to work—this was during the short time that Jill was in the house before I was born—Iona hissed from the bedroom as Jill was going by. As if there was a secret. But who was there now in the house to keep a secret from? It couldn’t be Mrs. Kirkham.

  Iona had to struggle to get a stuck drawer of her bureau open. “Darn,” she said, and giggled. “Darn it. There.”

  The drawer was full of baby clothes—not plain necessary shirts and nightgowns such as Jill had bought at a shop that sold seconds, factory rejects, in Toronto, but knitted bonnets, sweaters and bootees and soakers, handmade tiny gowns. All possible pastel colors or combinations of colors—no blue or pink prejudice—with crocheted trimming and minute embroidered flowers and birds and lambs. The sort of stuff that Jill had barely known existed. She would have known, if she had done any thorough research in baby departments or peering into baby carriages, but she hadn’t.

  “Of course I don’t know what you’ve got,” Iona said. “You may have got so many things already, or maybe you don’t like homemade, I don’t know—” Her giggling was a kind of punctuation of speech and it was also an extension of her tone of apology. Everything she said, every look and gesture, seemed to be clogged up, overlaid with a sticky honey or snuffled mucus of apology, and Jill did not know how to deal with this.

  “It’s really nice,” she said flatly.

  “Oh no, I didn’t know if you’d even want it. I didn’t know if you’d like it at all.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  “I didn’t do it all, I bought some of it. I went to the church bazaar and the Hospital Auxiliary, their bazaar, I just thought it would be nice, but if you don’t like it or maybe you don’t need it I can just put it in the Missionary Bale.”

  “I do need it,” Jill said. “I haven’t got anything like this at all.”

  “Haven’t you really? What I did isn’t so good, but maybe what the church ladies did or the Auxiliary, maybe you’d think that was all right.”

  Was this what George had meant about Iona’s being a nervous wreck? (According to Ailsa, her breakdown at the nursing school had been caused by her being a bit too thin-skinned and the supervisor’s being a bit too hard on her.) You might think she was clamoring for reassurance, but whatever reassurance you tried seemed to be not enough, or not to get through to her. Jill felt as if Iona’s words and giggles and sniffles and damp looks (no doubt she had damp hands as well) were things crawling on her—on Jill—mites trying to get under her skin.

  But this was something she got used to, in time. Or Iona toned it down. Both she and Iona felt relief—it was as if a teacher had gone out of the room—when the door closed behind Ailsa in the morning. They took to having a second cup of coffee, while Mrs. Kirkham washed the dishes. She did this job very slowly—looking around for the drawer or shelf where each item should go—and with some lapses. But with rituals, too, which she never omitted, such as scattering the coffee grounds on a bush by the kitchen door.

  “She thinks the coffee makes it grow,” Iona whispered. “Even if she puts it on the leaves not the ground. Every day we have to take the hose and rinse it off.”

  Jill thought that Iona sounded like the girls who were most picked on at the orphanage. They were always eager to pick on somebody else. But once you got Iona past her strung-out apologies or barricades of humble accusations (“Of course I’m the last person they’d consult about anything down at the shop,” “Of course Ailsa wouldn’t listen to my opinion,” “Of course George never made any secret about how he despised me”) you might get her to talk about fairly interesting things. She told Jill about the house that had been their grandfather’s and was now the center wing of the hospital, about the specific shady deals that had lost their father his job, and about a romance that was going on between two married people at the bakery. She also mentioned the supposed previous history of the Shantzes, and even the fact that Ailsa was soft on Dr. Shantz. The shock treatment Iona had had after her nervous breakdown seemed perhaps to have blown a hole in her discretion, and the voice that came through this hole—once the disguising rubbish had been cleared away—was baleful and sly.

  And Jill might as well spend her time chatting—her fingers had got too puffy now to try to play the violin.

  AND THEN I was born and everything changed, especially for Iona.

  Jill had to stay in bed for a week, and even after she got up she moved like a stiff old woman and breathed warily each time she lowered herself into a chair. She was all painfully stitched together, and her stomach and breasts were bound tight as a mummy’s—that was the custom then. Her milk came in plentifully; it was leaking through the binding and onto the sheets. Iona loosened the binding and tried to connect the nipple to my mouth. But I would not take it. I refused to take my mother’s breast. I screamed blue murder. The big stiff breast might just as well have been a snouted beast rummaging in my face. Iona held me, she gave me a little warm boiled water, and I quieted down. I was losing weight, though. I couldn’t live on water. So Iona mixed up a formula and took me out of Jill’s arms where I stiffened and wailed. Iona rocked and soothed me and touched my cheek with the rubber nipple and that turned out to be what I preferred. I drank the formula greedily and kept it down. Iona’s arms and the nipple that she was in charge of became my chosen home. Jill’s breasts had to be bound even tighter, and she had to forgo liquids (remember, this was in the hot weather) and endure the ache until her milk dried up.

  “What a monkey, what a monkey,” crooned Iona. “You are a monkey, you don’t want your mommy’s good milk.”

  I soon got fatter and stronger. I could cry louder. I cried if anybody but Iona tried to hold me. I rejected Ailsa and Dr. Shantz with his thoughtfully warmed hands, but of course it was my aversion to Jill that got the most attention.

  Once Jill was out of bed Iona got her sitting in the chair where she herself usually sat to feed me; she put her own blouse around Jill’s shoulders and the bottle in Jill’s hand.

  No use, I was not fooled. I batted my cheek against the bottle and straightened my legs and hardened my abdomen into a ball. I would not accept the substitution. I cried. I would not give in.

  My cries were still thin new-baby cries, but they were a disturbance in the house, and Iona was the only person who had the power to stop them. Touched or spoken to by a non-Iona, I cried. Put down to sleep, not rocked by Iona, I cried myself into exhaustion and slept for ten minutes and woke ready to go at it again. I had no good times or fussy times. I had the Iona-times and the Iona-desertion-times, which might become—oh, worse and worse—the other-people-times, mostly Jill-times.

  How could Iona go back to work, then, once her two weeks were up? She couldn’t. There wasn’t any question of it. The bakery had to get someone else. Iona had gone from being the most negligible to being the most important person in the house; she was the one who stood between those who lived there and constant discordance, unanswerable complaint. She had to be up at all hours to keep the househol
d in any sort of ease. Dr. Shantz was concerned; even Ailsa was concerned.

  “Iona, don’t wear yourself out.”

  And yet a wonderful change had taken place. Iona was pale but her skin glowed, as if she had finally passed out of adolescence. She could look anybody in the eye. And there was no more trembling, hardly any giggling, no sly cringing in her voice, which had grown as bossy as Ailsa’s and more joyful. (Never more joyful than when she was scolding me for my attitude to Jill.)

  “Iona’s in seventh heaven—she just adores that baby,” Ailsa told people. But in fact Iona’s behavior seemed too brisk for adoration. She did not care how much noise she made, quelling mine. She tore up the stairs calling breathlessly, “I’m coming, I’m coming, hold your horses.” She would walk around with me carelessly plastered to her shoulder, held with one hand, while the other hand accomplished some task connected with my maintenance. She ruled in the kitchen, commandeering the stove for the sterilizer, the table for the mixing of the formula, the sink for the baby wash. She swore cheerfully, even in Ailsa’s presence, when she had misplaced or spilled something.

  She knew herself to be the only person who didn’t wince, who didn’t feel the distant threat of annihilation, when I sent up my first signal wail. Instead, she was the one whose heart jumped into double time, who felt like dancing, just from the sense of power she had, and gratitude.

  Once her bindings were off and she’d seen the flatness of her stomach, Jill took a look at her hands. The puffiness seemed to be all gone. She went downstairs and got her violin out of the closet and took off its cover. She was ready to try some scales.

  This was on a Sunday afternoon. Iona had lain down for a nap, one ear always open to hear my cry. Mrs. Kirkham too was lying down. Ailsa was painting her fingernails in the kitchen. Jill began to tune the violin.