by Alice Munro
Their house has a row of cedars of one side and a railway embankment on the other. The railway traffic has never amounted to much, and by now there might be only a couple of trains a month. Weeds were lavish between the tracks. One time, when she was on the verge of menopause, Nita had teased Rich into making love up there—not on the ties of course but on the narrow grass verge beside them, and they had climbed down inordinately pleased with themselves.
She thought carefully, every morning when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the smaller bathroom where his shaving things still were and the prescription pills for various troublesome but not serious ailments that he refused to throw out. Nor was he in the bedroom, which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger bathroom, which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen that had become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not out on the half-scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window—through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be starting a striptease.
Or in the study. That was where of all places his absence had to be most firmly established. At first she had found it necessary to go to the door and open it and stand there, surveying the piles of paper, moribund computer, spilling files, books lying open or face down as well as crowded on the shelves. Now she could manage just by picturing things.
One of these days she would have to enter. She thought of it as invading. She would have to invade her husband’s dead mind. This was one thing that she had never considered. Rich had seemed to her such a tower of efficiency and competence, so vigorous and firm a presence, that she had always believed, quite unreasonably, in his surviving her. Then in the last year this had become not a foolish belief at all, but in both their minds, as she thought, a certainty.
She would do the cellar first. It really was a cellar, not a basement. Planks made walkways over the dirt floor, and the small high windows were hung with dirty cobwebs. Nothing was down there that she ever needed. Just Rich’s half-filled paint tins, boards of various lengths that might have come in handy someday, tools that might be usable or ready to be discarded. She had opened the door and gone down the steps just once, to see that no lights had been left on, and to assure herself that the switches were there, with labels written beside them to tell her which controlled what. When she came up she bolted the door as usual, on the kitchen side. Rich used to laugh about that habit of hers, asking what she thought could get in, through the stone walls and elf-sized windows, to menace them.
Nevertheless the cellar would be easier to start on; it would be a hundred times easier than the study.
She did make up the bed and tidy her own little mess in the kitchen or bathroom, but in general the impulse to manage any wholesale sweep of housecleaning was beyond her. She could barely throw out a twisted paper clip or a fridge magnet that had lost its attraction, let alone the dish of Irish coins that she and Rich had brought home from a trip fifteen years ago. Everything seemed to have acquired its own peculiar heft and strangeness.
Carol or Virgie phoned every day, usually toward supper time, when they must have thought her solitude might be least bearable. She said she was okay, she would come out of her lair soon, she just needed this time, she was just thinking and reading. And eating okay, and sleeping.
That was true too, except for the reading. She sat in the chair surrounded by her books without opening one of them. She had always been such a reader—that was one reason Rich said she was the right woman for him, she could sit and read and let him alone—and now she couldn’t stick it for even half a page.
She hadn’t been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit—and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.
And now, most strangely, all that was gone. Not just with Rich’s death but with her own immersion in illness. Then she had thought the change was temporary and the magic would reappear once she was off certain drugs and exhausting treatments.
Apparently not.
Sometimes she tried to explain why, to an imaginary inquisitor.
“I got too busy.”
“So everybody says. Doing what?”
“Too busy paying attention.”
“To what?”
“I mean thinking.”
“What about?”
“Never mind.”
ONE MORNING after sitting for a while she decided that it was a very hot day. She should get up and turn on the fans. Or she could, with more environmental responsibility, try opening the front and back doors and let the breeze, if there was any, blow through the screen and through the house.
She unlocked the front door first. And even before she had allowed half an inch of morning light to show itself, she was aware of a dark stripe cutting that light off.
There was a young man standing outside the screen door, which was hooked.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I was looking for a doorbell or something. I gave a little knock on the frame here, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”
“Sorry,” she said.
“I’m supposed to look at your fuse box. If you could tell me where it is.”
She stepped aside to let him in. She took a moment to remember.
“Yes. In the cellar,” she said. “I’ll turn the light on. You’ll see it.”
He shut the door behind him and bent to take off his shoes.
“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s not as if it’s raining.”
“Might as well, though. I make it a habit. Could leave you dust tracks insteada mud.”
She went into the kitchen, not able to sit down again until he left the house.
She opened the door for him as he came up the steps.
“Okay?” she said. “You found it okay?”
“Fine.”
She was leading him toward the front door, then realized there were no steps behind her. She turned and saw him standing in the kitchen.
“You don’t happen to have anything you could fix up for me to eat, do you?”
There was a change in his voice—a crack in it, a rising pitch, that made her think of a television comedian doing a rural whine. Under the kitchen skylight she saw that he wasn’t so young. When she opened the door she had just been aware of a skinny body, a face dark against the morning glare. The body, as she saw it now, was certainly skinny, but more wasted than boyish, affecting a genial slouch. His face was long and rubbery, with prominent light blue eyes. A jokey look, but a persistence, as if he generally got his way.
“See, I happen to be a diabetic,” he said. “I don’t know if you know any diabetics, but the fact is when you get hungry you got to eat, otherwise your system all goes weird. I should have ate before I came in here, but I let myself get in a hurry. You don’t mind if I sit down?”
He was already sitting down at the kitchen table.
“You got any coffee?”
“I have tea. Herbal tea, if you’d like that.”
“Sure. Sure.”
She measured tea into a cup, plugged in the kettle, and opened the refrigerator.
“I don’t have much on hand,” she said. “I have some eggs. Sometimes I scramble an egg and put ketchup on it. Would you like that? I have some English muffins I could toast.”
“English, Irish, Yukoranian, I don’t care.”
She cracked a couple of eggs into the pan, broke up the yolks, and stirred them all together with a cooking fork, then sliced a muffin and put it into the toaster. She got a plate from the cupboard, set it down in front of him. Then a knife and fork from the cutlery drawer.
“Pretty plate,” he said, h
olding it up as if to see his face in it. Just as she turned her attention to the eggs she heard it smash on the floor.
“Oh mercy me,” he said in a new voice, a squeaky and definitely nasty voice. “Look what I gone and done now.”
“It’s all right,” she said, knowing now that nothing was.
“Musta slipped through my fingers.”
She got down another plate, set it on the counter until she was ready to put the toasted muffin halves and then eggs smeared with ketchup on top of it.
He had stooped down, meanwhile, to gather up the pieces of broken china. He held up one piece that had broken so that it had a sharp point to it. As she set his meal down on the table he scraped the point lightly down his bare forearm. Tiny beads of blood appeared, at first separate, then joining to form a string.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s just a joke. I know how to do it for a joke. If I’d of wanted to be serious we wouldn’t of needed no ketchup, eh?”
There were still some pieces on the floor that he had missed. She turned away, thinking to get the broom, which was in a closet near the back door. He caught her arm in a flash.
“You sit down. You sit right here while I’m eating.” He lifted the bloodied arm to show it to her again. Then he made an eggburger out of the muffin and the eggs and ate it in a very few bites. He chewed with his mouth open. The kettle was boiling. “Tea bag in the cup?” he said.
“Yes. It’s loose tea actually.”
“Don’t you move. I don’t want you near that kettle, do I?”
He poured boiling water into the cup.
“Looks like hay. Is that all you got?”
“I’m sorry. Yes.”
“Don’t go on saying you’re sorry. If it’s all you got it’s all you got. You never did think I come here to look at the fuse box, did you?”
“Well yes,” Nita said. “I did.”
“You don’t now.”
“No.”
“You scared?”
She chose to consider this not as a taunt but as a serious question.
“I don’t know. I’m more startled than scared, I guess. I don’t know.”
“One thing. One thing you don’t need to be scared of. I’m not going to rape you.”
“I hardly thought so.”
“You can’t never be too sure.” He took a sip of the tea and made a face. “Just because you’re an old lady. There’s all kinds out there, they’ll do it to anything. Babies or dogs and cats or old ladies. Old men. They’re not fussy. Well I am. I’m not interested in getting it any way but normal and with some nice lady I like and what likes me. So rest assured.”
Nita said, “I am. But thank you for telling me.”
He shrugged, but seemed pleased with himself.
“That your car out front?”
“My husband’s car.”
“Husband? Where’s he?”
“He’s dead. I don’t drive. I mean to sell it, but I haven’t yet.”
What a fool, what a fool she was to tell him that.
“Two thousand four?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“For a minute I thought you were going to trick me with the husband stuff. Wouldn’t of worked, though. I can smell it if a woman’s on her own. I know it the minute I walk in a house. Minute she opens the door. Instinct. So it runs okay? You know the last day he drove it?”
“The seventeenth of June. The day he died.”
“Got any gas in it?”
“I would think so.”
“Nice if he filled it up right before. You got the keys?”
“Not on me. I know where they are.”
“Okay.” He pushed his chair back, hitting one of the pieces of crockery. He stood up, shook his head in some kind of surprise, sat down again.
“I’m wiped. Gotta sit a minute. I thought it’d be better when I’d ate. I was just making that up about being a diabetic.”
She pushed her chair and he jumped.
“You stay where you are. I’m not that wiped I couldn’t grab you. It’s only I walked all night.”
“I was just going to get the keys.”
“You wait till I say. I walked the railway track. Never seen a train. I walked all the way to here and never seen a train.”
“There’s hardly ever a train.”
“Yeah. Good. I went down in the ditch going round some of them half-assed little towns. Then it come daylight I was still okay except where it crossed the road and I took a run for it. Then I looked down here and seen the house and the car and I said to myself, That’s it. I could have took my old man’s car, but I got some brains left in my head.”
She knew he wanted her to ask what had he done. She was also sure that the less she knew the better for her.
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?”
“May be 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 grey-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 s
uch 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.”
