Dear Life: Stories

by Alice Munro

  One day when we were going down the lane for the mail, and were in fact not far from the box, my mother stopped and stood quite still.

  “Quiet,” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word and wasn’t even playing the shuffling game with my boots in the snow.

  “I was being quiet,” I said.

  “Shush. Turn around.”

  “But we didn’t get the mail.”

  “Never mind. Just walk.”

  Then I noticed that Blitzee, who was always with us, just behind or ahead of us, wasn’t there anymore. Another dog was, on the opposite side of the road, a few feet from the mailbox.

  My mother phoned the theater as soon as we got home and let in Blitzee, who was waiting for us. Nobody answered. She phoned the school and asked someone to tell the bus driver to drive Caro up to the door. It turned out that the driver couldn’t do that, because it had snowed since Neal last plowed the lane, but he—the driver—did watch until she got to the house. There was no wolf to be seen by that time.

  Neal was of the opinion that there never had been one. And if there had been, he said, it would have been no danger to us, weak as it was probably from hibernation.

  Caro said that wolves did not hibernate. “We learned about them in school.”

  Our mother wanted Neal to get a gun.

  “You think I’m going to get a gun and go and shoot a goddam poor mother wolf who has probably got a bunch of babies back in the bush and is just trying to protect them, the way you’re trying to protect yours?” he said quietly.

  Caro said, “Only two. They only have two at a time.”

  “Okay, okay. I’m talking to your mother.”

  “You don’t know that,” my mother said. “You don’t know if it’s got hungry cubs or anything.”

  I had never thought she’d talk to him like that.

  He said, “Easy. Easy. Let’s just think a bit. Guns are a terrible thing. If I went and got a gun, then what would I be saying? That Vietnam was okay? That I might as well have gone to Vietnam?”

  “You’re not an American.”

  “You’re not going to rile me.”

  This is more or less what they said, and it ended up with Neal not having to get a gun. We never saw the wolf again, if it was a wolf. I think my mother stopped going to get the mail, but she may have become too big to be comfortable doing that anyway.

  The snow dwindled magically. The trees were still bare of leaves and my mother made Caro wear her coat in the mornings, but she came home after school dragging it behind her.

  My mother said that the baby had got to be twins, but the doctor said it wasn’t.

  “Great. Great,” Neal said, all in favor of the twins idea. “What do doctors know.”

  The gravel pit had filled to its brim with melted snow and rain, so that Caro had to edge around it on her way to catch the school bus. It was a little lake, still and dazzling under the clear sky. Caro asked with not much hope if we could play in it.

  Our mother said not to be crazy. “It must be twenty feet deep,” she said.

  Neal said, “Maybe ten.”

  Caro said, “Right around the edge it wouldn’t be.”

  Our mother said yes it was. “It just drops off,” she said. “It’s not like going in at the beach, for fuck’s sake. Just stay away from it.”

  She had started saying “fuck” quite a lot, perhaps more than Neal did, and in a more exasperated tone of voice.

  “Should we keep the dog away from it, too?” she asked him.

  Neal said that that wasn’t a problem. “Dogs can swim.”

  A Saturday. Caro watched The Friendly Giant with me and made comments that spoiled it. Neal was lying on the couch, which unfolded into his and my mother’s bed. He was smoking his kind of cigarettes, which could not be smoked at work so had to be made the most of on weekends. Caro sometimes bothered him, asking to try one. Once he had let her, but told her not to tell our mother.

  I was there, though, so I told.

  There was alarm, though not quite a row.

  “You know he’d have those kids out of here like a shot,” our mother said. “Never again.”

  “Never again,” Neal said agreeably. “So what if he feeds them poison Rice Krispies crap?”

  In the beginning, we hadn’t seen our father at all. Then, after Christmas, a plan had been worked out for Saturdays. Our mother always asked afterwards if we had had a good time. I always said yes, and meant it, because I thought that if you went to a movie or to look at Lake Huron, or ate in a restaurant, that meant that you had had a good time. Caro said yes, too, but in a tone of voice that suggested that it was none of our mother’s business. Then my father went on a winter holiday to Cuba (my mother remarked on this with some surprise and maybe approval) and came back with a lingering sort of flu that caused the visits to lapse. They were supposed to resume in the spring, but so far they hadn’t.

  After the television was turned off, Caro and I were sent outside to run around, as our mother said, and get some fresh air. We took the dog with us.

  When we got outside, the first thing we did was loosen and let trail the scarves our mother had wrapped around our necks. (The fact was, though we may not have put the two things together, the deeper she got into her pregnancy the more she slipped back into behaving like an ordinary mother, at least when it was a matter of scarves we didn’t need or regular meals. There was not so much championing of wild ways as there had been in the fall.) Caro asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I didn’t know. This was a formality on her part but the honest truth on mine. We let the dog lead us, anyway, and Blitzee’s idea was to go and look at the gravel pit. The wind was whipping the water up into little waves, and very soon we got cold, so we wound our scarves back around our necks.

  I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

  I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.

  That the dog had fallen into the water.

  The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.

  Blitzee. Drownded.

  Drowned.

  But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

  She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

  I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

  Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

  Why?

  I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

  In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned towards the trailer by then—I must have done so.

  When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not towards the trailer but back towards the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming towards her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

  What I really did was make my way up the little incline towards the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

  I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.

  I don’t
know if I sat there for five minutes. More? Less? It wasn’t too cold.

  I went to see a professional person about this once and she convinced me—for a time, she convinced me—that I must have tried the door of the trailer and found it locked. Locked because my mother and Neal were having sex and had locked it against interruptions. If I’d banged on the door they would have been angry. The counsellor was satisfied to bring me to this conclusion, and I was satisfied, too. For a while. But I no longer think that was true. I don’t think they would have locked the door, because I know that once they didn’t and Caro walked in and they laughed at the look on her face.

  Maybe I remembered that Neal had said that dogs did not drown, which meant that Caro’s rescue of Blitzee would not be necessary. Therefore she herself wouldn’t be able to carry out her game. So many games, with Caro.

  Did I think she could swim? At nine, many children can. And in fact it turned out that she’d had one lesson the summer before, but then we had moved to the trailer and she hadn’t taken any more. She may have thought she could manage well enough. And I may indeed have thought that she could do anything she wanted to.

  The counsellor did not suggest that I might have been sick of carrying out Caro’s orders, but the thought did occur to me. It doesn’t quite seem right, though. If I’d been older, maybe. At the time, I still expected her to fill my world.

  How long did I sit there? Likely not long. And it’s possible that I did knock. After a while. After a minute or two. In any case, my mother did, at some point, open the door, for no reason. A presentiment.

  Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes.

  I think he says something to me with a singsong sadness in his voice. Strange.

  Beyond that I have no details.

  My mother didn’t throw herself into the water. She didn’t go into labor from the shock. My brother, Brent, was not born until a week or ten days after the funeral, and he was a full-term infant. Where she was while she waited for the birth to happen I do not know. Perhaps she was kept in the hospital and sedated as much as possible under the circumstances.

  I remember the day of the funeral quite well. A very pleasant and comfortable woman I didn’t know—her name was Josie—took me on an expedition. We visited some swings and a sort of dollhouse that was large enough for me to go inside, and we ate a lunch of my favorite treats, but not enough to make me sick. Josie was somebody I got to know very well later on. She was a friend my father had made in Cuba, and after the divorce she became my stepmother, his second wife.

  My mother recovered. She had to. There was Brent to look after and, most of the time, me. I believe I stayed with my father and Josie while she got settled in the house that she planned to live in for the rest of her life. I don’t remember being there with Brent until he was big enough to sit up in his high chair.

  My mother went back to her old duties at the theater. At first she may have worked as she had before, as a volunteer usher, but by the time I was in school she had a real job, with pay, and year-round responsibilities. She was the business manager. The theater survived, through various ups and downs, and is still going now.

  Neal didn’t believe in funerals, so he didn’t attend Caro’s. He never saw Brent. He wrote a letter—I found this out much later—saying that since he did not intend to act as a father it would be better for him to bow out at the start. I never mentioned him to Brent, because I thought it would upset my mother. Also because Brent showed so little sign of being like him—like Neal—and seemed, in fact, so much more like my father that I really wondered about what was going on around the time he was conceived. My father has never said anything about this and never would. He treats Brent just as he treats me, but he is the kind of man who would do that anyway.

  He and Josie have not had any children of their own, but I don’t think that bothers them. Josie is the only person who ever talks about Caro, and even she doesn’t do it often. She does say that my father doesn’t hold my mother responsible. He has also said that he must have been sort of a stick-in-the-mud when my mother wanted more excitement in her life. He needed a shaking-up, and he got one. There’s no use being sorry about it. Without the shaking-up, he would never have found Josie and the two of them would not have been so happy now.

  “Which two?” I might say, just to derail him, and he would staunchly say, “Josie. Josie, of course.”

  My mother cannot be made to recall any of those times, and I don’t bother her with them. I know that she has driven down the lane we lived on, and found it quite changed, with the sort of trendy houses you see now, put up on unproductive land. She mentioned this with the slight scorn that such houses evoke in her. I went down the lane myself but did not tell anyone. All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes me as a mistake.

  Even where the gravel pit was a house now stands, the ground beneath it levelled.

  I have a partner, Ruthann, who is younger than I am but, I think, somewhat wiser. Or at least more optimistic about what she calls routing out my demons. I would never have got in touch with Neal if it had not been for her urging. Of course, for a long time I had no way, just as I had no thought, of getting in touch. It was he who finally wrote to me. A brief note of congratulations, he said, after seeing my picture in the Alumni Gazette. What he was doing looking through the Alumni Gazette I have no idea. I had received one of those academic honors that mean something in a restricted circle and little anywhere else.

  He was living hardly fifty miles away from where I teach, which also happens to be where I went to college. I wondered if he had been there at that time. So close. Had he become a scholar?

  At first I had no intention of replying to the note, but I told Ruthann and she said that I should think about writing back. So the upshot was that I sent him an e-mail, and arrangements were made. I was to meet him in his town, in the unthreatening surroundings of a university cafeteria. I told myself that if he looked unbearable—I did not quite know what I meant by this—I could just walk on through.

  He was shorter than he used to be, as adults we remember from childhood usually are. His hair was thin, and trimmed close to his head. He got me a cup of tea. He was drinking tea himself.

  What did he do for a living?

  He said that he tutored students in preparation for exams. Also, he helped them write their essays. Sometimes, you might say, he wrote those essays. Of course, he charged.

  “It’s no way to get to be a millionaire, I can tell you.”

  He lived in a dump. Or a semi-respectable dump. He liked it. He looked for clothes at the Sally Ann. That was okay too.

  “Suits my principles.”

  I did not congratulate him on any of this, but, to tell the truth, I doubt that he expected me to.

  “Anyway, I don’t think my lifestyle is so interesting. I think you might want to know how it happened.”

  I could not figure out how to speak.

  “I was stoned,” he said. “And, furthermore, I’m not a swimmer. Not many swimming pools around where I grew up. I’d have drowned, too. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  I said that he was not really the one that I was wondering about.

  Then he became the third person I’d asked, “What do you think Caro had in mind?”

  The counsellor had said that we couldn’t know. “Likely she herself didn’t know what she wanted. Attention? I don’t think she meant to drown herself. Attention to how bad she was feeling?”

  Ruthann had said, “To make your mother do what she wanted? Make her smarten up and see that she had to go back to your father?”

  Neal said, “It doesn’t matter. Maybe she though
t she could paddle better than she could. Maybe she didn’t know how heavy winter clothes can get. Or that there wasn’t anybody in a position to help her.”

  He said to me, “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

  I said that I had considered what he was saying, but no.

  “The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”

  Now, good-bye.

  I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.

  HAVEN

  ALL this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it, the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver. The boys’ hair was longer than it had been, but not straggling down their backs, and there didn’t seem to be an unusual amount of liberation or defiance in the air.

  My uncle started off by teasing me about grace. About not saying grace. I was thirteen years old, living with him and my aunt for the year that my parents were in Africa. I had never bowed my head over a plate of food in my life.

  “Lord bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” Uncle Jasper said, while I held my fork in midair and refrained from chewing the meat and potatoes that were already in my mouth.