Dear Life: Stories

by Alice Munro

  She gives up on the desk for the moment, and takes a closer look at the space she has found herself in. It’s a hexagon, with doors at intervals. Four doors—one is the large door that lets in the light and any visitors, another is an official and private-looking door behind the desk, not that easy of access, and the other two doors, exactly alike and facing each other, would obviously take you into the long wings, to the corridors and rooms where the inmates are housed. Each of these has an upper window, and the window glass looks clear enough for anybody to manage to see through.

  She goes up to one of these possibly accessible doors and knocks, then tries the knob and cannot budge it. Locked. She cannot see through the window properly, either. Close up the glass is all wavy and distorted.

  In the door directly opposite there is the same problem with the glass and the same problem with the knob.

  The click of her shoes on the floor, the trick of the glass, the uselessness of the polished knobs have made her feel more discouraged than she would care to admit.

  She does not give up, however. She tries the doors again in the same order, and this time she shakes both knobs as well as she can and also calls out, “Hello?” in a voice that sounds at first trivial and silly, then aggrieved, but not more hopeful.

  She squeezes herself in behind the desk and bangs that door, with practically no hope. It doesn’t even have a knob, just a keyhole.

  There is nothing to do but get out of this place and go home.

  All very cheerful and elegant, she thinks, but there is no pretense here of serving the public. Of course they shove the residents or patients or whatever they call them into bed early, it is the same old story everywhere, however glamorous the surroundings.

  Still thinking about this, she gives the entry door a push. It is too heavy. She pushes again.

  Again. It does not budge.

  She can see the pots of flowers outside in the open air. A car going by on the road. The mild evening light.

  She has to stop and think.

  There are no artificial lights on in here. The place will get dark. Already in spite of the lingering light outside, it seems to be getting dark. No one will come, they have all completed their duties, or at least the duties that brought them through this part of the building. Wherever they have settled down now is where they will stay.

  She opens her mouth to yell but it seems that no yell is forthcoming. She is shaking all over and no matter how she tries she cannot get her breath down into her lungs. It is as if she has a blotter in her throat. Suffocation. She knows that she has to behave differently, and more than that, she has to believe differently. Calm. Calm. Breathe. Breathe.

  She doesn’t know if the panic has taken a long time or a short time. Her heart is pounding but she is nearly safe.

  There is a woman here whose name is Sandy. It says so on the brooch she wears, and Nancy knows her anyway.

  “What are we going to do with you?” says Sandy. “All we want is to get you into your nightie. And you go and carry on like a chicken that’s scared of being et for dinner.

  “You must have had a dream,” she says. “What did you dream about now?”

  “Nothing,” says Nancy. “It was back when my husband was alive and when I was still driving the car.”

  “You have a nice car?”

  “Volvo.”

  “See? You’re sharp as a tack.”

  DOLLY

  THAT fall there had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Franklin being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.

  One day we were driving around in the country not too far from where we live, and we found a road we hadn’t known about. The trees, maples and oaks and others, were second growth, though of an impressive size, indicating that there had been cleared land. Farms at one time, pastures and houses and barns. But not a sign of this was left. The road was unpaved but not untravelled. It looked as if it might see several vehicles a day. Maybe there were trucks that used it as a shortcut.

  This was important, Franklin said. No way did we want to be there for a day or two, or possibly a week, with no discovery. Nor did we want to leave the car empty, with the police having to tramp through the trees in search of remains that the coyotes might already have got into.

  Also, the day must not be too melancholy. No rain or early snow. The leaves turned but not many fallen. Plastered with gold, as they were on that day. But perhaps the sun would not be shining, else the gold, the glamour of the day, might make us feel like spoilers.

  We had a difference about the note. That is, about whether we should leave a note or not. I thought that we owed people an explanation. They should be told that there was no question of a fatal illness, no onset of pain that blocked out the prospect of a decent life. They should be assured that this was a clearheaded, you might almost say a lighthearted decision.

  Gone while the going is good.

  No. I retracted that. Flippancy. An insult.

  Franklin’s idea was that any explanation at all was an insult. Not to others but to ourselves. To ourselves. We belonged to ourselves and to each other and any explanation at all struck him as snivelling.

  I saw what he meant but I was still inclined to disagree.

  And that very fact—our disagreement—seemed to put the possibility out of his head.

  He said that it was rubbish. All right for him but I was too young. We could talk again when I was seventy-five.

  I said that the only thing that bothered me, a little, was the way there was an assumption that nothing more was going to happen in our lives. Nothing of importance to us, nothing to be managed anymore.

  He said that we had just had an argument, what more did I want?

  It was too polite, I said.

  I have never felt that I am younger than Franklin, except maybe when the war comes up in conversation—I mean the Second World War—and that seldom happens nowadays. For one thing, he does more strenuous exercise than I do. At one time he was the overseer of a stable—I mean the sort of stable where people board riding horses, not racehorses. He still goes there two or three times a week, and rides his own horse, and talks to the man in charge who occasionally wants his advice. Though mostly he says he tries to keep out of the way.

  He is in fact a poet. He is really a poet and really a horse trainer. He has held one-term jobs at various colleges, but never so far away that he can’t keep in touch with the stables. He admits to giving readings, but only as he says once in a blue moon. He doesn’t stress the poetic employment. Sometimes I am annoyed with this attitude—I call it his aw-shucks persona—but I can see the point. When you’re busy with horses people can see that you are busy, but when you’re busy at making up a poem you look as if you’re in a state of idleness and you feel a little strange or embarrassed having to explain what’s going on.

  Another problem might be that though he is a reticent sort of man, the poem that he is best known for is what people around here—that is, where he grew up—are apt to call raw. Pretty raw, I have heard him say himself, not apologizing but just maybe warning somebody off. He has a feeling for the sensibilities of those people he knows who can be upset by certain things, though he is a great defender of freedom of speech in general.

  Not that there haven’t been changes around here, concerning what you can say out loud and read in print. Prizes help, and being mentioned in the papers.

  All the years that I taught in a high school I didn’t teach literature, as you might expect, but mathematics. Then staying home I grew restless and undertook something else—writing tidy and I hope entertaining biographies of Canadian novelists who have been undeservedly forgotten or have never received proper attention. I don’t think I would have got the job if it wasn’t for Franklin,
and the literary reputation that we don’t talk about—I was born in Scotland and really didn’t know any Canadian writers.

  I never would have counted Franklin or any poet as deserving of the sympathy I gave the novelists, I mean for their faded or even vanished condition. I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps I think poetry is more of an end in itself.

  I liked the work, I thought it worthwhile, and after years in classrooms I was glad of the control and the quiet. But there might come a time, say around four in the afternoon, when I just wanted to relax and have some company.

  And it was around that time on a dreary closed-in day when a woman came to my door with a load of cosmetics. At any other time I wouldn’t have been glad to see her, but I was then. Her name was Gwen, and she said she hadn’t called on me before because they had told her I wasn’t the type.

  “Whatever that is,” she said. “But anyway I had the idea, just let her speak for herself, all she has to do is say no.”

  I asked her if she would like a cup of the coffee I had just made and she said sure.

  She said she was just getting ready anyway to pack it in. She set her burdens down with a groan.

  “You don’t wear makeup. I wouldn’t wear none neither if I wasn’t in the business.”

  If she had not told me that, I would have thought her face was as bare as mine. Bare, sallow, and with an amazing nest of wrinkles round the mouth. Glasses that magnified her eyes, which were the lightest blue. The only blatant thing about her was brassy thin hair cut straight across her forehead in bangs.

  Maybe it had made her uneasy, to be asked in. She kept taking jumpy little looks around.

  “It’s bad cold today,” she said.

  And then in a rush, “I don’t see any kind of an ashtray around here, do I?”

  I found one in a cupboard. She got out her cigarettes and sank back in relief.

  “You don’t smoke?”

  “I used to.”

  “Didn’t everybody.”

  I poured her coffee.

  “Black,” she said. “Oh, isn’t this the great stuff? I hope I didn’t interrupt whatever you were doing. You writing letters?”

  And I found myself telling her about the neglected writers, even naming the one I was working on at the moment. Martha Ostenso, who wrote a book called Wild Geese and a horde of others all now forgotten.

  “You mean like all this stuff will get printed? Like in the paper?”

  In a book, I said. She exhaled somewhat dubiously, and I realized that I wanted to tell her something more interesting.

  “Her husband is supposed to have written parts of the novel, but the odd thing is his name isn’t anywhere on it.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want the guys to kid him,” she said. “Like, you know, what are they going to think about the kind of guy writes books.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “But he wouldn’t mind taking the money,” she said. “You know men.”

  Then she began to smile and shake her head and said, “You must be one smart person. Wait till I get to tell them at home that I saw a book that was just getting written.”

  To take her off the subject, which had begun to embarrass me, I asked who were those at home.

  Various people whom I didn’t get straight, or maybe didn’t bother to. I’m not sure about the order in which they were mentioned except that her husband was the final one and he was dead.

  “Last year. Except he wasn’t my husband officially. You know.”

  “Mine wasn’t either,” I said. “Isn’t, I mean.”

  “Is that right? There’s so many doing that now, isn’t there? It used to be, oh my, isn’t it awful, and now it’s just, what the hell? And then there’s the ones that live together year after year and finally it’s, oh, we’re getting married. You think then, whatever for? For the presents, is it, or just the thought of getting dolled up in the white dress. Makes you laugh, I could die.”

  She said she had a daughter who went through the whole fancy-dancy that way and much good it did her because she was now in jail for trafficking. Stupid. It was the man she went and married that got her into it. So now it was necessary to sell cosmetics as well as look after the daughter’s two young children, who had nobody else.

  All the time she was telling me this she seemed in high good humor. It was when she got onto the subject of another quite successful daughter, a registered nurse who was retired and living in Vancouver, that she became dubious and a little fretful.

  This daughter wanted her mother to ditch the whole lot of them and come and live with her.

  “But I don’t like Vancouver. Everybody else does, I know. Just don’t like it.”

  No. The trouble was, really, if she went to live with that daughter, she would have to quit smoking. It wasn’t Vancouver, it was the giving up smoking.

  I paid for some lotion that would restore my youth and she promised to drop it off next time she came around.

  I told Franklin all about her. Gwen, her name was.

  “It’s another world. I rather enjoyed it,” I said. Then I didn’t quite like myself for saying that.

  He said that maybe I needed to get out more, and should put my name in for some supply teaching.

  When she came by soon with the lotion, I was surprised. After all I had already paid. She didn’t even try to sell me anything more, which seemed almost a relief to her, not a tactic. I made coffee again, and we talked easily, even in a rush, as before. I gave her the copy of Wild Geese that I had been using to write about Martha Ostenso. I said she could keep it, because I would be getting another one when the series came out.

  She said she would read it. No matter what. She didn’t know when she had ever read a book through because of being so busy, but this time she promised.

  She said she had never met a person like me, that was so educated and so easy. I felt a little flattered, yet cautious at the same time, as you feel when you realize that some student has a crush on you. Then there was embarrassment, as if I had no right to be so superior.

  It was dark when she went out to start her car, and she couldn’t get it going. She tried again and again and the engine made a willing noise, then stopped. When Franklin came into the yard and couldn’t get past it I hurried to tell him the trouble. She got out of the driver’s seat when she saw him coming, and began to explain, saying it had been acting up on her like the devil lately.

  He tried to get it going, while we stood by his truck, out of the way. He couldn’t manage it either. He went inside to call the garage in the village. She didn’t want to go in again, though it was cold out. The presence of the man of the house seemed to have made her reticent. I waited with her. He came to the door to call to us that the garage was closed.

  There was nothing to do then but ask her to stay for supper, and overnight. She was immensely apologetic, then more comfortable, once she got sitting down with a new cigarette. I started taking things out for the meal. Franklin was off changing his clothes. I asked her if she wanted to phone whoever was at her house.

  She said, yes, she better.

  I was thinking that she might have somebody there who could come take her home. I wasn’t looking forward to talking all evening with Franklin sitting listening. Of course he could go to his own room—he wouldn’t call it his study—but I would feel that this banishment was my fault. Also we would want to watch the news, and she would want to talk through it. Even my brightest women friends did that, and he hated it.

  Or she might sit quiet and strangely bewildered. Just as bad.

  There seemed to be nobody answering. So she called the people next door—that was where the children were—and there was a great deal of apologetic laughing, then a talk with the children to urge them to be good, then more assurances and heartfelt thanks to the people who would be keeping them. Though it turned out that those friends had somewhere to go tomorrow so that the children would have to go with them, and it was really not so handy after all.


  Franklin was coming back into the kitchen just as she hung up the phone. She turned to me and said that they might have made up stuff about going out, that was what they were like. Never mind all the favors she had done for them when they needed it.

  Both she and Franklin then were struck at the same time.

  “Oh my Lord,” said Gwen.

  “No it isn’t,” said Franklin. “It’s just me.”

  And they stood halted in their tracks. How could they have missed it, they said. Realizing, I supposed, that it would not do to spread their arms and fall upon each other. Instead, they made some strange disconnected movements, as if they had to look all around them in order to be sure this was reality. Also repeating each other’s names in tones of some mockery and dismay. Not the names I would have expected them to say either.

  “Frank.”

  “Dolly.”

  After a moment I realized that Gwen, Gwendolyn, could indeed be teased into Dolly.

  And any young man would rather be called Frank than Franklin.

  They did not forget about me, or Franklin didn’t, except for that one moment.

  “You’ve heard me mention Dolly?”

  His voice insisted on our going back to normal, while Dolly’s or Gwen’s voice insisted on the enormous or even supernatural joke of their finding each other.

  “I can’t tell you the last time when I ever heard myself called that. Not anybody else in the world that knows me by that name. Dolly.”

  The odd thing now was that I began to participate in the general merriment. For wonder would have to be changed into merriment before my eyes, and that was happening. The whole discovery had to take that quick turn. And so eager was I apparently to do my share that I produced a bottle of wine.

  Franklin does not drink anymore. He never drank much, then quietly gave it up altogether. So it was up to Gwen and myself to chatter and explain, in our newly discovered high spirits, and to keep remarking on the coincidence of things.