Dear Life: Stories

by Alice Munro

  She told me that she had been a nursemaid when she knew Franklin. She had been working in Toronto, looking after two little English children whose parents had sent them out to Canada so that they could miss the war. There was other help in the house so she got most of her evenings off and she would go out to have a good time, as what young girl wouldn’t? She met Franklin when he was on his last leave before going overseas and they had as crazy a time as you could imagine. He might have written her a letter or two, but she was just too busy for letters. Then when the war was over she got on a boat as soon as possible to transport the English children home and she met a man on that boat whom she married.

  But it didn’t last, England was so dreary after the war that she thought she would die, so she came on home.

  That was a part of her life I didn’t already know about. But I did know about her two weeks with Franklin, and so, as I have said, did many others. At least if they read poetry. They knew how lavish she was with her love, but they didn’t know as I did how she believed that she couldn’t get pregnant because she had been a twin and wore her dead sis’s hair in a locket around her neck. She had all kinds of notions like that and gave Franklin a magic tooth—he didn’t know whose—to keep him safe when he left to go overseas. He managed to lose it right away, but his life was spared.

  She had a rule also that if she stepped off a curb on the wrong foot the whole day would go bad for her, and so they would have to go back and do it again. Her rules enthralled him.

  To tell the truth I was privately un-enthralled when told this. I had thought how men are charmed by stubborn quirks if the girl is good-looking enough. Of course that has gone out of fashion. At least I hope it has. All that delight in the infantile female brain. (When I first went teaching they told me there was a time, not long ago, when women never taught mathematics. Weakness of intellect prevented it.)

  Of course that girl, that charmer I had badgered him into telling me about, might be generally made up. She might be anybody’s creation. But I did not think so. She was her own sassy choice. She’d loved herself so thoroughly.

  Naturally I kept my mouth shut about what he’d told me and what had gone into the poem. And Franklin remained quiet about that most of the time too, except to say something about what Toronto was like in those teeming war days, about the stupid liquor laws or the farce of the Church Parade. If I had thought at this point that he might make her a gift of any of his writing, it seemed I was mistaken.

  He got tired and went to bed. Gwen or Dolly and I made up her bed on the couch. She sat on the side of it with her last cigarette, telling me not to worry, she was not going to burn the house down, she never lay down till it was finished.

  Our room was cold, the windows opened much wider than usual. Franklin was asleep. He was really asleep, I could always tell if he was shamming.

  I hate going to sleep knowing there are dirty dishes on the table, but I had felt suddenly too tired to do them with Gwen helping as I knew she would. I meant to get up early in the morning to clear things away.

  But I woke to full daylight and a clatter in the kitchen and the smell of breakfast as well as the smell of cigarettes. Conversation too, and it was Franklin talking when I would have expected Gwen. I heard her laughing at whatever he said. I got up at once and hurried into my clothes and fixed my hair, a thing I never usually bother with so early.

  All the safety and merriment of the evening was gone from me. I made a good deal of noise coming down the stairs.

  Gwen was at the sink with a row of sparkling clean glass jars on the draining board.

  “Done the dishes all by hand because I was scared I wouldn’t get the hang of your dishwasher,” she said. “Then I got hold of these jars up there and I thought I might as well do them while I was at it.”

  “They haven’t been washed in a century,” I said.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  Franklin said he’d gone out and tried the car again, but no go. He had got hold of the garage though, and they’d said that somebody could come up and look at it this afternoon. But he thought instead of waiting around he’d tow the car down there and they could get at it this morning.

  “Gives Gwen a chance to get at the rest of the kitchen,” I said, but neither one was interested in my joke. He said no, Gwen had better go with him, they’d want to talk to her since it was her car.

  I noticed that he had a little trouble saying the name Gwen, having to push aside Dolly.

  I said I had been joking.

  He asked if he could make me any breakfast and I said no.

  “How she keeps her figure,” Gwen said. And somehow even this compliment turned into a thing they could laugh at together.

  Neither gave any sign of knowing how I felt, though it seemed to me I was behaving oddly, with every remark I made coming out like some brittle kind of mockery. They are so full of themselves, I thought. It was an expression that came from I don’t know where. When Franklin went out to prepare the car to be towed she followed, as if she didn’t want to lose sight of him for a moment.

  As she left she called back that she could never thank me enough.

  Franklin tooted the horn to wish me good-bye, a thing he never did normally.

  I wanted to run after them, pound them to pieces. I walked up and down as this grievous excitement got more and more of a hold on me. There was no doubt at all about what I should do.

  In a fairly short time I went out and got into my car, having dropped my house key through the slot in the front door. I had a suitcase beside me, though I had already more or less forgotten what I’d put in it. I had written a terse note saying that I had to check some facts about Martha Ostenso and then I started to write a longer note which I intended to address to Franklin but did not want Gwen to see when she came back with him as she surely would. It said that he must be free to do as he wished and that the only thing that was unbearable to me was the deception or perhaps it was self-deception. There was nothing for it but for him to admit what he wanted. It was ridiculous and cruel to make me watch it and so I would just get out of the way.

  I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough. And so on, a berating that became in even so short a space somewhat repetitive and rambling and more and more without dignity or grace. I understood now that it would have to be rewritten before I could let it go to Franklin so I had to take it with me and send it through the mail.

  At the end of our driveway I turned in the other direction from the village and the garage, and in no time, as it seemed, I was driving east on a major highway. Where was I going? If I didn’t make up my mind soon I was going to find myself in Toronto, and it seemed to me that far from getting into a hiding place there I was bound to run into places and people all tied up with my former happiness, and Franklin.

  To keep this from happening I turned and headed for Cobourg. A town that we had never been in together.

  It wasn’t even noon yet. I got a room in a downtown motel. I passed the maids who were cleaning up the rooms that had been occupied last night. My room, having been unoccupied, was very cold. I turned the heat on and decided to go for a walk. Then when I opened the door I couldn’t do it. I was shivering and shaking. I locked the door and got into bed with all my clothes on and I still shook so I pulled the covers up to my ears.

  When I woke up it was well into a bright afternoon and my clothes were plastered to me with sweat. I turned the heat off and found a few clothes in the suitcase, which I changed into, and I went out. I walked very fast. I was hungry but felt that I could never slow down, or sit down, to eat.

  What had happened to me was not uncommon, I thought. Not in books or in life. There should be, there must be, some well-worn way of dealing with it. Walking like this, of course. But you had to stop, even in a town this size you have to stop f
or cars and red lights. Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence. Everywhere an insult in your face.

  As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed it, more of life.

  Where the shops finally did peter out there were some cabins. Empty, boards nailed across their windows, waiting to be demolished. Where people used to stay on humbler holidays, before the motels. And then I remembered that I too had stayed there. Yes, in one of those places when they were reduced—maybe it was the off-season—reduced to taking in afternoon sinners and I had been one of them. I was still a student teacher and I would not even have remembered that it was in this town if it wasn’t for something about those now boarded-up cabins. The man a teacher, older. A wife at home, undoubtedly children. Lives to be tampered with. She mustn’t know, it would break her heart. I didn’t care in the least. Let it break.

  I could remember more if I tried, but it wasn’t worth it. Except that it slowed me down to a more normal pace and turned me back towards the motel. And there on the dresser was the letter I’d written. Sealed but without a stamp. I went out again, found the post office, bought a stamp, dropped the envelope where it should go. Hardly any thought and no misgiving. I could have left it on the table, what did it matter? All is over.

  On the walk I had noticed a restaurant, down some steps. I found it again, and looked at the posted menu.

  Franklin did not like eating out. I did. I walked some more, at a normal pace this time, waiting for the place to open. I saw a scarf I liked in a window, and I thought that I should go in and buy it, that it would be good for me. But when I picked it up I had to drop it. Its silky feel made me sick.

  In the restaurant I drank wine and waited a long time for my food. There was hardly anybody there—they were just setting up the band for the evening. I went into the washroom and was surprised how much like myself I looked. I wondered if it was possible that some man—some old man—would ever think of picking me up. The idea was grotesque—not because of his possible age but because there could be no thought in my head of any man but Franklin, ever.

  I could eat hardly any food when it did come. It was not the food’s fault. Just the oddity of sitting alone, eating alone, the gaping solitude, the unreality.

  I had thought to bring sleeping pills, though I hardly ever used them. In fact I’d had them for so long that I wondered if they would work. But they did—I fell asleep and did not waken once, not until nearly six o’clock in the morning.

  Some big trucks were already pulling out of their berths at the motel.

  I knew where I was, I knew what I had done. And I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. I got dressed and, as soon as I could, got out of the motel. I could barely tolerate the friendly chat of the woman behind the desk. She said that there was snow coming later on. Take care, she told me.

  The traffic was already getting heavy on the highway. And then there was an accident which slowed things down further.

  I thought of Franklin maybe out looking for me. An accident could happen to him too. We might never see each other again.

  I did not think of Gwen except as a person who had got in the way and created absurd problems. Her little stout legs, her foolish hair, her nest of wrinkles. A caricature you might say, somebody you could not blame and should never have taken seriously either.

  Then I was home. Our house had not changed. I turned up the drive, and I saw his car. Thank God he was there.

  I did notice that the car was not parked in its usual place.

  The reason being that another car, Gwen’s car, was in that spot.

  I couldn’t take it in. All this way I had thought of her, when I thought of her at all, as a person who would already be set aside, who after the first disturbance could not maintain herself as a character in our lives. I was still full of the relief of being home and his being home, safe. Assurance had spread all over me so that my body was ready, still, to spring out of the car and run to the house. I had even been feeling for my house key, having forgotten what I had done with it.

  I wouldn’t have needed it, anyway. Franklin was opening the door of our house. He did not call out in surprise or relief, not even when I had left the car and was out and going towards him. He just came down the house steps in a measured way, and his words held me off as I reached him. He said, “Wait.”

  Wait. Of course. She was there.

  “Get back in the car,” he said. “We can’t talk out here, it’s too cold.”

  When we were in the car he said, “Life is totally unpredictable.”

  His voice was unusually gentle and sad. He didn’t look at me but stared straight ahead at the windshield, at our house.

  “No use saying I’m sorry,” he told me.

  “You know,” he went on, “it’s not even the person. It’s like a sort of aura. It’s a spell. Well of course it is really the person but it surrounds them and embodies them. Or they embody—I don’t know. Do you understand? It just strikes like an eclipse or something.”

  He shook his bent head. All dismay.

  He was longing to talk about her, you could see that. But this spiel was surely something that would have made him sick, normally. That was what made me lose hope.

  I felt myself getting bitterly cold. I was going to ask him if he had alerted the other party to this transformation. Then I thought that of course he had and she was with us, in the kitchen with the things she polished.

  His enchantment was so dreary. It was like anybody else’s. Dreary.

  “Don’t talk any more,” I said. “Just don’t talk.”

  He turned and looked at me for the first time and spoke without any of that special wondering hush in his voice.

  “Christ, I’m kidding,” he said. “I thought you’d catch on. All right. All right. Oh for God’s sake, shut up. Listen.”

  For I was howling now with anger and relief.

  “All right, I was a little mad at you. I felt like giving you a hard time. What was I supposed to think when I came home and you were just gone? All right, I’m an asshole. Stop. Stop.”

  I didn’t want to stop. I knew it was all right now, but it was such a comfort to howl. And I found a fresh grievance.

  “What is her car doing here, then?”

  “They can’t do anything with it, it’s junk.”

  “But why is it here?”

  He said it was here because the non-junk parts of it, and that wasn’t much, now belonged to him. Us.

  Because he had bought her a car.

  “A car? New?”

  New enough to run better than what she had.

  “The thing is she wants to go to North Bay. She has relatives or something there and that’s where she wants to go when she can get a car fit to take her.”

  “She has relatives here. Wherever she lives here. She has three-year-old kids to look after.”

  “Well apparently the ones in North Bay would suit her better. I don’t know about any three-year-olds. Maybe she’ll take them along.”

  “Did she ask you to buy her a car?”

  “She wouldn’t ask for anything.”

  “So now,” I said. “Now she’s in our life.”

  “She’s in North Bay. Let’s go in the house. I haven’t even got a jacket on.”

  On our way I asked if he had told her about his poem. Or maybe read it to her.

  He said, “Oh God no, why would I do that?”

  The first thing I saw in the kitchen was the sparkle of glass jars. I yanked a chair out and climbed up on it and began putting them away on top of the cupboard.

  “Can you help me?” I said, and he handed them up to me.

  I wondered—could he have been lying about the poem? Could she
have heard it read to her? Or been left to read it by herself?

  If so, her response had not been satisfactory. Whose ever could be?

  Suppose she said that it was lovely? He would have hated that.

  Or she might have wondered out loud how he could get away with what he had got away with. The smut, she might have said. That would have been better, but not as much better as you might think.

  Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? And not too much or not too little, just enough.

  He put his arms around me, lifted me down from the chair.

  “We can’t afford rows,” he said.

  No indeed. I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain.

  I could see the key now, the one I had put through the slot. It was in a crack between the hairy brown mat and the doorsill.

  I would have to be on the lookout for that letter I had written as well.

  Supposing I should die before it came? You can think yourself in reasonable shape and then die, just like that. Ought I to leave a note for Franklin to find, just in case?

  If a letter comes addressed to you from me, tear it up.

  The thing was, he would do what I asked. I wouldn’t, in his place. I would rip it open, no matter what promises had been made.

  He’d obey.

  What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, at his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together.

  FINALE

  The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life.

  THE EYE

  WHEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.