Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

  “It doesn’t matter so much nowadays,” Hazel said. “Girls have children first and get married later. Movie stars, ordinary girls, too. All the time. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I would say it matters around here,” Antoinette said. “We aren’t movie stars around here. A man would have to think twice. He’d have to think about his family. It’d be an insult to his mother. It would be even if she was past knowing anything about it. And if you make your living dealing with the public, you have to think about that, too.”

  She was pulling the car off the road. She said, “Excuse me,” and got out and walked over to the stone wall. She bent forward. Was she weeping? No. She was vomiting. Her shoulders were hunched and quivering. She vomited neatly over the wall into the fallen leaves of the oak forest. Hazel opened the car door and started toward her, but Antoinette waved her back with one hand.

  The helpless and intimate sound of vomiting, in the stillness of the country, the misty rain.

  Antoinette leaned down and held on to the wall for a moment. Then she straightened up and came back to the car and wiped herself off with tissues, shakily but thoroughly.

  “I get that,” she said, “with the kind of headaches I get.”

  Hazel said, “Do you want me to drive?”

  “You aren’t used to this side of the road.”

  “I’ll go carefully.”

  They changed places—Hazel was rather surprised that Antoinette had agreed—and Hazel drove slowly, while Antoinette sat with her eyes closed most of the time and her hands against her mouth. Her skin showed gray through the pink makeup. But near the edge of town she opened her eyes and dropped her hands and said something like “This is Cathaw.”

  They were going past a low field by the river. “Where in that poem,” Antoinette said—speaking hastily, as one might if one was afraid of being overtaken by further vomiting—“the girl goes out and loses her maidenhead, and so on.”

  The field was brown and soggy and surrounded by what looked like council housing.

  Hazel was surprised to recall a whole verse now. She could hear Miss Dobie’s voice chanting it hard at them.

  “Now, gowd rings ye may buy, maidens,

  Green mantles ye may spin;

  But, gin ye lose your maidenheid,

  Ye’ll ne’er get that agen!”

  A ton of words Miss Dobie had, to bury anything.

  “Antoinette isn’t well,” Hazel said to Dudley Brown when she came into the lounge that evening. “She has a sick headache. We drove out today to see Miss Dobie.”

  “She left me a note to that effect,” Dudley said, setting out the whisky and water.

  Antoinette was in bed. Hazel had helped her get there, because she was too dizzy to manage by herself. Antoinette got into bed in her slip and asked for a facecloth, so that she could remove what was left of her makeup and not spoil the pillowcase. Then she asked for a towel, in case she should be sick again. She told Hazel how to hang up her suit—still the same one, and still miraculously unspotted—on its padded hanger. Her bedroom was mean and narrow. It looked out on the stucco wall of the bank next door. She slept on a metal-frame cot. On the dresser was displayed all the paraphernalia that she used to color her hair. Would she be upset when she realized that Hazel must have seen it? Probably not. She might have forgotten that lie already. Or she might be prepared to go on lying—like a queen, who makes whatever she says the truth.

  “She had the woman from the kitchen go up to see about dinner,” Hazel said. “It’ll be on the sideboard, and we’re to help ourselves.”

  “Help ourselves to this first,” Dudley said. He had brought the whisky bottle.

  “Miss Dobie was not able to remember my husband.”

  “Was she not?”

  “A girl was there. A young woman, rather. Who looks after Miss Dobie.”

  “Judy Armstrong,” Dudley said.

  She waited to see if he could keep himself from asking more, if he could force himself to change the subject. He couldn’t. “Has she still got her wonderful red hair?”

  “Yes,” Hazel said. “Did you think she would have shaved it off?”

  “Girls do terrible things to their hair. I see sights every day. But Judy is not that sort.”

  “She served a very nice dark fruitcake,” Hazel said. “Antoinette mentioned bringing a piece home to you. But I think she forgot. I think she was already feeling ill when we left.”

  “Perhaps the cake was poisoned,” Dudley said. “The way it often is, in the stories.”

  “Judy ate two slices herself, and I ate some and Miss Dobie ate some, so I don’t think so.”

  “Perhaps only Antoinette’s.”

  “Antoinette didn’t have any. Just some wine, and a cigarette.”

  After a silent moment Dudley said, “How did Miss Dobie entertain you?”

  “She recited a long poem.”

  “Aye, she’ll do that. Ballads, they’re rightly called, not poems. Do you recall which one it was?”

  The lines that came into Hazel’s mind were those concerning the maidenhead. But she rejected them as being too crudely malicious and tried to find others.

  “First dip me in a stand of milk?” she said tentatively. “Then in a stand of water?”

  “But hold me fast, don’t let me pass,” Dudley cried, very pleased. “I’ll be your bairn’s father!”

  Quite as tactless as the first lines she had thought of, but he did not seem to mind. Indeed, he threw himself back in his chair, looking released, and lifted his head and started reciting—the same poem that Miss Dobie had recited, but spoken with calm relish now, and with style, in a warm, sad, splendid male voice. His accent broadened, but, having absorbed a good deal of the poem once already, almost against her will, Hazel was able to make out every word. The boy captured by fairies, living a life of adventures and advantages—not able to feel pain, for one thing—but growing wary as he gets older, scared of “paying the teint to hell,” and longing for a human climate, so seducing a bold girl and instructing her how she can get him free. She has to do it by holding on to him, holding on no matter what horror the fairies can change him into, holding on until all their tricks are exhausted, and they let him go. Of course Dudley’s style was old-fashioned, of course he mocked himself, a little. But that was only on the surface. This reciting was like singing. You could parade your longing without fear of making a fool of yourself.

  “They shaped him in her arms at last,

  A mother-naked man;

  She wrapt him in her green mantle,

  And so her true love wan!”

  You and Miss Dobie, you are a pair.

  “We saw the place where she went to meet him,” Hazel said. “On the way back, Antoinette showed it to me. Down by the river.” She thought that it was a wonder to be here, in the middle of these people’s lives, seeing what she’d seen of their scheming, their wounds. Jack was not here, Jack was not here after all, but she was.

  “Carterhaugh?” Dudley said, sounding scornful and excited. “That’s not down by the river! Antoinette doesn’t know what she’s talking about! That’s the high field, it overlooks the river. That’s where the fairy rings were. Fungi. If the moon were out, we could drive out tonight and look at it.”

  Hazel could feel something, as if a cat had jumped into her lap. Sex. She felt her eyes widen, her skin tighten, her limbs settle, attentively. But the moon was not going to be out—that was the other thing his tone made clear. He poured out more whisky, and it wasn’t in aid of a seduction. All the faith and energy, the adeptness, the forgetfulness that is necessary to manage even a tiny affair—Hazel knew, for she’d had two tiny affairs, one at college and one at a teachers’ conference—all that was beyond them at present. They would let the attraction wash over them and ebb away. Antoinette would have been willing, Hazel was sure of that. Antoinette would have tolerated someone who was going away, who didn’t really matter, who was only a sort of American. That was another thing to make th
em draw back—Antoinette’s acceptance. That was enough to make them thoughtful, fastidious.

  “The little girl,” Dudley said, in a quieter voice. “Was she there?”

  “No. She goes to kindergarten.” Hazel thought how little was required, really—a recitation—to turn her mind from needling to comforting.

  “Does she? What a name that child has got. Tania.”

  “That’s not so odd a name,” Hazel said. “Not nowadays.”

  “I know. They all have outlandish international names, like Tania and Natasha and Erin and Solange and Carmen. No one has family names. Those girls with the rooster hair I see on the streets. They pick the names. They’re the mothers.”

  “I have a granddaughter named Brittany,” Hazel said. “And I have heard of a little girl called Cappuccino.”

  “Cappuccino! Is that true? Why don’t they call one Cassoulet? Fettucini? Alsace-Lorraine?”

  “They probably do.”

  “Schleswig-Holstein! There’s a good name for you!”

  “But when did you see her last?” Hazel said. “Tania?”

  “I don’t see her,” Dudley said. “I don’t go out there. We have financial matters, but I don’t go out.”

  Well, you ought to go, she was about to say to him. You must go, and not make stupid arrangements that Antoinette can step in and spoil, as she did today. He was the one, however, who spoke first. He leaned across and spoke to her with slightly drunken sincerity.

  “What am I to do? I can’t make two women happy.”

  A statement that might have been thought fatuous, conceited, evasive.

  Yet it was true. Hazel was stopped. It was true. At first the claim seemed to be all Judy’s, because of her child and her loneliness and her lovely hair. But why did Antoinette have to lose out, just because she had been in the running for a long time, could calculate, and withstand defections, and knew how to labor at her looks? Antoinette must have been useful and loyal and perhaps privately tender. And she didn’t even ask for a man’s whole heart. She might shut her eyes to a secret visit once in a while. (She’d be sick, though; she’d have to turn her head away and vomit.) Judy wouldn’t put up with that at all. She’d be bursting with ballad fervor, all vows and imprecations. He couldn’t bear such suffering, such railing. So had Antoinette foiled him today for his own good? That was the way she must see it—the way he might see it, too, after a little while. Even now, perhaps—now that the ballad had stirred and eased his heart.

  Jack had said something like that once. Not about two women, but about making a woman—well, it was Hazel—happy. She thought back to what he had said. I could make you very happy. He meant that he could give her an orgasm. It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. Perhaps they still said it. Probably they were not so indirect nowadays. And he had been quite right about what he promised. But nobody had said that to Hazel before, and she was amazed, taking the promise at face value. It seemed rash and sweeping to her, dazzling but presumptuous. She had to try to see herself, then, as somebody who could be made happy. The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of Hazel—was that something that could just be picked up and made happy?

  One day, about twenty years later, she was driving down the main street of Walley and she saw Jack. He was looking out the front window of the appliance store. He wasn’t looking in her direction, he didn’t see the car. This was while she was going to college. She had errands to do, classes to get to, papers, labs, housework. She could notice things only if she was halted for a minute or two, as she was now, waiting for the light. She noticed Jack—how slim and youthful he looked, in his slacks and pullover—how gray and insubstantial. She didn’t have anything like a clear intimation that he was going to die there, in the store. (He did die there; he slumped over while talking to a customer—but that was years later.) She didn’t take account, all at once, of what his life had become—two or three nights a week at the Legion, the other nights spent lying on the sofa from supper to bedtime, watching television, drinking. Three drinks, four. Never mean, never noisy, he never passed out. He rinsed his glass at the kitchen sink before he went to bed. A life of chores, routines, seasons, pleasantries. All she saw was the stillness about him, a look you could have called ghostly. She saw that his handsomeness—a particular Second World War handsomeness, she felt, with a wisecracking edge to it and a proud passivity—was still intact but drained of power. A ghostly sweetness was what he showed her, through the glass.

  She could be striving toward him, now as much as then. Full of damaging hopes, and ardor, and accusations. She didn’t let herself then—she thought about an exam, or groceries. And if she let herself now, it would be like testing the pain in a lost limb. A quick test, a twinge that brings the whole shape into the air. That would be enough.

  She was a little drunk herself by this time, and she thought of saying to Dudley Brown that perhaps he was making those two women happy. What could she mean by that? Maybe that he was giving them something to concentrate on. A hard limit that you might someday get past in a man, a knot in his mind you might undo, a stillness in him you might jolt, or an absence you might make him regret—that sort of thing will make you pay attention, even when you think you’ve taught yourself not to. Could it be said to make you happy?

  Meanwhile, what makes a man happy?

  It must be something quite different.

  Oranges and Apples

  “I hired a looker from out Shawtown,” Murray’s father said. “She’s a Delaney, but so far she doesn’t seem to have any bad habits. I put her in Men’s Wear.”

  This was in the spring of 1955. Murray was just out of college. He’d come home and seen at once what fate was waiting for him. Anybody could see it, written on his father’s darkened, scooped-out face, rising almost daily in his father’s stomach—the hard loaf that would kill before winter. In six months Murray would be in charge, sitting in the little lookout office that hung like a cage at the back of the store, over Linoleum.

  Zeigler’s then was still called Zeigler’s Department Store. It was about the same age as the town itself. The present building—three stories high, red brick, the name in angled gray brick letters that had always looked, to Murray, puzzlingly jaunty and Oriental—had gone up in 1880, replacing an earlier building of wood. The store did not deal in groceries or hardware anymore, but they still had Men’s, Ladies’, and Children’s Wear, Dry Goods, Boots and Shoes, Draperies, Housewares, Furniture.

  Murray strolled by to have a look at the looker. He found her penned behind rows of cellophaned shirts. Barbara. She was tall and well developed, as his father in a lowered and regretful voice had said. Her thick black hair did not curl or lie flat—it sprang up like a crest from her wide white forehead. Her eyebrows were thick and black as well, and glossy. Murray found out later that she put Vaseline on them, and plucked out the hairs that would have met above her nose.

  Barbara’s mother had been the mainstay of a back-country farm. When she died, the family migrated to Shawtown, which was a rackety half-rural settlement on the edge of Walley. Barbara’s father did odd jobs, and her two brothers had got into trouble with cars and breaking and entering. One later disappeared. The other married a managing sort of girl and settled down. It was that one who was coming into the store at this time and hanging around, on the pretext of visiting Barbara.

  “Watch out for him,” Barbara told the other clerks. “He’s a jerk, but he knows how to stick things to his fingers.”

  Hearing about this, Murray was impressed by her lack of family feeling. He was an only child, not spoiled but favored, and he felt himself bound by many ties of obligation, decency, and love. As soon as he got home from college, he had to go around greeting all the people who worked in the store, most of whom he’d known since childhood. He had to chat and smile on the streets of Walley, affable as a crown prince.

  Barbara’s brother was caught with a pair of socks in one pocket and a p
ackage of curtain hooks in the other.

  “What do you think he wanted the curtain hooks for?” Murray asked Barbara. He was anxious to make a joke of this, showing her how nothing was held against her on her brother’s account.

  “How should I know?” said Barbara.

  “Maybe he needs counselling,” said Murray. He had taken some sociology courses, because he had hoped at one time to become a United Church minister.

  Barbara said, “Maybe he needs to be hanged.”

  Murray fell in love with her then, if he was not in love already. Here is a noble girl, he thought. A bold black-and-white lily out of the Swamp Irish—Lorna Doone with a rougher tongue and a stronger spine. Mother won’t like her, he thought. (About that he was entirely right.) He was happier than he’d been at any time since he lost his faith. (That was an unsatisfactory way of putting it. It was more as if he’d come into a closed-off room or opened a drawer and found that his faith had dried up, turned to a mound of dust in the corner.)

  He always said that he made up his mind at once to get Barbara, but he used no tactics beyond an open display of worship. A capacity for worship had been noticeable in him all through his school days, along with his good nature and a tendency to befriend underdogs. But he was sturdy enough—he had enough advantages of his own—that it hadn’t got him any serious squelching. Minor squelches he was able to sustain.

  Barbara refused to ride on a float as the Downtown Merchants’ contestant for the Queen of the Dominion Day Parade.

  “I absolutely agree with you,” said Murray. “Beauty contests are degrading.”

  “It’s the paper flowers,” said Barbara. “They make me sneeze.”

  Murray and Barbara live now at Zeigler’s Resort, twenty-five miles or so northwest of Walley. The land here is rough and hilly. The farmers abandoned it around the turn of the century and let it go back to bush. Murray’s father bought two hundred acres of it and built a primitive cabin and called the place his hunting camp. When Murray lost the store in Walley, and the big house and the little house on the lot behind the store, he came up here with Barbara and their two small children. He drove a school bus to get some cash income, and worked all the rest of the time building eight new cabins and renovating the one that was there, to serve as the lodge and as living quarters for his family. He learned carpentry, masonry, wiring, plumbing. He cut down trees and dammed the creek and cleaned the creek bed and trucked in sand, to make a swimming pond and a beach. For obvious reasons (as he says), Barbara handled the finances.