by Alice Munro
The boyfriend was a good-looking man about ten years older than Matilda. He had thinning dark hair and a pencil mustache and a rather unfriendly, suspicious, determined expression. He was very tall, and he bent toward Matilda, with his arm around her waist, as they walked along the streets. They walked on the streets so much because Mrs. Carbuncle had taken a huge dislike to him and would not let him inside the house. At first he didn’t have a car. Later he did. He was said to be either an airplane pilot or a waiter in a posh restaurant, and it was not known where Matilda had met him. When they walked, his arm was actually below Matilda’s waist—his spread fingers rested securely on her hipbone. It seemed to Joan that this bold, settled hand had something to do with his gloomy and challenging expression.
But before this, before Matilda got a job, or cut her hair, something happened that showed Joan—by then long past being in love—an aspect, or effect, of Matilda’s beauty that she hadn’t suspected. She saw that such beauty marked you—in Logan, anyway—as a limp might, or a speech impediment. It isolated you—more severely, perhaps, than a mild deformity, because it could be seen as a reproach. After she realized that, it wasn’t so surprising to Joan, though it was still disappointing, to see that Matilda would do her best to get rid of or camouflage that beauty as soon as she could.
Mrs. Buttler, Mrs. Carbuncle, invading their kitchen as she does every so often, never removes her black coat and her multicolored velvet turban. That is to keep your hopes up, their mother says. Hopes that she’s about to leave, that you’re going to get free of her in under three hours. Also to cover up whatever god-awful outfit she’s got on underneath. Because she’s got that coat, and is willing to wear it every day of the year, Mrs. Carbuncle never has to change her dress. A smell issues from her—camphorated, stuffy.
She arrives in mid-spiel, charging ahead in her talk—about something that has happened to her, some person who has outraged her, as if you were certain to know what it was or who. As if her life were on the news and you had just failed to catch the last couple of bulletins. Joan is always eager to listen to the first half hour or so of this report, or tirade, preferably from outside the room, so that she can slip away when things start getting repetitious. If you try to slip away from where Mrs. Carbuncle can see you, she’s apt to ask sarcastically where you’re off to in such a hurry, or accuse you of not believing her.
Joan is doing that—listening from the dining room, while pretending to practice her piano piece for the public-school Christmas concert. Joan is in her last year at the public grade school, and Matilda is in her last year at high school. (Morris will drop out, after Christmas, to take over the lumberyard.) It’s a Saturday morning in mid-December—gray sky and an iron frost. Tonight the high-school Christmas Dance, the only formal dance of the year, is to be held in the town armory.
It’s the high-school principal who has got into Mrs. Carbuncle’s bad books. This is an unexceptional man named Archibald Moore, who is routinely called by his students Archie Balls, or Archie Balls More, or Archie More Balls. Mrs. Carbuncle says he isn’t fit for his job. She says he can be bought and everybody knows it; you’ll never pass out of high school unless you slip him the money.
“But the exams are marked in Toronto,” says Joan’s mother, as if genuinely puzzled. For a while, she enjoys pushing things along, with mild objections and queries.
“He’s in cahoots with them, too,” says Mrs. Carbuncle. “Them, too.” She goes on to say that if money hadn’t changed hands he’d never have got out of high school himself. He’s very stupid. An ignoramus. He can’t solve the problems on the blackboard or translate the Latin. He has to have a book with the English words all written in on top. Also, a few years ago, he made a girl pregnant.
“Oh, I never heard that!” says Joan’s mother, utterly genteel.
“It was hushed up. He had to pay.”
“Did it take all the profits he made on the examinations?”
“He ought to have been horsewhipped.”
Joan plays the piano softly—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is her piece, and very difficult—because she hopes to hear the name of the girl, or perhaps how the baby was disposed of. (One time, Mrs. Carbuncle described the way a certain doctor in town disposed of babies, the products of his own licentious outbursts.) But Mrs. Carbuncle is swinging around to the root of her grievance, and it seems to be something about the dance. Archibald Moore has not managed the dance in the right way. He should make them all draw names for partners to take. Or else he should make them all go without partners. Either one or the other. That way, Matilda could go. Matilda hasn’t got a partner—no boy has asked her—and she says she won’t go alone. Mrs. Carbuncle says she will. She says she will make her. The reason she will make her is that her dress cost so much. Mrs. Carbuncle enumerates. The cost of the net, the taffeta, the sequins, the boning in the midriff (it’s strapless), the twenty-two-inch zipper. She made this dress herself, putting in countless hours of labor, and Matilda wore it once. She wore it last night in the high-school play on the stage in the town hall, and that’s all. She says she won’t wear it tonight; she won’t go to the dance, because nobody has asked her. It is all the fault of Archibald Moore, the cheater, the fornicator, the ignoramus.
Joan and her mother saw Matilda last night. Morris didn’t go—he doesn’t want to go out with them anymore in the evenings. He would sooner listen to the radio or scribble figures, probably having to do with the lumberyard, in a special notebook. Matilda played the role of a mannequin a young man falls in love with. Their mother told Morris when she came home that he was smart to stay away—it was an infinitely silly play. Matilda did not speak, of course, but she did hold herself still for a long time, showing a lovely profile. The dress was wonderful—a snow cloud with silver sequins glinting on it like frost.
Mrs. Carbuncle has told Matilda that she has to go. Partner or not, she has to go. She has to get dressed in her dress and put on a coat and be out the door by nine o’clock. The door will be locked till eleven, when Mrs. Carbuncle goes to bed.
But Matilda still says she won’t go. She says she will just sit in the coal shed at the back of the yard. It isn’t a coal shed anymore, it’s just a shed. Mrs. Carbuncle can’t buy coal any more than the Fordyces can.
“She’ll freeze,” says Joan’s mother, really concerned with the conversation for the first time.
“Serve her right,” Mrs. Carbuncle says.
Joan’s mother looks at the clock and says she is sorry to be rude but she has just remembered an appointment she has uptown. She has to get a tooth filled, and she has to hurry—she has to ask to be excused.
So Mrs. Carbuncle is turned out—saying that it’s the first time she heard of filling teeth on a Saturday—and Joan’s mother immediately phones the lumberyard to tell Morris to come home.
Now there is the first argument—the first real argument—that Joan has ever heard between Morris and their mother. Morris keeps saying no. What his mother wants him to do he won’t do. He sounds as if there were no convincing him, no ordering him. He sounds not like a boy talking to his mother but like a man talking to a woman. A man who knows better than she does, and is ready for all the tricks she will use to make him give in.
“Well, I think you’re very selfish,” their mother says. “I think you can’t think of anybody but yourself. I am very disappointed in you. How would you like to be that poor girl with her loony mother? Sitting in the coal shed? There are things a gentleman will do, you know. Your father would have known what to do.”
Morris doesn’t answer.
“It’s not like proposing marriage or anything. What will it cost you?” their mother says scornfully. “Two dollars each?”
Morris says in a low voice that it isn’t that.
“Do I very often ask you to do anything you don’t want to do? Do I? I treat you like a grown man. You have all kinds of freedom. Well, now I ask you to do something to show that you really can act like a grownup and des
erve your freedom, and what do I hear from you?”
This goes on a while longer, and Morris resists. Joan does not see how their mother is going to win and wonders that she doesn’t give up. She doesn’t.
“You don’t need to try making the excuse that you can’t dance, either, because you can, and I taught you myself. You’re an elegant dancer!”
Then, of all things, Morris must have agreed, because the next thing Joan hears is their mother saying, “Go and put on a clean sweater.” Morris’s boots sound heavily on the back stairs, and their mother calls after him, “You’ll be glad you did this! You won’t regret it!”
She opens the dining-room door and says to Joan, “I don’t hear an awful lot of piano-playing in here. Are you so good you can give up practicing already? The last time I heard you play that piece through, it was terrible.”
Joan starts again from the beginning. But she doesn’t keep it up after Morris comes down the stairs and slams the door, and their mother, in the kitchen, turns on the radio, opens the cupboards, begins putting together something for lunch. Joan gets up from the piano bench and goes quietly across the dining room, through the door into the hall, right up to the front door. She puts her face against the colored glass. You can’t see in through this glass, because the hall is dark, but if you get your eye in the right place you can see out. There is more red than any other color, so she chooses a red view—though she has managed every color in her time—blue and gold and green; even if there’s just a tiny leaf of it, she has figured a way to squint through.
The gray cement-block house across the street is turned to lavender. Morris stands at the door. The door opens, and Joan can’t see who has opened it. Is it Matilda or is it Mrs. Carbuncle? The stiff, bare trees and the lilac bush by the door of that house are a dark red, like blood. Morris’s good yellow sweater is a blob of golden red, a stoplight, at the door.
Far back in the house, Joan’s mother is singing along with the radio. She doesn’t know of any danger. Between the front door, the scene outside, and their mother singing in the kitchen, Joan feels the dimness, the chilliness, the frailty and impermanence of these high half-bare rooms—of their house. It is just a place to be judged like other places—it’s nothing special. It is no protection. She feels this because it occurs to her that their mother may be mistaken. In this instance—and further, as far as her faith and suppositions reach—she may be mistaken.
It is Mrs. Carbuncle. Morris has turned away and is coming down the walk and she is coming after him. Morris walks down the two steps to the sidewalk, he walks across the street very quickly without looking around. He doesn’t run, he keeps his hands in his pockets, and his pink, blood-eyed face smiles to show that nothing that is happening has taken him by surprise. Mrs. Carbuncle is wearing her loose and tattery seldom-seen housedress, her pink hair is wild as a banshee’s; at the top of her steps she halts and shrieks after him, so that Joan can hear her through the door, “We’re not so bad off we need some Deadeye Dick to take my daughter to a dance!”
II—Frazil Ice
Morris looks to Joan like the caretaker when she sees him out in front of the apartment building, cutting the grass. He is wearing dull-green work pants and a plaid shirt, and, of course, his glasses, with the dark lens. He looks like a man who is competent, even authoritative, but responsible to someone else. Seeing him with a gang of his own workmen (he has branched out from the lumberyard into the construction business), you’d probably take him for the foreman—a sharp-eyed, fair-minded foreman with a solid but limited ambition. Not the boss. Not the owner of the apartment building. He is round-faced and partly bald, with a recent tan and new freckles showing on the front of his scalp. Sturdy but getting round-shouldered, or is that just the way he looks when pushing the mower? Is there a look bachelors get, bachelor sons—bachelor sons who have cared for old parents, particularly mothers? A closed-in, patient look that verges on humility? She thinks that it’s almost as if she were coming to visit an uncle.
This is 1972, and Joan herself looks younger than she did ten years ago. She wears her dark hair long, tucked back behind her ears; she makes up her eyes but not her mouth; she dresses in voluminous soft bright cottons or brisk little tunics that cover only a couple of inches of her thighs. She can get away with this—she hopes she can get away with it—because she is a tall, slim-waisted woman with long, well-shaped legs.
Their mother is dead. Morris has sold the house and built, or rebuilt, this and other apartment buildings. The people who bought the house are making it into a nursing home. Joan has told her husband that she wants to go home—that is, back to Logan—to help Morris get settled, but she knows, in fact, that he will be settled; with his grasp of things Morris always seemed settled. All he needs Joan to help him with is the sorting out of some boxes and a trunk, full of clothes, books, dishes, pictures, curtains, that he doesn’t want or doesn’t have space for and has stored temporarily in the basement of his building.
Joan has been married for years. Her husband is a journalist. They live in Ottawa. People know his name—they even know what he looks like, or what he looked like five years ago, from his picture at the top of a back-page column in a magazine. Joan is used to being identified as his wife, here and elsewhere. But in Logan this identification carries a special pride. Most people here do not care for the journalist’s wit, which they think cynical, or for his opinions, but they are pleased that a girl from this town has got herself attached to a famous, or semi-famous, person.
She has told her husband that she will be staying here for a week. It’s Sunday evening when she arrives, a Sunday late in May, with Morris cutting the first grass of the year. She plans to leave on Friday, spending Saturday and Sunday in Toronto. If her husband should find out that she has not spent the entire week with Morris, she has a story ready—about having decided, when Morris no longer needed her, to visit a woman friend she has known since college. Perhaps she should tell that story anyway—it would be safer. She worries about whether she should take the friend into her confidence.
It is the first time she has ever managed anything of this sort.
The apartment building runs deep into the lot, its windows looking out on parking space or on the Baptist church. A driving shed once stood here, for the farmers to leave their horses in during the church service. It’s a red brick building. No balconies. Plain, plain.
Joan hugs Morris. She smells cigarettes, gasoline, soft, worn, sweaty shirt, along with the fresh-cut grass. “Oh, Morris, you know what you should do?” she shouts over the sound of the lawnmower. “You should get an eyepatch. Then you’d look just like Moshe Dayan!”
Every morning Joan walks to the post office. She is waiting for a letter from a man in Toronto, whose name is John Brolier. She wrote to him and told him Morris’s name, the name of Logan, the number of Morris’s post-office box. Logan has grown, but it is still too small to have home delivery.
On Monday morning she hardly hopes for a letter. On Tuesday she does hope for one. On Wednesday she feels she should have every reasonable expectation. Each day she is disappointed. Each day a suspicion that she has made a fool of herself—a feeling of being isolated and unwanted—rises closer to the surface. She has taken a man at his word when he didn’t mean it. He has thought again.
The post office she goes to is a new, low pinkish brick building. The old one, which used to make her think of a castle, has been torn down. The look of the town has greatly changed. Not many houses have been pulled down, but most have been improved. Aluminum siding, sandblasted brick, bright roofs, wide double-glazed windows, verandas demolished or enclosed as porches. And the wide, wild yards have disappeared—they were really double lots—and the extra lots have been sold and built on. New houses crowd in between the old houses. These are all suburban in style, long and low, or split-level. The yards are tidy and properly planned, with nests of ornamental shrubs, round and crescent-shaped flower beds. The old habit of growing flowers like vegetables, in
a row beside the beans or potatoes, seems to have been forgotten. Many of the great shade trees have been cut down. They were probably getting old and dangerous. The shabby houses, the long grass, the cracked sidewalks, the deep shade, the unpaved streets full of dust or puddles—all of this, which Joan remembers, is not to be found. The town seems crowded, diminished, with so many spruced-up properties, so much deliberate arrangement. The town of her childhood—that haphazard, dreamy Logan—was just Logan going through a phase. Its leaning board fences and sun-blistered walls and flowering weeds were no permanent expression of what the town could be. And people like Mrs. Buttler—costumed, obsessed—seemed to be bound to that old town and not to be possible anymore.
Morris’s apartment has one bedroom, which he has given to Joan. He sleeps on the living-room sofa. A two-bedroom apartment would surely have been more convenient for the times when he has visitors. But he probably doesn’t intend to have visitors, very many of them, or very often. And he wouldn’t want to lose out on the rent from the larger apartment. He must have considered taking one of the bachelor apartments in the basement, so that he’d be getting the rent from the one-bedroom place as well, but he must have decided that that would be going too far. It would look mingy, it would call attention. It would be a kind of self-indulgence better avoided.
The furniture in the apartment comes from the house where Morris lived with their mother, but not much of it dates from the days when Joan lived at home. Anything that looked like an antique has been sold, and replaced with fairly durable, fairly comfortable furniture that Morris has been able to buy in quantity. Joan sees some things she sent as birthday presents, Christmas presents. They don’t fit in quite as well, or liven things up as much, as she had hoped they would.
