by Alice Munro
Yet these were the same women who in my mother’s house turned sulky, sly, elderly, eager to take offense. Out of my mother’s hearing they were apt to say to me, “Is that the hairbrush you use on your hair? Oh, we thought it was for the dog!” Or, “Is that what you dry your dishes with?” They would bend over the pans, scraping, scraping off every last bit of black that had accumulated since the last time they visited here. They greeted what my mother had to say usually with little stunned smiles; her directness, her outrageousness, paralyzed them for the moment, and they could only blink at her rapidly and helplessly, as if faced with a cruel light.
The kindest things she said were the most wrong. Aunt Elspeth could play the piano by ear; she would sit down and play the few pieces she knew—“My Bonny Lies over the Ocean” and “Road to the Isles.” My mother offered to teach her to read music.
“Then you can play really good things.”
Aunt Elspeth refused, with a delicate, unnatural laugh, as if somebody had offered to teach her to play pool. She went out and found a neglected flowerbed and knelt in the dirt, in the hot midday sun, pulling up weeds. “That flowerbed I just don’t care about any more. I’ve given up on it,” called my mother airly, warningly, from the kitchen door. “There’s nothing planted in it but that old London Pride, and I’d just as soon yank that up anyway!” Aunt Elspeth went on weeding as if she never heard. My mother made an exasperated, finally dismissing face and actually sat down in her canvas chair, leaned back and closed her eyes and remained doing nothing, smiling angrily, for about ten minutes. My mother went along straight lines. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her, retreating and disappearing and coming back, slippery and soft-voiced and indestructible. She pushed them out of her way as if they were cobwebs; I knew better than that.
Back home at Jenkin’s Bend—bearing me with them for the long summer visit—they were refreshed, plumped out as if they had been put in water. I could see the change happening. I too with some slight pangs of disloyalty exchanged my mother’s world of serious skeptical questions, endless but somehow disregarded housework, lumps in the mashed potatoes, and unsettling ideas, for theirs of work and gaiety, comfort and order, intricate formality. There was a whole new language to learn in their house. Conversations there had many levels, nothing could be stated directly, every joke might be a thrust turned inside out. My mother’s disapproval was open and unmistakable, like heavy weather; theirs came like tiny razor-cuts, bewilderingly, in the middle of kindness. They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.
The daughter of the family on the next farm had married a lawyer, a city man, of whom her family were very proud. They brought him over to be introduced. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace had baked, and polished silver, and got out their hand-painted plates and little pearl-handled knives, for this visit. They fed him cakes, shortbread, nut loaf, tarts. He was a greedy or perhaps desperately bewildered young man, eating out of nervousness. He picked up whole cakes and they crumbled as he was getting them into his mouth; icing was smeared on his moustache. At supper Auntie Grace without saying a word began to do an imitation of his way of eating, exaggerating gradually, making gobbling noises and grabbing imaginary things from her plate. “Oh, the law-yer!” cried Aunt Elspeth elegantly, and leaning across the table inquired, “Have you always—been interested—in country life?” After their marvellous courtesy to him I found this faintly chilling; it was a warning. Didn’t he think he was somebody! That was their final condemnation, lightly said. He thinks he’s somebody. Don’t they think they’re somebody. Pretensions were everywhere.
Not that they were against ability. They acknowledged it in their own family, our family. But it seemed the thing to do was to keep it more or less a secret. Ambition was what they were alarmed by, for to be ambitious was to court failure and to risk making a fool of oneself. The worst thing, I gathered, the worse thing that could happen in this life was to have people laughing at you.
“Your Uncle Craig,” said Aunt Elspeth to me, “your Uncle Craig is one of the smartest, and the best-liked, and the most respected men in Wawanash county. He could have been elected to the legislature. He could have been in the Cabinet, if he’d wanted.”
“Didn’t he get elected? Uncle Craig?”
“Don’t be silly, he never ran. He wouldn’t let his name stand. He preferred not.”
There it was, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them. They liked people turning down things that were offered, marriage, positions, opportunities, money. My cousin Ruth McQueen who lived in Tupperton, had won a scholarship to go to college, for she was very clever, but she thought it over and turned it down, she decided to stay home.
“She preferred not.”
Why was this such an admirable thing to have done? Like certain subtle harmonies of music or colour, the beauties of the negative were beyond me. Yet I was not ready, like my mother, to deny that they were there.
“Afraid to stick her head out of her own burrow,” was what my mother had to say about Ruth McQueen.
Aunt Moira was married to Uncle Bob Oliphant. They lived in Porterfield, and had one daughter, Mary Agnes, born rather far along in their married life. During the summer Aunt Moira would sometimes drive the thirteen miles from Porterfield to Jenkin’s Bend, for an afternoon’s visit, bringing Mary Agnes with her. Aunt Moira could drive a car. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace thought this very brave of her (my mother was learning to drive our car, and they thought that reckless and unnecessary). They would watch for her old-fashioned, square-topped car to cross the bridge and come up the road from the river, and go out to greet her with encouraging, admiring, welcoming cries, as if she had just found her way across the Sahara, instead of over the hot dusty roads from Porterfield.
That nimble malice that danced under their courtesies to the rest of the world was entirely lacking in their attentions to each other, to brother and sister. For each other they had only tenderness and pride. And for Mary Agnes Oliphant. I could not help thinking they preferred her to me. I was welcomed and enjoyed, yes, but I was tainted by other influences and by half my heredity; my upbringing was riddled with heresies, that could never all be put straight. Mary Agnes, it seemed to me, was received with a more unmixed, and shining, confident, affection.
At Jenkin’s Bend it would never be mentioned that there was anything the matter with Mary Agnes. And in fact there was not much the matter; she was almost like other people. Except that you could not imagine her going into a store by herself, and buying something, going anywhere by herself; she had to be with her mother. She was not an idiot, she was nothing like Irene Pollox and Frankie Hall on the Flats Road, she was certainly not idiotic enough to be allowed to ride free all day on the merry-go-round at the Kinsmen’s Fair, as they were—even provided Aunt Moira would have let her make such a spectacle of herself, which she would not. Her skin was dusty-looking, as if there was a thin, stained sheet of glass over it, or a light oiled paper.
“She was deprived of oxygen,” my mother said, taking some satisfaction as always in explanations. “She was deprived of oxygen in the birth canal. Uncle Bob Oliphant held Aunt Moira’s legs together on the way to the hospital because the doctor had told them she might hemorrhage.”
I did not want to hear any more. In the first place I shied away from the implication that this was something that could happen to anyone, that I myself might have been blunted, all by lack of some namable, measurable, ordinary thing, like oxygen. And the words birth canal made me think of a straight-banked river of blood. I thought of Uncle Bob Oliphant holding Aunt Moira’s heavy, vein-riddled legs together while she heaved and tried to deliver; I never could see him afterwards without thinking of that. Whenever we did see him in his own house he was sitting by the radio, sucking his pipe, listening to Boston Blackie or Police Patrol, tires shrieking and guns cracking while he seriously nodded his nutbald head. W
ould he have his pipe in his mouth while he held Aunt Moira’s legs, would he give businesslike assent to her commotion, just as he did to Boston Blackie’s?
Perhaps because of this story it seemed to me that the gloom spreading out from Aunt Moira had a gynecological odour, like that of the fuzzy, rubberized bandages on her legs. She was a woman I would recognize now as a likely sufferer from varicose veins, hemorrhoids, a dropped womb, cysted ovaries, inflammations, discharges, lumps and stones in various places, one of those heavy, cautiously moving, wrecked survivors of the female life, with stories to tell. She sat on the verandah in the wicker rocker, wearing, in spite of the hot weather, some stately, layered dress, dark and trembling with beads, a large hat like a turban, earth-coloured stockings which she would sometimes roll down, to let the bandages “breathe.” Not much could be said for marriage, really, if you were to compare her with her sisters, who could still jump up so quickly, who still smelled fresh and healthy, and who would occasionally, deprecatingly, mention the measurements of their waists. Even getting up or sitting down, or moving in the rocker, Aunt Moira gave off rumbles of complaint, involuntary and eloquent as noises of digestion or wind.
She told about Porterfield. Not a dry town like Jubilee, it had two beer parlours facing each other across the main street, one in each of the hotels. Sometimes on a Saturday night or early Sunday morning there would be a terrible street fight. Aunt Moira’s house was only half a block from the main street and close to the side walk. From behind her darkened front windows she had watched men hooting like savages, had seen a car spin sideways and crash into a telephone pole, crushing the steering wheel into the driver’s heart; she had seen two men dragging a girl who was drunk and couldn’t stand up, and the girl was urinating on the street, in her clothes. She had scraped drunks’ vomit off her painted fence. All this was no more than she expected. And it was not only Saturday drunks but grocers and neighbours and delivery boys who cheated, were rude, committed outrages. Aunt Moira’s voice, telling things at leisure, would spread out over the day, over the yard, like black oil, and Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace would sympathize.
“Well, no, you couldn’t be expected to take that!”
“We don’t know how lucky we are, here.”
And they would run in and out with cups of tea, glasses of lemon ade, fresh buttered baking powder biscuits, Martha Washington cake, slices of pound cake with raisins, little confections of candied fruit rolled in coconut, delicious to nibble on.
Mary Agnes sat listening and smiling. She smiled at me. This was not a guileless smile but the smile of the person who arbitrarily, even rather high-handedly, extends to a child all the sociability which cannot, through fear and habit, be extended to anybody else. She wore her black hair bobbed, prickles showing on her thin olive neck; she wore glasses. Aunt Moira dressed her like the high school girl she had never been, in plaid pleated skirts loose at the waist, too-large, long-sleeved, carefully laundered white blouses. She wore no make-up, no powder to tint the soft dark hairs at the corners of her mouth. She spoke to me in the harsh, hectoring, uncertain tones of somebody who is not just teasing but imitating teasing, imitating the way she had heard certain brash and jovial people, storekeepers maybe, talking to children.
“What do you do that for?” She came and caught me looking through the little panes of coloured glass around the front door. She put her eye to the red one.
“Yard’s on fire!” she said, but laughed at me as if I had said it.
Other times she would hide in the dark hall, and jump out and grab me from behind, closing her hands over my eyes. “Guess who, guess who!” She would squeeze and tickle me till I shrieked. Her hands were hot and dry, her hugs fierce. I fought back as hard as I could but could not call her names as I would somebody at school, could not spit at her and pull her hair out, because of her age—she was nominally a grownup—and her protected status. So I thought her a bully and said—but not at Jenkin’s Bend—that I hated her. At the same time I was curious and not altogether displeased, discovering that I could be so important, in a way I could not even understand, to someone who was not important at all to me. She would roll me over on the hall carpet, tickling my belly ferociously, as if I were a dog, and I was as much overcome by amazement, each time, as by her unpredictable strength and unfair tricks; I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
I knew something, too, that had happened to Mary Agnes. My mother had told me. Years ago she had been out in the front yard of their house in Porterfield while Aunt Moira was washing clothes in the cellar, and some boys had come by, five boys. They persuaded her to go for a walk with them and they took her out to the fairgrounds and took off all her clothes and left her lying on the cold mud, and she caught bronchitis and nearly died. That was why, now, she had to wear warm underwear even in summer.
I supposed that the degradation—for my mother told me the story to warn me that some degradation was possible, if ever you were persuaded to go off with boys—lay in having all her clothes taken off, in being naked. Having to be naked myself, the thought of being naked, stabbed me with shame in the pit of my stomach. Every time I thought of the doctor pulling down my pants and jabbing the needle in my buttocks, for smallpox, I felt outraged, frantic, unbearably, almost exquisitely humiliated. I thought of Mary Agnes’s body lying exposed on the fairgrounds, her prickly cold buttocks sticking out—that did seem to me the most shameful, helpless-looking part of anybody’s body—and I thought that if it had happened to me, to be seen like that, I could not live on afterwards.
“Del, you and Mary Agnes ought to go for a walk.”
“You ought to chase around the barn and see if you can find
Robber.”
I rose obediently, and around the corner of the verandah beat a stick on the latticework, in savage dejection. I didn’t want to go with Mary Agnes. I wanted to stay and eat things, and hear more about Porterfield, that depraved sullen town, filled with untrustworthy, gangsterish people. I heard Mary Agnes coming after me, with her heavy tripping run.
“Mary Agnes, stay out of the sun where you can. Don’t go paddling in the river. You can catch cold any time of the year!”
We went down the road and along the river bank. In the heat of dry stubble-fields, cracked creek-beds, white dusty roads, the Wawanash river made a cool trough. The shade was of thin willow leaves, which held the sunlight like a sieve. The mud along the banks was dry but not dried to dust; it was like cake icing, delicately crusted on top but moist and cool underneath, lovely to walk on. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot. Mary Agnes hooted, “I’m telling on you!”
“Tell if you like.” I called her bugger under my breath.
Cows had been down to the river and had left their hoof-prints in the mud. They left cowpats too, nicely rounded, looking when they dried like artifacts, like handmade lids of day. Along the edge of the water, on both sides, were carpets of lily leaves spread out, and here and there a yellow water lily, looking so pale, tranquil and desirable, that I had to tuck my dress into my pants and wade in among the sucking roots, in black mud that oozed up between my toes and clouded the water, silting the leaves and lily petals.
“You’re going to drown, you’re going to drown,” cried Mary Agnes in cross excitement, though I was hardly past my knees. Brought to shore, the flowers seemed coarse and rank and began to die immediately. I walked on forgetting about them, mashing the petals in my fist.
We came upon a dead cow, lying with its hind feet in the water. Black flies were crawling and clustering on its brown and white hide, sparkling where the sun caught them like beaded embroidery.
I took a stick and tapped the hide. The flies rose, circled, dropped back. I could see that the cow’s hide was a map. The brown could be the ocean, the white the floating continents. With my stick I traced their strange shapes, their curving
coasts, trying to keep the point of the stick exactly between the white and the brown. Then I guided the stick up the neck, following a taut rope of muscle—the cow had died with its neck stretched out, as if reaching for water, but it was lying the wrong way for that—and I tapped the face. I was shyer about touching the face. I was shy about looking at its eye.
The eye was wide open, dark, a smooth sightless bulge, with a sheen like silk and a reddish gleam in it, a reflection of light. An orange stuffed in a black silk stocking. Flies nestled in one corner, bunched together beautifully in an iridescent brooch. I had a great desire to poke the eye with my stick, to see if it would collapse, if it would quiver and break like a jelly, showing itself to be the same composition all the way through, or if the skin over the surface would break and let loose all sorts of putrid mess, to flow down the face. I traced the stick all the way round the eye, I drew it back—but I was not able, I could not poke it in.
Mary Agnes did not come close. “Leave it alone,” she warned. “That old dead cow. It’s dirty. You get yourself dirty.”
“Day-ud cow,” I said, expanding the word lusciously. “Day-ud cow, day-ud cow.”
“You come on,” Mary Agnes bossed me, but was afraid, I thought, to come nearer.
Being dead, it invited desecration. I wanted to poke it, trample it, pee on it, anything to punish it, to show what contempt I had for its being dead. Beat it up, break it up, spit on it, tear it, throw it away! But still it had power, lying with a gleaming strange map on its back, its straining neck, the smooth eye. I had never once looked at a cow alive and thought what I thought now: why should there be a cow? Why should the white spots be shaped just the way they were, and never again, not on any cow or creature, shaped in exactly the same way? Tracing the outline of a continent again, digging the stick in, trying to make a definite line, I paid attention to its shape as I would sometimes pay attention to the shape of real continents or islands on real maps, as if the shape itself were a revelation beyond words, and I would be able to make sense of it, If I tried hard enough, and had time.