by Alice Munro
I drank it off as quickly as possible. I set the glass down and stood looking at my face in the window, half expecting to see it altered. My throat was burning, but I felt nothing else. It was very disappointing, when I had worked myself up to it. But I was not going to let it go at that. I poured another full glass, then filled each of the bottles with water to approximately the level I had seen when I came in. I drank the second glass only a little more slowly than the first. I put the empty glass down on the counter with care, perhaps feeling in my head a rustle of things to come, and went and sat down on a chair in the living room. I reached up and turned on a floor lamp beside the chair, and the room jumped on me.
When I say that I was expecting extravagant results I do not mean that I was expecting this. I had thought of some sweeping emotional change, an upsurge of gaiety and irresponsibility, a feeling of lawlessness and escape, accompanied by a little dizziness and perhaps a tendency to giggle out loud. I did not have in mind the ceiling spinning like a great plate somebody had thrown at me, nor the pale green blobs of the chairs swelling, converging, disintegrating, playing with me a game full of enormous senseless inanimate malice. My head sank back; I closed my eyes. And at once opened them, opened them wide, threw myself out of the chair and down the hall and reached—thank God, thank God!—the Berrymans’ bathroom, where I was sick everywhere, everywhere, and dropped like a stone.
From this point on I have no continuous picture of what happened; my memories of the next hour or two are split into vivid and improbable segments, with nothing but murk and uncertainty between. I do remember lying on the bathroom floor looking sideways at the little six-sided white tiles, which lay together in such an admirable and logical pattern, seeing them with the brief broken gratitude and sanity of one who has just been torn to pieces with vomiting. Then I remember sitting on the stool in front of the hall phone, asking weakly for Joyce’s number. Joyce was not home. I was told by her mother (a rather rattlebrained woman, who didn’t seem to notice a thing the matter—for which I felt weakly, mechanically grateful) that she was at Kay Stringer’s house. I didn’t know Kay’s number so I just asked the operator; I felt I couldn’t risk looking down at the telephone book.
Kay Stringer was not a friend of mine but a new friend of Joyce’s. She had a vague reputation for wildness and a long switch of hair, very oddly, though naturally, coloured—from soap-yellow to caramel-brown. She knew a lot of boys more exciting than Martin Collingwood, boys who had quit school or been imported into town to play on the hockey team. She and Joyce rode around in these boys’ cars, and sometimes went with them—having lied of course to their mothers—to the Gay-la dance hall on the highway north of town.
I got Joyce on the phone. She was very keyed-up, as she always was with boys around, and she hardly seemed to hear what I was saying.
“Oh, I can’t tonight,” she said. “Some kids are here. We’re going to play cards. You know Bill Kline? He’s here. Ross Armour—”
“I’m sick,” I said trying to speak distinctly; it came out an inhuman croak. “I’m drunk. Joyce!” Then I fell off the stool and the receiver dropped out of my hand and banged for a while dismally against the wall.
I had not told Joyce where I was, so after thinking about it for a moment she phoned my mother, and using the elaborate and unnecessary subterfuge that young girls delight in, she found out. She and Kay and the boys—there were three of them—told some story about where they were going to Kay’s mother, and got into the car and drove out. They found me still lying on the broadloom carpet in the hall; I had been sick again, and this time I had not made it to the bathroom.
It turned out that Kay Stringer, who arrived on this scene only by accident, was exactly the person I needed. She loved a crisis, particularly one like this, which had a shady and scandalous aspect and which must be kept secret from the adult world. She became excited, aggressive, efficient; that energy which was termed wildness was simply the overflow of a great female instinct to manage, comfort and control. I could hear her voice coming at me from all directions, telling me not to worry, telling Joyce to find the biggest coffeepot they had and make it full of coffee (strong coffee, she said), telling the boys to pick me up and carry me to the sofa. Later, in the fog beyond my reach, she was calling for a scrub-brash.
Then I was lying on the sofa, covered with some kind of crocheted throw they had found in the bedroom. I didn’t want to lift my head. The house was full of the smell of coffee. Joyce came in, looking very pale; she said that the Berryman kids had wakened up but she had given them a cookie and told them to go back to bed, it was all right; she hadn’t let them out of their room and she didn’t believe they’d remember. She said that she and Kay had cleaned up the bathroom and the hall though she was afraid there was still a spot on the rug. The coffee was ready. I didn’t understand anything very well. The boys had turned on the radio and were going through the Berrymans’ record collection; they had it out on the floor. I felt there was something odd about this but I could not think what it was.
Kay brought me a huge breakfast mug full of coffee.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Sit up,” she said briskly, as if dealing with drunks was an everyday business for her, I had no need to feel myself important. (I met, and recognized, that tone of voice years later, in the maternity ward.) “Now drink,” she said. I drank, and at the same time realized that I was wearing only my slip. Joyce and Kay had taken off my blouse and skirt. They had brushed off the skirt and washed out the blouse, since it was nylon; it was hanging in the bathroom. I pulled the throw up under my arms and Kay laughed. She got everybody coffee. Joyce brought in the coffeepot and on Kay’s instructions she kept filling my cup whenever I drank from it. Somebody said to me with interest. “You must have really wanted to tie one on.”
“No,” I said rather sulkily, obediently drinking my coffee. “I only had two drinks.”
Kay laughed, “Well it certainly gets to you, I’ll say that. What time do you expect they’ll be back?” she said.
“Late, After one I think.”
“You should be all right by that time. Have some more coffee.”
Kay and one of the boys began dancing to the radio. Kay danced very sexily, but her face had the gently superior and indulgent, rather cold look it had when she was lifting me up to drink the coffee. The boy was whispering to her and she was smiling, shaking her head. Joyce said she was hungry, and she went out to the kitchen to see what there was—potato chips or crackers, or something like that, that you could eat without making too noticeable a dint. Bill Kline came over and sat on the sofa beside me and patted my legs through the crocheted throw. He didn’t say anything to me, just patted my legs and looked at me with what seemed to me a very stupid, half-sick, absurd and alarming expression. I felt very uncomfortable; I wondered how it had ever got around that Bill Kline was so good looking, with an expression like that. I moved my legs nervously and he gave me a look of contempt, not ceasing to pat me. Then I scrambled off the sofa, pulling the throw around me, with the idea of going to the bathroom to see if my blouse was dry. I lurched a little when I started to walk, and for some reason—probably to show Bill Kline that he had not panicked me—I immediately exaggerated this, and calling out, “Watch me walk a straight line!” I lurched and stumbled, to the accompaniment of everyone’s laughter, towards the hall. I was standing in the archway between the hall and the living room when the knob of the front door turned with a small matter-of-fact click and everything became silent behind me except the radio of course and the crocheted throw inspired by some delicate malice of its own slithered down around my feet and there—oh, delicious moment in a well-organized farce!—there stood the Berrymans, Mr. and Mrs., with expressions on their faces as appropriate to the occasion as any old-fashioned director of farces could wish. They must have been preparing those expressions, of course; they could not have produced them in the first moment of shock; with the noise we were making, they had no doub
t heard us as soon as they got out of the car; for the same reason, we had not heard them. I don’t think I ever knew what brought them home so early—a headache, an argument—and I was not really in a position to ask.
Mr. Berryman drove me home. I don’t remember how I got into that car, or how I found my clothes and put them on, or what kind of a good-night, if any, I said to Mrs. Berryman. I don’t remember what happened to my friends, though I imagine they gathered up their coats and fled, covering up the ignominy of their departure with a mechanical roar of defiance. I remember Joyce with a box of crackers in her hand, saying that I had become terribly sick from eating—I think she said sauerkraut—for supper, and that I had called them for help. (When I asked her later what they made of this she said, “It wasn’t any use. You reeked.”) I remember also her saying, “Oh, no, Mr. Berryman I beg of you, my mother is a terribly nervous person I don’t know what the shock might do to her. I will go down on my knees to you if you like but you must not phone my mother.” I have no picture of her down on her knees—and she would have done it in a minute—so it seems this threat was not carried out.
Mr. Berryman said to me, “Well I guess you know your behaviour tonight is a pretty serious thing.” He made it sound as if I might be charged with criminal negligence or something worse. “It would be very wrong of me to overlook it,” he said. I suppose that besides being angry and disgusted with me, he was worried about taking me home in this condition to my strait-laced parents, who could always say I got the liquor in his house. Plenty of Temperance people would think that enough to hold him responsible, and the town was full of Temperance people. Good relations with the town were very important to him from a business point of view.
“I have an idea it wasn’t the first time,” he said. “If it was the first time, would a girl be smart enough to fill three bottles up with water? No. Well in this case, she was smart enough, but not smart enough to know I could spot it. What do you say to that?” I opened my mouth to answer and although I was feeling quite sober the only sound that came out was a loud, desolate-sounding giggle. He stopped in front of our house. “Light’s on,” he said. “Now go in and tell your parents the straight truth. And if you don’t, remember I will.” He did not mention paying me for my baby-sitting services of the evening and the subject did not occur to me either.
I went into the house and tried to go straight upstairs but my mother called to me. She came into the front hall, where I had not turned on the light, and she must have smelled me at once for she ran forward with a cry of pure amazement, as if she had seen somebody falling, and caught me by the shoulders as I did indeed fall down against the bannister, overwhelmed by my fantastic lucklessness, and I told her everything from the start, not omitting even the name of Martin Collingwood and my flirtation with the aspirin bottle, which was a mistake.
On Monday morning my mother took the bus over to Baileyville and found the liquor store and bought a bottle of Scotch whisky. Then she had to wait for a bus back, and she met some people she knew and she was not quite able to hide the bottle in her bag; she was furious with herself for not bringing a proper shopping-bag. As soon as she got back she walked out to the Berrymans’; she had not even had lunch. Mr. Berryman had not gone back to the factory. My mother went in and had a talk with both of them and made an excellent impression and then Mr. Berryman drove her home. She talked to them in the forthright and unemotional way she had, which was always agreeably surprising to people prepared to deal with a mother, and she told them that although I seemed to do well enough at school I was extremely backward—or perhaps eccentric—in my emotional development. I imagine that this analysis of my behaviour was especially effective with Mrs. Berryman, a great reader of Child Guidance books. Relations between them warmed to the point where my mother brought up a specific instance of my difficulties, and disarmingly related the whole story of Martin Collingwood.
Within a few days it was all over town and the school that I had tried to commit suicide over Martin Collingwood. But it was already all over school and the town that the Berrymans had come home on Saturday night to find me drunk, staggering, wearing nothing but my slip, in a room with three boys, one of whom was Bill Kline. My mother had said that I was to pay for the bottle she had taken the Berrymans out of my baby-sitting earnings, but my clients melted away like the last April snow, and it would not be paid for yet if newcomers to town had not moved in across the street in July, and needed a baby sitter before they talked to any of their neighbours.
My mother also said that it had been a great mistake to let me go out with boys and that I would not be going out again until well after my sixteenth birthday, if then. This did not prove to be a concrete hardship at all, because it was at least that long before anybody asked me. If you think that news of the Berrymans adventure would put me in demand for whatever gambols and orgies were going on in and around that town, you could not be more mistaken. The extraordinary publicity which attended my first debauch may have made me seemed marked for a special kind of ill luck, like the girl whose illegitimate baby turns out to be triplets: nobody wants to have anything to do with her. At any rate I had at the same time one of the most silent telephones and positively the most sinful reputation in the whole High School. I had to put up with this until the next fall, when a fat blonde girl in Grade Ten ran away with a married man and was picked up two months later, living in sin—though not with the same man—in the city of Sault Ste. Marie. Then everybody forgot about me.
But there was a positive, a splendidly unexpected, result of this affair: I got completely over Martin Collingwood. It was not only that he at once said, publicly, that he had always thought I was a nut; where he was concerned I had no pride, and my tender fancy could have found a way around that, a month, a week, before. What was it that brought me back into the world again? It was the terrible and fascinating reality of my disaster; it was the way things happened. Not that I enjoyed it; I was a self-conscious girl and I suffered a good deal from all this exposure. But the development of events on that Saturday night—that fascinated me; I felt that I had had a glimpse of the shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised. I could not take my eyes off it.
And of course Martin Collingwood wrote his Senior Matric that June, and went away to the city to take a course at a school for Morticians, as I think it is called, and when he came back he went into his uncle’s undertaking business. We lived in the same town and we would hear most things that happened to each other but I do not think we met face to face or saw one another, except at a distance, for years. I went to a shower for the girl he married, but then everybody went to everybody else’s showers. No, I do not think I really saw him again until I came home after I had been married several years, to attend a relative’s funeral. Then I saw him; not quite Mr. Darcy but still very nice-looking in those black clothes. And I saw him looking over at me with an expression as close to a reminiscent smile as the occasion would permit, and I knew that he had been surprised by a memory either of my devotion or my little buried catastrophe. I gave him a gentle uncomprehending look in return. I am a grown-up woman now; let him unbury his own catastrophes.
THE TIME OF DEATH
Afterwards the mother, Leona Parry, lay on the couch, with a quilt around her, and the women kept putting more wood on the fire although the kitchen was very hot, and no one turned the light on. Leona drank some tea and refused to eat, and talked, beginning like this, in a voice that was ragged and insistent but not yet hysterical: I wasn’t hardly out of the house, I wasn’t out of the house twenty minutes—
(Three-quarters of an hour at the least, Allie McGee thought, but she did not say so, not at the time. But she remembered, because there were three serials on the radio she was trying to listen to, she listened to every day, and she couldn’t get half of them; Leona was there in her kitchen going on about Patricia. Leona was sewing this cowgirl outfit for Patricia on Allie’s machine; she rac
ed the machine and she pulled the thread straight out to break it instead of pulling it back though Allie had told her don’t do that please it’s liable to break the needle. Patricia was supposed to have the outfit for that night when she sang at a concert up the valley; she was singing Western pieces. Patricia sang with the Maitland Valley Entertainers, who went all over the country playing at concerts and dances. Patricia was introduced as the Little Sweetheart of Maitland Valley, the Baby Blonde, the Pint-Size Kiddie with the Great Big Voice. She did have a big voice, almost alarming in so frail a child. Leona had started her singing in public when she was three years old.
Never was ascared once, Leona said, leaning forward with a jerky pressure on the pedal, it just comes natural to her to perform. Her kimona fallen open revealed her lean chest, her wilted breasts with their large blue veins sloping into the grey-pink nightgown. She don’t care, it could be the King of England watching her, she’d get up and sing, and when she was through singing she’d sit down, that’s just the way she is. She’s even got a good name for a singer, Patricia Parry, doesn’t that sound like you just heard it announced over the air? Another thing is natural blonde hair. I have to do it up in rags every night of her life, but that real natural blonde is a lot scarcer than natural curly. It don’t get dark, either, there’s that strain of natural blondes in my family that don’t get dark. My cousin I told you about, that won the Miss St. Catharines of 1936, she was one, and my aunt that died—)
Allie McGee did not say, and Leona caught her breath and plunged on: Twenty minutes. And that last thing I said to her as I went out the door was, you keep an eye on the kids! She’s nine years old, isn’t she? I’m just going to run acrost the road to sew up this outfit, you keep an eye on the kids. And I went out the door and down the steps and down to the end of the garden and just as I took the hook off the gate something stopped me, I thought, something’s wrong! What’s wrong, I said to myself. I stood there and I looked back at the garden and all I could see was the cornstalks standing and the cabbages there frozen, we never got them in this year, and I looked up and down the road and all I could see was Mundy’s old hound laying out in front of their place, no cars comin’ one way or the other and the yards all empty, it was cold I guess and no kids playin’ out—And I thought, My Lord, maybe I got my days mixed up and this isn’t Saturday morning, it’s some special day I forgot about—Then I thought all it was was the snow coming I could feel in the air, and you know how cold it was, the puddles in the road was all turned to ice and splintered up—but it didn’t snow, did it, it hasn’t snowed yet—And I run acrost the road then over to McGee’s and up the front steps and Allie says, Leona, what’s the matter with you, you look so white, she says—