Open Secrets

by Alice Munro

  Of course none of them went as far as the toilet, late at night. Eunie and the old woman squatted on the grass. The old man watered the spirea at the far end of the porch.

  Then I must have gone to sleep, Eunie’s mother said, but I woke up later on and I thought that I never heard her come in.

  She went downstairs and walked around in the house. Eunie’s room was behind the kitchen, but she might be sleeping anywhere on a hot night. She might be on the couch in the front room or stretched out on the hall floor to get the breeze between the doors. She might have gone out on the porch where there was a decent car seat that her father, years ago, had found discarded farther down the road. Her mother could not find her anywhere. The kitchen clock said twenty past two.

  Eunie’s mother went back upstairs and shook Eunie’s father till he woke up.

  “Eunie’s not down there,” she said.

  “Where is she, then?” said her husband, as if it was up to her to know. She had to shake him and shake him, to keep him from going back to sleep. He had a great indifference to news, a reluctance to listen to what anybody said, even when he was awake.

  “Get up, get up,” she said. “We got to find her.” Finally he obeyed her, sat up, pulled on his trousers and his boots. “Get your flashlight,” she told him, and with him behind her she went down the stairs again, out onto the porch, down into the yard. It was his job to shine the flashlight—she told him where. She directed him along the path to the toilet, which stood in a clump of lilacs and currant bushes at the back of the property. They poked the light inside the building and found nothing. Then they peered in among the sturdy lilac trunks—these were practically trees—and along the path, almost lost now, that led through a sagging section of the wire fence to the wild growth along the riverbank. Nothing there. Nobody.

  Back through the vegetable garden they went, lighting up the dusted potato plants and the rhubarb that was now grandly gone to seed. The old man lifted a great rhubarb leaf with his boot, shone the light under that. His wife asked whether he had gone crazy.

  She recalled that Eunie used to walk in her sleep. But that was years ago.

  She spotted something glinting at the corner of the house, like knives or a man in armor. “There. There,” she said. “Shine it there. What’s that?” It was only Eunie’s bicycle, which she rode to work every day.

  Then the mother called Eunie’s name. She called it at the back and at the front of the house—plum trees grew as high as the house in front and there was no sidewalk, just a dirt path between them. Their trunks crowded in like watchers, crooked black animals. When she waited for an answer, she heard the gulp of a frog, as close as if it sat in those branches. Half a mile farther on, this road ended up in a field too marshy for any use, with weedy poplars growing up through the willow bushes and elderberries. In the other direction, it met the road from town, then crossed the river and climbed the hill to the chicken farm. On the river flats lay the old fairgrounds, some grandstands abandoned since before the war, when the fair here was taken over by the big fair at Walley. The racetrack oval was still marked out in the grass.

  This was where the town set out to be, over a hundred years ago. Mills and hostelries were here. But the river floods persuaded people to move to higher ground. House-plots remained on the map, and roads laid out, but only the one row of houses where people lived was still there, people who were too poor or in some way too stubborn to change—or, at the other extreme, too temporary in their living arrangements to object to the invasion of the water.

  They gave up—Eunie’s parents did. They sat down in the kitchen without any light on. It was between three and four o’clock. It must have seemed as if they were waiting for Eunie to come and tell them what to do. It was Eunie who was in charge in that house, and they probably could hardly imagine a time when it had been otherwise. Nineteen years ago she had literally burst into their lives. Mrs. Morgan had thought she was having the change and getting stout—she was stout enough already that it did not make much difference. She thought the commotion in her stomach was what people called indigestion. She knew how people got children, she was not a dunce—it was just that she had gone on so long without any such thing happening. One day in the post office she had to ask for a chair, she was weak and overcome by cramps. Then her water broke, she was hustled over to the hospital, and Eunie popped out with a full head of white hair. She was claiming attention from the moment of her birth.

  One whole summer, Eunie and Rhea played together, but they never had thought of their activity as play. Playing was what they called it to satisfy other people. It was the most serious part of their lives. What they did the rest of the time seemed frivolous, forgettable. When they cut from Eunie’s yard down to the riverbank, they became different people. Each of them was called Tom. The Two Toms. A Tom was a noun to them, not just a name. It was not male or female. It meant somebody exceptionally brave and clever but not always lucky, and—just barely—indestructible. The Toms had a battle which could never end and this was with the Bannershees. (Perhaps Rhea and Eunie had heard of banshees.) The Bannershees lurked along the river and could take the form of robbers or Germans or skeletons. Their tricks and propensities were endless. They laid traps and lay in ambush and tortured the children they had stolen. Sometimes Eunie and Rhea got some real children—the McKays, who lived briefly in one of the river houses—and persuaded them to let themselves be tied up and thrashed with cattails. But the McKays could not or would not submit themselves to the plot, and they soon cried or escaped and went home, so that it was just the Toms again.

  The Toms built a city of mud by the riverbank. It was walled with stones against the Bannershees’ attack, and contained a royal palace, a swimming pool, a flag. But then the Toms took a journey and the Bannershees levelled it all. (Of course Eunie and Rhea had to change themselves, often, into Bannershees.) A new leader appeared, a Bannershee Queen, her name was Joylinda, and her schemes were diabolical. She had poisoned the blackberries growing on the bank, and the Toms had eaten some, being careless and hungry after their journey. They lay writhing and sweating down among the juicy weeds when the poison struck. They pressed their bellies into mud that was slightly soft and warm like just-made fudge. They felt their innards shrivel and they were shaking in every limb, but they had to get up and stagger about, looking for an antidote. They tried chewing sword grass—which, true to its name, could slice your skin—they smeared their mouths with mud, and considered biting into a live frog if they could catch one, but decided at last it was chokecherries that would save them from death. They ate a cluster of the tiny chokecherries and the skin inside their mouths puckered desperately, so that they had to run to the river to drink the water. They threw themselves down on it, where it was all silty among the waterlilies and you couldn’t see the bottom. They drank and drank it, while the bluebottles flew straight as arrows over their heads. They were saved.

  Emerging from this world in the late afternoon, they found themselves in Eunie’s yard where her parents would be working still, or again, hoeing or hilling or weeding their vegetables. They would lie down in the shade of the house, exhausted as if they had swum lakes or climbed mountains. They smelled of the river, of the wild garlic and mint they had squashed underfoot, of the hot rank grass and the foul mud where the drain emptied. Sometimes Eunie would go into the house and get them something to eat—slices of bread with corn syrup or molasses. She never had to ask if she could do this. She always kept the bigger piece for herself.

  They were not friends, in the way that Rhea would understand being friends, later on. They never tried to please or comfort each other. They did not share secrets, except for the game, and even that was not a secret because they let others come and go in it. But they never let the others be Toms. So maybe that was what they shared, in their intense and daily collaboration. The nature, the danger, of being Toms.

  Eunie never seemed subject to her parents, or even connected to them, in the way of other ch
ildren. Rhea was struck by the way she ruled her own life, the careless power she had in the house. When Rhea said that she had to be home at a certain time, or that she had to do chores, or change her clothes, Eunie was affronted, disbelieving. Every decision Eunie took must have been on her own. When she was fifteen, she stopped going to school and got a job in the glove factory, and Rhea could imagine her just coming home and announcing to her parents that was what she had done. No, not even announcing it—it would come out in an offhand way, maybe when she started getting home later in the afternoon. Now that she was earning money, she bought a bicycle. She bought a radio, and listened to it in her room late at night. Perhaps her parents would hear shots ring out then, vehicles roaring through the streets. She might tell them things she had heard—the news of crimes and accidents, hurricanes, avalanches. Rhea didn’t think they would pay much attention. They were busy and their life was eventful, though the events in it were seasonal and had to do with the vegetables they sold in town to earn their living. The vegetables, the raspberries, the rhubarb. They hadn’t time for much else.

  While Eunie was still in school Rhea was riding her bicycle, so they never walked together although they took the same route. When Rhea rode past Eunie, Eunie was in the habit of shouting out something challenging, disparaging. “Hi-oh, Silver!” And now, when Eunie had a bicycle, Rhea had started walking—there was a notion at the high school that any girl who rode a bicycle after Grade 9 looked gawky and ridiculous. But Eunie would dismount, and walk along beside Rhea, as if she was doing her a favor.

  It was not a favor at all—Rhea did not want her. Eunie had always been a peculiar sight, tall for her age, with sharp, narrow shoulders, a whitish-blond crest of fuzzy hair sticking up at the crown of her head, a cocksure expression, and a long, heavy jaw. That jaw gave a thickness to the lower part of her face that seemed reflected in the thickness, the phlegmy growl, of her voice. When she was younger, none of that had mattered—her own conviction, that everything about her was the proper thing, had daunted many. But now she was five feet nine or ten, drab and mannish in her slacks and bandannas, with big feet in what looked like men’s shoes, a hectoring voice, and an ungainly walk—she had gone right from being a child to being a character. And she spoke to Rhea with a proprietary air that grated, asking her if she wasn’t tired of going to school, or if her bike was broken and her father couldn’t afford to get it fixed. When Rhea got a permanent, Eunie wanted to know what had happened to her hair. All this she thought she could do because she and Rhea lived on the same side of town and had played together, in an era that seemed to Rhea so distant and discardable. And the worst thing was when Eunie launched into accounts that Rhea found both boring and infuriating, of murders and disasters and freakish events that she had heard about on the radio. Rhea was infuriated because she could not get Eunie to tell her whether these things had really happened, or even to make that distinction—as far as Rhea could tell—to herself.

  Was that on the news, Eunie? Was it a story? Were there people acting it in front of a microphone or was it reporting? Eunie! Was it real or was it a play?

  It was Rhea, never Eunie, who would get frazzled by these questions. Eunie would just get on her bicycle and ride away. “Toodeley oodeley oo! See you in the zoo!”

  Eunie’s job suited her, surely. The glove factory occupied the second and third floor of a building on the main street, and in the warm weather, when the windows were open, you could hear not only the sewing machines but the loud jokes, the quarrels and insults, the famous rough language of the women who worked there. They were supposed to be of a lower class than waitresses, much lower than store clerks. They worked longer hours and made less money, but that didn’t make them humble. Far from it. They came jostling and joking down the stairs and burst out onto the street. They yelled at cars in which there were people they knew, and people they didn’t know. They spread disorder as if they had every right.

  People close to the bottom, like Eunie Morgan, or right at the top, like Billy Doud, showed a similar carelessness, a blunted understanding.

  During her last year at high school, Rhea got a job, too. She worked in the shoe store on Saturday afternoons. Billy Doud came into the store, in early spring, and said he wanted to buy a pair of rubber boots like the ones hanging up outside.

  He was through college at last, home learning how to run Douds piano factory.

  Billy took off his shoes and displayed his feet in fine black socks. Rhea told him that it would be better to wear woollen socks, work socks, inside rubber boots, so that his feet wouldn’t slide around. He asked if they sold such socks and said he would buy a pair of those, too, if Rhea would bring them. Then he asked her if she would put the wool socks on his feet.

  This was all a ploy, he told her later. He didn’t need either one, boots or socks.

  His feet were long and white and perfectly sweet-smelling. A scent of lovely soap arose, a whiff of talcum. He leaned back in the chair, tall and pale, cool and clean—he himself might have been carved from soap. A high curved forehead, temples already bare, hair with a glint of tinsel, sleepy ivory eyelids.

  “That’s sweet of you,” he said, and asked her to go to a dance that night, the opening dance of the season in the Walley Pavilion.

  After that, they went to the dance in Walley every Saturday night. They didn’t go out together during the week, because Billy had to get up early and go to the factory and learn the business—from his mother, known as the Tatar—and Rhea had to do some housekeeping for her father and brothers. Her mother was in the hospital, in Hamilton.

  “There goes your heartthrob,” girls would say if Billy drove by the school when they were out playing volleyball, or if he passed on the street, and in truth Rhea’s heart did throb—at the sight of him, his bright hatless hair, his negligent but surely powerful hands on the wheel. But also at the thought of herself suddenly singled out, so unexpectedly chosen, with the glow of a prizewinner—or a prize—about her now, a grace formerly hidden. Older women she didn’t even know would smile at her on the street, girls wearing engagement rings spoke to her by name, and in the mornings she would wake up with the sense that she had been given a great present, but that her mind had boxed it away overnight, and she could not for a moment remember what it was.

  Billy brought her honor everywhere but at home. That was not unexpected—home, as Rhea knew it, was where they cut you down to size. Her younger brothers would imitate Billy offering their father a cigarette. “Have a Pall Mall, Mr. Sellers.” They would flourish in front of him an imaginary package of ready-mades. The unctuous voice, the complacent gesture made Billy Doud seem asinine. “Putty” was what they called him. First “Silly Billy,” then “Silly Putty,” then “Putty” by itself.

  “You quit tormenting your sister,” Rhea’s father said. Then he took it up himself, with a businesslike question. “You aim to keep on at the shoe store?”

  Rhea said, “Why?”

  “Oh. I was just thinking. You might need it.”

  “What for?”

  “To support that fellow. Once his old lady’s dead and he runs the business into the ground.”

  And all the time Billy Doud said how much he admired Rhea’s father. Men like your father, he said. Who work so hard. Just to get along. And never expect any different. And are so decent, and even-tempered, and kindhearted. The world owes a lot to men like that.

  Billy Doud and Rhea and Wayne and Lucille would leave the dance around midnight and drive in the two cars to the parking spot, at the end of a dirt road on the bluffs above Lake Huron. Billy kept the radio on, low. He always had the radio on, even though he might be telling Rhea some complicated story. His stories had to do with his life at college, with parties and practical jokes and dire escapades sometimes involving the police. They always had to do with drinking. Once, somebody who was drunk vomited out a car window, and so noxious was the drink he had taken that the paint was destroyed all down the side of the car. The characters in t
hese stories were not known to Rhea, except for Wayne. Girls’ names cropped up occasionally, and then she might have to interrupt. She had seen Billy Doud home from college, over the years, with girls whose looks, or clothes, whose jaunty or fragile airs, she had been greatly taken with, and now she had to ask him, Was Claire the one with the little hat that had a veil, and the purple gloves? In church? Which one had the long red hair and the camel’s-hair coat? Who wore velvet boots with mouton tops?

  Usually, Billy was not able to remember, and if he did go on to tell her more about these girls, what he had to say might not be complimentary.

  When they parked, and sometimes even while they drove, Billy put an arm around Rhea’s shoulders, he squeezed her. A promise. There were promises also during their dances. He was not too proud to nuzzle her cheek then, or drop a row of kisses on her hair. The kisses he gave her in the car were quicker, and the speed, the rhythm of them, the little smacks they might be served up with informed her that they were jokes, or partly jokes. He tapped his fingers on her, on her knees, and just at the top of her breasts, murmuring appreciatively and then scolding himself, or scolding Rhea, saying that he had to keep the lid on her.

  “You’re quite the baddy,” he said. He pressed his lips tightly against hers as if it was his job to keep both their mouths shut.

  “How you entice me,” he said, in a voice not his own, the voice of some sleek and languishing movie actor, and slipped his hand between her legs, touched the skin above her stocking—then jumped, laughed, as if she was too hot there, or too cold.

  “Wonder how old Wayne is getting on?” he said.

  The rule was that after a time either he or Wayne would sound a blast on the car horn, and then the other one had to answer. This game—Rhea did not understand that it was a contest, or at any rate what kind of a contest it was—came eventually to take up more and more of his attention. “What do you think?” he would say, peering into the night at the dark shape of Wayne’s car. “What do you think—should I give the boy the horn?”