by Alice Munro
Eric made his living prawn fishing, and had done so for a long time. Once he had been a medical student. That had come to an end because he had performed an abortion, on a friend (not a girlfriend). All had gone well, but somehow the story got out. This was something Juliet had thought of revealing to her broad-minded parents. She had wanted, perhaps, to establish him as an educated man, not just a fisherman. But why should that matter, especially now that Sam was a vegetable man? Also, their broad-mindedness was possibly not so reliable as she had thought.
—
There was more to be sold than fresh vegetables and berries. Jam, bottled juice, relish, were turned out in the kitchen. The first morning of Juliet’s visit, raspberry-jam making was in progress. Irene was in charge, her blouse wet with steam or sweat, sticking to her skin between the shoulder blades. Every so often she flashed a look at the television set, which had been wheeled down the back hall to the kitchen doorway, so that you had to squeeze around it to get into the room. On the screen was a children’s morning program, showing a Bullwinkle cartoon. Now and then Irene gave a loud laugh at the cartoon antics, and Juliet laughed a little, to be comradely. Of this Irene took no notice.
Counter space had to be cleared so that Juliet could boil and mash an egg for Penelope’s breakfast, and make some coffee and toast for herself. “Is that enough room?” Irene asked her, in a voice that was dubious, as if Juliet was an intruder whose demands could not be foreseen.
Close-up, you could see how many fine black hairs grew on Irene’s forearms. Some grew on her cheeks, too, just in front of her ears.
In her sidelong way she watched everything Juliet did, watched her fiddle with the knobs on the stove (not remembering at first which burners they controlled), watched her lifting the egg out of the saucepan and peeling off the shell (which stuck, this time, and came away in little bits rather than in large easy pieces), then watched her choosing the saucer to mash it in.
“You don’t want her to drop that on the floor.” This was a reference to the china saucer. “Don’t you got a plastic dish for her?”
“I’ll watch it,” Juliet said.
It turned out that Irene was a mother, too. She had a boy three years old and a daughter just under two. Their names were Trevor and Tracy. Their father had been killed last summer in an accident at the chicken barn where he worked. She herself was three years younger than Juliet—twenty-two. The information about the children and the husband came out in answer to Juliet’s questions, and the age could be figured from what she said next.
When Juliet said, “Oh, I’m sorry”—speaking about the accident and feeling that she had been rude to pry, and that it was now hypocritical of her to commiserate—Irene said, “Yeah. Right in time for my twenty-first birthday,” as if misfortunes were something to accumulate, like charms on a bracelet.
After Penelope had eaten all of the egg that she would accept, Juliet hoisted her onto one hip and carried her upstairs.
Halfway up she realized that she had not washed the saucer.
There was nowhere to leave the baby, who was not yet walking but could crawl very quickly. Certainly she could not be left for even five minutes in the kitchen, with the boiling water in the sterilizer and the hot jam and the chopping knives—it was too much to ask Irene to watch her. And first thing this morning she had again refused to make friends with Sara. So Juliet carried her up the enclosed stairs to the attic—having shut the door behind—and set her there on the steps to play, while she herself looked for the old playpen. Fortunately Penelope was an expert on steps.
The house was a full two stories tall, its rooms high-ceilinged but boxlike—or so they seemed to Juliet now. The roof was steeply pitched, so that you could walk around in the middle of the attic. Juliet used to do that, when she was a child. She walked around telling herself some story she had read, with certain additions or alterations. Dancing—that too—in front of an imaginary audience. The real audience consisted of broken or simply banished furniture, old trunks, an immensely heavy buffalo coat, the purple martin house (a present from long-ago students of Sam’s, which had failed to attract any purple martins), the German helmet supposed to have been brought home by Sam’s father from the First World War, and an unintentionally comic amateur painting of the Empress of Ireland sinking in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with matchstick figures flying off in all directions.
And there, leaning against the wall, was I and the Village. Face out—no attempt had been made to hide it. And no dust on it to speak of, so it had not been there long.
She found the playpen, after a few moments of searching. It was a handsome heavy piece of furniture, with a wooden floor and spindle sides. And the baby carriage. Her parents had kept everything, had hoped for another child. There had been one miscarriage at least. Laughter in their bed, on Sunday mornings, had made Juliet feel as if the house had been invaded by a stealthy, even shameful, disturbance, not favorable to herself.
The baby carriage was of the kind that folded down to become a stroller. This was something Juliet had forgotten about, or hadn’t known. Sweating by now, and covered with dust, she got to work to effect this transformation. This sort of job was never easy for her, she never grasped right away the manner in which things were put together, and she might have dragged the whole thing downstairs and gone out to the garden to get Sam to help her, but for the thought of Irene. Irene’s flickering pale eyes, indirect but measuring looks, competent hands. Her vigilance, in which there was something that couldn’t quite be called contempt. Juliet didn’t know what it could be called. An attitude, indifferent but uncompromising, like a cat’s.
She managed at last to get the stroller into shape. It was cumbersome, half again as big as the stroller she was used to. And filthy, of course. As she was herself by now, and Penelope, on the steps, even more so. And right beside the baby’s hand was something Juliet hadn’t even noticed. A nail. The sort of thing you paid no attention to, till you had a baby at the hand-to-mouth stage, and that you had then to be on the lookout for all the time.
And she hadn’t been. Everything here distracted her. The heat, Irene, the things that were familiar and the things that were unfamiliar.
I and the Village.
—
“Oh,” said Sara. “I hoped you wouldn’t notice. Don’t take it to heart.”
The sunroom was now Sara’s bedroom. Bamboo shades had been hung on all the windows, filling the small room—once part of the verandah—with a brownish-yellow light and a uniform heat. Sara, however, was wearing woolly pink pajamas. Yesterday, at the station, with her pencilled eyebrows and raspberry lipstick, her turban and suit, she had looked to Juliet like an elderly Frenchwoman (not that Juliet had seen many elderly Frenchwomen), but now, with her white hair flying out in wisps, her bright eyes anxious under nearly nonexistent brows, she looked more like an oddly aged child. She was sitting up against the pillows with the quilts pulled up to her waist. When Juliet had walked her to the bathroom, earlier, it had been revealed that in spite of the heat she was wearing both socks and slippers in bed.
A straight-backed chair had been placed by her bed, its seat being easier for her to reach than a table. On it were pills and medicines, talcum powder, moisturizing lotion, a half-drunk cup of milky tea, a glass filmed with the traces of some dark tonic, probably iron. On top of the bed were magazines—old copies of Vogue and the Ladies’ Home Journal.
“I’m not,” said Juliet.
“We did have it hanging up. It was in the back hall by the dining-room door. Then Daddy took it down.”
“Why?”
“He didn’t say anything about it to me. He didn’t say that he was going to. Then came a day when it was just gone.”
“Why would he take it down?”
“Oh. It would be some notion he had, you know.”
“What sort of a notion?”
“Oh. I think—you know, I think it probably had to do with Irene. That it would disturb Irene.”
�
��There wasn’t anybody naked in it. Not like the Botticelli.”
For indeed there was a print of The Birth of Venus hanging in Sam and Sara’s living room. It had been the subject of nervous jokes years ago on the occasion when they had the other teachers to supper.
“No. But it was modern. I think it made Daddy uncomfortable. Or maybe looking at it with Irene looking at it—that made him uncomfortable. He might be afraid it would make her feel—oh, sort of contemptuous of us. You know—that we were weird. He wouldn’t like for Irene to think we were that kind of people.”
Juliet said, “The kind of people who would hang that kind of picture? You mean he’d care so much what she thought of our pictures?”
“You know Daddy.”
“He’s not afraid to disagree with people. Wasn’t that the trouble in his job?”
“What?” said Sara. “Oh. Yes. He can disagree. But he’s careful sometimes. And Irene. Irene is—he’s careful of her. She’s very valuable to us, Irene.”
“Did he think she’d quit her job because she thought we had a weird picture?”
“I would have left it up, dear. I value anything that comes from you. But Daddy…”
Juliet said nothing. From the time when she was nine or ten until she was perhaps fourteen, she and Sara had an understanding about Sam. You know Daddy.
That was the time of their being women together. Home permanents were tried on Juliet’s stubborn fine hair, dressmaking sessions produced the outfits like nobody else ’s, suppers were peanut-butter-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches on the evenings Sam stayed late for a school meeting. Stories were told and retold about Sara’s old boyfriends and girlfriends, the jokes they played and the fun they had, in the days when Sara was a schoolteacher too, before her heart got too bad. Stories from the time before that, when she lay in bed with rheumatic fever and had the imaginary friends Rollo and Maxine who solved mysteries, even murders, like the characters in certain children’s books. Glimpses of Sam’s besotted courtship, disasters with the borrowed car, the time he showed up at Sara’s door disguised as a tramp.
Sara and Juliet, making fudge and threading ribbons through the eyelet trim on their petticoats, the two of them intertwined. And then abruptly, Juliet hadn’t wanted any more of it, she had wanted instead to talk to Sam late at night in the kitchen, to ask him about black holes, the Ice Age, God. She hated the way Sara undermined their talk with wide-eyed ingenuous questions, the way Sara always tried somehow to bring the subject back to herself. That was why the talks had to be late at night and there had to be the understanding neither she nor Sam ever spoke about. Wait till we’re rid of Sara. Just for the time being, of course.
There was a reminder going along with that. Be nice to Sara. She risked her life to have you, that’s worth remembering.
“Daddy doesn’t mind disagreeing with people that are over him,” Sara said, taking a deep breath. “But you know how he is with people that are under him. He’ll do anything to make sure they don’t feel he’s any different from them, he just has to put himself down on their level—”
Juliet did know, of course. She knew the way Sam talked to the boy at the gas pumps, the way he joked in the hardware store. But she said nothing.
“He has to suck up to them,” said Sara with a sudden change of tone, a wavering edge of viciousness, a weak chuckle.
—
Juliet cleaned up the stroller, and Penelope, and herself, and set off on a walk into town. She had the excuse that she needed a certain brand of mild disinfectant soap with which to wash the diapers—if she used ordinary soap the baby would get a rash. But she had other reasons, irresistible though embarrassing.
This was the way she had walked to school for years of her life. Even when she was going to college, and came home on a visit, she was still the same—a girl going to school. Would she never be done going to school? Somebody asked Sam that at a time when she had just won the Intercollegiate Latin Translation Prize, and he had said, “ ’Fraid not.” He told this story on himself. God forbid that he should mention prizes. Leave Sara to do that—though Sara might have forgotten just what the prize was for.
And here she was, redeemed. Like any other young woman, pushing her baby. Concerned about the diaper soap. And this wasn’t just her baby. Her love child. She sometimes spoke of Penelope that way, just to Eric. He took it as a joke, she said it as a joke, because of course they lived together and had done so for some time, and they intended to go on together. The fact that they were not married meant nothing to him, so far as she knew, and she often forgot about it, herself. But occasionally—and now, especially, here at home, it was the fact of her unmarried state that gave her some flush of accomplishment, a silly surge of bliss.
—
“So—you went upstreet today,” Sam said. (Had he always said upstreet? Sara and Juliet said uptown.) “See anybody you knew?”
“I had to go to the drugstore,” Juliet said. “So I was talking to Charlie Little.”
This conversation took place in the kitchen, after eleven o’clock at night. Juliet had decided that this was the best time to make up Penelope’s bottles for tomorrow.
“Little Charlie?” said Sam—who had always had this other habit she hadn’t remembered, the habit of continuing to call people by their school nicknames. “Did he admire the offspring?”
“Of course.”
“And well he might.”
Sam was sitting at the table, drinking rye and smoking a cigarette. His drinking whisky was new. Because Sara’s father had been a drunk—not a down-and-out drunk, he had continued to practice as a veterinarian, but enough of a terror around the house to make his daughter horrified by drinking—Sam had never used to so much as drink a beer, at least to Juliet’s knowledge, at home.
Juliet had gone into the drugstore because that was the only place to buy the diaper soap. She hadn’t expected to see Charlie, though it was his family’s store. The last she had heard of him, he was going to be an engineer. She had mentioned that to him, today, maybe tactlessly, but he had been easy and jovial when he told her that it hadn’t worked out. He had put on weight around the middle, and his hair had thinned, had lost some of its wave and glisten. He had greeted Juliet with enthusiasm, with flattery for herself as well as her baby, and this had confused her, so that she had felt her face and neck hot, slightly perspiring, all the time he talked to her. In high school he would have had no time for her—except for a decent greeting, since his manners were always affable, democratic. He took out the most desirable girls in the school, and was now, as he told her, married to one of them. Janey Peel. They had two children, one of them about Penelope’s age, one older. That was the reason, he said, with a candor that seemed to owe something to Juliet’s own situation—that was the reason he hadn’t gone on to become an engineer.
So he knew how to win a smile and a gurgle from Penelope, and he chatted with Juliet as a fellow parent, somebody now on the same level. She felt idiotically flattered and pleased. But there was more to his attention than that—the quick glance at her unadorned left hand, the joke about his own marriage. And something else. He appraised her, covertly, perhaps he saw her now as a woman displaying the fruits of a boldly sexual life. Juliet, of all people. The gawk, the scholar.
“Does she look like you?” he had asked, when he squatted down to peer at Penelope.
“More like her father,” said Juliet casually, but with a flood of pride, the sweat now pearling on her upper lip.
“Does she?” said Charlie, and straightened up, speaking confidentially. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I thought it was a shame—”
—
Juliet said to Sam, “He told me he thought it was a shame what happened with you.”
“He did, did he? What did you say to that?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he meant. But I didn’t want him to know that.”
“No.”
She sat down at the table. “I’d l
ike a drink but I don’t like whisky.”
“So you drink now, too?”
“Wine. We make our own wine. Everybody in the Bay does.”
He told her a joke then, the sort of joke that he would never have told her before. It involved a couple going to a motel, and it ended up with the line “So it’s like what I always tell the girls at Sunday school—you don’t have to drink and smoke to have a good time.”
She laughed but felt her face go hot, as with Charlie.
“Why did you quit your job?” she said. “Were you let go because of me?”
“Come on now.” Sam laughed. “Don’t think you’re so important. I wasn’t let go. I wasn’t fired.”
“All right then. You quit.”
“I quit.”
“Did it have anything at all to do with me?”
“I quit because I got goddamn sick of my neck always in that noose. I was on the point of quitting for years.”
“It had nothing to do with me?”
“All right,” Sam said. “I got into an argument. There were things said.”
“What things?”
“You don’t need to know.
“And don’t worry,” he said after a moment. “They didn’t fire me. They couldn’t have fired me. There are rules. It’s like I told you—I was ready to go anyway.”
“But you don’t realize,” said Juliet. “You don’t realize. You don’t realize just how stupid this is and what a disgusting place this is to live in, where people say that kind of thing, and how if I told people I know this, they wouldn’t believe it. It would seem like a joke.”
“Well. Unfortunately your mother and I don’t live where you live. Here is where we live. Does that fellow of yours think it’s a joke too? I don’t want to talk any more about this tonight, I’m going to bed. I’m going to look in on Mother and then I’m going to bed.”
“The passenger train—,” said Juliet with continued energy, even scorn. “It does still stop here. Doesn’t it? You didn’t want me getting off here. Did you?”
On his way out of the room, her father did not answer.