by Alice Munro
The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind that curls through the narrowest passages of your blood.
When she woke that feeling was still with her. She found the dream shameful. Obvious, banal. A dirty indulgence of her own.
—
There was a knock on the front door in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody used the front door—Juliet found it a bit stiff to open.
The man who stood there wore a well-pressed yellow shirt with short sleeves, and tan pants. He was perhaps a few years older than she was, tall but rather frail-looking, slightly hollow-chested, but vigorous in his greeting, relentless in his smiling.
“I’ve come to see the lady of the house,” he said.
Juliet left him standing there and went into the sunroom.
“There’s a man at the door,” she said. “He might be selling something. Should I get rid of him?”
Sara was pushing herself up. “No, no,” she said breathlessly. “Tidy me a bit, can you? I heard his voice. It’s Don. It’s my friend Don.”
Don had already entered the house and was heard outside the sunroom door.
“No fuss, Sara. It’s only me. Are you decent?”
Sara, with a wild and happy look, reached for the hairbrush she could not manage, then gave up and ran her fingers through her hair. Her voice rang out gaily. “I’m as decent as I’ll ever be, I’m afraid. Come in here.”
The man appeared, hurried up to her, and she lifted her arms to him. “You smell of summer,” she said. “What is it?” She fingered his shirt. “Ironing. Ironed cotton. My, that’s nice.”
“I did it myself,” he said. “Sally’s over at the church messing about with the flowers. Not a bad job, eh?”
“Lovely,” said Sara. “But you almost didn’t get in. Juliet thought you were a salesman. Juliet’s my daughter. My dear daughter. I told you, didn’t I? I told you she was coming. Don is my minister, Juliet. My friend and minister.”
Don straightened up, grasped Juliet’s hand.
“Good you’re here—I’m very glad to meet you. And you weren’t so far wrong, actually. I am a sort of salesman.”
Juliet smiled politely at the ministerial joke.
“What church are you the minister of?”
The question made Sara laugh. “Oh dear—that gives the show away, doesn’t it?”
“I’m from Trinity,” said Don, with his unfazed smile. “And as for giving the show away—it’s no news to me that Sara and Sam were not involved with any of the churches in the community. I just started dropping in anyway, because your mother is such a charming lady.”
Juliet could not remember whether it was the Anglican or United Church that was called Trinity.
“Would you get Don a reasonable sort of chair, dear?” said Sara. “Here he is bending over me like a stork. And some sort of refreshment, Don? Would you like an eggnog? Juliet makes me the most delicious eggnogs. No. No, that’s probably too heavy. You’ve just come in from the heat of the day. Tea? That’s hot too. Ginger ale? Some kind of juice? What juice do we have, Juliet?”
Don said, “I don’t need anything but a glass of water. That would be welcome.”
“No tea? Really?” Sara was quite out of breath. “But I think I’d like some. You could drink half a cup, surely. Juliet?”
—
In the kitchen, by herself—Irene could be seen in the garden, today she was hoeing around the beans—Juliet wondered if the tea was a ruse to get her out of the room for a few private words. A few private words, perhaps even a few words of prayer? The notion sickened her.
Sam and Sara had never belonged to any church, though Sam had told someone, early in their life here, that they were Druids. Word had gone around that they belonged to a church not represented in town, and that information had moved them up a notch from having no religion at all. Juliet herself had gone to Sunday school for a while at the Anglican Church, though that was mostly because she had an Anglican friend. Sam, at school, had never rebelled at having to read the Bible and say the Lord’s Prayer every morning, any more than he objected to “God Save the Queen.”
“There’s times for sticking your neck out and times not to,” he had said. “You satisfy them this way, maybe you can get away with telling the kids a few facts about evolution.”
Sara had at one time been interested in the Baha’i faith, but Juliet believed that this interest had waned.
She made enough tea for the three of them and found some digestive biscuits in the cupboard—also the brass tray which Sara had usually taken out for fancy occasions.
Don accepted a cup, and gulped down the ice water which she had remembered to bring him, but shook his head at the cookies.
“Not for me, thanks.”
He seemed to say this with special emphasis. As if godliness forbade him.
He asked Juliet where she lived, what was the nature of the weather on the west coast, what work her husband did.
“He’s a prawn fisherman, but he’s actually not my husband,” said Juliet pleasantly.
Don nodded. Ah, yes.
“Rough seas out there?”
“Sometimes.”
“Whale Bay. I’ve never heard of it but now I’ll remember it. What church do you go to in Whale Bay?”
“We don’t go. We don’t go to church.”
“Is there not a church of your sort handy?”
Smiling, Juliet shook her head.
“There is no church of our sort. We don’t believe in God.”
Don’s cup made a little clatter as he set it down in its saucer. He said he was sorry to hear that.
“Truly sorry to hear that. How long have you been of this opinion?”
“I don’t know. Ever since I gave it any serious thought.”
“And your mother’s told me you have a child. You have a little girl, don’t you?”
Juliet said yes, she had.
“And she has never been christened? You intend to bring her up a heathen?”
Juliet said that she expected Penelope would make up her own mind about that, someday.
“But we intend to bring her up without religion. Yes.”
“That is sad,” said Don quietly. “For yourselves, it’s sad. You and your—whatever you call him—you’ve decided to reject God’s grace. Well. You are adults. But to reject it for your child—it’s like denying her nourishment.”
Juliet felt her composure cracking. “But we don’t believe,” she said. “We don’t believe in God’s grace. It’s not like denying her nourishment, it’s refusing to bring her up on lies.”
“Lies. What millions of people all over the world believe in, you call lies. Don’t you think that’s a little presumptuous of you, calling God a lie?”
“Millions of people don’t believe it, they just go to church,” said Juliet, her voice heating. “They just don’t think. If there is a God, then God gave me a mind, and didn’t he intend me to use it?
“Also,” she said, trying to hold herself steady. “Also, millions of people believe something different. They believe in Buddha, for instance. So how does millions of people believing in anything make it true?”
“Christ is alive,” said Don readily. “Buddha isn’t.”
“That’s just something to say. What does it mean? I don’t see any proof of either one being alive, as far as that goes.”
“You don’t. But others do. Do you know that Henry Ford—Henry Ford the second, who has everything anybody in life could desire—nevertheless he gets down on his knees and prays to God every night of his life?”
“Henry Ford?” cried Juliet. “Henry Ford? What does anything Henry Ford does matter to me?”
The argument was taking the course that arguments of this sort are bound to take. The minister’s voice, which had started out more sorrowful than angry—though always indicating ironclad conviction—was taking on a shrill and scolding tone, while Juliet, who had begun,
as she thought, in reasonable resistance—calm, shrewd, rather maddeningly polite—was now in a cold and biting rage. Both of them cast around for arguments and refutations that would be more insulting than useful.
Meanwhile Sara nibbled on a digestive biscuit, not looking up at them. Now and then she shivered, as if their words struck her, but they were beyond noticing.
What did bring their display to an end was the loud wailing of Penelope, who had wakened wet and had complained softly for a while, then complained more vigorously, and finally given way to fury. Sara heard her first, and tried to attract their attention.
“Penelope,” she said faintly, then, with more effort, “Juliet. Penelope.” Juliet and the minister both looked at her distractedly, and then the minister said, with a sudden drop in his voice, “Your baby.”
Juliet hurried from the room. She was shaking when she picked Penelope up, she came close to stabbing her when she was pinning on the dry diaper. Penelope stopped crying, not because she was comforted but because she was alarmed by this rough attention. Her wide wet eyes, her astonished stare, broke into Juliet’s preoccupation, and she tried to settle herself down, talking as gently as she could and then picking her child up, walking with her up and down the upstairs hall. Penelope was not immediately reassured, but after a few minutes the tension began to leave her body.
Juliet felt the same thing happening to her, and when she thought that a certain amount of control and quiet had returned to both of them, she carried Penelope downstairs.
The minister had come out of Sara’s room and was waiting for her. In a voice that might have been contrite, but seemed in fact frightened, he said, “That’s a nice baby.”
Juliet said, “Thank you.”
She thought that now they might properly say good-bye, but something was holding him. He continued to look at her, he did not move away. He put his hand out as if to catch hold of her shoulder, then dropped it.
“Do you know if you have—,” he said, then shook his head slightly. The have had come out sounding like hab.
“Jooze,” he said, and slapped his hand against his throat. He waved in the direction of the kitchen.
Juliet’s first thought was that he must be drunk. His head was wagging slightly back and forth, his eyes seemed to be filmed over. Had he come here drunk, had he brought something in his pocket? Then she remembered. A girl, a pupil at the school where she had once taught for half a year. This girl, a diabetic, would suffer a kind of seizure, become thick-tongued, distraught, staggering, if she had gone too long without food.
Shifting Penelope to her hip, she took hold of his arm and steadied him along towards the kitchen. Juice. That was what they had given the girl, that was what he was talking about.
“Just a minute, just a minute, you’ll be all right,” she said. He held himself upright, hands pressed down on the counter, head lowered.
There was no orange juice—she remembered giving Penelope the last of it that morning, thinking she must get more. But there was a bottle of grape soda, which Sam and Irene liked to drink when they came in from work in the garden.
“Here,” she said. Managing with one hand, as she was used to doing, she poured out a glassful. “Here.” And as he drank she said, “I’m sorry there’s no juice. But it’s the sugar, isn’t it? You have to get some sugar?”
He drank it down, he said, “Yeah. Sugar. Thanks.” Already his voice was clearing. She remembered this too, about the girl at the school—how quick and apparently miraculous the recovery. But before he was quite recovered, or quite himself, while he was still holding his head at a slant, he met her eyes. Not on purpose, it seemed, just by chance. The look in his eyes was not grateful, or forgiving—it was not really personal, it was just the raw look of an astounded animal, hanging on to whatever it could find.
And within a few seconds the eyes, the face, became the face of the man, the minister, who set down his glass and without another word fled out of the house.
—
Sara was either asleep or pretending to be, when Juliet went to pick up the tea tray. Her sleeping state, her dozing state, and her waking state had now such delicate and shifting boundaries that it was hard to identify them. At any rate, she spoke, she said in little more than a whisper, “Juliet?”
Juliet paused in the doorway.
“You must think Don is—rather a simpleton,” Sara said. “But he isn’t well. He’s a diabetic. It’s serious.”
Juliet said, “Yes.”
“He needs his faith.”
“Foxhole argument,” said Juliet, but quietly, and perhaps Sara did not hear, for she went on talking.
“My faith isn’t so simple,” said Sara, her voice all shaky (and seeming to Juliet, at this moment, strategically pathetic). “I can’t describe it. But it’s—all I can say—it’s something. It’s a—wonderful—something. When it gets really bad for me—when it gets so bad I—you know what I think then? I think, all right. I think—Soon. Soon I’ll see Juliet.”
Dreaded (Dearest) Eric,
Where to begin? I am fine and Penelope is fine. Considering. She walks confidently now around Sara’s bed but is still leery of striking out with no support. The summer heat is amazing, compared with the west coast. Even when it rains. It’s a good thing it does rain because Sam is going full-tilt at the market garden business. The other day I rode around with him in the ancient vehicle delivering fresh raspberries and raspberry jam (made by a sort of junior Ilse Koch person who inhabits our kitchen) and newly dug first potatoes of the season. He is quite gung-ho. Sara stays in bed and dozes or looks at outdated fashion magazines. A minister came to visit her and he and I got into a big stupid row about the existence of God or some such hot topic. The visit is going okay though…
This was a letter that Juliet found years later. Eric must have saved it by accident—it had no particular importance in their lives.
—
She had gone back to the house of her childhood once more, for Sara’s funeral, some months after that letter was written. Irene was no longer around, and Juliet had no memory of asking or being told where she was. Most probably she had married. As Sam did again, in a couple of years. He married a fellow teacher, a good-natured, handsome, competent woman. They lived in her house—Sam tore down the house where he and Sara had lived, and extended the garden. When his wife retired, they bought a trailer and began to go on long winter trips. They visited Juliet twice at Whale Bay. Eric took them out in his boat. He and Sam got along well. As Sam said, like a house afire.
When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before.
Because it’s what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.
But she had not protected Sara. When Sara had said, soon I’ll see Juliet, Juliet had found no reply. Could it not have been managed? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say Yes. To Sara it would have meant so much—to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away, she had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held grape soda. She had put everything away.
SILENCE
On the short ferry ride from Buckley Bay to Denman Island, Juliet got out of her car and stood at the front of the boat, in the summer breeze. A woman standing there recognized her, and they began to talk. It is not unusual for people to take a second look at Juliet and wonder where they’ve seen her before, and, sometimes, to remember. She appears regularly on the Provincial Television channel, interviewing people who are leading singular or notable lives, and deftly directing panel discussions, on a program called Issues of the Day. Her hair is cut sh
ort now, as short as possible, and has taken on a very dark auburn color, matching the frames of her glasses. She often wears black pants—as she does today—and an ivory silk shirt, and sometimes a black jacket. She is what her mother would have called a striking-looking woman.
“Forgive me. People must be always bothering you.”
“It’s okay,” Juliet says. “Except when I’ve just been to the dentist or something.”
The woman is about Juliet’s age. Long black hair streaked with gray, no makeup, long denim skirt. She lives on Denman, so Juliet asks her what she knows about the Spiritual Balance Centre.
“Because my daughter is there,” Juliet says. “She’s been on a retreat there or taking a course, I don’t know what they call it. For six months. This is the first time I’ve got to see her, in six months.”
“There are a couple of places like that,” the woman says. “They sort of come and go. I don’t mean there’s anything suspect about them. Just that they’re generally off in the woods, you know, and don’t have much to do with the community. Well, what would be the point of a retreat if they did?”
She says that Juliet must be looking forward to seeing her daughter again, and Juliet says yes, very much.
“I’m spoiled,” she says. “She’s twenty years old, my daughter—she’ll be twenty-one this month, actually—and we haven’t been apart much.”
The woman says that she has a son of twenty and a daughter of eighteen and another of fifteen, and there are days when she’d pay them to go on a retreat, singly or all together.
Juliet laughs. “Well. I’ve only the one. Of course, I won’t guarantee that I won’t be all for shipping her back, given a few weeks.”