by Alice Munro
He liked to say that men lusted after Lorna. Particularly when they’d been to a department party, and she had been the youngest wife there. She would have been embarrassed to have anybody hear him say that, lest they think it a wishful and foolish exaggeration. But sometimes, especially if she was a little drunk, it roused her as well as Brendan, to think that she might be so universally appealing. In Lionel’s case, though, she was pretty sure that it was not true, and she hoped very much that Brendan would never hint at such a thing in front of him. She remembered the look that he had given her over his mother’s head. A disavowal there, a mild warning.
She did not tell Brendan about the poems. Once a week or so a poem arrived quite properly sealed and posted, in the mail. These were not anonymous—Lionel signed them. His signature was just a squiggle, quite difficult to make out—but then so was every word of every poem. Fortunately, there were never many words—sometimes only a dozen or two in all—and they made a curious path across the page, like uncertain bird tracks. At first glance Lorna could never make out anything at all. She found that it was best not to try too hard, just to hold the page in front of her and look at it long and steadily as if she had gone into a trance. Then, usually, words would appear. Not all of them—there were two or three in every poem that she never figured out—but that did not matter much. There was no punctuation but dashes. The words were mostly nouns. Lorna was not a person unfamiliar with poetry, or a person who gave up easily on whatever she did not quickly understand. But she felt about these poems of Lionel’s more or less as she did about, say, the Buddhist religion—that they were a resource she might be able to comprehend, to tap into, in the future, but that she couldn’t do that just now.
After the first poem she agonized about what she should say. Something appreciative, but not stupid. All she managed was, “Thank you for the poem”—when Brendan was well out of earshot. She kept herself from saying, “I enjoyed it.” Lionel gave a jerky nod, and made a sound that sealed off the conversation. Poems continued to arrive, and were not mentioned again. She began to think that she could regard them as offerings, not as messages. But not love-offerings—as Brendan, for instance, would assume. There was nothing in them about Lionel’s feelings for her, nothing personal at all. They reminded her of those faint impressions you can sometimes make out on the sidewalks in spring—shadows, left by wet leaves plastered there the year before.
There was something else, more urgent, that she did not speak about to Brendan. Or to Lionel. She did not say that Polly was coming to visit. Polly, her cousin, was coming from home.
Polly was five years older than Lorna and had worked, ever since she graduated from high school, in the local bank. She had saved up almost enough money for this trip once before, but decided to spend it on a sump pump instead. Now, however, she was on her way across the country by bus. To her it seemed the most natural and appropriate thing to do—to visit her cousin and her cousin’s husband and her cousin’s family. To Brendan it would seem almost certainly an intrusion, something nobody had any business doing unless invited. He was not averse to visitors—look at Lionel—but he wanted to do the choosing himself. Every day Lorna thought of how she must tell him. Every day she put it off.
And this was not a thing she could talk about to Lionel. You could not speak to him about anything seen seriously as a problem. To speak of problems meant to search for, to hope for, solutions. And that was not interesting, it did not indicate an interesting attitude towards life. Rather, a shallow and tiresome hopefulness. Ordinary anxieties, uncomplicated emotions, were not what he enjoyed hearing about. He preferred things to be utterly bewildering and past bearing, yet ironically, even merrily, borne.
One thing she had told him that might have been chancy. She told him how she had cried on her wedding day and during the actual wedding ceremony. But she was able to make a joke of that, because she could tell how she tried to pull her hand out of Brendan’s grip to get her handkerchief, but he would not let go, so she had to keep on snuffling. And in fact she had not cried because she didn’t want to be married, or didn’t love Brendan.
She had cried because everything at home seemed suddenly so precious to her—though she had always planned to leave—and the people there seemed closer to her than anyone else could ever be, though she had hidden all her private thoughts from them. She cried because she and Polly had laughed as they cleaned the kitchen shelves and scrubbed the linoleum the day before, and she had pretended she was in a sentimental play and said goodbye, old linoleum, goodbye, crack in the teapot, goodbye, the place where I used to stick my gum under the table, goodbye.
Why don’t you just tell him forget it, Polly had said. But of course she didn’t mean that, she was proud, and Lorna herself was proud, eighteen years old and never had a real boyfriend, and here she was, marrying a good-looking thirty-year-old man, a professor.
Nevertheless, she cried, and cried again when she got letters from home in the early days of her marriage. Brendan had caught her at it, and said, “You love your family, don’t you?”
She thought he sounded sympathetic. She said, “Yes.”
He sighed. “I think you love them more than you love me.”
She said that was not true, it was only that she felt sorry for her family sometimes. They had a hard time, her grandmother teaching Grade Four year after year though her eyes were so bad that she could hardly see to write on the board, and Aunt Beatrice with too many nervous complaints to ever have a job, and her father—Lorna’s father—working in the hardware store that wasn’t even his own.
“A hard time?” said Brendan. “They’ve been in a concentration camp, have they?”
Then he said that people needed gumption in this world. And Lorna lay down on the marriage bed and gave way to one of those angry weeping fits that she was now ashamed to remember. Brendan came and consoled her, after a while, but still believed that she cried as women always did when they could not win the argument any other way.
Some things about Polly’s looks Lorna had forgotten. How tall she was and what a long neck and narrow waist she had, and an almost perfectly flat chest. A bumpy little chin and a wry mouth. Pale skin, light-brown hair cut short, fine as feathers. She looked both frail and hardy, like a daisy on a long stalk. She wore a ruffled denim skirt with embroidery on it.
For forty-eight hours Brendan had known she was coming. She had phoned, collect, from Calgary, and he had answered the phone. He had three questions to ask afterwards. His tone was distant, but calm.
How long is she staying?
Why didn’t you tell me?
Why did she phone collect?
“I don’t know,” said Lorna.
Now from the kitchen where she was preparing dinner, Lorna strained to hear what they would say to each other. Brendan had just come home. His greeting she could not hear, but Polly’s voice was loud and full of a risky jollity.
“So I really started out on the wrong foot, Brendan, wait till you hear what I said. Lorna and I are walking down the street from the bus stop and I’m saying, Oh, shoot, this is a pretty classy neighborhood you live in, Lorna—and then I say, But look at that place, what’s it doing here? I said, It looks like a barn.”
She couldn’t have started out worse. Brendan was very proud of their house. It was a contemporary house, built in the West Coast style called Post and Beam. Post and Beam houses were not painted; the idea was to fit in with the original forests. So the effect was plain and functional from the outside, with the roof flat and protruding beyond the walls. Inside, the beams were exposed and none of the wood was covered up. The fireplace in this house was set in a stone chimney that went up to the ceiling, and the windows were long and narrow and uncurtained. The architecture is always preeminent, the builder had told them, and Brendan repeated this, as well as the word “contemporary,” when introducing anybody to the house for the first time.
He did not bother to say this to Polly, or to get out the magazine in which there
was an article about the style, with photographs—though not of this particular house.
Polly had brought from home the habit of starting off her sentences with the name of the person specifically addressed. “Lorna—” she would say, or “Brendan—” Lorna had forgotten about this way of talking—it seemed to her now rather peremptory and rude. Most of Polly’s sentences at the dinner table began with “Lorna—” and were about people known only to her and Polly. Lorna knew that Polly did not intend to be rude, that she was making a strident but brave effort to seem at ease. And she had at first tried to include Brendan. Both she and Lorna had done so, they had launched into explanations of whoever it was they were talking about—but it did not work. Brendan spoke only to call Lorna’s attention to something needed on the table, or to point out that Daniel had spilled his mashed food on the floor around his high chair.
Polly went on talking while she and Lorna cleared the table, and then as they washed the dishes. Lorna usually bathed the children and put them to bed before she started on the dishes, but tonight she was too rattled—she sensed that Polly was near tears—to attend to things in their proper order. She let Daniel crawl around on the floor while Elizabeth, with her interest in social occasions and new personalities, hung about listening to the conversation. This lasted until Daniel knocked the high chair over—fortunately not on himself, but he howled with fright—and Brendan came from the living room.
“Bedtime seems to have been postponed,” he said, as he removed his son from Lorna’s arms. “Elizabeth. Go and get ready for your bath.”
Polly had moved on from talking about people in town to describing how things were going at home. Not well. The owner of the hardware store—a man whom Lorna’s father had always spoken of as more of a friend than an employer—had sold the business without a word of what he was intending until the deed was done. The new man was expanding the store at the same time business was being lost to Canadian Tire, and there was not a day that he did not stir up some kind of a row with Lorna’s father. Lorna’s father came home from the shop so discouraged that all he wanted to do was lie on the couch. He was not interested in the paper or the news. He drank bicarbonate of soda but wouldn’t discuss the pains in his stomach.
Lorna mentioned a letter from her father in which he made light of these troubles.
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” said Polly. “To you.”
The upkeep of both houses, Polly said, was a continual nightmare. They should all move into one house and sell the other, but now that their grandmother had retired she picked on Polly’s mother all the time, and Lorna’s father could not stand the idea of living with the two of them. Polly often wanted to walk out and never come back, but what would they do without her?
“You should live your own life,” said Lorna. It felt strange to her, to be giving advice to Polly.
“Oh, sure, sure,” said Polly. “I should’ve got out while the going was good, that’s what I guess I should have done. But when was that? I don’t ever remember the going being so particularly good. I was stuck with having to see you through school first, for one thing.”
Lorna had spoken in a regretful, helpful voice, but she refused to stop in her work, to give Polly’s news its due. She accepted it as if it concerned some people she knew and liked, but was not responsible for. She thought of her father lying on the couch in the evenings, dosing himself for pains he wouldn’t admit to, and Aunt Beatrice next door, worried about what people were saying about her, afraid they were laughing behind her back, writing things about her on walls. Crying because she’d gone to church with her slip showing. To think of home caused Lorna pain, but she could not help feeling that Polly was hammering at her, trying to bring her to some capitulation, wrap her up in some intimate misery. And she was bound that she would not give in.
Just look at you. Look at your life. Your stainless-steel sink. Your house where the architecture is preeminent.
“If I ever went away now I think I’d just feel too guilty,” Polly said. “I couldn’t stand it. I’d feel too guilty leaving them.”
Of course some people never feel guilty. Some people never feel at all.
“Quite a tale of woe you got,” said Brendan, when they were lying side by side in the dark.
“It’s on her mind,” Lorna said.
“Just remember. We are not millionaires.”
Lorna was startled. “She doesn’t want money.”
“Doesn’t she?”
“That’s not what she’s telling me for.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
She lay rigid, not answering. Then she thought of something that might put him in a better mood.
“She’s only here for two weeks.”
His turn not to answer.
“Don’t you think she’s nice-looking?”
“No.”
She was about to say that Polly had made her wedding dress. She had planned to be married in her navy suit, and Polly had said, a few days before the wedding, “This isn’t going to do.” So she got out her own high-school formal (Polly had always been more popular than Lorna, she had gone to dances) and she put in gussets of white lace and sewed on white lace sleeves. Because, she said, a bride can’t do without sleeves.
But what could he have cared about that?
Lionel had gone away for a few days. His father had retired, and Lionel was helping him with the move from the town in the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver Island. On the day after Polly’s arrival, Lorna had a letter from him. Not a poem—a real letter, though it was very short.
I dreamt that I was giving you a ride on my bicycle.
We were going quite fast. You did not seem to be afraid,
though perhaps you should have been. We must not feel
called upon to interpret this.
Brendan had gone off early. He was teaching summer school, he said he would eat breakfast at the cafeteria. Polly came out of her room as soon as he was gone. She wore slacks instead of the flounced skirt, and she smiled all the time, as if at a joke of her own. She kept ducking her head slightly to avoid Lorna’s eyes.
“I better get off and see something of Vancouver,” she said, “seeing it isn’t likely I’ll ever get here again.”
Lorna marked some things on a map, and gave her directions, and said she was sorry she couldn’t go along, but it would be more trouble than it was worth, with the children.
“Oh. Oh, no. I wouldn’t expect you to. I didn’t come out here to be on your hands all the time.”
Elizabeth sensed the strain in the atmosphere. She said, “Why are we trouble?”
Lorna gave Daniel an early nap, and when he woke up she got him into the stroller and told Elizabeth they were going to a playground. The playground she had chosen was not the one in a nearby park—it was down the hill, close to the street Lionel lived on. Lorna knew his address, though she had never seen the house. She knew that it was a house, not an apartment building. He lived in one room, upstairs.
It did not take her long to get there—though no doubt it would take her longer to get back, pushing the stroller uphill. But she had already passed into the older part of North Vancouver, where the houses were smaller, perched on narrow lots. The house where Lionel lived had his name beside one bell, and the name B. Hutchison beside the other. She knew that Mrs. Hutchison was the landlady. She pressed that bell.
“I know Lionel’s away and I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I lent him a book, it’s a library book and now it’s overdue, and I just wondered if I could run up to his apartment and see if I could find it.”
The landlady said, “Oh.” She was an old woman with a bandanna round her head and large dark spots on her face.
“My husband and I are friends of Lionel’s. My husband was his professor at college.”
The word “professor” was always useful. Lorna was given the key. She parked the stroller in the shade of the house and told Elizabeth to stay and watch Daniel.
“
This isn’t a playground,” Elizabeth said.
“I just have to run upstairs and back. Just for a minute, okay?”
Lionel’s room had an alcove at the end of it for a two-burner gas stove and a cupboard. No refrigerator and no sink, except for the one in the toilet. A Venetian blind stuck halfway down the window, and a square of linoleum whose pattern was covered by brown paint. There was a faint smell of the gas stove, mixed with a smell of unaired heavy clothing, perspiration, and some pine-scented decongestant, which she accepted—hardly thinking of it and not at all disliking it—as the intimate smell of Lionel himself.
Other than that, the place gave out hardly any clues. She had come here not for any library book, of course, but to be for a moment inside the space where he lived, breathe his air, look out of his window. The view was of other houses, probably like this one chopped up into small apartments on the wooded slope of Grouse Mountain. The bareness, the anonymity of the room were severely challenging. Bed, bureau, table, chair. Just the furniture that had to be provided so that the room could be advertised as furnished. Even the tan chenille bedspread must have been there when he moved in. No pictures—not even a calendar—and most surprisingly, no books.
Things must be hidden somewhere. In the bureau drawers? She couldn’t look. Not only because there was no time—she could hear Elizabeth calling her from the yard—but the very absence of whatever might be personal made the sense of Lionel stronger. Not just the sense of his austerity and his secrets, but of a watchfulness—almost as if he had set a trap and was waiting to see what she would do.
What she really wanted to do was not to investigate anymore but to sit down on the floor, in the middle of the square of linoleum. To sit for hours not so much looking at this room as sinking into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle.