by Alice Munro
“Leave it for now. There’s probably a couple of classrooms already have their eye on him and that’d just get them more interested. Mr. Box can speak to him if somebody has to. Actually, Mr. Box was mentioning him.”
Coonie Box was the school janitor, who had hired Ross for the spring cleanup of the grounds.
“Oh? What?” said Colin.
“He says your brother keeps his own hours a bit.”
“Does he do the work all right?”
“He didn’t say he didn’t.” Davidson gave Colin one of his tight-lipped, dismissive, much-imitated smiles. “Just that he’s inclined to be independent.”
Colin and Ross looked rather alike, being tall, as their father had been, and fair-skinned and fair-haired, like their mother. Colin was athletic, with a shy, severe expression. Ross, though younger, was soft around the middle; he had a looser look. And he had an expression that seemed both leering and innocent.
Ross was not retarded. He had kept up with his age group in school. His mother said he was a genius of the mechanical kind. Nobody else would go that far.
“So? Is Ross getting used to getting up in the morning? Has he got an alarm?” Colin said to his mother.
“They’re lucky to have him,” Sylvia said.
Colin hadn’t known whether he’d find her at home. She worked shifts as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, and when she wasn’t working she was often out. She had a lot of friends and commitments.
“And you’re lucky I’m in,” she said. “I’m on the early shift this week and next, but usually I go over to Eddy’s after work and do a bit of housecleaning for him.”
Eddy was Sylvia’s boyfriend, a dapper seventy-year-old, twice a widower, with no children and plenty of money, a retired garage owner and car dealer who could certainly have afforded to hire somebody to clean his house. What did Sylvia know about house-cleaning, anyway? All last summer, she had kept the winter plastic tacked up over her front windows to save the trouble of putting it up again. Colin’s wife, Glenna, said that it gave her the same feeling as bleary glasses—she couldn’t stand it. And the house—the same Insul-brick-covered cottage Sylvia and Ross and Colin had always lived in—was so full of furniture and junk some rooms had turned into passageways. Most surfaces were piled high with magazines, newspapers, plastic and paper bags, catalogues, circulars, and fliers for sales that had come and gone, in some cases for businesses that had folded and products that had disappeared from the market. In any ashtray or ornamental dish you might find a button or two, keys, cutout coupons promising ten cents off, an earring, a cold capsule still in its plastic wrap, a vitamin pill turning to powder, a mascara brush, a broken clothespin. And Sylvia’s cupboards were full of all kinds of cleaning fluids and polishes—not the regular kind bought in stores, but products supposedly of unique and dazzling effectiveness, signed for at parties. She was kept broke paying for all the things she had signed for at parties—cosmetics, pots and pans, baking utensils, plastic bowls. She loved giving and going to those parties, also bridal showers and baby showers, and goodbye showers for her co-workers leaving the hospital. Here in these deeply cluttered rooms, she had dispensed, on her own, a great deal of careless, hopeful hospitality.
She poured water from the kettle onto the powdered coffee in their cups, which she had rinsed lightly at the sink.
“Was it boiling?” said Colin.
“Near enough.”
She shook some pink-and-white marshmallow cookies out of their plastic package.
“I told Eddy I needed the afternoon off. He’s getting to think like he owns me.”
“Can’t have that,” said Colin.
About her boyfriends, he usually took a lightly critical tone.
Sylvia was a short woman with a large head—made larger by her fluffy, graying hair—and broad hips and shoulders. One of her boyfriends used to tell her she looked like a baby elephant, and she took that—at first—as an endearment. Colin thought there was something clumsy and appealing about her figure and her wide-open face with its pink, soft skin, clear blue eyes under almost nonexistent eyebrows, her eager all-purpose smile. Something maddening as well.
The subject of Ross was one of the few things that could make her face tighten up. That, and the demands and peculiarities of boyfriends, once they were on the wane.
Was Eddy on the verge of waning?
Sylvia said, “I’ve been telling him he’s just too darn possessive.” Then she told Colin a joke that was going round at the hospital, about a black man and a white man at the urinal.
“If you’re working the early shift,” said Colin, “how do you know what time Ross gets up?”
“Somebody complaining about Ross, is that it?”
“Well. They’re just saying he likes to keep his own hours.”
“They’ll find out. If they have any mechanical thing or electrical thing that goes wrong, they’ll be glad they got Ross. Ross has just as many brains as you do but they have gone in a different direction.”
“I won’t argue that,” said Colin. “But his job is on the grounds.”
Glenna said that the reason Sylvia proclaimed Ross to be a genius—aside from the fact that he really was clever about engines—was that he had the other side of a genius. He was absentminded and not very clean. He called attention to himself. He was weird, and that was the way a genius was supposed to be. But taken by itself, said Glenna, that wasn’t enough proof.
Then she always said, “I like Ross, though. You can’t help liking him. I like him and your mother. I like her, too.” Colin believed she did like Ross. He wasn’t so sure she liked his mother.
“I only go over to your place when I’m invited, Colin,” was what his mother said. “It’s your home, but it’s Glenna’s home, too. Nevertheless I’m glad Ross feels so welcome.”
“I went in the office today,” Colin said, “and there was Davidson looking out the window.” He hadn’t known whether or not he was going to tell his mother about the hats. As usual, he wanted to get her a little upset about Ross, but not too upset. The sight of Ross working away there, with the electric clippers, all alone on the school grounds, a floppy pink straw hat perched on his seed-corn cap, had seemed to Colin something new, newly disturbing. He had seen Ross in odd getups before—once in the supermarket wearing Sylvia’s blond wig. That seemed more calculated than today’s appearance, more definitely a joke, with an audience in mind. Today, too, Ross could be thinking about all the kids behind the widows. And teachers and typists and Davidson and anybody driving by. But not them particularly. Something about Ross today suggested the audience had grown and faded—it included the whole town, the whole world, and Ross was almost indifferent to it. A sign, Colin thought. He didn’t know what of—just a sign that Ross was farther along the way that Ross was going.
Sylvia didn’t seem concerned with that part of it. She was upset, but for another reason.
“My hat. He’s bound to lose it. I’ll give him Hail Columbia. I’ll give him proper hell. It may not look like much, but I really value that hat.”
The first words Ross ever spoke directly to Glenna were “Do you know the only thing that’s the matter with you?”
“What?” said Glenna, looking alarmed. She was a tall, frail girl with dark curly hair, a white skin, very light blue eyes, and a habit of holding on to her bottom lip with her teeth, which gave her a wistful, worried air. She was the sort of girl who often wears pale blue (she had a fuzzy sweater on, of that color), and a delicate chain around her neck, with a cross or heart on it, or a name. (Glenna wore her name, because people had trouble spelling it.)
“The only thing the matter with you,” said Ross, chewing and nodding, “is that I didn’t find you first!”
A relief. They all laughed. This was during Glenna’s first dinner at Sylvia’s house. Sylvia and Colin and Glenna were eating take-out Chinese food—Sylvia had set a pile of plates and forks and even paper napkins beside the cardboard cartons—and Ross was eating a pizza,
which Sylvia had ordered especially for him because he didn’t like Chinese food.
Glenna suggested that Ross might like to come to the drive-in with them that night, and he did. The three of them sat on top of Colin’s car, with Glenna in the middle, drinking beer.
It became a family joke. What would have happened if Glenna had met Ross first?
Colin wouldn’t have had a chance.
Finally, Colin had to ask her, “What if you had met him first? Would you have gone out with him?”
“Ross is sweet,” Glenna said.
“But would you have gone out with him?”
She looked embarrassed, which was really all the answer Colin needed.
“Ross isn’t the type you go out with.”
Sylvia said, “Ross, someday you are going to find a wonderful girl.”
But Ross seemed to have given up looking. He stopped calling up girls and crowing like a rooster into the phone; he no longer drove slowly along the street, trailing them, sounding the horn as if in Morse code. One Saturday night, at Colin’s and Glenna’s house, he said he had given up on women, it was so hard to find a decent one, and anyway he had never gotten over Wilma Barry.
“Wilma Barry, who was that?” said Glenna. “Were you in love, Ross? When?”
“Grade Nine.”
“Wilma Barry! Was she pretty? Did she know how you felt about her?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”
Colin said, “Jesus, the whole school knew!”
“Where is she now, Ross?” said Glenna.
“Gone. Married.”
“Did she like you, too?”
“Couldn’t stand me,” said Ross complacently.
Colin was remembering the persecution of Wilma Barry—how Ross would go into empty classrooms and write her name on the blackboard, in little dots of colored chalk, or little hearts; how he went to watch the girls’ basketball games, in which she played, and carried on like a madman every time she got near the ball or the basket. She dropped off the team. She took to hiding in the girls’ washroom and sending out scouts to tell her if the coast was clear. Ross knew this, and hid in broom closets so he could pop out and whistle mournfully at her. She dropped out of school altogether and married at seventeen. Ross was too much for her.
“What a shame,” said Glenna.
“I did love that Wilma,” Ross said, and shook his head. “Colin, tell Glenna about me and the piece of pie!”
So Colin told that story, a favorite with everybody who had gone to high school around their time. Colin and Ross always brought their lunch to school because their mother worked and the cafeteria was too expensive. They always had bologna-and-ketchup sandwiches and store pie. One day, they were all being kept in at noon for some reason, Grades 9 and 10 together, so Ross and Colin were in the same room. Ross had his lunch in his desk and right in the middle of whatever lecture they were getting, he took out a big piece of apple pie and started to eat it. “What in the devil do you think you’re doing?” the teacher yelled, and Ross without a moment’s hesitation thrust the pie under his bum and sat on it, bringing his sticky hands together in a clap of innocence.
“I didn’t do it to be funny!” Ross told Glenna. “I just couldn’t think what to do with that pie but stick it underneath me!”
“I can just see you!” said Glenna, laughing. “Oh, Ross, I can just see you! Like some character on television!”
“Didn’t we ever tell you that before?” said Ross. “How come we never?”
“I kind of think we did,” said Colin.
Glenna said, “You did, but it’s funny to hear it again.”
“All right, Colin, tell her about the time you shot me dead!”
“You told me that, too, and I don’t want to ever have to hear it again,” said Glenna.
“Why not?” said Ross, disappointed.
“Because it’s horrible.”
Colin knew that when he got home from Sylvia’s Ross would be there ahead of him, working on the car. He was right. It was nearly the end of May now, and Ross had started his car-wrecking and combo-building in Colin’s yard as soon as the snow was gone. There wasn’t enough room for this activity at Sylvia’s.
Plenty of room for it here. Colin and Glenna had bought a run-down cottage set far back from the street, in the remains of an orchard. They were fixing it up. They used to live over the laundromat, and when Glenna had to quit work—she was a teacher, too, a primary specialist—because of being pregnant with Lynnette, she took on the job of managing the laundromat so that they could live rent free and save money. They talked then about moving—right away, to someplace remote and adventurous-sounding like Labrador or Moosonee or Yellowknife. They talked about going to Europe and teaching the children of Canadian servicemen. Meanwhile this house came up for sale, and it happened to be a house Glenna had always looked at and wondered about when she took Lynnette for a walk in the carriage or stroller. She had grown up in Air Force bases all over the country, and she loved to look at old houses.
Now, Glenna said, with all the work there was to do on this place, it looked as if they knew where they’d be and what they’d be doing forevermore.
Ross had two cars to wreck and one to build. The Chevy was a 1958 model that had been in an accident. The windshield was smashed, and the radiator and fan shoved back on the engine. The wiring was burned. Ross hadn’t been able to tell how the engine ran until he got the fan and the radiator and the banged-up sheet metal out of the way. Then he hot-wired it and filled the block with water. It ran. Ross said he knew it would. That was what he had bought the car for, the body being so damaged it was no use to him. The body he was using belonged to a 1971 Camaro. The top coat of paint had fallen off in sheets when he used the stripper, but now he was having to work with the hose and scouring pads on what was underneath. He was going to have to take out the dents in the roof with a body hammer and cut out the rusted sections of the floorboards to put in an aluminum panel. That and a lot more. It looked as if the job might take all summer.
Right now Ross was working on the wheels, with Glenna helping him. Glenna was polishing the trim rings and center caps, which had been taken off, while Ross scoured the wheels themselves and went over them with a wire brush. Lynnette was in her playpen by the front door.
Colin sniffed the air for stripper. Ross didn’t use a respirator; he said you didn’t need to in the fresh air. Colin knew he should trust Glenna not to expose herself and Lynnette to that. But he sniffed, and it was all right; they hadn’t been using any stripper. To cover up, he said, “Smells like spring.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” said Glenna, who was subject to hay fever. “I can feel the clouds of pollen just getting ready to move in.”
“Did you get your shots?” said Colin.
“Not today.”
“That was dumb.”
“I know,” said Glenna, polishing like mad. “I was going to walk over to the hospital. Then I got fooling around with these and I got sort of hypnotized.”
Lynnette walked cautiously around the sides of her playpen, holding on, then lifted her arms and said, “Up, Dad.” Colin was delighted with the firm, businesslike way she said “Dad”—not “Da” as other babies did.
“What I’ve decided I’m going to do,” said Ross. “I’m going to put on a rust remover that’s a conditioner and then a conversion coating and then a primer. But I got to get every last bit of the old filler out, because the stripper could’ve got into it and it’d look like a mess through the new paint. I’m going to use acrylic lacquer. What do you think?”
“What color?” said Colin. He was talking to two rear ends, both in jeans. Glenna’s jeans were cutoffs, baring her long, powdery-white legs. No sign of either hat on Ross now. He sobered up remarkably whenever he got near his car.
“I was thinking yellow. Then I thought red always looks good on a Camaro.”
“We’ll get the paint chart and hold it up in front of Lynnette and let her choose,”
said Glenna. “Okay, Ross? Whatever she points to? Will we do that?”
“Okay,” said Ross.
“She’ll point to red. She loves red.”
“Take it easy,” said Colin to Lynnette as he went past her into the house. She started to complain, not too seriously. He got three bottles of beer out of the refrigerator. During the winter, they had worked inside the house, pulling off wallpaper and tearing up linoleum, and they had got the place now to a stage where all the innards were showing. There were batts of pink insulating material held in place under sheets of plastic. Piles of lumber to be used in the new partitions sat around drying. You walked on springy wide boards in the kitchen. Ross had shown up regularly to help, but had not offered since he started on the car.
Glenna had said, “I think he started thinking about the car when he realized he wasn’t going to live with us in the house.”
Colin said, “Ross always fooled around with cars.”
But Ross had never cared so much before about what a car looked like. He had cared about the getaway speed and top speed and whatever menacing or ridiculous-sounding noise he could force out of it. He had had two accidents. Once, he rolled his car into a ditch and walked away without a scratch. Another time, he had taken a shortcut, as he said, through a vacant lot in town and run into a heap of junk that included an old bathtub. When Colin came home from college on the weekend, there was Ross with purple bruises along the side of his face, a cut over one ear, and his ribs taped.
“I had a collision with a bathtub.” Had he been drunk, or high?
“I don’t think so,” said Ross.
This time he seemed to have something else in mind than gunning the engine and fishtailing down the street, leaving a trail of burn marks on the pavement. He wanted a real car, what the magazine he read called a “street car.” Could that be to get girls? Or just to show himself off in, driving in a respectable style with an occasional flash of speed or powerful growl when he took off at the lights? Maybe this time he could even do without a trick horn.
“This is one car isn’t going to be run up and down the main street like a maniac or hittin’ a hundred on the gravel,” he said.