The Progress of Love

by Alice Munro

  “That’s right, Ross,” said Glenna. “Time you graduated.”

  “Beer,” said Colin, and put it down where Ross could reach.

  “Ross?” said Glenna. (“Thank you,” she said to Colin.) “Ross, you’re going to have to rip the carpet off the doors. You are. It looks okay but really it stinks. I can smell it. Over here.”

  Colin sat on the step with Lynnette on one knee, knowing he wasn’t going to bring up the matter of being on time, let alone the hats. He wasn’t going to remind Ross that this was the first job he’d had in over a year. He was too tired, and now he felt too peaceful. Some of this peacefulness was Glenna’s doing. Glenna didn’t ally herself with anybody who was completely weird, or with any futile undertaking. And there she was, looking at her face in the caps, sniffing the carpet panels, taking Ross and his car seriously—so seriously that when Colin first got out of the car and saw her squatted down, polishing, he had felt like asking if this was the way things were going to go all summer, with her so involved with Ross’s car she wouldn’t have time to work on the house. He’d be kicking himself now if he’d said that. What would he do if she didn’t like Ross, if she hadn’t liked him from the start and agreed to have him around? When Ross said what the one thing wrong was, at their first meeting, and Glenna smiled, not politely or condescendingly but with true surprise and pleasure, Colin had felt more than relief. He had felt as if from now on Ross could stop being a secret weight on him; he would have someone to share Ross with. He had never counted Sylvia.

  The other thought that had crossed Colin’s mind was dirty in every sense of the word. Ross never would. Ross was a prude. He glowered and stuck his big lip out and looked as if he half felt like crying when there was a sexy scene at the movies.

  On Saturday morning, there was a large package of chicken pieces thawing on the counter, reminding Colin that Glenna had asked Sylvia and Eddy and her friend—their friend—Nancy to come over for supper.

  Glenna had gone to the hospital, walking, with Lynnette in the stroller, to get her hay-fever shots. Ross was already working. He had come into the house and put a tape on, leaving the door open so that he could hear it. Chariots of Fire. That was Glenna’s. Ross usually listened to country and Western.

  Colin was just home from the builders’-supply store, where they didn’t have his ceiling panels in yet, in spite of promises. He went out to look at the grass he had planted last Saturday, a patch of lawn to the side of the house, fenced off with string. He gave it some water, then watched Ross sanding the wheels. Before long and without quite intending to, he was sanding as well. It was hypnotizing, as Glenna had said; you just kept on at it. After they were sufficiently sanded down, the wheels had to be painted with primer (the tires protected from that with masking tape and paper), and when the primer was dry, they had to be scuffed off with a copper pad and cleaned again with a wax-and-grease remover. Ross had all this planned out.

  They worked all morning and then all afternoon. Glenna made hamburgers for lunch. When Colin told her he couldn’t do the kitchen ceiling because the panels hadn’t come, she said he couldn’t have worked on the kitchen anyway, because she had to make a dessert.

  Ross went uptown and bought a touch-up gun and some metallic charcoal paint, as well as Armor-All for the tires. This was a good idea—the touch-up gun made it a lot easier to get into the recesses of the wheels.

  Nancy arrived about the middle of the afternoon, driving her dinky little Chevette and wearing a strange new outfit—rather long, loose shorts and a top that was like a bag with holes cut for the head and arms, the whole thing dirt-colored and held at the waist with a long raggedy purple sash. Nancy had been brought in that year to teach French from kindergarten to Grade 8, that being the new requirement. She was a rangy, pale, flat-chested girl with frizzy, corn-yellow hair and an intelligent, mournful face. Colin found her likable and disturbing. She came around like an old friend, bringing her own beer and her own music. She chattered to Lynnette, and had a made-up name for her—Winnie-Winnie. But whose old friend was she? Before last September, none of them had ever set eyes on her. She was in her early thirties, had lived with three different men, and did not think she would ever marry. The first time she met Sylvia and Eddy, she told them about the three men and about the drugs she had taken. Sylvia egged her on, of course. Eddy didn’t know what she was talking about, and when she mentioned acid, he may have thought she was referring to battery acid. She told you how she felt every time you saw her. Not that she had a headache or a cold or swollen glands or sore feet, but whether she was depressed or elated or whatever. And she had an odd way of talking about this town. She talked about it as if it were a substance, a lump, as if the people in it were all glued together, and as if the lump had—for her—peculiar and usually discouraging characteristics.

  “I saw you yesterday, Ross,” said Nancy. She sat on the step, having opened a beer and put on Joan Armatrading, “Show Some Emotion.” She got up and lifted Lynnette out of the playpen. “I saw you at the school. You were beautiful.”

  Colin said, “There’s stuff lying all around here she could put in her mouth. Little nuts and stuff. You have to watch her.”

  “I’ll watch her,” said Nancy. “Winnie-Winnie.” She was tickling Lynnette with the fringe of her sash.

  “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux,” she said. “I had Grade Three all looking out the window and admiring you. That’s what we decided to call you. Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux. Monsieur of the Two Hats.”

  “We do know some French. Strange as it may seem,” said Colin.

  “I don’t,” said Ross. “I don’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Oh, Ross,” said Nancy, tickling Lynnette. “Aren’t you my little honey bear, my little Winnie-Winnie? Ross, you were beautiful. What an inspiration on a dull dragged-out old Friday afternoon.”

  Nancy had a way of making Ross turn sullen. To her face behind her back, he often said that she was crazy.

  “You’re crazy, Nancy. You never saw me. You’re seeing things. You got double vision.”

  “Sure,” said Nancy. “Absolutely, Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux. So what are you doing? Tell me. You taking up car-wrecking?”

  “We’re painting these wheels, at the moment,” said Colin. Ross wouldn’t say anything.

  “I once took a course,” said Nancy. “I took a course in elementary mechanics so I would know what was going on with my car and I wouldn’t have to go into the garage squeaking like a little woman.” She squeaked like a little woman, “Oh, there’s this funny noise and tell me what’s under the hood, please? Good heavens, it’s an engine! Well, so I wouldn’t do that I took this course and I got so interested I took another course and I was actually thinking about becoming a mechanic. I was going to get down in the grease pit. But really I’m too conventional. I couldn’t face the hassle. I’d rather teach French.”

  She put Lynnette on her hip and walked over to look at the engine.

  “Ross? You going to steam-clean this?”

  “Yeah,” said Ross. “I’ll have to see about renting one.”

  “Also, I lived with a guy who was involved with cars and you know what he did? When he had to rent a steamer, he used to ask around to see if anybody else wanted it done, and then he’d charge them ten dollars. So he made money on the rent.”

  “Yeah,” Ross said.

  “Just suggesting. You’ll need a different radiator brace, won’t you? V-8s mount the radiator behind the brace.”

  After that Ross came out of his sulk—he saw he might as well—and started showing her things.

  • • •

  “Come on, Colin,” Nancy said. “Glenna says we need more whipping cream. We can go in my car. You hold Lynnette.”

  “I haven’t got a shirt on,” said Colin.

  “Lynnette doesn’t care. I’ll go into the store. Come on. Glenna wants it now.”

  In the car she said, “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I figured that.�
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  “It’s about Ross. About what he’s doing.”

  “You mean him going around in those hats? What? What did Davidson say?”

  “I don’t mean anything about that. I mean that car.”

  Colin was relieved. “What about the car?”

  “That engine. Colin, that engine is too big. He can’t put that engine in that body.”

  Her voice was dramatically deep and calm.

  “Ross knows quite a bit about cars,” Colin said.

  “I believe you. I never said Ross was dumb. He does know. But that engine, if he puts it in, I’m afraid it will simply break the drive shaft—not immediately but sooner or later. And sooner rather than later. Kids do that a lot. They put in a big powerful engine for the pickup and speed they want, and one day, you know, really, it can take the whole car over. It literally flips it over. Breaks the shaft. The thing is, with kids, something else often goes wrong first or they wreck it up. So he could have done this before and gotten away with it. Thought he was getting away with it. I’m not just doing the big expert, Colin. I swear to God I’m not.”

  “Okay,” said Colin. “You’re not.”

  “You know I’m not? Colin?”

  “I know you’re not.”

  “I just could not bring myself to say anything to Ross. He is so steamed up about it. That’s what they say here, isn’t it? Steamed up? I couldn’t come out with a major criticism like that. Anyway, he might not believe me.”

  “I don’t know if he’d believe me,” said Colin. “Look. You are dead sure?”

  “Don’t say dead!” Nancy begged him, in that phony-sounding voice he had to believe was sincere. “I am absolutely and undeniably sure and if I wasn’t I would not have opened my big mouth.”

  “He knows he’s putting in a bigger engine. He knows that. He must figure it’s all right.”

  “He figures wrong. Colin, I love Ross. I don’t want to upset his project.”

  “You better not let Sylvia hear you say that.”

  “Say what? She doesn’t want him killed, either.”

  “That you love Ross.”

  “I love you all, Colin,” said Nancy, pulling into the Mac’s Milk lot. “I really do.”

  “This is what I did, I’ll tell you,” said Sylvia, speaking mostly to Nancy, after a fourth glass of rosé. “I gave myself a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party. What do you think of that?”

  “Marvellous!” said Nancy. Sylvia had just told her the joke about the black man and white man at the urinal, and Colin could see that it had given her some difficulty.

  “I mean, without a husband. I mean, he wasn’t still living with me. I wasn’t still living with him. He was still living. In Peterborough. He isn’t still living now. But I said, ‘I have been married twenty-five years, and I still am married. So don’t I deserve to have a party?’ ”

  Nancy said, “Certainly.”

  They were sitting at the picnic table out in the back yard, just a few steps from the kitchen door, under the blossoming black-cherry tree. Glenna had spread a white cloth and used her wedding china.

  “This will be a patio by next year,” Glenna said.

  “See,” said Sylvia. “If you had’ve used plastic, you could scoop all this up now and put it in the garbage.”

  Eddy lit Sylvia’s cigarette. He himself had not stopped smoking throughout the meal.

  Nancy picked a soggy strawberry out of the ruined crown of meringue. “It’s lovely here now,” she said.

  “At least no bugs yet,” said Glenna.

  Sylvia said, “True. Strawberries would have been a lot cheaper by next week, but you couldn’t’ve ate out here because of the bugs.”

  That seemed funny to Nancy. She started laughing, and Eddy joined in. For some unstated reason—with him it would have to be unstated—he admired Nancy and all she did. Sylvia, bewildered but good-humored, with her face as pink as a tissue-paper rose starting to look pretty crumpled round the edges, said, “I don’t see what’s funny. What did I say?”

  “Go on,” said Ross.

  “Go on what?”

  “Go on and tell about the anniversary party.”

  “Oh, Ross,” said Glenna. She got up and turned on the lights in the colored plastic lanterns that were strung along the wall of the house. “I should have made Colin get up and put some in the cherry tree,” she said.

  “Well, Colin was thirteen at the time and Ross was twelve,” Sylvia said. “Oh, everybody knows this backwards and forwards except you, Nancy. So, twenty-five years married and my oldest kid is thirteen? You could say that was the problem. Such a long time without kids, we were just counting on never having any. First counting on having them and then being disappointed and then getting used to it, and being used to it so long, over ten years married, and I’m pregnant! That was Colin. And not even twelve months later, eleven months and three days later, another one! That was Ross!”

  “Whoopee!” said Ross.

  “The poor man, I guess he got scared from then on I would just be dropping babies every time he turned around, so he took off.”

  “He was transferred,” Colin said. “He worked for the railway, and when they took off the passenger train through here they transferred him to Peterborough.”

  He had not many memories of his father. Once, walking down the street, his father had offered him a stick of gum. There was a kindly, official air about this gesture—his father was wearing his uniform at the time—rather than a paternal intimacy. Colin had the impression that Sylvia couldn’t manage sons and a husband, somehow—that she had mislaid her marriage without exactly meaning to.

  “He didn’t just work for the railway,” said Sylvia. “He was a conductor on it. After he first was transferred, he used to come back sometimes on the bus, but he hated travelling on the bus and he couldn’t drive a car. He just gradually quit visiting and he died just before he would’ve retired. So maybe he would’ve come back then, who knows?”

  (It was Glenna’s idea, relayed to Colin, that all this easygoing talk about throwing her own anniversary party was just Sylvia’s bluff—that she had asked or told her husband to come, and he hadn’t.)

  “Well, never mind him, it was a party,” Sylvia said. “I asked a lot of people. I would’ve asked Eddy but I didn’t know him then so well as I do now. I thought he was too high class.” She jabbed Eddy’s arm with her elbow. Everybody knew it was his second wife who had been too high class. “It was August, the weather was good, we were able to be outside, like we are here. I had trestle tables set up and I had a washtub full of potato salad. I had spareribs and fried chicken and desserts and pies and an anniversary cake I got iced by the bakery. And two fruit punches, one with and one without. The one with got a lot more with as the evening wore on and people kept pouring in vodka and brandy and whatever they had and I didn’t know it!”

  Ross said, “Everybody thought Colin got into the punch!”

  “Well, he didn’t,” said Sylvia. “That was a lie.”

  Earlier, Colin and Nancy had cleared the table together, and when they were alone in the kitchen Nancy said, “Did you say anything to Ross?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You will, though? Colin? It’s serious.”

  Glenna coming in with a platter of chicken bones heard that, though she didn’t say anything.

  Colin said, “Nancy thinks Ross is making a mistake with his car.”

  “A fatal mistake,” said Nancy. Colin went back outside, leaving her talking in a lowered, urgent voice to Glenna.

  “And we had music,” Sylvia said. “We were dancing on the sidewalk round the front, as well as partying at the back. We had records playing in my front room and the windows open. The night constable came down and he was dancing along with us! It was just after they put the pink streetlights up on that street, so I said, ‘Look at the lights they put up for my party!’ Where are you going?” she said to Colin, who had stood up.

  “I want to show Eddy something.” />
  Eddy stood up, looking pleased, and padded around the table. He was wearing brown-and-yellow checked pants, not too bold a check, a yellow sports shirt and dark-red neckerchief. “Doesn’t he look nice?” said Sylvia, not for the first time. “Eddy, you’re such a dresser! Colin just don’t want to hear me tell the rest.”

  “The rest is the best,” Ross said. “Coming up!”

  “I want to show Eddy something and ask him something,” Colin said. “In private.”

  “This part of it is like something you would read in the newspaper,” said Sylvia.

  Glenna said, “It’s horrible.”

  “He’s going to show Eddy his precious grass,” said Sylvia. “Plus, he really does want to get away from me telling it. Why? Wasn’t his fault. Well, partly. But it’s the kind of thing has happened over and over again with others, only the outcome has been worse. Tragic.”

  “It sure could’ve been tragic,” Ross said, laughing.

  Colin, guiding Eddy around to the front of the house, could hearRoss laughing. He got Eddy past the string fence and the new grass. In the front yard there was some light from the streetlight, not really enough. He turned on the light by the front door.

  “Now. How good can you see Ross’s car?” Colin said.

  Eddy said, “I seen it all before.”

  “Wait.”

  Colin’s car was parked so that the lights would shine where he wanted them to, and he had the keys in his pocket. He got in and started the motor and turned on the lights.

  “There,” he said. “Take a look at the engine now while I got the lights on.”

  Eddy said, “Okay,” and walked over into the car light and stood contemplating the engine.

  “Now look at the body.”

  “Yeah,” said Eddy, doing a quarter-turn but not stooping to look. In those clothes, he wouldn’t want to get too close to anything.

  Colin turned off the lights and the motor and got out of the car. In the dark he heard Ross laughing again.

  “Somebody was saying to me that the engine was too big to be put in there,” Colin said. “This person said it would break the universal and the drive shaft would go and the car would somersault. Now, I don’t know enough about cars. Is that true?”