My mother went back to her old duties at the theater. At first she may have worked as she had before, as a volunteer usher, but by the time I was in school she had a real job, with pay, and year-round responsibilities. She was the business manager. The theater survived, through various ups and downs, and is still going now.
Neal didn’t believe in funerals, so he didn’t attend Caro’s. He never saw Brent. He wrote a letter – I found this out much later – saying that since he did not intend to act as a father it would be better for him to bow out at the start. I never mentioned him to Brent, because I thought it would upset my mother. Also because Brent showed so little sign of being like him – like Neal – and seemed, in fact, so much more like my father that I really wondered about what was going on around the time he was conceived. My father has never said anything about this and never would. He treats Brent just as he treats me, but he is the kind of man who would do that anyway.
He and Josie have not had any children of their own, but I don’t think that bothers them. Josie is the only person who ever talks about Caro, and even she doesn’t do it often. She does say that my father doesn’t hold my mother responsible. He has also said that he must have been sort of a stick-in-the-mud when my mother wanted more excitement in her life. He needed a shaking-up, and he got one. There’s no use being sorry about it. Without the shaking-up, he would never have found Josie and the two of them would not have been so happy now.
“Which two?” I might say, just to derail him, and he would staunchly say, “Josie. Josie, of course.”
My mother cannot be made to recall any of those times, and I don’t bother her with them. I know that she has driven down the lane we lived on, and found it quite changed, with the sort of trendy houses you see now, put up on unproductive land. She mentioned this with the slight scorn that such houses evoke in her. I went down the lane myself but did not tell anyone. All the eviscerating that is done in families these days strikes me as a mistake.
Even where the gravel pit was a house now stands, the ground beneath it levelled.
I have a partner, Ruthann, who is younger than I am but, I think, somewhat wiser. Or at least more optimistic about what she calls routing out my demons. I would never have got in touch with Neal if it had not been for her urging. Of course, for a long time I had no way, just as I had no thought, of getting in touch. It was he who finally wrote to me. A brief note of congratulations, he said, after seeing my picture in the Alumni Gazette. What he was doing looking through the Alumni Gazette I have no idea. I had received one of those academic honors that mean something in a restricted circle and little anywhere else.
He was living hardly fifty miles away from where I teach, which also happens to be where I went to college. I wondered if he had been there at that time. So close. Had he become a scholar?
At first I had no intention of replying to the note, but I told Ruthann and she said that I should think about writing back. So the upshot was that I sent him an e-mail, and arrangements were made. I was to meet him in his town, in the unthreatening surroundings of a university cafeteria. I told myself that if he looked unbearable – I did not quite know what I meant by this – I could just walk on through.
He was shorter than he used to be, as adults we remember from childhood usually are. His hair was thin, and trimmed close to his head. He got me a cup of tea. He was drinking tea himself.
What did he do for a living?
He said that he tutored students in preparation for exams. Also, he helped them write their essays. Sometimes, you might say, he wrote those essays. Of course, he charged.
“It’s no way to get to be a millionaire, I can tell you.”
He lived in a dump. Or a semi-respectable dump. He liked it. He looked for clothes at the Sally Ann. That was okay too.
“Suits my principles.”
I did not congratulate him on any of this, but, to tell the truth, I doubt that he expected me to.
“Anyway, I don’t think my lifestyle is so interesting. I think you might want to know how it happened.”
I could not figure out how to speak.
“I was stoned,” he said. “And, furthermore, I’m not a swimmer. Not many swimming pools around where I grew up. I’d have drowned, too. Is that what you wanted to know?”
I said that he was not really the one that I was wondering about.
Then he became the third person I’d asked, “What do you think Caro had in mind?”
The counsellor had said that we couldn’t know. “Likely she herself didn’t know what she wanted. Attention? I don’t think she meant to drown herself. Attention to how bad she was feeling?”
Ruthann had said, “To make your mother do what she wanted? Make her smarten up and see that she had to go back to your father?”
Neal said, “It doesn’t matter. Maybe she thought she could paddle better than she could. Maybe she didn’t know how heavy winter clothes can get. Or that there wasn’t anybody in a position to help her.”
He said to me, “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”
I said that I had considered what he was saying, but no.
“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”
Now, good-bye.
I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.
The Eye
Alice Munro
Alice Munro (b. 1931) is a Canadian short story writer and winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, which honours her complete body of work. She has been awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Award for fiction three times, the Giller Prize twice and is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Fiction. She was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for her collection, The Love of a Good Woman.
When I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.
Then a year later a baby girl appeared, and there was another fuss but more subdued than with the first one.
Up until the time of the first baby I had not been aware of ever feeling different from the way my mother said I felt. And up until that time the whole house was full of my mother, of her footsteps her voice her powdery yet ominous smell that inhabited all the rooms; even when she wasn’t in them.
Why do I say ominous? I didn’t feel frightened. It wasn’t that my mother actually told me what I was to feel about things. She was an authority on that without having to question a thing. Not just in the case of a baby brother but in the matter of Red River cereal which was good for me and so I must be fond of it. And in my interpretation of the picture that hung at the foot of my bed, showing Jesus suffering the little children to come unto him. Suffering meant something different in those days, but that was not what we concentrated on. My mother pointed out the little girl half hiding round a corner because she wanted to come to Jesus but was too shy. That was me, my mother said, and I supposed it was though I wouldn’t have figured it out without her telling me and I rather wished it wasn’t so.
The thing I really felt miserable about was Alice in Wonderland huge and trapped in the rabbit hole, but I laughed because my mother seemed delighted.
It was with my brother’s coming, though, and the endless carryings-on about how he was some sort of present for me, that I began to accept how largely my mother’s notions about me might differ from my own.
I suppose all this was making me ready for
Sadie when she came to work for us. My mother had shrunk to whatever territory she had with the babies. With her not around so much, I could think about what was true and what wasn’t. I knew enough not to speak about this to anybody.
The most unusual thing about Sadie – though it was not a thing stressed in our house – was that she was a celebrity. Our town had a radio station where she played her guitar and sang the opening welcome song which was her own composition.
“Hello, hello, hello, everybody—”
And half an hour later it was, “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, everybody.” In between she sang songs that were requested, as well as some she picked out herself. The more sophisticated people in town tended to joke about her songs and about the whole station which was said to be the smallest one in Canada. Those people listened to a Toronto station that broadcast popular songs of the day – three little fishes and a momma fishy too – and Jim Hunter hollering out the desperate war news. But people on the farms liked the local station and the kind of songs Sadie sang. Her voice was strong and sad and she sang about loneliness and grief.
Leanin’ on the old top rail,
In a big corral.
Lookin’ down the twilight trail
For my long lost pal –
Most of the farms in our part of the country had been cleared and settled around a hundred and fifty years ago, and you could look out from almost any farmhouse and see another farmhouse only a few fields away. Yet the songs the farmers wanted were all about lone cowhands, the lure and disappointment of far-off places, the bitter crimes that led to criminals dying with their mothers’ names on their lips, or God’s.
This was what Sadie sang with such sorrow in a full-throated alto, but in her job with us she was full of energy and confidence, happy to talk and mostly to talk about herself. There was usually nobody to talk to but me. Her jobs and my mother’s kept them divided most of the time and somehow I don’t think they would have enjoyed talking together anyway. My mother was a serious person as I have indicated, one who used to teach school before she taught me. She maybe would have liked Sadie to be somebody she could help, teaching her not to say “youse.” But Sadie did not give much indication that she wanted the help anybody could offer, or to speak in any way that was different from how she had always spoken.
After dinner, which was the noon meal, Sadie and I were alone in the kitchen. My mother took time off for a nap and if she was lucky the babies napped too. When she got up she put on a different sort of dress as if she expected a leisurely afternoon, even though there would certainly be more diapers to change and also some of that unseemly business that I tried never to catch sight of, when the littlest one guzzled at a breast.
My father took a nap too – maybe fifteen minutes on the porch with the Saturday Evening Post over his face, before he went back to the barn.
Sadie heated water on the stove and washed the dishes with me helping and the blinds down to keep out the heat. When we were finished she mopped the floor and I dried it, by a method I had invented – skating around and around it on rags. Then we took down the coils of sticky yellow flypaper that had been put up after breakfast and were already heavy with dead or buzzing nearly dead black flies, and hung up the fresh coils which would be full of newly dead ones by suppertime. All this while Sadie was telling me about her life.
I didn’t make easy judgments about ages then. People were either children or grown-ups and I thought her a grown-up. Maybe she was sixteen, maybe eighteen or twenty. Whatever her age, she announced more than once that she was not in any hurry to get married.
She went to dances every weekend but she went by herself. By herself and for herself, she said.
She told me about the dance halls. There was one in town, off the main street, where the curling rink was in the winter. You paid a dime for a dance, then went up and danced on a platform with people gawking all around, not that she cared. She always liked to pay her own dime, not to be beholden. But sometimes a fellow got to her first. He asked if she wanted to dance and the first thing she said was, Can you? Can you dance? she asked him bluntly. Then he would look at her funny and say yes, meaning why else would he be here? And it would turn out usually that what he meant by dance was shuffling around on two feet with his sweaty big meats of hands grabbing at her. Sometimes she just broke off and left him stranded, danced by herself – which was what she liked to do anyway. She finished up the dance that had been paid for, and if the moneymaker objected and tried to make her pay for two when it was only one, she told him that was enough out of him. They could all laugh at her dancing by herself if they liked.
The other dance hall was just out of town on the highway. You paid at the door there and it wasn’t for one dance but the whole night. The place was called the Royal-T. She paid her own way there too. There was generally a better class of dancer, but she did try to get an idea of how they managed before she let them take her out on the floor. They were usually town fellows while the ones at the other place were country. Better on their feet – the town ones – but it was not always the feet you had to look out for. It was where they wanted to get hold of you. Sometimes she had to read them the riot act and tell them what she would do to them if they didn’t quit it. She let them know she’d come there to dance and paid her own way to do it. Furthermore she knew where to jab them. That would straighten them out. Sometimes they were good dancers and she got to enjoy herself. Then when they played the last dance she bolted for home.
She wasn’t like some, she said. She didn’t mean to get caught.
Caught. When she said that, I saw a big wire net coming down, some evil little creatures wrapping it around and around you and choking you so you could never get out. Sadie must have seen something like this on my face because she said not to be scared.
“There’s nothing in this world to be scared of, just look out for yourself.”
“You and Sadie talk together a lot,” my mother said.
I knew something was coming that I should watch for but I didn’t know what.
“You like her, don’t you?”
I said yes.
“Well of course you do. I do too.”
I hoped that was going to be all and for a moment I thought it was.
Then, “You and I don’t get so much time now we have the babies. They don’t give us much time, do they?
“But we do love them, don’t we?”
Quickly I said yes.
She said, “Truly?”
She wasn’t going to stop till I said truly, so I said it.
My mother wanted something very badly. Was it nice friends? Women who played bridge and had husbands who went to work in suits with vests? Not quite, and no hope of that anyway. Was it me as I used to be, with my sausage curls that I didn’t mind standing still for, and my expert Sunday School recitations? No time for her to manage that anymore. And something in me was turning traitorous, though she didn’t know why, and I didn’t know why either. I hadn’t made any town friends at Sunday School. Instead, I worshipped Sadie. I heard my mother say that to my father. “She worships Sadie.”
My father said Sadie was a godsend. What did that mean? He sounded cheerful. Maybe it meant he wasn’t going to take anybody’s side.
“I wish we had proper sidewalks for her,” my mother said. “Maybe if we had proper sidewalks she could learn to roller-skate and make friends.”
I did wish for roller skates. But now without any idea why, I knew that I was never going to admit it.
Then my mother said something about it being better when school started. Something about me being better or something concerning Sadie that would be better. I didn’t want to hear.
Sadie was teaching me some of her songs and I knew I wasn’t very good at singing. I hoped that wasn’t what had to get better or else stop. I truly did not want it to stop.
My father didn’t have much to say. I was my mother’s business, except for later on when I got really mouthy and had to be punished. He wa
s waiting for my brother to get older and be his. A boy would not be so complicated.
And sure enough my brother wasn’t. He would grow up to be just fine.
Now school has started. It started some weeks ago, before the leaves turned red and yellow. Now they were mostly gone. I am not wearing my school coat but my good coat, the one with the dark velvet cuffs and collar. My mother is wearing the coat she wears to church, and a turban covers most of her hair.
My mother is driving to whatever place it is that we are going to. She doesn’t drive often, and her driving is always more stately and yet uncertain than my father’s. She peeps her horn at any curve.
“Now,” she says, but it takes a little while for her to get the car into place.
“Here we are then.” Her voice seems meant to be encouraging. She touches my hand to give me a chance to hold hers, but I pretend not to notice and she takes her hand away.
The house has no driveway or even a sidewalk. It’s decent but quite plain. My mother has raised her gloved hand to knock but it turns out we don’t have to. The door is opened for us. My mother has just started to say something encouraging to me – something like, It will go more quickly than you think – but she doesn’t get finished. The tone in which she spoke to me had been somewhat stern but slightly comforting. It changes when the door is opened into something more subdued, softened as if she was bowing her head.
The door has been opened to let some people go out, not just to let us go in. One of the women going out calls back over her shoulder in a voice that does not try to be soft at all.
“It’s her that she worked for, and that little girl.”
Then a woman who is rather dressed up comes and speaks to my mother and helps her off with her coat. That done, my mother takes my coat off and says to the woman that I was especially fond of Sadie. She hopes it was all right to bring me.
“Oh the dear little thing,” the woman says and my mother touches me lightly to get me to say hello.
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