Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

  “I love my love with an R, because he is ruthless. His name is Rex, and he lives in a—restaurant.”

  “I love my love with an A, because he is absentminded. His name is Arthur, and he lives in an ash can.”

  “Why, Et,” Arthur said. “I never suspected. But I don’t know if I like about the ash can.”

  “You would think we were all twelve years old,” said Char.

  AFTER THE BLUEING episode Char became popular. She became involved in the productions of the Amateur Dramatic Society and the Oratorio Society, although she was never much of an actress or a singer. She was always the cold and beautiful heroine in the plays, or the brittle exquisite young society woman. She learned to smoke, because of having to do it onstage. In one play Et never forgot, she was a statue. Or rather, she played a girl who had to pretend to be a statue, so that a young man fell in love with her and later discovered, to his confusion and perhaps disappointment, that she was only human. Char had to stand for eight minutes perfectly still onstage, draped in white crêpe and showing the audience her fine indifferent profile. Everybody marvelled at how she did it.

  The moving spirit behind the Amateur Dramatic Society and the Oratorio Society was a high-school teacher new to Mock Hill, Arthur Comber. He taught Et history in her last year. Everybody said he gave her A’s because he was in love with her sister, but Et knew it was because she worked harder than she ever had before; she learned the history of North America as she had never learned anything in her life. Missouri Compromise. Mackenzie to the Pacific, 1793. She never forgot.

  Arthur Comber was thirty or so, with a high bald forehead, a red face in spite of not drinking (that later paled), and a clumsy, excited manner. He knocked a bottle of ink off his desk and permanently stained the History Room floor. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he said, crouching down to the spreading ink, flapping at it with his handkerchief. Et imitated that. “Oh dear, oh dear!” “Oh, good heavens!” All his flustery exclamations and miscalculated gestures. Then, when he took her essay at the door, his red face shining with eagerness, giving her work and herself such a welcome, she felt sorry. That was why she worked so hard, she thought, to make up for mocking him.

  He had a black scholar’s gown he wore over his suit, to teach in. Even when he wasn’t wearing it, Et could see it on him. Hurrying along the street to one of his innumerable, joyfully undertaken obligations, flapping away at the Oratorio singers, jumping onstage—so the whole floor trembled—to demonstrate something to the actors in a play, he seemed to her to have those long ridiculous crow’s wings flapping after him, to be as different from other men, as absurd yet intriguing, as the priest from Holy Cross. Char made him give up the gown altogether, after they were married. She had heard that he tripped in it, running up the steps of the school. He had gone sprawling. That finished it, she ripped it up.

  “I was afraid one of these days you’d really get hurt.”

  But Arthur said, “Ah. You thought I looked like a fool.”

  Char didn’t deny it, though his eyes on her, his wide smile, were begging her to. Her mouth twitched at the corners, in spite of herself. Contempt. Fury. Et saw, they both saw, a great wave of that go over her before she could smile at him and say, “Don’t be silly.” Then her smile and her eyes were trying to hold on to him, trying to clutch onto his goodness (which she saw, as much as anybody else did, but which finally only enraged her, Et believed, like everything else about him, like his sweaty forehead and his galloping optimism), before that boiling wave could come back again, altogether carry her away.

  Char had a miscarriage during the first year of her marriage and was sick for a long time afterwards. She was never pregnant again. Et by this time was not living in the house; she had her own place on the Square, but she was there one time on washday, helping Char haul the sheets off the line. Their parents were both dead by that time—their mother had died before and their father after the wedding—but it looked to Et like sheets for two beds.

  “It gives you plenty of wash.”

  “What does?”

  “Changing sheets like you do.”

  Et was often there in the evening, playing rummy with Arthur while Char, in the other room, picked at the piano in the dark. Or talking and reading library books with Char, while Arthur marked his papers. Arthur walked her home. “Why do you have to go off and live by yourself anyway?” he scolded her. “You ought to come back and live with us.”

  “Three’s a crowd.”

  “It wouldn’t be for long. Some man is going to come along someday and fall hard.”

  “If he was such a fool as to do that I’d never fall for him, so we’d be back where we started.”

  “I was a fool that fell for Char, and she ended up having me.”

  Just the way he said her name indicated that Char was above, outside, all ordinary considerations—a marvel, a mystery. No one could hope to solve her, they were lucky just being allowed to contemplate her. Et was on the verge of saying, “She swallowed blueing once over a man that wouldn’t have her,” but she thought, What would be the good of it, Char would only seem more splendid to him, like a heroine out of Shakespeare. He squeezed Et’s waist as if to stress their companionable puzzlement, involuntary obeisance, before her sister. She felt afterwards the bumpy pressure of his fingers as if they had left dents just above where her skirt fastened. It had felt like somebody absentmindedly trying out the keys of a piano.

  ET HAD set up in the dressmaking business. She had a long narrow room on the Square, once a shop, where she did all her fitting, sewing, cutting, pressing, and, behind a curtain, her sleeping and cooking. She could lie in bed and look at the squares of pressed tin on her ceiling, their flower pattern, all her own. Arthur had not liked her taking up dressmaking because he thought she was too smart for it. All the hard work she had done in History had given him an exaggerated idea of her brains. “Besides,” she told him, “it takes more brains to cut and fit, if you do it right, than to teach people about the War of 1812. Because, once you learn that, it’s learned and isn’t going to change you. Whereas every article of clothing you make is an entirely new proposition.”

  “Still it’s a surprise,” said Arthur, “to see the way you settle down.”

  It surprised everybody, but not Et herself. She made the change easily, from a girl turning cartwheels to a town fixture. She drove the other dressmakers out of business. They had been meek, unimportant creatures anyway, going around to people’s houses, sewing in back rooms, and being grateful for meals. Only one serious rival appeared in all Et’s years, and that was a Finnish woman who called herself a designer. Some people gave her a try, because people are never satisfied, but it soon came out she was all style and no fit. Et never mentioned her, she let people find out for themselves; but afterwards, when this woman had left town and gone to Toronto—where, from what Et had seen on the streets, nobody knew a good fit from a bad—Et did not restrain herself. She would say to a customer she was fitting, “I see you’re still wearing that herringbone my foreigner friend tacked together for you. I saw you on the street.”

  “Oh, I know,” the woman would say. “But I do have to wear it out.”

  “You can’t see yourself from behind anyway, what’s the difference.”

  Customers took this kind of thing from Et, came to expect it, even. She’s a terror, they said about her, Et’s a terror. She had them at a disadvantage, she had them in their slips and corsets. Ladies who looked quite firm and powerful outside were here immobilized, apologetic, exposing such trembly, meek-looking thighs squeezed together by corsets, such long sad breast creases, bellies blown up and torn by children and operations.

  Et always closed her front curtains tight, pinning the crack.

  “That’s to keep the men from peeking.”

  Ladies laughed nervously.

  “That’s to keep Jimmy Saunders from stumping over to get an eyeful.”

  Jimmy Saunders was a World War I veteran who had a little shop next to E
t’s, harness and leather goods.

  “Oh, Et. Jimmy Saunders has a wooden leg.”

  “He hasn’t got wooden eyes. Or anything else that I know of.”

  “Et, you’re terrible.”

  ET KEPT Char beautifully dressed. The two steadiest criticisms of Char, in Mock Hill, were that she dressed too elegantly, and that she smoked. It was because she was a teacher’s wife that she should have refrained from doing either of these things, but Arthur of course let her do anything she liked, even buying her a cigarette holder so she could look like a lady in a magazine. She smoked at a high-school dance, and wore a backless satin evening dress, and danced with a boy who had got a high-school girl pregnant, and it was all the same to Arthur. He did not get to be Principal. Twice the school board passed him over and brought in somebody from outside, and when they finally gave him the job, in 1942, it was only temporarily and because so many teachers were away at war.

  Char fought hard all these years to keep her figure. Nobody but Et and Arthur knew what effort that cost her. Nobody but Et knew it all. Both of their parents had been heavy, and Char had inherited the tendency, though Et was always as thin as a stick. Char did exercises and drank a glass of warm water before every meal. But sometimes she went on eating binges. Et had known her to eat a dozen cream puffs one after the other, a pound of peanut brittle, or a whole lemon-meringue pie. Then pale and horrified she took down Epsom salts, three or four or five times the prescribed amount. For two or three days she would be sick, dehydrated, purging her sins, as Et said. During these periods she could not look at food. Et would have to come and cook Arthur’s supper. Arthur did not know about the pie or the peanut brittle or whatever it was, or about the Epsom salts. He thought she had gained a pound or two and was going through a fanatical phase of dieting. He worried about her.

  “What is the difference, what does it matter?” he would say to Et. “She would still be beautiful.”

  “She won’t do herself any harm,” said Et, enjoying her food, and glad to see that worry hadn’t put him off his. She always made him good suppers.

  IT WAS the week before the Labor Day weekend. Blaikie had gone to Toronto—for a day or two, he said.

  “It’s quiet without him,” said Arthur.

  “I never noticed he was such a conversationalist,” Et said.

  “I only mean in the way that you get used to somebody.”

  “Maybe we ought to get unused to him,” said Et.

  Arthur was unhappy. He was not going back to the school; he had obtained a leave of absence until after Christmas. Nobody believed he would go back then.

  “I suppose he has his own plans for the winter,” he said.

  “He may have his own plans for right now. You know, I have my customers from the hotel. I have my friends. Ever since I went on that excursion, I hear things.”

  She never knew where she got the inspiration to say what she said, where it came from. She had not planned it at all, yet it came so easily, believably.

  “I hear he’s taken up with a well-to-do woman down at the hotel.”

  Arthur was the one to take an interest, not Char.

  “A widow?”

  “Twice, I believe. The same as he is. And she has the money from both. It’s been suspected for some time and she was talking about it openly. He never said anything, though. He never said anything to you, did he, Char?”

  “No,” said Char.

  “I heard this afternoon that now he’s gone, and she’s gone. It wouldn’t be the first time he pulled something like this. Char and I remember.”

  Then Arthur wanted to know what she meant and she told him the story of the lady ventriloquist, remembering even the names of the dolls, though of course she left out all about Char. Char sat through this, even contributing a bit.

  “They might come back but my guess is they’d be embarrassed. He’d be embarrassed. He’d be embarrassed to come here, anyway.”

  “Why?” said Arthur, who had cheered up a little through the ventriloquist story. “We never set down any rule against a man getting married.”

  Char got up and went into the house. After a while they heard the sound of the piano.

  THE QUESTION often crossed Et’s mind in later years—what did she mean to do about this story when Blaikie got back? For she had no reason to believe he would not come back. The answer was that she had not made any plans at all. She had not planned anything. She supposed she might have wanted to make trouble between him and Char—make Char pick a fight with him, her suspicions roused even if rumors had not been borne out, make Char read what he might do again in the light of what he had done before. She did not know what she wanted. Only to throw things into confusion, for she believed then that somebody had to, before it was too late.

  Arthur made as good a recovery as could be expected at his age; he went back to teaching history to the senior classes, working half-days until it was time for him to retire. Et kept up her own place on the Square and tried to get up and do some cooking and cleaning for Arthur, as well. Finally, after he retired, she moved back, into the house, keeping the other place only for business purposes. “Let people jaw all they like,” she said. “At our age.”

  Arthur lived on and on, though he was frail and slow. He walked down to the Square once a day, dropped in on Et, went and sat in the park. The hotel closed down and was sold again. There was a story that it was going to be opened up and used as a rehabilitation center for drug addicts, but the town got up a petition and that fell through. Eventually it was torn down.

  Et’s eyesight was not as good as it used to be, she had to slow down. She had to turn people away. Still she worked, every day. In the evenings Arthur watched television or read, but she sat out on the porch, in the warm weather, or in the dining room in winter, rocking and resting her eyes. She came and watched the news with him, and made him his hot drink, cocoa or tea.

  THERE WAS no trace of the bottle. Et went and looked in the cupboard as soon as she could—having run to the house in response to Arthur’s early-morning call, and found the doctor, old McClain, coming in at the same time. She ran out and looked in the garbage, but she never found it. Could Char have found the time to bury it? She was lying on the bed, fully and nicely dressed, her hair piled up. There was no fuss about the cause of death as there is in stories. She had complained of weakness to Arthur the night before, after Et had gone; she had said she thought she was getting the flu. So the old doctor said heart, and let it go. Nor could Et ever know. Would what was in that bottle leave a body undisfigured, as Char’s was? Perhaps what was in the bottle was not what it said. She was not even sure that it had been there that last evening; she had been too carried away with what she was saying to go and look, as she usually did. Perhaps it had been thrown out earlier and Char had taken something else, pills maybe. Perhaps it really was her heart. All that purging would have weakened anybody’s heart.

  Her funeral was on Labor Day and Blaikie Noble came, cutting out his bus tour. Arthur in his grief had forgotten about Et’s story, was not surprised to see Blaikie there. He had come back to Mock Hill on the day Char was found. A few hours too late, like some story. Et in her natural confusion could not remember what it was. Romeo and Juliet, she thought later. But Blaikie of course did not do away with himself afterwards; he went back to Toronto. For a year or two he sent Christmas cards, then was not heard of anymore. Et would not be surprised if her story of his marrying had not come true in the end. Only her timing was mistaken.

  Sometimes Et had it on the tip of her tongue to say to Arthur, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.” She didn’t believe she was going to let him die without knowing. He shouldn’t be allowed. He kept a picture of Char on his bureau. It was the one taken of her in her costume for that play, where she played the statue-girl. But Et let it go, day to day. She and Arthur still played rummy and kept up a bit of garden, along with raspberry canes. If they had been married, people would have said they were very happy
.

  The Ottawa Valley

  I THINK of my mother sometimes in department stores. I don’t know why, I was never in one with her; their plenitude, their sober bustle, it seems to me, would have satisfied her. I think of her of course when I see somebody on the street who has Parkinson’s disease, and more and more often lately when I look in the mirror. Also in Union Station, Toronto, because the first time I was there I was with her, and my little sister. It was one summer during the War, we waited between trains; we were going home with her, with my mother, to her old home in the Ottawa Valley.

  A cousin she was planning to meet, for a between-trains visit, did not show up. “She probably couldn’t get away,” said my mother, sitting in a leather chair in the darkly panelled Ladies’ Lounge, which is now boarded up. “There was probably something to do that she couldn’t leave to anybody else.” This cousin was a legal secretary, and she worked for a senior partner in what my mother always called, in her categorical way, “the city’s leading law firm.” Once, she had come to visit us, wearing a large black hat and a black suit, her lips and nails like rubies. She did not bring her husband. He was an alcoholic. My mother always mentioned that her husband was an alcoholic, immediately after she had stated that she held an important job with the city’s leading law firm. The two things were seen to balance each other, to be tied together in some inevitable and foreboding way. In the same way, my mother would say of a family we knew that they had everything money could buy but their only son was an epileptic, or that the parents of the only person from our town who had become moderately famous, a pianist named Mary Renwick, had said that they would give all their daughter’s fame for a pair of baby hands. A pair of baby hands? Luck was not without its shadow, in her universe.