by Alice Munro
Aubreyville was a limestone town, built along the river. The old stove foundry, out of which Sophie’s father had made his money, was still there on the riverbank. It had been partly converted into a crafts center, where people blew glass and wove shawls and made bird-houses, which they sold on the premises. The name Vogelsang, the German name that had also appeared on the stoves and had contributed to the downfall of the company during the First World War, could still be read, carved in stone, over the door. The handsome house where Sophie had been born had become a nursing home.
The catering woman lived on one of the new streets of town—the streets that Sophie hated. The street was recently paved, broad and black, with smooth curbs. There were no sidewalks. No trees either, no hedges or fences, just some tiny ornamental shrubs with a wire roll to protect them. Split-level and ranch-style houses alternated. Some of the driveways were paved with the glittering white crushed stone called, around Aubreyville, “white marble.” On one lawn, three spotted plastic deer were resting; at a doorway, a little black boy held up a lantern for coaches. An arrangement of pink-and-gray-speckled boulders prevented people from crossing a corner lot.
“Plastic rocks,” said Isabel. “I wonder if they have weights or are stuck into the ground?”
The catering woman brought the cake out to the car. She was a stout, dark-haired, rather pretty woman in her forties, with heavy green eye shadow and a perfect, gleaming, bouffant hairstyle.
“I’ve been on the lookout for you,” she said. “I have to run, some pies over to the Legion. You want to take a look at this and see if it’s okay?”
“I’m sure it’s lovely,” said Isabel, getting out her wallet. Denise took the cake box onto her lap.
“I wish I had a girl this size around to help me,” the woman said.
Isabel looked at the two little boys—they were about three and four years old—who were jumping in and out of an inflated wading pool on the lawn. “Are those yours?” she said politely.
“Are you kidding? Those are my daughter’s she dumped on me. I’ve got one married son and one married daughter, and another son—the only time I see him he’s in a motorcycle helmet. I was an early starter.”
Isabel had begun to back the car out of the drive when Denise gave a cry of surprise. “Mom! That’s the pilot!”
A man had come out of the side door and was talking to the catering woman.
“Damn it, Denise, don’t scare me like that!” Isabel said. “I thought it was one of the kids running behind the car.”
“It’s the pilot I was talking to at the airport!”
“He must be her husband. Keep the cake level.”
“But isn’t that strange? On Daddy’s birthday? The woman who made his cake is married to the man who’s going to take him up in the plane. Maybe he is. He’s got a partner. He and his partner give flying lessons and they fly hunters up North in the fall and they fly fishermen to lakes you can only fly to. He told me. Isn’t it strange?”
“It’s only moderately strange in a place the size of Aubreyville. Denise, you have to watch that cake.”
Denise subsided, feeling a little insulted. If a grownup had cried out in surprise, Isabel wouldn’t have shown such irritation. If a grownup had remarked on this strange coincidence, Isabel would have agreed that it was indeed strange. Denise hated it when Isabel treated her like a child. With her grandmother, or Laurence, she expected a certain denseness and inflexibility. Those two were always the same. But Isabel could be confiding, friendly, infinitely understanding, then remote and irritable. And sometimes the more she gave you, the less you felt satisfied. Denise suspected that her father felt that about Isabel too.
Today Isabel was wearing a long wraparound skirt of Indian cotton—her hippie skirt, Laurence called it—and a dark-blue halter. She was slim and brown—she tanned well, considering she was a redhead—and until you got close to her she looked only about twenty-five. Even close up, she didn’t look more than twenty-nine. So Laurence said. He wouldn’t let her cut her dark-red hair, and he supervised her tan, calling out, “Where are you going,” in a warning, upset voice, when she tried to move into the shade or go up to the house for a little while.
“If I let her, Isabel would sneak off out of the sun every time my back was turned,” Laurence had said to visitors, and Denise had heard Isabel laugh.
“It’s true. I’ve got Laurence to thank. I’d never last long enough on my own to get any kind of a tan. I get the fried-brain feeling.”
“Who cares about fried brains if you’ve got a gorgeous brown body?” said Laurence, in a lordly, farcical way, tap-tapping the smooth stomach bared by Isabel’s bikini.
Those little rhythmic slaps made Denise’s own stomach go queasy. The only way she could keep from yelling out “Stop it!” was to jump up and rush at the lake with her arms spread wide and silly whoops coming out of her mouth.
WHEN Denise saw the catering woman again, more than a year had gone by. It was nearly the end of August, a close, warm, cloudy day, when they were near the end of their summer’s stay at the Log House. Isabel had gone to town on one of that summer’s regular trips to the dentist. She was having some complicated work done in Aubreyville, because she liked the dentist there better than the dentist in Ottawa. Sophie had not been at the Log House since the beginning of summer. She was in Wellesley Hospital, in Toronto, having some tests done.
Denise and Peter and their father were in the kitchen making bacon-and-tomato sandwiches for lunch. There were a few things that Laurence believed he could cook better than anybody else, and one of them was bacon. Denise was slicing tomatoes, and Peter was supposed to be buttering the toast, but was reading his book. The radio was on, giving the noon news. Laurence liked to hear the news several times a day.
Denise went to see who was at the front door. She did not immediately recognize the catering woman, who was wearing a more youthful dress this time—a loose dress with swirls of red and blue and purple “psychedelic” colors—and did not look as pretty. Her hair was down over her shoulders.
“Is your mother home?” this woman said.
“I’m sorry, she’s not here right now,” said Denise, with a dignified politeness she knew to be slightly offensive. She thought the woman was selling something.
“She is not here,” the woman said. “No. She is not here.” Her face was puffy and unsmiling, her lipstick clownishly thick, and her eye makeup blotchy. Her voice was heavy with some insinuation Denise could not grasp. She would not talk that way if she was trying to sell something. Could they owe her money? Had Peter run across her property or bothered her dog?
“My father’s here,” Denise said contritely. “Would you like to talk to him?”
“Your father, yes, I will talk to him,” the woman said, and hoisted her large, shiny red handbag up under her arm. “Why don’t you go and get him, then?”
Denise realized then that this was the same voice that had said, “I wish I had a girl this size to help me.”
“The lady who does catering is at the door,” she said to her father.
“The lady who does catering?” he repeated, in a displeased, disbelieving voice, as if she had invented this lady just to interrupt him.
But he wiped his hands and went off down the hall. She heard him say smoothly, “Yes, indeed, what can I do for you?”
And instead of coming back in a few minutes, he took this woman into the dining room; he shut the dining-room door. Why into the dining room? Visitors were taken into the living room. The bacon, lying on a paper towel, was getting cold.
There was a little window high in the door between the kitchen and the dining room. In the days when Sophie was a little girl, there used to be a cook in the kitchen. The cook could watch the progress of the meal through this window to know when to change the dishes.
Denise raised herself on tiptoe.
“Spy,” said Peter, without looking up from his book. It was a science-fiction book called Satan’s World.
/> “I just want to know when to make the sandwiches,” Denise said.
She saw that there had been a reason for going into the dining room. Her father was sitting in his usual place, at the end of the table. The woman was sitting in Peter’s usual place, nearest the hall door. She had her purse on the table, and her hands clasped on top of it. Whatever they were talking about demanded a table and straight-backed chairs and an upright, serious position. It was like an interview. Information is being given, questions are being asked, a problem is being considered.
Well, all right, thought Denise. They were talking about a problem. They would finish talking about it, settle it, and it would be over with. Her father would tell the family about it, or not tell them. It would be over.
She turned off the radio. She made the sandwiches. Peter ate his. She waited a while, then ate hers. They drank Coke, which their father allowed them at lunch. Denise ate and drank too quickly. She sat at the table quietly burping and retasting the bacon, and hearing the terrible sound of a stranger crying in their house.
From the plane on her father’s birthday, they had seen some delicate, almost transparent, mounded clouds in the western sky, and Denise had said, “Thunderclouds.”
“That’s right,” said the pilot. “But they’re a long ways away.”
“It must be pretty dramatic,” said Laurence, “flying in a thunderstorm.”
“Once, I looked out and I saw blue rings of fire around the propellers,” the pilot said. “Round the propellers and the wing tips. Then I saw the same thing round the nose. I put my hand out to touch the glass—this here, the Plexiglas—and just as I got within touching distance, flames came shooting out of my fingers. I don’t know if I touched the glass or not. I didn’t feel anything. Little blue flames. One time in a thunderstorm. That’s what they call St. Elmo’s fire.”
“It’s from the electrical discharges in the atmosphere,” called Peter from the back seat.
“You’re right,” the pilot called back.
“Strange,” said Laurence.
“It gave me a start.”
Denise had a picture in her mind of the pilot with cold blue fire shooting out of his fingertips, and that seemed to her a sign of pain, though he had said he didn’t feel anything. She thought of the time she had touched an electric fence. The spurts of sound coming out of the dining room made her remember. Peter went on reading, and they didn’t say anything, though she knew he heard the sound too.
MAGDA is in the kitchen making the salad. She is humming a tune from an opera. “Home to Our Mountains.” Denise is in the dining room setting the table. She hears her father laughing on the patio. The guests have arrived—two pleasant, rich couples, not cottagers. One couple comes from Boston, one from Montreal. They have summer houses in Westfield.
Denise hears her father say, “Weltschmerz.” He says it as if in quotation marks. He must be quoting some item they all know about, from a magazine they all read.
I should be like Peter, she thinks. I should stop coming here.
But perhaps it’s all right, and this is happiness, which she is too stubborn, too childish, too glumly political—too mired in a past that everyone else has abandoned—to accept?
The dining room has been extended to take in the area where part of the veranda was, and the extension is all glass—walls and slanting roof, all glass. In the darkening glass, she sees herself—a tall, careful woman with a long braid, very plainly dressed, setting down on the long pine table, among the prettily overflowing bowls of nasturtiums, little blue glass dishes full of salt. Red-and-orange linen napkins, yellow candles like round pats of butter, thick white country plates with a pattern of grapes around the edges. Layers of forthcoming food and wine, and the talk that cuts off the living air: layers of harmony and satisfaction.
Magda, bearing in the salad, stops humming.
“Your mother—is she happy, out in British Columbia?”
Her fault, Denise thinks. Isabel’s.
Unfair, unbidden thoughts can strike her here, reverberating harshly, to no purpose.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I think so.” By which she means that Isabel, at least, has no regrets.
II
Sophie’s tread made the floorboards shudder. She was barefoot, naked under the striped terry-cloth bathrobe, in the early morning. She had swum naked in the lake since she was a child and all this shore belonged to her father, down as far as Bryce’s farm. If she wanted to swim like that now, she had to get up early in the morning. That was all right. She woke early. Old people did.
After she had her swim, she liked to sit on the rocks and smoke her first cigarette. That was what she was looking for now—not her cigarettes, but her lighter. She looked on the shelf over the sink, in the cutlery drawer—not meaning to make such a clatter—and on the dining-room buffet. Then she remembered that she had been sitting in the living room last night, watching David Copperfield on television. And there it was, her lighter, on the grubby arm of the chintz-covered chair.
Laurence had rented a television set so that they could watch the moon shot. She had agreed that that was an occasion the children shouldn’t miss—that none of them should miss, said Laurence sternly—but she had supposed it would mean a twenty-four-hour rental, the presence of the television set in the house overnight. Laurence pointed out her mistake. The moon shot would take place Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, and the landing, if all went well, on Sunday. Had she really thought the trip would be only a matter of hours? And Laurence said there would be no hope of renting a decent set if you waited until the last moment. All the cottagers would be after them. So they had got one ten days ahead of time, and Laurence’s campaign, ever since it came into the house, had been to get Sophie to watch it. He had been lucky, discovering reruns of last winter’s National Geographic series: one about the Galápagos Islands, which Sophie watched without protest, and one on America’s National Parks, which she said was good but tainted by American boasting. Then there was David Copperfield, a British-made series shown every Sunday night in hour-long segments.
“You see what you’ve been missing?” said Laurence to Sophie. She had refused to have television all these years—not only at the Log House, but in her apartment in Toronto.
“Oh, Laurence. Don’t rub it in,” said Isabel. Her tone was affectionate but weary. Sophie, saying nothing, was annoyed with Isabel more than with Laurence. How little that girl knew her husband if she expected him to take any triumph discreetly. And how little she knew Sophie if she expected Laurence’s pushing to discomfort her. It was his way—their way. He would push and push at Sophie, and no matter what he got out of her it would never be enough. Sophie’s capitulation about the television had turned out not to be enough; she didn’t really care enough, and that was what Laurence knew.
It was the same about the steps. (Sophie was making her way down the bank now to the lake, scrambling past the wooden forms.) Sophie had not wanted cement steps, preferring logs set into the bank, but had given in, finally, to Laurence’s complaints about the logs rotting and the job he had replacing them. Now he called her every day to see the progress he had made.
“I build for the ages,” he announced, with a grand gesture. He had made a memorial step for each of them: a palm print, initials, the date—July, 1969.
Sophie slipped from the rocks into the water and swam toward the middle of the lake, into the sunlight. Then she turned onto her back. Though there were cottages all along the shore, most people had been quite decent about not cutting down the trees. She could lie here in the water and look at the high bank of pine and cedar, poplar and soft maple, both white and golden birch. There was no wind, no ripple on the lake except what Sophie had made, yet the birch and poplar leaves turned at their own will, flashed like coins in the sun.
There was movement, not just in the leaves. Sophie saw figures. They were coming down the bank, coming out of the trees close to the rocks where she had left her bathrobe. She lowered her bo
dy, so that she wasn’t floating but treading water, and watched them.
Two boys and a girl. All three had long hair, waist-length or nearly so, though one of the boys wore his combed back into a ponytail. The ponytailed boy had a beard and wore dark glasses, and a suit jacket with no shirt underneath. The other boy wore only jeans. He had some chains or necklaces, perhaps feathers, dangling down on his thin brown chest. The girl was fat and gypsyish, with a long red skirt and a bandanna tied across her forehead. She had tied her skirt into a floppy knot in front, so that she could more easily get down the bank.
Children—young people—who looked like this were of course no new sight to Sophie. You saw a lot of them around the lake on weekends—the children of cottagers visiting, bringing friends. Sometimes they took over cottages, with no parents present, and held weekend-long parties. The Property Owners’ Newsletter had proposed a ban on long hair and “weird forms of dress,” to be voluntarily administered by each property holder on his or her own property. People had been invited to write letters supporting or opposing this ban, and Sophie had written opposing it. She stated in her letter that this entire side of the lake had once been Vogelsang property, and that Augustus Vogelsang had left the comparative comfort of Bismarck’s Germany to seek the freedom of the New World, in which all individuals might choose how they dressed, spoke, worshipped, and so on.
But she didn’t think these three belonged to any of the cottages. They were surely trespassers, nomads. Why did she think so? Something furtive about them—but bold too, disdainful. She didn’t think, however, that any harm would come from them. They were play-actors, self-absorbed, not real marauders.
They had seen her bathrobe. They were looking at her, across the water.
Sophie waved. She called out, “Good morning,” in a cheerful, hailing tone—to indicate that the greeting was all, that nothing more was expected.