by Alice Munro
She had left her children alone, the doors unlocked. Nothing happened to them. They didn’t wake up and discover her defection. No burglar, or prowler, or murderer surprised her on her return. That was a piece of luck that she did not even appreciate. She had gone out leaving the door open and the lights on, and when she came back she hardly recognized her folly, though she closed the door and turned out some lights and lay down on the living-room sofa. She didn’t sleep. She lay still, as if the smallest movement would sharpen her suffering, until she saw the day getting light and heard the birds waking. Her limbs were stiff. She got up and went to the phone and listened again for the dial tone. She walked stiffly to the kitchen and put on the kettle and said to herself the words a paralysis of grief.
A paralysis of grief. What was she thinking of? That was what she would feel, how she might describe the way she would feel, if one of her children had died. Grief is for serious matters, important losses. She knew that. She would not have bartered away an hour of her children’s lives to have had the phone ring at ten o’clock last night, to have heard Maya say, “Georgia, he’s desperate. He’s sorry; he loves you very much.”
No. But it seemed that such a phone call would have given her a happiness that no look or word from her children could give her. Than anything could give her, ever again.
She phoned Maya before nine o’clock. As she was dialling, she thought that there were still some possibilities to pray for. Maya’s phone had been temporarily out of order. Maya had been ill last night. Raymond had been in a car accident on his way home from the hospital.
All these possibilities vanished at the first sound of Maya’s voice, which was sleepy (pretending to be sleepy?) and silky with deceit. “Georgia? Is that Georgia? Oh, I thought it was going to be Raymond. He had to stay over at the hospital in case this poor wretched woman needed a C-section. He was going to call me—”
“You told me that last night,” said Georgia.
“He was going to call me—Oh, Georgia, I was supposed to call you! Now I remember. Yes. I was supposed to call you, but I thought it was probably too late. I thought the phone might wake up the children. I thought, Oh, better just leave it till morning!”
“How late was it?”
“Not awfully. I just thought.”
“What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” Maya laughed, like a lady in a silly play.
“Georgia, are you in a state?”
“What happened?”
“Oh, Georgia,” said Maya, groaning magnanimously but showing an edge of nerves. “Georgia, I’m sorry. It was nothing. It was just nothing. I’ve been rotten, but I didn’t mean to be. I offered him a beer. Isn’t that what you do when somebody rides up to your house on a motorcycle? You offer him a beer. But then he came on very lordly and said he only drank Scotch. And he said he’d only drink Scotch if I would drink with him. I thought he was pretty high-handed. Pretty high-handed pose. But I really was doing this for you, Georgia—I was wanting to find out what was on his mind. So I told him to put the motorcycle behind the garage, and I took him to sit in the back garden. That was so if I heard Raymond’s car I could chase him out the back way and he could walk the motorcycle down the lane. I am not about to unload anything new onto Raymond at this point. I mean even something innocent, which this started out to be.”
Georgia, with her teeth chattering, hung up the phone. She never spoke to Maya again. Maya appeared at her door, of course, a little while later, and Georgia had to let her in, because the children were playing in the yard. Maya sat down contritely at the kitchen table and asked if she could smoke. Georgia did not answer. Maya said she would smoke anyway and she hoped it was all right. Georgia pretended that Maya wasn’t there. While Maya smoked, Georgia cleaned the stove, dismantling the elements and putting them back together again. She wiped the counters and polished the taps and straightened out the cutlery drawer. She mopped the floor around Maya’s feet. She worked briskly, thoroughly, and never quite looked at Maya. At first she was not sure whether she could keep this up. But it got easier. The more earnest Maya became—the further she slipped from sensible remonstrance, half-amused confession, into true and fearful regret—the more fixed Georgia was in her resolve, the more grimly satisfied in her heart. She took care, however, not to appear grim. She moved about lightly. She was almost humming.
She took a knife to scrape out the grease from between the counter tiles by the stove. She had let things get into a bad way.
Maya smoked one cigarette after another, stubbing them out in a saucer that she fetched for herself from the cupboard. She said, “Georgia, this is so stupid. I can tell you, he’s not worth it. It was nothing. All it was was Scotch and opportunity.”
She said, “I am really sorry. Truly sorry. I know you don’t believe me. How can I say it so you will?”
And, “Georgia, listen. You are humiliating me. Fine. Fine. Maybe I deserve it. I do deserve it. But after you’ve humiliated me enough we’ll go back to being friends and we’ll laugh about this. When we’re old ladies, I swear we’ll laugh. We won’t be able to remember his name. We’ll call him the motorcycle sheikh. We will.”
Then, “Georgia, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to throw myself on the floor? I’m about ready to. I’m trying to keep myself from snivelling, and I can’t. I’m snivelling, Georgia. Okay?”
She had begun to cry. Georgia put on her rubber gloves and started to clean the oven.
“You win,” said Maya. “I’ll pick up my cigarettes and go home.”
She phoned a few times. Georgia hung up on her. Miles phoned, and Georgia hung up on him too. She thought he sounded cautious but smug. He phoned again and his voice trembled, as if he were striving just for candor and humility, bare love. Georgia hung up at once. She felt violated, shaken.
Maya wrote a letter, which said, in part, I suppose you know that Miles is going back to Seattle and whatever home fires he keeps burning there. It seems the treasure thing has fallen through. But you must have known he was bound to go sometime and you’d have felt rotten then, so now you’ve got the rotten feeling over with. So isn’t that okay? I don’t say this to excuse myself. I know I was weak and putrid. But can’t we put it behind us now?
She went on to say that she and Raymond were going on a long-planned holiday to Greece and Turkey, and that she hoped very much that she would get a note from Georgia before she left. But if she didn’t get any word she would try to understand what Georgia was telling her, and she would not make a nuisance of herself by writing again.
She kept her word. She didn’t write again. She sent, from Turkey, a pretty piece of striped cloth large enough for a tablecloth. Georgia folded it up and put it away. She left it for Ben to find after she moved out, several months later.
“I’M HAPPY,” Raymond tells Georgia. “I’m very happy, and the reason is that I’m content to be an ordinary sort of person with an ordinary calm life. I am not looking for any big revelation or any big drama or any messiah of the opposite sex. I don’t go around figuring out how to make things more interesting. I can say to you quite frankly I think Maya made a mistake. I don’t mean she wasn’t very gifted and intelligent and creative and so on, but she was looking for something—maybe she was looking for something that just is not there. And she tended to despise a lot that she had. It’s true. She didn’t want the privileges she had. We’d travel, for example, and she wouldn’t want to stay in a comfortable hotel. No. She had to go on some trek that involved riding on poor, miserable donkeys and drinking sour milk for breakfast. I suppose I sound very square. Well, I suppose I am. I am square. You know, she had such beautiful silver. Magnificent silver. It was passed down through her family. And she couldn’t be bothered to polish it or get the cleaning woman to polish it. She wrapped it all up in plastic and hid it away. She hid it away—you’d think it was a disgrace. How do you think she envisaged herself? As some kind of hippie, maybe? Some kind of free spirit? She didn’t even
realize it was her money that kept her afloat. I’ll tell you, some of the free spirits I’ve seen pass in and out of this house wouldn’t have been long around her without it.
“I did all I could,” said Raymond. “I didn’t scoot off and leave her, like her Prince of Fantasy Land.”
GEORGIA got a vengeful pleasure out of breaking with Maya. She was pleased with the controlled manner in which she did it. The deaf ear. She was surprised to find herself capable of such control, such thoroughgoing punishment. She punished Maya. She punished Miles, through Maya, as much as she could. What she had to do, and she knew it, was to scrape herself raw, to root out all addiction to the gifts of those two pale prodigies. Miles and Maya. Both of them slippery, shimmery—liars, seducers, finaglers. But you would have thought that after such scourging she’d have scuttled back into her marriage and locked its doors, and appreciated what she had there as never before.
That was not what happened. She broke with Ben. Within a year, she was gone. Her way of breaking was strenuous and unkind. She told him about Miles, though she spared her own pride by leaving out the part about Miles and Maya. She took no care—she had hardly any wish—to avoid unkindness. On the night when she waited for Maya to call, some bitter, yeasty spirit entered into her. She saw herself as a person surrounded by, living by, sham. Because she had been so readily unfaithful, her marriage was a sham. Because she had gone so far out of it, so quickly, it was a sham. She dreaded, now, a life like Maya’s. She dreaded just as much a life like her own before this happened. She could not but destroy. Such cold energy was building in her she had to blow her own house down.
She had entered with Ben, when they were both so young, a world of ceremony, of safety, of gestures, concealment. Fond appearances. More than appearances. Fond Contrivance. (She thought when she left that she would have no use for contrivance anymore.) She had been happy there, from time to time. She had been sullen, restless, bewildered, and happy. But she said most vehemently, Never, never. I was never happy, she said.
People always say that.
People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine.
JUST THE SAME, Georgia knows that her remorse about the way she changed her life is dishonest. It is real and dishonest. Listening to Raymond, she knows that whatever she did she would have to do again. She would have to do it again, supposing that she had to be the person she was.
Raymond does not want to let Georgia go. He does not want to part with her. He offers to drive her downtown. When she has gone, he won’t be able to talk about Maya. Very likely Anne has told him that she does not want to hear any more on the subject of Maya.
“Thank you for coming,” he says on the doorstep. “Are you sure about the ride? Are you sure you can’t stay to dinner?”
Georgia reminds him again about the bus, the last ferry. She says no, no, she really wants to walk. It’s only a couple of miles. The late afternoon so lovely, Victoria so lovely. I had forgotten, she says.
Raymond says once more, “Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for the drinks,” Georgia says. “Thank you too. I guess we never believe we are going to die.”
“Now, now,” says Raymond.
“No. I mean we never behave—we never behave as if we believed we were going to die.”
Raymond smiles more and more and puts a hand on her shoulder. “How should we behave?” he says.
“Differently,” says Georgia. She puts a foolish stress on the word, meaning that her answer is so lame that she can offer it only as a joke.
Raymond hugs her, then involves her in a long chilly kiss. He fastens onto her with an appetite that is grievous but unconvincing. A parody of passion, whose intention neither one of them, surely, will try to figure out.
She doesn’t think about that as she walks back to town through the yellow-leafed streets with their autumn smells and silences. Past Clover Point, the cliffs crowned with broom bushes, the mountains across the water. The mountains of the Olympic Peninsula, assembled like a blatant backdrop, a cutout of rainbow tissue paper. She doesn’t think about Raymond, or Miles, or Maya, or even Ben.
She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows. The accidental clarity.
Carried Away
LETTERS
IN THE DINING ROOM of the Commercial Hotel, Louisa opened the letter that had arrived that day from overseas. She ate steak and potatoes, her usual meal, and drank a glass of wine. There were a few travellers in the room, and the dentist who ate there every night because he was a widower. He had shown an interest in her in the beginning but had told her he had never before seen a woman touch wine or spirits.
“It is for my health,” said Louisa gravely.
The white tablecloths were changed every week and in the meantime were protected by oilcloth mats. In winter, the dining room smelled of these mats wiped by a kitchen rag, and of coal fumes from the furnace, and beef gravy and dried potatoes and onions—a smell not unpleasant to anybody coming in hungry from the cold. On each table was a little cruet stand with the bottle of brown sauce, the bottle of tomato sauce, and the pot of horseradish.
The letter was addressed to “The Librarian, Carstairs Public Library, Carstairs, Ontario.” It was dated six weeks before—January 4, 1917.
Perhaps you will be surprised to hear from a person you don’t know and that doesn’t remember your name. I hope you are still the same Librarian though enough time has gone by that you could have moved on.
What has landed me here in Hospital is not too serious. I see worse all around me and get my mind off of all that by picturing things and wondering for instance if you are still there in the Library. If you are the one I mean, you are about of medium size or perhaps not quite, with light brownish hair. You came a few months before it was time for me to go in the Army following on Miss Tamblyn who had been there since I first became a user aged nine or ten. In her time the books were pretty much every which way, and it was as much as your life was worth to ask her for the least help or anything since she was quite a dragon. Then when you came what a change, it was all put into sections of Fiction and Non-Fiction and History and Travel and you got the magazines arranged in order and put out as soon as they arrived, not left to molder away till everything in them was stale. I felt gratitude but did not know how to say so. Also I wondered what brought you there, you were an educated person.
My name is Jack Agnew and my card is in the drawer. The last book I took out was very good—H. G. Wells, Mankind in the Making. My education was to Second Form in High School, then I went into Douds as many did. I didn’t join up right away when I was eighteen so you will not see me as a Brave Man. I am a person tending to have my own ideas always. My only relative in Carstairs, or anyplace, is my father Patrick Agnew. He work for Douds not at the factory but at the house doing the gardening. He is a lone wolf even more than me and goes out to the country fishing every chance he gets. I write him a letter sometimes but I doubt if he reads it.
After supper Louisa went up to the Ladies’ Parlor on the second floor, and sat down at the desk to write her reply.
I am very glad to hear you appreciated what I did in the Library though it was just the normal organization, nothing special.
I am sure you would like to hear news of home, hut I am a poor person for the job, being an outsider here. I do talk to people in the Library and in the hotel. The travellers in the hotel mostly talk about how business is (it is brisk if you can get the goods) and a little about sickness, and a lot about the War. There are rumors on rumors and opinions galore, which I’m sure would make you laugh if they didn’t make you angry. I will not bother to write them down because I am sure there is a Censor reading this who would cut my letter to ribbons.
You ask how I came here. There is no interesting story. My parents are both dead. My father worked for Eaton’s in Toronto in the Furniture Department, and after his death my mother worked there too in
Linens. And I also worked there for a while in Books. Perhaps you could say Eaton’s was our Douds. I graduated from Jarvis Collegiate. I had some sickness which put me in hospital for a long time, but I am quite well now. I had a great deal of time to read and my favorite authors are Thomas Hardy, who is accused of being gloomy but I think is very true to life—and Willa Cather. I just happened to be in this town when I heard the Librarian had died and I thought, perhaps that is the job for me.
A good thing your letter reached me today as I am about to be discharged from here and don’t know if it would have been sent on to where I am going. I am glad you did not think my letter was too foolish.
If you run into my father or anybody you do not need to say anything about the fact we are writing to each other. It is nobody’s business and I know there are plenty of people would laugh at me writing to the Librarian as they did at me going to the Library even, why give them the satisfaction?
I am glad to be getting out of here. So much luckier than some I see that will never walk or have their sight and will have to hide themselves away from the world.
You asked where did I live in Carstairs. Well, it was not anyplace to be proud of. If you know where Vinegar Hill is and you turned off on Flowers Road it is the last house on the right, yellow paint once upon a time. My father grows potatoes, or did. I used to take them around town with my wagon, and every load I sold got a nickel to keep.
You mention favorite authors. At one time I was fond of Zane Grey, but I drifted away from reading fiction stories to reading History or Travel. I sometimes read books away over my head, I know, but I do get something out of them. H. G. Wells I mentioned is one and Robert Ingersoll who writes about religion. They have given me a lot to think about. If you are very religious I hope I have not offended you.
One day when I got to the Library it was a Saturday afternoon and you had just unlocked the door and were putting the lights on as it was dark and raining out. You had been caught out with no hat or umbrella and your hair had got wet. You took the pins out of it and let it come down. Is it too personal a thing to ask if you have it long still or have you cut it? You went over and stood by the radiator and shook your hair on it and the water sizzled like grease in the frying pan. I was sitting reading in the London Illustrated News about the War. We exchanged a smile. (I didn’t mean to say your hair was greasy when I wrote that!)