Selected Stories

by Alice Munro

  He was imitating Bea. He was doing what she was doing but in a sillier, ugly way. He was most intentionally and insistently making a fool of her. See how vain she is, said Ladner’s angular prancing. See what a fake. Pretending not to be afraid of the deep water, pretending to be happy, pretending not to know how we despise her.

  This was thrilling and shocking. Liza’s face was trembling with her need to laugh. Part of her wanted to make Ladner stop, to stop at once, before the damage was done, and part of her longed for that very damage, the damage Ladner could do, the ripping open, the final delight of it.

  Kenny whooped out loud. He had no sense.

  Bea had already seen the change in Liza’s face, and now she heard Kenny. She turned to see what was behind her. But Ladner had dropped into the water again, he was pulling up weeds.

  Liza at once kicked up a distracting storm. When Bea didn’t respond to this, she swam out into the deep part of the pond and dived down. Deep, deep, to where it’s dark, where the carp live, in the mud. She stayed down there as long as she could. She swam so far that she got tangled in the weeds near the other bank and came up gasping, only a yard or so away from Ladner.

  “I got caught in the reeds,” she said. “I could have drowned.”

  “No such luck,” said Ladner. He made a pretend grab at her, to get her between the legs. At the same time he made a pious, shocked face, as if the person in his head was having a fit at what his hand might do.

  Liza pretended not to notice. “Where’s Bea?” she said.

  Ladner looked at the opposite bank. “Maybe up to the house,” he said. “I didn’t see her go.” He was quite ordinary again, a serious work-man, slightly fed up with all their foolishness. Ladner could do that. He could switch from one person to another and make it your fault if you remembered.

  Liza swam in a straight line as hard as she could across the pond. She splashed her way out and heavily climbed the bank. She passed the owls and the eagle staring from behind glass. The “Nature does nothing uselessly” sign.

  She didn’t see Bea anywhere. Not ahead on the boardwalk over the marsh. Not in the open space under the pine trees. Liza took the path to the back door of the house. In the middle of the path was a beech tree you had to go around, and there were initials carved in the smooth bark. One “L” for Ladner, another for Liza, a “K” for Kenny. A foot or so below were the letters “P.D.P.” When Liza had first shown Bea the initials, Kenny had banged his fist against P.D.P. “Pull down pants!” he shouted, hopping up and down. Ladner gave him a serious pretend-rap on the head. “Proceed down path,” he said, and pointed out the arrow scratched in the bark, curving around the trunk. “Pay no attention to the dirty-minded juveniles,” he said to Bea.

  Liza could not bring herself to knock on the door. She was full of guilt and foreboding. It seemed to her that Bea would have to go away. How could she stay after such an insult—how could she put up with any of them? Bea did not understand about Ladner. And how could she? Liza herself couldn’t have described to anybody what he was like. In the secret life she had with him, what was terrible was always funny, badness was mixed up with silliness, you always had to join in with dopey faces and voices and pretending he was a cartoon monster. You couldn’t get out of it, or even want to, any more than you could stop an invasion of pins and needles.

  Liza went around the house and out of the shade of the trees. Barefoot, she crossed the hot gravel road. There was her own house sitting in the middle of a cornfield at the end of a short lane. It was a wooden house with the top half painted white and the bottom half a glaring pink, like lipstick. That had been Liza’s father’s idea. Maybe he thought it would perk the place up. Maybe he thought pink would make it look as if it had a woman inside it.

  There is a mess in the kitchen—spilled cereal on the floor, puddles of milk souring on the counter. A pile of clothes from the Laundromat overflowing the corner armchair, and the dishcloth—Liza knows this without looking—all wadded up with the garbage in the sink. It is her job to clean all this up, and she had better do it before her father gets home.

  She doesn’t worry about it yet. She goes upstairs where it is baking hot under the sloping roof and gets out her little bag of precious things. She keeps this bag stuffed in the toe of an old rubber boot that is too small for her. Nobody knows about it. Certainly not Kenny.

  In the bag there is a Barbie-doll evening dress, stolen from a girl Liza used to play with (Liza doesn’t much like the dress anymore, but it has an importance because it was stolen), a blue snap-shut case with her mother’s glasses inside, a painted wooden egg that was her prize for an Easter picture-drawing contest in Grade 2 (with a smaller egg inside it and a still smaller egg inside that). And the one rhinestone earring that she found on the road. For a long time she believed the rhinestones to be diamonds. The design of the earring is complicated and graceful, with teardrop rhinestones dangling from loops and scallops of smaller stones, and when hung from Liza’s ear it almost brushes her shoulders.

  She is wearing only her bathing suit, so she has to carry the earring curled up in her palm, a blazing knot. Her head feels swollen with the heat, with leaning over her secret bag, with her resolution. She thinks with longing of the shade under Ladner’s trees, as if that were a black pond.

  There is not one tree anywhere near this house, and the only bush is a lilac with curly, brown-edged leaves, by the back steps. Around the house nothing but corn, and at a distance the leaning old barn that Liza and Kenny are forbidden to go into, because it might collapse at any time. No divisions over here, no secret places—everything is bare and simple.

  But when you cross the road—as Liza is doing now, trotting on the gravel—when you cross into Ladner’s territory, it’s like coming into a world of different and distinct countries. There is the marsh country, which is deep and jungly, full of botflies and jewelweed and skunk cabbage. A sense there of tropical threats and complications. Then the pine plantation, solemn as a church, with its high boughs and needled carpet, inducing whispering. And the dark rooms under the down-swept branches of the cedars—entirely shaded and secret rooms with a bare earth floor. In different places the sun falls differently and in some places not at all. In some places the air is thick and private, and in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are harsh or enticing. Certain walks impose decorum and certain stones are set a jump apart so that they call out for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut and a star from a planet, and places also where they have run and hollered and hung from branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.

  P.D.P.

  Squeegey-boy.

  Rub-a-dub-dub.

  When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose from its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look to him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

  He clucked his tongue faintly and his eyes shone out of ambush, hard and round as the animals’ glass eyes.

  Bad-bad-bad.

  “The loveliest thing,” Bea said. “Liza, tell me—was this your mother’s?”

  Liza said yes. She could see now that this gift of a single earring might be seen as childish and pathetic—perhaps intentionally pathetic. Even keeping it as a treasure could seem stupid. But if it was her mother’s, that would be understandable, and it would be a gift of some importance. “You could put it on a chain,” she said. “If you put it on a chain you could wear it around your neck.”

  “But I was just thinking that!” Bea s
aid. “I was just thinking it would look lovely on a chain. A silver chain—don’t you think? Oh, Liza, I am just so proud you gave it to me!”

  “You could wear it in your nose,” said Ladner. But he said this without any sharpness. He was peaceable now—played out, peaceable. He spoke of Bea’s nose as if it might be a pleasant thing to contemplate.

  Ladner and Bea were sitting under the plum trees right behind the house. They sat in the wicker chairs that Bea had brought out from town. She had not brought much—just enough to make islands here and there among Ladner’s skins and instruments. These chairs, some cups, a cushion. The wineglasses they were drinking out of now.

  Bea had changed into a dark-blue dress of very thin and soft material. It hung long and loose from her shoulders. She trickled the rhinestones through her fingers, she let them fall and twinkle in the folds of her blue dress. She had forgiven Ladner, after all, or made a bargain not to remember.

  Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. Surely she could. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant. None of that. Not allowed. Be good. The woman who could rescue them—who could make them all, keep them all, good.

  What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.

  Only Liza sees.

  IV

  Liza locked the door as you had to, from the outside. She put the key in the plastic bag and the bag in the hole in the tree. She moved towards the snowmobile, and when Warren didn’t do the same she said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  Warren said, “What about the window by the back door?”

  Liza breathed out noisily. “Ooh, I’m an idiot!” she said. “I’m an idiot ten times over!”

  Warren went back to the window and kicked at the bottom pane. Then he got a stick of firewood from the pile by the tin shed and was able to smash the glass out. “Big enough so a kid could get in,” he said.

  “How could I be so stupid?” Liza said. “You saved my life.”

  “Our life,” Warren said.

  The tin shed wasn’t locked. Inside it he found some cardboard boxes, bits of lumber, simple tools. He tore off a piece of cardboard of a suitable size. He took great satisfaction in nailing it over the pane that he had just smashed out. “Otherwise animals could get in,” he said to Liza.

  When he was all finished with this job, he found that Liza had walked down into the snow between the trees. He went after her.

  “I was wondering if the bear was still in there,” she said.

  He was going to say that he didn’t think bears came this far south, but she didn’t give him the time. “Can you tell what the trees are by their bark?” she said.

  Warren said he couldn’t even tell from their leaves. “Well, maples,” he said. “Maples and pines.”

  “Cedar,” said Liza. “You’ve got to know cedar. There’s a cedar. There’s a wild cherry. Down there’s birch. The white ones. And that one with the bark like gray skin? That’s a beech. See, it had letters carved on it, but they’ve spread out, they just look like any old blotches now.”

  Warren wasn’t interested. He only wanted to get home. It wasn’t much after three o’clock, but you could feel the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow.

  Bibliographical Note

  The stories in this volume appear in roughly chronological sequence. They are listed here in the same order as in the book, with the place and year of first publication following.

  “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).

  “Dance of the Happy Shades,” The Montrealer (1961).

  “Postcard,” The Tamarack Review (1968).

  “Images,” Dance of the Happy Shades (1968).

  “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974).

  “The Ottawa Valley,” Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974).

  “Material,” The Tamarack Review (1973).

  “Royal Beatings,” The New Yorker (1977).

  “Wild Swans,” Toronto Life (1978).

  “The Beggar Maid,” The New Yorker (1977).

  “Simon’s Luck,” Viva (1978, under the title “Emily”).

  “Chaddeleys and Flemings”: “I. Connection,” Chatelaine (1979);

  “II. The Stone in the Field,” Saturday Night (1979).

  “Dulse,” The New Yorker (1980).

  “The Turkey Season,” The New Yorker (1980).

  “Labor Day Dinner,” The New Yorker (1981).

  “The Moons of Jupiter,” The New Yorker (1978).

  “The Progress of Love,” The New Yorker (1985).

  “Lichen,” The New Yorker (1985).

  “Miles City, Montana,” The New Yorker (1985).

  “White Dump,” The New Yorker (1986).

  “Fits,” Grand Street (1986).

  “Friend of My Youth,” The New Yorker (1990).

  “Meneseteung,” The New Yorker (1988).

  “Differently,” The New Yorker (1989).

  “Carried Away,” The New Yorker (1991).

  “The Albanian Virgin,” The New Yorker (1994).

  “A Wilderness Station,” The New Yorker (1992).

  “Vandals,” The New Yorker (1993).

  ALICE MUNRO

  Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten collections of stories as well as a novel, Lives of Girls and Women. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

  BOOKS BY ALICE MUNRO

  Dear Life

  Too Much Happiness

  The View from Castle Rock

  Away from Her

  Carried Away

  Runaway

  Vintage Munro

  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

  The Love of a Good Woman

  Selected Stories

  Open Secrets

  Friend of My Youth

  The Progress of Love

  The Moons of Jupiter

  The Beggar Maid

  Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

  Lives of Girls and Women

  Dance of the Happy Shades

  ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO

  AWAY FROM HER

  Alice Munro has long been heralded for her penetrating, lyrical prose, and in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”—the basis for Sarah Polley’s film Away from Her—her prodigious talents are once again on display. As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife, Fiona, begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

  Fiction/Literature

  THE BEGGAR MAID

  In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women over the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

  Fiction/Short Stories

  DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES

  A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father’s past when she realizes the sales call they’ve made one summer afternoon in the Great Depression is to his old sweetheart. A married
woman returning home after the death of her invalid mother tries to release the sister who stayed home to nurse her into a more abundant future. The audience at a children’s piano recital receives a surprising lesson in the power of art to transform when a not-quite-right student performs with unexpected musicality and a spirit of joy. In these fifteen short stories, Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.

  Fiction/Short Stories

  CARRIED AWAY

  A Selection of Stories

  Introduction by Margaret Atwood

  Carried Away is a dazzling selection of stories—seventeen favorites chosen by the author from across her distinguished career. The stories brought together here span a quarter century, drawn from some of her earliest books, The Beggar Maid and The Moons of Jupiter, through her bestselling collection, Runaway. Here are such favorites as “Royal Beatings,” in which a young girl, her father, and stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; “Friend of My Youth,” in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and “The Love of a Good Woman,” in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry. Munro’s incomparable empathy for her characters, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction. Like the World War I soldier in the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn’t know change her life forever, Munro’s unassuming characters insinuate themselves in our hearts and take permanent hold.