by Alice Munro
—
LORNA CARRIED DANIEL up to his room. She laid him in his crib and stood beside him making soft noises and stroking his back.
She thought that Lionel must be punishing her for her mistake in going to his room. The landlady would have told him. Lorna should have expected that, if she had stopped to think. She hadn’t stopped to think, probably, because she had the idea that it would not matter. She might even have thought that she would tell him herself.
I was going past on my way to the playground and I just thought I would go in and sit in the middle of your floor. I can’t explain it. It seemed like that would give me a moment’s peace, to be in your room and sit in the middle of the floor.
She had thought—after the letter?—that there was a bond between them, not to be made explicit but to be relied on. And she had been wrong, she had scared him. Presumed too much. He had turned around and there was Polly. Because of Lorna’s offense he had taken up with Polly.
Perhaps not, though. Perhaps he had simply changed. She thought of the extraordinary bareness of his room, the light on its walls. Out of that might come such altered versions of himself, created with no effort in the blink of an eye. That could be in response to something that had gone a little wrong, or to a realization that he could not carry something through. Or to nothing that definite—just the blink of an eye.
When Daniel had fallen into true sleep she went downstairs. In the bathroom she found that Polly had rinsed the diapers properly and put them in the pail, covered with the blue solution that would disinfect them. She picked up the suitcase that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, carried it upstairs and laid it on the big bed, opening it to sort out which clothes had to be washed and which could be put away.
The window of this room looked out on the back yard. She heard voices—Elizabeth’s raised, almost shrieking with the excitement of homecoming and perhaps the effort of keeping the attention of an enlarged audience, Brendan’s authoritative but pleasant, giving an account of their trip.
She went to the window and looked down. She saw Brendan go over to the storage shed, unlock it, and start to drag out the children’s wading pool. The door was swinging shut on him and Polly hurried to hold it open.
Lionel got up and went to uncoil the hose. She would not have thought he knew even where the hose was.
Brendan said something to Polly. Thanking her? You would think they were on the best of terms.
How had that happened?
It could be that Polly was now fit to be taken account of, being Lionel’s choice. Lionel’s choice, and not Lorna’s imposition.
Or Brendan might simply be happier, because they had been away. He might have dropped for a while the burden of keeping his household in order. He might have seen, quite rightly, that this altered Polly was no threat.
A scene so ordinary and amazing, come about as if by magic. Everybody happy.
Brendan had begun to blow up the rim of the plastic pool. Elizabeth had stripped off to her underpants and was dancing around impatiently. Brendan hadn’t bothered to tell her to run and put on her bathing suit, that underpants were not suitable. Lionel had turned the water on, and until it was needed for the pool he stood watering the nasturtiums, like any householder. Polly spoke to Brendan and he pinched the hole shut that he had been blowing into, passing the half-inflated heap of plastic over to her.
Lorna recalled that Polly had been the one to blow up the dolphin at the beach. As she said herself, she had good wind. She blew steadily and with no appearance of effort. She stood there in her shorts, her bare legs firmly apart, skin gleaming like birch bark. And Lionel watched her. Exactly what I need, he might be thinking. Such a competent and sensible woman, pliant but solid. Someone not vain or dreamy or dissatisfied. That might well be the sort of person he would marry someday. A wife who could take over. Then he would change and change again, maybe fall in love with some other woman, in his way, but the wife would be too busy to take notice.
That might happen. Polly and Lionel. Or it might not. Polly might go home as planned, and if she did, there wouldn’t be any heartbreak. Or that was what Lorna thought. Polly would marry, or not marry, but whichever way it was, the things that happened with men would not be what broke her heart.
In a short time the rim of the wading pool was swollen and smooth. The pool was set on the grass, the hose placed inside it, and Elizabeth was splashing her feet in the water. She looked up at Lorna as if she had known she was there all the time.
“It’s cold,” she cried in a rapture. “Mommy—it’s cold.”
Now Brendan looked up at Lorna too.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Unpacking.”
“You don’t have to do that now. Come on outside.”
“I will. In a minute.”
—
SINCE SHE HAD ENTERED the house—in fact since she had first understood that the voices she heard came from her own back yard and belonged to Polly and Lionel—Lorna had not thought of the vision she’d had, mile after mile, of Polly lashed to the back door. She was surprised by it now as you sometimes are surprised, long after waking, by the recollection of a dream. It had a dream’s potency and shamefulness. A dream’s uselessness, as well.
Not quite at the same time, but in a lagging way, came the memory of her bargain. Her weak and primitive neurotic notion of a bargain.
But what was it she had promised?
Nothing to do with the children.
Something to do with herself?
She had promised that she would do whatever she had to do, when she recognized what it was.
That was hedging, it was a bargain that was not a bargain, a promise that had no meaning at all.
But she tried out various possibilities. Almost as if she was shaping this story to be told to somebody—not Lionel now—but somebody, as an entertainment.
Give up reading books.
Take in foster children from bad homes and poor countries. Labor to cure them of wounds and neglect.
Go to church. Agree to believe in God.
Cut her hair short, stop putting on makeup, never again haul her breasts up into a wired brassiere.
She sat down on the bed, tired out by all this sport, this irrelevance.
—
WHAT MADE MORE SENSE was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.
It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.
So, nothing now but what she or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret, or strange.
Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious.
Elizabeth called again, “Mommy. Come here.” And then the others—Brendan and Polly and Lionel, one after the other, were calling her, teasing her.
Mommy.
Mommy.
Come here.
—
IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.
The Bear Came Over the Mountain
FIONA LIVED IN HER PARENTS’ HOUSE, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, rever
ed around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and kept coming and going and arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and this activity in her house was probably the reason.
Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics, though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also she played the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired, gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phrases. He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.
“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”
He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
—
JUST BEFORE THEY LEFT their house Fiona noticed a mark on the kitchen floor. It came from the cheap black house shoes she had been wearing earlier in the day.
“I thought they’d quit doing that,” she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance and perplexity, rubbing at the gray smear that looked as if it had been made by a greasy crayon.
She remarked that she would never have to do this again, since she wasn’t taking those shoes with her.
“I guess I’ll be dressed up all the time,” she said. “Or semi dressed up. It’ll be sort of like in a hotel.”
She rinsed out the rag she’d been using and hung it on the rack inside the door under the sink. Then she put on her golden-brown fur-collared ski jacket over a white turtle-necked sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman, seventy years old but still upright and trim, with long legs and long feet, delicate wrists and ankles and tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her hair, which was light as milkweed fluff, had gone from pale blond to white somehow without Grant’s noticing exactly when, and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done. (That was the thing that had alarmed Grant’s own mother, a small-town widow who worked as a doctor’s receptionist. The long white hair on Fiona’s mother, even more than the state of the house, had told her all she needed to know about attitudes and politics.)
Otherwise Fiona with her fine bones and small sapphire eyes was nothing like her mother. She had a slightly crooked mouth which she emphasized now with red lipstick—usually the last thing she did before she left the house. She looked just like herself on this day—direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.
—
OVER A YEAR AGO Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the house. That was not entirely new. She’d always written things down—the title of a book she’d heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she did that day. Even her morning schedule was written down—he found it mystifying and touching in its precision.
7 a.m. Yoga. 7:30–7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45–8:15 walk. 8:15 Grant and Breakfast.
The new notes were different. Taped onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dishtowels, Knives. Couldn’t she have just opened the drawers and seen what was inside? He remembered a story about the German soldiers on border patrol in Czechoslovakia during the war. Some Czech had told him that each of the patrol dogs wore a sign that said Hund. Why? said the Czechs, and the Germans said, Because that is a hund.
He was going to tell Fiona that, then thought he’d better not. They always laughed at the same things, but suppose this time she didn’t laugh?
Worse things were coming. She went to town and phoned him from a booth to ask him how to drive home. She went for her walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line—a very long way round. She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere.
It was hard to figure out. She said that about fences as if it was a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing my mind.”
He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.
“If I have I don’t remember,” she said. Then she said she was sorry to sound so flippant.
“I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins.”
Vitamins didn’t help. She would stand in doorways trying to figure out where she was going. She forgot to turn on the burner under the vegetables or put water in the coffeemaker. She asked Grant when they’d moved to this house.
“Was it last year or the year before?”
He said that it was twelve years ago.
She said, “That’s shocking.”
“She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor. “Once she left her fur coat in storage and just forgot about it. That was when we were always going somewhere warm in the winters. Then she said it was unintentionally on purpose, she said it was like a sin she was leaving behind. The way some people made her feel about fur coats.”
He tried without success to explain something more—to explain how Fiona’s surprise and apologies about all this seemed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amusement. As if she’d stumbled on some adventure that she had not been expecting. Or was playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to. They had always had their games—nonsense dialects, characters they invented. Some of Fiona’s made-up voices, chirping or wheedling (he couldn’t tell the doctor this), had mimicked uncannily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about.
“Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might be selective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we see the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say.”
In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer went shopping alone, disappeared from the supermarket while Grant had his back turned. A policeman picked her up as she walked down the middle of the road, blocks away. He asked her name and she answered readily. Then he asked her the name of the prime minister of the country.
“If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible job.”
He laughed. But then she made the mistake of asking if he’d seen Boris and Natasha.
These were the Russian wolfhounds she had adopted some years ago as a favor to a friend, then devoted herself to for the rest of their lives. Her taking them over might have coincided with the discovery that she was not likely to have children. Something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted—Grant could not remember now. He had always avoided thinking about all that female apparatus. Or it might have been after her mother died. The dogs’ long legs and silky hair, their narrow, gentle, intransigent faces made a fine match for her when she took them out for walks. And Grant himself, in those days, landing his first job at the university (his father-in-law’s money welcome in spite of the political taint), might have seemed to some people to have been picked up on another of Fiona’s eccentric whims, and groomed and tended and favored. Though he never understood this, fortunately, until much later.
—
SHE SAID TO HIM, at suppertime on the day of the wandering-off at the supermarket, “You know what you’re going to have to do with me, don’t you? You’re going to have to put me in that place. Shallowlake?”
Grant said, “Meadowlake. We’re not at that stage yet.”
“Shallowlake, Shillylake,” she said, as if they were engaged in a playful competition. “Sillylake. Sillylake it is.”
He held his head in his hands, his elbows on the table. He said that if
they did think of it, it must be as something that need not be permanent. A kind of experimental treatment. A rest cure.
—
THERE WAS A RULE that nobody could be admitted during the month of December. The holiday season had so many emotional pitfalls. So they made the twenty-minute drive in January. Before they reached the highway the country road dipped through a swampy hollow now completely frozen over. The swamp-oaks and maples threw their shadows like bars across the bright snow.
Fiona said, “Oh, remember.”
Grant said, “I was thinking about that too.”
“Only it was in the moonlight,” she said.
She was talking about the time that they had gone out skiing at night under the full moon and over the black-striped snow, in this place that you could get into only in the depths of winter. They had heard the branches cracking in the cold.
So if she could remember that so vividly and correctly, could there really be so much the matter with her?
It was all he could do not to turn around and drive home.
—
THERE WAS ANOTHER RULE which the supervisor explained to him. New residents were not to be visited during the first thirty days. Most people needed that time to get settled in. Before the rule had been put in place, there had been pleas and tears and tantrums, even from those who had come in willingly. Around the third or fourth day they would start lamenting and begging to be taken home. And some relatives could be susceptible to that, so you would have people being carted home who would not get on there any better than they had before. Six months later or sometimes only a few weeks later, the whole upsetting hassle would have to be gone through again.
“Whereas we find,” the supervisor said, “we find that if they’re left on their own they usually end up happy as clams. You have to practically lure them into a bus to take a trip to town. The same with a visit home. It’s perfectly okay to take them home then, visit for an hour or two—they’re the ones that’ll worry about getting back in time for supper. Meadowlake’s their home then. Of course, that doesn’t apply to the ones on the second floor, we can’t let them go. It’s too difficult, and they don’t know where they are anyway.”