Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  She had been hardly interested in her gift. Almost sullen as she reached out for her mug of coffee.

  “There was one thing I thought you would have liked a lot,” said Sylvia energetically. “The goats. They were quite small even when they were full-grown. Some spotty and some white, and they were leaping around up on the rocks just like—like the spirits of the place.” She laughed in an artificial way, she couldn’t stop herself. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d had wreaths on their horns. How is your little goat? I forget her name.”

  Carla said, “Flora.”

  “Flora.”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone? Did you sell her?”

  “She disappeared. We don’t know where.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But isn’t there a chance she’ll turn up again?”

  No answer. Sylvia looked directly at the girl, something that up to now she had not quite been able to do, and saw that her eyes were full of tears, her face blotchy—in fact it looked grubby—and that she seemed bloated with distress.

  She didn’t do anything to avoid Sylvia’s look. She drew her lips tight over her teeth and shut her eyes and rocked back and forth as if in a soundless howl, and then, shockingly, she did howl. She howled and wept and gulped for air and tears ran down her cheeks and snot out of her nostrils and she began to look around wildly for something to wipe with. Sylvia ran and got handfuls of Kleenex.

  “Don’t worry, here you are, here, you’re all right,” she said, thinking that maybe the thing to do would be to take the girl in her arms. But she had not the least wish to do that, and it might make things worse. The girl might feel how little Sylvia wanted to do such a thing, how appalled she was in fact by this noisy fit.

  Carla said something, said the same thing again.

  “Awful,” she said. “Awful.”

  “No it’s not. We all have to cry sometimes. It’s all right, don’t worry.”

  “It’s awful.”

  And Sylvia could not help feeling how, with every moment of this show of misery, the girl made herself more ordinary, more like one of those soggy students in her—Sylvia’s—office. Some of them cried about their marks, but that was often tactical, a brief unconvincing bit of whimpering. The more infrequent, real waterworks would turn out to have something to do with a love affair, or their parents, or a pregnancy.

  “It’s not about your goat, is it?”

  “No. No.”

  “You better have a glass of water,” said Sylvia.

  She took time to run it cold, trying to think what else she should do or say, and when she returned with it Carla was already calming down.

  “Now. Now,” Sylvia said as the water was being swallowed. “Isn’t that better?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not the goat. What is it?”

  Carla said, “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  What could she not stand?

  It turned out to be the husband.

  He was mad at her all the time. He acted as if he hated her. There was nothing she could do right, there was nothing she could say. Living with him was driving her crazy. Sometimes she thought she already was crazy. Sometimes she thought he was.

  “Has he hurt you, Carla?”

  No. He hadn’t hurt her physically. But he hated her. He despised her. He could not stand it when she cried and she could not help crying because he was so mad.

  She did not know what to do.

  “Perhaps you do know what to do,” said Sylvia.

  “Get away? I would if I could.” Carla began to wail again. “I’d give anything to get away. I can’t. I haven’t any money. I haven’t anywhere in this world to go.”

  “Well. Think. Is that altogether true?” said Sylvia in her best counselling manner. “Don’t you have parents? Didn’t you tell me you grew up in Kingston? Don’t you have a family there?”

  Her parents had moved to British Columbia. They hated Clark. They didn’t care if she lived or died.

  Brothers or sisters?

  One brother nine years older. He was married and in Toronto. He didn’t care either. He didn’t like Clark. His wife was a snob.

  “Have you ever thought of the Women’s Shelter?”

  “They don’t want you there unless you’ve been beaten up. And everybody would find out and it would be bad for our business.”

  Sylvia gently smiled.

  “Is this a time to think about that?”

  Then Carla actually laughed. “I know,” she said, “I’m insane.”

  “Listen,” said Sylvia. “Listen to me. If you had the money to go, would you go? Where would you go? What would you do?”

  “I would go to Toronto,” Carla said readily enough. “But I wouldn’t go near my brother. I’d stay in a motel or something and I’d get a job at a riding stable.”

  “You think you could do that?”

  “I was working at a riding stable the summer I met Clark. I’m more experienced now than I was then. A lot more.”

  “You sound as if you’ve figured this out,” said Sylvia thoughtfully.

  Carla said, “I have now.”

  “So when would you go, if you could go?”

  “Now. Today. This minute.”

  “All that’s stopping you is lack of money?”

  Carla took a deep breath. “All that’s stopping me,” she said.

  “All right,” said Sylvia. “Now listen to what I propose. I don’t think you should go to a motel. I think you should take the bus to Toronto and go to stay with a friend of mine. Her name is Ruth Stiles. She has a big house and she lives alone and she won’t mind having somebody to stay. You can stay there till you find a job. I’ll help you with some money. There must be lots and lots of riding stables around Toronto.”

  “There are.”

  “So what do you think? Do you want me to phone and find out what time the bus goes?”

  Carla said yes. She was shivering. She ran her hands up and down her thighs and shook her head roughly from side to side.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I’ll pay you back. I mean, thank you. I’ll pay you back. I don’t know what to say.”

  Sylvia was already at the phone, dialling the bus depot.

  “Shh, I’m getting the times,” she said. She listened, and hung up. “I know you will. You agree about Ruth’s? I’ll let her know. There’s one problem, though.” She looked critically at Carla’s shorts and T-shirt. “You can’t very well go in those clothes.”

  “I can’t go home to get anything,” said Carla in a panic. “I’ll be all right.”

  “The bus will be air-conditioned. You’ll freeze. There must be something of mine you could wear. Aren’t we about the same height?”

  “You’re ten times skinnier.”

  “I didn’t use to be.”

  In the end they decided on a brown linen jacket, hardly worn—Sylvia had considered it to be a mistake for herself, the style too brusque—and a pair of tailored tan pants and a cream-colored silk shirt. Carla’s sneakers would have to do with this outfit, because her feet were two sizes larger than Sylvia’s.

  Carla went to take a shower—something she had not bothered with in her state of mind that morning—and Sylvia phoned Ruth. Ruth was going to be out at a meeting that evening, but she would leave the key with her upstairs tenants and all Carla would have to do was ring their bell.

  “She’ll have to take a cab from the bus depot, though. I assume she’s okay to manage that?” Ruth said.

  Sylvia laughed. “She’s not a lame duck, don’t worry. She is just a person in a bad situation, the way it happens.”

  “Well good. I mean good she’s getting out.”

  “Not a lame duck at all,” said Sylvia, thinking of Carla trying on the tailored pants and linen jacket. How quickly the young recover from a fit of despair and how handsome the girl had looked in the fresh clothes.

  The bus would stop in town at twenty past two. Sylvia decided to make omelettes
for lunch, to set the table with the dark-blue cloth, and to get down the crystal glasses and open a bottle of wine.

  “I hope you’re hungry enough to eat something,” she said, when Carla came out clean and shining in her borrowed clothes. Her softly freckled skin was flushed from the shower, and her hair was damp and darkened, out of its braid, the sweet frizz now flat against her head. She said she was hungry, but when she tried to get a forkful of the omelette to her mouth her trembling hands made it impossible.

  “I don’t know why I’m shaking like this,” she said. “I must be excited. I never knew it would be this easy.”

  “It’s very sudden,” said Sylvia. “Probably it doesn’t seem quite real.”

  “It does, though. Everything now seems really real. Like the time before now, that’s when I was in a daze.”

  “Maybe when you make up your mind to something, when you really make up your mind, that’s how it is. Or that’s how it should be.”

  “If you’ve got a friend,” said Carla with a self-conscious smile and a flush spreading over her forehead. “If you’ve got a true friend. I mean like you.” She laid down the knife and fork and raised her wineglass awkwardly with both hands. “Drinking to a true friend,” she said, uncomfortably. “I probably shouldn’t even take a sip, but I will.”

  “Me too,” said Sylvia with a pretense of gaiety. She drank, but spoiled the moment by saying, “Are you going to phone him? Or what? He’ll have to know. At least he’ll have to know where you are by the time he’d be expecting you home.”

  “Not the phone,” said Carla, alarmed. “I can’t do it. Maybe if you—”

  “No,” said Sylvia. “No.”

  “No, that’s stupid. I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just hard to think straight. What I maybe should do, I should put a note in the mailbox. But I don’t want him to get it too soon. I don’t want us to even drive past there when we’re going into town. I want to go the back way. So if I write it—if I write it, could you, could you maybe slip it in the box when you come back?”

  Sylvia agreed to this, seeing no good alternative.

  She brought pen and paper. She poured a little more wine. Carla sat thinking, then wrote a few words.

  —

  I have gone away. I will be all write.

  These were the words that Sylvia read when she unfolded the paper, on her way back from the bus depot. She was sure Carla knew right from write. It was just that she had been talking about writing a note, and she was in a state of exalted confusion. More confusion perhaps than Sylvia had realized. The wine had brought out a stream of talk, but it had not seemed to be accompanied by any particular grief or upset. She had talked about the horse barn where she had worked and met Clark when she was eighteen and just out of high school. Her parents wanted her to go to college, and she had agreed as long as she could choose to be a veterinarian. All she really wanted, and had wanted all her life, was to work with animals and live in the country. She had been one of those dorky girls in high school, one of those girls they made rotten jokes about, but she didn’t care.

  Clark was the best riding teacher they had. Scads of women were after him, they would take up riding just to get him as their teacher. Carla teased him about his women and at first he seemed to like it, then he got annoyed. She apologized and tried to make up for it by getting him talking about his dream—his plan, really—to have a riding school, a horse stable, someplace out in the country. One day she came into the stable and saw him hanging up his saddle and realized she had fallen in love with him.

  Now she considered it was sex. It was probably just sex.

  —

  WHEN FALL CAME and she was supposed to quit working and leave for college in Guelph, she refused to go, she said she needed a year off.

  Clark was very smart but he hadn’t waited even to finish high school. He had altogether lost touch with his family. He thought families were like a poison in your blood. He had been an attendant in a mental hospital, a disc jockey on a radio station in Lethbridge, Alberta, a member of a road crew on the highways near Thunder Bay, an apprentice barber, a salesman in an Army Surplus store. And those were only the jobs he told her about.

  She had nicknamed him Gypsy Rover, because of the song, an old song her mother used to sing. Now she took to singing it around the house all the time and her mother knew something was up.

  “Last night she slept in a feather bed

  With a silken quilt for cover

  Tonight she’ll sleep on the cold hard ground—

  Beside her gypsy lo-ov-ver.”

  Her mother said, “He’ll break your heart, that’s a sure thing.” Her stepfather, who was an engineer, did not even grant Clark that much power. “A loser,” he called him. “One of those drifters.” As if Clark was a bug he could just whisk off his clothes.

  So Carla said, “Does a drifter save up enough money to buy a farm? Which, by the way, he has done?” and he only said, “I’m not about to argue with you.” She was not his daughter anyway, he added, as if that was the clincher.

  So, naturally, Carla had to run away with Clark. The way her parents behaved, they were practically guaranteeing it.

  “Will you get in touch with your parents after you’re settled?” Sylvia said. “In Toronto?”

  Carla lifted her eyebrows, pulled in her cheeks and made a saucy O of her mouth. She said, “Nope.”

  Definitely a little drunk.

  —

  BACK HOME, having left the note in the mailbox, Sylvia cleaned up the dishes that were still on the table, washed and polished the omelette pan, threw the blue napkins and tablecloth in the laundry basket, and opened the windows. She did this with a confusing sense of regret and irritation. She had put out a fresh cake of apple-scented soap for the girl’s shower and the smell of it lingered in the house, as it had in the air of the car.

  The rain was holding off. She could not stay still, so she went for a walk along the path that Leon had cleared. The gravel he had dumped in the boggy places had mostly washed away. They used to go walking every spring, to look for wild orchids. She taught him the name of every wildflower—all of which, except for trillium, he forgot. He used to call her his Dorothy Wordsworth.

  Last spring she went out once and picked him a small bunch of dog’s-tooth violets, but he looked at them—as he sometimes looked at her—with mere exhaustion, disavowal.

  She kept seeing Carla, Carla stepping onto the bus. Her thanks had been sincere but already almost casual, her wave jaunty. She had got used to her salvation.

  Back in the house, at around six o’clock, Sylvia put in a call to Toronto, to Ruth, knowing that Carla would not have arrived yet. She got the answering machine.

  “Ruth,” said Sylvia. “Sylvia. It’s about this girl I sent you. I hope she doesn’t turn out to be a bother to you. I hope it’ll be all right. You may find her a little full of herself. Maybe it’s just youth. Let me know. Okay?”

  She phoned again before she went to bed but got the machine, so she said, “Sylvia again. Just checking,” and hung up. It was between nine and ten o’clock, not even really dark. Ruth must still be out and the girl would not want to pick up the phone in a strange house. She tried to think of the name of Ruth’s upstairs tenants. They surely wouldn’t have gone to bed yet. But she could not remember. And just as well. Phoning them would have meant making too much of a fuss, being too anxious, going too far.

  She got into the bed but it was impossible to stay there, so she took a light quilt and went out to the living room and lay down on the sofa, where she had slept for the last three months of Leon’s life. She did not think it likely that she would get to sleep there either—there were no curtains on the bank of windows and she could tell by the look of the sky that the moon had risen, though she could not see it.

  The next thing she knew she was on a bus somewhere—in Greece?—with a lot of people she did not know, and the engine of the bus was making an alarming knocking sound. She woke to find the kno
cking was at her front door.

  Carla?

  —

  CARLA HAD KEPT HER HEAD DOWN until the bus was clear of town. The windows were tinted, nobody could see in, but she had to guard herself against seeing out. Lest Clark appear. Coming out of a store or waiting to cross the street, all ignorant of her abandoning him, thinking this an ordinary afternoon. No, thinking it the afternoon when their scheme—his scheme—was put in motion, eager to know how far she had got with it.

  Once they were out in the country she looked up, breathed deeply, took account of the fields, which were slightly violet-tinted through the glass. Mrs. Jamieson’s presence had surrounded her with some kind of remarkable safety and sanity and had made her escape seem the most rational thing you could imagine, in fact the only self-respecting thing that a person in Carla’s shoes could do. Carla had felt herself capable of an unaccustomed confidence, even of a mature sense of humor, revealing her life to Mrs. Jamieson in a way that seemed bound to gain sympathy and yet to be ironic and truthful. And adapted to live up to what, as far as she could see, were Mrs. Jamieson’s—Sylvia’s—expectations. She did have a feeling that it would be possible to disappoint Mrs. Jamieson, who struck her as a most sensitive and rigorous person, but she thought that she was in no danger of doing that.

  If she didn’t have to be around her for too long.

  The sun was shining, as it had been for some time. When they sat at lunch it had made the wineglasses sparkle. No rain had fallen since early morning. There was enough of a wind blowing to lift the roadside grass, the flowering weeds, out of their drenched clumps. Summer clouds, not rain clouds, were scudding across the sky. The whole countryside was changing, shaking itself loose, into the true brightness of a July day. And as they sped along she was able to see not much trace at all of the recent past—no big puddles in the fields, showing where the seed had washed out, no miserable spindly cornstalks or lodged grain.

  It occurred to her that she must tell Clark about this—that perhaps they had chosen what was for some freakish reason a very wet and dreary corner of the country, and there were other places where they could have been successful.