Family Furnishings

by Alice Munro

  Clark had managed to get hold of a large enough piece of roofing at a good price. He had spent the whole first day after Runaway Day (that was how they referred to Carla’s bus trip) fixing the roof of the exercise ring.

  For a couple of days, as they went about their chores, he and Carla would wave at each other. If she happened to pass close to him, and there was nobody else around, Carla might kiss his shoulder through the light material of his summer shirt.

  “If you ever try to run away on me again I’ll tan your hide,” he said to her, and she said, “Would you?”

  “What?”

  “Tan my hide?”

  “Damn right.” He was high-spirited now, irresistible as when she had first known him.

  Birds were everywhere. Red-winged blackbirds, robins, a pair of doves that sang at daybreak. Lots of crows, and gulls on reconnoitering missions from the lake, and big turkey buzzards that sat in the branches of a dead oak about half a mile away, at the edge of the woods. At first they just sat there, drying out their voluminous wings, lifting themselves occasionally for a trial flight, flapping around a bit, then composing themselves to let the sun and the warm air do their work. In a day or so they were restored, flying high, circling and dropping to earth, disappearing over the woods, coming back to rest in the familiar bare tree.

  Lizzie’s owner—Joy Tucker—showed up again, tanned and friendly. She had just got sick of the rain and gone off on her holidays to hike in the Rocky Mountains. Now she was back.

  “Perfect timing weatherwise,” Clark said. He and Joy Tucker were soon joking as if nothing had happened.

  “Lizzie looks to be in good shape,” she said. “But where’s her little friend? What’s her name—Flora?”

  “Gone,” said Clark. “Maybe she took off to the Rocky Mountains.”

  “Lots of wild goats out there. With fantastic horns.”

  “So I hear.”

  —

  For three or four days they had been just too busy to go down and look in the mailbox. When Carla opened it she found the phone bill, some promise that if they subscribed to a certain magazine they could win a million dollars, and Mrs. Jamieson’s letter.

  My Dear Carla,

  I have been thinking about the (rather dramatic) events of the last few days and I find myself talking to myself but really to you, so often that I thought I must speak to you, even if—the best way I can do now—only in a letter. And don’t worry—you do not have to answer me.

  Mrs. Jamieson went on to say that she was afraid that she had involved herself too closely in Carla’s life and had made the mistake of thinking somehow that Carla’s happiness and freedom were the same thing. All she cared for was Carla’s happiness and she saw now that she—Carla—must find that in her marriage. All she could hope was that perhaps Carla’s flight and turbulent emotions had brought her true feelings to the surface and perhaps a recognition in her husband of his true feelings as well.

  She said that she would perfectly understand if Carla had a wish to avoid her in the future and that she would always be grateful for Carla’s presence in her life during such a difficult time.

  The strangest and most wonderful thing in this whole string of events seems to me the reappearance of Flora. In fact it seems rather like a miracle. Where had she been all the time and why did she choose just that moment for her reappearance? I am sure your husband has described it to you. We were talking at the patio door and I—facing out—was the first to see this white something—descending on us out of the night. Of course it was the effect of the ground fog. But truly terrifying. I think I shrieked out loud. I had never in my life felt such bewitchment, in the true sense. I suppose I should be honest and say fear. There we were, two adults, frozen, and then out of the fog comes little lost Flora.

  There has to be something special about this. I know of course that Flora is an ordinary little animal and that she probably spent her time away in getting herself pregnant. In a sense her return has no connection at all with our human lives. Yet her appearance at that moment did have a profound effect on your husband and me. When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified—no, frightened—by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity—that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. So Flora has her place as a good angel in my life and perhaps also in your husband’s life and yours.

  With all my good wishes, Sylvia Jamieson

  As soon as Carla had read this letter she crumpled it up. Then she burned it in the sink. The flames leapt up alarmingly and she turned on the tap, then scooped up the soft disgusting black stuff and put it down the toilet as she should have done in the first place.

  She was busy for the rest of that day, and the next, and the next. During that time she had to take two parties out on the trails, she had to give lessons to children, individually and in groups. At night when Clark put his arms around her—busy as he was now, he was never too tired, never cross—she did not find it hard to be cooperative.

  It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.

  —

  SYLVIA HAD TAKEN AN APARTMENT in the college town where she taught. The house was not up for sale—or at least there wasn’t a sign out in front of it. Leon Jamieson had got some kind of posthumous award—news of this was in the papers. There was no mention this time of any money.

  —

  AS THE DRY GOLDEN DAYS of fall came on—an encouraging and profitable season—Carla found that she had got used to the sharp thought that had lodged in her. It wasn’t so sharp anymore—in fact, it no longer surprised her. And she was inhabited now by an almost seductive notion, a constant low-lying temptation.

  She had only to raise her eyes, she had only to look in one direction, to know where she might go. An evening walk, once her chores for the day were finished. To the edge of the woods, and the bare tree where the buzzards had held their party.

  And then the little dirty bones in the grass. The skull with perhaps some shreds of bloodied skin clinging to it. A skull that she could hold like a teacup in one hand. Knowledge in one hand.

  Or perhaps not. Nothing there.

  Other things could have happened. He could have chased Flora away. Or tied her in the back of the truck and driven some distance and set her loose. Taken her back to the place they’d got her from. Not to have her around, reminding them.

  She might be free.

  The days passed and Carla didn’t go near that place. She held out against the temptation.

  Soon

  TWO PROFILES FACE EACH OTHER. One the profile of a pure white heifer, with a particularly mild and tender expression, the other that of a green-faced man who is neither young nor old. He seems to be a minor official, maybe a postman—he wears that sort of cap. His lips are pale, the whites of his eyes shining. A hand that is probably his offers up, from the lower margin of the painting, a little tree or an exuberant branch, fruited with jewels.

  At the upper margin of the painting are dark clouds, and underneath them some small tottery houses and a toy church with its toy cross, perched on the curved surface of the earth. Within this curve a small man (drawn to a larger scale, however, than the buildings) walks along purposefully with a scythe on his shoulder, and a woman, drawn to the same scale, seems to wait for him. But she is hanging upside down.

  There are other things as well. For instance, a girl milking a cow, within the heifer’s cheek.

  Juliet decided at once to buy this print for her parents’ Christmas present.

  “Because it reminds me of them,” she said to Christa, her friend who had come down with her from Whale Bay to do some shopping. They were in the gift shop of the Vancouver Art Gallery.

  Christa laughed. “The green man and the cow? T
hey’ll be flattered.”

  Christa never took anything seriously at first, she had to make some joke about it. Juliet wasn’t bothered. Three months pregnant with the baby that would turn out to be Penelope, she was suddenly free of nausea, and for that reason, or some other, she was subject to fits of euphoria. She thought of food all the time, and hadn’t even wanted to come into the gift shop, because she had spotted a lunchroom.

  She loved everything in the picture, but particularly the little figures and rickety buildings at the top of it. The man with the scythe and the woman hanging upside down.

  She looked for the title. I and the Village.

  It made exquisite sense.

  “Chagall. I like Chagall,” said Christa. “Picasso was a bastard.”

  Juliet was so happy with what she had found that she could hardly pay attention.

  “You know what he is supposed to have said? Chagall is for shopgirls,” Christa told her. “So what’s wrong with shopgirls? Chagall should have said, Picasso is for people with funny faces.”

  “I mean, it makes me think of their life,” Juliet said. “I don’t know why, but it does.”

  She had already told Christa some things about her parents—how they lived in a curious but not unhappy isolation, though her father was a popular schoolteacher. Partly they were cut off by Sara’s heart trouble, but also by their subscribing to magazines nobody around them read, listening to programs on the national radio network, which nobody around them listened to. By Sara’s making her own clothes—sometimes ineptly—from Vogue patterns, instead of Butterick. Even by the way they preserved some impression of youth instead of thickening and slouching like the parents of Juliet’s schoolfellows. Juliet had described Sam as looking like her—long neck, a slight bump to the chin, light-brown floppy hair—and Sara as a frail pale blonde, a wispy untidy beauty.

  —

  WHEN PENELOPE was thirteen months old, Juliet flew with her to Toronto, then caught the train. This was in 1969. She got off in a town twenty miles or so away from the town where she had grown up, and where Sam and Sara still lived. Apparently the train did not stop there anymore.

  She was disappointed to get off at this unfamiliar station and not to see reappear, at once, the trees and sidewalks and houses she remembered—then, very soon, her own house, Sam and Sara’s house, spacious but plain, no doubt with its same blistered and shabby white paint, behind its bountiful soft maple tree.

  Sam and Sara, here in this town where she’d never seen them before, were smiling but anxious, diminished.

  Sara gave a curious little cry, as if something had pecked her. A couple of people on the platform turned to look.

  Apparently it was only excitement.

  “We’re long and short, but still we match,” she said.

  At first Juliet did not understand what was meant. Then she figured it out—Sara was wearing a black linen skirt down to her calves and a matching jacket. The jacket’s collar and cuffs were of a shiny lime-green cloth with black polka dots. A turban of the same green material covered her hair. She must have made the outfit herself, or got some dressmaker to make it for her. Its colors were unkind to her skin, which looked as if fine chalk dust had settled over it.

  Juliet was wearing a black minidress.

  “I was wondering what you’d think of me, black in the summertime, like I’m all in mourning,” Sara said. “And here you’re dressed to match. You look so smart, I’m all in favor of these short dresses.”

  “And long hair,” said Sam. “An absolute hippy.” He bent to look into the baby’s face. “Hello, Penelope.”

  Sara said, “What a dolly.”

  She reached out for Penelope—though the arms that slid out of her sleeves were sticks too frail to hold any such burden. And they did not have to, because Penelope, who had tensed at the first sound of her grandmother’s voice, now yelped and turned away, and hid her face in Juliet’s neck.

  Sara laughed. “Am I such a scarecrow?” Again her voice was ill controlled, rising to shrill peaks and falling away, drawing stares. This was new—though maybe not entirely. Juliet had an idea that people might always have looked her mother’s way when she laughed or talked, but in the old days it would have been a spurt of merriment they noticed, something girlish and attractive (though not everybody would have liked that either, they would have said she was always trying to get attention).

  Juliet said, “She’s so tired.”

  Sam introduced the young woman who was standing behind them, keeping her distance as if she was taking care not to be identified as part of their group. And in fact it had not occurred to Juliet that she was.

  “Juliet, this is Irene. Irene Avery.”

  Juliet stuck out her hand as well as she could while holding Penelope and the diaper bag, and when it became evident that Irene was not going to shake hands—or perhaps did not notice the intention—she smiled. Irene did not smile back. She stood quite still but gave the impression of wanting to bolt.

  “Hello,” said Juliet.

  Irene said, “Pleased to meet you,” in a sufficiently audible voice, but without expression.

  “Irene is our good fairy,” Sara said, and then Irene’s face did change. She scowled a little, with sensible embarrassment.

  She was not as tall as Juliet—who was tall—but she was broader in the shoulders and hips, with strong arms and a stubborn chin. She had thick, springy black hair, pulled back from her face into a stubby ponytail, thick and rather hostile black eyebrows, and the sort of skin that browns easily. Her eyes were green or blue, a light surprising color against this skin, and hard to look into, being deep set. Also because she held her head slightly lowered and twisted her face to the side. This wariness seemed hardened and deliberate.

  “She does one heck of a lot of work for a fairy,” Sam said, with his large strategic grin. “I’ll tell the world she does.”

  And now of course Juliet recalled the mention in letters of some woman who had come in to help, because of Sara’s strength having gone so drastically downhill. But she had thought of somebody much older. Irene was surely no older than she was herself.

  The car was the same Pontiac that Sam had got secondhand maybe ten years ago. The original blue paint showed in streaks here and there but was mostly faded to gray, and the effects of winter road salt could be seen in its petticoat fringe of rust.

  “The old gray mare,” said Sara, almost out of breath after the short walk from the railway platform.

  “She hasn’t given up,” said Juliet. She spoke admiringly, as seemed to be expected. She had forgotten that this was what they called the car, though it was the name she had thought up herself.

  “Oh, she never gives up,” said Sara, once she was settled with Irene’s help in the backseat. “And we’d never give up on her.”

  Juliet got into the front seat, juggling Penelope, who was beginning again to whimper. The heat inside the car was shocking, even though it had been parked with the windows down in the scanty shade of the station poplars.

  “Actually I’m considering—,” said Sam as he backed out, “I’m considering turning her in for a truck.”

  “He doesn’t mean it,” shrieked Sara.

  “For the business,” Sam continued. “It’d be a lot handier. And you’d get a certain amount of advertising every time you drove down the street, just from the name on the door.”

  “He’s teasing,” Sara said. “How am I going to ride around in a vehicle that says Fresh Vegetables? Am I supposed to be the squash or the cabbage?”

  “Better pipe down, Missus,” Sam said, “or you won’t have any breath left when we reach home.”

  After nearly thirty years of teaching in the public schools around the county—ten years in the last school—Sam had suddenly quit and decided to get into the business of selling vegetables, full-time. He had always cultivated a big vegetable garden, and raspberry canes, in the extra lot beside their house, and they had sold their surplus produce to a few people a
round town. But now, apparently, this was to change into his way of making a living, selling to grocery stores and perhaps eventually putting up a market stall at the front gate.

  “You’re serious about all this?” said Juliet quietly.

  “Darn right I am.”

  “You’re not going to miss teaching?”

  “Not on your Nelly-O. I was fed up. I was fed up to the eyeballs.”

  It was true that after all those years, he had never been offered, in any school, the job of principal. She supposed that was what he was fed up with. He was a remarkable teacher, the one whose antics and energy everyone would remember, his Grade Six unlike any other year in his pupils’ lives. Yet he had been passed over, time and again, and probably for that very reason. His methods could be seen to undercut authority. So you could imagine Authority saying that he was not the sort of man to be in charge, he’d do less harm where he was.

  He liked outdoor work, he was good at talking to people, he would probably do well, selling vegetables.

  But Sara would hate it.

  Juliet did not like it either. If there was a side to be on, however, she would have to choose his. She was not going to define herself as a snob.

  And the truth was that she saw herself—she saw herself and Sam and Sara, but particularly herself and Sam—as superior in their own way to everybody around them. So what should his peddling vegetables matter?

  Sam spoke now in a quieter, conspiratorial voice.

  “What’s her name?”

  He meant the baby’s.

  “Penelope. We’re never going to call her Penny. Penelope.”

  “No, I mean—I mean her last name.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s Henderson-Porteous I guess. Or Porteous-Henderson. But maybe that’s too much of a mouthful, when she’s already called Penelope? We knew that but we wanted Penelope. We’ll have to settle it somehow.”