by Alice Munro
“It’s all right,” she said, and then she told him, in a straightforward way, just what had happened. How the man bent over and asked her if the seat was taken, how he sat down, how she had been looking out the window and how she couldn’t do that any longer so she had tried or had pretended to read her book, how he had asked where she had got on the train, and found out where she lived, and kept trying to make headway with the conversation, till she just picked up and left him.
The only thing she did not reveal to him was the expression chum around. She had a notion that if she were to say that she would burst into tears all over again.
“People interrupt women,” he said. “Easier than men.”
“Yes. They do.”
“They think women are bound to be nicer.”
“But he just wanted somebody to talk to,” she said, shifting sides a little. “He wanted somebody worse than I didn’t want somebody. I realize that now. And I don’t look mean. I don’t look cruel. But I was.”
A pause, while she once more got her sniffling and her leaky eyes under control.
He said, “Haven’t you ever wanted to do that to anybody before?”
“Yes. But I’ve never done it. I never have gone so far. And why I did it this time—it was that he was so humble. And he had all new clothes on he’d probably bought for the trip. He was probably depressed and thought he’d go on a trip and it was a good way to meet people and make friends.
“Maybe if he’d just been going a little way—,” she said. “But he said he was going to Vancouver and I would have been saddled with him. For days.”
“Yes.”
“I really might have been.”
“Yes.”
“So.”
“Rotten luck,” he said, smiling a very little. “The first time you get up the nerve to give somebody the gears he throws himself under a train.”
“It could have been the last straw,” she said, now feeling slightly defensive. “It could have been.”
“I guess you’ll just have to watch out, in future.”
Juliet raised her chin and looked at him steadily.
“You mean I’m exaggerating.”
Then something happened that was as sudden and unbidden as her tears. Her mouth began to twitch. Unholy laughter was rising.
“I guess it is a little extreme.”
He said, “A little.”
“You think I’m dramatizing?”
“That’s natural.”
“But you think it’s a mistake,” she said, with the laughter under control. “You think feeling guilty is just an indulgence?”
“What I think is—,” he said. “I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life—things will probably happen in your life—that will make this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about.”
“Don’t people always say that, though? To somebody who is younger? They say, oh, you won’t think like this someday. You wait and see. As if you didn’t have a right to any serious feelings. As if you weren’t capable.”
“Feelings,” he said. “I was talking about experience.”
“But you are sort of saying that guilt isn’t any use. People do say that. Is it true?”
“You tell me.”
They went on talking about this for a considerable time, in low voices, but so forcefully that people passing by sometimes looked astonished, or even offended, as people may when they overhear debates that seem unnecessarily abstract. Juliet realized, after a while, that though she was arguing—rather well, she thought—for the necessity of some feelings of guilt both in public and in private life, she had stopped feeling any, for the moment. You might even have said that she was enjoying herself.
He suggested that they go forward to the lounge, where they could drink coffee. Once there Juliet discovered that she was quite hungry, though the lunch hours were long over. Pretzels and peanuts were all that could be procured, and she gobbled them up in such a way that the thoughtful, slightly competitive conversation they were having before was not retrievable. So they talked instead about themselves. His name was Eric Porteous, and he lived in a place called Whale Bay, somewhere north of Vancouver, on the west coast. But he was not going there immediately, he was breaking the trip in Regina, to see some people he had not seen for a long time. He was a fisherman, he caught prawns. She asked about the medical experience he had referred to, and he said, “Oh, it’s not very extensive. I did some medical study. When you’re out in the bush or on the boat anything can happen. To the people you’re working with. Or to yourself.”
He was married, his wife’s name was Ann.
Eight years ago, he said, Ann had been injured in a car accident. For several weeks she was in a coma. She came out of that, but she was still paralyzed, unable to walk or even to feed herself. She seemed to know who he was, and who the woman who looked after her was—with the help of this woman he was able to keep her at home—but her attempts to talk, and to understand what was going on around her, soon faded away.
They had been to a party. She hadn’t particularly wanted to go but he had wanted to go. Then she decided to walk home by herself, not being very happy with things at the party.
It was a gang of drunks from another party who ran off the road and knocked her down. Teenagers.
Luckily, he and Ann had no children. Yes, luckily.
“You tell people about it and they feel they have to say, how terrible. What a tragedy. Et cetera.”
“Can you blame them?” said Juliet, who had been about to say something of the sort herself.
No, he said. But it was just that the whole thing was a lot more complicated than that. Did Ann feel that it was a tragedy? Probably not. Did he? It was something you got used to, it was a new kind of life. That was all.
All of Juliet’s enjoyable experience of men had been in fantasy. One or two movie stars, the lovely tenor—not the virile heartless hero—on a certain old recording of Don Giovanni. Henry V, as she read about him in Shakespeare and as Laurence Olivier had played him in the movie.
This was ridiculous, pathetic, but who ever needed to know? In actual life there had been humiliation and disappointment, which she had tried to push out of her mind as quickly as possible.
There was the experience of being stranded head and shoulders above the gaggle of other unwanted girls at the high school dances, and being bored but making a rash attempt to be lively on college dates with boys she didn’t much like, who did not much like her. Going out with the visiting nephew of her thesis adviser last year and being broken into—you couldn’t call it rape, she too was determined—late at night on the ground in Willis Park.
On the way home he had explained that she wasn’t his type. And she had felt too humiliated to retort—or even to be aware, at that moment—that he was not hers.
She had never had fantasies about a particular, real man—least of all about any of her teachers. Older men—in real life—seemed to her to be slightly unsavory.
This man was how old? He had been married for at least eight years—and perhaps two years, two or three years, more than that. Which made him probably thirty-five or thirty-six. His hair was dark and curly with some gray at the sides, his forehead wide and weathered, his shoulders strong and a little stooped. He was hardly any taller than she was. His eyes were wide set, dark, and eager but also wary. His chin was rounded, dimpled, pugnacious.
She told him about her job, the name of the school—Torrance House. (“What do you want to bet it’s called Torments?”) She told him that she was not a real teacher but that they were glad to get anybody who had majored in Greek and Latin at college. Hardly anybody did anymore.
“So why did you?”
“Oh, just to be different, I guess.”
Then she told him what she had always known that she should never tell any man or boy, lest he lose interest immediately.
“And because I love it. I love all that stuff. I really do.”
They ate
dinner together—each drinking a glass of wine—and then went up to the observation car, where they sat in the dark, all by themselves. Juliet had brought her sweater this time.
“People must think there’s nothing to see up here at night,” he said. “But look at the stars you can see on a clear night.”
Indeed the night was clear. There was no moon—at least not yet—and the stars appeared in dense thickets, both faint and bright. And like anyone who had lived and worked on boats, he was familiar with the map of the sky. She was able to locate only the Big Dipper.
“That’s your start,” he said. “Take the two stars on the side of the Dipper opposite the handle. Got them? Those are the pointers. Follow them up. Follow them, you’ll find the polestar.” And so on.
He found for her Orion, which he said was the major constellation in the Northern Hemisphere in winter. And Sirius, the Dog Star, at that time of year the brightest star in the whole northern sky.
Juliet was pleased to be instructed but also pleased when it came her turn to be the instructor. He knew the names but not the history.
She told him that Orion was blinded by Enopion but had got his sight back by looking at the sun.
“He was blinded because he was so beautiful, but Hephaestus came to his rescue. Then he was killed anyway, by Artemis, but he got changed into a constellation. It often happened when somebody really valuable got into bad trouble, they were changed into a constellation. Where is Cassiopeia?”
He directed her to a not very obvious W.
“It’s supposed to be a woman sitting down.”
“That was on account of beauty too,” she said.
“Beauty was dangerous?”
“You bet. She was married to the king of Ethiopia and she was the mother of Andromeda. And she bragged about her beauty and for punishment she was banished to the sky. Isn’t there an Andromeda, too?”
“That’s a galaxy. You should be able to see it tonight. It’s the most distant thing you can see with the naked eye.”
Even when guiding her, telling her where to look in the sky, he never touched her. Of course not. He was married.
“Who was Andromeda?” he asked her.
“She was chained to a rock but Perseus rescued her.”
Whale Bay.
A long dock, a number of large boats, a gas station and store that has a sign in the window saying that it is also the bus stop and the Post Office.
A car parked at the side of this store has in its window a homemade taxi sign. She stands just where she stepped down from the bus. The bus pulls away. The taxi toots its horn. The driver gets out and comes towards her.
“All by yourself,” he says. “Where are you headed for?”
She asks if there is a place where tourists stay. Obviously there won’t be a hotel.
“I don’t know if there’s anybody renting rooms out this year. I could ask them inside. You don’t know anybody around here?”
Nothing to do but to say Eric’s name.
“Oh sure,” he says with relief. “Hop in, we’ll get you there in no time. But it’s too bad, you pretty well missed the wake.”
At first she thinks that he said wait. Or weight? She thinks of fishing competitions.
“Sad time,” the driver says, now getting in behind the wheel. “Still, she wasn’t ever going to get any better.”
Wake. The wife. Ann.
“Never mind,” he says. “I expect there’ll still be some people hanging around. Of course you did miss the funeral. Yesterday. It was a monster. Couldn’t get away?”
Juliet says, “No.”
“I shouldn’t be calling it a wake, should I? Wake is what you have before they’re buried, isn’t it? I don’t know what you call what takes place after. You wouldn’t want to call it a party, would you? I can just run you up and show you all the flowers and tributes, okay?”
Inland, off the highway, after a quarter of a mile or so of rough dirt road, is Whale Bay Union Cemetery. And close to the fence is the mound of earth altogether buried in flowers. Faded real flowers, bright artificial flowers, a little wooden cross with the name and date. Tinselly curled ribbons that have blown about all over the cemetery grass. He draws her attention to all the ruts, the mess the wheels of so many cars made yesterday.
“Half of them had never even seen her. But they knew him, so they wanted to come anyway. Everybody knows Eric.”
They turn around, drive back, but not all the way back to the highway. She wants to tell the driver that she has changed her mind, she does not want to visit anybody, she wants to wait at the store to catch the bus going the other way. She can say that she really did get the day wrong, and now she is so ashamed of having missed the funeral that she does not want to show up at all.
But she cannot get started. And he will report on her, no matter what.
They are following narrow, winding back roads, past a few houses. Every time they go by a driveway without turning in, there is a feeling of reprieve.
“Well, here’s a surprise,” the driver says, and now they do turn in. “Where’s everybody gone? Half a dozen cars when I drove past an hour ago. Even his truck’s gone. Party over. Sorry—I shouldn’t’ve said that.”
“If there’s nobody here,” Juliet says eagerly, “I could just go back down.”
“Oh, somebody’s here, don’t worry about that. Ailo’s here. There’s her bike. You ever meet Ailo? You know, she’s the one took care of things?” He is out and opening her door.
As soon as Juliet steps out, a large yellow dog comes bounding and barking, and a woman calls from the porch of the house.
“Aw go on, Pet,” the driver says, pocketing the fare and getting quickly back into the car.
“Shut up. Shut up, Pet. Settle down. She won’t hurt you,” the woman calls. “She’s just a pup.”
Pet’s being a pup, Juliet thinks, would not make her any less likely to knock you down. And now a small reddish-brown dog arrives to join in the commotion. The woman comes down the steps, yelling, “Pet. Corky. You behave. If they think you are scared of them they will just get after you the worse.”
Her just sounds something like chust.
“I’m not scared,” says Juliet, jumping back when the yellow dog’s nose roughly rubs her arm.
“Come on in, then. Shut up, the two of you, or I will knock your heads. Did you get the day mixed up for the funeral?”
Juliet shakes her head as if to say that she is sorry. She introduces herself.
“Well, it is too bad. I am Ailo.” They shake hands.
Ailo is a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a thick but not flabby body, and yellowish-white hair loose over her shoulders. Her voice is strong and insistent, with some rich production of sounds in the throat. A German, Dutch, Scandinavian accent?
“You better sit down here in the kitchen. Everything is in a mess. I will get you some coffee.”
The kitchen is bright, with a skylight in the high, sloping ceiling. Dishes and glasses and pots are piled everywhere. Pet and Corky have followed Ailo meekly into the kitchen, and have started to lap out whatever is in the roasting pan that she has set down on the floor.
Beyond the kitchen, up two broad steps, there is a shaded, cavernous sort of living room, with large cushions flung about on the floor.
Ailo pulls out a chair at the table. “Now sit down. You sit down here and have some coffee and some food.”
“I’m fine without,” says Juliet.
“No. There is the coffee I have just made, I will drink mine while I work. And there are so much things left over to eat.”
She sets before Juliet, with the coffee, a piece of pie—bright green, covered with some shrunken meringue.
“Lime Jell-O,” she says, withholding approval. “Maybe it tastes all right, though. Or there is rhubarb?”
Juliet says, “Fine.”
“So much mess here. I clean up after the wake, I get it all settled. Then the funeral. Now after the funeral I have to clean up all
over again.”
Her voice is full of sturdy grievance. Juliet feels obliged to say, “When I finish this I can help you.”
“No. I don’t think so,” Ailo says. “I know everything.” She is moving around not swiftly but purposefully and effectively. (Such women never want your help. They can tell what you’re like.) She continues drying the glasses and plates and cutlery, putting what she has dried away in cupboards and drawers. Then scraping the pots and pans—including the one she retrieves from the dogs—submerging them in fresh soapy water, scrubbing the surfaces of the table and the counters, wringing the dishcloths as if they were chickens’ necks. And speaking to Juliet, with pauses.
“You are a friend of Ann? You know her from before?”
“No.”
“No. I think you don’t. You are too young. So why do you want to come to her funeral?”
“I didn’t,” says Juliet. “I didn’t know. I just came by to visit.” She tries to sound as if this was a whim of hers, as if she had lots of friends and wandered about making casual visits.
With singular fine energy and defiance Ailo polishes a pot, as she chooses not to reply to this. She lets Juliet wait through several more pots before she speaks.
“You come to visit Eric. You found the right house. Eric lives here.”
“You don’t live here, do you?” says Juliet, as if this might change the subject.
“No. I do not live here. I live down the hill, with my hussband.” The word hussband carries a weight, of pride and reproach.
Without asking, Ailo fills up Juliet’s coffee cup, then her own. She brings a piece of pie for herself. It has a rosy layer on the bottom and a creamy layer on top.
“Rhubarb cusstart. It has to be eaten or it will go bad. I do not need it, but I eat it anyway. Maybe I get you a piece?”
“No. Thank you.”
“Now. Eric has gone. He will not be back tonight. I do not think so. He has gone to Christa’s place. Do you know Christa?”
Juliet tightly shakes her head.
“Here we all live so that we know the other people’s situations. We know well. I do not know what it is like where you live. In Vancouver?” (Juliet nods.) “In a city. It is not the same. For Eric to be so good to look after his wife he must need help, do you see? I am one to help him.”