by Alice Munro
Juliet said, “The kind of people who would hang that kind of picture? You mean he’d care so much what she thought of our pictures?”
“You know Daddy.”
“He’s not afraid to disagree with people. Wasn’t that the trouble in his job?”
“What?” said Sara. “Oh. Yes. He can disagree. But he’s careful sometimes. And Irene. Irene is—he’s careful of her. She’s very valuable to us, Irene.”
“Did he think she’d quit her job because she thought we had a weird picture?”
“I would have left it up, dear. I value anything that comes from you. But Daddy …”
Juliet said nothing. From the time when she was nine or ten until she was perhaps fourteen, she and Sara had an understanding about Sam. You know Daddy.
That was the time of their being women together. Home permanents were tried on Juliet’s stubborn fine hair, dressmaking sessions produced the outfits like nobody else’s, suppers were peanut-butter-and-tomato-and-mayonnaise sandwiches on the evenings Sam stayed late for a school meeting. Stories were told and retold about Sara’s old boyfriends and girlfriends, the jokes they played and the fun they had, in the days when Sara was a schoolteacher too, before her heart got too bad. Stories from the time before that, when she lay in bed with rheumatic fever and had the imaginary friends Rollo and Maxine who solved mysteries, even murders, like the characters in certain children’s books. Glimpses of Sam’s besotted courtship, disasters with the borrowed car, the time he showed up at Sara’s door disguised as a tramp.
Sara and Juliet, making fudge and threading ribbons through the eyelet trim on their petticoats, the two of them intertwined. And then abruptly, Juliet hadn’t wanted any more of it, she had wanted instead to talk to Sam late at night in the kitchen, to ask him about black holes, the Ice Age, God. She hated the way Sara undermined their talk with wide-eyed ingenuous questions, the way Sara always tried somehow to bring the subject back to herself. That was why the talks had to be late at night and there had to be the understanding neither she nor Sam ever spoke about. Wait till we’re rid of Sara. Just for the time being, of course.
There was a reminder going along with that. Be nice to Sara. She risked her life to have you, that’s worth remembering.
“Daddy doesn’t mind disagreeing with people that are over him,” Sara said, taking a deep breath. “But you know how he is with people that are under him. He’ll do anything to make sure they don’t feel he’s any different from them, he just has to put himself down on their level—”
Juliet did know, of course. She knew the way Sam talked to the boy at the gas pumps, the way he joked in the hardware store. But she said nothing.
“He has to suck up to them,” said Sara with a sudden change of tone, a wavering edge of viciousness, a weak chuckle.
Juliet cleaned up the stroller, and Penelope, and herself, and set off on a walk into town. She had the excuse that she needed a certain brand of mild disinfectant soap with which to wash the diapers—if she used ordinary soap the baby would get a rash. But she had other reasons, irresistible though embarrassing.
This was the way she had walked to school for years of her life. Even when she was going to college, and came home on a visit, she was still the same—a girl going to school. Would she never be done going to school? Somebody asked Sam that at a time when she had just won the Intercollegiate Latin Translation Prize, and he had said, “ ’Fraid not.” He told this story on himself. God forbid that he should mention prizes. Leave Sara to do that—though Sara might have forgotten just what the prize was for.
And here she was, redeemed. Like any other young woman, pushing her baby. Concerned about the diaper soap. And this wasn’t just her baby. Her love child. She sometimes spoke of Penelope that way, just to Eric. He took it as a joke, she said it as a joke, because of course they lived together and had done so for some time, and they intended to go on together. The fact that they were not married meant nothing to him, so far as she knew, and she often forgot about it, herself. But occasionally—and now, especially, here at home, it was the fact of her unmarried state that gave her some flush of accomplishment, a silly surge of bliss.
“So—you went upstreet today,” Sam said. (Had he always said upstreet? Sara and Juliet said uptown.) “See anybody you knew?”
“I had to go to the drugstore,” Juliet said. “So I was talking to Charlie Little.”
This conversation took place in the kitchen, after eleven o’clock at night. Juliet had decided that this was the best time to make up Penelope’s bottles for tomorrow.
“Little Charlie?” said Sam—who had always had this other habit she hadn’t remembered, the habit of continuing to call people by their school nicknames. “Did he admire the offspring?”
“Of course.”
“And well he might.”
Sam was sitting at the table, drinking rye and smoking a cigarette. His drinking whisky was new. Because Sara’s father had been a drunk—not a down-and-out drunk, he had continued to practice as a veterinarian, but enough of a terror around the house to make his daughter horrified by drinking—Sam had never used to so much as drink a beer, at least to Juliet’s knowledge, at home.
Juliet had gone into the drugstore because that was the only place to buy the diaper soap. She hadn’t expected to see Charlie, though it was his family’s store. The last she had heard of him, he was going to be an engineer. She had mentioned that to him, today, maybe tactlessly, but he had been easy and jovial when he told her that it hadn’t worked out. He had put on weight around the middle, and his hair had thinned, had lost some of its wave and glisten. He had greeted Juliet with enthusiasm, with flattery for herself as well as her baby, and this had confused her, so that she had felt her face and neck hot, slightly perspiring, all the time he talked to her. In high school he would have had no time for her—except for a decent greeting, since his manners were always affable, democratic. He took out the most desirable girls in the school, and was now, as he told her, married to one of them. Janey Peel. They had two children, one of them about Penelope’s age, one older. That was the reason, he said, with a candor that seemed to owe something to Juliet’s own situation—that was the reason he hadn’t gone on to become an engineer.
So he knew how to win a smile and a gurgle from Penelope, and he chatted with Juliet as a fellow parent, somebody now on the same level. She felt idiotically flattered and pleased. But there was more to his attention than that—the quick glance at her unadorned left hand, the joke about his own marriage. And something else. He appraised her, covertly, perhaps he saw her now as a woman displaying the fruits of a boldly sexual life. Juliet, of all people. The gawk, the scholar.
“Does she look like you?” he had asked, when he squatted down to peer at Penelope.
“More like her father,” said Juliet casually, but with a flood of pride, the sweat now pearling on her upper lip.
“Does she?” said Charlie, and straightened up, speaking confidentially. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I thought it was a shame—”
Juliet said to Sam, “He told me he thought it was a shame what happened with you.”
“He did, did he? What did you say to that?”
“I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what he meant. But I didn’t want him to know that.”
“No.”
She sat down at the table. “I’d like a drink but I don’t like whisky.”
“So you drink now, too?”
“Wine. We make our own wine. Everybody in the Bay does.”
He told her a joke then, the sort of joke that he would never have told her before. It involved a couple going to a motel, and it ended up with the line “So it’s like what I always tell the girls at Sunday school—you don’t have to drink and smoke to have a good time.”
She laughed but felt her face go hot, as with Charlie.
“Why did you quit your job?” she said. “Were you let go because of me?”
“Come on now.” Sam laughed. “D
on’t think you’re so important. I wasn’t let go. I wasn’t fired.”
“All right then. You quit.”
“I quit.”
“Did it have anything at all to do with me?”
“I quit because I got goddamn sick of my neck always in that noose. I was on the point of quitting for years.”
“It had nothing to do with me?”
“All right,” Sam said. “I got into an argument. There were things said.”
“What things?”
“You don’t need to know.
“And don’t worry,” he said after a moment. “They didn’t fire me. They couldn’t have fired me. There are rules. It’s like I told you—I was ready to go anyway.”
“But you don’t realize,” said Juliet. “You don’t realize. You don’t realize just how stupid this is and what a disgusting place this is to live in, where people say that kind of thing, and how if I told people I know this they wouldn’t believe it. It would seem like a joke.”
“Well. Unfortunately your mother and I don’t live where you live. Here is where we live. Does that fellow of yours think it’s a joke too? I don’t want to talk any more about this tonight, I’m going to bed. I’m going to look in on Mother and then I’m going to bed.”
“The passenger train—,” said Juliet with continued energy, even scorn. “It does still stop here. Doesn’t it? You didn’t want me getting off here. Did you?”
On his way out of the room, her father did not answer.
Light from the last streetlight in town now fell across Juliet’s bed. The big soft maple tree had been cut down, replaced by a patch of Sam’s rhubarb. Last night she had left the curtains closed to shade the bed, but tonight she felt that she needed the outside air. So she had to switch the pillow down to the foot of the bed, along with Penelope, who had slept like an angel with the full light in her face.
She wished she had drunk a little of the whisky. She lay stiff with frustration and anger, composing in her head a letter to Eric. I don’t know what I’m doing here, I should never have come here, I can’t wait to go home.
Home.
When it was barely light in the morning, she woke to the noise of a vacuum cleaner. Then a voice—Sam’s—interrupted this noise, and she must have fallen asleep again. When she woke up later, she thought it must have been a dream. Otherwise Penelope would have woken up, and she hadn’t.
The kitchen was cooler this morning, no longer full of the smell of simmering fruit. Irene was fixing little caps of gingham cloth, and labels, onto all the jars.
“I thought I heard you vacuuming,” said Juliet, dredging up cheerfulness. “I must have dreamed it. It was only about five o’clock in the morning.”
Irene did not answer for a moment. She was writing on a label. She wrote with great concentration, her lips caught between her teeth.
“That was her,” she said when she had finished. “She woke your dad up and he had to go and make her quit.”
This seemed unlikely. Yesterday Sara had left her bed only to go to the bathroom.
“He told me,” said Irene. “She wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks she’s going to do something and then he has to get up and make her quit.”
“She must have a spurt of energy then,” said Juliet.
“Yeah.” Irene was getting to work on another label. When that was done, she faced Juliet.
“Wants to wake your dad up and get attention, that’s it. Him dead tired and he’s got to get out of bed and tend to her.”
Juliet turned away. Not wanting to set Penelope down—as if the child wasn’t safe here—she juggled her on one hip while she fished the egg out with a spoon, tapped and shelled and mashed it with one hand.
While she fed Penelope she was afraid to speak, lest the tone of her voice alarm the baby and set her wailing. Something communicated itself to Irene, however. She said in a more subdued voice—but with an undertone of defiance—“That’s just the way they get. When they’re sick like that, they can’t help it. They can’t think about nobody but themselves.”
Sara’s eyes were closed, but she opened them immediately. “Oh, my dear ones,” she said, as if laughing at herself. “My Juliet. My Penelope.”
Penelope seemed to be getting used to her. At least she did not cry, this morning, or turn her face away.
“Here,” said Sara, reaching for one of her magazines. “Set her down and let her work at this.”
Penelope looked dubious for a moment, then grabbed a page and tore it vigorously.
“There you go,” said Sara. “All babies love to tear up magazines. I remember.”
On the bedside chair there was a bowl of Cream of Wheat, barely touched.
“You didn’t eat your breakfast?” Juliet said. “Is that not what you wanted?”
Sara looked at the bowl as if serious consideration was called for, but couldn’t be managed.
“I don’t remember. No, I guess I didn’t want it.” She had a little fit of giggling and gasping. “Who knows? Crossed my mind—she could be poisoning me.
“I’m just kidding,” she said when she recovered. “But she’s very fierce. Irene. We mustn’t underestimate—Irene. Did you see the hairs on her arms?”
“Like cats’ hairs,” said Juliet.
“Like skunks’.”
“We must hope none of them get into the jam.”
“Don’t make me—laugh any more—”
Penelope became so absorbed in tearing up magazines that in a while Juliet was able to leave her in Sara’s room and carry the Cream of Wheat out to the kitchen. Without saying anything, she began to make an eggnog. Irene was in and out, carrying boxes of jam jars to the car. On the back steps, Sam was hosing off the earth that clung to the newly dug potatoes. He had begun to sing—too softly at first for his words to be heard. Then, as Irene came up the steps, more loudly.
“Irene, good ni-i-ight,
Irene, good night,
Good night, Irene, good night, Irene,
I’ll see you in my dreams.”
Irene, in the kitchen, swung around and yelled, “Don’t sing that song about me.”
“What song about you?” said Sam, with feigned amazement. “Who’s singing a song about you?”
“You were. You just were.”
“Oh—that song. That song about Irene? The girl in the song? By golly—I forgot that was your name too.”
He started up again, but humming, stealthily. Irene stood listening, flushed, with her chest going up and down, waiting to pounce if she should hear a word.
“Don’t you sing about me. If it’s got my name in it, it’s about me.”
Suddenly Sam burst out in full force.
“Last Saturday night I got married,
Me and my wife settled down—”
“Stop it. You stop it,” cried Irene, wide-eyed, inflamed. “If you don’t stop I’ll go out there and squirt the hose on you.”
Sam was delivering jam, that afternoon, to various grocery stores and a few gift shops which had placed orders. He invited Juliet to come along. He had gone to the hardware store and bought a brand-new baby’s car seat for Penelope.
“That’s one thing we don’t have in the attic,” he said. “When you were little, I don’t know if they had them. Anyway, it wouldn’t have mattered. We didn’t have a car.”
“It’s very spiffy,” said Juliet. “I hope it didn’t cost a fortune.”
“A mere bagatelle,” said Sam, bowing her into the car.
Irene was in the field picking more raspberries. These would be for pies. Sam tooted the horn twice and waved as they set off, and Irene decided to respond, raising one arm as if batting away a fly.
“That’s a dandy girl,” Sam said. “I don’t know how we would have survived without her. But I imagine she seems pretty rough to you.”
“I hardly know her.”
“No. She’s scared stiff of you.”
“Surely not.” And trying to think of something appreciative or a
t least neutral to say about Irene, Juliet asked how her husband had been killed at the chicken barn.
“I don’t know if he was a criminal type or just immature. Anyway, he got in with some goons who were planning a sideline in stolen chickens and of course they managed to set off the alarm and the farmer came out with a gun and whether he meant to shoot him or not he did—”
“My God.”
“So Irene and her in-laws went to court but the fellow got off. Well, he would. It must have been pretty hard on her, though. Even if it doesn’t seem that the husband was much of a prize.”
Juliet said that of course it must have been, and asked him if Irene was somebody he had taught at school.
“No no no. She hardly got to school, as far as I can make out.”
He said that her family had lived up north, somewhere near Huntsville. Yes. Somewhere near there. One day they all went into town. Father, mother, kids. And the father told them he had things to do and he would meet them in a while. He told them where. When. And they walked around with no money to spend, until it was time. And he just never showed up.
“Never intended to show up. Ditched them. So they had to go on welfare. Lived in some shack out in the country, where it was cheap. Irene’s older sister, the one who was the mainstay, more than the mother, I gather—she died of a burst appendix. No way of getting her into town, snowstorm on and they didn’t have a phone. Irene didn’t want to go back to school then, because her sister had sort of protected her from the way the other kids would act towards them. She may seem thick-skinned now but I guess she wasn’t always. Maybe even now it’s more of a masquerade.”
And now, he said, now Irene’s mother was looking after the little boy and the little girl, but guess what, after all these years the father had shown up and was trying to get the mother to go back to him, and if that should happen Irene didn’t know what she’d do, since she didn’t want her kids near him.
“They’re cute kids, too. The little girl has some problem with a cleft palate and she’s already had one operation but she’ll need another later on. She’ll be all right. But that’s just one more thing.”