Runaway

by Alice Munro

  One more thing.

  What was the matter with Juliet? She felt no real sympathy. She felt herself rebelling, deep down, against this wretched litany. It was too much. When the cleft palate appeared in the story what she had really wanted to do was complain. Too much.

  She knew she was wrong, but the feeling would not budge. She was afraid to say anything more, lest out of her mouth she betray her hard heart. She was afraid she would say to Sam, “Just what is so wonderful about all this misery, does it make her a saint?” Or she might say, most unforgivably, “I hope you don’t mean to get us mixed up with people like that.”

  “I’m telling you,” Sam said, “at the time she came to help us out I was at wits’ end. Last fall, your mother was a downright catastrophe. And not exactly that she was letting everything go. No. Better if she had let everything go. Better if she’d done nothing. What she did, she’d start one job up and then she could not get on with it. Over and over. Not that this was anything absolutely new. I mean, I always had to pick up after her and look after her and help her do the housework. Me and you both—remember? She’d always been this sweet pretty girl with a bad heart and she was used to being waited on. Once in a while over the years it did occur to me she could have tried harder.

  “But it got so bad,” he said. “It got so I’d come home to the washing machine in the middle of the kitchen floor and wet clothes slopping all over the place. And some baking mess she’d started on and given up on, stuff charred to a crisp in the oven. I was scared she’d set herself on fire. Set the house on fire. I’d tell her and tell her, stay in bed. But she wouldn’t and then she’d be all in this mess, crying. I tried a couple of girls coming in and they just couldn’t handle her. So then—Irene.

  “Irene,” he said with a robust sigh. “I bless the day. I tell you. Bless the day.”

  But like all good things, he said, this must come to an end. Irene was getting married. To a forty- or fifty-year-old widower. Farmer. He was supposed to have money and for her sake Sam guessed he hoped it was true. Because the man did not have much else to recommend him.

  “By Jesus he doesn’t. As far as I can see he’s only got one tooth in his head. Bad sign, in my opinion. Too proud or stingy to get choppers. Think of it—a grand-looking girl like her.”

  “When is the event?”

  “In the fall sometime. In the fall.”

  Penelope had been sleeping all this time—she had gone to sleep in her car seat almost as soon as they started to move. The front windows were down and Juliet could smell the hay, which was freshly cut and baled—nobody made hay coils anymore. Some elm trees were still standing, marvels now, in their isolation.

  They stopped in a village built all along one street in a narrow valley. Bedrock stuck out of the valley walls—the only place for many miles around where such massive rocks were to be seen. Juliet remembered coming here when there was a special park which you paid to enter. In the park there was a fountain, a teahouse where they served strawberry shortcake and ice cream—and surely other things which she could not remember. Caves in the rock were named after each of the Seven Dwarfs. Sam and Sara had sat on the ground by the fountain eating ice cream while she had rushed ahead to explore the caves. (Which were nothing much, really—quite shallow.) She had wanted them to come with her but Sam had said, “You know your mother can’t climb.”

  “You run,” Sara had said. “Come back and tell us all about it.” She was dressed up. A black taffeta skirt that spread in a circle around her on the grass. Those were called ballerina skirts.

  It must have been a special day.

  Juliet asked Sam about this when he came out of the store. At first he could not remember. Then he did. A gyp joint, he said. He didn’t know when it had disappeared.

  Juliet could see no trace anywhere along the street of a fountain or a teahouse.

  “A bringer of peace and order,” Sam said, and it took a moment for her to recognize that he was still talking about Irene. “She’ll turn her hand to anything. Cut the grass and hoe the garden. Whatever she’s doing she gives it her best and she behaves as if it’s a privilege to do it. That’s what never ceases to amaze me.”

  What could the carefree occasion have been? A birthday, a wedding anniversary?

  Sam spoke insistently, even solemnly, over the noise of the car’s struggle up the hill.

  “She restored my faith in women.”

  Sam charged into every store after telling Juliet that he wouldn’t be a minute, and came back to the car quite a while later explaining that he had not been able to get away. People wanted to talk, people had been saving up jokes to tell him. A few followed him out to see his daughter and her baby.

  “So that’s the girl who talks Latin,” one woman said.

  “Getting a bit rusty nowadays,” Sam said. “Nowadays she has her hands full.”

  “I bet,” the woman said, craning to get a look at Penelope. “But aren’t they a blessing? Oh, the wee ones.”

  Juliet had thought she might talk to Sam about the thesis she was planning to return to—though at present that was just a dream. Such subjects used to come up naturally between them. Not with Sara. Sara would say, “Now, you must tell me what you’re doing in your studies,” and Juliet would sum things up, and Sara might ask her how she kept all those Greek names straight. But Sam had known what she was talking about. At college she had mentioned how her father had explained to her what thaumaturgy meant, when she ran across the word at the age of twelve or thirteen. She was asked if her father was a scholar.

  “Sure,” she said. “He teaches Grade Six.”

  Now she had a feeling that he would subtly try to undermine her. Or maybe not so subtly. He might use the word airy-fairy. Or claim to have forgotten things she could not believe he had forgotten.

  But maybe he had. Rooms in his mind closed up, the windows blackened—what was in there judged by him to be too useless, too discreditable, to meet the light of day.

  Juliet spoke out more harshly than she intended.

  “Does she want to get married? Irene?”

  This question startled Sam, coming as it did in that tone and after a considerable silence.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  And after a moment, “I don’t see how she could.”

  “Ask her,” Juliet said. “You must want to, the way you feel about her.”

  They drove for a mile or two before he spoke. It was clear she had given offense.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sleepy, Sneezy,” Sara said.

  “Doc,” said Juliet.

  “Doc. Doc. Happy, Sneezy, Doc, Grumpy, Bashful, Sneezy—No. Sneezy, Bashful, Doc, Grumpy—Sleepy, Happy, Doc, Bashful—”

  Having counted on her fingers, Sara said, “Wasn’t that eight?

  “We went there more than once,” she said. “We used to call it the Shrine of Strawberry Shortcake—oh, how I’d like to go again.”

  “Well, there’s nothing there,” Juliet said. “I couldn’t even see where it was.”

  “I’m sure I could have. Why didn’t I go with you? A summer drive. What strength does it take to ride in a car? Daddy’s always saying I haven’t the strength.”

  “You came to meet me.”

  “Yes I did,” said Sara. “But he didn’t want me to. I had to throw a fit.”

  She reached around to pull up the pillows behind her head, but she could not manage it, so Juliet did it for her.

  “Drat,” said Sara. “What a useless piece of goods I am. I think I could handle a bath, though. What if company comes?”

  Juliet asked if she was expecting anybody.

  “No. But what if?”

  So Juliet took her into the bathroom and Penelope crawled after them. Then when the water was ready and her grandmother hoisted in, Penelope decided that the bath must be for her as well. Juliet undressed her, and the baby and the old woman were bathed together. Though Sara, nak
ed, did not look like an old woman as much as an old girl—a girl, say, who had suffered some exotic, wasting, desiccating disease.

  Penelope accepted her presence without alarm, but kept a firm hold on her own duck-shaped yellow soap.

  It was in the bath that Sara finally brought herself to ask, circumspectly, about Eric.

  “I’m sure he is a nice man,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” said Juliet casually.

  “He was so good to his first wife.”

  “Only wife,” Juliet corrected her. “So far.”

  “But I’m sure now you have this baby—you’re happy, I mean. I’m sure you’re happy.”

  “As happy as is consistent with living in sin,” Juliet said, surprising her mother by wringing out a dripping washcloth over her soaped head.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Sara after ducking and covering her face, with a joyful shriek. Then, “Juliet?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know I don’t mean it if I ever say mean things about Daddy. I know he loves me. He’s just unhappy.”

  Juliet dreamed she was a child again and in this house, though the arrangement of the rooms was somewhat different. She looked out the window of one of the unfamiliar rooms, and saw an arc of water sparkling in the air. This water came from the hose. Her father, with his back to her, was watering the garden. A figure moved in and out among the raspberry canes and was revealed, after a while, to be Irene—though a more childish Irene, supple and merry. She was dodging the water sprinkled from the hose. Hiding, reappearing, mostly successful but always caught again for an instant before she ran away. The game was supposed to be lighthearted, but Juliet, behind the window, watched it with disgust. Her father always kept his back to her, yet she believed—she somehow saw—that he held the hose low, in front of his body, and that it was only the nozzle of it that he turned back and forth.

  The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind that curls through the narrowest passages of your blood.

  When she woke that feeling was still with her. She found the dream shameful. Obvious, banal. A dirty indulgence of her own.

  There was a knock on the front door in the middle of the afternoon. Nobody used the front door—Juliet found it a bit stiff to open.

  The man who stood there wore a well-pressed yellow shirt with short sleeves, and tan pants. He was perhaps a few years older than she was, tall but rather frail-looking, slightly hollow-chested, but vigorous in his greeting, relentless in his smiling.

  “I’ve come to see the lady of the house,” he said.

  Juliet left him standing there and went into the sunroom.

  “There’s a man at the door,” she said. “He might be selling something. Should I get rid of him?”

  Sara was pushing herself up. “No, no,” she said breathlessly. “Tidy me a bit, can you? I heard his voice. It’s Don. It’s my friend Don.”

  Don had already entered the house and was heard outside the sunroom door.

  “No fuss, Sara. It’s only me. Are you decent?”

  Sara, with a wild and happy look, reached for the hairbrush she could not manage, then gave up and ran her fingers through her hair. Her voice rang out gaily. “I’m as decent as I’ll ever be, I’m afraid. Come in here.”

  The man appeared, hurried up to her, and she lifted her arms to him. “You smell of summer,” she said. “What is it?” She fingered his shirt. “Ironing. Ironed cotton. My, that’s nice.”

  “I did it myself,” he said. “Sally’s over at the church messing about with the flowers. Not a bad job, eh?”

  “Lovely,” said Sara. “But you almost didn’t get in. Juliet thought you were a salesman. Juliet’s my daughter. My dear daughter. I told you, didn’t I? I told you she was coming. Don is my minister, Juliet. My friend and minister.”

  Don straightened up, grasped Juliet’s hand.

  “Good you’re here—I’m very glad to meet you. And you weren’t so far wrong, actually. I am a sort of salesman.”

  Juliet smiled politely at the ministerial joke.

  “What church are you the minister of?”

  The question made Sara laugh. “Oh dear—that gives the show away, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m from Trinity,” said Don, with his unfazed smile. “And as for giving the show away—it’s no news to me that Sara and Sam were not involved with any of the churches in the community. I just started dropping in anyway, because your mother is such a charming lady.”

  Juliet could not remember whether it was the Anglican or United Church that was called Trinity.

  “Would you get Don a reasonable sort of chair, dear?” said Sara. “Here he is bending over me like a stork. And some sort of refreshment, Don? Would you like an eggnog? Juliet makes me the most delicious eggnogs. No. No, that’s probably too heavy. You’ve just come in from the heat of the day. Tea? That’s hot too. Ginger ale? Some kind of juice? What juice do we have, Juliet?”

  Don said, “I don’t need anything but a glass of water. That would be welcome.”

  “No tea? Really?” Sara was quite out of breath. “But I think I’d like some. You could drink half a cup, surely. Juliet?”

  In the kitchen, by herself—Irene could be seen in the garden, today she was hoeing around the beans—Juliet wondered if the tea was a ruse to get her out of the room for a few private words. A few private words, perhaps even a few words of prayer? The notion sickened her.

  Sam and Sara had never belonged to any church, though Sam had told someone, early in their life here, that they were Druids. Word had gone around that they belonged to a church not represented in town, and that information had moved them up a notch from having no religion at all. Juliet herself had gone to Sunday school for a while at the Anglican Church, though that was mostly because she had an Anglican friend. Sam, at school, had never rebelled at having to read the Bible and say the Lord’s Prayer every morning, any more than he objected to “God Save the Queen.”

  “There’s times for sticking your neck out and times not to,” he had said. “You satisfy them this way, maybe you can get away with telling the kids a few facts about evolution.”

  Sara had at one time been interested in the Baha’i faith, but Juliet believed that this interest had waned.

  She made enough tea for the three of them and found some digestive biscuits in the cupboard—also the brass tray which Sara had usually taken out for fancy occasions.

  Don accepted a cup, and gulped down the ice water which she had remembered to bring him, but shook his head at the cookies.

  “Not for me, thanks.”

  He seemed to say this with special emphasis. As if godliness forbade him.

  He asked Juliet where she lived, what was the nature of the weather on the west coast, what work her husband did.

  “He’s a prawn fisherman, but he’s actually not my husband,” said Juliet pleasantly.

  Don nodded. Ah, yes.

  “Rough seas out there?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Whale Bay. I’ve never heard of it but now I’ll remember it. What church do you go to in Whale Bay?”

  “We don’t go. We don’t go to church.”

  “Is there not a church of your sort handy?”

  Smiling, Juliet shook her head.

  “There is no church of our sort. We don’t believe in God.”

  Don’s cup made a little clatter as he set it down in its saucer. He said he was sorry to hear that.

  “Truly sorry to hear that. How long have you been of this opinion?”

  “I don’t know. Ever since I gave it any serious thought.”

  “And your mother’s told me you have a child. You have a little girl, don’t you?”

  Juliet said yes, she had.

  “And she has never been christened? You intend to bring her up a heathen?”

  Juliet said that she expected Penelope would make up her own mind about that, someday.

&nbs
p; “But we intend to bring her up without religion. Yes.”

  “That is sad,” said Don quietly. “For yourselves, it’s sad. You and your—whatever you call him—you’ve decided to reject God’s grace. Well. You are adults. But to reject it for your child—it’s like denying her nourishment.”

  Juliet felt her composure cracking. “But we don’t believe,” she said. “We don’t believe in God’s grace. It’s not like denying her nourishment, it’s refusing to bring her up on lies.”

  “Lies. What millions of people all over the world believe in, you call lies. Don’t you think that’s a little presumptuous of you, calling God a lie?”

  “Millions of people don’t believe it, they just go to church,” said Juliet, her voice heating. “They just don’t think. If there is a God, then God gave me a mind, and didn’t he intend me to use it?

  “Also,” she said, trying to hold herself steady. “Also, millions of people believe something different. They believe in Buddha, for instance. So how does millions of people believing in anything make it true?”

  “Christ is alive,” said Don readily. “Buddha isn’t.”

  “That’s just something to say. What does it mean? I don’t see any proof of either one being alive, as far as that goes.”

  “You don’t. But others do. Do you know that Henry Ford—Henry Ford the second, who has everything anybody in life could desire—nevertheless he gets down on his knees and prays to God every night of his life?”

  “Henry Ford?” cried Juliet. “Henry Ford? What does anything Henry Ford does matter to me?”

  The argument was taking the course that arguments of this sort are bound to take. The minister’s voice, which had started out more sorrowful than angry—though always indicating ironclad conviction—was taking on a shrill and scolding tone, while Juliet, who had begun, as she thought, in reasonable resistance—calm, shrewd, rather maddeningly polite—was now in a cold and biting rage. Both of them cast around for arguments and refutations that would be more insulting than useful.

  Meanwhile Sara nibbled on a digestive biscuit, not looking up at them. Now and then she shivered, as if their words struck her, but they were beyond noticing.