by Alice Munro
“Just when you came in this afternoon I was feeling sad,” Delphine said. “I was thinking about a girl I used to know and thinking I should write her a letter if I knew where she was. Joyce was her name. I was thinking about what happened to her in her life.”
The weight of Delphine’s body made the mattress sag so that Lauren had trouble not sliding towards her. The effort that she was making not to bump against that body embarrassed her, and made her try to be particularly polite.
“When did you know her?” she said. “When you were young?”
Delphine laughed. “Yeah. When I was young. She was young too and she had to get out of her house and she was hanging around with this guy and she got caught. You know what I mean by that?”
Lauren said, “Pregnant.”
“Right. So she was just drifting along, she thought it might go ’way, maybe. Ha-ha. Like the flu. The guy she was with already had two kids with another woman he wasn’t married to but that was more or less his wife, and he was always thinking about going back to her. But before he got around to that he got busted. And also she did—Joyce did—because she was carrying stuff around for him. She had it packed into Tampax tubes, you know what they look like? You know what stuff I mean?”
“Yes,” said Lauren to both questions. “Sure. Dope.”
Delphine made a gurgling sound, swallowing her drink. “This is all top secret, you understand that?”
Not all the lumps of hot chocolate powder had got mashed up and dissolved, and Lauren did not want to mash them with the spoon that would still have the taste of the so-called cough syrup on it.
“She got off with a suspended sentence, so it wasn’t all a bad thing she was pregnant, that was what got her off. And what happened next, she got in with these Christians and they knew a doctor and wife that looked after girls when they had their babies and got the babies adopted right away. It was not quite on the up-and-up, they were getting money for these babies, but anyway it kept her clear of the social workers. So, she had her baby and never even saw it. All she knew was that it was a girl.”
Lauren looked around for a clock. There didn’t seem to be one. Delphine’s watch was up under the sleeve of her black sweater.
“So she got out of there and one thing and another happened to her and she didn’t give the baby a thought. She thought she’d get married and have some more kids. So, well, that didn’t happen. Not that she minded so much, given some of the people it didn’t happen with. She even had a couple of operations so it wouldn’t. You know what kind of operations?”
“Abortions,” Lauren said. “What time is it?”
“You are a kid that is not short of information,” Delphine said. “Yeah, that’s right. Abortions.” She pulled up her sleeve to look at her watch. “It isn’t five yet. I was just going to say that she started thinking about that little girl and wondering what became of her so she started investigating to find out. So it happened she got lucky and found those same people. The Christian people. She had to get a bit nasty with them but she got some information. She found out the names of the couple that took her.”
Lauren wriggled her way off the bed. Half tripping on the blanket, she set her cup on the bureau.
“I have to go now,” she said. She looked out the little window. “It’s snowing.”
“Is it? So what else is new? Don’t you want to know the rest?”
Lauren was putting on her boots, trying to do it in an absent-minded way so that Delphine wouldn’t take much notice.
“The man was supposed to be working for this magazine, so she went there and they said he wasn’t there but they told her where he had went to. She didn’t know what name they gave her baby but that was another thing she was able to find out. You never know what you’ll find out till you try. You trying to run away on me?”
“I have to go. My stomach feels sick. I’ve got a cold.”
Lauren yanked at the jacket that Delphine had hung on the high hook on the back of the door. When she couldn’t get it down immediately, her eyes filled with tears.
“I don’t even know this person Joyce,” she said miserably.
Delphine shifted her feet to the floor, got up slowly from the bed, set her cup on the bureau.
“If your stomach feels sick you should lie down. You probably drank that too fast.”
“I just want my jacket.”
Delphine lifted the jacket down but held it too high. When Lauren grabbed at it she would not let go.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “You’re not crying, are you? I wouldn’t’ve took you for a crybaby. Okay. Okay. Here it is. I was just teasing you.”
Lauren got her sleeves in but knew she couldn’t manage the zipper. She stuck her hands in the pockets.
“Okay?” said Delphine. “You okay now? You still my friend?”
“Thank you for the hot chocolate.”
“Don’t walk too fast, you want your stomach to settle down.”
Delphine bent over. Lauren backed off, scared that the white hair, the silky flopping curtains of hair, were going to get in her mouth.
If you were old enough for your hair to be white, then it shouldn’t be long.
“I know you can keep a secret, I know you keep our visits and talks and everything a secret. You’ll understand later. You’re a wonderful little girl. There.”
She kissed Lauren’s head.
“You just don’t worry about anything,” she said.
Large flakes of snow were falling straight down, leaving on the sidewalks a fluffy coating that melted into black tracks where people walked, and then filled up again. The cars moved along cautiously, showing blurred yellow lights. Lauren looked around now and then to see if anybody was following her. She could not see very well because of the thickening snow and the failing light, but she did not think anybody was.
The feeling in her stomach was of both a swelling and a hollow. It seemed as if she might get rid of that just by eating the right sort of food, so when she got into the house she went straight to the kitchen cupboard and poured herself a bowl of the familiar breakfast cereal. There was no maple syrup left, but she found some corn syrup. She stood in the cold kitchen, eating without even having taken her boots and her outdoor clothing off, and looking out at the freshly whitened backyard. Snow made things visible, even with the kitchen light on. She saw herself reflected against the background of snowy yard and dark rocks capped with white, and evergreen branches drooping already under their white load.
She had hardly got the last spoonful into her mouth when she had to run to the bathroom and throw it all up—cornflakes as yet hardly altered, slime of syrup, slick strings of pale chocolate.
When her parents got home she was lying on the sofa, still in her boots and jacket, watching television.
Eileen pulled her outdoor things off and brought her a blanket and took her temperature—it was normal—then felt her stomach to see if it was hard, and made her bend her right knee up to her chest to see if that gave her a pain in her right side. Eileen always worried about appendicitis because she had once been at a party—the sort of party that went on for days—where a girl had died of a burst appendix, with everybody too stoned to realize that she was in any serious trouble. When she decided that Lauren’s appendix was not involved she went to get dinner, and Harry kept Lauren company.
“I think you’ve got schoolitis,” he said. “I used to get it myself. Only when I was a kid the cure for it hadn’t been invented. You know what the cure is? Lying on the couch and watching TV.”
Next morning Lauren said that she was still feeling sick, though it was not true. She refused breakfast, but as soon as Harry and Eileen were out of the house she got a large cinnamon bun, which she ate without warming it up while she watched television. She wiped her sticky fingers on the blanket that covered her, and tried to think about her future. She wanted to spend it right here, inside the house, on the sofa, but unless she could manufacture some genuine sickness she did not se
e how that would be possible.
The television news was over and one of the daily soap operas had come on. Here was a world she had been familiar with when she had bronchitis last spring, and had since forgotten all about. In spite of her desertion not much seemed to have changed. Most of the same characters appeared—in new circumstances, of course—and they had their same ways of behaving (noble, ruthless, sexy, sad) and their same looks into the distance and same unfinished sentences referring to accidents and secrets. She enjoyed watching them for a while, but then something that came into her mind began to worry her. Children and grown people too in these stories had often turned out to belong to quite different families from those they had always accepted as their own. Strangers who were sometimes crazy and dangerous had appeared out of the blue with their catastrophic claims and emotions, lives were turned upside down.
This might once have seemed to her an attractive possibility, but it didn’t any longer.
Harry and Eileen never locked the doors. Imagine that, Harry would say—we live in a place where you can just walk out and never lock your doors. Lauren got up now and locked them, back and front. Then she closed the curtains on all of the windows. It wasn’t snowing today, but there was no melting. The new snow already had a gray tinge to it, as if it had got old overnight.
There was no way that she could cover the little windows in the front door. There were three of them, shaped like teardrops, in a diagonal line. Eileen hated them. She had ripped off the wallpaper and painted the walls of this cheap house with unexpected colors—robin’s-egg blue, blackberry-rose, lemon yellow—she had taken up ugly carpets and sanded the floors, but there was nothing she could do about those dinky little windows.
Harry said that they weren’t so bad, that there was one for each of them, and just at the right height too, for each of them to look out. He named them Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear.
When the soap opera ended and a man and woman began talking about indoor plants, Lauren fell into a light sleep which she hardly knew was a sleep. She knew that it must have been when she woke up from a dream of an animal, a wintry sort of gray weasel or skinny fox—she wasn’t sure what—watching the house in broad daylight from the backyard. In the dream somebody had told her that this animal was rabid, because it was not scared of humans or the houses where they lived.
The phone was ringing. She pulled the blanket over her head so she would not hear it. She was sure it was Delphine. Delphine wanting to know how she was, why she was hiding, what did she think about the story she had told her, when was she coming to the hotel?
It was really Eileen, checking on how Lauren was feeling and the state of her appendix. Eileen let the phone ring ten or fifteen times, then she ran from the newspaper office without putting on her coat and drove home. When she found the door locked she banged on it with her fist and rattled the knob. She pressed her face to the Mama Bear window and shouted Lauren’s name. She could hear the television. She ran around to the back door and banged and shouted again.
Lauren heard all this, of course, with her head under the blanket, but it took a while for her to realize that it was Eileen and not Delphine. When she did realize that, she came creeping into the kitchen with the blanket trailing behind her, still half thinking the voice might be a trick.
“Jesus, what is the matter with you?” Eileen said, throwing her arms around her. “Why was the door locked, why didn’t you answer the phone, what kind of game are you up to?”
Lauren held out for about fifteen minutes, with Eileen alternately hugging her and shouting at her. Then she collapsed and told everything. It was a great relief and yet even as she shivered and cried she felt that something private and complex was being traded away for safety and comfort. It wasn’t possible to tell the whole truth because she couldn’t get it straight herself. She couldn’t explain what she had wanted, right up to the point of not wanting it at all.
Eileen phoned Harry and told him that he had to come home. He would have to walk, she could not go to get him, she could not leave Lauren.
She went to unlock the front door and found an envelope, put through the mail slot but unstamped, with nothing written on it but LAUREN.
“Did you hear this come through the slot?” she said. “Did you hear anybody on the porch, how in the fuck did this happen?”
She tore the envelope open and pulled out the gold chain with Lauren’s name on it.
“I forgot to tell you that part,” said Lauren.
“There’s a note.”
“Don’t read it,” Lauren cried. “Don’t read it. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Don’t be silly. It can’t bite. She just says she phoned up the school and you weren’t there so she wondered if you were sick and here is a present to cheer you up. She says she bought it for you anyway, nobody lost it. What does that mean? It was going to be a birthday present when you turned eleven in March but she wants you to have it now. Where did she get the idea your birthday was in March? Your birthday is in June.”
“I know that,” said Lauren, in the exhausted, childish, sulky voice she had now fallen back on.
“You see?” said Eileen. “She’s got everything wrong. She’s crazy.”
“She knew your name, though. She knew where you were. How did she know that if you didn’t adopt me?”
“I don’t know how the hell she knew, but she is wrong. She has got it all wrong. Look. We’ll get out your birth certificate. You were born in Wellesley Hospital in Toronto. We’ll take you there, I could show you the exact room—” Eileen looked at the note again and crumpled it in her fist.
“That bitch. Phoning the school,” she said. “Coming to our house. Crazy bitch.”
“Hide that thing,” said Lauren, meaning the chain. “Hide it. Put it away. Now.”
Harry was not so angry as Eileen.
“She seemed a perfectly okay person anytime I talked to her,” he said. “She never said anything like this to me.”
“Well, she wouldn’t,” said Eileen. “She wanted to get at Lauren. You have got to go and have a talk with her. Or I will. I mean it. Today.”
Harry said he would. “I’ll straighten her out,” he said. “Absolutely. There won’t be any more trouble. What a shame.”
Eileen made an early lunch. She made hamburgers with mayonnaise and mustard on them, the way Harry and Lauren both liked them. Lauren had finished hers before she realized that it had probably been a mistake to show such an appetite.
“Feeling better?” said Harry. “Back to school this afternoon?”
“I still have got a cold.”
Eileen said, “No. Not back to school. And I am staying home with her.”
“I don’t absolutely see that that’s necessary,” said Harry.
“And give her this,” said Eileen, pushing the envelope into his pocket. “Never mind, don’t bother looking at it, it’s just her stupid present. And tell her no more of that kind of thing ever or she’ll be in trouble. No more ever. No more.”
Lauren never had to go back to school, not in that town.
During the afternoon Eileen phoned Harry’s sister—whom Harry wasn’t speaking to, because of criticisms the sister’s husband had made about his, Harry’s, way of living his life—and they talked about the school that the sister had gone to, a girls’ private school in Toronto. More phone calls followed, an appointment was made.
“It’s not a matter of money,” Eileen said. “Harry has enough money. Or he can get it.
“It’s not just this happening, either,” she said. “You don’t deserve to have to grow up in this crappy town. You don’t deserve to end up sounding like a hick. I’ve been thinking of this all along. I was only putting it off till you got a bit older.”
Harry said, when he came home, that surely it depended on what Lauren wanted.
“You want to leave home, Lauren? I thought you liked it here. I thought you had friends.”
“Friends?” said Eileen. “She had that woman. D
el-phine. Did you really get through to her? Did she get the message?”
“I did,” said Harry. “She did.”
“Did you give her back the bribe?”
“If you like to call it that. Yes.”
“No more trouble? She understands, no more trouble?”
Harry turned on the radio and they listened to the news through dinner. Eileen opened a bottle of wine.
“What’s this?” Harry said in a slightly menacing voice. “A celebration?”
Lauren had learned the signs, and she thought she saw what there was to be gone through now, what price there was to be paid for the miraculous rescue—the never having to go back to school or go near the hotel, perhaps never to have to walk in the streets at all, never to go out of the house in the two weeks left before the Christmas holidays.
Wine could be one of the signs. Sometimes. Sometimes not. But when Harry got out the bottle of gin and poured half a tumbler for himself, adding nothing to it but ice—and soon he wouldn’t even be adding ice—the course was set. Everything might still be cheerful but the cheerfulness was hard as knives. Harry would talk to Lauren, and Eileen would talk to Lauren, more than either of them usually talked to her. Now and then they would speak to each other, in almost a normal way. But there would be a recklessness in the room that had not yet been expressed in words. Lauren would hope, or try to hope—more accurately, she used to try to hope—that somehow they would stop the fight from breaking out. And she had always believed—she did yet—that she was not the only one to hope this. They did, too. Partly they did. But partly they were eager for what would come. They never overcame this eagerness. There had never been one time when this feeling was in the room, the change in the air, the shocking brightness that made all shapes, all the furniture and utensils, sharper, yet denser—never one time that the worst did not follow.
Lauren used to be unable to stay in her room, she had to be where they were, flinging herself at them, protesting and weeping, till one or the other would pick her up and carry her back to bed, saying, “All right, all right, don’t bug us, just don’t bug us, it’s our life, we have to be able to talk.” “To talk” meant to pace around the house delivering precise harangues of condemnation, shrieks of contradiction, until they had to start flinging ashtrays, bottles, dishes, at each other. One time Eileen ran outside and threw herself down on the lawn, tearing up chunks of dirt and grass, while Harry hissed from the doorway, “Oh, that’s the style, give them a show.” Once Harry bolted himself in the bathroom, calling, “There’s only one way to get out of this torment.” Both of them threatened the use of pills and razors.