by Alice Munro
Things must be hidden somewhere. In the bureau drawers? She couldn’t look. Not only because there was no time—she could hear Elizabeth calling her from the yard—but the very absence of whatever might be personal made the sense of Lionel stronger. Not just the sense of his austerity and his secrets, but of a watch-fulness—almost as if he had set a trap and was waiting to see what she would do.
What she really wanted to do was not to investigate anymore but to sit down on the floor, in the middle of the square of linoleum. To sit for hours not so much looking at this room as sinking into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle.
On Saturday morning, Lorna and Brendan and the children were to drive to Penticton. A graduate student had invited them to his wedding. They would stay Saturday night and all day Sunday and Sunday night as well, and leave for home on Monday morning.
“Have you told her?” Brendan said.
“It’s all right. She isn’t expecting to come.”
“But have you told her?”
Thursday was spent at Ambleside Beach. Lorna and Polly and the children rode there on buses, changing twice, encumbered with towels, beach toys, diapers, lunch, and Elizabeth’s blow-up dolphin. The physical predicaments they found themselves in, and the irritation and dismay that the sight of their party roused in other passengers, brought on a peculiarly feminine reaction—a mood of near hilarity. Getting away from the house where Lorna was installed as wife was helpful too. They reached the beach in triumph and ragtag disarray and set up their encampment, from which they took turns going into the water, minding the children, fetching soft drinks, Popsicles, french fries.
Lorna was lightly tanned, Polly not at all. She stretched a leg out beside Lorna’s and said, “Look at that. Raw dough.”
With all the work she had to do in the two houses, and with her job in the bank, she said, there was not a quarter hour when she was free to sit in the sun. But she spoke now matter-of-factly, without her undertone of virtue and complaint. Some sour atmosphere that had surrounded her—like old dishrags—was falling away. She had found her way around Vancouver by herself—the first time she had ever done that in a city. She had talked to strangers at bus stops and asked what sights she should see and on somebody’s advice had taken the chairlift to the top of Grouse Mountain.
As they lay on the sand Lorna offered an explanation.
“This is a bad time of year for Brendan. Teaching summer school is really nerve-racking, you have to do so much so fast.”
Polly said, “Yeah? It’s not just me, then?”
“Don’t be stupid. Of course it isn’t you.”
“Well, that’s a relief. I thought he kind of hated my guts.”
She then spoke of a man at home who wanted to take her out.
“He’s too serious. He’s looking for a wife. I guess Brendan was too, but I guess you were in love with him.”
“Was and am,” said Lorna.
“Well, I don’t think I am.” Polly spoke with her face pressed into her elbow. “I guess it might work though if you liked somebody okay and you went out with them and made up your mind to see the good points.”
“So what are the good points?” Lorna was sitting up so that she could watch Elizabeth ride the dolphin.
“Give me a while to think,” said Polly, giggling. “No. There’s lots. I’m just being mean.”
As they were rounding up toys and towels she said, “I really wouldn’t mind doing all this over again tomorrow.”
“Me neither,” said Lorna, “but I have to get ready to go to the Okanagan. We’re invited to this wedding.” She made it sound like a chore—something she hadn’t bothered speaking about till now because it was too disagreeable and boring.
Polly said, “Oh. Well, I might come by myself then.”
“Sure. You should.”
“Where is the Okanagan?”
The next evening, after putting the children to bed, Lorna went into the room where Polly slept. She went to get a suitcase out of the closet, expecting the room to be empty—Polly, as she thought, still in the bathroom, soaking the day’s sunburn in lukewarm water and soda.
But Polly was in bed, with the sheet pulled up around her like a shroud.
“You’re out of the bath,” said Lorna, as if she found all this quite normal. “How does your burn feel now?”
“I’m okay,” said Polly in a muffled voice. Lorna knew at once that she had been and probably still was weeping. She stood at the foot of the bed, not able to leave the room. A disappointment had come over her that was like sickness, a wave of disgust. Polly didn’t really mean to keep hiding, she rolled over and looked out, with her face all creased and helpless, red from the sun, and her weeping. Fresh tears came welling up in her eyes. She was a mound of misery, one solid accusation.
“What is it?” Lorna said. She feigned surprise, she feigned compassion.
“You don’t want me.”
Her eyes were on Lorna all the time, brimming not just with her tears, her bitterness and accusation of betrayal, but with her outrageous demand, to be folded in, rocked, comforted.
Lorna would sooner have hit her. What gives you the right, she wanted to say. What are you leeching onto me for? What gives you the right?
Family. Family gives Polly the right. She has saved her money and planned her escape, with the idea that Lorna should take her in. Is that true—has she dreamed of staying here and never having to go back? Becoming part of Lorna’s good fortune, Lorna’s transformed world?
“What do you think I can do?” said Lorna quite viciously and to her own surprise. “Do you think I have any power? He never even gives me more than a twenty-dollar bill at a time.”
She dragged the suitcase out of the room.
It was all so false and disgusting—setting her own lamentations up in that way, to match Polly’s. What did the twenty dollars at a time have to do with anything? She had a charge account, he never refused her when she asked.
She couldn’t go to sleep, berating Polly in her mind.
The heat of the Okanagan made summer seem more authentic than the summer on the coast. The hills with their pale grass, the sparse shade of the drylands pine trees, seemed a natural setting for so festive a wedding with its endless supplies of champagne, its dancing and flirtation and overflow of instant friendship and goodwill. Lorna got rapidly drunk and was amazed at how easy it was, with alcohol, to get loose from the bondage of her spirits. Forlorn vapors lifted. She went to bed still drunk, and lecherous, to Brendan’s benefit. Even her hangover the next day seemed mild, cleansing rather than punishing. Feeling frail, but not at all displeased with herself, she lay by the shores of the lake and watched Brendan help Elizabeth build a sand castle.
“Did you know that your daddy and I met at a wedding?” she asked.
“Not much like this one, though,” said Brendan. He meant that the wedding he had attended, when a friend of his married the McQuaig girl (the McQuaigs being a top family in Lorna’s hometown) had been officially dry. The reception had been in the United Church Hall—Lorna was one of the girls recruited to pass sandwiches—and the drinking had been done in a hurry, in the parking lot. Lorna was not used to smelling whisky on men and thought that Brendan must have put on too much of some unfamiliar hairdressing. Nevertheless, she admired his thick shoulders, his bull’s neck, his laughing and commanding golden-brown eyes. When she learned that he was a teacher of mathematics she fell in love with what was inside his head also. She was excited by whatever knowledge a man might have that was utterly strange to her. A knowledge of auto mechanics would have worked as well.
His answering attraction to her seemed to be in the nature of a miracle. She learned later that he had been on the lookout for a wife; he was old enough, it was time. He wanted a young girl. Not a colleague, or a student, perhaps not even the sort of girl whose parents could send her to col
lege. Unspoiled. Intelligent, but unspoiled. A wildflower, he said in the heat of those early days, and sometimes even now.
On the drive back, they left this hot golden country behind, somewhere between Keremeos and Princeton. But the sun still shone, and Lorna had only a faint disturbance in her mind, like a hair in her vision that could be flicked away, or could float out of sight on its own.
But it did keep coming back. It grew more ominous and persistent, till at last it made a spring at her and she knew it for what it was.
She was afraid—she was half certain—that while they were away in the Okanagan Polly would have committed suicide in the kitchen of the house in North Vancouver.
In the kitchen. It was a definite picture Lorna had. She saw exactly the way in which Polly would have done it. She would have hanged herself just inside the back door. When they returned, when they came to the house from the garage, they would find the door locked. They would unlock it and try to push it open but be unable to because of the lump of Polly’s body against it. They would hurry around to the front door and come into the kitchen that way and be met by the full sight of Polly dead. She would be wearing the flounced denim skirt and the white drawstring blouse—the brave outfit in which she had first appeared to try their hospitality. Her long pale legs dangling down, her head twisted fatally on its delicate neck. In front of her body would be the kitchen chair she had climbed onto, and then stepped from, or jumped from, to see how misery could finish itself.
Alone in the house of people who did not want her, where the very walls and the windows and the cup she drank her coffee from must have seemed to despise her.
Lorna remembered a time when she had been left alone with Polly, left in Polly’s charge for a day, in their grandmother’s house. Perhaps her father was at the shop. But she had an idea that he too had gone away, that all three adults were out of town. It must have been an unusual occasion, since they never went on shopping trips, let alone trips for pleasure. A funeral—almost certainly a funeral. The day was a Saturday, there was no school. Lorna was too young to be in school anyway. Her hair had not grown long enough to be put into pigtails. It blew in wisps around her head, as Polly’s did now.
Polly was going through a stage then in which she loved to make candy or rich treats of any kind, from her grandmother’s cookbook. Chocolate date cake, macaroons, divinity fudge. She was in the middle of mixing something up, on that day, when she found out that an ingredient she needed was not in the cupboard. She had to ride uptown on her bicycle, to charge it at the store. The weather was windy and cold, the ground bare—the season must have been late fall or early spring. Before she left, Polly pushed in the damper on the wood stove. But she still thought of stories she had heard about children who perished in house fires when their mothers had run out on similar quick errands. So she directed Lorna to put on her coat, and took her outside, around to the corner between the kitchen and the main part of the house, where the wind was not so strong. The house next door must have been locked, or she could have taken her there. She told her to stay put, and rode off to the store. Stay there, don’t move, don’t worry, she said. Then she kissed Lorna’s ear. Lorna obeyed her to the letter. For ten minutes, maybe fifteen, she remained crouched behind the white lilac bush, learning the shapes of the stones, the dark and light ones, in the house’s foundation. Until Polly came tearing back and flung the bike down in the yard and came calling her name. Lorna, Lorna, throwing down the bag of brown sugar or walnuts and kissing her all around her head. For the thought had occurred to her that Lorna might have been spotted in her corner by lurking kidnappers—the bad men who were the reason that girls must not go down into the field behind the houses. She had prayed all her way back for this not to have happened. And it hadn’t. She bustled Lorna inside to warm her bare knees and hands.
Oh, the poor little handsies, she said. Oh, were you scared? Lorna loved the fussing and bent her head to have it stroked, as if she was a pony.
The pines gave way to the denser evergreen forest, the brown lumps of hills to the rising blue-green mountains. Daniel began to whimper and Lorna got out his juice bottle. Later she asked Brendan to stop so that she could lay the baby down on the front seat and change his diaper. Brendan walked at a distance while she did this, smoking a cigarette. Diaper ceremonies always affronted him a little.
Lorna also took the opportunity of getting out one of Elizabeth’s storybooks and when they were settled again she read to the children. It was a Dr. Seuss book. Elizabeth knew all the rhymes and even Daniel had some idea of where to chime in with his made-up words.
Polly was no longer that person who had rubbed Lorna’s small hands between her own, the person who knew all the things Lorna did not know and who could be trusted to take care of her in the world. Everything had been turned around, and it seemed that in the years since Lorna got married Polly had stayed still. Lorna had passed her by. And now Lorna had the children in the back seat to take care of and to love, and it was unseemly for a person of Polly’s age to come clawing for her share.
It was no use for Lorna to think this. No sooner had she put the argument in place than she felt the body knock against the door as they tried to push it open. The dead weight, the gray body. The body of Polly, who had been given nothing at all. No part in the family she had found, and no hope of the change she must have dreamed was coming in her life.
“Now read Madeline,” said Elizabeth.
“I don’t think I brought Madeline,” said Lorna. “No. I didn’t bring it. Never mind, you know it off by heart.”
She and Elizabeth started off together.
“In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines,
Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
In two straight lines they broke their bread
Brushed their teeth and went to bed—”
This is stupidity, this is melodrama, this is guilt. This will not have happened.
But such things do happen. Some people founder, they are not helped in time. They are not helped at all. Some people are pitched into darkness.
“In the middle of the night,
Miss Clavel turned on her light.
And said, ‘Something is not right—’ ”
“Mommy,” said Elizabeth. “Why did you stop?”
Lorna said, “I had to, for a minute. My mouth got dry.”
At Hope they had hamburgers and milkshakes. Then down the Fraser Valley, the children asleep in the back seat. Still some time left. Till they got to Chilliwack, till they got to Abbotsford, till they saw the hills of New Westminister ahead and the other hills crowned with houses, the beginnings of the city. Bridges still that they had to go over, turns they had to take, streets they had to drive along, corners they had to pass. All this in the time before. The next time she saw any of it would be in the time after.
When they entered Stanley Park it occurred to her to pray. This was shameless—the opportune praying of a nonbeliever. The gibberish of let-it-not-happen, let-it-not-happen. Let it not have happened.
The day was still cloudless. From the Lion’s Gate Bridge they looked out at the Strait of Georgia.
“Can you see Vancouver Island today?” said Brendan. “You look, I can’t.”
Lorna craned her neck to look past him.
“Far away,” she said. “Quite faint but it’s there.”
And with the sight of those blue, progressively dimmer, finally almost dissolving mounds that seemed to float upon the sea, she thought of one thing there was left to do. Make a bargain. Believe that it was still possible, up to the last minute it was possible to make a bargain.
It had to be serious, a most final and wrenching promise or offer. Take this. I promise this. If it can be made not true, if it can not have happened.
Not the children. She snatched that thought away as if she was grabbing them out of a fire. Not Brendan, for an opposite reason. She did not love him enough. She would say she loved him, and mean it to a certain exte
nt, and she wanted to be loved by him, but there was a little hum of hate running along beside her love, nearly all the time. So it would be reprehensible—also useless—to offer him in any bargain.
Herself? Her looks? Her health?
It occurred to her that she might be on the wrong track. In a case like this, it might not be up to you to choose. Not up to you to set the terms. You would know them when you met them. You must promise to honor them, without knowing what they are going to be. Promise.
But nothing to do with the children.
Up Capilano Road, into their own part of the city and their own corner of the world, where their lives took on true weight and their actions took on consequences. There were the uncompromising wooden walls of their house, showing through the trees.
“The front door would be easier,” Lorna said. “Then we wouldn’t have any steps.”
Brendan said, “What’s the problem with a couple of steps?”
“I never got to see the bridge,” Elizabeth cried, suddenly wide awake and disappointed. “Why did you never wake me up to see the bridge?”
Nobody answered her.
“Daniel’s arm is all sunburnt,” she said, in a tone of incomplete satisfaction.
Lorna heard voices which she thought were coming from the yard of the house next door. She followed Brendan around the corner of the house. Daniel lay against her shoulder still heavy with sleep. She carried the diaper bag and the storybook bag and Brendan carried the suitcase.
She saw that the people whose voices she had heard were in her own back yard. Polly and Lionel. They had dragged two lawn chairs around so that they could sit in the shade. They had their backs to the view.
Lionel. She had forgotten all about him.
He jumped up and ran to open the back door.
“The expedition has returned with all members accounted for,” he said, in a voice which Lorna did not believe she had ever heard before. An unforced heartiness in it, an easy and appropriate confidence. The voice of the friend of the family. As he held the door open he looked straight into her face—something he had almost never done—and gave her a smile from which all subtlety, secrecy, ironic complicity, and mysterious devotion had been removed. All complications, all private messages had been removed.