Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

by Alice Munro

  She made her voice an echo of his.

  “So—when did you get back?”

  “Saturday,” he said. “I’d forgotten you were going away. I came laboring up here to say hello and you weren’t here, but Polly was here and of course she told me and then I remembered.”

  “Polly told you what?” said Polly, coming up behind him. This was not really a question, but the half-teasing remark of a woman who knows that almost anything she says will be well received. Polly’s sunburn had turned to tan, or at least to a new flush, on her forehead and her neck.

  “Here,” she said to Lorna, relieving her of both of the bags carried over her arm and the empty juice bottle in her hand. “I’ll take everything but the baby.”

  Lionel’s floppy hair was now more brownish-black than black—of course she was seeing him for the first time in full sunlight—and his skin too was tanned, enough for his forehead to have lost its pale gleam. He wore the usual dark pants, but his shirt was unfamiliar to her. A yellow short-sleeved shirt of some much-ironed, shiny, cheap material, too big across the shoulders, maybe bought at the church thrift sale.

  Lorna carried Daniel up to his room. She laid him in his crib and stood beside him making soft noises and stroking his back.

  She thought that Lionel must be punishing her for her mistake in going to his room. The landlady would have told him. Lorna should have expected that, if she had stopped to think. She hadn’t stopped to think, probably, because she had the idea that it would not matter. She might even have thought that she would tell him herself.

  I was going past on my way to the playground and I just thought I would go in and sit in the middle of your floor. I can’t explain it. It seemed like that would give me a moment’s peace, to be in your room and sit in the middle of the floor.

  She had thought—after the letter?—that there was a bond between them, not to be made explicit but to be relied on. And she had been wrong, she had scared him. Presumed too much. He had turned around and there was Polly. Because of Lorna’s offense he had taken up with Polly.

  Perhaps not, though. Perhaps he had simply changed. She thought of the extraordinary bareness of his room, the light on its walls. Out of that might come such altered versions of himself, created with no effort in the blink of an eye. That could be in response to something that had gone a little wrong, or to a realization that he could not carry something through. Or to nothing that definite—just the blink of an eye.

  When Daniel had fallen into true sleep she went downstairs. In the bathroom she found that Polly had rinsed the diapers properly and put them in the pail, covered with the blue solution that would disinfect them. She picked up the suitcase that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, carried it upstairs and laid it on the big bed, opening it to sort out which clothes had to be washed and which could be put away.

  The window of this room looked out on the back yard. She heard voices—Elizabeth’s raised, almost shrieking with the excitement of homecoming and perhaps the effort of keeping the attention of an enlarged audience, Brendan’s authoritative but pleasant, giving an account of their trip.

  She went to the window and looked down. She saw Brendan go over to the storage shed, unlock it, and start to drag out the children’s wading pool. The door was swinging shut on him and Polly hurried to hold it open.

  Lionel got up and went to uncoil the hose. She would not have thought he knew even where the hose was.

  Brendan said something to Polly. Thanking her? You would think they were on the best of terms.

  How had that happened?

  It could be that Polly was now fit to be taken account of, being Lionel’s choice. Lionel’s choice, and not Lorna’s imposition.

  Or Brendan might simply be happier, because they had been away. He might have dropped for a while the burden of keeping his household in order. He might have seen, quite rightly, that this altered Polly was no threat.

  A scene so ordinary and amazing, come about as if by magic. Everybody happy.

  Brendan had begun to blow up the rim of the plastic pool. Elizabeth had stripped off to her underpants and was dancing around impatiently. Brendan hadn’t bothered to tell her to run and put on her bathing suit, that underpants were not suitable. Lionel had turned the water on, and until it was needed for the pool he stood watering the nasturtiums, like any householder. Polly spoke to Brendan and he pinched the hole shut that he had been blowing into, passing the half-inflated heap of plastic over to her.

  Lorna recalled that Polly had been the one to blow up the dolphin at the beach. As she said herself, she had good wind. She blew steadily and with no appearance of effort. She stood there in her shorts, her bare legs firmly apart, skin gleaming like birch bark. And Lionel watched her. Exactly what I need, he might be thinking. Such a competent and sensible woman, pliant but solid. Someone not vain or dreamy or dissatisfied. That might well be the sort of person he would marry someday. A wife who could take over. Then he would change and change again, maybe fall in love with some other woman, in his way, but the wife would be too busy to take notice.

  That might happen. Polly and Lionel. Or it might not. Polly might go home as planned, and if she did, there wouldn’t be any heartbreak. Or that was what Lorna thought. Polly would marry, or not marry, but whichever way it was, the things that happened with men would not be what broke her heart.

  In a short time the rim of the wading pool was swollen and smooth. The pool was set on the grass, the hose placed inside it, and Elizabeth was splashing her feet in the water. She looked up at Lorna as if she had known she was there all the time.

  “It’s cold,” she cried in a rapture. “Mommy—it’s cold.”

  Now Brendan looked up at Lorna too.

  “What are you doing up there?”

  “Unpacking.”

  “You don’t have to do that now. Come on outside.”

  “I will. In a minute.”

  Since she had entered the house—in fact since she had first understood that the voices she heard came from her own back yard and belonged to Polly and Lionel—Lorna had not thought of the vision she’d had, mile after mile, of Polly lashed to the back door. She was surprised by it now as you sometimes are surprised, long after waking, by the recollection of a dream. It had a dream’s potency and shamefulness. A dream’s uselessness, as well.

  Not quite at the same time, but in a lagging way, came the memory of her bargain. Her weak and primitive neurotic notion of a bargain.

  But what was it she had promised?

  Nothing to do with the children.

  Something to do with herself?

  She had promised that she would do whatever she had to do, when she recognized what it was.

  That was hedging, it was a bargain that was not a bargain, a promise that had no meaning at all.

  But she tried out various possibilities. Almost as if she was shaping this story to be told to somebody—not Lionel now—but somebody, as an entertainment.

  Give up reading books.

  Take in foster children from bad homes and poor countries. Labor to cure them of wounds and neglect.

  Go to church. Agree to believe in God.

  Cut her hair short, stop putting on makeup, never again haul her breasts up into a wired brassiere.

  She sat down on the bed, tired out by all this sport, this irrelevance.

  What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.

  It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.

  So, nothing now but what sh
e or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret, or strange.

  Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious.

  Elizabeth called again, “Mommy. Come here.” And then the others—Brendan and Polly and Lionel, one after the other, were calling her, teasing her.

  Mommy.

  Mommy.

  Come here.

  It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

  What Is Remembered

  In a hotel room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote—something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.

  “Balmain taught me everything. He said, ‘Always wear white gloves. It’s best.’ ”

  It’s best. Why is she smiling at that? It seems so soft a whisper of advice, such absurd and final wisdom. Her gloved hands are formal, but tender-looking as a kitten’s paws.

  Pierre asks why she’s smiling and she says, “Nothing,” then tells him.

  He says, “Who is Balmain?”

  They were getting ready to go to a funeral. They had come over on the ferry last night from their home on Vancouver Island to be sure of being on time for the morning ceremony. It was the first time they’d stayed in a hotel since their wedding night. When they went on a holiday now it was always with their two children, and they looked for inexpensive motels that catered to families.

  This was only the second funeral they had been to as a married couple. Pierre’s father was dead, and Meriel’s mother was dead, but these deaths had happened before Pierre and Meriel met. Last year a teacher at Pierre’s school died suddenly, and there was a fine service, with the schoolboy choir and the sixteenth-century words for the Burial of the Dead. The man had been in his mid-sixties, and his death seemed to Meriel and Pierre only a little surprising and hardly sad. It did not make much difference, as they saw it, whether you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five.

  The funeral today was another matter. It was Jonas who was being buried. Pierre’s best friend for years and Pierre’s age— twenty-nine. Pierre and Jonas had grown up together in West Vancouver—they could remember it before the Lion’s Gate Bridge was built, when it seemed like a small town. Their parents were friends. When they were eleven or twelve years old they had built a rowboat and launched it at Dundarave Pier. At the university they had parted company for a while—Jonas was studying to be an engineer, while Pierre was enrolled in Classics, and the Arts and Engineering students traditionally despised each other. But in the years since then the friendship had to some extent been revived. Jonas, who was not married, came to visit Pierre and Meriel, and sometimes stayed with them for a week at a time.

  Both of these young men were surprised by what had happened in their lives, and they would joke about it. Jonas was the one whose choice of profession had seemed so reassuring to his parents, and had roused a muted envy in Pierre’s parents, yet it was Pierre who had married and got a teaching job and taken on ordinary responsibilities, while Jonas, after university, had never settled down with a girl or a job. He was always on a sort of probation that did not end up in a firm attachment to any company, and the girls—at least to hear him tell it—were always on a sort of probation with him. His last engineering job was in the northern part of the province, and he stayed on there after he either quit or was fired. “Employment terminated by mutual consent,” he wrote to Pierre, adding that he was living at the hotel, where all the high-class people lived, and might get a job on a logging crew. He was also learning to fly a plane, and thinking of becoming a bush pilot. He promised to come down for a visit when present financial complications were worked out.

  Meriel had hoped that wouldn’t happen. Jonas slept on the living-room couch and in the morning threw the covers on the floor for her to pick up. He kept Pierre awake half the night talking about things that had happened when they were teenagers, or even younger. His name for Pierre was Piss-hair, a nickname from those years, and he referred to other old friends as Stinkpool or Doc or Buster, never by the names Meriel had always heard—Stan or Don or Rick. He recalled with a gruff pedantry the details of incidents that Meriel did not think so remarkable or funny (the bag of dog shit set on fire on the teacher’s front steps, the badgering of the old man who offered boys a nickel to pull down their pants), and grew irritated if the conversation turned to the present.

  When she had to tell Pierre that Jonas was dead she was apologetic, shaken. Apologetic because she hadn’t liked Jonas and shaken because he was the first person they knew well, in their own age group, to have died. But Pierre did not seem to be surprised or particularly stricken.

  “Suicide,” he said.

  She said no, an accident. He was riding a motorcycle, after dark, on gravel, and he went off the road. Somebody found him, or was with him, help was at hand, but he died within an hour. His injuries were mortal.

  That was what his mother had said, on the phone. His injuries were mortal. She had sounded so quickly resigned, so unsurprised. As Pierre did when he said, “Suicide.”

  After that Pierre and Meriel had hardly spoken about the death itself, just about the funeral, the hotel room, the need for an all-night sitter. His suit to be cleaned, a white shirt obtained. It was Meriel who made the arrangements, and Pierre kept checking up on her in a husbandly way. She understood that he wished her to be controlled and matter-of-fact, as he was, and not to lay claim to any sorrow which—he would be sure—she could not really feel. She had asked him why he had said, “Suicide,” and he had told her, “That’s just what came into my head.” She felt his evasion to be some sort of warning or even a rebuke. As if he suspected her of deriving from this death—or from their proximity to this death— a feeling that was discreditable and self-centered. A morbid, preening excitement.

  Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back—during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of the children—into a kind of second adolescence. A lightening of spirits when the husbands departed. Dreamy rebellion, subversive get-togethers, laughing fits that were a throwback to high school, mushrooming between the walls that the husband was paying for, in the hours when he wasn’t there.

  After the funeral some people had been invited back to Jonas’s parents’ house in Dundarave. The rhododendron hedge was in bloom, all red and pink and purple. Jonas’s father was complimented on the garden.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “We had to get it in shape in a bit of a hurry.”

  Jonas’s mother said, “This isn’t a real lunch, I’m afraid. Just a pickup.” Most people were drinking sherry, though some of the men had whisky. Food was set out on the extended dining-room table—salmon mousse and crackers, mushroom tarts, sausage rolls, a light lemon cake and cut-up fruit and pressed-almond cookies, as well as shrimp and ham and cucumber-and-avocad
o sandwiches. Pierre heaped everything onto his small china plate, and Meriel heard his mother say to him, “You know, you could always come back for a second helping.”

  His mother didn’t live in West Vancouver anymore but had come in from White Rock for the funeral. And she wasn’t quite confident about a direct reprimand, now that Pierre was a teacher and a married man.

  “Or didn’t you think there’d be any left?” she said.

  Pierre said carelessly, “Maybe not of what I wanted.”

  His mother spoke to Meriel. “What a nice dress.”

  “Yes, but look,” said Meriel, smoothing down the wrinkles that had formed while she sat through the service.

  “That’s the trouble,” Pierre’s mother said.

  “What’s the trouble?” said Jonas’s mother brightly, sliding some tarts onto the warming-dish.

  “That’s the trouble with linen,” said Pierre’s mother. “Meriel was just saying how her dress had wrinkled up”—she did not say, “during the funeral service”—“and I was saying that’s the trouble with linen.”

  Jonas’s mother might not have been listening. Looking across the room, she said, “That’s the doctor who looked after him. He flew down from Smithers in his own plane. Really, we thought that was so good of him.”

  Pierre’s mother said, “That’s quite a venture.”

  “Yes. Well. I suppose he gets around that way, to attend people in the bush.”

  The man they were talking about was speaking to Pierre. He was not wearing a suit, though he had a decent jacket on, over a turtlenecked sweater.

  “I suppose he would,” said Pierre’s mother, and Jonas’s mother said, “Yes,” and Meriel felt as if something—about the way he was dressed?—had been explained and settled, between them.