by Alice Munro
“You are going to look so good when I take these rollers out,” she said. “You won’t be saying you haven’t got a boyfriend for very long. But it’ll be too late to go looking today. Early bird tomorrow. If Stan asks you anything, say you went to a couple of places and they took your phone number. Say a store or a restaurant or anything, just so long as he thinks you’re looking.”
I was hired the next day at the first place I tried, though I hadn’t managed to be such an early bird after all. Queenie had decided to do my hair still another way and to make up my eyes, but the result was not what she had hoped for. “You’re really more the natural type after all,” she said, and I scrubbed it all off and put on my own lipstick, which was ordinary red, not glimmering-pale like hers.
By this time it was too late for Queenie to go out with me to check on her Post Office box. She had to get ready to go to the movie theater. It was a Saturday, so she had to work in the afternoon as well as in the evening. She got out her key and asked me to check the box for her, as a favor. She explained to me where it was.
“I had to get my own box when I wrote to your dad,” she said.
The job I got was in a drugstore in the basement of an apartment building. I was hired to work behind the lunch counter. When I first came in I felt fairly hopeless. My hairstyle was drooping in the heat and I had a moustache of sweat on my upper lip. At least my cramps had moderated.
A woman in a white uniform was at the counter, drinking coffee.
“Did you come about the job?” she said.
I said yes. The woman had a hard, square face, pencilled eyebrows, a beehive of purplish hair.
“You speak English, do you?”
“Yes.”
“I mean you didn’t just learn it? You’re not a foreigner?”
I said I wasn’t.
“I tried out two girls in the last two days and I had to let them both go. One let on she could speak English, but she couldn’t and the other I had to tell her everything ten times over. Wash your hands good at the sink and I’ll get you an apron. My husband is the pharmacist and I do the till.” (I noticed for the first time a gray-haired man behind a high counter in the corner looking at me and pretending not to.) “It’s slow now, but it’ll get busy in a while. It’s all old people in this block and after their naps they start coming down here wanting coffee.”
I tied on an apron and took my place behind the counter. Hired for a job in Toronto. I tried to find out where things were without asking questions and had to ask only two—how to work the coffeemaker and what to do about the money.
“You make out the bill and they bring it to me. What did you think?”
It was all right. People came in one or two at a time mostly wanting coffee or a Coke. I kept the cups washed and wiped, the counter clean, and apparently I made out the bills properly, since there was no complaint. The customers were mostly old people, as the woman had said. Some spoke to me in a kindly way, saying I was new here and even asking where I came from. Others seemed to be in a kind of trance. One woman wanted toast and I managed that. Then I did a ham sandwich. There was a little flurry with four people there at once. A man wanted pie and ice cream, and I found the ice cream hard as cement to scoop out. But I did it. I got more confident. I said to them, “Here you are” when I set down their orders, and “Here’s the damage” when I presented the bill.
In a slow moment the woman from the till came over.
“I see you made somebody toast,” she said. “Can you read?”
She pointed to a sign stuck on the mirror behind the counter.
NO BREAKFAST ITEMS SERVED AFTER 11 A.M.
I said that I thought it was okay to make toast, if you could make toasted sandwiches.
“Well, you thought wrong. Toasted sandwiches, yes, ten cents extra. Toast, no. Do you understand now?”
I said yes. I wasn’t so crushed as I might have been at first. All the time I was working I thought what a relief it would be to go back and tell Mr. Vorguilla that yes, I had a job. Now I could go and look for a room of my own to live in. Maybe tomorrow, Sunday, if the drugstore was closed. If I even had one room, I thought, Queenie would have some place to run away to if Mr. Vorguilla got mad at her again. And if Queenie ever decided to leave Mr. Vorguilla (I persisted in thinking of this as a possibility in spite of how Queenie had finished her story), then with the pay from both our jobs maybe we could get a little apartment. Or at least a room with a hot plate and a toilet and shower to ourselves. It would be like when we lived at home with our parents except that our parents would not be there.
I garnished each sandwich with a bit of torn-off lettuce and a dill pickle. That was what another sign on the mirror promised. But when I got the dill pickle out of a jar I thought it looked like too much, so I cut it in half. I had just served a man a sandwich in this way when the woman from the till came over and got herself a cup of coffee. She took her coffee back to the till and drank it standing up. When the man had finished his sandwich and paid for it and left the store she came over again.
“You gave that man half a dill pickle. Have you been doing that with every sandwich?”
I said yes.
“Don’t you know how to slice a pickle? One pickle ought to last ten sandwiches.”
I looked at the sign. “It doesn’t say a slice. It says a pickle.”
“That’s enough,” the woman said. “Get out of that apron. I don’t take any back talk from my employees, that’s one thing I won’t do. You can get your purse and get out of here. And don’t go asking me where’s your pay because you haven’t been any use to me anyway and this was just supposed to be training.”
The gray-haired man was peeking out, with a nervous smile.
So I found myself out on the street again, walking to the streetcar stop. But I knew the way some streets went now and I knew how to use a transfer. I had even had experience at a job. I could say that I had worked behind a lunch counter. If anybody wanted a reference it would be tricky—but I could say the lunch counter was in my hometown. While I waited for the streetcar I took out the list of other places where I meant to apply, and the map that Queenie had given me. But it was later than I’d thought, and most places seemed too far away. I dreaded having to tell Mr. Vorguilla. I decided to walk back, in the hopes that when I got there he’d have gone.
I had just turned up the hill when I remembered the Post Office. I found my way back to it and got a letter out of the box and walked home again. Surely he would be gone by now.
But he wasn’t. When I walked past the open living-room window that overlooked the path beside the house, I heard music. It wasn’t what Queenie would play. It was the sort of complicated music that we had heard sometimes coming through the open windows of the Vorguillas’ house—music that demanded your attention and then didn’t go anywhere, or at least didn’t go anywhere soon enough. Classical.
Queenie was in the kitchen, wearing another of her skimpy dresses, and all her makeup. She had bangles on her arms. She was setting teacups on a tray. I was dizzy for a moment, coming out of the sunlight, and every inch of my skin bloomed with sweat.
“Shh,” Queenie said, because I’d closed the door with a crash. “They’re in there listening to records. It’s him and his friend Leslie.”
Just as she said this the music came to an abrupt halt and there was a burst of excited talk.
“One of them plays a record and the other has to guess what it is just from a little bit of it,” Queenie said. “They play these little bits and then stop, over and over. It drives you crazy.” She started cutting slices off a delicatessen chicken and putting them on buttered slices of bread. “Did you get a job?” she said.
“Yes, but it wasn’t permanent.”
“Oh, well.” She didn’t seem very interested. But as the music started again she looked up and smiled and said, “Did you go to the—” And she saw the letter I was carrying in my hand.
She dropped the knife and came to me in a hurry, s
aying softly, “You walked right in with it in your hand. I should have told you, put it in your purse. My private letter.” She grabbed it from my hand and right at that moment the kettle on the stove began to shriek.
“Oh, get the kettle. Chrissy, quick, quick! Get the kettle or he’ll be out here, he can’t stand the sound.”
She had turned her back and was tearing open the envelope.
I took the kettle off the burner, and she said, “Make the tea, please—” in the soft, preoccupied voice of somebody reading an urgent message. “Just pour the water on, it’s measured.”
She laughed as if she’d read a private joke. I poured the water on the tea leaves and she said, “Thanks. Oh, thanks, Chrissy; thanks.” She turned around and looked at me. Her face was rosy and all the bangles on her arms jingled with a delicate agitation. She folded up the letter and pulled up her skirt and tucked it under the elastic waistband of her underpants.
She said, “Sometimes he goes through my purse.”
I said, “Is the tea for them?”
“Yes. And I have to get back to work. Oh, what am I doing? I have to cut the sandwiches. Where’s the knife?”
I picked up the knife and cut the sandwiches and put them on a plate.
“Don’t you want to know who my letter’s from?” she said.
I couldn’t think.
I said, “Bet?”
Because I had a hope that a private forgiveness from Bet could be the thing that had made Queenie burst into flower.
I had not even looked at the writing on the envelope.
Queenie’s face changed—for a moment she looked as if she didn’t know who that was. Then she recovered her happiness. She came and put her arms around me and spoke into my ear, in a voice that was shivering and shy and triumphant.
“It’s from Andrew. Can you take the tray in to them? I can’t. I can’t right now. Oh, thank you.”
Before Queenie went off to work she came into the living room and kissed both Mr. Vorguilla and his friend. She kissed both of them on their foreheads. She gave me a butterfly wave. “Bye-bye.”
When I had brought the tray in I saw the annoyance on Mr. Vorguilla’s face, that I wasn’t Queenie. But he spoke to me in a surprisingly tolerant way and introduced me to Leslie. Leslie was a stout bald man who at first looked to me almost as old as Mr. Vorguilla. But when you got used to him and took his baldness into account he seemed much younger. He was not the sort of friend I would have expected Mr. Vorguilla to have. He was not brusque or know-it-all but comfortable and full of encouragement. For example, when I told about my employment at the lunch counter he said, “Well you know that’s something. Getting hired the first place you tried. It shows you know how to make a good impression.”
I had not found the experience hard to talk about. The presence of Leslie made everything easier and seemed to soften the behavior of Mr. Vorguilla. As if he had to show me a decent courtesy in the presence of his friend. It could also have been that he sensed a change in me. People do sense the difference when you are not afraid of them anymore. He would not be sure of this difference and he would have no idea how it came about, but it would puzzle him and make him more careful. He agreed with Leslie when Leslie said I was well out of that job, and he even went on to say that the woman sounded like the sort of hard-bitten chiseler you sometimes found in that kind of hole-in-corner establishment in Toronto.
“And she had no business not paying you,” he said.
“You’d think the husband might have come forward,” said Leslie. “If he was the druggist, he was the boss.”
Mr. Vorguilla said, “He might brew up a special dose someday. For his wife.”
It wasn’t so hard to pour out tea and offer milk and sugar and pass sandwiches, and even talk, when you knew something another person didn’t know, about a danger he was in. It was just because he didn’t know, that I could feel something other than loathing for Mr. Vorguilla. It wasn’t that he had changed in himself—or if he had changed it was probably because I had.
Soon he said that it was time for him to get ready to go to work. He went to change his clothes. Then Leslie asked me if I would like to have supper with him.
“Just around the corner there’s a place I go,” he said. “Nothing fancy. Nothing like Stan’s place.”
I was glad enough to hear that it wouldn’t be anyplace fancy. I said, “Sure.” And after we had dropped off Mr. Vorguilla at the restaurant we drove in Leslie’s car to a fish and chips place. Leslie ordered the Super Dinner—though he had just consumed several chicken sandwiches—and I ordered the Regular. He had a beer and I had a Coke.
He talked about himself. He said he wished he had gone to Teachers’ College himself instead of choosing music, which did not make for a very settled life.
I was too absorbed in my own situation even to ask him what kind of musician he was. My father had bought me a return ticket, saying, “You never know how things are going to sit with him and her.” I had thought of that ticket at the moment I watched Queenie tucking Andrew’s letter under the waistband of her underpants. Even though I didn’t yet know that it was Andrew’s letter.
I hadn’t just come to Toronto, or come to Toronto to get a summer job. I had come to be part of Queenie’s life. Or if necessary, part of Queenie’s and Mr. Vorguilla’s life. Even when I had the fantasy about Queenie living with me, the fantasy had something to do with Mr. Vorguilla and how she would be serving him right.
And when I’d thought of the return ticket I was taking something else for granted. That I could go back and live with Bet and my father and be part of their life.
My father and Bet. Mr. and Mrs. Vorguilla. Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla. Even Queenie and Andrew. These were couples and each of them, however disjointed, had now or in memory a private burrow with its own heat and disturbance, from which I was cut off. And I had to be, I wished to be, cut off, for there was nothing I could see in their lives to instruct me or encourage me.
Leslie too was a person cut off. Yet he talked to me about various people he was connected to by ties of blood or friendship. His sister and her husband. His nieces and nephews, the married couples he visited and spent holidays with. All of these people had problems, but all had value. He talked about their jobs, lack of jobs, talents, strokes of luck, errors in judgment, with great interest but a lack of passion. He was cut off, it seemed, from love or rancor.
I would have seen flaws in this, later in my life. I would have felt the impatience, even suspicion a woman can feel towards a man who lacks a motive. Who has only friendship to offer and offers that so easily that even if it is rejected he can move along as cheerfully as ever. Here was no solitary fellow hoping to hook up with a girl. Even I could see that. Just a person who took comfort in the moment and in a sort of reasonable facade of life.
His company was just what I needed, though I hardly realized it. Probably he was being deliberately kind to me. As I had thought of myself as being kind to Mr. Vorguilla, or at least protecting him, so unexpectedly, a little while before.
I was at Teachers’ College when Queenie ran away again. I got the news in a letter from my father. He said that he did not know just how or when it happened. Mr. Vorguilla hadn’t let him know for a while, and then he had, in case Queenie had come back home. My father had told Mr. Vorguilla he didn’t think there was much chance of that. In the letter to me he said that at least it wasn’t the kind of thing we could say now that Queenie wouldn’t do.
For years, even after I was married, I would get a Christmas card from Mr. Vorguilla. Sleighs laden with bright parcels; a happy family in a decorated doorway, welcoming friends. Perhaps he thought these were the sorts of scenes that would appeal to me in my present way of life. Or perhaps he picked them blindly off the rack. He always included a return address—reminding me of his existence and letting me know where he was, in case of any news.
I had given up expecting that kind of news, myself. I never even found out if it was Andrew that Quee
nie went away with, or somebody else. Or whether she stayed with Andrew, if he was the one. When my father died there was some money left, and a serious attempt was made to trace her, but without success.
But now something has happened. Now in the years when my children are grown up and my husband has retired, and he and I are travelling a lot, I have a notion that sometimes I see Queenie. It’s not through any particular wish or effort that I see her, and it’s not as if I believe it is really her, either.
Once it was in a crowded airport, and she was wearing a sarong and a flower-trimmed straw hat. Tanned and excited, rich-looking, surrounded by friends. And once she was among the women at a church door waiting for a glimpse of the wedding party. She wore a spotty suede jacket and she did not look either prosperous or well. Another time she was stopped at a crosswalk, leading a string of nursery-school children on their way to the swimming pool or the park. It was a hot day and her thick middle-aged figure was frankly and comfortably on view, in flowered shorts and a sloganed T-shirt.
The last and the strangest time was in a supermarket in Twin Falls, Idaho. I came around a corner carrying the few things I had collected for a picnic lunch, and there was an old woman leaning on her shopping cart, as if waiting for me. A little wrinkled woman with a crooked mouth and an unhealthy-looking brownish skin. Hair in yellow-brown bristles, purple pants hitched up over the small mound of her stomach—she was one of those thin women who have nevertheless, with age, lost the convenience of a waistline. The pants could have come from some thrift shop and so could the gaily colored but matted and shrunken sweater buttoned over a chest no bigger than a ten-year-old’s.
The shopping cart was empty. She was not even carrying a purse.
And unlike those other women, this one seemed to know that she was Queenie. She smiled at me with such a merry recognition, and such a yearning to be recognized in return, that you would have thought that this was a great boon—a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.