by Alice Munro
She has no business on the second floor. Her glee club is singing downstairs. She has been working them hard, getting them ready for the Christmas concert. “He Shall Feed His Flock” is their hard piece. Then “The Huron Carol” (one complaint from a parent who said he understood it was written by a priest), “Hearts of Oak” because there had to be something patriotic, times being what they were, and “The Desert Song,” their choice. Now they are singing “The Holy City.” A great favorite, that one, especially with big-breasted moony girls and choir ladies. High-school girls could irritate the life out of Frances. They wanted the windows closed, they wanted the windows opened. They felt drafts, they were faint from the heat. They were tender toward their bodies, moving in a trance of gloomy self-love, listening for heart flutters, talking of twinges. The start of being women. Then what happened to them? The big fronts and rears, the bland importance, milkiness, dopiness, stubbornness. Smell of corsets, sickening revelations. Sacrificial looks they would get in the choir. It was all a dreary sort of sex. He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.
She has left them on their own, pretended she is going to the teachers’ washroom. All she does there is turn on the light and look with relief at her own unrapt, unswollen face, her long bright face, with its rather large nose, clear brown eyes and short bush of dark-reddish hair, uncontrollably curly. Frances likes her own looks, is usually cheered by her own face in the mirror. Most women, at least in books, seem to have a problem about their looks, thinking themselves less pretty than they really are. Frances has to admit she may have an opposite problem. Not that she thinks herself pretty; just that her face seems lucky to her, and encouraging. She remembers sometimes a girl at the conservatory, Natalie somebody, who played the violin. Frances was amazed to learn that people sometimes confused her with this Natalie, who was pale, frizzy-haired, bony-faced; she was even more amazed to learn, through a network of friends and confidantes, that it bothered Natalie as much as it did her. And when she broke her engagement to Paul, another student at the conserva-tory, he said to her in a harsh, matter-of-fact voice without any of the courtliness or sentimentality he had previously felt obliged to use toward her, “Well, do you really think you can do that much better? You’re not the greatest beauty, you know.”
She turns out the light and instead of going back to the glee club she goes upstairs. In the winter mornings the school is dreary; not enough heat yet, everybody yawning and shivering, country children who have left home before light rubbing crusty bits of sleep from the corners of their eyes. But by this time of day, by midafternoon, Frances feels a comforting hum about the place, a more agreeable drowsiness, with the dark wainscoting soaking up the light, and the silent cloakrooms stuffed with drying woolen coats and scarves and boots and skates and hockey sticks. Through the open transoms flow some orderly instructions; French dictation; confident facts. And along with all this order and acquiescence there is a familiar pressure, of longing or foreboding, that strange lump of something you can feel sometimes in music or a landscape, barely withheld, promising to burst and reveal itself, but it doesn’t, it dissolves and goes away.
Frances is directly opposite the door of the science room. That transom is open, too, and she can hear clinking sounds, low voices, shifting of stools. He must have them doing an experiment. Absurdly, shamefully, she feels the sweat in her palms, the hammering in her chest, that she has felt before a piano examination or recital. That air of crisis, the supposed possibilities of triumph or calamity that she could manufacture, for herself and others, now seems trumped up, foolish, artificial. But what about this, her affair with Ted Makkavala? She is not so far gone that she cannot see how foolish that would seem to anybody looking on. Never mind. If foolish means risky and imprudent, she does not care. Perhaps all she has ever wanted was a chance to take chances. But the thought comes to her sometimes that a love affair can be, not artificial, yet somehow devised and deliberate, an occasion provided, just as those silly performances were: a rickety invention. That is an idea she can’t take a chance with; she puts it out of sight.
A student’s voice, a girl’s, puzzled and complaining (another thing about high-school girls—they whine when they don’t understand; boys’ grunting contempt is better). Ted’s low voice answering, explaining. Frances can’t hear his words. She thinks of him bending attentively, performing some ordinary action such as lowering the flame of a Bunsen burner. She likes to think of him as diligent, patient, self-contained. But she knows, word has reached her, that his classroom behavior is different from what he has led her or anyone to believe. It is his habit to speak rather scornfully of his job, of his students. If asked what sort of discipline he favors, he will say, oh, nothing much, maybe a knuckle sandwich, maybe a good swift kick in the arse. The truth is, he gets his students’ attention by all sorts of tricks and cajolery; he makes use of props such as dunce hats and birthday whistles; he carries on in a highly melodramatic way over their stupidity, and once burned their test papers one by one in the sink. What a character, Frances has heard students say of him. She does not like hearing them say that. She is sure they say it of her, too; she herself is not above using extravagant tactics, tearing her fingers through her bushy hair lamenting no-no-no-no when they sing badly. But she would rather he did not have to do such things. She shies away sometimes from mention of him, from hearing what people have to say. He’s very friendly, they say, and she thinks she hears some puzzlement, some scorn; why does he take such pains? She has to wonder, too; she knows what he thinks of this town and the people in it. Or what he says he thinks.
The door is opening, giving Frances a shock. There is nothing she wants less than for Ted to find her here, listening, spying. But it isn’t Ted, thank God, it’s the school secretary, a plump, serious woman who has been secretary here forever, since Frances was a student herself, and before that. She is devoted to the school, and to the Bible class she runs at the United Church.
“Hello there, dear; getting a bit of air?”
The window Frances is standing beside is of course not open, has even been taped around the cracks. But Frances makes a humorous assenting face, says, “Playing hooky,” to acknowledge being out of her classroom, and the secretary goes calmly downstairs, her kind voice floating back.
“Your glee club sounds lovely today. I always like the Christmas music.”
Frances goes back to her classroom and sits on the desk, smiling into the singing faces. They have got through “The Holy City” and all by themselves got on “The Westminster Carol.” They do look silly, but how can they help it? Singing is silly altogether. She never thinks that they will notice her smile and mention it afterward, sure she has been out to meet Ted in the hall. It is in imagining her affair to be a secret that Frances shows, most clearly, a lack of small-town instincts, a trust and recklessness she is unaware of; this is what people mean when they say of her that it sure shows that she has been away. She was only four years away, at the conservatory; the truth was, she always lacked caution. Tall, fine-boned, with narrow shoulders, she has the outsider’s quick movements, preoccupied look, high-pitched, urgent voice, the outsider’s innocent way of supposing herself unobserved as she dashes from one place to another around town, arms full of music books, calling across the street some message relating to the fluctuating and it would seem nearly impossible arrangements of her life.
Tell Bonnie not to come until 3:30!
Did you get the keys? I left them in the office!
She showed that even when she was little, and was so determined to learn to play the piano, even though they didn’t have one, in the apartment over the hardware store where she lived with her mother and brother (her mother a widow, poorly paid, who worked downstairs). Somehow the thirty-five cents a week had been found, but the only piano she saw was the teacher’s. At home, she practiced on a keyboard penciled on the windowsill. There was some composer— Handel, was it?—who used to practice on the harpsichord in the atti
c with the door closed, so his father would not know what a grip music had got on him. (How he managed to sneak a harpsichord in there was an interesting question.) If Frances had become a famous pianist, the windowsill keyboard—overlooking the alley, the roof of the curling rink—would have become another such legend.
“Don’t think you’re any genius,” was another thing Paul had said to her, “because you’re not.” Had she thought that? She thought the future had something remarkable in store for her. She didn’t even think it very clearly, just behaved as if she thought it. She came home, started teaching music. Mondays at the high school, Wednesdays at the public school, Tuesdays and Thursdays at little schools out in the country. Saturdays for organ practice and private pupils; Sundays she played in the United Church.
“Still bumbIing around this great cultural metropolis,” she would scrawl on her Christmas cards to old friends from the conservatory, the idea being that once her mother died, once she was free, she would embark on the separate, dimly imagined, immeasurably more satisfying life that was still waiting for her. The messages she got back had often the same distracted and disbelieving tone. Another baby and my hands are in the diaper pail more often than on the keyboard as you can well imagine. They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
Wind is bending the trees outside and snow is blurring them. A minor blizzard is going on, nothing to take much notice of in this part of the country. On the windowsill is an ink pitcher of battered brass with a long spout, a familiar object that makes Frances think of the Arabian nights, or something like that; something whose promise, or suggestion, is foreign, reticent, delightful.
“HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?” said Ted when she met him in the hall after four. Then he said in a lower voice, “Supply room. I’ll be right there.”
“Fine,” said Frances. “Fine.” She went to lock up some music books and close the piano. She fussed and dawdled around until all the students were gone, then ran upstairs, into the science room, into a large, windowless closet opening off it, which was Ted’s supply room. He was not there yet.
The room was a sort of pantry, lined with shelves on which sat bottles of various chemicals—copper sulfate was the only one she would have known without the label, she remembered the beautiful color—Bunsen burners, flasks, test tubes, a human skeleton and a cat’s, some bottled organs, or maybe organisms; she didn’t look too closely and anyway the room was dark.
She was afraid that the janitor might come in, or even some students working under Ted’s direction on some project involving mold or frog spawn (though it would surely be the wrong time of year for that). What if they should come back to check on something? When she heard footsteps her heart began banging away; when she realized they were Ted’s it did not quiet down but seemed to shift into another gear, so that it was pounding not from fright but from strong, overpowering expectation, which, however delightful, was as hard on her, physically, as fear; it seemed enough to suffocate her.
She heard him lock the door.
She had two ways of looking at him, all in the moment it took him to appear in the doorway of the supply room, then pull that door nearly shut, so they were almost in the dark. First, she saw him as if it was a year ago, and he was someone who had nothing to do with her. Ted Makkavala, the science teacher, not in the war, though he was under forty; he did have a wife and three children, and perhaps he had a heart murmur, or something like that; he did look tired. A tall, slightly stooping, dark-haired, dark-skinned man, with an irritable, humorous expression, eyes both tired and bright. It could be supposed he had a similar sighting of her, standing there looking irresolute and alarmed, with her coat over her arm and her boots in her hand, since she had thought it unwise to leave them in the teachers’ cloakroom. There was a moment’s chance they would not be able to make the switch, to see each other differently; they wouldn’t remember how the crossover was managed or grace wouldn’t be granted them, and if that could be so, what were they doing in this place?
As he drew the door shut she saw him again, the side of his face and the slant of the cheekbones, a marvelous, polished, Tartarish slant; she perceived the act of drawing the door closed as stealthy and ruthless, and she knew there was no chance in the world they would not make the switch. It was already made.
Then, as usual. Licks and pressures, tongues and bodies, teasing and hurting and comforting. Invitations, attentions. She used to wonder, in her days with Paul, if the whole thing could be a fraud, an Emperor’s clothes sort of thing, if nobody really felt what they pretended, and certainly she and Paul did not. There had been a dreadful air of apology and constraint and embarrassment about the whole business, the worst of it being the moans and endearments and reassurances they had to offer. But no, it wasn’t a fraud, it was all true, it surpassed everything; and the signs that it could happen—the locked eyes, the shiver along the spine, all that elemental foolishness—those were true, too.
“How many other people know about this?” she said to Ted. “Oh, not very many, maybe a dozen or so.”
“It’ll never catch on, I don’t suppose.”
“Well. It’ll never be popular with the masses.”
The space between the shelves was narrow. There was so much breakable equipment. And why had she not had sense enough to put down her boots and her coat? The truth was she had not expected so much or such purposeful embracing. She had thought he wanted to tell her something.
He opened the door slightly, to give them a bit more light. He took her boots from her and set them outside the door. Then he took her coat. But instead of setting it down outside he was opening it out and spreading it on the bare boards of the floor. The first time she had seen him do something like that was last spring. In the cold, still-leafless woods he had taken off his windbreaker and spread it inadequately on the ground. She had been powerfully moved by this simple preparatory act, by the way he spread the jacket open and patted it down, without any questions, any doubts or hurry. She had not been sure, until he did that, what was going to happen. Such a gentle, steady, fatalistic look he had. She was stirred by the memory as he knelt in this narrow space and spread out her coat. At the same time she was thinking: if he wants to do it now, does it mean he can’t come on Wednesday? Wednesday night was when they regularly met, in the church after Frances’ choir practice. Frances would stay on in the church, playing the organ, until everyone had gone home. At about eleven o’clock she would go down and turn out the lights and wait at the back door, the Sunday-school door, to let him in. They had thought of this when the weather turned cold. What he told his wife she did not know.
“Take everything off.”
“We can’t here,” said Frances, though she knew they would. They always took all their clothes off, even that first time in the woods; she had never believed she could feel the cold so little.
Only once before here, in the school, in this same room, and that had been in the summer holidays, just after dark. All the woodwork in the science room had been freshly painted and there had been no warning signs up—why should there be, nobody was expected to get in. The smell was strong enough, when they finally noticed. They had twisted around somehow so that their legs were in this doorway, and they both got smeared with the paint from the door frame. Fortunately Ted had been wearing shorts that evening—an odd sight in town, at the time—and had been able to tell Greta the truth, that he had smeared his leg when he went to do something in the science room, without having to explain how his legs were bare. Frances did not have to explain since her mother was beyond noticing such things. She did not clean the crescent of paint off (it was just above her ankle); she let it wear away, and enjoyed looking at it and knowing it was there, just as she enjoyed the dark bruises, the bite marks, on her upper arms and shoulders, that she could easily have covered with long sleeves but often did not. Then people would say to her, “How did you get that nasty bruise?” and she would say,
“You know, I don’t know! I bruise so easily. Every time I look at myself, there’s a bruise!” Her sister-in-law Adelaide, her brother’s wife, was the only one who would know what it was, and would find occasion to say something.
“Oh-oh, you been out with that tomcat again. Haven’t you, eh? Haven’t you?” She would laugh and even put her finger to the mark.
Adelaide was the only person Frances had told. Ted said he had told nobody, and she believed him. He did not know that she had told Adelaide. She wished she had not. She did not like Adelaide well enough to make a confidante of her. It was all vulgar, discreditable; she had done it just to have somebody to parade in front of. When Adelaide said tomcat, in that crude, taunting, aroused and unconsciously jealous way, Frances was gratified and excited, though of course ashamed. She would be frantic if she thought Ted had made similar confidences about her.
The night they got the paint on themselves was such a hot night, the whole town was cranky and drooping and waiting for rain, which came toward morning, with a thunderstorm. Frances looking back at this time always thought of lightning, a crazy and shattering, painful kind of lust. She used to think of each time separately, would go over them in her mind. There was a peculiar code, a different feeling, for each time. The time in the science room like lightning and wet paint. The time in the car in the rain in the middle of the afternoon, with sleepy rhythms, so pleased and sleepy they were then that it seemed they could hardly be bothered to do the next thing. That time had a curved, smooth feeling for her, in memory; the curve came from the sheets of rainwater on the windshield, looking like looped-back curtains.
Since they were meeting regularly in the church, the pattern did not change so much, one time was much like another.