by Alice Munro
“The Incas eating off gold plates while Pizarro was landing on the coast,” says David.
“Don’t talk as if there’s no solution,” says Kimberly.
“I think maybe we’re destroyed already,” Ruth says dreamily. “I think maybe we’re anachronisms. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean relics. In some way we are already. Relics.”
Eva raises her head from her folded arms on the table. Her curtain veil is pulled down over one eye; her makeup has leaked beyond its boundaries, so that her whole face is a patchy flower. She says in a loud, stern voice, “I am not a relic,” and they all laugh.
“Certainly not!” says Valerie, and then begins the yawning, the pushing back of chairs, the rather sheepish and formal smiles, the blowing out of candles: time to go home.
“Smell the river now!” Valerie tells them. Her voice sounds forlorn and tender, in the dark.
“A GIBBOUS MOON.”
It was Roberta who told George what a gibbous moon was, and so his saying this is always an offering. It is an offering now, as they drive between the black cornfields.
“So there is.”
Roberta doesn’t reject the offering with silence, but she doesn’t welcome it, either. She is polite. She yawns, and there is a private sound to her yawn. This isn’t tactics, though she knows indifference is attractive. The real thing is. He can spot an imitation; he can always withstand tactics. She has to go all the way, to where she doesn’t care. Then he feels how light and distant she is and his love revives. She has power. But the minute she begins to value it it will begin to leave her. So she is thinking, as she yawns and wavers on the edge of caring and not caring. She’d stay on this edge if she could.
The half-ton truck bearing George and Roberta, with Eva and Angela in the back, is driving down the third concession road of Weymouth Township, known locally as the Telephone Road. It is a gravel road, fairly wide and well travelled. They turned on to it from the River Road, a much narrower road, which runs past Valerie’s place. From the corner of the River Road to George’s gate is a distance of about two and a quarter miles. Two side roads cut this stretch of the Telephone Road at right angles. Both these roads have stop signs; the Telephone Road is a through road. The first crossroad they have already passed. Along the second crossroad, from the west, a dark-green 1969 Dodge is travelling at between eighty and ninety miles an hour. Two young men are returning from a party to their home in Logan. One has passed out. The other is driving. He hasn’t remembered to put the lights on. He sees the road by the light of the moon.
There isn’t time to say a word. Roberta doesn’t scream. George doesn’t touch the brake. The big car flashes before them, a huge, dark flash, without lights, seemingly without sound. It comes out of the dark corn and fills the air right in front of them the way a big flat fish will glide into view suddenly in an aquarium tank. It seems to be no more than a yard in front of their headlights. Then it’s gone—it has disappeared into the corn on the other side of the road. They drive on. They drive on down the Telephone Road and turn into the lane and come to a stop and are sitting in the truck in the yard in front of the dark shape of the half-improved house. What they feel is not terror or thanksgiving—not yet. What they feel is strangeness. They feel as strange, as flattened out and borne aloft, as unconnected with previous and future events as the ghost car was, the black fish. The shaggy branches of the pine trees are moving overhead, and under those branches the moonlight comes clear on the hesitant grass of their new lawn.
“Are you guys dead?” Eva says, rousing them. “Aren’t we home?”
Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd
Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd have known each other eighty years, ever since Kindergarten, which was not called that then, but Primary. Mrs. Cross’s first picture of Mrs. Kidd is of her standing at the front of the class reciting some poem, her hands behind her back and her small black-eyed face lifted to let out her self-confident voice. Over the next ten years, if you went to any concert, any meeting that featured entertainment, you would find Mrs. Kidd (who was not called Mrs. Kidd then but Marian Botherton), with her dark, thick bangs cut straight across her forehead, and her pinafore sticking up in starched wings, reciting a poem with the greatest competence and no hitch of memory. Even today with hardly any excuse, sitting in her wheelchair, Mrs. Kidd will launch forth.
“Today we French stormed Ratisbon,”
she will say, or:
“Where are the ships I used to know
That came to port on the Fundy tide?”
She stops not because she doesn’t remember how to go on but in order to let somebody say, “What’s that one?” or, “Wasn’t that in the Third Reader?” which she takes as a request to steam ahead.
“Half a century ago
In beauty and stately pride.”
Mrs. Kidd’s first memory of Mrs. Cross (Dolly Grainger) is of a broad red face and a dress with a droopy hem, and thick fair braids, and a bellowing voice, in the playground on a rainy day when they were all crowded under the overhang. The girls played a game that was really a dance, that Mrs. Kidd did not know how to do. It was a Virginia reel and the words they sang were:
“Jolting up and down in the old Brass Wagon
Jolting up and down in the old Brass Wagon
Jolting up and down in the old Brass Wagon
You’re the One my Darling!”
Nobody whirled and stomped and sang more enthusiastically than Mrs. Cross, who was the youngest and smallest allowed to play. She knew it from her older sisters. Mrs. Kidd was an only child.
Younger people, learning that these two women have known each other for more than three-quarters of a century, seem to imagine this gives them everything in common. They themselves are the only ones who can recall what separated them, and to a certain extent does yet: the apartment over the Post Office and Customs house, where Mrs. Kidd lived with her mother and her father who was the Postmaster; the row-house on Newgate Street where Mrs. Cross lived with her mother and father and two sisters and four brothers; the fact that Mrs. Kidd went to the Anglican Church and Mrs. Cross to the Free Methodist; that Mrs. Kidd married, at the age of twenty-three, a high-school teacher of science, and Mrs. Cross married, at the age of seventeen, a man who worked on the lake boats and never got to be a captain. Mrs. Cross had six children, Mrs. Kidd had three. Mrs. Cross’s husband died suddenly at forty-two with no life insurance; Mrs. Kidd’s husband retired to Goderich with a pension after years of being principal of the high school in a nearby town. Only recently has the gap closed. The children equalled things out; Mrs. Cross’s children, on the average, make as much money as Mrs. Kidd’s children, though they do not have as much education. Mrs. Cross’s grandchildren make more money.
Mrs. Cross has been in Hilltop Home three years and two months, Mrs. Kidd three years less a month. They both have bad hearts and ride around in wheelchairs to save their energy. During their first conversation, Mrs. Kidd said, “I don’t notice any hilltop.”
“You can see the highway,” said Mrs. Cross. “I guess that’s what they mean. Where did they put you?” she asked.
“I hardly know if I can find my way back. It’s a nice room, though. It’s a single.”
“Mine is too, I have a single. Is it the other side of the dining-room or this?”
“Oh. The other side.”
“That’s good. That’s the best part. Everybody’s in fairly good shape down there. It costs more, though. The better you are, the more it costs. The other side of the dining-room is out of their head.”
“Senile?”
“Senile. This side is the younger ones that have something like that the matter with them. For instance.” She nodded at a Mongoloid man of about fifty, who was trying to play the mouth organ. “Down in our part there’s also younger ones, but nothing the matter up here,” she tapped her head. “Just some disease. When it gets to the point they can’t look after themselves—upstairs. That’s where you get the far-gone ones. Then the crazies
is another story. Locked up in the back wing. That’s the real crazies. Also, I think there is some place they have the ones that walk around but soil all the time.”
“Well, we are the top drawer,” said Mrs. Kidd with a tight smile. “I knew there would be plenty of senile ones, but I wasn’t prepared for the others. Such as.” She nodded discreetly at the Mongoloid who was doing a step-dance in front of the window.
Unlike most Mongoloids, he was thin and agile, though very pale and brittle-looking.
“Happier than most,” said Mrs. Cross, observing him. “This is the only place in the county, everything gets dumped here. After a while it doesn’t bother you.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
MRS. KIDD’S ROOM is full of rocks and shells, in boxes and in bottles. She has a case of brittle butterflies and a case of stuffed song-birds. Her bookshelves contain Ferns and Mosses of North America, Peterson’s Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, How to Know the Rocks and Minerals, and a book of Star Maps. The case of butterflies and the songbirds once hung in the classroom of her husband, the science teacher. He bought the songbirds, but he and Mrs. Kidd collected the butterflies themselves. Mrs. Kidd was a good student of botany and zoology. If she had not had what was perceived at the time as delicate health, she would have gone on and studied botany at a university, though few girls did such a thing then. Her children, who all live at a distance, send her beautiful books on subjects they are sure will interest her, but for the most part these books are large and heavy and she can’t find a way to look at them comfortably, so she soon relegates them to her bottom shelf. She would not admit it to her children, but her interest has waned, it has waned considerably. They say in their letters that they remember how she taught them about mushrooms; do you remember when we saw the destroying angel in Petrie’s Bush when we were living in Logan? Their letters are full of remembering. They want her fixed where she was forty or fifty years ago, these children who are ageing themselves. They have a notion of her that is as fond and necessary as any notion a parent ever had of a child. They celebrate what would in a child be called precocity: her brightness, her fund of knowledge, her atheism (a secret all those years her husband was in charge of the minds of the young), all the ways in which she differs from the average, or expected, old lady. She feels it a duty to hide from them the many indications that she is not so different as they think.
Mrs. Cross also gets presents from her children, but not books. Their thoughts run to ornaments, pictures, cushions. Mrs. Cross has a bouquet of artificial roses in which are set tubes of light, always shooting and bubbling up like a fountain. She has a Southern Belle whose satin skins are supposed to form an enormous pincushion. She has a picture of the Lord’s supper, in which a light comes on to form a halo around Jesus’s head. (Mrs. Kidd, after her first visit, wrote a letter to one of her children in which she described this picture and said she had tried to figure out what the Lord and his Disciples were eating and it appeared to be hamburgers. This is the sort of thing her children love to hear from her.) There is also, near the door, a life-size plaster statue of a collie dog which resembles a dog the Cross family had when the children were small: old Bonnie.
Mrs. Cross finds out from her children what these things cost and tells people. She says she is shocked.
Shortly after Mrs. Kidd’s arrival, Mrs. Cross took her along on a visit to the Second Floor. Mrs. Cross has been going up there every couple of weeks to visit a cousin of hers, old Lily Barbour.
“Lily is not running on all cylinders,” she warned Mrs. Kidd, as they wheeled themselves into the elevator. “Another thing, it doesn’t smell like Sweet Violets, in spite of them always spraying. They do the best they can.”
The first thing Mrs. Kidd saw as they got off the elevator was a little wrinkled-up woman with wild white hair, and a dress rucked up high on her bare legs (Mrs. Kidd snatched her eyes away from that) and a tongue she couldn’t seem to stuff back inside her mouth. The smell was of heated urine—you would think they had had it on the stove—as well as of floral sprays. But here was a smooth-faced sensible-looking person with a topknot, wearing an apron over a clean pink dress.
“Well, did you get the papers?” this woman said in a familiar way to Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd.
“Oh, they don’t come in till about five o’clock,” said Mrs. Kidd politely, thinking she meant the newspaper.
“Never mind her,” said Mrs. Cross.
“I have to sign them today,” the woman said. “Otherwise it’ll be a catastrophe. They can put me out. You see I never knew it was illegal.” She spoke so well, so plausibly and confidentially, that Mrs. Kidd was convinced she had to make sense, but Mrs. Cross was wheeling vigorously away. Mrs. Kidd went after her.
“Don’t get tied up in that rigamarole,” said Mrs. Cross when Mrs. Kidd caught up to her. A woman with a terrible goitre, such as Mrs. Kidd had not seen for years, was smiling winningly at them. Up here nobody had teeth.
“I thought there was no such thing as a goitre any more,” Mrs. Kidd said. “With the iodine.”
They were going in the direction of a hollering voice.
“George!” the voice said. “George! Jessie! I’m here! Come and pull me up! George!”
Another voice was weaving cheerfully in and out of these yells. “Bad-bad-bad,” it said. “Bad. Bad-bad. Bad-bad-bad. Bad-bad.”
The owners of both these voices were sitting around a long table by a row of windows halfway down the hall. Nine or ten women were sitting there. Some were mumbling or singing softly to themselves. One was tearing apart a little embroidered cushion somebody had made. Another was eating a chocolate-covered ice-cream bar. Bits of chocolate had caught on her whiskers, dribbles of ice cream ran down her chin. None of them looked out the windows, or at each other. None of them paid any attention to George-and-Jessie, or to Bad-bad-bad, who were carrying on without a break.
Mrs. Kidd halted.
“Where is this Lily?”
“She’s down at the end. They don’t get her out of bed.”
“Well, you go on and see her,” said Mrs. Kidd. “I’m going back.” “There’s nothing to get upset about,” said Mrs. Cross. “They’re all off in their own little world. They’re happy as clams.”
“They may be, but I’m not,” said Mrs. Kidd. “I’ll see you in the Recreation Room.” She wheeled herself around and down the hall to the elevator where the pink lady was still inquiring urgently for her papers. She never came back.
MRS. CROSS and Mrs. Kidd used to play cards in the Recreation Room every afternoon. They put on earrings, stockings, afternoon dresses. They took turns treating for tea. On the whole, these afternoons were pleasant. They were well matched at cards.
Sometimes they played Scrabble, but Mrs. Cross did not take Scrabble seriously, as she did cards. She became frivolous and quarrelsome, defending words that were her own invention. So they went back to cards; they played rummy, most of the time. It was like school here. People paired off, they had best friends. The same people always sat together in the dining-room. Some people had nobody.
THE FIRST TIME Mrs. Cross took notice of Jack, he was in the Recreation Room, when she and Mrs. Kidd were playing cards. He had just come in a week or so before. Mrs. Kidd knew about him.
“Do you see that red-haired fellow by the window?” said Mrs. Kidd. “He’s in from a stroke. He’s only fifty-nine years old. I heard it in the dining-room before you got down.”
“Poor chap. That young.”
“He’s lucky to be alive at all. His parents are still alive, both of them, they’re still on a farm. He was back visiting them and he took the stroke and was lying face down in the barnyard when they found him. He wasn’t living around here, he’s from out west.”
“Poor chap,” said Mrs. Cross. “What did he work at?”
“He worked on a newspaper.”
“Was he married?”
“That I didn’t hear. He’s supposed to have been an alcoholic, then
he joined A.A. and got over it. You can’t trust all you hear in this place.”
(That was true. There was usually a swirl of stories around any newcomer; stories about the money people had, or the places they had been, or the number of operations they have had and the plastic repairs or contrivances they carry around in or on their bodies. A few days later Mrs. Cross was saying that Jack had been the editor of a newspaper. First she heard it was in Sudbury, then she heard Winnipeg. She was saying he had had a nervous breakdown due to overwork; that was the truth, he had never been an alcoholic. She was saying he came from a good family. His name was Jack MacNeil.)
At present Mrs. Cross noticed how clean and tended he looked in his gray pants and light shirt. It was unnatural, at least for him; he looked like something that had gone soft from being too long in the water. He was a big man, but he could not hold himself straight, even in the wheelchair. The whole left side of his body was loose, emptied, powerless. His hair and moustache were not even gray yet, but fawn-colored. He was white as if just out of bandages.
A distraction occurred. The Gospel preacher who came every week to conduct a prayer service, with hymns (the more established preachers came, in turn, on Sundays), was walking through the Recreation Room with his wife close behind, the pair of them showering smiles and greetings wherever they could catch an eye. Mrs. Kidd looked up when they had passed and said softly but distinctly, “Joy to the World.”
At this, Jack, who was wheeling himself across the room in a clumsy way—he tended to go in circles—smiled. The smile was intelligent, ironic, and did not go with his helpless look. Mrs. Cross waved him over and wheeled part of the way to meet him. She introduced herself, and introduced Mrs. Kidd. He opened his mouth and said, “Anh-anh-anh.”