by Alice Munro
She needn’t have worried. Charlotte did not know how to take offense.
“Well good for you,” said Mrs. Kidd, frowning, and right away she made demon across from the d. “Triple word!” she said, and was writing down the score. “Pick up your letters, Charlotte.”
Charlotte showed her new letters to Jack, one by one, and he made a noise of appreciation. Mrs. Cross kept an eye on him, hoping nothing would happen to turn him bad-tempered and spoil this show of friendliness. Nothing did. But he was not having a good effect on Charlotte’s concentration.
“You want to help?” Charlotte said, and moved the little stand with the letters on it so that it was in front of both of them. He bent over so that he almost had his head on her shoulder.
“Anh-anh-anh,” said Jack, but he sounded cheerful. “Anh-anh-anh?” said Charlotte, teasing him. “What kind of a word is that, anh-anh-anh?”
Mrs. Cross waited for the skies to fall, but the only thing Jack did was giggle, and Charlotte giggled, so that there was a sort of giggling-match set up between the two of them.
“Aren’t you the great friends,” said Mrs. Kidd.
Mrs. Cross thought it would be just as well not to exasperate Mrs. Kidd if they wanted to make a habit of visiting.
“Now Jack, don’t distract Charlotte,” she said affably. “You let her play.”
Even as she finished saying this, she saw Jack’s hand descend clumsily on the Scrabble board. The letters went flying. He turned and showed her his ugly look, worse than she had ever seen it. She was amazed and even frightened, but she did not mean to let him see.
“Now what have you done?” she said. “Fine behavior!”
He made a sound of disgust and pushed the Scrabble board and all the letters to the floor, all the time looking at Mrs. Cross so that there could be no doubt that this disgust and fury had been aroused by her. She knew that it was important at this moment to speak coldly and firmly. That was what you must do with a child or an animal, you must show them that your control has not budged and that you are not hurt or alarmed by such displays. But she was not able to say a word, such a feeling of grief, and shock, and helplessness rose in her heart. Her eyes filled with tears, and at the sight of her tears his expression grew even more hateful and menacing as if the feelings he had against her were boiling higher every moment.
Charlotte was smiling, either because she could not switch out of her giggling mood of a moment before or because she did not know how to do anything but smile, no matter what happened. She was pink-faced, apologetic, excited.
Jack managed to turn his chair around, with a violent, awkward motion. Charlotte stood up. Mrs. Cross made herself speak.
“Yes, you better push him home now. He better go home and cool off and repent of his bad manners. He better.”
Jack made a taunting sound, which seemed to point out that Mrs. Cross was just telling Charlotte to do what Charlotte was going to do anyway; Mrs. Cross was just pretending to have control of things. Charlotte had hold of the wheelchair and was pushing it towards the door, her smiling lips pressed together in concentration as she avoided the bookshelves and the butterfly case leaning against the wall. Perhaps it was hard for her to steer, perhaps the ordinary reflexes and balances of her body were not there for her to rely on. But she looked pleased; she raised her hand to them and released her smile, and set off down the corridor. She was just like one of those old-fashioned dolls, not the kind Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd used to have but the kind their mothers had, with the long, limp bodies and pink-and-white faces and crimped china hair and ladylike smiles. Jack kept his face turned away; the bit of it Mrs. Cross could see was flushed red.
“It would be easy for any man to get the better of Charlotte,” said Mrs. Kidd when they were gone.
“I don’t think he’s so much of a danger,” said Mrs. Cross. She spoke in a dry tone but her voice was shaking.
Mrs. Kidd looked at the Scrabble board and the letters scattered all over the floor.
“We can’t do much about picking them up,” she said. “If either one of us bends over we black out.” That was true.
“Useless old crocks, aren’t we?” said Mrs. Cross. Her voice was under better control now.
“We won’t try. When the girl comes in with the juice I’ll ask her to do it. We don’t need to say how it happened. That’s what we’ll do. We won’t bend over and end up smashing our noses.”
Mrs. Cross felt her heart give a big flop. Her heart was like an old crippled crow, flopping around in her chest. She crossed her hands there, to hold it.
“Well, I never told you, I don’t think I did,” said Mrs. Kidd, with her eyes on Mrs. Cross’s face. “I never told you what happened that time I got out of bed too fast in my apartment, and I fell over on my face. I blacked out. Fortunately the woman was home, in the apartment underneath me, and she heard the crash and got the whatyamacallit, the man with the keys, the superintendent. They came and found me out cold and took me in the ambulance. I don’t remember a thing about it. I can’t remember anything that happened throughout the next three weeks. I wasn’t unconscious. I wish I had been. I was conscious and saying a lot of foolish things.
Do you know the first thing I remember? The psychiatrist coming to see me! They had got a psychiatrist in to determine whether I was loony. But nobody told me he was a psychiatrist. That’s part of it, they don’t tell you. He had a thing like an army jacket on. He was quite young. So I thought he was just some fellow who had walked in off the street.
“‘What is the name of the Prime Minister?’ he said to me.
“Well! I thought he was loony. So I said, ‘Who cares?’ And I turned my back on him as if I was going to sleep, and from that time on I remember everything.”
“Who cares!”
As a matter of fact, Mrs. Cross had heard Mrs. Kidd tell this story before, but it was a long time ago and she laughed now not just to be obliging; she laughed with relief. Mrs. Kidd’s firm voice had spread a numbing ointment over her misery.
Out of their combined laughter, Mrs. Kidd shot a quick serious question.
“Are you all right?”
Mrs. Cross lifted her hands from her chest, waited. “I think so. Yes. But I think I’ll go and lie down.”
In this exchange it was understood that Mrs. Kidd also said, “Your heart is weak, you shouldn’t put it at the mercy of these emotions,” and Mrs. Cross replied, “I will do as I do, though there may be something in what you say.”
“You haven’t got your chair,” Mrs. Kidd said. Mrs. Cross was sitting on an ordinary chair. She had come here walking slowly behind Jack’s chair, to help him steer.
“I can walk,” she said. “I can walk if I take my time.”
“No. You ride. You get in my chair and I’ll push you.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Yes I can. If I don’t use my energy I’ll get mad about my Scrabble game.”
Mrs. Cross heaved herself up and into Mrs. Kidd’s wheelchair. As she did so she felt such weakness in her legs that she knew Mrs. Kidd was right. She couldn’t have walked ten feet.
“Now then,” said Mrs. Kidd, and she negotiated their way out of the room into the corridor.
“Don’t strain yourself. Don’t try to go too fast.”
They proceeded down the corridor, turned left, made their way successfully up a very gentle ramp. Mrs. Cross could hear Mrs. Kidd’s breathing.
“Maybe I can manage the rest by myself.”
“No you can’t.”
They made another left turn at the top of the ramp. Now Mrs.
Cross’s room was in sight. It was three doors ahead of them.
“What I am going to do now,” said Mrs. Kidd, with emphasis and pauses to hide her breathlessness, “is give you a push. I can give you a push that will take you exactly to your own door.”
“Can you?” said Mrs. Cross doubtfully.
“Certainly. Then you can turn yourself in and get on the bed and take your time
to get yourself settled, then ring for the girl and get her to deliver the chair back to me.”
“You won’t bash me into anything?”
“You watch.”
With that Mrs. Kidd gave the wheelchair a calculated, delicately balanced push. It rolled forward smoothly and came to a stop just where she had said it would, in exactly the right place in front of Mrs. Cross’s door. Mrs. Cross had hastily raised her feet and hands for this last bit of the ride. Now she dropped them. She gave a single, satisfied, conceding nod and turned and glided safely into her own room.
Mrs. Kidd, as soon as Mrs. Cross was out of sight, sank down and sat with her back against the wall, her legs stuck straight out in front of her on the cool linoleum. She prayed no nosy person would come along until she could recover her strength and get started on the trip back.
Hard-Luck Stories
Julie is wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirtwaist dress, and a hat of lacy beige straw, with a pink rose under the brim. I noticed the hat first, when she came striding along the street. For a moment I didn’t realize it was Julie. Over the last couple of years I have experienced moments of disbelief when I meet my friends in public. They look older than I think they should. Julie didn’t look older, but she did catch my attention in a way she had never done before. It was the hat. I thought there was something gallant and absurd about it, on that tall, tomboyish woman. Then I saw that it was Julie and hurried to greet her, and we got a table under an umbrella at this sidewalk restaurant where we are having lunch.
We have not seen each other for two months, not since the conference in May. I am down in Toronto for the day. Julie lives here.
She soon tells me what is going on. Sitting down, she looks pretty, with the angles of her face softened and shaded by the hat, and her dark eyes shining.
“It makes me think of a story,” Julie says. “Isn’t it like one of those ironical-twist-at-the-end sort of stories that used to be so popular? I really did think that I was asked along to protect you. No, not exactly protect, that’s too vulgar, but I thought you felt something and you were being prudent, and that was why me. Wouldn’t it make a good story? Why did those stories go out of style?”
“They got to seem too predictable,” I said. “Or people thought, that isn’t the way things happen. Or they thought, who cares the way things happen?”
“Not to me! Not to me was anything predictable!” says Julie. One or two people look our way. The tables are too close together here.
She makes a face, and pulls the hat down on both cheeks, scrunching the rose against her temple.
“I must be crowing,” she says. “I have a tendency now to get light-headed. It just seems to me so remarkable. Is this hat silly? No, seriously, do you remember when we were driving down and you told about the visit you went on, the visit that man took you on, to see the rich people? The rich woman? The awful one? Do you remember you said then about there being the two kinds of love, and the one kind nobody wants to think they’ve missed out on? Well, I was thinking then, have I missed out on every kind? I haven’t even got to tell the different kinds apart.”
I am about to say, “Leslie,” which is the name of Julie’s husband. “Don’t say ‘Leslie,’” Julie says. “You know that doesn’t count. I can’t help it. It doesn’t count. So I was thinking, I was ready to make a joke about it but I was thinking, how I’d like to get some crumbs, even!”
“Douglas is better than crumbs,” I say. “Yes he is.”
WHEN THE CONFERENCE last May had ended and the buses were standing at the door of the summer hotel, waiting to take people back to Toronto or to the airport, I went into Julie’s room and found her doing up her backpack.
“I’ve got us a ride to Toronto,” I said. “If you’d rather that than the bus. Remember the man I introduced you to last night? Douglas Reider?”
“All right,” said Julie. “I’m mildly sick of all these people. Do we have to talk?”
“Not much. He will.”
I helped her hoist her backpack. She probably doesn’t own an overnight case. She was wearing her hiking boots and a denim jacket. She wasn’t faking. She could have walked to Toronto. Every summer she and her husband and some of their children walk the Bruce Trail. Other things fit the picture. She makes her own yogurt, and whole-grain bread, and granola. You’d think I would have worried about introducing her to Douglas, who is driven by any display of virtue into the most extraordinary provocations. I’ve heard him tell people that yogurt causes cancer, and smoking is good for your heart, and whales are an abomination. He does this lightheartedly but with absolute assurance, and adds a shocking, contemptuous embroidery of false statistics and invented detail. The people he takes on are furious or confused or wounded—sometimes all of those things at once. I don’t remember thinking about how Julie would have handled him, but I suppose, if I did think about it, I must have decided that she would be all right. Julie isn’t simple. She knows her own stratagems, her efforts, her doubts. You couldn’t get at her through her causes.
Julie and I have been friends for years. She is a children’s librarian, in Toronto. She helped me get the job I have now, or at least, she told me about it. I drive a bookmobile in the Ottawa Valley. I have been divorced for a long time, and so it is natural that Julie should talk to me about a problem she says she cannot discuss with many people. It is a question, more than a problem. The question is: should Julie herself try living alone? She says her husband Leslie is cold-hearted, superficial, stubborn, emotionally stingy, loyal, honest, high-minded, and vulnerable. She says she never really wants him. She says she thinks she might miss him more than she could stand, or perhaps just being alone would be more than she could stand. She says she has no illusions about being able to attract another man. But sometimes she feels her emotions, her life, her something-or-other—all that is being wasted.
I listen, and think this sounds like the complaints many women make, and in fact it sounds a lot like the complaints I used to make, when I was married. How much is this meant, how deep does it go? How much is it an exercise that balances the marriage and keeps it afloat? I’ve asked her, has she ever been in love, in love with somebody else? She says she once thought she was, with a boy she met on the beach, but it was all nonsense, it all evaporated. And once in recent years a man thought he was in love with her, but that was nonsense too, nothing came of it. I tell her that being alone has its grim side, certainly; I tell her to think twice. I think that I am in some ways a braver person than Julie, because I have taken the risk. I have taken more than one risk.
JULIE AND DOUGLAS REIDER and I had lunch at a restaurant in an old white wooden building overlooking a small lake. The lake is one of a chain of lakes, and there was a dock where the lake boats used to come in before the road was built; boats brought the holidayers then, and the supplies. The trees came down to the shore, on both sides of the building. Most of them were birch and poplar. The leaves were not quite out here, even though it was May. You could see all the branches with just an impression of green, as if that was the color of the air. Under the trees there were hundreds of white trilliums. The day was cloudy, though the sun had been trying to break through. The water looked bright and cold.
We sat on old, unmatched, brightly painted kitchen chairs, on a long glassed-in veranda. We were the only people there. It was a bit late for lunch. We ate roast chicken.
“It’s Sunday dinner, really,” I said. “It’s Sunday dinner after church.”
“It’s a lovely place,” said Julie. She asked Douglas how he knew it existed.
Douglas said he got to know where everything was, he spent so much time travelling around the province. He is in charge of collecting, buying up for the Provincial Archives, all sorts of old diaries, letters, records, that would otherwise perish, or be sold to collectors outside the province or the country. He pursues various clues and hunches, and when he finds a treasure it is not always his immediately. He often has to persuade reticent or suspicious or g
reedy owners, and to outwit private dealers.
“He’s a sort of pirate, really,” I said to Julie.
He was talking about the private dealers, telling stories about his rivals. Sometimes they would get hold of valuable material, and then impudently try to sell it back to him. Or they would try to sell it out of the country to the highest bidders, a disaster he has sworn to prevent.
Douglas is tall, and most people would think of him as lean, disregarding the little bulge over his belt which can be seen as a recent, unsuitable, perhaps temporary, development. His hair is gray, and cut short, perhaps to reassure elderly and conservative diary-owners.
To me he is a boyish-looking man. I don’t mean to suggest by that a man who is open-faced and ruddy and shy. I am thinking of the hard youthfulness, the jaunty grim looks you often see in photographs of servicemen in the Second World War. Douglas was one of those, and is preserved, not ripened. Oh, the modesty and satisfaction of those faces, clamped down on their secrets! With such men the descent into love is swift and private and amazing—so is their recovery. I watched him as he told Julie about the people who deal in old books and papers, how they are not fusty and shadowy, as in popular imagination, not mysterious old magpies, but bold rogues with the instincts of gamblers and confidence men. In this, as in any other enterprise where there is the promise of money, intrigues and lies and hoodwinking and bullying abound.
“People have that idea about anything to do with books,” Julie said. “They have it about librarians. Think of the times you hear people say that somebody is not a typical librarian. Haven’t you wanted to say it about yourself?”
Julie was excited, drinking her wine. I thought it was because she had flourished, at the conference. She has a talent for conferences, and no objection to making herself useful. She can speak up in general meetings without her mouth going dry and her knees shaking. She knows what a point of order is. She says she has to admit to rather liking meetings, and committees, and newsletters. She has worked for the P.T.A. and the N.D.P. and the Unitarian Church, and for Tenants’ Associations, and Great Books Clubs; she has given a lot of her life to organizations. Maybe it’s an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can’t help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn’t such a muddle.