by Alice Munro
Two men came with brooms to sweep up the debris the audience had left behind. They told me that the next show would start in forty minutes. In the meantime, I had to get out.
“I WENT TO THE SHOW at the planetarium,” I said to my father. “It was very exciting—about the solar system.” I thought what a silly word I had used: “exciting.” “It’s like a slightly phony temple,” I added.
He was already talking. “I remember when they found Pluto. Right where they thought it had to be. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,” he recited. “Jupiter, Saturn, Nept—no, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Is that right?”
“Yes,” I said. I was just as glad he hadn’t heard what I said about the phony temple. I had meant that to be truthful, but it sounded slick and superior. “Tell me the moons of Jupiter.”
“Well, I don’t know the new ones. There’s a bunch of new ones, isn’t there?”
“Two. But they’re not new.”
“New to us,” said my father. “You’ve turned pretty cheeky now I’m going under the knife.”
“‘Under the knife.’ What an expression.”
He was not in bed tonight, his last night. He had been detached from his apparatus, and was sitting in a chair by the window. He was bare-legged, wearing a hospital dressing gown, but he did not look self-conscious or out of place. He looked thoughtful but good-humored, an affable host.
“You haven’t even named the old ones,” I said.
“Give me time. Galileo named them. Io.”
“That’s a start.”
“The moons of Jupiter were the first heavenly bodies discovered with the telescope.” He said this gravely, as if he could see the sentence in an old book. “It wasn’t Galileo named them, either; it was some German. Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. There you are.”
‘‘‘Yes.
“Io and Europa, they were girlfriends of Jupiter’s, weren’t they?
Ganymede was a boy. A shepherd? I don’t know who Callisto was.”
“I think she was a girlfriend, too,” I said. “Jupiter’s wife—Jove’s wife—changed her into a bear and stuck her up in the sky. Great Bear and Little Bear. Little Bear was her baby.”
The loudspeaker said that it was time for visitors to go. “I’ll see you when you come out of the anesthetic,” I said.
“Yes.”
When I was at the door, he called to me, “Ganymede wasn’t any shepherd. He was Jove’s cupbearer.”
When i left the planetarium that afternoon, I had walked through the museum to the Chinese garden. I saw the stone camels again, the warriors, the tomb. I sat on a bench looking toward Bloor Street. Through the evergreen bushes and the high grilled iron fence I watched people going by in the late-afternoon sunlight. The planetarium show had done what I wanted it to after all—calmed me down, drained me. I saw a girl who reminded me of Nichola. She wore a trenchcoat and carried a bag of groceries. She was shorter than Nichola—not really much like her at all—but I thought that I might see Nichola. She would be walking along some street maybe not far from here—burdened, preoccupied, alone. She was one of the grownup people in the world now, one of the shoppers going home.
If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing.
I meant to get up and go over to the tomb, to look at the relief carvings, the stone pictures, that go all the way around it. I always mean to look at them and I never do. Not this time, either. It was getting cold out, so I went inside to have coffee and something to eat before I went back to the hospital.