Too Much Happiness

by Alice Munro

  The phone rang just as I was about to leave for my first class on Monday morning.

  “It’s me,” said Nina, in a rushed warning, but with something like triumph in her voice. “Listen. Please. Could you please do me a favor?”

  “Where are you? They’re looking for you.”

  “Who is?”

  “Mr. Purvis. Mrs. Winner.”

  “Well, you’re not to tell them. Don’t tell them anything. I’m here.”

  “Where?”

  “Ernest’s.”

  “Ernest’s?” I said. “Ernie’s?”

  “Sshh. Did anybody there hear you?”

  “No.”

  “Listen, could you please, please get on a bus and bring me the rest of my stuff? I need my shampoo. I need my kimono. I’m going around in Ernest’s bathrobe. You should see me, I look like an old woolly brown dog. Is the car still outside?”

  I went and looked.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then, you should get on the bus and ride up to the college just like you normally do. And then catch the bus downtown. You know where to get off. Campbell and Howe. Then walk over here. Carlisle Street. Three sixty-three. You know it, don’t you?”

  “Is Ernie there?”

  “No, dum-dum. He’s at work. He’s got to support us, doesn’t he?”

  Us? Was Ernie to support Nina and me?

  No. Ernie and Nina. Ernie and Nina.

  Nina said, “Oh, please. You’re the only person I’ve got.”

  I did as directed. I caught the college bus, then the downtown bus. I got off at Campbell and Howe and walked west to Carlisle Street. The snowstorm was over; the sky was clear; it was a bright, windless, deep-frozen day. The light hurt my eyes and the fresh snow squeaked under my feet.

  Now half a block north, on Carlisle Street, to the house where Ernie had lived with his mother and father and then with his mother and then alone. And now—how was it possible?—with Nina.

  The house looked just as it had when I had come here once or twice with my mother. A brick bungalow with a tiny front yard, an arched living room window with an upper pane of colored glass. Cramped and genteel.

  Nina was wrapped, just as she had described herself, in a man’s brown woolly tasselled dressing gown, with its manly but innocent Ernie-smell of shaving lather and Lifebuoy soap.

  She grabbed my hands, which were stiff with cold inside my gloves. Each of them had been holding on to the handle of a shopping bag.

  “Frozen,” she said. “Come on, we’ll get them into some warm water.”

  “They are not frozen,” I said. “Just frozen.”

  But she went ahead and helped me off with my things, and took me into the kitchen and ran a bowlful of water, and then as the blood returned painfully to my fingers she told me how Ernest (Ernie) had come to the rooming house on Saturday night. He was bringing a magazine that had a lot of pictures of old ruins and castles and things that he thought might interest me. She got herself out of bed and came downstairs, because of course he could not go upstairs, and when he saw how sick she was he said she had to come home with him so he could look after her. Which he had done so well that her sore throat was practically gone and her fever completely gone. And then they had decided that she would stay here. She would just stay with him and never go back to where she was before.

  She seemed unwilling even to mention Mr. Purvis’s name.

  “But it has to be a huge big secret,” she said. “You are the only one to know. Because you’re our friend and you are the reason we met.”

  She was making coffee. “Look up there,” she said, waving at the open cupboard. “Look at the way he keeps things. Mugs here. Cups and saucers here. Every cup has got its own hook. Isn’t it tidy? The house is just like that all over. I love it.

  “You are the reason we met,” she repeated. “If we have a baby and it’s a girl, we could name it after you.”

  I held my hands round the mug, still feeling a throb in my fingers. There were African violets on the windowsill over the sink. His mother’s order in the cupboards, his mother’s house-plants. The big fern was probably still in front of the living room window, and the doilies on the armchairs. What she had said, in regard to herself and Ernie, seemed brazen and—especially when I thought of the Ernie part of it—abundantly distasteful.

  “You’re going to get married?”

  “Well.”

  “You said if you have a baby.”

  “Well, you never know, we might have started that without being married,” said Nina, ducking her head mischievously.

  “With Ernie?” I said. “With Ernie?”

  “Well, why not? Ernie’s nice,” she said. “And anyway I’m calling him Ernest.” She hugged the bathrobe around herself.

  “What about Mr. Purvis?”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, if it’s something happening already, couldn’t it be his?”

  Everything changed about Nina. Her face turned mean and sour. “Him,” she said with contempt. “What do you want to talk about him for? He never had it in him.”

  “Oh?” I said, and was going to ask what about Gemma, but she interrupted.

  “What do you want to talk about the past for? Don’t make me sick. That’s all dead and gone. It doesn’t matter to me and Ernest. We’re together now. We’re in love now.”

  In love. With Ernie. Ernest. Now.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Sorry I yelled at you. Did I yell? I’m sorry. You’re our friend and you brought me my things and I appreciate it. You’re Ernest’s cousin and you’re our family.”

  She slipped behind me and her fingers darted into my armpits and she began to tickle me, at first lazily and then furiously, saying, “Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  I tried to get free, but I couldn’t. I went into spasms of suffering laughter and wriggled and cried out and begged her to stop. Which she did, when she had me quite helpless, and both of us were out of breath.

  “You’re the ticklishest person I ever met.”

  I had to wait a long time for the bus, stamping my feet on the pavement. When I got to the college I had missed my second as well as my first class, and I was late for my work in the cafeteria. I changed into my green cotton uniform in the broom closet and pushed my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me) under a cotton snood.

  I was supposed to get the sandwiches and salads out on the shelves before the doors opened for lunch, but now I had to do it with an impatient lineup watching me, and that made me feel clumsy. I was so much more noticeable now than when I pushed the cart among the tables to collect the dirty dishes. People were concentrating then on their food and conversation. Now they were just looking at me.

  I thought of what Beverly and Kay had said about spoiling my chances, marking myself off in the wrong way. It seemed now it could be right.

  After I finished cleaning up the cafeteria tables, I changed back into my ordinary clothes and went to the college library to work on my essay. It was my afternoon free of classes.

  An underground tunnel led from the Arts Building to the library, and around the entrance to this tunnel were posted advertisements for movies and restaurants and used bicycles and typewriters, as well as notices for plays and concerts. The Music Department announced that a free recital of songs composed to fit the poems of English Country Poets would be presented on a date that had now passed. I had seen this notice before, and did not have to look at it to be reminded of the names Herrick, Housman, Tennyson. And a few steps into the tunnel the lines began to assault me.

  On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble

  I would never think of those lines again without feeling the prickles of the upholstery on my bare haunches. The sticky prickly shame. A far greater shame it seemed now, than at the time. He had done something to me, after all.

  From far, from eve and morning

  And yon twelve-winded sky,

&nb
sp; The stuff of life to knit me

  Blew hither—here am I.

  No.

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  No, never.

  White in the moon the long road lies

  That leads me from my love.

  No. No. No.

  I would always be reminded of what I had agreed to do. Not been forced, not ordered, not even persuaded. Agreed to do.

  Nina would know. She had been too preoccupied with Ernie to say anything that morning, but there would come a time when she would laugh about it. Not cruelly, but just the way she laughed at so many things. And she might even tease me about it. Her teasing would have in it something like her tickling, something insistent, obscene.

  Nina and Ernie. In my life from now on.

  The college library was a high beautiful space, designed and built and paid for by people who believed that those who sat at the long tables before open books—even those who were hung-over, sleepy, resentful, and uncomprehending—should have space above them, panels of dark gleaming wood around them, high windows bordered with Latin admonitions, through which to look at the sky. For a few years before they went into schoolteaching or business or began to rear children, they should have that. And now it was my turn and I should have it too.

  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  I was writing a good essay. I would probably get an A. I would go on writing essays and getting A’s because that was what I could do. The people who awarded scholarships, who built universities and libraries, would continue to dribble out money so that I could do it.

  But that was not what mattered. That was not going to keep you from damage.

  Nina did not stay with Ernie even for one week. One day very soon he would come home and find her gone. Gone her coat and boots, her lovely clothes and the kimono that I had brought over. Gone her taffy hair and her tickling habits and the extra warmth of her skin and the little un-unhs as she moved. All gone with no explanation, not a word on paper. Not a word.

  Ernie was not one, however, to shut himself up and mourn. He said so, when he phoned to tell me the news and check on my availability for Sunday dinner. We climbed the stairs to the Old Chelsea and he commented on the fact that this was our last dinner before the Christmas holidays. He helped me off with my coat and I smelled Nina’s smell. Could it still be on his skin?

  No. The source was revealed when he passed something to me. Something like a large handkerchief.

  “Just put it in your coat pocket,” he said.

  Not a handkerchief. The texture was sturdier, with a slight ribbing. An undershirt.

  “I don’t want it around,” he said, and by his voice you might have thought that it was just underwear itself he did not want around, never mind that it was Nina’s and smelled of Nina.

  He ordered the roast beef, and cut and chewed it with his normal efficiency and polite appetite. I gave him the news from home, which as usual at this time of year consisted of the size of snowdrifts, the number of blocked roads, the winter havoc which gave us distinction.

  After some time Ernie said, “I went round to his house. There was nobody in it.”

  Whose house?

  Her uncle’s, he said. He knew which house because he and Nina had driven past it, after dark. There was nobody there now, he said, they had packed up and gone. Her choice, after all.

  “It’s a woman’s privilege,” he said. “Like they say, it’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind.”

  His eyes, now that I looked into them, had a dry famished look, and the skin around them was dark and wrinkled. He pursed his mouth, controlling a tremor, then talked on, with an air of trying to see all sides, trying to understand.

  “She couldn’t leave her old uncle,” he said. “She didn’t have the heart to run out on him. I said we could take him in with us, because I was used to old people, but she said she would sooner make a break. Then I guess she didn’t have the heart to after all.”

  “Better not to expect too much. Some things I guess you’re just not meant to have.”

  When I went past the coats on my way to the washroom I got the shirt out of my pocket. I stuffed it in with the used towels.

  That day in the library I had been unable to go on with Sir Gawain. I had torn a page from my notebook and picked up my pen and walked out. On the landing outside the library doors there was a pay phone, and beside that hung a phone book. I looked through the phone book and on the piece of paper I had brought I wrote two numbers. They were not phone numbers but addresses.

  1648 Henfryn Street.

  The other number, which I needed only to check, having seen it both recently and on Christmas card envelopes, was 363 Carlisle.

  I walked back through the tunnel to the Arts Building and entered the little shop across from the Common Room. I had enough change in my pocket to buy an envelope and a stamp. I tore off the paper with the Carlisle Street address on it and put that scrap into the envelope. I sealed the envelope and on the front of it I wrote the other, longer number with the name of Mr. Purvis and the address on Henfryn Street. All in block capitals. Then I licked and fixed the stamp. I think that in those days it would have been a four-cent stamp.

  Just outside the shop was a mail chute. I slipped the envelope into it, there in the wide lower corridor of the Arts Building with people passing me on the way to classes, on the way to have a smoke and maybe a game of bridge in the Common Room. On their way to deeds they didn’t know they had in them.

  Deep-Holes

  Sally packed devilled eggs—something she hated to take on a picnic, because they were so messy. Ham sandwiches, crab salad, lemon tarts—also a packing problem. Kool-Aid for the children, a half-size Mumm’s for herself and Alex. She would have just a sip, because she was still nursing. She had bought plastic champagne glasses for this occasion, but when Alex spotted her handling them he got the real ones—a wedding present—out of the china cabinet. She protested, but he insisted, and took charge of them himself, the wrapping and packing.

  “Dad is really a sort of bourgeois gentilhomme,” Kent was to say to Sally some years later when he was in his teens and acing everything at school. So sure of becoming some sort of scientist that he could get away with spouting French around the house.

  “Don’t make fun of your father,” said Sally mechanically.

  “I’m not. It’s just that most geologists seem so grubby.”

  The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first solo article in Zeitschrift für Geomorphology. They were going to Osler Bluff because it figured largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had never been there.

  They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road—having turned off a decent unpaved country road—and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.

  CAUTION. DEEP-HOLES.

  Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?

  The entrance to the woods looked quite ordinary and unthreatening. Sally understood, of course, that these woods were on top of a high bluff, and she expected a daunting lookout somewhere. She did not expect to find what had to be skirted almost immediately in front of them.

  Deep chambers, really, some as big as a coffin, some much bigger than that, like rooms cut out of the rocks. Corridors zigzagging between them and ferns and mosses growing out of their sides. Not enough greenery, however, to make any sort of cushion over the rubble that seemed so far below. The path went meandering amongst them, over hard earth or shelves of not-quite-level rock.

  “Ooee,” came the call of the boys, Kent and Peter, nine and six years old, running ahead.

  “No tearing around in here,” called Alex. “No stupid showing off, you hear me? You understand? Answer me.”

  They called okay, and he proceeded, carrying the picnic basket and apparently believing that no further fatherly warning was necessary. Sally
stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn’t slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

  The outlook did not appear until they had gone along these dirt and rock paths for what seemed to her like half a mile, and was probably a quarter mile. Then there was a brightening, an intrusion of sky, and a halt of her husband ahead. He gave a cry of arrival and display, and the boys hooted with true astonishment. Sally, emerging from the woods, found them lined up on an outcrop above the treetops—above several levels of treetops, as it turned out—with the summer fields spread far below in a shimmer of green and yellow.

  As soon as she was put down on her blanket Savanna began to cry.

  “Hungry,” said Sally.

  Alex said, “I thought she got her lunch in the car.”

  “She did. But she’s hungry again.”

  She got Savanna latched onto one side and with her free hand unfastened the picnic basket. This was not of course how Alex had planned things. But he gave a good-humored sigh and retrieved the champagne glasses from their wrappings in his pockets, placing them on their sides on a patch of grass.

  “Glug-glug I’m thirsty too,” said Kent, and Peter immediately imitated him.

  “Glug-glug me too glug-glug.”

  “Shut up,” said Alex.

  Kent said, “Shut up, Peter.”

  Alex said to Sally, “What did you bring for them to drink?”

  “Kool-Aid in the blue jug. And the plastic glasses in a napkin underneath.”

  Of course Alex believed that Kent had started that nonsense not because he was really thirsty but because he was crudely excited by the sight of Sally’s breast. He thought it was high time Savanna was transferred to the bottle—she was nearly six months old. And he thought Sally was far too casual about the whole procedure, sometimes going around the kitchen doing things with one hand while the infant guzzled. With Kent sneaking peeks and Peter referring to Mommy’s milk jugs. That came from Kent, Alex said. Kent was a sneak and a troublemaker and the possessor of a dirty mind.