by Alice Munro
As far as Ray was concerned, this was all revolting chatter. Adulteries and drunks and scandals—who was right and who was wrong? Who could care? That girl had grown up to preen and bargain like the rest of them. The waste of time, the waste of life, by people all scrambling for excitement and paying no attention to anything that mattered.
Of course, when he had been able to talk to Isabel, everything had been different. Not that Isabel would have been looking for answers—rather, that she would have made him feel as if there were more to the subject than he had taken account of. Then she’d have ended up laughing.
He got along well enough at work. They asked him if he wanted to join a bowling team and he thanked them but said he didn’t have time. He had plenty of time, actually, but had to spend it with Isabel. Watching for any change, any explanation. Not letting anything slip away.
“Her name is Isabel,” he used to remind the nurses if they said, “Now, my lady,” or “Okay, missus, over we go.”
Then he got used to hearing them speak to her that way. So there were changes, after all. If not in Isabel, he could find them in himself.
For quite a while, he had been going to see her once a day.
Then he made it every other day. Then twice a week.
Four years. He thought it must be close to a record. He asked those who cared for her if that was so and they said, “Well. Getting there.” They had a habit of being vague about everything.
He had got over the persistent idea that she was thinking. He was no longer waiting for her to open her eyes. It was just that he could not go off and leave her there alone.
She had changed from a very thin woman not to a child but to an ungainly and ill-assorted collection of bones, with a birdlike crest, ready to die every minute with the erratic shaping of her breath.
There were some large rooms used for rehabilitation and exercise, connected to the hospital. Usually he saw them only when they were empty, all the equipment put away and the lights turned off. But one night as he was leaving he took a different route through the building for some reason and saw a light left on.
And when he went to investigate he saw that somebody was still there. A woman. She was sitting astride one of the blown-up exercise balls, just resting there, or perhaps trying to remember where she was supposed to go next.
It was Leah. He didn’t recognize her at first, but then he looked again and it was Leah. He wouldn’t have gone in, maybe, if he’d seen who it was, but now he was halfway on his mission to turn off the light. She saw him.
She slid off her perch. She was wearing some sort of purposeful athletic outfit and had gained a fair amount of weight.
“I thought I might run into you sometime,” she said. “How is Isabel?”
It was a bit of a surprise to hear her call Isabel by her first name, or to speak of her at all, as if she’d known her.
He told her briefly how Isabel was. No way to tell it now except briefly.
“Do you talk to her?” she said.
“Not so much anymore.”
“Oh, you should. You shouldn’t give up talking to them.”
How did she come to think she knew so much about everything?
“You’re not surprised to see me, are you? You must have heard?” she said.
He did not know how to answer this.
“Well,” he said.
“It’s been a while since I heard that you were here and all, so I guess I just thought you’d know about me being down here, too.”
He said no.
“I do recreation,” she told him. “I mean for the cancer patients. If they’re up to it, like.”
He said he guessed that was a good idea.
“It’s great. I mean for me, too. I’m pretty much okay, but sometimes things get to me. I mean particularly at suppertime. That’s when it can start to feel weird.”
She saw that he didn’t know what she was talking about and she was ready—maybe eager—to explain.
“I mean without the kids and all. You didn’t know their father got them?”
“No,” he said.
“Oh, well. It’s because they thought his mother could look after them, really. He’s in AA and all, but the judgment wouldn’t have gone like that if it wasn’t for her.”
She snuffled and dashed away tears in an almost disregarding way.
“Don’t be embarrassed—it isn’t as bad as it looks. I just automatically cry. Crying isn’t so bad for you, either, so long as you don’t make a career of it.”
The man in AA would be the sax player. But what about the minister and whatever had been going on there?
Just as if he had asked her aloud, she said, “Oh. Then. Carl. That stuff was such a big deal and everything? I should have had my head examined.
“Carl got married again,” she continued. “That made him feel better. I mean because he’d sort of got past whatever it was he had on me. It was really kind of funny. He went and married another minister. You know how they let women be ministers now? Well, she’s one. So he’s like the minister’s wife. I think that’s a howl.”
Dry-eyed now, smiling. He knew that there was more coming, but he could not guess what it might be.
“You must have been here quite a while. You got a place of your own?”
“Yes.”
“You cook your own supper and everything?”
He said that that was the case.
“I could do that for you once in a while. Would that be a good idea?”
Her eyes had brightened, holding his.
He said maybe, but to tell the truth there wasn’t room in his place for more than one person to move around at a time.
Then he said that he hadn’t looked in on Isabel for a couple of days, and he must go and do it now.
She nodded just slightly in agreement. She did not appear hurt or discouraged.
“See you around.”
“See you.”
They had been looking all over for him. Isabel was finally gone. They said “gone,” as if she had got up and left. When someone had checked her about an hour ago, she had been the same as ever, and now she was gone.
He had often wondered what difference it would make.
But the emptiness in place of her was astounding.
He looked at the nurse in wonder. She thought he was asking her what he had to do next and she began to tell him. Filling him in. He understood her fine, but was still preoccupied.
He’d thought that it had happened long before with Isabel, but it hadn’t. Not until now.
She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever. And people hurried around, as if this outrageous fact could be overcome by making sensible arrangements. He, too, obeyed the customs, signing where he was told to sign, arranging—as they said—for the remains.
What an excellent word—“remains.” Like something left to dry out in sooty layers in a cupboard.
And before long he found himself outside, pretending that he had as ordinary and good a reason as anybody else to put one foot ahead of the other.
What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.
The girl he’d been talking to, whom he’d once known—she had spoken of her children. The loss of her children. Getting used to that. A problem at suppertime.
An expert at losing, she might be called—himself a novice by comparison. And now he could not remember her name. Had lost her name, though he’d known it well. Losing, lost. A joke on him, if you wanted one.
He was going up his own steps when it came to him.
Leah.
A relief out of all proportion, to remember her.
GRAVEL
AT that time we were living beside a gravel pit. Not a large one, hollowed out by monster machinery, just a minor pit that a farmer must have made some money from years before. In fact, the pit was shallow enough to lead you to think
that there might have been some other intention for it—foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further.
My mother was the one who insisted on calling attention to it. “We live by the old gravel pit out the service-station road,” she’d tell people, and laugh, because she was so happy to have shed everything connected with the house, the street—the husband—with the life she’d had before.
I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture. All that I retain in my head of the house in town is the wallpaper with teddy bears in my old room. In this new house, which was really a trailer, my sister, Caro, and I had narrow cots, stacked one above the other. When we first moved there, Caro talked to me a lot about our old house, trying to get me to remember this or that. It was when we were in bed that she talked like this, and generally the conversation ended with me failing to remember and her getting cross. Sometimes I thought I did remember, but out of contrariness or fear of getting things wrong I pretended not to.
It was summer when we moved to the trailer. We had our dog with us. Blitzee. “Blitzee loves it here,” my mother said, and it was true. What dog wouldn’t love to exchange a town street, even one with spacious lawns and big houses, for the wide-open countryside? She took to barking at every car that went past, as if she owned the road, and now and then she brought home a squirrel or a groundhog she’d killed. At first Caro was quite upset by this, and Neal would have a talk with her, explaining about a dog’s nature and the chain of life in which some things had to eat other things.
“She gets her dog food,” Caro argued, but Neal said, “Suppose she didn’t? Suppose someday we all disappeared and she had to fend for herself?”
“I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and I’m always going to look after her.”
“You think so?” Neal said, and our mother stepped in to deflect him. Neal was always ready to get on the subject of the Americans and the atomic bomb, and our mother didn’t think we were ready for that yet. She didn’t know that when he brought it up I thought he was talking about an atomic bun. I knew that there was something wrong with this interpretation, but I wasn’t about to ask questions and get laughed at.
Neal was an actor. In town there was a professional summer theater, a new thing at the time, which some people were enthusiastic about and others worried about, fearing that it would bring in riffraff. My mother and father had been among those in favor, my mother more actively so, because she had more time. My father was an insurance agent and travelled a lot. My mother had got busy with various fund-raising schemes for the theater and donated her services as an usher. She was good-looking and young enough to be mistaken for an actress. She’d begun to dress like an actress too, in shawls and long skirts and dangling necklaces. She’d let her hair go wild and stopped wearing makeup. Of course, I had not understood or even particularly noticed these changes at the time. My mother was my mother. But no doubt Caro had noticed. And my father must have. Though, from all that I know of his nature and his feelings for my mother, I think he may have been proud to see how good she looked in these liberating styles and how well she fit in with the theater people. When he spoke about this time, later on, he said that he had always approved of the arts. I can imagine now how embarrassed my mother would have been, cringing and laughing to cover up her cringing, if he’d made this declaration in front of her theater friends.
Well, then came a development that could have been foreseen and probably was, but not by my father. I don’t know if it happened to any of the other volunteers. I do know, though I don’t remember it, that my father wept and for a whole day followed my mother around the house, not letting her out of his sight and refusing to believe her. And, instead of telling him anything to make him feel better, she told him something that made him feel worse.
She told him that the baby was Neal’s.
Was she sure?
Absolutely. She had been keeping track.
What happened then?
My father gave up weeping. He had to get back to work. My mother packed up our things and took us to live with Neal in the trailer he had found, out in the country. She said afterwards that she had wept too. But she said also that she had felt alive. Maybe for the first time in her life, truly alive. She felt as if she had been given a chance; she had started her life all over again. She’d walked out on her silver and her china and her decorating scheme and her flower garden and even on the books in her bookcase. She would live now, not read. She’d left her clothes hanging in the closet and her high-heeled shoes in their shoe trees. Her diamond ring and her wedding ring on the dresser. Her silk nightdresses in their drawer. She meant to go around naked at least some of the time in the country, as long as the weather stayed warm.
That didn’t work out, because when she tried it Caro went and hid in her cot and even Neal said he wasn’t crazy about the idea.
What did he think of all this? Neal. His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.
I am suspicious of people who talk like this, but I can’t say that I have a right to be.
He was not really an actor. He had got into acting, he said, as an experiment. To see what he could find out about himself. In college, before he dropped out, he had performed as part of the Chorus in Oedipus Rex. He had liked that—the giving yourself over, blending with others. Then one day, on the street in Toronto, he ran into a friend who was on his way to try out for a summer job with a new small-town theater company. He went along, having nothing better to do, and ended up getting the job, while the other fellow didn’t. He would play Banquo. Sometimes they make Banquo’s Ghost visible, sometimes not. This time they wanted a visible version and Neal was the right size. An excellent size. A solid ghost.
He had been thinking of wintering in our town anyway, before my mother sprang her surprise. He had already spotted the trailer. He had enough carpentry experience to pick up work renovating the theater, which would see him through till spring. That was as far ahead as he liked to think.
Caro didn’t even have to change schools. She was picked up by the school bus at the end of the short lane that ran alongside the gravel pit. She had to make friends with the country children, and perhaps explain some things to the town children who had been her friends the year before, but if she had any difficulty with that I never heard about it.
Blitzee was always waiting by the road for her to come home.
I didn’t go to kindergarten, because my mother didn’t have a car. But I didn’t mind doing without other children. Caro, when she got home, was enough for me. And my mother was often in a playful mood. As soon as it snowed that winter she and I built a snowman and she asked, “Shall we call it Neal?” I said okay, and we stuck various things on it to make it funny. Then we decided that I would run out of the house when his car came and say, Here’s Neal, here’s Neal! but be pointing up at the snowman. Which I did, but Neal got out of the car mad and yelled that he could have run me over.
That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.
Those short winter days must have seemed strange to me—in town, the lights came on at dusk. But children get used to changes. Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where it had gone.
My mother’s good times with Neal went on into the night. If I woke up and had to go to the bathroom, I’d call for her. She would come happily but not in any hurry, with some piece of cloth or a scarf wrapped around her—also a smell that I associated with candlelight and music. And love.
Something did happen that was not so reassuring, but I didn’t try to make much sense of it at the time. Blitzee, our dog, was not very big, but she didn’t seem small enough to fit under Caro’s coat. I don’t know how Caro managed to do it. Not once but twice. She hid the dog under her coat on the school bus, and then,
instead of going straight to school, she took Blitzee back to our old house in town, which was less than a block away. That was where my father found the dog, on the winter porch, which was not locked, when he came home for his solitary lunch. There was great surprise that she had got there, found her way home like a dog in a story. Caro made the biggest fuss, and claimed not to have seen the dog at all that morning. But then she made the mistake of trying it again, maybe a week later, and this time, though nobody on the bus or at school suspected her, our mother did.
I can’t remember if our father brought Blitzee back to us. I can’t imagine him in the trailer or at the door of the trailer or even on the road to it. Maybe Neal went to the house in town and picked her up. Not that that’s any easier to imagine.
If I’ve made it sound as though Caro was unhappy or scheming all the time, that isn’t the truth. As I’ve said, she did try to make me talk about things, at night in bed, but she wasn’t constantly airing grievances. It wasn’t her nature to be sulky. She was far too keen on making a good impression. She liked people to like her; she liked to stir up the air in a room with the promise of something you could even call merriment. She thought more about that than I did.
She was the one who most took after our mother, I think now.
There must have been some probing about what she’d done with the dog. I think I can remember some of it.
“I did it for a trick.”
“Do you want to go and live with your father?”
I believe that was asked, and I believe she said no.
I didn’t ask her anything. What she had done didn’t seem strange to me. That’s probably how it is with younger children—nothing that the strangely powerful older child does seems out of the ordinary.
Our mail was deposited in a tin box on a post, down by the road. My mother and I would walk there every day, unless it was particularly stormy, to see what had been left for us. We did this after I got up from my nap. Sometimes it was the only time we went outside all day. In the morning, we watched children’s television shows—or she read while I watched. (She had not given up reading for very long.) We heated up some canned soup for lunch, then I went down for my nap while she read some more. She was quite big with the baby now and it stirred around in her stomach, so that I could feel it. Its name was going to be Brandy—already was Brandy—whether it was a boy or a girl.