by Alice Munro
Come on, Maria, give me a ten. Me, too. Maria, give me a ten, too. Come on, Maria, you know me.
Twenty, Maria. Give me twenty. Come on. Twenty bucks. You owe me, Maria. Come on, now. You don’t want me to tell. Come on, Maria.
A twenty, a twenty, a twenty. Maria is forking over. She is going to the shed every night. And if that isn’t bad enough for her, some boys start refusing. They want the money first. They take the money and then they say no. They say she never paid them. She paid them, she paid them in front of witnesses, and all the witnesses deny that she did. They shake their heads, they taunt her. No. You never paid him. I never saw you. You pay me now and I’ll go. I promise I will. I’ll go. You pay me twenty, Maria.
And the older boys, who have learned from their younger brothers what is going on, are coming up to her at the cash register and saying, “How about me, Maria? You know me, too. Come on, Maria, how about a twenty?” Those boys never go to the shed with her, never. Did she think they would? They never even promise, they just ask her for money. You know me a long time, Maria. They threaten, they wheedle. Aren’t I your friend, too, Maria?
Nobody was Maria’s friend.
Maria’s matronly, watchful calm was gone—she looked wild and sullen and mean. She gave them looks full of hate, but she continued giving them money. She kept handing over the bills. Not even trying to bargain, or to argue or refuse, anymore. In a rage she did it—a silent rage. The more they taunted her, the more readily the twenty-dollar bills flew out of the till. Very little, perhaps nothing, was done to earn them now.
They’re stoned all the time, Neil and his friends. All the time, now that they have this money. They see sweet streams of atoms flowing in the Formica tabletops. Their colored souls are shooting out under their fingernails. Maria has gone crazy, the store is bleeding money. How can this go on? How is it going to end? Maria must be into the strongbox now; the till at the end of the day wouldn’t have enough for her. And all the time her mother keeps on baking buns and making pierogi, and the father keeps sweeping the sidewalk and greeting the customers. Nobody has told them. They go on just the same.
They had to find out on their own. They found a bill that Maria hadn’t paid—something like that, somebody coming in with an unpaid bill—and they went to get the money to pay it, and they found that there was no money. The money wasn’t where they kept it, in the safe or strongbox or wherever, and it wasn’t anywhere else—the money was gone. That was how they found out.
Maria had succeeded in giving away everything. All they had saved, all their slowly accumulated profits, all the money on which they operated their business. Truly, everything. They could not pay the rent now, they could not pay the electricity bill or their suppliers. They could not keep on running the Confectionery. At least they believed they couldn’t. Maybe they simply had not the heart to go on.
The store was locked. A sign went up on the door: “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” Nearly a year went by before the place was reopened. It had been turned into a laundromat.
People said it was Maria’s mother, that big, meek, bent-over woman, who insisted on bringing charges against her daughter. She was scared of the English language and the cash register, but she brought Maria into court. Of course, Maria could only be charged as a juvenile, and she could only be sent to a place for young offenders, and nothing could be done about the boys at all. They all lied anyway—they said it wasn’t them. Maria’s parents must have found jobs, they must have gone on living in Victoria, because Lisa did. She still swam at the Y, and in a few years she was working at Eaton’s, in Cosmetics. She was very glamorous and haughty by that time.
Neil always has vodka and orange juice for them to drink. That’s Brenda’s choice. She read somewhere that orange juice replenishes the vitamin C that the liquor leeches away, and she hopes the vodka really can’t be detected on your breath. Neil tidies up the trailer, too—or so she thinks, because of the paper bag full of beer cans leaning against the cupboard, a pile of newspapers pushed together, not really folded, a pair of socks kicked into a corner. Maybe his housemate does it. A man called Gary, whom Brenda has never met or seen a picture of, and wouldn’t know if they met on the street. Would he know her? He knows she comes here, he knows when; does he even know her name? Does he recognize her perfume, the smell of her sex, when he comes home in the evening? She likes the trailer, the way nothing in it has been made to look balanced or permanent. Things set down just wherever they will be convenient. No curtains or placemats, not even a pair of salt and pepper shakers—just the salt box and pepper tin, the way they come from the store. She loves the sight of Neil’s bed—badly made, with a rough plaid blanket and a flat pillow, not a marriage bed or a bed of illness, comfort, complication. The bed of his lust and sleep, equally strenuous and oblivious. She loves the life of his body, so sure of its rights. She wants commands from him, never requests. She wants to be his territory.
It’s only in the bathroom that the dirt bothers her a bit, like anybody else’s dirt, and she wishes they’d done a better job of cleaning the toilet and the washbasin.
They sit at the table to drink, looking out through the trailer window at the steely, glittering, choppy water of the lake. Here the trees, exposed to lake winds, are almost bare. Birch bones and poplars stiff and bright as straw frame the water. There may be snow in another month. Certainly in two months. The seaway will close, the lake boats will be tied up for the winter, there’ll be a wild landscape of ice thrown up between the shore and the open water. Neil says he doesn’t know what he’ll do, once the work on the beach is over. Maybe stay on, try to get another job. Maybe go on unemployment insurance for a while, get a snowmobile, enjoy the winter. Or he could go and look for work somewhere else, visit friends. He has friends all over the continent of North America and out of it. He has friends in Peru.
“So what happened?” Brenda says. “Don’t you have any idea what happened to Maria?”
Neil says no, he has no idea.
The story won’t leave Brenda alone; it stays with her like a coating on the tongue, a taste in the mouth.
“Well, maybe she got married,” she says. “After she got out. Lots of people get married who are no beauties. That’s for sure. She might’ve lost weight and be looking good even.”
“Sure,” says Neil. “Maybe have guys paying her, instead of the other way round.”
“Or she might still be just sitting in one of those places. One of those places where they put people.”
Now she feels a pain between her legs. Not unusual after one of these sessions. If she were to stand up at this moment, she’d feel a throb there, she’d feel the blood flowing back down through all the little veins and arteries that have been squashed and bruised, she’d feel herself throbbing like a big swollen blister.
She takes a long drink and says, “So how much money did you get out of her?”
“I never got anything,” Neil says. “I just knew these other guys who did. It was my brother Jonathan made the money off her. I wonder what he’d say if I reminded him now.”
“Older guys, too—you said older guys, too. Don’t tell me you just sat back and watched and never got your share.”
“That’s what I am telling you. I never got anything.”
Brenda clicks her tongue, tut-tut, and empties her glass and moves it around on the table, looking skeptically at the wet circles.
“Want another?” Neil says. He takes the glass out of her hand.
“I’ve got to go,” she says. “Soon.” You can make love in a hurry if you have to, but you need time for a fight. Is that what they’re starting on? A fight? She feels edgy but happy. Her happiness is tight and private, not the sort that flows out from you and fuzzes everything up and makes you good-naturedly careless about what you say. The very opposite. She feels light and sharp and unconnected. When Neil brings her back a full glass, she takes a drink from it at once, to safeguard this feeling.
“You’ve got the same name as
my husband,” she says. “It’s funny I never thought of that before.”
She has thought of it before. She just hasn’t mentioned it, knowing it’s not something Neil would like to hear.
“Cornelius isn’t the same as Neil,” he says.
“It’s Dutch. Some Dutch people shorten it to Neil.”
“Yeah, but I’m not Dutch, and I wasn’t named Cornelius, just Neil.”
“Still, if his had been shortened you’d be named the same.”
“His isn’t shortened.”
“I never said it was. I said if it had been.”
“So why say that if it isn’t?”
He must feel the same thing she does—the slow but irresistible rise of a new excitement, the need to say, and hear, dire things. What a sharp, releasing pleasure there is in the first blow, and what a dazzling temptation ahead—destruction. You don’t stop to think why you want that destruction. You just do.
“Why do we have to drink every time?” Neil says abruptly. “Do we want to turn ourselves into alcoholics or something?”
Brenda takes a quick sip and pushes her glass away. “Who has to drink?” she says.
She thinks he means they should drink coffee, or Cokes. But he gets up and goes to the dresser where he keeps his clothes, opens a drawer, and says, “Come over here.”
“I don’t want to look at any of that stuff,” she says.
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“Sure I do.”
Of course she doesn’t—not specifically.
“You think it’s going to bite you?”
Brenda drinks again and keeps looking out the window. The sun is getting down in the sky already, pushing the bright light across the table to warm her hands.
“You don’t approve,” Neil says.
“I don’t approve or disapprove,” she says, aware of having lost some control, of not being as happy as she was. “I don’t care what you do. That’s you.”
“I don’t approve or disapprove,” says Neil, in a mincing voice. “Don’t care what you do.”
That’s the signal, which one or the other had to give. A flash of hate, pure meanness, like the glint of a blade. The signal that the fight can come out into the open. Brenda takes a deep drink, as if she very much deserved it. She feels a desolate satisfaction. She stands up and says, “Time for me to go.”
“What if I’m not ready to go yet?” Neil says.
“I said me, not you.”
“Oh. You got a car outside?”
“I can walk.”
“That’s five miles back to where the van is.”
“People have walked five miles.”
“In shoes like that?” says Neil. They both look at her yellow shoes, which match the appliquéd-satin birds on her turquoise sweater. Both things bought and worn for him!
“You didn’t wear those shoes for walking,” he says. “You wore them so every step you took would show off your fat arse.”
She walks along the lakeshore road, in the gravel, which bruises her feet through the shoes and makes her pay attention to each step, lest she should twist an ankle. The afternoon is now too cold for just a sweater. The wind off the lake blows at her sideways, and every time a vehicle passes, particularly a truck, an eddy of stiff wind whirls around her and grit blows into her face. Some of the trucks slow down, of course, and some cars do, too, and men yell at her out of the windows. One car skids onto the gravel and stops ahead of her. She stands still, she cannot think what else to do, and after a moment he churns back onto the pavement and she starts walking again.
That’s all right, she’s not in any real danger. She doesn’t even worry about being seen by someone she knows. She feels too free to care. She thinks about the first time Neil came to the Furniture Barn, how he put his arm around Samson’s neck and said, “Not much of a watchdog you got here, Ma’am.” She thought the “Ma’am” was impudent, phony, out of some old Elvis Presley movie. And what he said next was worse. She looked at Samson, and she said, “He’s better at night.” And Neil said, “So am I.” Impudent, swaggering, conceited, she thought. And he’s not young enough to get away with it. Her opinion didn’t even change so much the second time. What happened was that all that became just something to get past. It was something she could let him know he didn’t have to do. It was her job to take his gifts seriously, so that he could be serious, too, and easy and grateful. How was she sure so soon that what she didn’t like about him wasn’t real?
When she’s in the second mile, or maybe just the second half of the first mile, the Mercury catches up to her. It pulls onto the gravel across the road. She goes over and gets in. She doesn’t see why not. It doesn’t mean that she is going to talk to him, or be with him any longer than the few minutes it will take to drive to the swamp road and the van. His presence doesn’t need to weigh on her any more than the grit blowing beside the road.
She winds the window all the way down so that there will be a rush of chilly wind across anything he may have to say.
“I want to beg your pardon for the personal remarks,” he says.
“Why?” she says. “It’s true. It is fat.”
“No.”
“It is,” she says, in a tone of bored finality that is quite sincere. It shuts him up for a few miles, until they’ve turned down the swamp road and are driving in under the trees.
“If you thought there was a needle there in the drawer, there wasn’t.”
“It isn’t any of my business what there was,” she says.
“All that was in there was some Percs and Quaaludes and a little hash.”
She remembers a fight she had with Cornelius, one that almost broke their engagement. It wasn’t the time he slapped her for smoking marijuana. They made that up quickly. It wasn’t about anything to do with their own lives. They were talking about a man Cornelius worked with at the mine, and his wife, and their retarded child. This child was just a vegetable, Cornelius said; all it did was gibber away in a sort of pen in a corner of the living room and mess its pants. It was about six or seven years old, and that was all it would ever do. Cornelius said he believed that if anybody had a child like that they had a right to get rid of it. He said that was what he would do. No question about it. There were a lot of ways you could do it and never get caught, and he bet that was what a lot of people did. He and Brenda had a terrible fight about this. But all the time they were arguing and fighting Brenda suspected that this was not something Cornelius would really do. It was something he had to say he would do. To her. To her, he had to insist that he would do it. And this actually made her angrier at him than she would have been if she believed he was entirely and brutally sincere. He wanted her to argue with him about this. He wanted her protest, her horror, and why was that? Men wanted you to make a fuss, about disposing of vegetable babies or taking drugs or driving a car like a bat out of hell, and why was that? So they could have your marshmallow sissy goodness to preen against, with their hard showoff badness? So that they finally could give in to you, growling, and not have to be so bad and reckless anymore? Whatever it was, you got sick of it.
In the mine accident, Cornelius could have been crushed to death. He was working the night shift when it happened. In the great walls of rock salt an undercut is made, then there are holes drilled for explosives, and the charges are fitted in; an explosion goes off every night at five minutes to midnight. The huge slice of salt slides loose, to be started on its journey to the surface. Cornelius was lifted up in a cage on the end of the arm of the scaler. He was to break off the loose material on the roof and fix in the bolts that held it for the explosion. Something went wrong with the hydraulic controls he was operating—he stalled, tried for a little power and got a surge that lifted him, so that he saw the rock ceiling closing down on him like a lid. He ducked, the cage halted, a rocky outcrop struck him in the back.
He had worked in the mine for seven years before that and hardly ever spoke to Brenda about what it was like. Now he
tells her. It’s a world of its own, he says—caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see. The machines stay down there forever. Some are assembled down there, taken down in parts; all are repaired there; and finally they’re ransacked for usable parts, then piled into a dead-end passage that is sealed up—a tomb for these underground machines. They make a ferocious noise all the time they’re working; the noise of the machines and the ventilating fans cuts out any human voice. And now there’s a new machine that can do what Cornelius went up in the cage to do. It can do it by itself, without a man.
Brenda doesn’t know if he misses being down there. He says he doesn’t. He says he just can’t look at the surface of the water without seeing all that underneath, which nobody who hasn’t seen it could imagine.
Neil and Brenda drive along under the trees, where suddenly you could hardly feel the wind at all.
“Also, I did take some money,” Neil says. “I got forty dollars, which, compared to what some guys got, was just nothing. I swear that’s all, forty dollars. I never got any more.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“I wasn’t looking to confess it,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.”
Now that she can hear his voice better, she notices that it’s nearly as flat and tired as her own. She sees his hands on the wheel and thinks what a hard time she would have describing what he looks like. At a distance—in the car, waiting for her—he’s always been a bright blur, his presence a relief and a promise. Close up, he’s been certain separate areas—silky or toughened skin, wiry hair or shaved prickles, smells that are unique or shared with other men. But it’s chiefly an energy, a quality of his self that she can see in his blunt, short fingers or the tanned curve of his forehead. And even to call it energy is not exact—it’s more like the sap of him, rising from the roots, clear and on the move, filling him to bursting. That’s what she has set herself to follow—the sap, the current, under the skin, as if that were the one true thing.