by Alice Munro
Daily life continued, ringed by disaster as by a jubilant line of fire. He felt his house transparent, his life transparent—but still standing—himself a stranger, soft-footed and maliciously observant.
What more would be revealed to him? At supper his daughter said, “Mommy, how come we never go to the beach this summer?” and it was hard to believe she didn’t know everything.
“You do go,” said Barbara. “You go with Heather’s mother.”
“But how come you and me and Adam don’t go?”
“Adam and I like it here.” Very smug and secure Barbara sounds—creamy. “I got tired of talking to the Other Mothers.”
“Don’t you like Heather’s mother?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t.”
“I do. I’m just lazy, Felicity. I’m unsociable.”
“You don’t,” said Felicity with satisfaction. She left the table, and Barbara began to describe, as if for Murray’s entertainment, the beach encampment set up by the Other Mothers. Their folding chairs and umbrellas, inflatable toys and mattresses, towels and changes of clothing, lotions, oils, antiseptic, Band-Aids, sun hats, lemonade, Kool-Aid, home-frozen popsicles, and healthful goodies. “Which are supposed to keep the little brutes from whining for French fries,” said Barbara. “They never look at the lake unless one of their kids is in it. They talk about their kids’ asthma or where they get the cheapest T-shirts.”
Victor still came to visit in the evenings. They still sat in the back yard and drank gin. Now it seemed that in the games and the aimless conversations both Victor and Barbara deferred to Murray, laughed appreciatively, applauded any joke or his sighting of a falling star. He often left them alone together. He went into the kitchen to get more gin or ice; he went to check on the children, pretending that he had heard one of them cry out. He imagined then that Victor’s long bare foot would slide out of its sandal and would graze, then knead, Barbara’s offered calf, her outstretched thigh. Their hands would slide over whatever parts of each other they could reach. For a risky instant they might touch tongues. But when he came clattering out they were always prudently separated, talking some treacherous ordinary talk.
Victor had to leave earlier than he used to, to get to work at the salt mine. “Off to the salt mine,” he would say—the same thing so many people said around here, the joke that was literally true.
Murray made love to Barbara then. He had never been so rough with her, or so free. He had a sense of despair and corruption. This is destruction, he thought. Another sentence in his head: This is the destruction of love. He fell asleep at once and woke up and had her again. She was full of a new compliance and passivity and she kissed him goodbye at breakfast with what seemed to him a strange, new, glistening sympathy. The sun shone every day, and in the mornings, particularly, it hurt his eyes. They were drinking more—three or four drinks now, instead of two—in the evenings, and he was putting more gin in them.
There came a time every afternoon when he couldn’t stay in the store any longer, so he drove out into the country. He drove through the inland towns—Logan, Carstairs, Dalby Hill. Sometimes he drove as far as the hunting camp that had belonged to his father and now belonged to him. There he got out and walked, or sat on the steps of the neglected, boarded-up cabin. Sometimes he felt in all his trouble a terrible elation. He was being robbed. He was being freed of his life.
That summer, as in other summers, there came a Sunday when they spent the day picking blackberries along the country roads. Murray and Barbara and Adam and Felicity picked blackberries, and on the way home they bought sweet corn at a farmer’s stand. Barbara made the annual supper of the first corn on the cob with the first fresh-blackberry pie. The weather had changed even as they were picking the berries, and when they bought the corn the farmer’s wife was putting up the shutters on her stand and had loaded what she hadn’t sold into the back of a truck. They were her last customers. The clouds were dark, and the kind of wind they hadn’t felt for months was lifting the boughs of the trees and tearing off the dry leaves. A few drops of rain slapped the windshield, and by the time they reached Walley they were driving through a full-blown rainstorm. The house was so chilly that Murray turned on the furnace, and with the first wave of heat a cellar smell was driven through the house—that forgotten cave smell of roots, earth, damp concrete.
Murray went out in the rain and picked up the sprinkler, the plastic pool. He shoved the lawn chairs under the eaves.
“Is our summer over?” he said to Barbara, shaking the rain off his head.
The children watched “Walt Disney,” and the boiling of the corn clouded the windows. They ate the supper. Barbara washed the dishes while Murray put the children to bed. When he shut the door on them and came out to the kitchen, he found Barbara sitting at the table in the near dark, drinking coffee. She was wearing one of last winter’s sweaters.
“What about Victor?” Murray said. He turned on the lights. “Did you leave any blankets for him over in the apartment?”
“No,” said Barbara.
“Then he’ll be cold tonight. There’s no heat on in the building.”
“He can come and get some blankets if he’s cold,” said Barbara.
“He wouldn’t come and ask,” Murray said.
“Why not?”
“He just wouldn’t.”
Murray went to the hall closet and found two heavy blankets. He carried them into the kitchen.
“Don’t you think you better take these over?” He laid them on the table, in front of her.
“Why not you?” said Barbara. “How do you even know he’s there?”
Murray went to the window over the sink. “His light’s on. He’s there.”
Barbara got up stiffly. She shuddered, as if she’d been holding herself tightly and now felt a chill.
“Is that sweater going to be enough?” said Murray. “Don’t you need a coat? Aren’t you going to comb your hair?”
She went into the bedroom. When she came out, she was wearing her white satin blouse and black pants. She had combed her hair and put on some new, very pale lipstick. Her mouth looked bleached-out, perverse, in her summer-tanned face.
Murray said, “No coat?”
“I won’t have time to get cold.”
He laid the blankets on her arms. He opened the door for her.
“It’s Sunday,” she said. “The doors’ll be locked.”
“Right,” said Murray, and got the spare keys from the kitchen hook. He made sure she knew which one of them opened the side door of the building.
He watched the glimmer of her blouse until it vanished, and then he walked all through the house very quickly, taking noisy breaths. He stopped in the bedroom and picked up the clothes she had taken off. Her jeans and shirt and sweater. He held them up to his face and smelled them and thought, This is like a play. He wanted to see if she had changed her underpants. He shook out her jeans but the pants weren’t there. He looked in the clothes hamper but he didn’t see them. Could she have been sly enough to slip them under the children’s things? What was the use of being sly now?
Her jeans had the smell jeans get when they’ve been worn a while without being washed—a smell not just of the body but of its labors. He could smell cleaning powder in them, and old cooking. And there was flour that she’d brushed off on them tonight, making the pastry for the pie. The smell of the shirt was of soap and sweat and perhaps of smoke. Was it smoke—was it cigarette smoke? He wasn’t sure, as he sniffed again, that it was smoke at all. He thought of his mother saying that Barbara was not well educated. His mother’s clothes would never smell this way, of her body and her life. She had meant that Barbara was not well-mannered, but couldn’t she also have meant—hose? A loose woman. When he heard people say that, he’d always thought of an unbuttoned blouse, clothes slipping off the body, to indicate its appetite and availability. Now he thought that it could mean just that—loose. A woman who could get loose, who wasn’t fastened do
wn, who was not reliable, who could roll away.
She had got loose from her own family. She had left them completely. Shouldn’t he have understood by that how she could leave him?
Hadn’t he understood it, all the time?
He had understood that there would be surprises.
He went back to the kitchen. (He stumbles into the kitchen.) He poured himself half a tumbler of gin, without tonic or ice. (He pours half a tumbler of gin.) He thought of further humiliations. His mother would get a new lease on life. She would take over the children. He and the children would move into his mother’s house. Or perhaps the children would move and he would remain here, drinking gin. Barbara and Victor might come to see him, wanting to be friends. They might establish a household and ask him over in the evenings, and he might go.
No. They would not think of him. They would banish the thought of him, they would go away.
As a child, Murray had seldom got into fights. He was diplomatic and good-humored. But eventually he had been in a fight and had been knocked to the ground of the Walley school-yard, knocked out, probably, for half a minute. He lay on his back in a daze, and saw the leaves on a bough above him turn into birds—black, then bright as the sun poked through and the wind stirred them. He was knocked into a free, breezy space where every shape was light and changeable and he himself the same. He lay there and thought, It’s happened to me.
The flight of seventy-eight steps from the beach to the park on top of the cliffs is called the Sunset Steps. Beside these steps there is a sign on which the time of the sunset is posted for every day from the beginning of June to the end of September. “SEE THE SUN SET TWICE,” the sign says, with an arrow pointing to the steps. The idea is that if you run very quickly from the bottom to the top of the steps you can see the last arc of the sun disappear a second time. Visitors think that this notion, and the custom of posting the sunset time, must be an old Walley tradition. Actually, it is a new wrinkle dreamed up by the Chamber of Commerce.
The boardwalk is new as well. The old-fashioned bandstand in the park is new. There was never a bandstand there before. All this charm and contrivance pleases visitors—Murray can hardly be against it; he is in the tourist business himself—and nowadays it pleases the townspeople as well. During that summer in the sixties, when Murray spent so much time driving around the country, it looked as if everything from an earlier time was being torn up, swept away, left to rot, disregarded. The new machinery was destroying the design of the farms, trees were cut down for wider roads, village stores and schools and houses were being abandoned. Everybody alive seemed to be yearning toward parking lots and shopping centers and suburban lawns as smooth as paint. Murray had to face up to being out of step, to having valued, as if they were final, things that were only accidental and temporary.
Out of such facing up, no doubt, came the orgy of smashing and renovating, which he was to get into a few months later.
And now it looks as if the world has come round to Murray’s old way of thinking. People are restoring old houses and building new houses with old-style verandas. It is hard to find anybody who is not in favor of shade trees and general stores, pumps, barns, swings, nooks and crannies. But Murray himself can’t quite recall the pleasure he took in these things, or find much shelter.
When he has walked beyond the end of the boardwalk to where the cedar trees crowd onto the beach, he sits on a boulder. First he noticed what a strange, beautiful boulder this was, with a line through it as if it had been split diagonally and the halves fitted together again not quite accurately—the pattern was jagged. He knew enough geology to understand that the line was a fault, and that the boulder must have come from the Precambrian shield that was a hundred miles away from here. It was rock formed before the last Ice Age; it was far older than the shore on which it sat. Look at the way it had been folded, as well as split—the layer on top hardened in waves like lapping cream.
He stopped being interested in the boulder and sat down on it. Now he sits looking at the lake. A line of turquoise blue at the horizon, fine as if drawn with turquoise ink, then a clear blue to the breakwater, shading into waves of green and silver breaking on the sand. La Mer Douce the French had called this lake. But of course it could change color in an hour; it could turn ugly, according to the wind and what was stirred up from the bottom.
People will sit and watch the lake as they’d never watch a field of waving grass or grain. Why is that, when the motion is the same? It must be the washing away, the wearing away, that compels them. The water all the time returning—eating, altering, the shore.
A similar thing happens to a person dying that kind of death. He has seen his father, he has seen others. A washing away, a vanishing—one fine layer after another down to the lighted bone.
He isn’t looking in that direction, but he knows when Barbara comes into sight. He turns and sees her at the top of the steps. Tall Barbara, in her fall wrap of handwoven wheat-colored wool, starting down with no particular hurry or hesitation, not holding on to the rail—her usual deliberate yet indifferent air. He can’t tell anything from the way she moves.
When Barbara opened the back door, her hair was wet from the rain—stringy—and her satin blouse ruinously spotted.
“What are you doing?” she said. “What are you drinking? Is that straight gin?”
Then Murray said what neither of them ever mentioned or forgot. “Didn’t he want you?” he said.
Barbara came over to the table and pushed his head against the wet satin and the cruel little buttons, pushed it mercilessly between her hard breasts. “We are never going to talk about it,” she said. “We never will. O.K.?” He could smell the cigarette smoke on her now, and the smell of the foreign skin. She held him till he echoed her.
“O.K.”
And she held to what she’d said, even when he told her that Victor had gone away on the morning bus and had left a note addressed to both of them. She didn’t ask to see or touch the note, she didn’t ask what was in it.
(“I am full of gratitude and now I have enough money that I think it is time for me to follow my life elsewhere. I think of going to Montreal where I will enjoy speaking French.”)
At the bottom of the steps Barbara bends down and picks up something white. She and Murray walk toward each other along the boardwalk, and in a minute Murray can see what it is: a white balloon, looking somewhat weakened and puckered.
“Look at this,” Barbara says as she comes up to him. She reads from a card attached to the string of the balloon. “ ‘Anthony Burler. Twelve years old. Joliet Elementary School. Crompton, Illinois. October 15th.’ That’s three days ago. Could it have flown over here in just three days?
“I’m O.K.,” she says then. “It wasn’t anything. It wasn’t anything bad. There isn’t anything to worry about.”
“No,” says Murray. He holds her arms, he breathes the leafy, kitchen smell of her black-and-white hair.
“Are you shaking?” she says.
He doesn’t think that he is.
Easily, without guilt, in the long-married way, he cancels out the message that flashed out when he saw her at the top of the steps: Don’t disappoint me again.
He looks at the card in her hand and says, “There’s more. ‘Favorite book—The Last of the Mohicans.’ ”
“Oh, that’s for the teacher,” Barbara says, with the familiar little snort of laughter in her voice, dismissing and promising. “That’s a lie.”
Pictures of the Ice
Three weeks before he died—drowned in a boating accident in a lake whose name nobody had heard him mention—Austin Cobbett stood deep in the clasp of a three-way mirror in Crawford’s Men’s Wear, in Logan, looking at himself in a burgundy sports shirt and a pair of cream, brown, and burgundy plaid pants. Both permanent press.
“Listen to me,” Jerry Crawford said to him. “With the darker shirt and the lighter pants you can’t go wrong. It’s youthful.”
Austin cackled. “Did you eve
r hear that expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’?”
“Referred to ladies,” Jerry said. “Anyway, it’s all changed now. There’s no old men’s clothes, no old ladies’ clothes anymore. Style applies to everybody.”
When Austin got used to what he had on, Jerry was going to talk him into a neck scarf of complementary colors and a cream pullover. Austin needed all the cover-up he could get. Since his wife died, about a year ago, and they finally got a new minister at the United Church (Austin, who was over seventy, was officially retired but had been hanging on and filling in while they haggled over hiring a new man and what they would pay him), he had lost weight, his muscles had shrunk, he was getting the potbellied caved-in shape of an old man. His neck was corded and his nose lengthened and his cheeks drooping. He was a stringy old rooster—stringy but tough, and game enough to gear up for a second marriage.
“The pants are going to have to be taken in,” Jerry said. “You can give us time for that, can’t you? When’s the happy happy day?”
Austin was going to be married in Hawaii, where his wife, his wife-to-be, lived. He named a date a couple of weeks ahead.
Phil Stadelman from the Toronto Dominion Bank came in then and did not recognize Austin from the back, though Austin was his own former minister. He’d never seen him in clothes like that.
Phil told his AIDS joke—Jerry couldn’t stop him.
Why did the Newfie put condoms on his ears?
Because he didn’t want to get hearing aids.
Then Austin turned around, and instead of saying, “Well, I don’t know about you fellows, but I find it hard to think of AIDS as a laughing matter,” or “I wonder what kind of jokes they tell in Newfoundland about the folks from Huron County,” he said, “That’s rich.” He laughed.