Friend of My Youth

by Alice Munro

  The thing that Margot kept back, Anita thought, was how it must really be at home, with her father. According to her, it was all like some movie comedy. Her father beside himself, a hapless comedian, racing around in vain pursuit (of fleet, mocking Margot) and rattling locked doors (the granary) and shouting monstrous threats and waving over his head whatever weapon he could get hold of—a chair or a hatchet or a stick of firewood. He tripped over his own feet and got mixed up in his own accusations. And no matter what he did, Margot laughed. She laughed, she despised him, she forestalled him. Never, never did she shed a tear or cry out in terror. Not like her mother. So she said.

  After Anita graduated as a nurse, she went to work in the Yukon. There she met and married a doctor. This should have been the end of her story, and a good end, too, as things were reckoned in Walley. But she got a divorce, she moved on. She worked again and saved money and went to the University of British Columbia, where she studied anthropology. When she came home to look after her mother, she had just completed her Ph.D. She did not have any children.

  “So what will you do, now you’re through?” said Margot.

  People who approved of the course Anita had taken in life usually told her so. Often an older woman would say, “Good for you!” or, “I wish I’d had the nerve to do that, when I was still young enough for it to make any difference.” Approval came sometimes from unlikely quarters. It was not to be found everywhere, of course. Anita’s mother did not feel it, and that was why, for many years, Anita had not come home. Even in her present sunken, hallucinatory state, her mother had recognized her, and gathered her strength to mutter, “Down the drain.”

  Anita bent closer.

  “Life,” her mother said. “Down the drain.”

  But another time, after Anita had dressed her sores, she said, “So glad. So glad to have—a daughter.”

  Margot didn’t seem to approve or disapprove. She seemed puzzled, in an indolent way. Anita began talking to her about some things she might do, but they kept being interrupted. Margot’s sons had come in, bringing friends. The sons were tall, with hair of varying redness. Two of them were in high school and one was home from college. There was one even older, who was married and living in the West. Margot was a grandmother. Her sons carried on shouted conversations with her about the whereabouts of their clothes, and what supplies of food, beer, and soft drinks there were in the house, also which cars would be going where at what times. Then they all went out to swim in the pool beside the house, and Margot called, “Don’t anybody dare go in that pool that’s got suntan lotion on!”

  One of the sons called back, “Nobody’s got it on,” with a great show of weariness and patience.

  “Well, somebody had it on yesterday, and they went in the pool, all right,” replied Margot. “So I guess it was just somebody that snuck up from the beach, eh?”

  Her daughter Debbie arrived home from dancing class and showed them the costume she was going to wear when her dancing school put on a program at the shopping mall. She was to impersonate a dragonfly. She was ten years old, brown-haired, and stocky, like Margot.

  “Pretty hefty dragonfly,” said Margot, lolling back in the deck chair. Her daughter did not arouse in her the warring energy that her sons did. Debbie tried for a sip of the sangria, and Margot batted her away.

  “Go get yourself a drink out of the fridge,” she said. “Listen. This is our visit. O.K.? Why don’t you go phone up Rosalie?”

  Debbie left, trailing an automatic complaint. “I wish it wasn’t pink lemonade. Why do you always make pink lemonade?”

  Margot got up and shut the sliding doors to the kitchen. “Peace,” she said. “Drink up. After a while I’ll get us some sandwiches.”

  Spring in that part of Ontario comes in a rush. The ice breaks up into grinding, jostling chunks on the rivers and along the lakeshore; it slides underwater in the pond and turns the water green. The snow melts and the creeks flood, and in no time comes a day when you open your coat and stuff your scarf and mittens in your pockets. There is still snow in the woods when the blackflies are out and the spring wheat showing.

  Teresa didn’t like spring any better than winter. The lake was too big and the fields too wide and the traffic went by too fast on the highway. Now that the mornings had turned balmy, Margot and Anita didn’t need the store’s shelter. They were tired of Teresa. Anita read in a magazine that coffee discolored your skin. They talked about whether miscarriages could cause chemical changes in your brain. They stood outside the store, wondering whether they should go in, just to be polite. Teresa came to the door and waved at them, peekaboo. They waved back with a little flap of their hands the way Reuel waved back every morning—just lifting a hand from the steering wheel at the last moment before he turned onto the highway.

  Reuel was singing in the bus one afternoon when he had dropped off all the other passengers. “He knew the world was round-o,” he sang. “And uh-uhm could be found-o.”

  He was singing a word in the second line so softly they couldn’t catch it. He was doing it on purpose, teasing. Then he sang it again, loud and clear so that there was no mistake.

  “He knew the world was round-o,

  And tail-o could be found-o.”

  They didn’t look at each other or say anything till they were walking down the highway. Then Margot said, “Big fat nerve he’s got, singing that song in front of us. Big fat nerve,” she said, spitting the word out like the worm in an apple.

  But only the next day, shortly before the bus reached the end of its run, Margot started humming. She invited Anita to join, poking her in the side and rolling her eyes. They hummed the tune of Reuel’s song; then they started working words into the humming, muffling one word, then clearly singing the next, until they finally got their courage up and sang the whole two lines, bland and sweet as “Jesus Loves Me.”

  “He knew the world was round-o,

  And tail-o could be found-o.”

  Reuel did not say a word. He didn’t look at them. He got off the bus ahead of them and didn’t wait by the door. Yet less than an hour before, in the school driveway, he had been most genial. One of the other drivers looked at Margot and Anita and said, “Nice load you got there,” and Reuel said, “Eyes front, Buster,” moving so that the other driver could not watch them stepping onto the bus.

  Next morning before he pulled away from the store, he delivered a lecture. “I hope I’m going to have a couple of ladies on my bus today and not like yesterday. A girl saying certain things is not like a man saying them. Same thing as a woman getting drunk. A girl gets drunk or talks dirty, first thing you know she’s in trouble. Give that some thought.”

  Anita wondered if they had been stupid. Had they gone too far? They had displeased Reuel and perhaps disgusted him, made him sick of the sight of them, just as he was sick of Teresa. She was ashamed and regretful and at the same time she thought Reuel wasn’t fair. She made a face at Margot to indicate this, turning down the corners of her mouth. But Margot took no notice. She was tapping her fingertips together, looking demurely and cynically at the back of Reuel’s head.

  Anita woke up in the night with an amazing pain. She thought at first she’d been wakened by some calamity, such as a tree falling on the house or flames shooting up through the floorboards. This was shortly before the end of the school year. She had felt sick the evening before, but everybody in the family was complaining of feeling sick, and blaming it on the smell of paint and turpentine. Anita’s mother was painting the linoleum, as she did every year at this time.

  Anita had cried out with pain before she was fully awake, so that everybody was roused. Her father did not think it proper to phone the doctor before daybreak, but her mother phoned him anyway. The doctor said to bring Anita in to Walley, to the hospital. There he operated on her and removed a burst appendix, which in a few hours might have killed her. She was very sick for several days after the operation, and had to stay nearly three weeks in the hospital. Until the last
few days, she could not have any visitors but her mother.

  This was a drama for the family. Anita’s father did not have the money to pay for the operation and the stay in the hospital—he was going to have to sell a stand of hard-maple trees. Her mother took the credit, rightly, for saving Anita’s life, and as long as she lived she would mention this, often adding that she had gone against her husband’s orders. (It was really only against his advice.) In a flurry of independence and self-esteem she began to drive the car, a thing she had not done for years. She visited Anita every afternoon and brought news from home. She had finished painting the linoleum, in a design of white and yellow done with a sponge on a dark-green ground. It gave the impression of a distant meadow sprinkled with tiny flowers. The milk inspector had complimented her on it, when he stayed for dinner. A late calf had been born across the creek and nobody could figure out how the cow had got there. The honeysuckle was in bloom in the hedge, and she brought a bouquet and commandeered a vase from the nurses. Anita had never seen her sociability turned on like this before for anybody in the family.

  Anita was happy, in spite of weakness and lingering pain. Such a fuss had been made to prevent her dying. Even the sale of the maple trees pleased her, made her feel unique and treasured. People were kind and asked nothing of her, and she took up that kindness and extended it to everything around her. She forgave everyone she could think of—the principal with his glittery glasses, the smelly boys on the bus, unfair Reuel and chattering Teresa and rich girls with lamb’s-wool sweaters and her own family and Margot’s father, who must suffer in his rampages. She didn’t tire all day of looking at the thin yellowish curtains at the window and the limb and trunk of a tree visible to her. It was an ash tree, with strict-looking corduroy lines of bark and thin petal leaves that were losing their fragility and sharp spring green, toughening and darkening as they took on summer maturity. Everything made or growing in the world seemed to her to deserve congratulations.

  She thought later that this mood of hers might have come from the pills they gave her for the pain. But perhaps not entirely.

  She had been put in a single room because she was so sick. (Her father had told her mother to ask how much extra this was costing, but her mother didn’t think they would be charged, since they hadn’t asked for it.) The nurses brought her magazines, which she looked at but could not read, being too dazzled and comfortably distracted. She couldn’t tell whether time passed quickly or slowly, and she didn’t care. Sometimes she dreamed or imagined that Reuel visited her. He showed a sombre tenderness, a muted passion. He loved but relinquished her, caressing her hair.

  A couple of days before she was due to go home, her mother came in shiny-faced from the heat of summer, which was now upon them, and from some other disruption. She stood at the end of Anita’s bed and said, “I always knew you thought it wasn’t fair of me.”

  By this time Anita had felt a few holes punched in her happiness. She had been visited by her brothers, who banged against the bed, and her father, who seemed surprised that she expected to kiss him, and by her aunt, who said that after an operation like this a person always got fat. Now her mother’s face, her mother’s voice came pushing at her like a fist through gauze.

  Her mother was talking about Margot. Anita knew that immediately by a twitch of her mouth.

  “You always thought I wasn’t fair to your friend Margot. I was never fussy about that girl and you thought I wasn’t fair. I know you did. So now it turns out. It turns out I wasn’t so wrong after all. I could see it in her from an early age. I could see what you couldn’t. That she had a sneaky streak and she was oversexed.”

  Her mother delivered each sentence separately, in a reckless loud voice. Anita did not look at her eyes. She looked at the little brown mole beneath one nostril. It seemed increasingly loathsome.

  Her mother calmed down a little, and said that Reuel had taken Margot to Kincardine on the school bus at the end of the day’s run on the very last day of school. Of course they had been alone in the bus at the beginning and the end of the run, ever since Anita got sick. All they did in Kincardine, they said, was eat French-fried potatoes. What nerve! Using a school bus for their jaunts and misbehaving. They drove back that evening, but Margot did not go home. She had not gone home yet. Her father had come to the store and beat on the gas pumps and broken them, scattering glass as far as the highway. He phoned the police about Margot, and Reuel phoned them about the pumps. The police were friends of Reuel’s, and now Margot’s father was bound over to keep the peace. Margot stayed on at the store, supposedly to escape a beating.

  “That’s all it is, then,” Anita said. “Stupid God-damned gossip.”

  But no. But no. And don’t swear at me, young lady.

  Her mother said that she had kept Anita in ignorance. All this had happened and she had said nothing. She had given Margot the benefit of the doubt. But now there was no doubt. The news was that Teresa had tried to poison herself. She had recovered. The store was closed. Teresa was still living there, but Reuel had taken Margot with him and they were living here, in Walley. In a back room somewhere, in the house of friends of his. They were living together. Reuel was going out to work at the garage every day, so you could say that he was living with them both. Would he be allowed to drive the school bus in future? Not likely. Everybody was saying Margot must be pregnant. Javex, was what Teresa took.

  “And Margot never confided in you,” Anita’s mother said. “She never sent you a note or one thing all the time you’ve been in here. Supposed to be your friend.”

  Anita had a feeling that her mother was angry at her not only because she’d been friends with Margot, a girl who had disgraced herself, but for another reason as well. She had the feeling that her mother was seeing the same thing that she herself could see—Anita unfit, passed over, disregarded, not just by Margot but by life. Didn’t her mother feel an angry disappointment that Anita was not the one chosen, the one enfolded by drama and turned into a woman and swept out on such a surge of life? She would never admit that. And Anita could not admit that she felt a great failure. She was a child, a know-nothing, betrayed by Margot, who had turned out to know a lot. She said sulkily, “I’m tired talking.” She pretended to fall asleep, so that her mother would have to leave.

  Then she lay awake. She lay awake all night. The nurse who came in the next morning said, “Well, don’t you look like the last show on earth! Is that incision bothering you? Should I see if I can get you back on the pills?”

  “I hate it here,” Anita said.

  “Do you? Well, you only have one more day till you can go home.”

  “I don’t mean the hospital,” Anita said. “I mean here. I want to go and live somewhere else.”

  The nurse did not seem to be surprised. “You got your grade twelve?” she said. “O.K. You can go in training. Be a nurse. All it costs is to buy your stuff. Because they can work you for nothing while you’re training. Then you can go and get a job anyplace. You can go all over the world.”

  That was what Margot had said. And now Anita was the one who would become a nurse, not Margot. She made up her mind that day. But she felt that it was second best. She would rather have been chosen. She would rather have been pinned down by a man and his desire and the destiny that he arranged for her. She would rather have been the subject of scandal.

  “Do you want to know?” said Margot. “Do you want to know really how I got this house? I mean, I didn’t go after it till we could afford it. But you know with men—something else can always come first? I put in my time living in dumps. We lived one place, there was just that stuff, you know that under-carpeting stuff, on the floor? That brown hairy stuff looks like the skin off some beast? Just look at it and you can feel things crawling on you. I was sick all the time anyway. I was pregnant with Joe. This was in behind the Toyota place, only it wasn’t the Toyota then. Reuel knew the landlord. Of course. We got it cheap.”

  But there came a day, Margot said. There
came a day about five years ago. Debbie wasn’t going to school yet. It was in June. Reuel was going away for the weekend, on a fishing trip up to northern Ontario. Up to the French River, in northern Ontario. Margot had got a phone call that she didn’t tell anybody about.

  “Is that Mrs. Gault?”

  Margot said yes.

  “Is it Mrs. Reuel Gault?”

  Yes, said Margot, and the voice—it was a woman’s or maybe a young girl’s voice, muffled and giggling—asked her if she wanted to know where her husband might be found next weekend.

  “You tell me,” said Margot.

  “Why don’t you check out the Georgian Pines?”

  “Fine,” said Margot. “Where is that?”

  “Oh, it’s a campground,” the voice said. “It’s a real nice place. Don’t you know it? It’s up on Wasaga Beach. You just check it out.”

  That was about a hundred miles to drive. Margot made arrangements for Sunday. She had to get a sitter for Debbie. She couldn’t get her regular sitter, Lana, because Lana was going to Toronto on a weekend jaunt with members of the high-school band. She was able to get a friend of Lana’s who wasn’t in the band. She was just as glad that it turned out that way, because it was Lana’s mother, Dorothy Slote, that she was afraid she might find with Reuel. Dorothy Slote did Reuel’s bookkeeping. She was divorced, and so well known in Walley for her numerous affairs that high-school boys would call to her from their cars, on the street, “Dorothy Slot, she’s hot to trot!” Sometimes she was referred to as Dorothy Slut. Margot felt sorry for Lana—that was why she had started hiring her to take care of Debbie. Lana was not going to be as good-looking as her mother, and she was shy and not too bright. Margot always got her a little present at Christmastime.