by Alice Munro
“Gee, don’t give me the creeps like that,” Heather Sue said. “It’s awfully hot, isn’t it? If I was at home this afternoon, I guess me and my girl friend would be going to the pool.”
“We can go and swim at Third Bridge,” Eunie said.
“Where is that?”
“Down the road, it’s not far. Half a mile.”
“In this heat?” Heather Sue said.
Eunie said, “I’ll ride you on my bike.” She said to May in an overly gay and hospitable voice, “You get your bike too, come on.”
May considered a moment and then got up and went into the store, which was always dark in the daytime, hot too, with a big wooden clock on the wall and bins full of little sweet crumbling cookies, soft oranges, onions. She went to the back where her grandmother was sitting on a stool beside the ice-cream freezer, under a big baking-powder sign that had a background of glittering foil, like a Christmas card.
May said, “Can I go swimming with Eunie and Heather Sue?”
“Where you going to go swimming?” her grandmother said, almost neutrally. She knew there was only one place you could go.
“Third Bridge.”
Eunie and Heather Sue had come in and were standing by the door. Heather Sue smiled with delicacy and politeness in the direction of the old woman.
“No, no you can’t.”
“It’s not deep there,” May said.
Her grandmother grunted enigmatically. She sat bent over, her elbow on her knee and her chin pressed down on her thumb. She would not bother looking up.
“Why can’t I?” May said stubbornly.
Her grandmother did not answer. Eunie and Heather Sue watched from the door.
“Why can’t I?” she said again. “Grandma, why can’t I?”
“You know why.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where all the boys go. I told you before. You’re getting too big for that.” Her mouth shut down hard; her face set in the lines of ugly and satisfied secrecy; now she looked up at May and looked at her until she brought up a flush of shame and anger. Some animation came into her own face. “Let the rest of them chase after the boys, see what it gets them.” She never once looked at Eunie and Heather Sue but when she said this they turned and fled out of the store. You could hear them running past the gas pumps and breaking into wild, somewhat desperate, whoops of laughter. The old woman did not let on she heard.
May did not say anything. She was exploring in the dark a new dimension of bitterness. She had a feeling that her grandmother did not believe in her own reasons any more, that she did not care, but would go on pulling these same reasons out of the bag, flourishing them nastily, only to see what damage they could do. Her grandmother said, “Heather-miss-what’s-her-name. I seen her, stepping out of the bus this morning.”
May walked out of the store straight through the back room and through the kitchen to the back yard. She went and sat down by the pump. An old wooden trough, green with decay, ran down from the spout of the pump to an island of cool mud in the dry clumps of grass. She sat there and after a while she saw a big toad, rather an old and tired one she thought, flopping around in the grass; she trapped it in her hands.
She heard the screen door shut; she did not look. She saw her grandmother’s shoes, her incredible ankles moving towards her across the grass. She held the toad in one hand and with the other she picked up a little stick; methodically she began to prod it in the belly.
“You quit that,” her grandmother said. May dropped the stick. “Let that miserable thing go,” she said, and very slowly May opened her fingers. In the close afternoon she could smell the peculiar flesh smell of her grandmother who stood over her; it was sweetish and corrupt like the smell of old apple peel going soft, and it penetrated and prevailed over the more commonplace odours of strong soap and dry ironed cotton and tobacco which she always carried around with her.
“I bet you don’t know,” her grandmother said loudly. “I bet you don’t know what’s been going through my head in there in the store.” May did not answer but bent down and began to pick with interest at a scab on her leg.
“I been thinking I might sell the store,” her grandmother said in this same loud monotonous voice as if she were talking to a deaf person or some larger power. Standing looking at the ragged pine-blue horizon, holding her apron down in an old woman’s gesture with her flat hands, she said, “You and me could get on the train and go out and see Lewis.” It was her son in California, whom she had not seen for about twenty years.
Then May had to look up to see if her grandmother was playing some kind of trick. The old woman had always said that the tourists were fools to think one place was any better than another and that they would have been better off at home.
“You and me could take a trip to the coast,” her grandmother said. “Wouldn’t cost so much, we could sit up nights and pack some food along. It’s better to pack your own food, you know what you’re getting.”
“You’re too old,” May said cruelly. “You’re seventy-eight.”
“People my age are travelling to the Old Country and all over, you look in the papers.”
“You might have a heart attack,” May said.
“They could put me in that car with the lettuce and tomatoes,” the old woman said, “and ship me home cold.” Meanwhile May could see the coast; she saw a long curve of sand like the beach at the lake only longer and brighter; the very words, The Coast, produced a feeling of coolness and delight in her. But she did not trust them, she could not understand; when in her life had her grandmother promised her any fine thing before?
There was a man standing at the front of the store drinking a lemon-lime. He was a small middle-aged man with a puffy, heat-shiny face; he wore a white shirt, not clean, a pale silk tie. The old woman had moved her stool up to the front counter and she sat there talking to him. May stood with her back to both of them looking out the front door. The clouds were dingy; the world was filled with an old, dusty unfriendly light that seemed to come not from the sky alone but from the flat brick walls, the white roads, the grey bush-leaves rustling and the metal signs flapping in the hot, monotonous wind. Ever since her grandmother had followed her into the back yard she had felt as if something had changed, something had cracked; yes, it was that new light she saw in the world. And she felt something about herself—like power, like the unsuspected still unexplored power of her own hostility, and she meant to hold it for a while and turn it like a cold coin in her hand.
“What company are you travelling for?” her grandmother said. The man said, “Rug Company.”
“Don’t they let a man go home to his family on the weekend?”
“I’m not travelling on business right now,” the man said. “At least I’m not travelling on rug business. You might say I’m travelling on private business.”
“Oh well,” the old woman said, in the tone of one who does not meddle with anybody’s private business. “Does it look to you like we’re going to have a rain?”
“Could be,” the man said. He took a big drink of lemon-lime and put the bottle down and wiped his mouth neatly with his handkerchief. He was the sort who would talk about his private business anyway; indeed he would not talk about anything else. “I’m on my way to see an acquaintance of mine, he’s staying at his summer cottage,” he said. “He has insomnia so bad he hasn’t had a good night’s rest in seven years.”
“Oh well,” the old woman said.
“I’m going to see if I can cure him of it. I’ve had pretty good success with some insomnia cases. Not one hundred per cent. Pretty good.”
“Are you a medical man too?”
“No, I’m not,” the little man said agreeably. “I’m a hypnotist. An amateur. I don’t think of myself as anything but an amateur.”
The old woman looked at him for several moments without saying anything. This did not displease him; he moved around the front of the store picking things up and looking at them in a l
ively and self-satisfied way. “I’ll bet you never saw anybody that said he was a hypnotist before in your life,” he said in a joking way to the old woman. “I look just like anybody else, don’t I? I look pretty tame.”
“I don’t believe in any of that kind of thing,” she said.
He just laughed. “What do you mean you don’t believe in it?”
“I don’t believe in any superstitious kind of thing.”
“It’s not superstition, lady, it’s a living fact.”
“I know what it is.”
“Well now a lot of people are of your opinion, a surprising lot of people. Maybe you didn’t happen to read an article that was published about two years ago in the Digest on this same subject? I wish I had it with me,” he said. “All I know is I cured a man of drinking. I cured people of all sorts of itches and rashes and bad habits. Nerves. I don’t claim I can cure everbody of their nervous habits but some people I can tell you have been very grateful to me. Very grateful.”
The old woman put her hands up to her head and did not answer.
“What’s the matter, lady, aren’t you feeling well. You got a headache?”
“I feel all right.”
“How did you cure those people?” May said boldly, though her grandmother had always told her: don’t let me catch you talking to strangers in the store.
The little man swung round attentively. “Why I hypnotize them, young lady. I hypnotize them. Are you asking me to explain to you what hypnotism is?”
May who did not know what she was asking flushed red and had no idea what to say. She saw her grandmother looking straight at her. The old woman looked out of her head at May and the whole world as if they had caught fire and she could do nothing about it, she could not even communicate the fact to them.
“She don’t know what she’s talking about,” her grandmother said.
“Well it’s very simple,” the man said directly to May, in a luxuriantly gentle voice he must think suitable for children. “It’s just like you put a person to sleep. Only they’re not really asleep, do you follow me honey? You can talk to them. And listen—listen to this—you can go way deep into their minds and find out things they wouldn’t even remember when they were awake. Find out their hidden worries and anxieties that’s causing them the trouble. Now isn’t that an amazing thing?”
“You couldn’t do that with me,” the old woman said. “I would know what was going on. You couldn’t do that with me.”
“I bet he could,” May said, and was so startled at herself her mouth stayed open. She did not know why she had said that. Time and again she had watched her grandmother’s encounters with the outside world, not with pride so much as a solid, fundamental conviction that the old woman would get the better of it. Now for the first time it seemed to her she saw the possibility of her grandmother’s defeat; in her grandmother’s face she saw it and not in the little man who must be crazy, she thought, and who made her want to laugh. The idea filled her with dismay and with a painful, irresistible excitement.
“Well you never can tell till you give it a try,” the man said, as if it were a joke. He looked at May. The old woman made up her mind. She said scornfully, “It don’t matter to me.” She put her elbows on the counter and held her head between her two hands, as if she were pressing something in. “Pity to take your time,” she said.
“You really ought to lay down so you can relax better.”
“Sitting down—” she said, and seemed to lose her breath a moment—“sitting down’s good enough for me.”
Then the man took a bottle-opener off a card of knick-knacks they had in the store and he walked over to stand in front of the counter. He was not in any hurry. When he spoke it was in a natural voice but it had changed a little; it had grown mild and unconcerned. “Now I know you’re resisting this idea,” he said softly. “I know you’re resisting it and I know why. It’s because you’re afraid.” The old woman made a noise of protest or alarm and he held up his hand, but gently. “You’re afraid,” he said, “and all I want to show you, all I mean to show you, is that there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Nothing to be afraid of, I just want you to keep your eyes on this shiny metal object I’m holding in my hand. That’s right, just keep your eyes on this shiny metal object here in my hand. Just keep your eyes on it. Don’t think. Don’t worry. Just say to yourself, there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be afraid of—” His voice sank; May could not make out the words. She stayed pressed against the soft-drink cooler. She wanted to laugh, she could not help it, watching the somehow disreputable back of this man’s head and his white, rounded, twitching shoulders. But she did not laugh because she had to wait to see what her grandmother would do. If her grandmother capitulated it would be as unsettling an event as an earthquake or a flood; it would crack the foundations of her life and set her terrifyingly free. The old woman stared with furious unblinking obedience at the bottle-opener in the man’s hand.
“Now I just want you to tell me,” he said, “if you can still see—if you can still see—” He bent forward to look into her face. “I just want you to tell me if you can still see—” The old woman’s face with its enormous cold eyes and its hard ferocious expression was on a level with his own. He stopped; he drew back.
“Hey what’s the matter?” he said, not in his hypnotizing but his ordinary voice—in fact a sharper voice than ordinary, which made May jump. “What’s the matter, lady, come on, wake up. Wake up,” he said, and touched her shoulder to give her a little shake. The old woman with a look of intemperate scorn still on her face fell forwards across the counter with a loud noise, scattering several packages of Kleenex, bubble gum, and cake decorations over the floor. The man dropped the bottle-opener and giving May an outraged look and crying, “I’m not responsible—it never happened before,” he ran out of the store to his car. May heard his car start and then she ran out after him, as if she wanted to call something, as if she wanted to call “Help” or “Stay.” But she did not call anything, she stood with her mouth open in the dust in front of the gas pumps, and he would not have heard her anyway; he gave one wildly negative wave out the window of his car and roared away to the north.
May stood outside the store and no other cars went by on the highway, no one came. The yards were empty in Black Horse. It had begun to rain a little while before and the drops of rain fell separately around her, sputtering in the dust. Finally she went back and sat on the step of the store where the rain fell too. It was quite warm and she did not mind. She sat with her legs folded under her looking out at the road where she might walk now in any direction she liked, and the world which lay flat and accessible and full of silence in front of her. She sat and waited for that moment to come when she could not wait any longer, when she would have to get up and go into the store where it was darker than ever now on account of the rain and where her grandmother lay fallen across the counter dead, and what was more, victorious.
THE PEACE OF UTRECHT
I.
I have been at home now for three weeks and it has not been a success. Maddy and I, though we speak cheerfully of our enjoyment of so long and intimate a visit, will be relieved when it is over. Silences disturb us. We laugh immoderately. I am afraid—very likely we are both afraid—that when the moment comes to say goodbye, unless we are very quick to kiss, and fervently mockingly squeeze each other’s shoulders, we will have to look straight into the desert that is between us and acknowledge that we are not merely indifferent; at heart we reject each other, and as for that past we make so much of sharing we do not really share it at all, each of us keeping it jealously to herself, thinking privately that the other has turned alien, and forfeited her claim.
At night we often sit out on the steps of the verandah, and drink gin and smoke diligently to defeat the mosquitoes and postpone until very late the moment of going to bed. It is hot; the evening takes a long time to burn out. The high brick house, which
stays fairly cool until midafternoon, holds the heat of the day trapped until long after dark. It was always like this, and Maddy and I recall how we used to drag our mattress downstairs onto the verandah, where we lay counting falling stars and trying to stay awake till dawn. We never did, falling asleep each night about the time a chill drift of air came up off the river, carrying a smell of reeds and the black ooze of the riverbed. At half-past ten a bus goes through the town, not slowing much; we see it go by at the end of our street. It is the same bus I used to take when I came home from college, and I remember coming into Jubilee on some warm night, seeing the earth bare around the massive roots of the trees, the drinking fountain surrounded by little puddles of water on the main street, the soft scrawls of blue and red and orange light that said BILLIARDS and CAFE; feeling as I recognized these signs a queer kind of oppression and release, as I exchanged the whole holiday world of school, of friends and, later on, of love, for the dim world of continuing disaster, of home. Maddy making the same journey four years earlier must have felt the same thing. I want to ask her: is it possible that children growing up as we did lose the ability to believe in—to be at home in—any ordinary and peaceful reality? But I don’t ask her; we never talk about any of that. No exorcising here, says Maddy in her thin, bright voice with the slangy quality I had forgotten, we’re not going to depress each other. So we haven’t.
One night Maddy took me to a party at the Lake, which is about thirty miles west of here. The party was held in a cottage a couple of women from Jubilee had rented for the week. Most of the women there seemed to be widowed, single, separated or divorced; the men were mostly young and unmarried—those from Jubilee so young that I remember them only as little boys in the lower grades. There were two or three older men, not with their wives. But the women—they reminded me surprisingly of certain women familiar to me in my childhood, though of course I never saw their party-going personalities, only their activities in the stores and offices, and not infrequently in the Sunday schools, of Jubilee. They differed from the married women in being more aware of themselves in the world, a little brisker, sharper and coarser (though I can think of only one or two whose respectability was ever in question). They wore resolutely stylish though matronly clothes, which tended to swish and rustle over their hard rubber corsets, and they put perfume, quite a lot of it, on their artificial flowers. Maddy’s friends were considerably modernized; they had copper rinses on their hair, and blue eyelids, and a robust capacity for drink.