by Alice Munro
For some reason reading these words had a strong effect on me; I felt as if my old life was lying around me, waiting to be picked up again. Only then for a few moments in our old room did I have this feeling. The brown halls of the old High School (a building since torn down) were re-opened for me, and I remembered the Saturday nights in spring, after the snow had melted and all the country people crowded into town. I thought of us walking up and down the main street, arm in arm with two or three other girls, until it got dark, then going in to Al’s to dance, under a string of little coloured lights. The windows in the dance hall were open; they let in the raw spring air with its smell of earth and the river; the hands of farm boys crumpled and stained our white blouses when we danced. And now an experience which seemed not at all memorable at the time (in fact Al’s was a dismal place and the ritual of walking up and down the street to show ourselves off we thought crude and ridiculous, though we could not resist it) had been transformed into something curiously meaningful for me, and complete; it took in more than the girls dancing and the single street, it spread over the whole town, its rudimentary pattern of streets and its bare trees and muddy yards just free of the snow, over the dirt roads where the lights of cars appeared, jolting towards the town, under an immense pale wash of sky.
Also: we wore ballerina shoes, and full black taffeta skirts, and short coats of such colours as robin’s egg blue, cerise red, lime green. Maddy wore a great funereal bow at the neck of her blouse and a wreath of artificial daisies in her hair. These were the fashions, or so we believed, of one of the years after the war. Maddy; her bright skeptical look; my sister.
I ask Maddy, “Do you ever remember what she was like before?”
“No,” says Maddy. “No, I can’t.”
“I sometimes think I can,” I say hesitantly. “Not very often.” Cowardly tender nostalgia, trying to get back to a gentler truth.
“I think you would have to have been away,” Maddy says, “You would have to have been away these last—quite a few—years to get those kind of memories.”
It was then she said: No exorcising.
And the only other thing she said was, “She spent a lot of time sorting things. All kinds of things. Greeting cards. Buttons and yarn. Sorting and putting them into little piles. It would keep her quiet by the hour.”
II.
I have been to visit Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou. This is the third time I have been there since I came home and each time they have been spending the afternoon making rugs out of dyed rags. They are very old now. They sit in a hot little porch that is shaded by bamboo blinds; the rags and the half-finished rugs make an encouraging, domestic sort of disorder around them. They do not go out any more, but they get up early in the mornings, wash and powder themselves and put on their shapeless print dresses trimmed with rickrack and white braid. They make coffee and porridge and then they clean the house, Aunt Annie working upstairs and Auntie Lou down. Their house is very clean, dark and varnished, and it smells of vinegar and apples. In the afternoon they lie down for an hour and then put on their afternoon dresses, with brooches at the neck, and sit down to do hand work.
They are the sort of women whose flesh melts or mysteriously falls away as they get older. Auntie Lou’s hair is still black, but it looks stiff and dry in its net as the dead end of hair on a ripe ear of corn. She sits straight and moves her bone-thin arms in very fine, slow movements; she looks like an Egyptian, with her long neck and small sharp face and greatly wrinkled, greatly darkened skin. Aunt Annie, perhaps because of her gentler, even coquettish manner, seems more humanly fragile and worn. Her hair is nearly all gone, and she keeps on her head one of those pretty caps designed for young wives who wear curlers to bed. She calls my attention to this and asks if I do not think it is becoming. They are both adept at these little ironies, and take a mild delight in pointing out whatever is grotesque about themselves. Their company manners are exceedingly lighthearted and their conversation with each other falls into an accomplished pattern of teasing and protest. I have a fascinated glimpse of Maddy and myself, grown old, caught back in the web of sisterhood after everything else has disappeared, making tea for some young, loved, and essentially unimportant relative—and exhibiting just such a polished relationship; what will anyone ever know of us? As I watch my entertaining old aunts I wonder if old people play such stylized and simplified roles with us because they are afraid that anything more honest might try our patience; or if they do it out of delicacy—to fill the social time—when in reality they feel so far away from us that there is no possibility of communicating with us at all.
At any rate I felt held at a distance by them, at least until this third afternoon when they showed in front of me some signs of disagreement with each other. I believe this is the first time that has happened. Certainly I never saw them argue in all the years when Maddy and I used to visit them, and we used to visit them often—not only out of duty but because we found the atmosphere of sense and bustle reassuring after the comparative anarchy, the threatened melodrama, of our house at home.
Aunt Annie wanted to take me upstairs to show me something. Auntie Lou objected, looking remote and offended, as if the whole subject embarrassed her. And such is the feeling for discretion, the tradition of circumlocution in that house, that it was unthinkable for me to ask them what they were talking about.
“Oh, let her have her tea,” Auntie Lou said, and Aunt Annie said, “Well. When she’s had her tea.”
“Do as you like then. That upstairs is hot.”
“Will you come up, Lou?”
“Then who’s going to watch the children?”
“Oh, the children. I forgot.”
So Aunt Annie and I withdrew into the darker parts of the house. It occurred to me, absurdly, that she was going to give me a five-dollar bill. I remembered that sometimes she used to draw me into the front hall in this mysterious way and open her purse. I do not think that Auntie Lou was included in that secret either. But we went on upstairs, and into Aunt Annie’s own bedroom, which looked so neat and virginal, papered with timid flowery wallpaper, the dressers spread with white scarves. It was really very hot, as Auntie Lou had said.
“Now,” Aunt Annie said, a little breathless. “Get me down that box on the top shelf of the closet.”
I did, and she opened it and said with her wistful conspirator’s gaiety, “Now I guess you wondered what became of all your mother’s clothes?”
I had not thought of it. I sat down on the bed, forgetting that in this house the beds were not to be sat on; the bedrooms had one straight chair apiece, for that. Aunt Annie did not check me. She began to lift things out, saying, “Maddy never mentioned them, did she?”
“I never asked her,” I said.
“No. Nor I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t say a word about it to Maddy. But I thought I might as well show you. Why not? Look,” she said. “We washed and ironed what we could and what we couldn’t we sent to the cleaners. I paid the cleaning myself. Then we mended anything needed mending. It’s all in good condition, see?”
I watched helplessly while she held up for my inspection the underwear which was on top. She showed me where things had been expertly darned and mended and where the elastic had been renewed. She showed me a slip which had been worn, she said, only once. She took out nightgowns, a dressing gown, knitted bed-jackets. “This was what she had on the last time I saw her,” she said. “I think it was. Yes.” I recognized with alarm the peach-coloured bed-jacket I had sent for Christmas.
“You can see it’s hardly used. Why, it’s hardly used at all.”
“No,” I said.
“Underneath is her dresses.” Her hands rummaged down through those brocades and flowered silks, growing yearly more exotic, in which my mother had wished to costume herself. Thinking of her in these peacock colours, even Aunt Annie seemed to hesitate. She drew up a blouse. “I washed this by hand, it looks like new. There’s a coat hanging up in the closet. Perfectly good. She never wore a co
at. She wore it when she went into the hospital, that was all. Wouldn’t it fit you?”
“No,” I said. “No.” For Aunt Annie was already moving towards the closet. “I just got a new coat. I have several coats. Aunt Annie!”
“But why should you go and buy,” Aunt Annie went on in her mild stubborn way, “when there are things here as good as new.”
“I would rather buy,” I said, and was immediately sorry for the coldness in my voice. Nevertheless I continued, “When I need something, I do go and buy it.” This suggestion that I was not poor any more brought a look of reproach and aloofness into my aunt’s face. She said nothing. I went and looked at a picture of Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou and their older brothers and their mother and father which hung over the bureau. They stared back at me with grave accusing Protestant faces, for I had run up against the simple unprepossessing materialism which was the rock of their lives. Things must be used; everything must be used up, saved and mended and made into something else and used again; clothes were to be worn. I felt that I had hurt Aunt Annie’s feelings and that furthermore I had probably borne out a prediction of Auntie Lou’s, for she was sensitive to certain attitudes in the world that were too sophisticated for Aunt Annie to bother about, and she had very likely said that I would not want my mother’s clothes.
“She was gone sooner than anybody would have expected,” Aunt Annie said. I turned around surprised and she said, “Your mother.” Then I wondered if the clothes had been the main thing after all; perhaps they were only to serve as the introduction to a conversation about my mother’s death, which Aunt Annie might feel to be a necessary part of our visit. Auntie Lou would feel differently; she had an almost superstitious dislike of certain rituals of emotionalism; such a conversation could never take place with her about.
“Two months after she went into the hospital,” Aunt Annie said. “She was gone in two months.” I saw that she was crying distractedly, as old people do, with miserable scanty tears. She pulled a handkerchief out of her dress and rubbed at her face.
“Maddy told her it was nothing but a check-up,” she said. “Maddy told her it would be about three weeks. Your mother went in there and she thought she was coming out in three weeks.” She was whispering as if she was afraid of us being overheard. “Do you think she wanted to stay in there where nobody could make out what she was saying and they wouldn’t let her out of her bed? She wanted to come home!”
“But she was too sick,” I said.
“No, she wasn’t, she was just the way she’d always been, just getting a little worse and a little worse as time went on. But after she went in there she felt she would die, everything kind of closed in around her, and she went down so fast.”
“Maybe it would have happened anyway,” I said. “Maybe it was just the time.”
Aunt Annie paid no attention to me. “I went up to see her,” she said. “She was so glad to see me because I could tell what she was saying. She said Aunt Annie, they won’t keep me in here for good, will they? And I said to her, No. I said, No.
“And she said, Aunt Annie ask Maddy to take me home again or I’m going to die. She didn’t want to die. Don’t you ever think a person wants to die, just because it seems to everybody else they have got no reason to go on living. So I told Maddy. But she didn’t say anything. She went to the hospital every day and saw your mother and she wouldn’t take her home. Your mother told me Maddy said to her, I won’t take you home.”
“Mother didn’t always tell the truth,” I said. “Aunt Annie, you know that.”
“Did you know your mother got out of the hospital?”
“No,” I said. But strangely I felt no surprise, only a vague physical sense of terror, a longing not to be told—and beyond this a feeling that what I would be told I already knew, I had always known.
“Maddy, didn’t she tell you?”
“No.”
“Well she got out. She got out the side door where the ambulance comes in, it’s the only door that isn’t locked. It was at night when they haven’t so many nurses to watch them. She got her dressing gown and her slippers on, the first time she ever got anything on herself in years, and she went out and there it was January, snowing, but she didn’t go back in. She was away down the street when they caught her. After that they put the board across her bed.”
The snow, the dressing gown and slippers, the board across the bed. It was a picture I was much inclined to resist. Yet I had no doubt that this was true, all this was true and exactly as it happened. It was what she would do; all her life as long as I had known her led up to that flight.
“Where was she going?” I said, but I knew there was no answer.
“I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Oh, Helen, when they came after her she tried to run. She tried to run.”
The flight that concerns everybody. Even behind my aunt’s soft familiar face there is another, more primitive old woman, capable of panic in some place her faith has never touched.
She began folding the clothes up and putting them back in the box. “They nailed a board across her bed. I saw it. You can’t blame the nurses. They can’t watch everybody. They haven’t the time.
“I said to Maddy after the funeral, Maddy, may it never happen like that to you. I couldn’t help it, that’s what I said.” She sat down on the bed herself now, folding things and putting them back in the box, making an effort to bring her voice back to normal—and pretty soon succeeding, for having lived this long who would not be an old hand at grief and self-control?
“We thought it was hard,” she said finally. “Lou and I thought it was hard.”
Is this the last function of old women, beyond making rag rugs and giving us five-dollar bills—making sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without?
She was afraid of Maddy—through fear, had cast her out for good. I thought of what Maddy had said: nobody speaks the same language.
When I got home Maddy was out in the back kitchen making a salad. Rectangles of sunlight lay on the rough linoleum. She had taken off her high-heeled shoes and was standing there in her bare feet. The back kitchen is a large untidy pleasant room with a view, behind the stove and the drying dishtowels, of the sloping back yard, the CPR station and the golden, marshy river that almost encircles the town of Jubilee. My children who had felt a little repressed in the other house immediately began to play under the table.
“Where have you been?” Maddy said.
“Nowhere. Just to see the Aunts.”
“Oh, how are they?”
“They’re fine. They’re indestructible.”
“Are they? Yes I guess they are. I haven’t been to see them for a while. I don’t actually see that much of them any more.”
“Don’t you?” I said, and she knew then what they had told me.
“They were beginning to get on my nerves a bit, after the funeral. And Fred got me this job and everything and I’ve been so busy—” She looked at me, waiting for what I would say, smiling a little derisively, patiently.
“Don’t be guilty, Maddy,” I said softly. All this time the children were running in and out and shrieking at each other between our legs.
“I’m not guilty,” she said. “Where did you get that? I’m not guilty.” She went to turn on the radio, talking to me over her shoulder. “Fred’s going to eat with us again since he’s alone. I got some raspberries for dessert. Raspberries are almost over for this year. Do they look all right to you?”
“They look all right,” I said. “Do you want me to finish this?”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go and get a bowl.”
She went into the dining room and came back carrying a pink cut-glass bowl, for the raspberries.
“I couldn’t go on,” she said. “I wanted my life.”
She was standing on the little step between the kitchen and the dining room and suddenly she lost her grip on the bowl, either because her hands had begun to shake or because she had not
picked it up properly in the first place; it was quite a heavy and elaborate old bowl. It slipped out of her hands and she tried to catch it and it smashed on the floor.
Maddy began to laugh. “Oh, hell,” she said. “Oh, hell, oh Hel-en,” she said, using one of our old foolish ritual phrases of despair. “Look what I’ve done now. In my bare feet yet. Get me a broom.”
“Take your life, Maddy. Take it.”
“Yes I will,” Maddy said. “Yes I will.”
“Go away, don’t stay here.”
“Yes I will.”
Then she bent down and began picking up the pieces of broken pink glass. My children stood back looking at her with awe and she was laughing and saying, “It’s no loss to me. I’ve got a whole shelf full of glass bowls. I’ve got enough glass bowls to do me the rest of my life. Oh, don’t stand there looking at me, go and get me a broom!” I went around the kitchen looking for a broom because I seemed to have forgotten where it was kept and she said, “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t I?”
DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES
Miss Marsalles is having another party. (Out of musical integrity, or her heart’s bold yearning for festivity, she never calls it a recital.) My mother is not an inventive or convincing liar, and the excuses which occur to her are obviously second-rate. The painters are coming. Friends from Ottawa. Poor Carrie is having her tonsils out. In the end all she can say is: Oh, but won’t all that be too much trouble, now? Now being weighted with several troublesome meanings; you may take your choice. Now that Miss Marsalles has moved from the brick and frame bungalow on Bank Street, where the last three parties have been rather squashed, to an even smaller place—if she has described it correctly—on Bala Street. (Bala Street, where is that?) Or: now that Miss Marsalles’ older sister is in bed, following a stroke; now that Miss Marsalles herself—as my mother says, we must face these things—is simply getting too old.