Selected Stories (99 page)

Liza swam in a straight line as hard as she could across the pond. She splashed her way out and heavily climbed the bank. She passed the owls and the eagle staring from behind glass. The “Nature does nothing uselessly” sign.

She didn’t see Bea anywhere. Not ahead on the boardwalk over the marsh. Not in the open space under the pine trees. Liza took the path to the back door of the house. In the middle of the path was a beech tree you had to go around, and there were initials carved in the smooth bark. One “L” for Ladner, another for Liza, a “K” for Kenny. A foot or so below were the letters “P.D.P.” When Liza had first shown Bea the initials, Kenny had banged his fist against P.D.P. “Pull down pants!” he shouted, hopping up and down. Ladner gave him a serious pretend-rap on the head. “Proceed down path,” he said, and pointed out the arrow scratched in the bark, curving around the trunk. “Pay no attention to the dirty-minded juveniles,” he said to Bea.

Liza could not bring herself to knock on the door. She was full of
guilt and foreboding. It seemed to her that Bea would have to go away. How could she stay after such an insult—how could she put up with any of them? Bea did not understand about Ladner. And how could she? Liza herself couldn’t have described to anybody what he was like. In the secret life she had with him, what was terrible was always funny, badness was mixed up with silliness, you always had to join in with dopey faces and voices and pretending he was a cartoon monster. You couldn’t get out of it, or even want to, any more than you could stop an invasion of pins and needles.

Liza went around the house and out of the shade of the trees. Barefoot, she crossed the hot gravel road. There was her own house sitting in the middle of a cornfield at the end of a short lane. It was a wooden house with the top half painted white and the bottom half a glaring pink, like lipstick. That had been Liza’s father’s idea. Maybe he thought it would perk the place up. Maybe he thought pink would make it look as if it had a woman inside it.

There is a mess in the kitchen—spilled cereal on the floor, puddles of milk souring on the counter. A pile of clothes from the Laundromat overflowing the corner armchair, and the dishcloth—Liza knows this without looking—all wadded up with the garbage in the sink. It is her job to clean all this up, and she had better do it before her father gets home.

She doesn’t worry about it yet. She goes upstairs where it is baking hot under the sloping roof and gets out her little bag of precious things. She keeps this bag stuffed in the toe of an old rubber boot that is too small for her. Nobody knows about it. Certainly not Kenny.

In the bag there is a Barbie-doll evening dress, stolen from a girl Liza used to play with (Liza doesn’t much like the dress anymore, but it has an importance because it was stolen), a blue snap-shut case with her mother’s glasses inside, a painted wooden egg that was her prize for an Easter picture-drawing contest in Grade 2 (with a smaller egg inside it and a still smaller egg inside that). And the one rhinestone earring that she found on the road. For a long time she believed the rhinestones to be diamonds. The design of the earring is complicated and graceful, with teardrop rhinestones dangling from loops and scallops of smaller stones, and when hung from Liza’s ear it almost brushes her shoulders.

She is wearing only her bathing suit, so she has to carry the earring curled up in her palm, a blazing knot. Her head feels swollen with the heat, with leaning over her secret bag, with her resolution. She thinks with longing of the shade under Ladner’s trees, as if that were a black pond.

There is not one tree anywhere near this house, and the only bush is a lilac with curly, brown-edged leaves, by the back steps. Around the house nothing but corn, and at a distance the leaning old barn that Liza and Kenny are forbidden to go into, because it might collapse at any time. No divisions over here, no secret places—everything is bare and simple.

But when you cross the road—as Liza is doing now, trotting on the gravel—when you cross into Ladner’s territory, it’s like coming into a world of different and distinct countries. There is the marsh country, which is deep and jungly, full of botflies and jewelweed and skunk cabbage. A sense there of tropical threats and complications. Then the pine plantation, solemn as a church, with its high boughs and needled carpet, inducing whispering. And the dark rooms under the down-swept branches of the cedars—entirely shaded and secret rooms with a bare earth floor. In different places the sun falls differently and in some places not at all. In some places the air is thick and private, and in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are harsh or enticing. Certain walks impose decorum and certain stones are set a jump apart so that they call out for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut and a star from a planet, and places also where they have run and hollered and hung from branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.

When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be
left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose from its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look to him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.

He clucked his tongue faintly and his eyes shone out of ambush, hard and round as the animals’ glass eyes.

Bad-bad-bad
.

“The loveliest thing,” Bea said. “Liza, tell me—was this your mother’s?”

Liza said yes. She could see now that this gift of a single earring might be seen as childish and pathetic—perhaps intentionally pathetic. Even keeping it as a treasure could seem stupid. But if it was her mother’s, that would be understandable, and it would be a gift of some importance. “You could put it on a chain,” she said. “If you put it on a chain you could wear it around your neck.”

“But I was just thinking that!” Bea said. “I was just thinking it would look lovely on a chain. A silver chain—don’t you think? Oh, Liza, I am just so proud you gave it to me!”

“You could wear it in your nose,” said Ladner. But he said this without any sharpness. He was peaceable now—played out, peaceable. He spoke of Bea’s nose as if it might be a pleasant thing to contemplate.

Ladner and Bea were sitting under the plum trees right behind the house. They sat in the wicker chairs that Bea had brought out from town. She had not brought much—just enough to make islands here and there among Ladner’s skins and instruments. These chairs, some cups, a cushion. The wineglasses they were drinking out of now.

Bea had changed into a dark-blue dress of very thin and soft material. It hung long and loose from her shoulders. She trickled the rhinestones through her fingers, she let them fall and twinkle in the folds of her blue dress. She had forgiven Ladner, after all, or made a bargain not to remember.

Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. Surely she could. All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a
hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant.
None of that. Not allowed. Be good
. The woman who could rescue them—who could make them all, keep them all, good.

What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn’t see.

Only Liza sees.

Liza locked the door as you had to, from the outside. She put the key in the plastic bag and the bag in the hole in the tree. She moved towards the snowmobile, and when Warren didn’t do the same she said, “What’s the matter with you?”

Warren said, “What about the window by the back door?”

Liza breathed out noisily. “Ooh, I’m an idiot!” she said. “I’m an idiot ten times over!”

Warren went back to the window and kicked at the bottom pane. Then he got a stick of firewood from the pile by the tin shed and was able to smash the glass out. “Big enough so a kid could get in,” he said.

“How could I be so stupid?” Liza said. “You saved my life.”

“Our life,” Warren said.

The tin shed wasn’t locked. Inside it he found some cardboard boxes, bits of lumber, simple tools. He tore off a piece of cardboard of a suitable size. He took great satisfaction in nailing it over the pane that he had just smashed out. “Otherwise animals could get in,” he said to Liza.

When he was all finished with this job, he found that Liza had walked down into the snow between the trees. He went after her.

“I was wondering if the bear was still in there,” she said.

He was going to say that he didn’t think bears came this far south, but she didn’t give him the time. “Can you tell what the trees are by their bark?” she said.

Warren said he couldn’t even tell from their leaves. “Well, maples,” he said. “Maples and pines.”

“Cedar,” said Liza. “You’ve got to know cedar. There’s a cedar. There’s a wild cherry. Down there’s birch. The white ones. And that
one with the bark like gray skin? That’s a beech. See, it had letters carved on it, but they’ve spread out, they just look like any old blotches now.”

Warren wasn’t interested. He only wanted to get home. It wasn’t much after three o’clock, but you could feel the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow.

The stories in this volume appear in roughly chronological sequence. They are listed here in the same order as in the book, with the place and year of first publication following.

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published more than ten collections of stories as well as a novel,
Lives of Girls and Women
. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review
, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

BOOKS BY
ALICE MUNRO

Dear Life

Too Much Happiness

The View from Castle Rock

Away from Her

Carried Away

Runaway

Vintage Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

The Love of a Good Woman

Selected Stories

Open Secrets

Friend of My Youth