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“Ultimately literature is nothing but carpentry. With both

you are working with reality, a material as hard as wood.”

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Recipient of 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature

Readings for Exploration of Short Story Concepts and Forms

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.1 Exploration of Plot, First-Person Point of View, and Ironic Tone

8.1  An Example for Exploration of Plot, First-Person Point of View, and Ironic Tone

Alice Munro (b. 1931)

Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, a small town in southern Ontario, Canada. She began publishing short stories when she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. Since then she has published seven collections of her stories, three of which received the Gov- ernor General’s Award for fiction. Much of her work reflects perceptions she gained from observing the relationships, ordinary happenings, and ways of people in her small town and its rural environment. There’s a “looking back” quality in her work, developed not with nostal- gia but with clarity, humor, and insight, especially about women, that speaks subtly to realities in today’s world.

How I Met My Husband Alice Munro (1974)

We heard the plane come over at noon, roaring through the radio news, and we were sure it was going to hit the house, so we all ran out into the yard. We saw it come in over the tree tops, all red and silver, the first close-up plane I ever saw. Mrs. Peebles screamed.

“Crash landing,” their little boy said. Joey was his name.

“It’s okay” said Dr. Peebles. “He knows what he’s doing.” Dr. Peebles was only an animal doctor, but had a calming way of talking, like any doctor.

This was my first job—working for Dr. and Mrs. Peebles, who had bought an old house out on the Fifth Line, about five miles out of town. It was just when the trend was starting of town people buying up old farms, not to work them but to live on them.

We watched the plane land across the road, where the fairgrounds used to be. It did make a good landing field, nice and level for the old race track, and the barns and display sheds torn down for scrap lumber so there was nothing in the way. Even the old grandstand had burned.

“All right,” said Mrs. Peebles, snappy as she always was when she got over her nerves. “Let’s go back in the house. Let’s not stand here gawk- ing like a set of farmers.”

She didn’t say that to hurt my feelings. It never occurred to her.

I was just setting the dessert down when Loretta Bird arrived, out of breath, at the screen.

Note that this story uses a first-

person point of view. Everything is

seen through the eyes of a teenage

girl.

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“I thought it was going to crash into the house and kill youse all!”

She lived on the next place and the Peebles thought she was a country- woman, they didn’t know the difference. She and her husband didn’t farm, he worked on the roads and had a bad name for drinking. They had seven children and couldn’t get credit at the Hi-Way Grocery. The Peebles made her welcome, not knowing any better, as I say, and offered her dessert.

Dessert was never anything to write home about, at their place. A dish of jello or sliced bananas or fruit out of a tin. “Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,” my mother used to say, but Mrs. Peebles operated differently.

Loretta Bird saw me getting the can of peaches.

“Oh, never mind,” she said. “I haven’t got the right kind of a stomach to trust what comes out of those tins, I can only eat home canning.”

I could have slapped her. I bet she never put down fruit in her life.

“I know what he’s landed here for,” she said. “He’s got permission to use the fairgrounds and take people up for rides. It costs a dollar. It’s the same fellow who was over at Palmerston last week and was up the lakeshore before that. I wouldn’t go up, if you paid me.”

“I’d jump at the chance,” Dr. Peebles said. “I’d like to see this neighbor- hood from the air.”

Mrs. Peebles said she would just as soon see it from the ground. Joey said he wanted to go and Heather did, too. Joey was nine and Heather was seven.

“Would you, Edie?” Heather said.

I said I didn’t know. I was scared but I never admitted that, especially in front of children I was taking care of.

“People are going to be coming out here in their cars raising dust and trampling your property, if I was you I would complain,” Loretta said. She hooked her legs around the chair rung and I knew we were in for a lengthy visit.

After Dr. Peebles went back to his office or out on his next call and Mrs. Peebles went for her nap, she would hang around me while I was trying to do the dishes. She would pass remarks about the Peebles in their own house.

“She wouldn’t find time to lay down in the middle of the day, if she had seven kids like I got.”

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She asked me did they fight and did they keep things in the dresser drawer not to have babies with. She said it was a sin if they did. I pre- tended I didn’t know what she was talking about.

I was fifteen and away from home for the first time. My parents had made the effort and sent me to high school for a year, but I didn’t like it, I was shy of strangers and the work was hard, they didn’t make it nice for you or explain the way they do now. At the end of the year the averages were published in the paper, and mine came out at the very bottom, 37 percent. My father said that’s enough and I didn’t blame him. The last thing I wanted, anyway, was to go on and end up teaching school. It happened the very day the paper came out with my disgrace in it. Dr. Peebles was staying at our place for dinner, having just helped one of our cows have twins, and he said I looked smart to him and his wife was looking for a girl to help. He said she felt tied down, with the two children, out in the country. I guess she would, my mother said, being polite, though I could tell from her face she was wondering what on earth it would be like to have only two children and no barn work, and then to be complaining.

When I went home I would describe to them the work I had to do and it made everybody laugh. Mrs. Peebles had an automatic washer and dryer, the first I ever saw. I have had those in my own home for such a long time now it’s hard to remember how much of a miracle it was to me, not having to struggle with the wringer and hang up and haul down. Let alone not having to heat water. Then there was practically no baking. Mrs. Peebles said she couldn’t make pie crust, the most amazing thing I ever heard a woman admit. I could, of course, and I could make light biscuits and a white cake and a dark cake, but they didn’t want it, she said they watched their figures. The only thing I didn’t like about work- ing there, in fact, was feeling half hungry a lot of the time. I used to bring back a box of doughnuts made out at home, and hide them under my bed. The children found out, and I didn’t mind sharing, but I thought I better bind them to secrecy.

The day after the plane landed Mrs. Peebles put both children in the car and drove over to Chesley to get their hair cut. There was a good woman then at Chesley for doing hair. She got hers done at the same place, Mrs. Peebles did, and that meant they would be gone a good while. She had to pick a day Dr. Peebles wasn’t going out into the country, she didn’t have her own car. Cars were still in short supply then, after the war.

I loved being left in the house alone, to do my work at leisure. The kitchen was all white and bright yellow, with fluorescent lights. That was before they ever thought of making the appliances all different colors and doing the cupboards like dark old wood and hiding the lighting. I loved light. I loved the double sink. So would anybody new come from washing dishes in a dish pan with a rag-plugged hole on an oilcloth- covered table by light of a coal-oil lamp. I kept everything shining.

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The bathroom too. I had a bath in there once a week. They wouldn’t have minded if I took one oftener, but to me it seemed like asking too much, or maybe risking making it less wonderful. The basin and the tub and the toilet were all pink, and there were glass doors with flamingoes painted on them, to shut off the tub. The light had a rosy cast and the mat sank under your feet like snow, except that it was warm. The mirror was three-way. With the mirror all steamed up and the air like a per- fume cloud, from things I was allowed to use, I stood up on the side of the tub and admired myself naked, from three directions. Sometimes I thought about the way we lived out at home and the way we lived here and how one way was so hard to imagine when you were living the other way. But I thought it was still a lot easier living the way we lived at home, to picture something like this, the painted flamingoes and the warmth and the soft mat, than it was for anybody knowing only things like this to picture how it was the other way. And why was that?

I was through my jobs in no time, and had the vegetables peeled for supper and sitting in cold water besides. Then I went into Mrs. Peebles’ bedroom. I had been in there plenty of times, cleaning, and I always took a good look in her closet, at the clothes she had hanging there. I wouldn’t have looked in her drawers, but a closet is open to anybody. That’s a lie. I would have looked in drawers, but I would have felt worse doing it and been more scared she could tell.

Some clothes in her closets she wore all the time, I was quite familiar with them. Others she never put on, they were pushed to the back. I was disappointed to see no wedding dress. But there was one long dress I could just see the skirt of, and I was hungering to see the rest. Now I took note of where it hung and lifted it out. It was satin, a lovely weight on my arm, light bluish-green in color, almost silvery. It had a fitted, pointed waist and a full skirt and an off-the-shoulder fold hiding the little sleeves.

Next thing was easy. I got out of my own things and slipped it on. I was slimmer at fifteen than anybody would believe who knows me now and the fit was beautiful. I didn’t, of course, have a strapless bra on, which was what it needed, I just had to slide my straps down my arms under the material. Then I tried pinning up my hair, to get the effect. One thing led to another. I put on rouge and lipstick and eyebrow pencil from her dresser. The heat of the day and the weight of the satin and all the excitement made me thirsty, and I went out to the kitchen, got-up as I was, to get a glass of ginger ale with ice cubes from the refrigerator. The Peebles drank ginger ale, or fruit drinks, all day, like water, and I was getting so I did too. Also there was no limit on ice cubes, which I was so fond of I would even put them in a glass of milk.

I turned from putting the ice tray back and saw a man watching me through the screen. It was the luckiest thing in the world I didn’t spill the ginger ale down the front of me then and there.

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“I never meant to scare you. I knocked but you were getting the ice out, you didn’t hear me.”

I couldn’t see what he looked like, he was dark the way somebody is pressed up against a screen door with the bright daylight behind them. I only knew he wasn’t from around here.

“I’m from the plane over there. My name is Chris Watters and what I was wondering was if I could use that pump.”

There was a pump in the yard. That was the way the people used to get their water. Now I noticed he was carrying a pail.

“You’re welcome,” I said, “I can get it from the tap and save you pump- ing.” I guess I wanted him to know we had piped water, didn’t pump ourselves.

“I don’t mind the exercise,” He didn’t move, though, and finally he said, “Were you going to a dance?”

Seeing a stranger there had made me entirely forget how I was dressed.

“Or is that the way ladies around here generally get dressed up in the afternoon?”

I didn’t know how to joke back then. I was too embarrassed.

“You live here? Are you the lady of the house?”

“I’m the hired girl.”

Some people change when they find that out, their whole way of look- ing at you and speaking to you changes, but his didn’t.

“Well, I just wanted to tell you you look very nice. I was so surprised when I looked in the door and saw you. Just because you looked so nice and beautiful.”

I wasn’t even old enough then to realize how out of the common it is, for a man to say something like that to a woman, or somebody he is treating like a woman. For a man to say a word like beautiful! I wasn’t old enough to realize or to say anything back, or in fact to do anything but wish he would go away. Not that I didn’t like him, but just that it upset me so, having him look at me, and me trying to think of something to say.

He must have understood. He said good-bye, and thanked me, and went and started filling his pail from the pump. I stood behind the Venetian blinds in the dining room, watching him. When he had gone, I went into

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the bedroom and took the dress off and put it back in the same place. I dressed in my own clothes and took my hair down and washed my face, wiping it on Kleenex, which I threw in the wastebasket.

—

The Peebles asked me what kind of man he was. Young, middle-aged, short, tall? I couldn’t say.

“Good-looking?” Dr. Peebles teased me.

I couldn’t think a thing but that he would be coming to get his water again, he would be talking to Dr. or Mrs. Peebles making friends with them, and he would mention seeing me that first afternoon dressed up. Why not mention it? He would think it was funny. And no idea of the trouble it would get me into.

After supper the Peebles drove into town to go to a movie. She wanted to go somewhere with her hair fresh done. I sat in my bright kitchen wondering what to do, knowing I would never sleep. Mrs. Peebles might not fire me, when she found out, but it would give her a different feeling about me altogether. This was the first place I ever worked but I already had picked up things about the way people feel when you are working for them. They like to think you aren’t curious. Not just that you aren’t dishonest, that isn’t enough. They like to feel you don’t notice things, that you don’t think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they like things ironed, and so on. I don’t mean they weren’t kind to me, because they were. They had me eat my meals with them (to tell the truth I expected to, I didn’t know there were families who don’t) and sometimes they took me along in the car. But all the same.

I went up and checked on the children being asleep and then I went out. I had to do it. I crossed the road and went in the old fairgrounds gate. The plane looked unnatural sitting there, and shining with the moon. Off at the far side of the fairgrounds, where the bush was taking over, I saw his tent.

He was sitting outside it smoking a cigarette. He saw me coming.

“Hello, were you looking for a plane ride? I don’t start taking people up till tomorrow.” Then he looked again and said, “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t know you without your long dress on.”

My heart was knocking away, my tongue was dried up. I had to say something. But I couldn’t. My throat was closed and I was like a deaf-and-dumb.

“Did you want a ride? Sit down. Have a cigarette.”

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I couldn’t even shake my head to say no, so he gave me one.

“Put it in your mouth or I can’t light it. It’s a good thing I’m used to shy ladies.”

I did. It wasn’t the first time I had smoked a cigarette, actually. My girl friend out home, Muriel Lower, used to steal them from her brother.

“Look at your hand shaking. Did you just want to have a chat, or what?”

In one burst I said, “I wisht you wouldn’t say anything about that dress.”

“What dress? Oh, the long dress.”

“It’s Mrs. Peebles’.”

“Whose? Oh, the lady you work for? Is that it? She wasn’t home so you got dressed up in her dress and played queen. I don’t blame you. You’re not smoking that cigarette right. Don’t just puff. Draw it in. Did nobody ever show you how to inhale? Are you scared I’ll tell on you? Is that it?”

I was so ashamed at having to ask him to connive this way I couldn’t nod. I just looked at him and he saw yes.

“Well I won’t. I won’t in the slightest way mention it or embarrass you. I give you my word of honor.”

Then he changed the subject, to help me out, seeing I couldn’t even thank him.

“What do you think of this sign?”

It was a board sign lying practically at my feet. SEE THE WORLD FROM THE SKY. ADULTS $1.00, CHILDREN 50¢. QUALIFIED PILOT

“My old sign was getting pretty beat up, I thought I’d make a new one. That’s what I’ve been doing with my time today.”

The lettering wasn’t all that handsome, I thought. I could have done a better one in half an hour.

“I’m not an expert at sign making.”

“It’s very good.” I said.

“I don’t need it for publicity, word of mouth is usually enough. I turned away two carloads tonight. I felt like taking it easy. I didn’t tell them ladies were dropping in to visit me.”

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Now I remembered the children and I was scared again, in case one of them had waked up and call me and I wasn’t there.

“Do You have to go so soon?”

I remembered some manners. “Thank you for the cigarette.”

“Don’t forget. You have my word of honor.”

I tore off across the fairgrounds, scared I’d see the car heading home from town. My sense of time was mixed up, I didn’t know how long I’d been out of the house. But it was all right, it wasn’t late, the children were asleep. I got in bed myself and lay thinking what a lucky end to the day, after all, and among things to be grateful for I could be grateful Loretta Bird hadn’t been the one who caught me.

—

The yard and borders didn’t get trampled, it wasn’t as bad as that. All the same it seemed very public, around the house. The sign was on the fairgrounds gate. People came mostly after supper but a good many in the afternoon, too. The Bird children all came without fifty cents between them and hung on the gate. We got used to the excitement of the plane coming in and taking off, it wasn’t excitement any more. I never went over, after that one time, but would see him when he came to get his water. I would be out on the steps doing sitting-down work, like preparing vegetables, if I could.

“Why don’t you come over? I’ll take you up in my plane.”

“I’m saving my money,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“For what? For getting married?”

I shook my head.

“I’ll take you up for free if you come sometime when it’s slack. I thought you would come, and have another cigarette.”

I made a face to hush him, because you never could tell when the chil- dren would be sneaking around the porch, or Mrs. Peebles herself listen- ing in the house. Sometimes she came out and had a conversation with him. He told her things he hadn’t bothered to tell me. But then I hadn’t thought to ask, He told her he had been in the War, that was where he learned to fly a plane, and now he couldn’t settle down to ordinary life, this was what he liked. She said she couldn’t imagine anybody liking such a thing. Though sometimes, she said, she was almost bored enough to try anything herself, she wasn’t brought up to living in the country.

It’s all my husband’s idea, she said. This was news to me.

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“Maybe you ought to give flying lessons,” she said.

“Would you take them?”

She just laughed.

—

Sunday was a busy flying day in spite of it being preached against from two pulpits. We were all sitting out watching. Joey and Heather were over on the fence with the Bird kids. Their father had said they could go, after their mother saying all week they couldn’t.

A car came down the road past the parked cars and pulled up right in the drive. It was Loretta Bird who got out, all importance, and on the driver’s side another woman got out, more sedately. She was wearing sunglasses.

“This is a lady looking for the man that flies the plane,” Loretta Bird said. “I heard her inquire in the hotel coffee shop where I was having a Coke and I brought her out.”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” the lady said. “I’m Alice Kelling, Mr. Watters’ fiancée.”

This Alice Kelling had on a pair of brown and white checked slacks and a yellow top. Her bust looked to me rather low and bumpy. She had a wor- ried face. Her hair had had a permanent, but had grown out, and she wore a yellow band to keep it off her face. Nothing in the least pretty or even young-looking about her. But you could tell from how she talked she was from the city, or educated, or both.

Dr. Peebles stood up and introduced himself and his wife and me and asked her to be seated.

“He’s up in the air right now, but you’re welcome to sit and wait. He gets his water here and he hasn’t been yet. He’ll probably take his break about five.”

“That is him, then?” said Alice Kelling, wrinkling and straining at the sky.

“He’s not in the habit of running out on you, taking a different name?” Dr. Peebles laughed. He was the one, not his wife to offer iced tea. Then she sent me into the kitchen to fix it. She smiled. She was wearing sun glasses too.

“He never mentioned his fiancée,” she said.

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I loved fixing iced tea with lots of ice and slices of lemon in tall glasses. I ought to have mentioned before, Dr. Peebles was an abstainer, at least around the house, or I wouldn’t have been allowed to take the place. I had to fix a glass for Loretta Bird, too, though it galled me, and when I went out she had settled in my lawn chair, leaving me the steps.

“I knew you was a nurse when I first heard you in that coffee shop.”

“How would you know a thing like that?”

“I get my hunches about people. Was that how you met him, nursing?”

“Chris? Well yes. Yes, it was.”

“Oh, were you overseas?” said Mrs. Peebles.

“No, it was before he went overseas. I nursed him when he was sta- tioned at Centralia and had a ruptured appendix. We got engaged and then he went overseas. My, this is refreshing, after a long drive.”

“He’ll be glad to see you,” Dr. Peebles said, “It’s a rackety kind of life, isn’t it, not staying in one place long enough to really make friends.”

“Youse’ve had a long engagement,” Loretta Bird said.

Alice Kelling passed that over. “I was going to get a room at the hotel, but when I was offered directions I came on out. Do you think I could phone them?”

“No need,” Dr. Peebles said, “You’re five miles away from him if you stay at the hotel. Here, you’re right across the road. Stay with us. We’ve got rooms on rooms, look at this big house.

Asking people to stay, just like that, is certainly a country thing, and maybe seemed natural to him now, but not to Mrs. Peebles, from the way she said, oh yes, we have plenty of room. Or to Alice Kelling, who kept protesting, but let herself be worn down. I got the feeling it was a temptation to her, to be that close. I was trying for a look at her ring. Her nails were painted red, her fingers were freckled and wrinkled. It was a tiny stone. Muriel Lowe’s cousin had one twice as big.

Chris came to get his water, later in the afternoon just as Dr. Peebles had predicted. He must have recognized the car from a way off. He came smiling.

“Here I am chasing after you to see what you’re up to,” called Alice Kel- ling. She got up and went to meet him and they kissed, just touched, in front of us.

“You’re going to spend a lot on gas that way,” Chris said.

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Dr. Peebles invited Chris to stay for supper, since he had already put up the sign that said: NO MORE RIDES TILL 7 P.M. Mrs. Peebles wanted it served in the yard, in spite of bugs. One thing strange to anybody from the country is this eating outside. I had made a potato salad earlier and she had made a jellied salad, that was one thing she could do, so it was just a matter of getting those out, and some sliced meat and cucumbers and fresh leaf lettuce. Loretta Bird hung around for some time saying, “Oh, well. I guess I better get home to those yappers,” and, “It’s so nice just sitting here, I sure hate to get up,” but nobody invited her, I was relieved to see, and finally she had to go.

That night after rides were finished Alice Kelling and Chris went off somewhere in her car, I lay awake till they got back. When I saw the car lights sweep my ceiling I got up to look down on them through the slats of my blind. I don’t know what I thought I was going to see. Muriel Lowe and I used to sleep on her front veranda and watch her sister and her sister’s boy friend saying good night. Afterwards we couldn’t get to sleep, for longing for somebody to kiss us and rub up against us and we would talk about suppose you were out in a boat with a boy and he wouldn’t bring you in to shore unless you did it, or what if somebody got you trapped in a barn, you would have to, wouldn’t you, it wouldn’t be your fault. Muriel said her two girl cousins used to try with a toilet paper roll that one of them was the boy. We wouldn’t do anything like that; just lay and wondered.

All that happened was that Chris got out on one side and she got out on the other and they walked off separately—him towards the fairgrounds and her towards house. I got back in bed and imagined about me com- ing home with him, not like that.

Next morning Alice Kelling got up late and I fixed a grapefruit for her the way I had learned and Mrs. Peebles sat down with her to visit and have another cup of coffee. Mrs. Peebles seemed pleased enough now, having company. Alice Kelling said she guessed she better get used to putting in a day just watching Chris take off and come down, and Mrs. Peebles said she didn’t know if she should suggest it because Alice Kel- ling was the one with the car, but the lake was only twenty-five miles away and what a good day for a picnic.

Alice Kelling took her up on the idea and by eleven o’clock they were in the car, with Joey and Heather and a sandwich lunch I had made. The only thing was that Chris hadn’t come down, and she wanted to tell him where they were going.

“Edie’ll go over and tell him,” Mrs. Peebles said. “There’s no problem.”

Alice Kelling wrinkled her face and agreed.

“Be sure and tell him we’ll be back by five!”

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I didn’t see that he would be concerned about knowing this right away, and I thought of him eating whatever he ate over there, alone, cooking on camp stove, so I got to work and mixed up a crumb cake and baked it, in between the other work I had to do; then, when it was a bit cooled, wrapped it in a tea towel. I didn’t do anything to myself but take off my apron and comb my hair. I would like to have put some make-up, but I was too afraid it would remind him of the way he first saw me and that would humiliate me all over again.

He had come and put another sign on the gate: NO RIDES THIS P.M. APOLOGIES. I was worried that he wasn’t feeling well. No sign of him outside and the tent flap was down. I knocked on the pole.

“Come in,” he said, in a voice that would just as soon have said Stay out.

I lifted the flap.

“Oh, it’s you. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was you.”

He had been just sitting on the side of the bed, smoking. Why not at least sit and smoke in the fresh air?

“I brought a cake and hope you’re not sick,” I said.

“Why would I be sick? Oh—that sign. That’s all right. I’m just tired of talking to people. I don’t mean you. Have a seat.” He pinned back the tent flap. “Get some fresh air in here.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, there was no place else. It was one of those fold-up cots, really: I remembered and gave him his fiancée’s message.

He ate some of the cake. “Good.”

“Put the rest away for when you’re hungry later.”

“I’ll tell you a secret. I won’t be around here much longer.”

“Are you getting married?”

“Ha ha. What time did you say they’d be back?”

“Five o’clock.”

“Well, by that time this place will have seen the last of me. A plane can get further than a car.” He unwrapped the cake and ate another piece of it, absent-mindedly.

“Now you’ll be thirsty.”

“There’s some water in the pail.”

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“It won’t be very cold. I could bring some fresh. I could bring some ice from the refrigerator.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to go. I want a nice long time of saying good-bye to you.”

He put the cake away carefully and sat beside me and started those little kisses so soft I can’t ever let myself think about them, such kindness in his face and lovely kisses, all over my eyelids and neck and ears, all over, then me kissing back as well as I could (I had only kissed a boy on a dare before, and kissed my own arms for practice) and we lay back on the cot and pressed together just gently, and he did some other things, not bad things or not in a bad way. It was lovely in the tent, that smell of grass and hot tent cloth with the sun beating down on it, and he said, “l wouldn’t do you any harm for the world.” Once, when he had rolled on top of me and we were sort of rocking together on the cot, he said softly, “Oh, no,” and freed himself and jumped up and got the water pail. He splashed some of it on his neck and face, and the little bit left, on me lying there.

“That’s to cool us off, Miss.”

When we said good-bye I wasn’t at all sad, because he held my face and said, “I’m going to write you a letter. I’ll tell you where I am and maybe you can come and see me. Would you like that? Okay then. You wait.” I was really glad I think to get away from him, it was like he was piling presents on me I couldn’t get the pleasure of till I considered them alone.

—

No consternation at first about the plane being gone. They thought he had taken somebody up, and I didn’t enlighten them. Dr. Peebles had phoned he had to go to the country, so there was just us having supper, and then Loretta Bird thrusting her head in the door and saying, “I see he’s took off.”

“What?” said Alice Kelling, and pushed back her chair.

“The kids come and told me this afternoon he was taking down his tent. Did he think he’d run through all the business there was around here? He didn’t take off without letting you know, did he?”

“He’ll send me word, Alice Kelling said. He’ll probably phone tonight. He’s terribly restless, since the War.”

“Edie, he didn’t mention to you, did he?” Mrs. Kelling said, “When you took over the message?”

“Yes,” I said. So far so true.

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“Well, why didn’t you say?” All of them were looking at me. “Did he say where he was going?”

“He said he might try Bayfield,” I said. What made me tell such a lie? I didn’t intend it.

“Bayfield, how far is that?” said Alice Kelling.

Mrs. Peebles said, “Thirty, thirty-five miles.”

“That’s not far. Oh, well, that’s really not far at all. It’s on the lake, isn’t it?”

You’d think I’d be ashamed of myself setting her on the wrong track. I did it to give him more time, whatever time he needed. I lied for him, and also, I have to admit, for me. Women should stick together and not do things like that. I see that now, didn’t then. I never thought of myself as being in any way like her, or coming to the same troubles, ever.

She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. I thought she suspected my lie.

“When did he mention this to you?”

“Earlier.”

“When you were over at the plane?”

“Yes.”

“You must’ve stayed and had a chat.” She smiled at me, not a nice smile. “You must’ve stayed and had a little visit with him.”

“I took a cake,” I said, thinking that telling some truth would spare me telling the rest.

“We didn’t have a cake,” said Mrs. Peebles rather sharply.

“I baked one.”

Alice Kelling said, “That was very friendly of you.”

“Did you get permission,” said Loretta Bird. “You never know what these girls’ll do next,” she said. “It’s not they mean harm so much, as they’re ignorant.”

“The cake is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Peebles broke in. “Edie, I wasn’t aware you knew Chris that well.”

I didn’t know what to say.

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“I’m not surprised,” Alice Kelling said in a high voice. “I knew by the look of her as soon as I saw her. We get them at the hospital all the time.” She looked hard at me with her stretched smile. “Having their babies. We have to put them in a special ward because of their diseases. Little country tramps. Fourteen and fifteen years old. You should see the babies they have, too.”

“There was a bad woman here in town had a baby that pus was running out of its eyes,” Loretta Bird put in.

“Wait a minute,” said Mrs. Peebles. “What is this talk? Edie. What about you and Mr. Watters? Were you intimate with him?”

“Yes,” I said. I was thinking of us lying on the cot and kissing, wasn’t that intimate? And I would never deny it.

They were all one minute quiet, even Loretta Bird.

“Well,” said Mrs. Peebles, “I am surprised. I think I need a cigarette. This is the first of any such tendencies I’ve seen in her,” she said, speaking to Alice Kelling, but Alice Kelling was looking at me.

“Loose little bitch.” Tears ran down her face. “Loose little bitch, aren’t you? I knew as soon as I saw you. Men despise girls like you. He just made use of you and went off, you know that, don’t you? Girls like you are just nothing, they’re just public conveniences, just filthy little rags!”

“Oh, now,” said Mrs. Peebles.

“Filthy,” Alice Kelling sobbed. “Filthy little rag!”

“Don’t get yourself upset,” Loretta Bird said. She was swollen up with pleasure at being in on this scene. “Men are all the same.”

“Edie, I’m very surprised,” Mrs. Peebles said. “I thought your parents were so strict. You don’t want to have a baby, do you?”

I’m still ashamed of what happened next. I lost control, just like a six- year-old, I started howling. “You don’t get a baby from just doing that!”

“You see. Some of them are that ignorant,” Loretta Bird said.

But Mrs. Peebles jumped up and caught my arms and shook me.

“Calm down. Don’t get hysterical. Calm down. Stop crying. Listen to me. Listen. I’m wondering, if you know what being intimate means. Now tell me. What did you think it meant?”

“Kissing,” I howled.

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She let go. “Oh, Edie. Stop it. Don’t be silly. It’s all right. It’s all a mis- understanding. Being intimate means a lot more than that. Oh, I wondered.”

“She’s trying to cover up, now,” said Alice Kelling.

“Yes. She’s not so stupid. She sees she got herself in trouble.”

“I believe her,” Mrs. Peebles said. “This is an awful scene.”

“Well there is one way to find out,” said Alice Kelling, getting up. “After all, I am a nurse.”

Mrs. Peebles drew a breath and said, “No. No. Go to your room, Edie. And stop that noise. That is too disgusting.”

I heard the car start in a little while. I tried to stop crying, pulling back each wave as it started over me. Finally, I succeeded and lay heaving on the bed.

Mrs. Peebles came and stood in the doorway.

“She’s gone,” she said. “That Bird woman too. Of course, you know you should never have gone near that man and that is the cause of all this trouble. I have a headache. As soon as you can, go and wash your face in cold water and get at the dishes and we will not say any more about this.”

—

Nor we didn’t. I didn’t figure out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from. Mrs. Peebles was not very friendly to me afterwards, but she was fair. Not very friendly is the wrong way of describing what she was. She never had been very friendly. It was just that now she had to see me all the time and it got on her nerves, a little.

As for me, I put it all out of my mind like a bad dream and concen- trated on waiting for my letter. The mail came every day except Sun- day, between one-thirty and two in the afternoon, a good time for me because Mrs. Peebles was always having her nap. I would get the kitchen all cleaned and then go up to the mailbox and sit in the grass, waiting. I was perfectly happy, waiting, I forgot all about Alice Kelling and her misery and awful talk and Mrs. Peebles and her chilliness and the embarrassment of whether she had told Dr. Peebles and the face of Loretta Bird, getting her fill of other people’s troubles. I was always smiling when the mailman got there, and continued smiling even after he gave me the mail and I saw today wasn’t the day. The mailman was a Carmichael. I knew by his face because there are a lot of Carmichaels living out by us and so many of them have a sort of sticking-out top lip. So I asked his name (he was a young man, shy, but good humored,

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anybody could ask him anything) and then I said, “I knew by your face!” He was pleased by that and always glad to see me and got a little less shy. “You’ve got the smile I’ve been waiting on all day!” he used to holler out the car window.

It never crossed my mind for a long time a letter might not come. I believed in it coming just like I believed the sun would rise in the morn- ing. I just put off my hope from day to day, and there was the goldenrod out around the mailbox and the children gone back to school, and the leaves turning, and I was wearing a sweater when I went to wait. One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full-blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me: No letter was ever going to come. It was an impossible idea to get used to. No, not impossible. If I thought about Chris’s face when he said he was going to write to me, it was impossible, but if I forgot that and thought about the actual tin mailbox, empty, it was plain and true. I kept on going to meet the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead. I only smiled because I thought of the mailman counting on it, and he didn’t have an easy life, with the winter driving ahead.

Till it came to me one day there were women doing this with their lives, all over. There were women just waiting and waiting by mailboxes for one letter or another. I imagined me making this journey day after day and year after year, and my hair starting to go gray, and I thought, I was never made to go on like that, so I stopped meeting the mail. If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and not waiting, I knew which I had to be.

Even though there might be things the second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it still is better.

I was surprised when the mailman phoned the Peebles’ place in the evening and asked for me. He said he missed me. He asked if I would like to go to Goderich where some well-known movie was on, I forget now what. So I said yes, and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a year more while l got my things together, and then we did marry. He always tells the children the story of how I went after him by sitting by the mailbox every day, and naturally I laugh and let him, because I like for people to think what pleases them and makes them happy.

“How I Met My Husband” by Alice Munro. In Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro. Copyright © 1974 Alice Munro. Published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Used with permission of the William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, LLC.

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.2 Exploration of Plot, First-Person Point of View, and Ironic Tone

8.2  An Example for Exploration of Plot, First-Person Point of View, and Ironic Tone

Responding and Reflection—Questions

Exploring Point of View 1. This story is told in the first-person by a teenage girl. What are the strengths and limi-

tations of such a narrator? 2. Edie makes this statement in the opening of the last section of the story, “I didn’t figure

out till years later the extent of what I had been saved from.” What does this statement reveal about the reliability of views she presented in the story, especially about Chris?

Exploring Plot The arrival of Chris and his plane initiates the action, and his appearing at the screen door while Edie is dressing up in Mrs. Peebles’ clothes gives a jolting start to their relationship. What other means does Munro use to advance the plot?

Exploring Ironic Tone Identify the various ironic aspects of Edie’s relationship with the mailman. What does each one reveal about her character?

Guy de Maupassant (1854–1892)

He was born in Normandy, France, to wealthy parents. He studied law at the University of Paris. Because one of France’s most prominent novelists, Gustave Flaubert, was a close friend of de Maupassant’s mother, he was strongly influenced by Flaubert and found his way into relationships with other well-known writers through him. De Maupassant was a prolific writer: In addition to six novels, he wrote plays and poetry—and nearly 300 short stories. “The Necklace” was first published in 1884 in Le Gaulois, a French daily newspaper.

The Necklace

Selected to illustrate how irony can be used as the central element in developing plot in a story. A young couple discovers that the upper society appears to glitter like a real necklace, but in reality it may not always be so; they learn that a decision that appears to protect their integrity in real- ity shows a lack of integrity—like a false necklace does. These ironic insights create drama, reveal character, and produce surprise.

The Necklace Guy de Maupassant (1884) Click here to listen: http://www.archive.org/details/library_best_mystery_4_0911_librivox

She was one of those pretty and charming girls, born by a blunder of destiny in a family of employees. She had no dowry, no expectations, no

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.2 Exploration of Plot, First-Person Point of View, and Ironic Tone

means of being known, understood, loved, married by a man rich and distinguished; and she let them make a match for her with a little clerk in the Department of Education.

She was simple since she could not be adorned; but she was unhappy as though kept out of her own class; for women have no caste and no descent, their beauty, their grace, and their charm serving them instead of birth and fortune. Their native keenness, their instinctive elegance, their flexibility of mind, are their only hierarchy; and these make the daughters of the people the equals of the most lofty dames.

She suffered intensely, feeling herself born for every delicacy and every luxury. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the worn walls, the abraded chairs, the ugliness of the stuffs. All these things, which another woman of her caste would not even have noticed, tor- tured her and made her indignant. The sight of the little girl from Brit- tany who did her humble housework awoke in her desolated regrets and distracted dreams. She let her mind dwell on the quiet vestibules, hung with Oriental tapestries, lighted by tall lamps of bronze, and on the two tall footmen in knee breeches who dozed in the large armchairs, made drowsy by the heat of the furnace. She let her mind dwell on the large parlors, decked with old silk, with their delicate furniture, supporting pre- cious bric-a-brac, and on the coquettish little rooms, perfumed, prepared for the five o’clock chat with the most intimate friends, men well known and sought after, whose attentions all women envied and desired.

When she sat down to dine, before a tablecloth three days old, in front of her husband, who lifted the cover of the tureen, declaring with an air of satisfaction, “Ah, the good pot-au-feu.1 I don’t know anything better than that,” she was thinking of delicate repasts, with glittering silver, with tap- estries peopling the walls with ancient figures and with strange birds in a fairy-like forest; she was thinking of exquisite dishes, served in marvelous platters, of compliments whispered and heard with a sphinx-like smile, while she was eating the rosy flesh of a trout or the wings of a quail.

She had no dresses, no jewelry, nothing. And she loved nothing else; she felt herself made for that only. She would so much have liked to please, to be envied, to be seductive and sought after.

She had a rich friend, a comrade of her convent days, whom she did not want to go and see any more, so much did she suffer as she came away. And she wept all day long, from chagrin, from regret, from despair, and from distress.

But one evening her husband came in with a proud air, holding in his hand a large envelope.

“There,” said he, “there’s something for you.”

“She suffered from the poverty

of her dwelling, from the worn

walls, the abraded chairs, the ugli-

ness of the stuffs.”

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1. Literally, “pot on the fire,” a French beef stew.

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.2 Exploration of Plot, First-Person Point of View, and Ironic Tone

She quickly tore the paper and took out of it a printed card which bore these words:—

“The Minister of Education and Mme. Georges Rampouneau beg M. and Mme. Loisel to do them the honor to pass the evening with them at the palace of the Ministry, on Monday, January 18.”

Instead of being delighted, as her husband hoped, she threw the invita- tion on the table with annoyance, murmuring—

“What do you want me to do with that?”

“But, my dear, I thought you would be pleased. You never go out, and here’s a chance, a fine one. I had the hardest work to get it. Everybody is after them; they are greatly sought for and not many are given to the clerks. You will see there all the official world.”

She looked at him with an irritated eye and she declared with impatience:—

“What do you want me to put on my back to go there?”

He had not thought of that; he hesitated:—

“But the dress in which you go to the theater. That looks very well to me—”

He shut up, astonished and distracted at seeing that his wife was weep- ing. Two big tears were descending slowly from the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth. He stuttered:—

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

But by a violent effort she had conquered her trouble, and she replied in a calm voice as she wiped her damp cheeks:—

“Nothing. Only I have no clothes, and in consequence I cannot go to this party. Give your card to some colleague whose wife has a better outfit than I.”

He was disconsolate. He began again:—

“See here, Mathilde, how much would this cost, a proper dress, which would do on other occasions; something very simple?”

She reflected a few seconds, going over her calculations, and thinking also of the sum which she might ask without meeting an immediate refusal and a frightened exclamation from the frugal clerk.

At last, she answered hesitatingly:—

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“I don’t know exactly, but it seems to me that with four hundred francs I might do it.”

He grew a little pale, for he was reserving just that sum to buy a gun and treat himself to a little shooting, the next summer, on the plain of Nan- terre, with some friends who used to shoot larks there on Sundays.

But he said:—

“All right. I will give you four hundred francs. But take care to have a pretty dress.”

The day of the party drew near, and Mme. Loisel seemed sad, rest- less, anxious. Yet her dress was ready. One evening her husband said to her:—

“What’s the matter? Come, now, you have been quite queer these last three days.”

And she answered:—

“It annoys me not to have a jewel, not a single stone, to put on. I shall look like distress. I would almost rather not go to this party.”

He answered:—

“You will wear some natural flowers. They are very stylish this time of the year. For ten francs you will have two or three magnificent roses.”

But she was not convinced.

“No; there’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among a lot of rich women.”

But her husband cried:—

“What a goose you are! Go find your friend, Mme. Forester, and ask her to lend you some jewelry. You know her well enough to do that.”

She gave a cry of joy:—

“That’s true. I had not thought of it.”

The next day she went to her friend’s and told her about her distress.

Mme. Forester went to her mirrored wardrobe, took out a large casket, brought it, opened it, and said to Mme. Loisel:—

“Choose, my dear.”

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She saw at first bracelets, then a necklace of pearls, then a Venetian cross of gold set with precious stones of an admirable workmanship. She tried on the ornaments before the glass, hesitated, and could not decide to take them off and to give them up. She kept on asking:—

“You haven’t anything else?”

“Yes, yes. Look. I do not know what will happen to please you.”

All at once she discovered, in a box of black satin, a superb necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with boundless desire. Her hands trembled in taking it up. She fastened it round her throat, on her high dress, and remained in ecstasy before herself.

Then, she asked, hesitating, full of anxiety:—

“Can you lend me this, only this?”

“Yes, yes, certainly.”

She sprang to her friend’s neck, kissed her with ardor, and then escaped with her treasure.

The day of the party arrived. Mme. Loisel was a success. She was the prettiest of them all, elegant, gracious, smiling, and mad with joy. All the men were looking at her, inquiring her name, asking to be introduced. All the attachés of the Cabinet wanted to dance with her. The Minister took notice of her.

She danced with delight, with passion, intoxicated with pleasure, think- ing of nothing, in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness made up of all these tributes, of all the admirations, of all these awakened desires, of this victory so complete and so sweet to a woman’s heart.

She went away about four in the morning. Since midnight, her husband has been dozing in a little anteroom with three other men whose wives were having a good time.

He threw over her shoulders the wraps he had brought to go home in, modest garments of every-day life, the poverty of which was out of keeping with the elegance of the ball dress. She felt this, and wanted to fly so as not to be noticed by the other women, who were wrapping themselves up in rich furs.

Loisel kept her back—

“Wait a minute; you will catch cold outside; I’ll call a cab.”

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“She was the pret- tiest of them all,

elegant, gracious, smiling, and mad

with joy.”

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But she did not listen to him, and went downstairs rapidly. When they were in the street, they could not find a carriage, and they set out in search of one, hailing the drivers whom they saw passing in the distance.

They went down toward the Seine, disgusted, shivering. Finally, they found on the Quai one of those old night-hawk cabs which one sees in Paris only after night has fallen, as though they are ashamed of their misery in the daytime.

It brought them to their door, rue des Martyrs; and they went up their own stairs sadly. For her it was finished. And he was thinking that he would have to be at the Ministry at ten o’clock.

She took off the wraps with which she had covered her shoulders, before the mirror, so as to see herself once more in her glory. But sud- denly she gave a cry. She no longer had the necklace around her throat!

Her husband, half undressed already, asked—

“What is the matter with you?”

She turned to him, terror-stricken:—

“I—I—I have not Mme. Forester’s diamond necklace!”

He jumped up, frightened—

“What? How? It is not possible!”

And they searched in the folds of the dress, in the folds of the wrap, in the pockets, everywhere. They did not find it.

He asked:—

“Are you sure you still had it when you left the ball?”

“Yes, I touched it in the vestibule of the Ministry.”

“But if you had lost it in the street, we should have heard it fall. It must be in the cab.”

“Yes. That is probable. Did you take the number?”

“No. And you—you did not even look at it?”

“No.”

They gazed at each other, crushed. At last Loisel dressed himself again.

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“I’m going,” he said, “back the whole distance we came on foot, to see if I cannot find it.”

And he went out. She stayed there, in her ball dress, without strength to go to bed, overwhelmed, on a chair, without a fire, without a thought.

Her husband came back about seven o’clock. He had found nothing.

Then he went to police headquarters, to the newspapers to offer a reward, to the cab company; he did everything, in fact, that a trace of hope could urge him to.

She waited all day, in the same dazed state in face of this horrible disaster.

Loisel came back in the evening, with his face worn and white; he had discovered nothing.

“You must write to your friend,” he said, “that you have broken the clasp of her necklace and that you are having it repaired. That will give us time to turn around.”

She wrote as he dictated.

At the end of a week they had lost all hope. And Loisel, aged by five years, declared:—

“We must see how we can replace those jewels.”

The next day they took the case which had held them to the jeweler whose name was in the cover. He consulted his books.

“It was not I, madam, who sold this necklace. I only supplied the case.”

Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, looking for a necklace like the other, consulting their memory,—sick both of them with grief and anxiety.

In a shop in the Palais Royal, they found a diamond necklace that seemed to them absolutely like the one they were seeking. It was priced forty thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.

They begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days. And they made a bargain that he should take it back for thirty-four thousand, if the first was found before the end of February.

Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs which his father had left him. He had to borrow the remainder.

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“‘You must write to your friend,’

he said, ‘that you have broken the clasp of her

necklace and that you are having it

repaired.’” 85

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He borrowed, asking a thousand francs from one, five hundred from another, five here, three louis there. He gave promissory notes, made ruinous agreements, dealt with usurers, with all kinds of lenders. He compromised the end of his life, risked his signature without even know- ing whether it could be honored; and, frightened by all the anguish of the future, by the black misery which was about to settle down on him, by the perspective of all sorts of physical deprivations and of all sorts of moral tortures, he went to buy the new diamond necklace, laying down on the jeweler’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.

When Mme. Loisel took back the necklace to Mme. Forester, the latter said, with an irritated air:—

“You ought to have brought it back sooner, for I might have needed it.”

She did not open the case, which her friend had been fearing. If she had noticed the substitution, what would she have thought? What would she have said? Might she not have been taken for a thief?

Mme. Loisel learned the horrible life of the needy. She made the best of it, moreover, frankly, heroically. The frightful debt must be paid. She would pay it. They dismissed the servant; they changed their rooms; they took an attic under the roof.

She learned the rough work of the household, the odious labors of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, wearing out her pink nails on the greasy pots and the bottoms of the pans. She washed the dirty linen, the shirts and the towels, which she dried on a rope; she carried down the gar- bage to the street every morning, and she carried up the water, pausing for breath on every floor. And, dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, a basket on her arm, bar- gaining, insulted, fighting for her wretched money, sou by sou.

Every month they had to pay notes, to renew others to gain time.

The husband worked in the evening keeping up the books of a shop- keeper, and at night often he did copying at five sous the page.

And this life lasted ten years.

At the end of ten years they had paid everything back, everything, with the rates of usury and all the accumulation of heaped-up interest.

Mme. Loisel seemed aged now. She had become the robust woman, hard and rough, of a poor household. Badly combed, with her skirts awry and her hands red, her voice was loud, and she washed the floor with splashing water.

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“Mme. Loisel learned the hor-

rible life of the needy. She made

the best of it, moreover, frankly,

heroically.”

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But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the window and she thought of that evening long ago, of that ball, where she had been so beautiful and so admired.

What would have happened if she had not lost that necklace? Who knows? Who knows? How singular life is, how changeable! What a little thing it takes to save you or to lose you.

Then, one Sunday, as she was taking a turn in the Champs Elysées,2 as a recreation after the labors of the week, she perceived suddenly a woman walking with a child. It was Mme. Forester, still young, still beau- tiful, still seductive.

Mme. Loisel felt moved. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And now that she had paid up, she would tell her all. Why not?

She drew near.

“Good morning, Jeanne.”

The other did not recognize her, astonished to be hailed thus familiarly by this woman of the people. She hesitated—

“But—madam—I don’t know—are you not making a mistake?”

“No. I am Mathilde Loisel.”

Her friend gave a cry—

“Oh!—My poor Mathilde, how you are changed.”

“Yes, I have had hard days since I saw you, and many troubles,—and that because of you.”

“Of me?—How so?”

“You remember that diamond necklace that you lent me to go to the ball at the Ministry?”

“Yes. And then?”

“Well, I lost it.”

“How can that be?—since you brought it back to me?”

“I brought you back another just like it. And now for ten years we have been paying for it. You will understand that it was not easy for us, who had nothing. At last, it is done, and I am mighty glad.”

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Mme. Forester had guessed.

“You say that you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?”

“Yes. You did not notice it, even, did you? They were exactly alike?”

And she smiled with proud and naïve joy.

Mme. Forester, much moved, took her by both hands:—

“Oh, my poor Mathilde. But mine were false. At most they were worth five hundred francs!”

This piece is in the public domain.

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Responding and Reflection—Questions

Exploring Plot 1. Are the events in the plot plausible? Or does the plot seem contrived to illustrate the

narrator’s observation in the opening sentence about fate, which allowed Mme. Loisel, “as if by a mistake of destiny” to be born into a family of clerks?

2. Plot is developed by conflict—when one person is opposed to another (external con- flict), or when a person must make a choice between opposing aspirations or ideals (internal conflict). At what points in the story is the plot driven by internal conflict? By external conflict?

Exploring Point of View 1. Maupassant uses a third-person point of view with limited omniscient perspective to

give the reader an intimate look at what’s happening in Mme. Loisel’s mind, in partic- ular. What evidence suggests that the narrator’s point of view is sympathetic toward Mme. Loisel? Unsympathetic to her?

2. How is this point of view used effectively to provide insights on happiness, on beauty, on materialism?

Exploring Ironic Tone 1. Explain the ironic tone, or implication, expressed in the following aspects of the story: a. The diamonds in Mme. Forester’s necklace were fake b. The invitation to the ball (situation irony) c. Mme. Loisel’s decision to pay the debt (“She took her part, moreover, all of a sud-

den, with heroism.”) 2. Identify the various ironies that evolve in the story’s masterful surprise ending. All

of them have a serious tone. What serious observations are expressed through these ironies?

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8.3  An Example for Exploration of Theme and Symbolism

Raymond Carver (1938–1988)

Raymond Carver was a fiction writer, widely praised for his skill in short story writing. He was born in Oregon and worked with his father in sawmills before graduating from Humboldt State College in California. Carver began writing while in college, worked in the publishing field, and taught at various universities. His struggle with alcoholism limited his productiv- ity for extended periods. After meeting the American poet Tess Gallagher, he changed his life patterns. Where I’m Calling From, a collection of 37 stories, was published in 1988. Carver died of cancer when he was 50. His poem “Gravy,” etched on his gravestone, includes these lines:

No other word will do. For that’s what it was. Gravy. Gravy, these past ten years.

Alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman.

Cathedral

Selected to show how symbols can be used paradoxically—a man who has sight is shown to be blind (to his insensitivities); this same man, in helping a blind person “see” what a cathedral looks like, discovers profound insight (pervasive self-awakening).

Cathedral Raymond Carver (1981)

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in laws’. Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip, and my wife would meet him at the station. She hadn’t seen him since she worked for him one summer in Seattle ten years ago. But she and the blind man had kept in touch. They made tapes and mailed them back and forth. I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the mov- ies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

That summer in Seattle she had needed a job. She didn’t have any money. The man she was going to marry at the end of the summer was in officers’ training school. He didn’t have any money, either. But she was in love with the guy, and he was in love with her, etc. She’d seen something in the paper: HELP WANTED—Reading to Blind Man, and a telephone number. She phoned and went over, was hired on the spot.

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She’d worked with this blind man all summer. She read stuff to him, case studies, reports, that sort of thing. She helped him organize his little office in the county social-service department. They’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man. How do I know these things? She told me. And she told me something else. On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it. She even tried to write a poem about it. She was always trying to write a poem. She wrote a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened to her.

When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips. I can remember I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry. I admit it’s not the first thing I reach for when I pick up something to read.

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer-to-be, he’d been her Childhood sweetheart. So, okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood sweetheart etc., who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. She made the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force base in Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. On the tape, she told the blind man about her husband and about their life together in the military. She told the blind man she loved her husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and she didn’t like it that he was a part of the military-industrial thing. She told the blind man she’d written a poem and he was in it. She told him that she was writing a poem about what it was like to be an Air Force officer’s wife. The poem wasn’t finished yet. She was still writing it. The blind man made a tape. He sent her the tape. She made a tape. This went on for years. My wife’s officer was posted to one base and then another. She sent tapes from Moody AFB, McGuire, McConnell, and finally Travis, near Sacramento, where one night she got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving- around life. She got to feeling she couldn’t go it another step. She went in and swallowed all the pills and capsules in the medicine chest and washed them down with a bottle of gin. Then she got into a hot bath and passed out.

But instead of dying, she got sick. She threw up. Her officer—why should he have a name? he was the childhood sweetheart, and what more does he want?—came home from somewhere, found her, and called the ambulance. In time, she put it all on a tape and sent the tape to the blind man. Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent

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the tapes off lickety-split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation. On one tape, she told the blind man she’d decided to live away from her officer for a time. On another tape, she told him about her divorce. She and I began going out, and of course she told her blind man about it. She told him everything, or so it seemed to me. Once she asked me if I’d like to hear the latest tape from the blind man. This was a year ago. I was on the tape, she said. So I said okay, I’d listen to it. I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen. First she inserted the tape into the player and adjusted a couple of dials. Then she pushed a lever. The tape squeaked and someone began to talk in this loud voice. She lowered the volume. After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn’t even know. And then this: “From all you’ve said about him, I can only conclude—” But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn’t ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to.

Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.

“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.

“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay, But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.

“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.

“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “god- damn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!”

I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.

“Was his wife a Negro?” I asked.

“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you? she said. “Are you drunk?”

“I’m just asking,” I said.

Right then my wife filled me in with more detail than I cared to know. I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen. Pieces of the story began to fall into place. Beulah had gone to work for the blind man the summer after my wife had stopped working for him. Pretty soon Beu- lah and the blind man had themselves a church wedding. It was a little wedding—who’d want to go to such a wedding in the first place?—just

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the two of them, plus the minister and the minister’s wife. But it was a church wedding just the same. It was what Beulah had wanted, he’d said. But even then Beulah must have been carrying the cancer in her glands. After they had been inseparable for eight years—my wife’s word, inseparable—Beulah’s health went into a rapid decline. She died in a Seattle hospital room, the blind man sitting beside the bed and hold- ing on to her hand. They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding. Hearing this, I felt sorry for the blind man for a little bit. And then I found myself thinking what a piti- ful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compli- ment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better. Someone who could wear makeup or not—what difference to him? She could, if she wanted, wear green eyeshadow around one eye, and a straight pin in her nostril yellow slacks and purple shoes. No matter. And then to slip off into death, the blind man’s hand on her hand, his blind eyes streaming tears—I’m imagining now—her last thought maybe this: that he never even knew what she looked like, and she on an express to the grave. Robert was left with a small insurance policy and half of a twenty- peso Mexican coin. The other half of the coin went into the box with her. Pathetic.

So when the time rolled around, my wife went to the depot to pick him up. With nothing to do but wait, I blamed him for that—I was having a drink and watching the TV when I heard the car pull into the drive. I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look.

I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing. She went around to the other side of the car to where the blind man was already starting to get out. This blind man, feature this, he was wearing a full beard! A beard on a blind man! Too much, I say. The blind man reached into the back seat and dragged out a suitcase. My wife took his arm, shut the car door, and, talking all the way, moved him down the drive and then up the steps to the front porch. I turned off the TV. I finished my drink, rinsed the glass, dried my hands. Then I went to the door.

My wife said, “I want you to meet Robert. Robert, this is my husband. I’ve told you all about him.” She was beaming. She had this blind man by his coat sleeve.

The blind man let go of his suitcase and up came his hand. I took it. He squeezed hard, held my hand, and then he let it go.

“I feel like we’ve already met,” he boomed.

Theme—Narrator notices how some conventional attri-

butes of a blind person are not

evident in Robert.

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“Likewise,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. Then I said, “Welcome. I’ve heard a lot about you.” We began to move then, a little group, from the porch into the living room, my wife was guiding him by the arm. The blind man was carrying his suitcase in his other hand. My wife said things like, “To your left here, Robert. That’s right. Now watch it, there’s a chair. That’s it. Sit down right here. This is the sofa. We just bought this sofa two weeks ago.”

I started to say something about the old sofa. I’d liked that old sofa. But l didn’t say anything. Then I wanted to say to say something else, small- talk, about the scenic ride along the Hudson. How going to New York, you should sit on the right-hand side of the train, and coming from New York, the left-hand side.

“Did you have a good train ride?” I said, “Which side of the train did you sit on, by the way?”

“What a question, which side!” my wife said. “What’s it matter which side?” she said.

“I just asked,” I said.

“Right side,” the blind man said. “I hadn’t been on a train in nearly forty years. Not since I was a kid. With my folks. That’s been a long time. I’d nearly forgotten the sensation. I have winter in my beard now,” he said. “So I’ve been told, anyway. Do I look distinguished, my dear?” the blind man said to my wife.

“You look distinguished, Robert,” she said. “Robert,” she said, “Robert, it’s just so good to see you.”

My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged.

I’ve never met, or personally known, anyone who was blind. This blind man was late forties, a heavy-set, balding man with stooped shoulders, as if he carried a great weight there. He wore brown slacks, brown shoes, a light-brown shirt, a tie, a sports coat. Spiffy. He also had this full beard. But he didn’t use a cane and he didn’t wear dark glasses. I’d always thought dark glasses were a must for the blind. Fact was, I wished he had a pair. At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move round in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without knowing it or want- ing it to be.

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Theme—The narrator, a self-

absorbed person, admits his own

“blindness” (lack of insight) about

blind people.

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I said, “Let me get you a drink. What’s your pleasure? We have a little of everything. It’s one of our pastimes.”

“Bub, I’m a Scotch man myself,” he said fast enough in this big voice.

“Right,” I said. Bub! “Sure you are. I knew it.”

He let his fingers touch his suitcase, which was sitting alongside the sofa. He was taking his bearings. I didn’t blame him for that.

“I’ll move that up to your room,” my wife said “No, that’s fine,” the blind man said loudly. “It can go up when I go up.”

“A little water with the Scotch?” I said.

“Very little,” he said.

“I knew it,” I said.

He said, “Just a tad. The Irish actor, Barry Fitzgerald? I’m like that fellow. When I drink water, Fitzgerald said, I drink water. When I drink whiskey, I drink whiskey.” My wife laughed. The blind man brought his hand up under his beard. He lifted his beard slowly and let it drop.

I did the drinks, three big glasses of Scotch with a splash of water in each. Then we made ourselves comfortable and talked about Robert’s travels. First the long flight from the West Coast to Connecticut, we covered that. Then from Connecticut up here by train. We had another drink concerning that leg of the trip.

I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, as speculation had it, they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much and that much only about blind people. But this blind man smoked his cigarette down to the nubbin and then lit another one. This blind man filled his ashtray and my wife emptied it.

When we sat down at the table for dinner, we had another drink. My wife heaped Robert’s plate with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, green beans. I buttered him up two slices of bread. I said, “Here’s bread and butter for you.” I swallowed some of my drink. “Now let us pray,” I said, and the blind man lowered his head. My wife looked at me, her mouth agape. “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.

We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. The blind man had right away located his foods, he knew just where everything was on his plate. I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat. He’d

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cut two pieces of meat, fork the meat into his mouth, and then go all out for the scalloped potatoes, the beans next, and then he’d tear off a hunk of buttered bread and eat that. He’d follow this up with a big drink of milk. It didn’t seem to bother him to use his fingers once in a while, either.

We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Sweat beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back. We took ourselves into the living room and sank into our places again. Robert and my wife sat on the sofa. I took the big chair. We had us two or three more drinks while they talked about the major things that had come to pass for them in the past ten years. For the most part, I just listened. Now and then I joined in. I didn’t want him to think I’d left the room, and I didn’t want her to think I was feeling left out. They talked of things that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s sweet lips: “And then my dear husband came into my life”—something like that. But I heard noth- ing of the sort.

More talk of Robert. Robert had done a little of everything it seemed, a regular blind jack-of-all trades. But most recently he and his wife had had an Amway distributorship, from which, I gathered, they’d earned their living, such as it was. The blind man was also a ham radio opera- tor. He talked in his loud voice about conversation he’d had with fellow operators in Guam, in the Philippines, in Alaska, and even in Tahiti. He said he’d have a lot of friends there if he ever wanted to go visit those places. From time to time, he’d turn his blind face toward me, put his hand under his beard, ask me something. How long had I been in my present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?) Finally, when I thought he was beginning to run down, I got up and turned on the TV.

My wife looked at me with irritation. She was heading toward a boil. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, do you have a TV?”

The blind man said, “My dear, I have two TVs. I have a color set and a black-and-white thing, an old relic. It’s funny, but if I turn the TV on, and I’m always turning it on. I turn on the color set. It’s funny, don’t you think?”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I had absolutely nothing to say to that. No opinion. So I watched the news program and tried to listen to what the announcer was saying.

“This is a color TV,” the blind man said. “Don’t ask me how, but I can tell.”

“We traded up a while ago,” I said.

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The blind man had another taste of his drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He positioned his ash- tray on the coffee table, then put the lighter to his cigarette. He leaned back on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.

My wife covered her mouth, and then she yawned. She stretched. She said, “I think I’ll go upstairs and put on my robe. I think I’ll change into something else. Robert, you make yourself comfortable,” she said.

“I’m comfortable,” the blind man said.

“I want you to feel comfortable in this house,” she said.

“I am comfortable,” the blind man said.

After she’d left the room, he and I listened to the weather report and then to the sports roundup. By that time, she’d been gone so long I didn’t know if she was going to come back. I thought she might have gone to bed. I wished she’d come back downstairs. I didn’t want to be left alone with a blind man. I asked him if he wanted another drink, and he said sure. Then I asked if he wanted to smoke some dope with me. I said I’d just rolled a number. I hadn’t, but I planned to do so in about two shakes.

“I’ll try some with you,” he said.

“Damn right,” I said. “That’s the stuff.”

I got our drinks and sat down on the sofa with him. Then I rolled us two fat numbers. I lit one and passed it. I brought it to his fingers. He took it and inhaled.

“Hold it as long as you can,” I said. I could tell he didn’t know the first thing.

My wife came back downstairs wearing her pink robe and her pink slippers.

“What do I smell?” she said.

“I’ve thought we’d have us some cannabis,” I said.

My wife gave me a savage look. Then she looked at the blind man and said, “Robert, I didn’t know you smoked.”

He said, “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything. But I don’t feel anything yet.”

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“This stuff is pretty mellow,” I said. “This stuff is mild. It’s dope you can reason with,” I said. “It doesn’t mess you up.”

“Not much it doesn’t, bub,” he said, and laughed.

My wife sat on the sofa between the blind man and me. I passed her the number. She took it and toked and then passed it back to me. “Which way is this going?” she said. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be smoking this. I can hardly keep my eyes open as it is. That dinner did me in. I shouldn’t have eaten so much.”

“It was the strawberry pie,” the blind man said. “That’s what did it,” he said, and he laughed his big laugh. Then he shook his head.

“There’s more strawberry pie,” I said.

“Do you want some more, Robert?” my wife said.

“Maybe in a little while,” he said.

We gave our attention to the TV. My wife yawned again. She said, “Your bed is made up when you feel like going to bed, Robert. I know you must have had a long day. When you’re ready to go to bed, say so.” She pulled his arm, “Robert?”

He came to and said, “I’ve had a real nice time. This beats tapes, doesn’t it?”

I said, “Coming at you,” and I put the number between his fingers. He inhaled, held the smoke, and then let it go. It was like he’d been doing it since he was nine years old.

“Thanks, bub,” he said. “But I think this is all for me. I think I’m begin- ning to feel it,” he said. He held the burning roach out for my wife.

“Same here,” she said. “Ditto. Me, too.” She took the roach and passed it to me.

“I may just sit here for a while between you two guys with my eyes closed. But don’t let me bother you, okay? Either one of you. If it both- ers you, say so. Otherwise, I may just sit here with my eyes closed until you’re ready to go to bed,” she said. “Your bed’s made up, Robert, when you’re ready. It’s right next to our room at the top of the stairs. We’ll show you up when you’re ready. You wake me up now, you guys, if I fall asleep.” She said that and then she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

The news program ended. I got up and changed the channel. I sat back down on the sofa. I wished my wife hadn’t pooped out. Her head lay across the back of the sofa, her mouth open. She’d turned so that her robe had slipped away from her legs, exposing a juicy thigh. I reached to

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Theme—Blindness and insight. “I’m

always learn- ing something.” This statement

prepares the way for the discussion

of the cathedral and the insights

that both Robert and the blind man

gain from it. 76

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draw her robe back over her, and it was then that I glanced at the blind man. What the hell! I flipped the robe open again.

“You say when you want some strawberry pie,” I said.

“I will,” he said,

I said, “Are you tired? Do you want me to take you up to your bed? Are you ready to hit the hay?”

“Not yet,” he said. “No, I’ll stay up with you, bub. If that’s all right. I’ll stay up until you’re ready to turn in. We haven’t had a chance to talk. Know what I mean? I feel like me and her monopolized the evening.” He lifted his beard and he let it fall. He picked up his cigarettes and his lighter.

“That’s all right,” I said. Then I said, “I’m glad for the company.”

And I guess I was. Every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time. When I did go to sleep, I had these dreams. Sometimes I’d wake up from one of them, my heart going crazy.

Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel and apologized.

“Bub, it’s all right,” the blind man said. “It’s fine with me. Whatever you want to watch is okay. I’m always learning something. Learning never ends. It won’t hurt me to learn something tonight. I got ears,” he said.

We didn’t say anything for a time. He was leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very discon- certing. Now and then his eyelids drooped and then they snapped open again. Now and then he put his fingers into his beard and tugged, like he was thinking about something he was hearing on the television.

On the screen, a group of men wearing cowls was being set upon and tormented by men dressed in skeleton costumes and men dressed as devils. The men dressed as devils wore devil masks, horns, and long tails. This pageant was part of a procession. The Englishman who was narrat- ing the thing said it took place in Spain once a year. I tried to explain to the blind man what was happening.

“Skeletons,” he said. “I know about skeletons,” he said, and he nodded.

The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at another one.

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Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline.

There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around over the cathedrals, or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. I waited as long as I could. Then I felt I had to say some- thing. I said, “They’re showing the outside of this cathedral now. Gar- goyles. Little statues carved to look like monsters. Now I guess they’re in Italy. Yea, they’re in Italy. There’s paintings on the walls of this one church.”

“Are those fresco paintings, bub?” he asked, and he sipped from his drink.

I reached for my glass. But it was empty. I tried to remember what I could remember. “You’re asking me for those frescoes? I said. “That’s a good question. I don’t know.”

The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then some- thing occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is? What they look like, that is? Do you follow me? If somebody says cathedral to you, do you have any notion what they’re talking about? Do you know the difference between that and a Baptist church, say?”

He let the smoke dribble from his mouth. “I know they took hundreds of workers fifty or a hundred years to build,” he said. “I just heard the man say that, of course. I know generations of the same families worked on a cathedral. I heard him say that, too. The men who began their life’s work on them, they never lived to see the completion of their work. In that wise, bub, they’re no different from the rest of us, right?” He laughed. Then his eyelids drooped again. His head nodded. He seemed to be snoozing. Maybe he was imagining himself in Portugal. The TV was showing another cathedral now. This one was in Germany. The English- man’s voice droned on. “Cathedrals,” the blind man said. He sat up and rolled his head back and forth. “If you want the truth, bub, that’s about all I know. What I just said. What I heard him say. But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a good idea.”

I stared hard at the shot of the cathedral on the TV. How could I even began to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else.

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said,

95

Symbol—Cathe- dral is a symbol of great human

achievement and spiritual devotion:

the result of a community effort, cooperation, and

trust.

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.3 Exploration of Theme and Symbolism

“To begin with, they’re very tall. I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up, up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind me of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.

He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. “They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be closer to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral building. I’m sorry,” I said, “but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just no good at it.”

“That’s all right, bub,” the blind man said. “Hey, listen. I hope you don’t mind my asking you. Can I ask you something? Let me ask you a simple question, yes or no. I’m just curious and there’s no offense. You’re my host. But let me ask if you are in any way religious? You don’t mind my asking?”

I shook my head. He couldn’t see that, though. A wink is the same as a nod to a blind man. “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, I do,” he said.

“Right,” I said.

The Englishman was still holding forth. My wife sighed in her sleep. She drew a long breath and went on with her sleeping.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “But I can’t tell you what a cathedral looks like. It just isn’t in me to do it. I can’t do any more than I’ve done.”

The blind man sat very still, his head down, as he listened to me.

I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Noth- ing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.”

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.3 Exploration of Theme and Symbolism

It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said. “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.

So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet. He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”

He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

“Doing fine,” the blind man said.

I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

110

Symbol—Their joined drawing effort, like the

intentions in build- ing a cathedral, is

purposeful.

115

Theme—Ironic commentary on the theme: The

narrator has sight but also has limi-

tations. 120

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.3 Exploration of Theme and Symbolism

My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.”

I didn’t answer her.

The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are work- ing on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said.

“Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?”

My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.

“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”

“They’re closed,” I said.

“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?”

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

“It’s really something,” I said.

“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, originally published in Cathedral by Raymond Carver, currently collected in Cathedral and Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver.

Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983 by Raymond Carver. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

125

130

Theme—In ways he had never

considered before, the self-centered narrator realizes

that blindness may be a physi-

cal handicap, but it has no spatial barriers. A blind

man’s insight can be profound.

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.4 Stories for Comparison

8.4  Stories for Comparison

Story of the Lost Son (Gospel of Luke) and A Father’s Story (Andre Dubus): The first story is a parable, a literary form in which the story exists for the purpose of making a point. In both stories a son (in the first one) and a daughter (in the second one) get entangled away from home in circumstances they’ve brought on themselves—and return home, coming clean about their offenses. Honest actions of this kind are always fascinating and ennobling, but these stories pull us beyond the regretful disclosures of the son and the daughter, to consider the capacity of the fathers to accept their children and forgive. These stories are about the adequacy of fathers’ love—and about the immeasurable obligations that forgiveness requires if it is to be authentic in human and spiritual relationships.

Luke, a first-century writer and physician, is considered the author of the third book in the New Testament (Gospel of Luke), where this parable attributed to Jesus of Nazareth is found.

Responding and Reflection—Questions

Exploring Theme 1. The writer uses the characters’ conversations about blindness to explore the story’s

theme of self-absorption. Identify particular references to physical, social, and emo- tional blindness that draw attention to this theme.

2. In writing about this story, Ewing Campbell observed that instead of presenting a person who experiences change through struggle and pain, “Cathedral” lets us see a narrator who discovers a life-affirming truth without the pain. Do you think that this structure—and its casual unfolding—is an effective way to approach a redemptive theme? Why?

3. “My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them.” How does this statement by the narrator, as he goes upstairs to get a pen to begin drawing the cathedral, relate to the theme of the story?

4. Writers sometimes end a story with an epiphany (a sudden realization of meaning or profound insight). How effective is the narrator’s epiphany in conveying the story’s theme?

Exploring Symbolism 1. Explain how blindness, as a symbol, is linked in the story to seeing life anew. 2. In what ways are the tapes important as a symbol? 3. A cathedral is a symbol of strength and acceptance. Describe a specific instance in the

story where Carver uses the cathedral symbol for these purposes. 4. Can spiritual awareness be associated with the cathedral symbol in this story? When

asked if he is religious, the narrator (near the end of the story) answers, “I don’t believe in anything.”

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.4 Stories for Comparison

Story of the Lost Son Gospel of Luke, The Bible in Contemporary Language

There was once a man who had two sons. The younger said to his father, “Father, I want right now what’s coming to me.”

So the father divided the property between them. It wasn’t long before the younger son packed his bags and left for a distant country. There, undisciplined and dissipated, he wasted everything he had. After he had gone through all his money, there was a bad famine all through that country and he began to hurt. He signed on with a citizen there who assigned him to his fields to slop the pigs. He was so hungry he would have eaten the corncobs in the pig slop, but no one would give him any.

That brought him to his senses. He said, “All those farmhands working for my father sit down to three meals a day, and here I am starving to death. I’m going back to my father. I’ll say to him, Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son. Take me on as a hired hand.” He got right up and went home to his father.

When he was still a long way off, his father saw him. His heart pounding, he ran out, embraced him, and kissed him. The son started his speech: “Father, I’ve sinned against God, I’ve sinned before you; I don’t deserve to be called your son ever again.”

But the father wasn’t listening. He was calling to the servants, “Quick. Bring a clean set of clothes and dress him. Put the family ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Then get a grain-fed heifer and roast it. We’re going to feast! We’re going to have a wonderful time! My son is here—given up for dead and now alive! Given up for lost and now found!” And they began to have a wonderful time.

All this time his older son was out in the field. When the day’s work was done he came in. As he approached the house, he heard the music and dancing. Calling over one of the houseboys, he asked what was going on. He told him, “Your brother came home. Your father has ordered a feast—barbecued beef!—because he has him home safe and sound.”

The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in. His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. The son said, “Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends? Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast!”

His father said, “Son, you don’t understand. You’re with me all the time, and everything that is mine is yours—but this is a wonderful time, and we had to celebrate. This brother of yours was dead, and he’s alive! He was lost, and he’s found!”

This piece is in the public domain

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.4 Stories for Comparison

A Father’s Story, Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus (1936–1999)

He was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and completed his early education in a Catholic school. He won recognition for his short stories, including the PEN/Malamud Award, writ- ing with precision and deep compassion for his characters. He was a guest lecturer at several American Universities. He lost a leg in a traffic accident when he stopped to help other motor- ists. The movie In the Bedroom, which was nominated for five academy awards in 2001, was based on his story “Killings.”

A Father’s Story Andre Dubus (1983)

My name is Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve north- west of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the window. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be if someone crept up to the house and looked through a window: a big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listen- ing to a grieving soprano.

My real life is the one nobody talks about anymore, except Father Paul LeBoeuf, another old buck. He has a decade on me: he’s sixty-four, a big man, bald on top with grey at the sides; when he had hair, it was black. His face is ruddy, and he jokes about being a whiskey priest, though he’s not. He gets outdoors as much as he can, goes for a long walk every morning, and hunts and fishes with me. But I can’t get him on a horse anymore. Ten years ago I could badger him into a trail ride; I had to give him a western saddle, and he’d hold the pommel and bounce through the woods with me, and be sore for days. He’s looking at seventy with eyes that are younger than many I’ve seen in people in their twenties. I do not remember ever feeling the way they seem to; but I was lucky, because even as a child I knew that life would try me, and I must be strong to endure, though in those early days I expected to be tortured and killed for my faith, like the saints I learned about in school.

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.4 Stories for Comparison

Father Paul’s family came down from Canada, and he grew up speaking more French than English, so he is different from the Irish priests who abound up here. I do not like to make general statements, or even to hold general beliefs, about people’s blood, but the Irish do seem hap- piest when they’re dealing with misfortune or guilt, either their own or somebody else’s, and if you think you’re not a victim of either one, you can count on certain Irish priests to try to change your mind. On Wednesday nights Father Paul comes to dinner. Often he comes on other nights too, and once, in the old days when we couldn’t eat meat on Fridays, we bagged our first ducks of the season on a Friday, and as we drove home from the marsh, he said: For the purposes of Holy Mother Church, I believe a duck is more a creature of water than land, and is not rightly meat. Sometimes he teases me about never putting anything in his Sunday collection, which he would not know about if I hadn’t told him years ago. I would like to believe I told him so we could have philosophical talk at dinner, but probably the truth is I suspected he knew, and I did not want him to think I so loved money that I would not even give his church a coin on Sunday. Certainly the ushers who pass the baskets know me as a miser.

I don’t feel right about giving money for buildings, places. This starts with the Pope, and I cannot respect one of them till he sells his house and everything in it, and that church too, and uses the money to feed the poor. I have rarely, and maybe never, come across saintliness, but I feel certain it cannot exist in such a place. But I admit, also, that I know very little, and maybe the popes live on a different plane and are tried in ways I don’t know about. Father Paul says his own church, St. John’s, is hardly the Vatican. I like his church: it is made of wood, and has a simple altar and crucifix, and no padding on the kneelers. He does not have to lock its doors at night. Still it is a place. He could say Mass in my barn. I know this is stubborn, but I can find no mention by Christ of maintain- ing buildings, much less erecting them of stone or brick, and decorating them with pieces of metal and mineral and elements that people still fight over like barbarians. We had a Maltese woman taking riding les- sons, she came over on the boat when she was ten, and once she told me how the nuns in Malta used to tell the little girls that if they wore jewelry, rings and bracelets and necklaces, in purgatory snakes would coil around their fingers and wrists and throats. I do not believe in fright- ening children or telling them lies, but if those nuns saved a few girls from devotion to things, maybe they were right. That Maltese woman laughed about it, but I noticed she wore only a watch, and that with a leather strap.

The money I give to the church goes in people’s stomachs, and on their backs, down in New York City. I have no delusions about the worth of what I do, but I feel it’s better to feed somebody than not. There’s a priest in Times Square giving shelter to runaway kids, and some Francis- cans who run a bread line; actually it’s a morning line for coffee and a roll, and Father Paul calls it the continental breakfast for winos and bag

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.4 Stories for Comparison

ladies. He is curious about how much I am sending, and I know why: he guesses I send a lot, he has said probably more than tithing, and he is right; he wants to know how much because he believes I’m generous and good, and he is wrong about that; he has never had much money and does not know how easy it is to write a check when you have every- thing you will ever need, and the figures are mere numbers, and rep- resent no sacrifice at all. Being a real Catholic is too hard; if I were one, I would do with my house and barn what I want the Pope to do with his. So I do not want to impress Father Paul, and when he asks me how much, I say I can’t let my left hand know what my right is doing.

He came on Wednesday nights when Gloria and I were married, and the kids were young; Gloria was a very good cook (I assume she still is, but it is difficult to think of her in the present), and I liked sitting at the table with a friend who was also a priest. I was proud of my handsome and healthy children. This was long ago, and they were all very young and cheerful and often funny, and the three boys took care of their baby sister, and did not bully or tease her. Of course they did sometimes, with that excited cruelty children are prone to, but not enough so that it was part of her days. On the Wednesday after Gloria left with the kids and a U-Haul trailer, I was sitting on the front steps, it was summer, and I was watching cars go by on the road, when Father Paul drove around the curve and into the driveway. I was ashamed to see him because he is a priest and my family was gone, but I was relieved too. I went to the car to greet him. He got out smiling, with a bottle of wine, and shook my hand, then pulled me to him, gave me a quick hug, and said: “It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Let’s open some cans.”

With arms about each other we walked to the house, and it was good to know he was doing his work but coming as a friend too, and I thought what good work he had. I have no calling. It is for me to keep horses.

In that other life, anyway. In my real one I go to bed early and sleep well and wake at four forty-five, for an hour of silence. I never want to get out of bed then, and every morning I know I can sleep for another four hours, and still not fail at any of my duties. But I get up, so have come to believe my life can be seen in miniature in that struggle in the dark of morning. While making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and moods, as a prayer of thanksgiving, and for Gloria and my children and my friends and two women I made love with after Gloria left. This morning offertory is a habit from my boyhood in a Catholic school; or then it was a habit, but as I kept it and grew older it became a ritual. Then I say the Lord’s Prayer, trying not to recite it, and one morning it occurred to me that a prayer, whether recited or said with concentra- tion, is always an act of faith.

I sit in the kitchen at the rear of the house and drink coffee and smoke and watch the sky growing light before sunrise, the trees of the woods near the barn taking shape, becoming single pines and elms and oaks

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.4 Stories for Comparison

and maples. Sometimes a rabbit comes out of the tree line, or is already sitting there, invisible till the light finds him. The birds are awake in the trees and feeding on the ground, and the little ones, the purple finches and titmice and chickadees, are at the feeder I rigged outside the kitchen window; it is too small for pigeons to get a purchase. I sit and give myself to coffee and tobacco, that get me brisk again, and I watch and listen. In the first year or so after I lost my family, I played the radio in the mornings. But I overcame that, and now I rarely play it at all. Once in the mail I received a questionnaire asking me to write down everything I watched on television during the week they had chosen. At the end of those seven days I wrote in The Wizard of Oz and returned it. That was in winter and was actually a busy week for my television, which normally sits out the cold months without once warming up. Had they sent the questionnaire during baseball season, they would have found me at my set. People at the stables talk about shows and performers I have never heard of, but I cannot get interested; when I am in the mood to watch television, I go to a movie or read a detective novel. There are always good detective novels to be found, and I like remembering them next morning with my coffee.

I also think of baseball and hunting and fishing, and of my children. It is not painful to think about them anymore, because even if we had lived together, they would be gone now, grown into their own lives, except Jennifer. I think of death too, not sadly, or with fear, though something like excitement does run through me, something more quickening than the coffee and tobacco. I suppose it is an intense interest, and an out- right distrust: I never feel certain that I’ll be here watching birds eating at tomorrow’s daylight. Sometimes I try to think of other things, like the rabbit that is warm and breathing but not there till twilight. I feel on the brink of something about the life of the senses, but either am not equipped to go further or am not interested enough to concentrate. I have called all of this thinking, but it is not, because it is unintentional; what I’ll really doing is feeling the day, in silence, and that is what Father Paul is doing too on his five-to-ten-mile walks.

When the hour ends I take an apple or carrot and I go to the stable and tack up a horse. We take good care of these horses, and no one rides them but students, instructors, and me, and nobody rides the horses we board unless an owner asks me to. The barn is dark and I turn on lights and take some deep breaths, smelling the hay and horses and their manure, both fresh and dried, a combined odor that you either like or you don’t. I walk down the wide space of dirt between stalls, greeting the horses, joking with them about their quirks, and choose one for no reason at all other than the way it looks at me that morning. I get my old English saddle that has smoothed and darkened through the years, and go into the stall, talking to this beautiful creature who’ll swerve out of a canter if a piece of paper blows in front of him, and if the barn catches fire and you manage to get him out he will, if he can get away from you, run back into the fire, to his stall. Like the smells that surround them,

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you either like them or you don’t. I love them, so am spared having to try to explain why. I feed one the carrot or apple and tack up and lead him outside, where I mount, and we go down the driveway to the road and cross it and turn northwest and walk then trot then canter to St. John’s.

A few cars are on the road, their drivers looking serious about going to work. It is always strange for me to see a woman dressed for work so early in the morning. You know how long it takes them, with the makeup and hair and clothes, and I think of them waking in the dark of winter or early light of other seasons, and dressing as they might for an evening’s entertainment. Probably this strikes me because I grew up seeing my father put on those suits he never wore on weekends or his two weeks off, and so am accustomed to the men, but when I see these women I think something went wrong, to send all those dressed-up people out on the road when the dew hasn’t dried yet. Maybe it’s because I so dis- like getting up early, but am also doing what I choose to do, while they have no choice. At heart I am lazy, yet I find such peace and delight in it that I believe it is a natural state, and in what looks like my laziest peri- ods I am closest to my center. The ride to St. John’s is fifteen minutes. The horses and I do it in all weather; the road is well plowed in win- ter, and there are only a few days a year when ice makes me drive the pickup. People always look at someone on horseback, and for a moment their faces change and many drivers and I wave to each other. Then at St. John’s, Father Paul and five or six regulars and I celebrate the Mass.

Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty-five minutes is at one with the words of the Mass. Each morn- ing I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and for- give my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love. And, while my mind dwells on breakfast, or Major or Duchess tethered under the church eave, there is, as I take the Host from Father Paul and place it on my tongue and return to the pew, a feeling that I am thankful I have not lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty. Or the certainty of peace. One night Father Paul and I talked about faith. It was long ago, and all I remember is him say- ing: Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you. That is the excitement, and the peace, then the Mass is over, and I go into the sacristy and we have a cigarette and chat, the mystery ends, we are two men talking like any two men on a morning in America, about baseball, plane crashes, presidents, governors, murders, the sun, the

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clouds. Then I go to the horse and ride back to the life people see, the one in which I move and talk, and most days I enjoy it.

It is late summer now, the time between fishing and hunting, but a good time for baseball. It has been two weeks since Jennifer left, to drive home to Gloria’s after her summer visit. She is the only one who still visits; the boys are married and have children, and sometimes fly up for a holiday, or I fly down or west to visit one of them. Jennifer is twenty, and I worry about her the way fathers worry about daughters but not sons. I want to know what she’s up to, and at the same time I don’t. She looks athletic, and she is: she swims and runs and of course rides. All my children do. When she comes for six weeks in summer, the house is loud with girls, friends of hers since childhood, and new ones. I am glad she kept the girl friends. They have been young company for me and, being with them, I have been able to gauge her growth between summers. On their riding days, I’d take them back to the house when their lessons were over and they had walked the horses and put them back in the stalls, and we’d have lemonade or Coke, and cookies if I had some, and talk until their parents came to drive them home. One year their breasts grew, so I wasn’t startled when I saw Jennifer in July. Then they were driving cars to the stable, and beginning to look like young women, and I was passing out beer and ashtrays and they were talking about college.

When Jennifer was here in summer, they were at the house most days. I would say generally that as they got older they became quieter, and though I enjoyed both, I sometimes missed the giggles and shouts. The quiet voices, just low enough for me not to hear from wherever I was, rising and failing in proportion to my distance from them, frightened me. Not that I believed they were planning or recounting anything really wicked, but there was a female seriousness about them, and it was secretive, and of course I thought: love, sex. But it was more than that: it was womanhood they were entering, the deep forest of it, and no matter how many women and men too are saying these days that there is little difference between us, the truth is that men find their way into that forest only on clearly marked trails, while women move about in it like birds. So hearing Jennifer and her friends talking so quietly, yet intensely, I wanted very much to have a wife.

But not as much as in the old days, when Gloria had left but her pres- ence was still in the house as strongly as if she had only gone to visit her folks for a week. There were no clothes or cosmetics, but potted plants endured my neglectful care as long as they could, and slowly died; I did not kill them on purpose, to exorcise the house of her, but; I could not remember to water them. For weeks, because I did not use it much, the house was as neat as she had kept it, though dust layered the order she had made. The kitchen went first: I got the dishes in and out of the dishwasher and wiped the top of the stove, but did not return cooking spoons and pot holders to their hooks on the wall, and soon the burn- ers and oven were caked with spillings, the refrigerator had more space

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and was spotted with juices. The living room and my bedroom went next; I did not go into the children’s rooms except on bad nights when I went from room to room and looked and touched and smelled, so they did not lose their order until a year later when the kids came for six weeks. It was three months before I ate the last of the food Gloria had cooked and frozen: I remember it was a beef stew, and very good. By then I had four cookbooks, and was boasting a bit, and talking about recipes with the women at the stables, and looking forward to cooking for Father Paul. But I never looked forward to cooking at night only for myself, though I made myself do it—on some nights I gave in to my daily temptation, and took a newspaper or detective novel to a restaurant. By the end of the second year, though, I had stopped turning on the radio as soon as I woke in the morning, and was able to be silent and alone in the evening too, and then I enjoyed my dinners.

It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand. That is what Father Paul told me in those first two years, on some of the bad nights when I believed I could not bear what I had to: the most painful loss was my children, then the loss of Gloria, whom I still loved despite or maybe because of our long periods of sadness that rendered us helpless, so neither of us could break out of it to give a hand to the other. Twelve years later I believe ritual would have healed us more quickly than the repetitious talks we had, perhaps even kept us healed. Marriages have lost that, and I wish I had known then what I know now, and we had per- formed certain acts together every day, no matter how we felt, and per- haps then we could have subordinated feeling to action, for surely that is the essence of love. I know this from my distractions during Mass, and during everything else I do, so that my actions and feelings are seldom one. It does happen every day, but in proportion to everything else in a day, it is rare, like joy. The third most painful loss, which became second and sometimes first as months passed, was the knowledge that I could never marry again, and so dared not even keep company with a woman.

On some of the bad nights I was bitter about this with Father Paul, and I so pitied myself that I cried, or nearly did, speaking with damp eyes and breaking voice. I believe that celibacy is for him the same trial it is for me, not of the flesh, but the spirit: the heart longing to love. But the difference is he chose it, and did not wake one day to a life with thirty horses. In my anger I said I had done my service to love and chastity, and I told him of the actual physical and spiritual pain of practicing rhythm: nights of striking the mattress with a fist, two young animals lying side by side in heat, leaving the bed to pace, to smoke, to curse, and too passionate to question, for we were so angered and oppressed by our passion that we could see no further than our loins. So now I understand how people can be enslaved for generations before they throw down their tools or use them as weapons, the form of their slav- ery—the cotton fields, the shacks and puny cupboards and untended

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illnesses—absorbing their emotions and thoughts until finally they have little or none at all to direct with clarity and energy at the owners and legislators. And I told him of the trick of passion and its slaking: how during what we had to believe were safe periods, though all four chil- dren were conceived at those times, we were able with some coher- ence to question the tradition and reason and justice of the law against birth control, but not with enough conviction to soberly act against it, as though regular satisfaction in bed tempered our revolutionary as well as our erotic desires. Only when abstinence drove us hotly away from each other did we receive an urge so strong it lasted all the way to the drugstore and back; but always, after release, we threw away the remaining condoms; and after going through this a few times, we knew what would happen, and from then on we submitted to the calendar she so precisely marked on the bedroom wall. I told him that living two lives each month, one as celibates, one as lovers, made us tense and short- tempered, so we snapped at each other like dogs.

To have endured that, to have reached a time when we burned slowly and could gain from bed the comfort of lying down at night with one who loves you and whom you love, could for weeks on end go to bed tired and peacefully sleep after a kiss, a touch of the hands, and then to be thrown out of the marriage like a bundle from a moving freight car, was unjust, was intolerable, and I could not or would not mus- ter the strength to endure it. But I did, a moment at a time, a day, a night, except twice, each time with a different woman and more than a year apart, and this was so long ago that I clearly see their faces in my memory, can hear the pitch of their voices, and the way they pro- nounced words, one with a Massachusetts accent, one Midwestern, but I feel as though I only heard about them from someone else. Each rode at the stables and was with me for part of an evening; one was badly married, one divorced, so none of us was free. They did not understand this Catholic view, but they were understanding about my having it, and I remained friends with both of them until the married one left her husband and went to Boston, and the divorced one moved to Maine. After both those evenings, those good women, I went to Mass early while Father Paul was still in the confessional, and received his absolu- tion. I did not tell him who I was, but of course he knew, though I never saw it in his eyes. Now my longing for a wife comes only once in a while, like a cold: on some late afternoons when I am alone in the barn, then I lock up and walk to the house, daydreaming, then suddenly look at and see it empty, as though for the first time, and all at once I’m weary and feel I do not have the energy to broil meat, and I think of driving to a restaurant, then shake my head and go on to the house, the refrigerator, the oven; and some mornings when I wake in the dark and listen to the silence and run my hand over the cold sheet beside me; and some days in summer when Jennifer is here.

Gloria left first me, then the Church, and that was the end of religion for the children, though on visits they went to Sunday Mass with me,

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and still do, out of a respect for my life that they manage to keep free of patronage. Jennifer is an agnostic, though I doubt she would call herself that, any more than she would call herself any other name that implied she had made a decision, a choice, about existence, death, and God. In truth she tends to pantheism, a good sign, I think; but not wanting to be a father who tells his children what they ought to believe, I do not say to her that Catholicism includes pantheism, like onions in a stew. Besides, I have no missionary instincts and do not believe everyone should or even could live with the Catholic faith. It is Jennifer’s woman- hood that renders me Awkward. And womanhood now is frank, not like when Gloria was twenty and there were symbols: high heels and cosmetics and dresses, a cigarette, a cocktail. I am glad that women are free now of false modesty and all its attention paid the flesh; but, still, it is difficult to see so much of your daughter, to hear her talk as only men and bawdy women used to, and most of all to see in her face the deep and unabashed sensuality of women, with no tricks of the eyes and mouth to bide the pleasure she feels at having a strong young body. I am certain, with the way things are now, that she has very happily not been a virgin for years. That does not bother me. What bothers me is my certainty about it, just from watching her walk across a room or light a cigarette or pour milk on cereal.

She told me all of it, waking me that night when I had gone to sleep listening to the wind in the trees and against the house, a wind so strong that I had to shut all but the lee windows, and still the house cooled; told it to me in such detail and so clearly that now, when she has driven the car to Florida, I remember it all as though I had been a passenger in the front seat, or even at the wheel. It started with a movie, then beer and driving to the sea to look at the waves in the night and the wind, Jennifer and Betsy and Liz. They drank a beer on the beach and wanted to go in naked but were afraid they would drown in the high surf. They bought another six-pack at a grocery store in New Hampshire, and drove home. I can see it now, feel it: the three girls and the beer and the ride on country roads where pines curved in the wind and the big decidu- ous trees swayed and shook as if they might leap from the earth. They would have some windows partly open so they could feel the wind; Jen- nifer would be playing a cassette, the music stirring them, as it does the young, to memories of another time, other people and places in what is for them the past.

She took Betsy home, then Liz, and sang with her cassette as she left the town west of us and started home, a twenty-minute drive on the road that passes my house. They had each had four beers, but now there were twelve empty bottles in the bag on the floor at the passenger seat, and I keep focusing on their sound against each other when the car shifted speeds or changed directions. For I want to understand that one moment out of all her heart’s time on earth, and whether her history had any bearing on it, or whether her heart was then isolated from all it had known, and the sound of those bottles urged it. She was just leaving the town, accelerating past a night club on the right, gaining speed to

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climb a long, gradual hill, then she went up it, singing, parting the beat on the steering wheel, the wind loud through her few inches of open window, blowing her hair as it did the high branches alongside the road, and she looked up at them and watched the top of the hill for someone drunk or heedless coming over it in part of her lane. She crested to an open black road, and there he was: a bulk, a blur, a thing running across her headlights, and she swerved left, and her foot went for the brake and was stomping air above its pedal when she hit him, saw his legs and body in the air, flying out of her light, into the dark. Her brakes were screaming into the wind, bottles clinking in the fallen bag, and with the music and wind inside the car was his sound, already a memory but as real as an echo, that car-shuddering thump as though she had struck a tree. Her foot was back on the accelerator. Then she shifted gears and pushed it. She ejected the cassette and closed the window. She did not start to cry until she knocked on my bedroom door, then called: “Dad?”

Her voice, her tears, broke through my dream and the wind I heard in my sleep, and I stepped into jeans and hurried to the door, thinking harm, rape, death. All were in her face, and I hugged her and pressed her cheek to my chest and smoothed her blown hair, then led her, weeping, to the kitchen and sat her at the table where still she could not speak, nor look at me; when she raised her face it fell forward again, as of its own weight, into her palms. I offered tea and she shook her head, so I offered beer twice, then she shook her head, so I offered whiskey and she nodded. I had some rye that Father Paul and I had not finished last hunting season, and I poured some over ice and set it in front of her and was putting away the ice but stopped and got another glass and poured one for myself too, and brought the ice and bottle to the table where she was trying to get one of her long menthols out of the pack, but her fingers jerked like severed snakes, and I took the pack and lit one for her and took one for myself. I watched her shudder with her first swallow of rye, and push hair back from her face, it is auburn and gleamed in the overhead light, and I remembered how beautiful she looked riding a sorrel, she was smoking fast, then the sobs in her throat stopped, and she looked at me and said it, the words coming out with smoke: “I hit somebody. With the car.”

Then she was crying and I was on my feet, moving back and forth, look- ing down at her, asking Who? Where? Where? She was pointing at the wall over the stove, jabbing her fingers and cigarette at it, her other hand at her eyes, and twice in horror I actually looked at the wall. She finished the whiskey in a swallow and I stopped pacing and asking and poured another, and either the drink or the exhaustion of tears quieted her, even the dry sobs, and she told me; not as I tell it now, for that was later as again and again we relived it in the kitchen or living room, and, if in daylight, fled it on horseback out on the trails through the woods and, if at night, walked quietly around in the moonlit pasture, walked around and around it, sweating through our clothes. She told it in bursts, like she was a child again, running to me, injured from play. I put on boots

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and a shirt and left her with the bottle and her streaked face and a cigarette twitching between her fingers, pushed the door open against the wind, and eased it shut. The wind squinted and watered my eyes as I leaned into it and went to the pickup.

When I passed St. John’s I looked at it, and Father Paul’s little white rec- tory in the rear, and wanted to stop, wished I could as I could if he were simply a friend who sold hardware or something. I had forgotten my watch but I always know the time within minutes, even when a sound or dream or my bladder wakes me in the night. It was nearly two; we had been in the kitchen about twenty minutes; she had hit him around one- fifteen. Or her. The road was empty and I drove between blowing trees; caught for an instant in my lights, they seemed to be in panic. I smoked and let hope play its tricks on me: it was neither man nor woman but an animal, a goat or calf or deer on the road; it was a man who had jumped away in time, the collision of metal and body glancing not direct, and he had limped home to nurse bruises and cuts. Then I threw the cigarette and hope both out the window and prayed that he was alive, while beneath that prayer, a reserve deeper in my heart, another one stirred: that if he were dead, they would not get Jennifer.

From our direction, east and a bit south, the road to that hill and the night club beyond it and finally the town is, for its last four or five miles, straight through farming country. When I reached that stretch I slowed the truck and opened my window for the fierce air; on both sides were scattered farmhouses and barns and sometimes a silo, looking not like shelters but like unsheltered things the wind would flatten. Corn bent toward the road from a field on my right, and always something blew in front of me: paper, leaves, dried weeds, branches. I slowed approach- ing the hill, and went up it in second, staring through my open window at the ditch on the left side of the road, its weeds alive, whipping, a mad dance with the trees above them. I went over the hill and down and, opposite the club, turned right onto a side street of houses, and parked there, in the leaping shadows of trees. I walked back across the road to the club’s parking lot, the wind behind me, lifting me as I strode, and I could not hear my boots on pavement. I walked up the hill, on the shoulder, watching the branches above me, hearing their leaves and the creaking trunks and the wind. Then I was at the top, looking down the road and at the farms and fields; the night was clear, and I could see a long way; clouds scudded past the half-moon and stars, blown out to sea.

I started down, watching the tall grass under the trees to my right, glancing into the dark of the ditch, listening for cars behind me; but as soon as I cleared one tree, its sound was gone, Its flapping leaves and rattling branches far behind me, as though the greatest distance I had at my back was a matter of feet, while ahead of me I could see a barn two miles off. Then I saw her skid marks: short, and going left and downhill, into the other lane. I stood at the ditch, its weeds blowing; across it were trees and their moving shadows, like the clouds. I stepped onto

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its slope, and it took me sliding on my feet, then rump, to the bottom, where I sat still, my body gathered to itself, lest a part of me should touch him. But there was only tall grass, and I stood, my shoulders reaching the sides of the ditch, and I walked uphill, wishing for the flash- light in the pickup, walking slowly, and down in the ditch I could hear my feet in the grass and on the earth, and kicking cans and bottles. At the top of the hill I turned and went down, watching the ground above the ditch on my right, praying my prayer from the truck again, the first one, the one I would admit, that he was not dead, was in fact home, and began to hope again, memory telling me of lost pheasants and grouse I had shot, but they were small and the colors of their home, while a man was either there or not; and from that memory I left where I was and while walking in the ditch under the wind was in the deceit of imagina- tion with Jennifer in the kitchen, telling her she had hit no one, or at least had not badly hurt anyone, when I realized he could be in the hos- pital now and I would have to think of a way to check there, something to say on the phone. I see now that, once hope returned, I should have been certain what it prepared me for: ahead of me, in high grass and the shadows of trees, I saw his shirt. Or that is all my mind would allow itself: a shirt, and I stood looking at it for the moments it took my mind to admit the arm and head and the dark length covered by pants. He lay face down, the arm I could see near his side, his head turned from me, on its cheek.

“Fella?” I said. I had meant to call, but it came out quiet and high, lost inches from my face in the wind. Then I said, ‘Oh God,’ and felt Him in the wind and the sky moving past the stars and moon and the fields around me, but only watching me as He might have watched Cain or Job, I did not know which, and I said it again, and wanted to sink to the earth and weep till I slept there in the weeds. I climbed, scrambling up the side of the ditch, pulling at clutched grass, gained the top on hands and knees, and went to him like that, panting, moving through the grass as high and higher than my face, crawling under that sky, making sounds too, like some animal, there being no words to let him know I was here with him now. He was long; that is the word that came to me, not tall. I kneeled beside him, my hands on my legs. His right arm was by his side, his left arm straight out from the shoulder, but turned, so his palm was open to the tree above us. His left cheek was clean-shaven, his eye closed, and there was no blood. I leaned forward to look at his open mouth and saw the blood on it, going down into the grass. I straightened and looked ahead at the wind blowing past me through grass and trees to a distant light, and I stared at the light, imagining someone awake out there, wanting someone to be, a gathering of old friends, or some- one alone listening to music or painting a picture, then I figured it was a night light at a farmyard whose house I couldn’t see. Going, I thought. Still going. I leaned over again and looked at dripping blood.

So I had to touch his wrist, a thick one with a watch and expansion band that I pushed up his arm, thinking he’s left-handed, my three fingers

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pressing his wrist, and all I felt was my tough fingertips on that smooth underside flesh and small bones, then relief, then certainty. But against my will, or only because of it, I still don’t know, I touched his neck, ran my fingers down it as if petting, then pressed, and my hand sprang back as from fire. I lowered it again, held it there until it felt that faint beating that I could not believe. There was too much wind. Nothing could make a sound in it. A pulse could not be felt in it, nor could mere fingers in that wind feel the absolute silence of a dead man’s artery. I was mak- ing sounds again; I grabbed his left arm and his waist, and pulled him toward me, and that side of him rose, turned, and I lowered him to his back, his face tilted up toward the tree that was groaning, the tree and I the only sounds in the wind. Turning my face from his, looking down the length of him at his sneakers, I placed my ear on his heart, and heard not that but something else, and I clamped a hand over my exposed ear, heard something liquid and alive, like when you pump a well and after a few strokes you hear air and water moving in the pipe, and I knew I must raise his legs and cover him and run to a phone, while still I listened to his chest, thinking raise with what? cover with what? and amid the liquid sound I heard the heart, then lost it, and pressed my ear against bone, but his chest was quiet, and I did not know when the liquid had stopped, and do not know now when I heard air, a faint rush of it, and whether under my ear or at his mouth or whether I heard it at all. I straightened and looked at the light, dim and yellow. Then I touched his throat, looking him full in the face. He was blond and young. He could have been sleeping in the shade of a tree, but for the smear of blood from his mouth to his hair, and the night sky, and the weeds blowing against his head, and the leaves shaking in the dark above us.

I stood. Then I kneeled again and prayed for his soul to join in peace and joy all the dead and living; and, doing so, confronted my first sin against him, not stopping for Father Paul, who could have given him the last rites, and immediately then my second one, or I saw then, my first, not calling an ambulance to meet me there, and I stood and turned into the wind, slid down the ditch and crawled out of it, and went up the hill and down it, across the road to the street of houses whose people I had left behind forever, so that I moved with stealth in the shadows to my truck.

When I came around the bend near my house, I saw the kitchen light at the rear. She sat as I had left her, the ashtray filled, and I looked at the bottle, felt her eyes on me, felt what she was seeing too: the dirt from my crawling. She had not drunk much of the rye. I poured some in my glass, with the water from melted ice, and sat down and swallowed some and looked at her and swallowed some more, and said: “He’s dead.”

She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, rubbed the checks under them, but she was dry now.

“He was probably dead when he hit the ground. I mean, that’s probably what killed—”

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“Where was he?”

“Across the ditch, under a tree.”

“Was he—did you see his face?”

“No. Not really. I just felt. For life, pulse. I’m going out to the car.”

“What for? Oh.”

I finished the rye, and pushed back the chair, then she was standing too.

“I’ll go with you.”

“There’s no need.”

“I’ll go.”

I took a flashlight from a drawer and pushed open the door and held it while she went out. We turned our faces from the wind. It was like on the hill, when I was walking, and the wind closed the distance behind me: after three or four steps I felt there was no house back there. She took my hand, as I was reaching for hers. In the garage we let go, and squeezed between the pickup and her little car, to the front of it, where we had more room, and we stepped back from the grill and I shone the light on the fender, the smashed headlight turned into it, the concave chrome staring to the right, at the garage wall.

“We ought to get the bottles,” I said.

She moved between the garage and the car, on the passenger side, and had room to open the door and lift the bag. I reached out, and she gave me the bag and backed up and shut the door and came around the car. We sidled to the doorway, and she put her arm around my waist and I hugged her shoulders.

“I thought you’d call the police,” she said.

We crossed the yard, faces bowed from the wind, her hair blowing away from her neck, and in the kitchen I put the bag of bottles in the gar- bage basket. She was working at the table: capping the rye and putting it away, filling the ice tray, washing the glasses, emptying the ashtray, sponging the table.

“Try to sleep now,” I said.

She nodded at the sponge circling under her hand, gathering ashes. Then she dropped it in the sink and, looking me full in the face, as I had never seen her look, as perhaps she never had, being for so long a

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daughter on visits (or so it seemed to me and still does: that until then our eyes had never seriously met), she crossed to me from the sink and kissed my lips, then held me so tightly I lost balance, and would have stumbled forward had she not held me so hard.

I sat in the living room, the house darkened, and watched the maple and the hemlock. When I believed she was asleep I put on La Bohème, and kept it at the same volume as the wind so it would not wake her. Then I listened to Madame Butterfly, and in the third act had to rise quickly to lower the sound: the wind was gone. I looked at the still maple near the window, and thought of the wind leaving farms and towns and the coast, going out over the sea to die on the waves. I smoked and gazed out the window. The sky was darker, and at daybreak the rain came. I listened to Tosca, and at six-fifteen went to the kitchen where Jenni- fer’s purse lay on the table, a leather shoulder purse crammed with the things of an adult woman, things she had begun accumulating only a few years back, and I nearly wept, thinking of what sandy foundations they were: driver’s license, credit card, disposable lighter, cigarettes, checkbook, ball-point pen, cash, cosmetics, comb, brush, Kleenex, these the rite of passage from childhood, and I took one of them—her keys— and went out, remembering a jacket and hat when the rain struck me, but I kept going to the car, and squeezed and lowered myself into it, pulled the seat belt over my shoulder and fastened it and backed out, turning in the drive, going forward into the road, toward St. John’s and Father Paul.

Cars were on the road, the workers, and I did not worry about any of them noticing the fender and light. Only a horse distracted them from what they drove to. In front of St. John’s is a parking lot; at its far side, past the church and at the edge of the lawn, is an old pine, taller than the steeple now. I shifted to third, left the road, and, aiming the right headlight at the tree, accelerated past the white blur of church, into the black trunk growing bigger till it was all I could see, then I rocked in that resonant thump she had heard, had felt, and when I turned off the ignition it was still in my ears, my blood, and I saw the boy flying in the wind. I lowered my forehead to the wheel. Father Paul opened the door, his face white in the rain.

“I’m all right.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I fainted.”

I got out and went around to the front of the car, looked at the smashed light, the crumpled and torn fender.

“Come to the house and lie down.”

“I’m all right.”

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“When was your last physical?”

“I’m due for one. let’s get out of this rain.”

“You’d better lie down.”

“No. I want to receive.”

That was the time to say I want to confess, but I have not and will not. Though I could now, for Jennifer is in Florida, and weeks have passed, and perhaps now Father Paul would not feel that he must tell me to go to the police. And, for that very reason, to confess now would be unfair. It is a world of secrets, and now I have one from my best, in truth my only, friend. I have one from Jennifer too, but that is the nature of fatherhood.

Most of that day it rained, so it was only in early evening, when the sky cleared, with a setting sun, that two little boys, leaving their confine- ment for some play before dinner, found him. Jennifer and I got that on the local news, which we listened to every hour, meeting at the radio, standing with cigarettes, until the one at eight o’clock; when she stopped crying, we went out and walked on the wet grass, around the pasture, the last of sunlight still in the air and trees. His name was Pat- rick Mitchell, he was nineteen years old, was employed by CETA, lived at home with his parents and brother and sister. The paper next day said he had been at a friend’s house, and was walking home, and I thought of that light I had seen, then knew it was not for him; he lived on one of the streets behind the club. The paper did not say then, or in the next few days, anything to make Jennifer think he was alive while she was with me in the kitchen. Nor do I know if we could have saved him.

In keeping her secret from her friends, Jennifer had to perform so often, as I did with Father Paul and at the stables, that I believe the acting, which took more of her than our daylight trail rides and our night walks in the pasture, was her healing. Her friends teased me about wrecking her car. When I carried her luggage out to the car on that last morning, we spoke only of the weather for her trip—the day was clear, with a dry cool breeze—and hugged and kissed, and I stood watching as she started the car and turned it around. But then she shifted to neutral and put on the parking brake and unclasped the belt, looking at me all the while, then she was coming to me, as she had that night in the kitchen, and I opened my arms.

I have said I talk with God in the mornings, as I start my day, and some- times as I sit with coffee, looking at the birds, and the woods. Of course He has never spoken to me, but that is not something I require. Nor does He need to. I know Him, as I know the part of myself that knows Him, that felt Him watching from the wind and the night as I kneeled over the dying boy. Lately I have taken to arguing with Him, as I can’t with Father Paul, who, when he bears my monthly confession, has not heard and will not hear anything of failure to do all that one can to save

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an anonymous life, of injustice to a family in their grief, of deepening their pain at the chance and mystery of death by giving them noth- ing—no one—to hate. With Father Paul I feel lonely about this, but not with God. When I received the Eucharist while Jennifer’s car sat twice- damaged, so redeemed, in the rain, I felt neither loneliness nor shame, but as though He were watching me, even from my tongue, intestines, blood, as I have watched my sons at times in their young lives when I was able to judge but without anger, and so keep silent while they, in the agony of their youth, decided how they must act; or found reasons, after their actions, for what they had done. Their reasons were never as good or as bad as their actions, but they needed to find them, to believe they were living by them, instead of the awful solitude of the heart.

I do not feel the peace I once did: not with God, nor the earth, or any- one on it. I have begun to prefer this state, to remember with fondness the other one as a period of peace I neither earned nor deserved. Now in the mornings while I watch purple finches driving larger titmice from the feeder, I say to Him: I would do it again. For when she knocked on my door, then called me, she woke what had flowed dormant in my blood since her birth, so that what rose from the bed was not a stable owner or a Catholic or any other Luke Ripley I had lived with for a long time, but the father of a girl.

And He says: I am a Father too.

Yes, I say, as You are a Son Whom this morning I will receive; unless You kill me on the way to church, then I trust You will receive me. And as a Son You made Your plea.

Yes, he says, but I would not lift the cup.

True, and I don’t want You to lift it from me either. And if one of my sons had come to me that night, I would have phoned the police and told them to meet us with an ambulance at the top of the hill.

Why? Do you love them less?

I tell Him no, it is not that I love them less, but that I could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons’ pain, could bear it with pride as they took the whip and nails. But You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion.

So, He says, you love her more than you love Me. I love her more than I love truth.

Then you love in weakness, He says.

As You love me, I say, and I go with an apple or carrot out to the barn.

From Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries) by Andre Dubus. Copyright 1995 by David R. Godine Publisher. Reproduced with permisison of David R. Godine Publisher, via Copyright Clearance Center. \

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8.5  A Common Human Dilemma Story

Good writers enable you to look at familiar things and discover something unfamiliar, or they point to some aspect of your everyday life that you already understand, but express its significant better than you have been able to do. The writers of these stories explore personal recovery, marriage faithfulness, conflict in family values and resistance to inevitable change—all common human dilemmas.

Alvarez explores conflict in family values, tracing the alienation and bitterness that clouded the lives of a father and his strong-willed daughter who, early on, took control of her own sexuality, violating her father’s rules and Dominican Republic cultural traditions—creating unresolved dif- ferences that, years later, she attempts to reconcile through reunion with her father and a kiss.

Julia Alvarez (b. 1950)

Julia Alvarez was born in New York, but spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic, where she still returns regularly to connect to her experiential roots. Her reflections on the differences between American and Dominican political perspectives and the expectations of women in both of these cultures stand out in her writing. She gained attention as a Latina writer through publication of two novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). She lives in Vermont and is an artist-in-residence at Middlebury College.

The Kiss Julia Alvarez (1991)

Even after they’d been married and had their own families and often couldn’t make it for other occasions, the four daughters always came home for their father’s birthday. They would gather together, without husbands, would-be husbands, or bring-home work. For this too was part of the tradition: the daughters came home alone. The apartment was too small for everyone, the father argued. Surely their husbands could spare them for one overnight?

The husbands would just as soon have not gone to their in-laws, but they felt annoyed at the father’s strutting. “When’s he going to realize you’ve grown up? You sleep with us!”

“He’s almost seventy for God’s sake!” the daughters said, defending the father. They were passionate women, but their devotions were like roots; they were sunk into the past towards the old man.

So for one night every November the daughters turned back into their father’s girls in the cramped living room, surrounded by the dark over- sized furniture from the old house they grew up in, they were children again in a smaller, simpler version of the world. There was the prodigal scene at the door. The father opened his arms wide and welcomed them

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in his broken English: “This is your home, and never you should forget it.” Inside, the mother fussed at them—their sloppy clothes, their long, loose hair, their looking tired, too skinny, too made up, and so on.

After a few glasses of wine, the father started in on what should be done if he did not live to see his next birthday. “Come on, Papi,” his daughters coaxed him, as if it were a modesty of his, to perish, and they had to talk him into staying alive. After his cake and candles, the father distributed bulky envelopes that felt as if they were padded, and they were, no less than several hundreds in bills, tens and twenties and fives, all arranged to face the same way, the top one signed with the father’s name, brand- ing them his. Why not checks? the daughters would wonder later, gossip- ing together in the bedroom, counting their money to make sure the father wasn’t playing favorites. Was there some illegality that the father stashed such sums away? Was he—none of the daughters really believed this, but to contemplate it was a wonderful little explosion in their heads—was he maybe dealing drugs or doing abortions in his office?

At the table there was always the pretense of trying to give the enve- lopes back “No, no, Papi, it’s your birthday, after all.”

The father told them there was plenty more where that had come from. The revolution in the old country had failed. Most of his comrades had been killed or bought off. He had escaped to this country. And now it was every man for himself, so what he made was for his girls. The father never gave his daughters money when their husbands were around. “They might receive the wrong idea,” the father once said, and although none of the daughters knew specifically what the father meant, they all understood what he was saying to them: Don’t bring the men home for my birthday.

But this year, for his seventieth birthday, the youngest daughter, Sofia, wanted the celebration at her house. Her son had been born that sum- mer, and she did not want to be traveling in November with a four- month-old and her little girl. And yet, she, of all the daughters, did not want to be the absent one because for the first time since she’d run off with her husband six years ago, she and her father were on speaking terms. In fact, the old man had been out to see her—or really to see his grandson—twice. It was a big deal that Sofia had had a son. He was the first male born into the family in two generations. In fact, the baby was to be named for the grandfather—Carlos—and his middle name was to be Sofia’s maiden name, and so, what the old man had never hoped for with his “harem of four girls,” as he liked to joke, his own name was to be kept going in this new country!

During his two visits, the grandfather had stood guard by the crib all day, speaking to little Carlos. “Charles the Fifth; Charles Dickens; Prince Charles.” He enumerated the names of famous Charleses in order to stir up genetic ambition in the boy. “Charlemagne,” he cooed at him also, for the baby was large and big-boned with blond fuzz on his pale pink skin,

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and blue eyes just like his German father’s. All the grandfather’s Carib- bean fondness for a male heir and for fair Nordic looks had surfaced. There was now good blood in the family against a future bad choice by one of its women.

“You can be president, you were born here,” the grandfather crooned. “You can go to the moon, maybe even to Mars by the time you are of my age.”

His macho babytalk brought back Sofia’s old antagonism towards her father. How obnoxious for him to go on and on like that while beside him stood his little granddaughter, wide-eyed and sad at all the things her baby brother, no bigger than one of her dolls, was going to be able to do just because he was a boy. “Make him stop, please,” Sofia asked her husband. Otto was considered the jolly, good-natured one among the brothers-in-law. “The camp counselor,” his sisters-in-law teased. Otto approached the grandfather. Both men looked fondly down at the new Viking.

“You can be as great a man as your father,” the grandfather said. This was the first compliment the father-in-law had ever paid any son-in-law in the family. There was no way Otto was going to mess with the old man now. “He is a good boy, is he not, Papi?” He clapped his hand on his father-in-law’s shoulders. They were friends now.

But though the father had made up with his son-in-law, there was still a strain with his own daughter. When he had come to visit, she embraced him at the door, but he stiffened and politely shrugged her off. “Let me put down these heavy bags, Sofia.” He had never called her by her family pet name, Fifi, even when she lived at home. He had always had prob- lems with his maverick youngest, and her running off hadn’t helped. “I don’t want loose women in my family,” he had cautioned all his daughters. Warnings were delivered communally, for even though there was usually the offending daughter of the moment, every wom- an’s character could use extra scolding.

His daughters had had to put up with this kind of attitude in an unsym- pathetic era. They grew up in the late sixties. Those were the days when wearing jeans and hoop earrings, smoking a little dope, and sleeping with their classmates were considered political acts against the military- industrial complex. But standing up to their father was a different matter altogether. Even as grown women, they lowered their voices in their father’s earshot when alluding to their bodies’ pleasure. Professional women, too, all three of them, with degrees on the wall!

Sofia was the one without the degrees. She had always gone her own way, though she downplayed her choices, calling them accidents. Among the four sisters, she was considered the plain one, with her tall, big-boned body and large-featured face. And yet, she was the one with

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“non-stop boyfriends,” her sisters joked, not without wonder and a little envy. They admired her and were always asking her advice about men. The third daughter had shared a room with Sofia growing up. She liked to watch her sister move about their room, getting ready for bed, brushing and arranging her hair in a clip before easing herself under the sheets as if someone were waiting for her there. In the dark, Fifi gave off a fresh, wholesome smell of clean flesh. It gave solace to the third daughter, who was always so tentative and terrified and had such troubles with men. Her sister’s breathing in the dark room was like hav- ing a powerful, tamed animal at the foot of her bed ready to protect her.

The youngest daughter had been the first to leave home. She had dropped out of college, in love. She had taken a job as a secretary and was living at home because her father had threatened to disown her if she moved out on her own. On her vacation she went to Colombia because her current boyfriend was going, and since she couldn’t spend an overnight with him in New York, she had to travel thousands of miles to sleep with him. In Bogota, they discovered that once they could enjoy the forbidden fruit, they lost their appetite. They broke up. She met a tourist on the street, some guy from Germany, just like that. The woman had not been without a boyfriend for more than a few days of her adult life. They fell in love.

On her way home, she tossed her diaphragm in the first bin at Ken- nedy Airport. She was taking no chances. But the father could tell. For months, he kept an eye out. First chance he got, he went through her drawers “looking for my nail clippers,” and there he found her packet of love letters. The German man’s small, correct handwriting mentioned unmentionable things—bed conversations were recreated on the thin blue sheets of aerogramme letters.

“What is the meaning of this?” The father shook the letters in her face. They had been sitting around the table, the four sisters, gabbing, and the father had come in, beating the packet against his leg like a whip, the satin hair ribbon unraveling where he had untied it, and then wrapped it round and round in a mad effort to contain his youngest daughter’s misbehavior.

“Give me those!” she cried, lunging at him.

The father raised his hand with the letters above both their heads like the Statue of Liberty with her freedom torch, but he had forgotten this was the daughter who was as tall as he was. She clawed his arm down and clutched the letters to herself as if they were her baby he’d plucked from her breast. It seemed a biological rather than a romantic fury.

After his initial shock, the father regained his own fury. “Has he deflow- ered you? That’s what I want to know. Have you gone behind the palm trees? Are you dragging my good name through the dirt, that is what I would like to know!” The father was screaming crazily in the youngest

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daughter’s face, question after question, not giving the daughter a chance to answer. His face grew red with fury, but hers was more ter- rible in its impassivity, a pale ivory moon, pulling and pulling at the tide of his anger, until it seemed he might drown in his own outpouring of fury.

Her worried sisters stood up, one at each arm, coaxing him like nurses, another touching the small of his back as if he were a feverish boy. “Come on, Papi, simmer down now. Take it easy. Let’s talk. We’re a fam- ily, after all.”

“Are you a whore?” the father interrogated his daughter. There was spit on the daughter’s cheeks from the closeness of his mouth to her face.

“It’s none of your fucking business!” she said in a low, ugly-sounding voice like the snarl of an animal who could hurt him. “You have no right, no right at all, to go through my stuff or read my mail!” Tears spurted out of her eyes, her nostrils flared.

The father’s mouth opened in a little zero of shock. Quietly, Sofia drew herself up and left the room. Usually, in her growing-up tantrums, this daughter would storm out of the house and come back hours later, placated, the sweetness in her nature reasserted, bearing silly gifts for everyone in the family, refrigerator magnets, little stuffed hairballs with roll-around eye-balls.

But this time they could hear her upstairs, opening and closing her draw- ers, moving back and forth from the bed to the closet. Downstairs, the father prowled up and down the length of the rooms, his three daugh- ters caging him while the other great power in the house, tidily—as if she had all the time in the world—buttoned and folded all her clothes, packed all her bags, and left the house forever. She got herself to Ger- many somehow and got the man to marry her. To throw in the face of the father who was so ambitious for presidents and geniuses in the fam- ily, the German nobody turned out to be a world-class chemist. But the daughter’s was not a petty nature. What did she care what Otto did for a living when she had shown up at his door and offered herself to him.

“I can love you as much as anybody else,” she said. “If you can do the same for me, let’s get married.”

“Come on in and let’s talk,” Otto had said, or so the story went.

“Yes or no.” Sofia answered. Just like that on a snowy night someone at his door and a cold draft coming in. “I couldn’t let her freeze,” Otto boasted later.

“Like hell you couldn’t!” Sofia planted a large hand on his shoulder, and anyone could see how it must be between them in the darkness of their

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love-making. On their honeymoon, they traveled to Greece, and Sofia sent her mother and father and sisters postcards like any newlywed. “We’re having a great time. Wish you were here.”

But the father kept to his revenge. For months no one could mention the daughter’s name in his presence, though he kept calling them all “Sofia” and quickly correcting himself. When the daughter’s baby girl was born, his wife put her foot down. Let him carry his grudge to the grave, she was going out to Michigan (where Otto had relocated) to see her first grandchild!

Last minute, the father relented and went along, but he might as well have stayed away. He was grim and silent the whole visit, no matter how hard Sofia and her sisters tried to engage him in conversation. Banish- ment was better than this cold shoulder. But Sofia tried again. On the old man’s next birthday, she appeared at the apartment with her little girl. “Surprise!” There was a reconciliation of sorts. The father first tried to shake hands with her. Thwarted, he then embraced her stiffly before taking the baby in his arms under the watchful eye of his wife. Every year after that, the daughter came for her father’s birthday, and in the way of women, soothed and stitched and patched over the hurt feel- ings. But there it was under the social fabric, the raw wound. The father refused to set foot in his daughter’s house. They rarely spoke, the father said public things to her in the same tone of voice he used with his sons-in-law.

But now his seventieth birthday was coming up, and he had agreed to have the celebration at Sofia’s house. The christening for little Carlos was scheduled for the morning, so the big event would be Papi Carlos’s party that night. It was a coup for the youngest daughter to have gath- ered the scattered family in the Midwest for a weekend. But the real coup was how Sofia had managed to have the husbands included this year. The husbands are coming, the husbands are coming, the sisters joked. Sofia passed the compliment off on little Carlos. The boy had opened the door for the other men in the family.

But the coup the youngest daughter most wanted was to reconcile with her father in a big way. She would throw the old man a party he wouldn’t forget. For weeks she planned what they would eat, where they would all sleep, the entertainment. She kept calling up her sisters with every little thing to see what they thought. Mostly, they agreed with her: a band, paper hats, balloons, buttons that broadcast the world’s greatest dad. Everything overdone and silly and devoted the way they knew the father would like it. Sofia briefly considered a belly dancer or a girl who’d pop out of a cake. But the third daughter, who had become a feminist in the wake of her divorce, said she considered such locker-room entertainments offensive. A band with music was what she’d pitch in on; her married sisters could split it three ways if they wanted to be sexists. With great patience, Sofia created a weekend that

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would offend no one. They were going to have a good time in her house for the old man’s seventieth, if it killed her!

The night of the party, the family ate an early dinner before the band and the guests arrived. Each daughter toasted both Carloses. The sons- in-law called big Carlos, “Papi.” Little Carlos, looking very much like a little girl in his long, white christening gown, bawled the whole time, and his poor mother had not a moment’s peace between serving the dinner she’d prepared for the family and giving him his. The phone kept ringing, relatives from the old country calling with congratulations for the old man. The toasts the daughters had prepared kept getting interrupted. Even so, their father’s eyes glazed with tears more than once as the four girls went through their paces.

He looked old tonight, every single one of his seventy years was show- ing. Perhaps it was that too much wine had darkened his complexion, and his white hair and brows and mustache stood out unnaturally white. He perked up a little for his gifts, though, gadgets and books and desk trophies from his daughters, and cards with long notes penned inside “to the best, dearest Papi in the world,” each one of which the old man wanted to read out loud. “No you don’t, Papi, they’re private!” his daughters chimed in, crowding around him, wanting to spare each other the embarrassment of having their gushing made public. His wife gave him a gold watch. The third daughter teased that that’s how companies retired their employees, but when her mother made angry eyes at her, she stopped. Then there were the men gifts—belts and credit card wal- lets from the sons-in-law.

“Things I really need.” The father was gracious. He stacked up the gift cards and put them away in his pocket to pore over later. The sons-in- law all knew that the father was watching them, jealously, for signs of indifference or self-interest. As for his girls, even after their toasts were given, the gifts opened, and the father had borne them out of the way with the help of his little granddaughter, even then, the daughters felt that there was something else he had been waiting for which they had not yet given him.

But there was still plenty of party left to make sure he got whatever it was he needed for the long, lonely year ahead. The band arrived, three middle-aged men, each with a silver wave slicked back with too much hair cream. Danny and his Boys set up a placard with their name against the fireplace. There was one on an accordion, another on a fiddle, and a third was miscellaneous on maracas and triangle and drums when needed. They played movie themes, polkas, anything familiar you could hum along to; the corny songs were all dedicated to “Poppy” or “his lovely lady.” The father liked the band. “Nice choice,” he congratulated Otto. The youngest daughter’s temper flared easily with all she’d had to drink and eat. She narrowed her eyes at her smiling husband and put a hand on her hip. As if Otto had lifted a finger during her long months of planning!

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The guests began to arrive, many with tales of how they’d gotten lost on the way; the suburbs were dark and intricate like mazes with their courts and cul-de-sacs. Otto’s unmarried colleagues looked around the room, trying to single out the recently divorced sister they’d heard so much about. But there was no one as beautiful and funny and talented as Sofia had boasted the third oldest would be. Most of these friends were half in love with Sofia anyway, and it was she they sought out in the crowded room.

There was a big chocolate cake in the shape of a heart set out on the long buffet with seventy-one candles—one for good luck. The grand- daughter and her aunts had counted them and planted them diagonally across the heart, joke candles that wouldn’t blow out. Later, they burned a flaming arrow that would not quit. The bar was next to the heart and by midnight when the band broke out again with “Happy Birthday, Poppy,” everyone had had too much to eat and drink.

They’d been playing party games on and off all night. The band obliged with musical chairs, but after two of the dining room chairs were broken, they left off playing. The third daughter, especially, had gotten out of hand, making musical chairs of every man’s lap. The father sat without speaking. He gazed upon the scene disapprovingly.

In fact, the older the evening got, the more withdrawn the father had become. Surrounded by his daughters and their husbands and fancy, intelligent, high-talking friends, he seemed to be realizing that he was just an old man sitting in their houses, eating up their roast lamb, impinging upon their lives. The daughters could almost hear his thoughts inside their own heads. He, who had paid to straighten their teeth and smooth the accent out of their English in expensive schools, he was nothing to them now.

Everyone in this room would survive him, even the silly men in the band who seemed like boys—imagine making a living out of playing birthday songs! How could they ever earn enough money to give their daughters pretty clothes and send them to Europe during the summers so they wouldn’t get bored? Where were the world’s men anymore? Every last one of his sons-in-law was a kid, he could see that clearly. Even Otto, the famous scientist, was a schoolboy with a pencil, doing his long division. The new son-in-law he even felt sorry for—he could see this husband would give out on his strong-willed second daughter. Already she had him giving her back-rubs and going for cigarettes in the middle of the night.

But he needn’t worry about his girls. Or his wife, for that matter. There she sat, pretty and slim as a girl, smiling coyly at everyone when a song was dedicated to her. Eight, maybe nine, months he gave her of widowhood, and then she’d find someone to grow old with on his life insurance.

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The third daughter thought of a party game to draw her father out. She took one of the baby’s soft receiving blankets, blindfolded her father, and led him to a chair at the center of the room. The women clapped. The men sat down. The father pretended he didn’t understand what all his daughters were up to. “How does one play this game. Mami?”

“You’re on your own, Dad,” the mother said, laughing. She was the only one in the family who called him by his American name.

“Are you ready, Papi?” the oldest asked.

“I am perfect ready,” he replied in his heavy accent.

“Okay, now, guess who this is,” the oldest said. She always took charge. This is how they worked things among the daughters.

The father nodded, his eyebrows shot up. He held on to his chair, excited, a little scared, like a boy about to be asked a hard question he knows the answer to.

The oldest daughter motioned to the third daughter, who tiptoed into the circle the women had made around the old man. She gave him a daughterly peck on the cheek.

“Who was that, Papi?” the oldest asked.

He was giggling with pleasure and could not get the words out at first. He had had too much to drink. “That was Mami,” he said in a coy little voice.

“No! Wrong!” all the women cried out.

“Carla?” he guessed the oldest. He was going down the line. “Wrong!” More shouts.

“Sandi? Yoyo?”

“You guessed it,” his third oldest said.

The women clapped; some bent over in hilarious laughter. Everyone had had too much to drink. And the old man was having his good time too.

“Okay, here’s another coming at you.” The eldest took up the game again. She put her index finger to her lips, gave everyone a meaning- ful glance, quietly circled the old man, and kissed him from behind on top of his head. Then she tiptoed back to where she had been stand- ing when she had first spoken. “Who was that, Papi?” she asked, extra innocent.

“Mami?” His voice rode up, exposed and vulnerable. Then it sank back into its certainties. “That was Mami.”

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.5 A Common Human Dilemma Story

“Count me out,” his wife said from the couch where she’d finally given in to exhaustion.

The father never guessed any of the other women in the room. That would have been disrespectful. Besides, their strange-sounding Ameri- can names were hard to remember and difficult to pronounce. Still he got the benefit of their kisses under cover of his daughters. Down the line, the father went each time: “Carla?” “Sandi?” “Yoyo?” Sometimes, he altered the order, put the third daughter first or the oldest one second.

Sofia had been in the bedroom, tending to her son, who was wild with all the noise in the house tonight. She came back into the living room, buttoning her dress front, and happened upon the game. “Ooh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s getting raunchy in here, ha!” She worked her hips in a mock rotation, and the men all laughed. She thrust her girlfriends into the circle and whispered to her little girl to plant the next kiss on her grandfather’s nose. The women all pecked and puckered at the old man’s face. The second daughter sat briefly on his lap and clucked him under the chin. Every time the father took a wrong guess, the youngest daughter laughed loudly. But soon, she noticed that he never guessed her name.

After all her hard work, she was not to be included in his daughter count. Damn him! She’d take her turn and make him know it was her!

Quickly, she swooped into the circle and gave the old man a wet, open- mouthed kiss in his ear. She ran her tongue in the whorls of his ear and nibbled the tip. Then she moved back.

“Oh la la,” the oldest said, laughing. “Who was that, Papi?”

The old man did not answer. The smile that had played on his lips throughout the game was gone. He sat up, alert. There was a long pause; everyone leaned forward, waiting for the father to begin with his usual, “Mami?”

But the father did not guess his wife’s name. He tore at his blindfold as if it were a contagious body whose disease he might catch. The receiving blanket fell in a soft heap beside his chair. His face had darkened with shame at having his pleasure aroused in public by one of his daughters. He looked from one to the other. His gaze faltered. On the face of his youngest was the brilliant, impassive look he remembered from when she had snatched her love letters out of his hands.

“That’s enough of that,” he commanded in a low, furious voice. And sure enough, his party was over.

From How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Copyright © 1991 by Julia Alvarez. Published by Plume, an imprint of The Penguin Group (USA) and originally in hardcover by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literacy Services, New York, NY and lamy, NM.

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.6 A Coming-of-Age Story

8.6  A Coming-of-Age Story

The term coming-of-age when applied to literature refers to a narrative in which the protago-nist is young and facing a situation that produces significant personal insight and growth. Often dramatic, these stories illustrate intense struggles as uncertainties loom. Such strug- gles often result in a shift from innocence to experience, from idealism to realism, or from igno- rance to knowledge. In these stories, characters are seen coming to grips with war or death or unanswered love. Usually, they have to confront and work through disillusionment in their initia- tion ordeal.

Because Updike’s narrative is short, it does not present the full scope of the coming-of-age pat- tern. But the main character is a young male who finds himself in a predicament different from any he has been in before. And (no surprise here!) he opts for an idealistic response, because an attractive girl creates the dilemma he faces. This physical fascination leads to impetuous action and painful consequences.

John Updike (1932–2009)

In his growing-up years in small-town Pennsylvania John Updike developed a lasting aware- ness of ways religious faith (as a coalescing element) was being replaced by material culture in America. His novels, essays, and poems are elegant portraits of aspects of this dilemma that he sought answers for and probed with unrestrained curiosity. He once said, “I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.” His short stories and novels often reflect life and changing relationships in communities where he lived in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for each of the last two novels in his famous Rabbit series Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.

A&P John Updike (1962)

In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I’m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don’t see them until they’re over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She’s one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She’d been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before.

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag— she gives me a little snort in passing, if she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem—by the time I get her

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CHAPTER 8Section 8.6 A Coming-of-Age Story

on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn’t even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece—it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit)—there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long—you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very “striking” and “attractive” but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much—and then the third one, that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn’t walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight.

She had on a kind of dirty-pink-beige maybe, I don’t know—bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A&P with your straps down, I suppose it’s the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn’t mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was.

She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoul- der Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn’t tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the

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cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings- spreads-spaghetti-soft drinks-crackers-and-cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle—the girls were walking against the usual traf- fic (not that we have one-way signs or anything)—were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A&P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering “Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!” or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.

You know, it’s one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A&P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.

“Oh Daddy,” Stokesie said beside me. “I feel so faint.”

“Darling,” I said. “Hold me tight.” Stokesie’s married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that’s the only difference. He’s twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.

“Is it done?” he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he’s going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it’s called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Com- pany or something.

What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big sum- mer colony out on the Point, but we’re right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we’re right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It’s not as if we’re on the Cape; we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years.

The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight

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behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it.

Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad but I don’t think it’s sad myself. The store’s pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, six packs of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice, I’ve often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money’s coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.

Then everybody’s luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss that much. He comes over and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach.”

Queenie blushes, though maybe it’s just a brush of sunburn I was notic- ing for the first time, now that she was so close. “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.” Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks.” All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with “They’ll Do It Every Time” cartoons stencilled on.

“That’s all right,” Lengel said. “But this isn’t the beach.” His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had

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been thinking all these years the A&P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn’t like my smiling—as I say he doesn’t miss much—but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school- superintendent stare.

Queenie’s blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back—a really sweet can—pipes up, “We weren’t doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing.”

“That makes no difference,” Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn’t noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. “We want you decently dressed when you come in here.”

“We are decent,” Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, get- ting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A&P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.

“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy.” He turns his back. That’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.

All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not want- ing to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting ner- vous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, “Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?”

I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT—it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap- py pee-pul (splat)”—the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.

The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw mate- rial she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.

“Did you say something, Sammy?”

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“I said I quit.”

“I thought you did.”

“You didn’t have to embarrass them.”

“It was they who were embarrassing us.”

I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo.” It’s a saying of my grandmother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.

“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.

“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.

Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He’s been a friend of my parents for years. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true, I don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you’ve ever wondered. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “pee-pul” and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.

I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

“A&P,” from Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories by John Updike, copyright © 1962 and renewed 1990 by John Upkide. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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