Friend of My Youth (37 page)

So she told Margot. It was more difficult than that, of course, and it was not so clear.

“Then did you go and find that other man?” said Margot.

“No. It was one-sided. I couldn’t.”

“Somebody else, then?”

“And somebody else, and somebody else,” said Anita, smiling. The other night when she had been sitting beside her mother’s bed, waiting to give her mother an injection, she had thought about men, putting names one upon another as if to pass the time, just as you’d name great rivers of the world, or capital cities, or the children of Queen Victoria. She felt regret about some of them but no repentance. Warmth, in fact, spread from the tidy buildup. An accumulating satisfaction.

“Well, that’s one way,” said Margot staunchly. “But it seems weird to me. It does. I mean—I can’t see the use of it, if you don’t marry them.” She paused. “Do you know what I do, sometimes?” She got up quickly and went to the sliding doors. She listened, then opened the door and stuck her head inside. She came back and sat down.

“Just checking to see Debbie’s not getting an earful,” she said. “Boys, you can tell any horrific personal stuff in front of them and you might as well be speaking Hindu, for all they ever listen. But girls listen. Debbie listens.…

“I’ll tell you what I do,” she said. “I go out and see Teresa.”

“Is she still there?” said Anita with great surprise. “Is Teresa still out at the store?”

“What store?” said Margot. “Oh, no! No, no. The store’s gone. The gas station’s gone. Torn down years ago. Teresa’s in the County Home. They have this what they call the Psychiatric Wing out there now. The weird thing is, she worked out there for years and years, just handing round trays and tidying up and doing this and that for them. Then she started having funny
spells herself. So now she’s sometimes sort of working there and she’s sometimes just
there
, if you see what I mean. When she goes off, she’s never any trouble. She’s just pretty mixed up. Talk-talk-talk-talk-talk. The way she always did, only more so. All she has any idea of doing is talk-talk-talk, and fix herself up. If you come and see her, she always wants you to bring her some bath oil or perfume or makeup. Last time I went out, I took her some of that highlight stuff for her hair. I thought that was taking a chance, it was kind of complicated for her to use. But she read the directions, she made out fine. She didn’t make a mess. What I mean by mixed up is, she figures she’s on the boat. The boat with the war brides. Bringing them all out to Canada.”

“War brides,” Anita said. She saw them crowned with white feathers, fierce and unsullied. She was thinking of war bonnets.

She didn’t need to see him, for years she hadn’t the least wish to see him. A man undermines your life for an uncontrollable time, and then one day there’s nothing, just a hollow where he was, it’s unaccountable.

“You know what just flashed through my mind this minute?” Margot said. “Just the way the store used to look in the mornings. And us coming in half froze. We had a hard life but we didn’t know it.”

We had power, Anita thought. It’s a power of transformation you have, when you’re stuffed full of fear and eagerness—not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.

“She used to come and beat on the door,” said Margot, in a flattened, disbelieving voice. “Out there. Out there, when Reuel was with me in the room. It was awful. I don’t know. I don’t know—do you think it was love?”

From up here the two long arms of the breakwater look like floating matchsticks. The towers and pyramids and conveyor belt of the salt mine look like large floating toys. The lake is glinting
like foil. Everything seems bright and distinct and harmless. Spellbound.

“We’re all on the boat,” says Margot. “She thinks we’re all on the boat. But she’s the one Reuel’s going to meet in Halifax, lucky her.”

Margot and Anita have got this far. They are not ready yet to stop talking. They are fairly happy.

THE BEGGAR MAID

In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

Fiction/Short Stories

HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE

In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this celebrated collection, Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
is tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, and deeply and gloriously humane.

Fiction/literature/short stories

THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN

Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest individuals. Munro evokes the vagaries of love, the tension and deceit that lie in wait under the polite surfaces of society, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart.

Fiction/Literature/short stories/

THE MOONS OF JUPITER

In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen; there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in
The Moons of Jupiter
are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force.

Fiction/Short Stories

OPEN SECRETS

In
Open Secrets
, Munro uncovers the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished young schoolgirls, indentured frontier brides, an eccentric recluse who finds love at a dinner party, and a Canadian woman fleeing a husband and a lover. These stories resonate with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, confirming Munro as one of the most gifted writers of our time.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

THE PROGRESS OF LOVE

A divorced woman returns to her childhood home and confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, Munro reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK

Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet. A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hope, adversity, and wonder.

Fiction/Literature/short stories

SOMETHING I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU

In these thirteen stories, Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future.

Fiction/Literature/Short Stories

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