Alice Munro - Open Secrets

When Wayne got there, she was on the porch cleaning eggs. “I want to know what you meant,” she said.

“By what?” said Wayne.

Rhea looked at him and kept looking, with an egg in one hand and a bit of steel wool in the other. He had one foot on the bottom step. His hand on the railing. He wanted to come up, to get out of the sun, but she was blocking his way.

“I was drunk,” Wayne said. “You’re not ugly.”

Rhea said, “I know I’m not.”

“I feel awful.”

“Not for that,” said Rhea.

“I was drunk. It was a joke.”

Rhea said, “You don’t want to get married to her. Lucille.”

He leaned into the railing. She thought maybe he was going to be sick. But he got over it, and tried his raising of the eyebrows, his discouraging smile.

“Oh, really? No kidding? So what advice do you have for me?”

“Write a note,” said Rhea, just as if he had asked that in all seriousness. “Get in your car and drive to Calgary.”

“Just like that.”

“If you want, I’ll ride with you to Toronto. You can drop me off and I’ll stay at the Y until I get a job.”

This was what she meant to do. She would always swear it was what she had meant to do. She felt more at liberty now and more dazzled by herself than she had last night when she was drunk. She made these suggestions as if they were the easiest things in the world. It would be days — weeks, maybe — before everything sank in, all that she had said and done.

“Did you ever look at a map?” said Wayne. “You don’t go through Toronto on your way to Calgary. You go across the border at Sarnia and up through the States to Winnipeg and then to Calgary.”

“Drop me off in Winnipeg then, that’s better.”

“One question,” said Wayne. “Have you had a sanity test recently?”

Rhea didn’t budge or smile. She said, “No.”

Eunie was on her way home when Rhea spotted her. Eunie was surprised to find the riverbank path not clear, as she was expecting, but all grown up with brambles. When she pushed out into her own yard, she had scratches and smears of blood on her arms and forehead, and bits of leaves caught in her hair. One side of her face was dirty, too, from being pressed against the ground.

In the kitchen she found her mother and her father and her Aunt Muriel Martin, and Norman Coombs, the Chief of Police, and Billy Doud. After her mother had phoned her Aunt Muriel, her father had stirred himself and said that he was going to phone Mr. Doud. He had worked in Douds when he was young, and remembered how Mr. Doud, Billy’s father, was always sent for in an emergency.

“He’s dead,” said Eunie’s mother. “What if you get her ?” (She meant Mrs. Doud, who had such a short fuse.) But Eunie’s father phoned anyway and got Billy Doud. Billy hadn’t been to bed.

Aunt Muriel Martin, when she’d got there, had phoned the Chief of Police. He said he would be down as soon as he got dressed and ate his breakfast. This took him a while. He disliked anything puzzling or disruptive, anything that might force him to make decisions which could be criticized later or result in his looking like a fool. Of all the people waiting in the kitchen, he might have been the happiest to see Eunie home safe, and to hear her story. It was right out of his jurisdiction. There was nothing to be followed up, nobody to be charged.

Eunie said that three children had come up to her, in her own yard, in the middle of the night. They said that they had something to show her. She asked them what it was and what they were doing up so late at night. She didn’t recall what they answered.

She found herself being borne along by them, without ever having said that she would go. They took her out through the gap in the fence at the corner of the yard and along the path on the riverbank. She was surprised to see the path so nicely opened up — she hadn’t walked that way for years.

It was two boys and a girl who took her. They looked about nine or ten or eleven years old and they all wore the same kind of outfit — a kind of seersucker sunsuit with a bib in front and straps over the shoulders. All fresh and clean as if just off the ironing board. The hair of these children was light brown, and straight and shiny. They were the most perfectly clean and polite and pleasant children. But how could she tell what color their hair was and that their sunsuits were made of seersucker? When she came out of the house, she hadn’t brought the flashlight. They must have brought some kind of light with them — that was her impression, but she couldn’t say what it was.

They took her along the path and out onto the old fairgrounds. They took her to their tent. But it seemed to her that she never saw that tent once from the outside. She was just suddenly inside it, and she saw that it was white, very high and white, and shivering like the sails on a boat. Also it was lit up, and again she had no idea where the light was coming from. And a certain part of this tent or building, or whatever it was, seemed to be made of glass. Yes. Definitely green glass, a very light green, as if panels of that were slid in between the sails. Possibly too a glass floor, because she was walking in her bare feet on something cool and smooth — not grass at all, and certainly not gravel.

Later on, in the newspaper, there was a drawing, an artist’s conception, of something like a sailboat in a saucer. But flying saucer was not what Eunie called it, at least not when she was talking about it immediately afterwards. Nor did she say anything about what appeared in print later, in a book of such stories, concerning the capture and investigation of her body, the sampling of her blood and fluids, the possibility that one of her secret eggs had been spirited away, that fertilization had taken place in an alien dimension — that there had been a subtle or explosive, at any rate indescribable, mating, which sucked Eunie’s genes into the life stream of the invaders.

She was set down in a seat she hadn’t noticed, she couldn’t say if it was a plain chair or a throne, and these children began to weave a veil around her. It was like mosquito netting or some such stuff, light but strong. All three of them moved continuously, winding or weaving it around her and never bumping into each other. By this time she was past asking questions. “What do you think you’re doing?” and “How did you get here?” and “Where are the grownups?” had just slipped off to some place where she couldn’t describe it. Some singing or humming might have been taking place, getting inside her head, something pacifying and delightful. And everything had got to seem perfectly normal. You couldn’t inquire about anything, anymore than you would say, “What is that teapot doing here?” in an ordinary kitchen.

When she woke up there was nothing around her, nothing over her. She was lying in the hot sunlight, well on in the morning. In the fairgrounds on the hard earth.

“Wonderful,” said Billy Doud several times as he watched and listened to Eunie. Nobody knew exactly what he meant by that. He smelled of beer but seemed sober and very attentive. More than attentive — you might say enchanted. Eunie’s singular revelations, her flushed and dirty face, her somewhat arrogant tone of voice appeared to give Billy Doud the greatest pleasure. What a relief, what a blessing, he might have been saying to himself. To find in the world and close at hand this calm, preposterous creature. Wonderful .

His love — Billy’s kind of love — could spring up to meet a need that Eunie wouldn’t know she had.

Aunt Muriel said it was time to phone the newspapers.