Alice Munro - Alice Munro's Best

Sophie was clearing up the children’s lunch. “Oh,” she cried. “Oh, what’ll we do with all that stuff?”

Ian had phoned, she said. Ian had phoned and said he was flying into Toronto tomorrow. Work on his book had progressed more quickly than he had expected; he had changed his plans. Instead of waiting for the three weeks to be up, he was coming tomorrow to collect Sophie and the children and take them on a little trip. He wanted to go to Quebec City. He had never been there, and he thought the children should see the part of Canada where people spoke French.

“He got lonesome,” Philip said.

Sophie laughed. She said, “Yes. He got lonesome for us.”

Twelve days, Eve thought. Twelve days had passed of the three weeks. She had had to take the house for a month. She was letting her friend Dev use the apartment. He was another out-of-work actor, and was in such real or imagined financial peril that he answered the phone in various stage voices. She was fond of Dev, but she couldn’t go back and share the apartment with him.

Sophie said that they would drive to Quebec in the rented car, then drive straight back to the Toronto airport, where the car was to be turned in. No mention of Eve’s going along. There wasn’t room in the rented car. But couldn’t she have taken her own car? Philip riding with her, perhaps, for company. Or Sophie. Ian could take the children, if he was so lonesome for them, and give Sophie a rest. Eve and Sophie could ride together as they used to in the summer, travelling to some town they had never seen before, where Eve had got a job.

That was ridiculous. Eve’s car was nine years old and in no condition to make a long trip. And it was Sophie Ian had got lonesome for — you could tell that by her warm averted face. Also, Eve hadn’t been asked.

“Well that’s wonderful,” said Eve. “That he’s got along so well with his book.”

“It is,” said Sophie. She always had an air of careful detachment when she spoke of Ian’s book, and when Eve had asked what it was about she had said merely, “Urban geography.” Perhaps this was the correct behavior for academic wives — Eve had never known any.

“Anyway you’ll get some time by yourself,” Sophie said. “After all this circus. You’ll find out if you really would like to have a place in the country. A retreat.”

Eve had to start talking about something else, anything else, so that she wouldn’t bleat out a question about whether Sophie still thought of coming next summer.

“I had a friend who went on one of those real retreats,” she said. “He’s a Buddhist. No, maybe a Hindu. Not a real Indian.” (At this mention of Indians Sophie smiled in a way that said this was another subject that need not be gone into.) “Anyway, you could not speak on this retreat for three months. There were other people around all the time, but you could not speak to them. And he said that one of the things that often happened and that they were warned about was that you fell in love with one of these people you’d never spoken to. You felt you were communicating in a special way with them when you couldn’t talk. Of course it was a kind of spiritual love, and you couldn’t do anything about it. They were strict about that kind of thing. Or so he said.”

Sophie said, “So? When you were finally allowed to speak what happened?”

“It was a big letdown. Usually the person you thought you’d been communicating with hadn’t been communicating with you at all. Maybe they thought they’d been communicating that way with somebody else, and they thought—”

Sophie laughed with relief. She said, “So it goes.” Glad that there was to be no show of disappointment, no hurt feelings.

Maybe they had a tiff, thought Eve. This whole visit might have been tactical. Sophie might have taken the children off to show him something. Spent time with her mother, just to show him something. Planning future holidays without him, to prove to herself that she could do it. A diversion.

And the burning question was, Who did the phoning?

“Why don’t you leave the children here?” she said. “Just while you drive to the airport? Then just drive back and pick them up and take off. You’d have a little time to yourself and a little time alone with Ian. It’ll be hell with them in the airport.”

Sophie said, “I’m tempted.”

So in the end that was what she did.

Now Eve had to wonder if she herself had engineered that little change just so she could get to talk to Philip.

(Wasn’t it a big surprise when your dad phoned from California?

He didn’t phone. My mom phoned him.

Did she? Oh I didn’t know. What did she say?

She said, “I can’t stand it here, I’m sick of it, let’s figure out some plan to get me away.”)

EVE DROPPED HER voice to a matter-of-fact level, to indicate an interruption of the game. She said, “Philip. Philip, listen. I think we’ve got to stop this. That truck just belongs to some farmer and it’s going to turn in someplace and we can’t go on following.”

“Yes we can,” Philip said.

“No we can’t. They’d want to know what we were doing. They might be very mad.”

“We’ll call up our helicopters to come and shoot them.”

“Don’t be silly. You know this is just a game.”

“They’ll shoot them.”

“I don’t think they have any weapons,” said Eve, trying another tack. “They haven’t developed any weapons to destroy aliens.”

Philip said, “You’re wrong,” and began a description of some kind of rockets, which she did not listen to.

WHEN SHE WAS a child staying in the village with her brother and her parents, Eve had sometimes gone for drives in the country with her mother. They didn’t have a car — it was wartime, they had come here on the train. The woman who ran the hotel was friends with Eve’s mother, and they would be invited along when she drove to the country to buy corn or raspberries or tomatoes. Sometimes they would stop to have tea and look at the old dishes and bits of furniture for sale in some enterprising farm woman’s front parlor. Eve’s father preferred to stay behind and play checkers with some other men on the beach. There was a big cement square with a checkerboard painted on it, a roof protecting it but no walls, and there, even in the rain, the men moved oversized checkers around in a deliberate way, with long poles. Eve’s brother watched them or went swimming unsupervised — he was older. That was all gone now — the cement, even, was gone, or something had been built right on top of it. The hotel with its verandas extending over the sand was gone, and the railway station with its flower beds spelling out the name of the village. The railway tracks too. Instead there was a fake-old-fashioned mall with the satisfactory new supermarket and wineshop and boutiques for leisure wear and country crafts.

When she was quite small and wore a great hair bow on top of her head, Eve was fond of these country expeditions. She ate tiny jam tarts and cakes whose frosting was stiff on top and soft underneath, topped with a bleeding maraschino cherry. She was not allowed to touch the dishes or the lace-and-satin pincushions or the sallow-looking old dolls, and the women’s conversations passed over her head with a temporary and mildly depressing effect, like the inevitable clouds. But she enjoyed riding in the backseat imagining herself on horseback or in a royal coach. Later on she refused to go. She began to hate trailing along with her mother and being identified as her mother’s daughter. My daughter, Eve. How richly condescending, how mistakenly possessive, that voice sounded in her ears. (She was to use it, or some version of it, for years as a staple in some of her broadest, least accomplished acting.) She detested also her mother’s habit of dressing up, wearing large hats and gloves in the country, and sheer dresses on which there were raised flowers, like warts. The oxford shoes, on the other hand — they were worn to favor her mother’s corns — appeared embarrassingly stout and shabby.