Alice Munro - Alice Munro's Best

“What will?” said Liza.

“You are a pair of dumb kids,” Ladner said. “What do you do all day — watch TV?”

That was the beginning of their spending Saturdays — and, when summer came, nearly all days — with Ladner. Their father said it was all right, if Ladner was fool enough to put up with them. “But you better not cross him or he’ll skin you alive,” their father said. “Like he does with his other stuff. You know that?”

They knew what Ladner did. He had let them watch. They had seen him clean out a squirrel’s skull and fix a bird’s feathers to best advantage with delicate wire and pins. Once he was sure that they would be careful enough, he let them fit the glass eyes in place. They had watched him skin animals, scrape the skins and salt them, and set them to dry inside out before he sent them to the tanner’s. Tanning put a poison in them so they would never crack, and the fur would never fall out.

Ladner fitted the skin around a body in which nothing was real. A bird’s body could be all of one piece, carved of wood, but an animal’s larger body was a wonderful construction of wires and burlap and glue and mushed-up paper and clay.

Liza and Kenny had picked up skinned bodies that were tough as rope. They had touched guts that looked like plastic tubing. They had squished eyeballs to jelly. They told their father about that. “But we won’t get any diseases,” Liza said. “We wash our hands in Borax soap.”

Not all the information they had was about dead things: What does the red-winged blackbird say? Compan-ee! What does the Jenny wren say? Pleasa-pleasa-please, can I have a piece of cheese?

“Oh, can it!” said their father.

Soon they knew much more. At least Liza did. She knew birds, trees, mushrooms, fossils, the solar system. She knew where certain rocks came from and that the swelling on a goldenrod stem contains a little white worm that can live nowhere else in the world.

She knew not to talk so much about all she knew.

BEA WAS STANDING on the bank of the pond, in her Japanese kimono. Liza was already swimming. She called to Bea, “Come on in, come in!” Ladner was working on the far side of the pond, cutting reeds and clearing the weeds that clogged the water. Kenny was supposed to be helping him. Liza thought, Like a family.

Bea dropped her kimono and stood in her yellow, silky bathing suit. She was a small woman with dark hair, lightly grayed, falling heavily around her shoulders. Her eyebrows were thick and dark and their arched shape, like the sweet sulky shape of her mouth, entreated kindness and consolation. The sun had covered her with dim freckles, and she was just a bit too soft all over. When she lowered her chin, little pouches collected along her jaw and under her eyes. She was prey to little pouches and sags, dents and ripples in the skin or flesh, sunbursts of tiny purplish veins, faint discolorations in the hollows. And it was in fact this collection of flaws, this shadowy damage, that Liza especially loved. Also she loved the dampness that was often to be seen in Bea’s eyes, the tremor and teasing and playful pleading in Bea’s voice, its huskiness and artificiality. Bea was not measured or judged by Liza in the way that other people were. But this did not mean that Liza’s love for Bea was easy or restful — her love was one of expectation, but she did not know what it was that she expected.

Now Bea entered the pond. She did this in stages. A decision, a short run, a pause. Knee-high in the water, she hugged herself and squealed.

“It’s not cold,” said Liza.

“No, no, I love it!” Bea said. And she continued, with noises of appreciation, to a spot where the water was up to her waist. She turned around to face Liza, who had swum around behind her with the intention of splashing.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Bea cried. And she began to jump in place, to pass her hands through the water, fingers spread, gathering it as if it were flower petals. Ineffectually, she splashed Liza.

Liza turned over and floated on her back and gently kicked a little water toward Bea’s face. Bea kept rising and falling and dodging the water Liza kicked, and as she did so she set up some sort of happy silly chant. Oh-woo, oh-woo, oh-woo. Something like that.

Even though she was lying on her back, floating on the water, Liza could see that Ladner had stopped working. He was standing in waist-deep water on the other side of the pond, behind Bea’s back. He was watching Bea. Then he too started jumping up and down in the water. His body was stiff but he turned his head sharply from side to side, skimming or patting the water with fluttery hands. Preening, twitching, as if carried away with admiration for himself.

He was imitating Bea. He was doing what she was doing but in a sillier, ugly way. He was most intentionally and insistently making a fool of her. See how vain she is, said Ladner’s angular prancing. See what a fake. Pretending not to be afraid of the deep water, pretending to be happy, pretending not to know how we despise her.

This was thrilling and shocking. Liza’s face was trembling with her need to laugh. Part of her wanted to make Ladner stop, to stop at once, before the damage was done, and part of her longed for that very damage, the damage Ladner could do, the ripping open, the final delight of it.

Kenny whooped out loud. He had no sense.

Bea had already seen the change in Liza’s face, and now she heard Kenny. She turned to see what was behind her. But Ladner had dropped into the water again, he was pulling up weeds.

Liza at once kicked up a distracting storm. When Bea didn’t respond to this, she swam out into the deep part of the pond and dived down. Deep, deep, to where it’s dark, where the carp live, in the mud. She stayed down there as long as she could. She swam so far that she got tangled in the weeds near the other bank and came up gasping, only a yard or so away from Ladner.

“I got caught in the reeds,” she said. “I could have drowned.”

“No such luck,” said Ladner. He made a pretend grab at her, to get her between the legs. At the same time he made a pious, shocked face, as if the person in his head was having a fit at what his hand might do.

Liza pretended not to notice. “Where’s Bea?” she said.

Ladner looked at the opposite bank. “Maybe up to the house,” he said. “I didn’t see her go.” He was quite ordinary again, a serious workman, slightly fed up with all their foolishness. Ladner could do that. He could switch from one person to another and make it your fault if you remembered.

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

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

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