Alice Munro - Dear Life

My mind was slower, but accurate, and that was a great relief to me.

She left me alone until the day—or evening, rather—when we were accustomed to watch television. Then she arrived with a can of soup. Not enough to make a meal in itself, and not something she had made, but nevertheless a contribution to a meal. And she was early, to make time for that. She opened it, too, without questioning me. She knew her way around my kitchen. She heated it and got out the soup bowls and we ate together. Her behavior seemed to remind me that I had been a sick man needing immediate nourishment. And that was true, in a way. That day at noon I had been unable, for shakiness, to use the can opener myself.

There were two shows we watched, back-to-back. But on that evening we never got to see the second one. She could not wait until the second one had its turn before starting a conversation that was very unsettling to me.

The gist of it was that she was prepared to move in.

For one thing, she said, she was not happy living in her apartment. That had been a big mistake. She liked houses. But that did not mean that she regretted leaving the house that she was born in. She would have gone batty living in that house by herself. The mistake was simply in thinking that an apartment could be the answer. She had never been happy in that place and never could be. What made her realize this was the time she had spent in my house. When I was sick. She should have realized it long ago. Long ago, when she was a little girl and looked at certain houses, she would wish that she was living there.

Another thing she said was that we were not entirely capable of looking after ourselves. What if I had got sick and been all alone? What if such a thing should happen again? Or should happen to her?

We had a certain feeling for each other, she said. We had a feeling which was not just the usual thing. We could live together like brother and sister and look after each other like brother and sister and it would be the most natural thing in the world. Everybody would accept it as so. How could they not?

All the time she was speaking I felt terrible. Angry, scared, appalled. The worst was towards the end, when she was talking about how nobody would think a thing about it. At the same time, I could see what she meant, and maybe agree with her that people would get used to it. A dirty joke or two we might not even get to hear.

She might be right. It might make sense.

At this I felt as if I had been thrown down into a cellar and a flat door slammed on my head.

I wouldn’t for anything let her know about that.

I said it was an interesting idea, but one thing made it impossible.

What was that?

I had neglected to tell her. With all the sickness and fuss and everything. But I had put this house on the market. This house was sold.

Oh. Oh. Why had I not told her this?

I had no inkling, I said then, truthfully. I had no inkling that she had such a plan in her head.

“So it just didn’t come to me soon enough,” she said. “Like a lot of things in my life. Something must be the matter with me. I don’t get around to thinking about things. I always think there’s plenty of time.”

I had rescued myself, but not without a cost. I had to put the house—this house—up for sale and sell it as quickly as I could. Almost the same as she had done with hers.

And I sold it almost that quickly, though I was not forced to accept such a ridiculous offer as she had. And then I had to face the job of dealing with all that had been accumulating since my parents moved in on their honeymoon, not having the money for any kind of a trip.

The neighbors were amazed. They weren’t longtime neighbors, they hadn’t known my mother, but they said they had got so used to my coming and going, my regularity.

They wanted to know what my plans were now, and I realized that I didn’t have any. Beyond doing the work I’d always done, and I had already been cutting down on that, looking forward to a careful old age.

I began scouting around town for a place to live, and it turned out that of all the places that came near to suiting me, only one was vacant. And that one was an apartment in the building on the site of Oneida’s old house. Not on the top floor, with the view, where she was, but on the bottom. I had never been much for views, anyhow, and I took it. Not knowing what else I could do.

Of course I meant to tell her. But the word got out before I could bring myself round to it. She had her own plans, anyway. It was summer by this time, our programs were off the air. It was a time when we did not regularly see each other. And I didn’t think, when it came right down to it, that I should have to apologize or ask her permission. When I went up to look at the place and sign the lease she hadn’t been anywhere in sight.

One thing I came to understand on that visit, or when I thought about it afterwards. A man I didn’t quite recognize spoke to me, and after a minute I realized he was somebody I’d known for years and greeted on the street for half my life. If I’d seen him there I might have known him, in spite of certain ravages of age. But here I hadn’t, and we laughed about that, and he wanted to know if I was moving into the boneyard.

I said I hadn’t realized they called it that, but yes, I guessed I was.

Then he wanted to know whether I played euchre, and I said I did, up to a point.

“That’ll be good,” he said.

And I thought then, Just living long enough wipes out the problems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours.

That made me think of Oneida, and how she looked while she was talking to me about moving in. She was not slender anymore but gaunt, tired, no doubt, from the nights of getting up with me, but her age was telling, beyond that. Her beauty had been delicate all along. A blond woman’s easily flushing kind of looks, with that strange mixture of apology and high-class confidence about it was what she’d had, and lost. When she set out to make her proposal to me, she looked strained and her expression was peculiar.

Of course if I had ever had the right to choose, I would naturally, according to my height, have picked a smaller girl. Like the college girl, dainty and dark-haired, who was related to the Krebses and worked there for a summer.

One day that girl had said to me in a friendly way that I could get a better job done on my face, nowadays. I’d be amazed, she said. And it wouldn’t cost, with OHIP.

She was right. But how could I explain that it was just beyond me to walk into some doctor’s office and admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got?

Oneida was looking better than formerly when she showed up in the midst of my packing and discarding. She’d had her hair done, and the color changed somewhat, maybe browner.

“You mustn’t throw everything out in one fell swoop,” she said. “All you’d collected for that town history.”

I said I was being selective, though that was not entirely true. It seemed to me that both of us were pretending to care about what happened, more than we really did. When I thought about the town history now, it seemed as if one town must after all be much like another.

We did not mention my going into the apartment building. As if that had all been discussed and taken for granted long ago.

She said that she was going off on one of her trips, and this time she named the place. Savary Island, as if that was enough.

I asked politely where that was and she said, “Oh, it’s off the coast.”

As if that answered the question.

“Where an old friend of mine lives,” she said.