Alice Munro - Dance of the Happy Shades - And Other Stories

May was lying in a big room full of boxes at the back of the store. That was where she slept in the summer, when it got too hot upstairs. Hazel slept in the front room on the chesterfield and played the radio half the night; her grandmother still slept upstairs, in a tight little room full of big furniture and old photographs that smelled of hot oilcloth and old women’s woollen stockings. May could not tell what time it was because she hardly ever woke up this early. Most mornings when she woke up there was a patch of hot sun on the floor at her feet and the farmers’ milk trucks were rattling past on the highway and her grandmother was scuttling back and forth from the store to the kitchen, where she had put a pot of coffee and a pan of thick bacon on the stove. Passing the old porch couch where May slept (its cushions still smelled faintly of mould and pine) she would twitch automatically at the sheet, saying, “Get up now, get up, do you think you’re going to sleep till dinner-time? There’s a man wants gas.”

And if May did not get up but clung to the sheet, muttering angrily, her grandmother would come through next time with a little cold water in a dipper, which she dumped in passing on her granddaughter’s feet. Then May would jump up, pushing her long switch of hair back from her face, which was sulky with sleepiness but not resentful; she accepted the rule of her grandmother as she accepted a rain squall or a stomach ache, with a tough, basic certainty that such things would pass. She put on all her clothes under her nightgown, with her arms underneath free of the sleeves; she was eleven years old and had entered a period of furious modesty during which she refused to receive a vaccination on her buttocks and screamed with rage if Hazel or her grandmother came into a room where she was dressing—which they did, she thought, for their own amusement and to ridicule the very idea of her privacy. She would go out and put gas in the car and come back wide awake, hungry; she would eat for breakfast four or five toast sandwiches with marmalade, peanut butter and bacon.

But this morning when she woke up it was just beginning to be light in the back room; she could just make out the printing on the cardboard boxes. Heinz Tomato Soup, she read, Golden Valley Apricots. She went through a private ritual of dividing the letters into threes; if they came out evenly it meant she would be lucky that day. While she was doing this she thought she heard a noise, as if someone was moving in the yard; a marvellous uneasiness took hold of her body at the soles of her feet and made her curl her toes and stretch her legs until she touched the end of the couch. She had a feeling through her whole body like the feeling inside her head when she was going to sneeze. She got up as quietly as she could and walked carefully across the bare boards of the back room, which felt sandy and springy underfoot, to the rough kitchen linoleum. She was wearing an old cotton nightgown of Hazel’s, which billowed out in a soft, ghostly way behind her.

The kitchen was empty; the clock ticked watchfully on the shelf above the sink. One of the taps dripped all the time and the dishcloth was folded into a little pad and placed underneath it. The face of the clock was almost hidden by a yellow tomato, ripening, and a can of powder that her grandmother used on her false teeth. Twenty to six. She moved towards the screen door; as she passed the breadbox one hand reached in of its own accord and came out with a couple of cinnamon buns which she began to eat without looking at them; they were a little dry.

The back yard at this time of day was strange, damp and shadowy; the fields were grey and all the cobwebbed, shaggy bushes along the fences thick with birds; the sky was pale, cool, smoothly ribbed with light and flushed at the edges, like the inside of a shell. It pleased her that her grandmother and Hazel were out of this, that they were still asleep. Nobody had spoken for this day yet; its purity astonished her. She had a delicate premonition of freedom and danger, like a streak of dawn across that sky. Around the corner of the house where the woodpile was she heard a small dry clattering sound.

“Who’s there?” said May in a loud voice, first swallowing a mouthful of cinnamon bun. “I know you are there,” she said.

Her grandmother came around the house carrying a few sticks of kindling wrapped in her apron and making private unintelligible noises of exasperation. May saw her come, not really with surprise but with a queer let-down feeling that seemed to spread thinly from the present moment into all areas of her life, past and future. It seemed to her that any place she went her grandmother would be there beforehand: anything she found out her grandmother would know already, or else could prove to be of no account.

“I thought it was somebody in the yard,” she said defensively. Her grandmother looked at her as if she were a stovepipe and came ahead into the kitchen.

“I didn’t think you would of got up so early,” May said. “What’d you get up so early for?”

Her grandmother didn’t answer. She heard everything you said to her but she didn’t answer unless she felt like it. She set to work making a fire in the stove. She was dressed for the day in a print dress, a blue apron rubbed and dirty across the stomach, an unbuttoned, ravelling, no-colour sweater that had belonged once to her husband, and a pair of canvas shoes. Things dangled on her in spite of her attempts to be tidy and fastened up; it was because there was no reasonable shape to her body for clothes to cling to; she was all flat and narrow, except for the little mound of her stomach like a four-months’ pregnancy that rode preposterously under her skinny chest. She had knobby fleshless legs and her arms were brown and veined and twisted like whips. Her head was rather big for her body and with her hair pulled tightly over her skull she had the look of an under-nourished but maliciously intelligent baby.

“You go on back to bed,” she said to May. May went instead to the kitchen mirror and began combing her hair and twisting it around her finger to see if it would go into a page-boy. She had remembered that it was today Eunie Parker’s cousin was coming. She would have taken Hazel’s curlers and done her hair up, if she thought she could do that without her grandmother knowing.

Her grandmother closed the door of the front room where Hazel was asleep. She emptied out the coffee pot and put in water and fresh coffee. She got a pitcher of milk out of the icebox, sniffed at it to make sure it was still all right and lifted two ants out of the sugar bowl with her spoon. She rolled herself a cigarette on a little machine she had. Then she sat at the table and read yesterday’s newspaper. She did not speak another word to May until the coffee had perked and she had dampered the fire and the room was almost as light as day.

“You get your own cup if you want any,” she said.

Usually she said May was too young to drink coffee. May got herself a good cup with green birds on it. Her grandmother didn’t say anything. They sat at the table drinking coffee, May in her long nightgown feeling privileged and ill at ease. Her grandmother was looking around the kitchen with its stained walls and calendars as if she had to keep it all in sight; she had a rather sly abstracted look.

May said conversationally, “Eunie Parker has her cousin coming today. Her name is Heather Sue Murray.”

Her grandmother did not pay any attention. Presently she said, “Do you know how old I am?”

May said, “No.”

“Well take a guess.”

May thought and said, “Seventy?”

Her grandmother did not speak for so long that May thought this was only another of her conversational blind alleys. She said, informatively, “This Heather Sue Murray has been a Highland dancer ever since she was three years old. She dances in competitions and all.”