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

“Seventy-eight,” her grandmother said. “Nobody knows that, I never told. No birth certificate. Never took the pension. Never took relief.” She thought a while and said, “Never was in a hospital. I got enough in the bank to cover burial. Any headstone will have to come out of charity or bad conscience of my relatives.”

“What do you want a headstone for?” May said sullenly, picking at the oilcloth at a spot where it was worn through. She did not like this conversation; it reminded her of a rather mean trick her grandmother had played on her about three years ago. She had come home from school and found her grandmother lying on that same couch in the back room where she slept now. Her grandmother lay with her hands dropped at her sides, her face the colour of curdled milk, her eyes closed; she wore an expression of pure and unassailable indifference. May had tried saying “Hello” first and then “Grandma” more or less in her everyday voice; her grandmother did not flick a muscle in her usually live and agitated face. May said again, more respectfully, “Grandma” and bending over did not hear the shallowest breath. She put out her hand to touch her grandmother’s cheek, but was checked by something remote and not reassuring in that cold shabby hollow. Then she started to cry, in the anxious, bitten-off way of someone who is crying with no one to hear them. She was afraid to say her grandmother’s name again; she was afraid to touch her, and at the same time afraid to take her eyes off her. However, her grandmother opened her eyes. Without lifting her arms or moving her head she looked up at May with a contrived, outrageous innocence and a curious spark of triumph. “Can’t a person lay down around here?” she said. “Shame to be such a baby.”

“I never said I wanted one,” her grandmother said. “Go and get some clothes on,” she said coldly, as May experimentally stuck one shoulder up through the loose neck of her nightgown. “Unless you think you are one of them Queens of Egypt.”

“What?” said May looking at her shoulder splotched un-pleasantly with peeling sunburn.

“Oh, one of them Queens of Egypt I understand they got at the Kinkaid Fair.”

When May came back to the kitchen her grandmother was still drinking coffee and looking at the want-ad section of the city paper, as if she had no store to open or breakfast to cook or anything to do all day. Hazel had got up and was ironing a dress to wear to work. She worked in a store in Kinkaid which was thirty miles away and she had to leave for work early. She tried to persuade her mother to sell the store and go and live in Kinkaid which had two movie theatres, plenty of stores and restaurants and a Royal Dance Pavilion; but the old woman would not budge. She told Hazel to go and live where she liked but Hazel for some reason did not go. She was a tall drooping girl of thirty-three, with bleached hair, a long wary face and on oblique resentful expression emphasized by a slight cast, a wilful straying of one eye. She had a trunk full of embroidered pillowcases and towels and silverware. She bought a set of dishes and a set of copper-bottomed pots and put them away in her trunk; she and the old woman and May continued to eat off chipped plates and cook in pots so battered they rocked on the stove.

“Hazel’s got everything she needs to get married but she just lacks one thing,” the old woman would say.

Hazel drove all over the country to dances with other girls who worked in Kinkaid or taught school. On Sunday morning she got up with a hangover and took coffee with aspirin and put on her silk print dress and drove off down the road to sing in the choir. Her mother, who said she had no religion, opened up the store and sold gas and ice cream to tourists.

Hazel hung over the ironing-board yawning and tenderly rubbing her blurred face and the old woman read out loud, “Tall industrious man, thirty-five years old, desires make acquaintance woman of good habits, non-smoker or drinker, fond of home life, no triflers please.”

“Aw, Mom,” Hazel said.

“What’s triflers?” May said.

“Man in prime of life,” the old woman read relentlessly, “desires friendship of healthy woman without encumbrances, send photograph first letter.”

“Aw cut it out, Mom,” Hazel said.

“What’s encumbrances?” May said.

“Where would you be if I did get married?” Hazel said gloomily with a look on her face of irritable satisfaction.

“Any time you want to get married you can get.”

“I got you and May.”

“Oh, go on.”

“Well I have.”

“Oh, go on,” the old woman said with disgust. “I look after my ownself. I always have.” She was going to say a lot more, for this speech was indeed a signpost in her life, but the moment after she had energetically summoned up that landscape which was coloured vividly and artlessly like a child’s crayon drawing, and presented just such magical distortions, she shut her eyes as if oppressed by a feeling of unreality, a reasonable doubt that any of this had ever existed. She tapped with her spoon on the table and said to Hazel, “Well you never had such a dream as I had last night.”

“I never do dream anyway,” Hazel said.

The old woman sat tapping her spoon and looking with concentration at nothing but the front of the stove.

“Dreamt I was walking down the road,” she said. “I was walking down the road past Simmonses’ gate and I felt like a cloud was passing over the sun, felt cold, like. So I looked up and I seen a big bird, oh, the biggest bird you ever saw, black as that stove top there, it was right over me between me and the sun. Did you ever dream a thing like that?”

“I never dream anything,” Hazel said rather proudly.

“Remember that nightmare I had when I was sleeping in the front room after I had the red measles?” May said. “Remember that nightmare?”

“I’m not talking about any nightmare,” the old woman said.

“I thought there was people in coloured hats going round and round in that room. Faster and faster so all their hats was blurred together. All the rest of them was invisible except they had on these coloured hats.”

Her grandmother put her tongue out to lick off some specks of dry tobacco that were stuck to her lips, then got up and lifted the stove lid and spat into the fire. “I might as well talk to a barn wall,” she said. “May, put a coupla sticks in that fire I’ll fry us some bacon. I don’t want to keep the stove on today any longer’n I can help.”

“It’s going to be hotter today than it was yesterday,” Hazel said placidly. “Me and Lois have a bargain on not to wear any stockings. Mr. Peebles says a word to us we’re going to say what do you think they hired you for, going around looking at everybody’s legs? He gets embarrassed, ” she said. Her bleached head disappeared into the skirt of her dress with a lonesome giggle like the sound of a bell rung once by accident, then caught.

“Huh,” the old woman said.

May and Eunie Parker and Heather Sue Murray sat in the afternoon on the front step of the store. The sun had clouded over about noon but it seemed the day got even hotter then. You could not hear a cricket or a bird, but there was a low wind; a hot, creeping wind came through the country grass. Because it was Saturday hardly anyone stopped at the store; the local cars drove on past, heading for town.

Heather Sue said, “Don’t you kids ever hitch a ride?”

“No,” May said.

Eunie Parker her best friend for two years said, “Oh, May wouldn’t even be allowed. You don’t know her grandmother. She can’t do anything.”

May scuffed her feet in the dirt and ground her heel into an ant hill. “Neither can you,” she said.