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

“I can so,” Eunie said. “I can do what I like.” Heather Sue looked at them in her puzzled company way and said, “Well what is there to do here? I mean what do you kids do? ”

Her hair was cut short all around her head; it was coarse, black, and curly. She had that Candy Apples lipstick on and it looked as if she shaved her legs.

“We go to the cemetery,” May said flatly. They did, too. She and Eunie went and sat in the cemetery almost every afternoon because there was a shady corner there and no younger children bothered them and they could talk speculatively without any danger of being overheard.

“You go where ?” Heather Sue said, and Eunie scowling into the dirt at their feet said, “Oh, we do not. I hate that stupid cemetery,” she said. Sometimes she and May had spent a whole afternoon looking at the tombstones and picking out names that interested them and making up stories about the people who were buried there.

“Gee, don’t give me the creeps like that,” Heather Sue said. “It’s awfully hot, isn’t it? If I was at home this afternoon, I guess me and my girl friend would be going to the pool.”

“We can go and swim at Third Bridge,” Eunie said.

“Where is that?”

“Down the road, it’s not far. Half a mile.”

“In this heat?” Heather Sue said.

Eunie said, “I’ll ride you on my bike.” She said to May in an overly gay and hospitable voice, “You get your bike too, come on.”

May considered a moment and then got up and went into the store, which was always dark in the daytime, hot too, with a big wooden clock on the wall and bins full of little sweet crumbling cookies, soft oranges, onions. She went to the back where her grandmother was sitting on a stool beside the ice-cream freezer, under a big baking-powder sign that had a background of glittering foil, like a Christmas card.

May said, “Can I go swimming with Eunie and Heather Sue?”

“Where you going to go swimming?” her grandmother said, almost neutrally. She knew there was only one place you could go.

“Third Bridge.”

Eunie and Heather Sue had come in and were standing by the door. Heather Sue smiled with delicacy and politeness in the direction of the old woman.

“No, no you can’t.”

“It’s not deep there,” May said.

Her grandmother grunted enigmatically. She sat bent over, her elbow on her knee and her chin pressed down on her thumb. She would not bother looking up.

“Why can’t I?” May said stubbornly.

Her grandmother did not answer. Eunie and Heather Sue watched from the door.

“Why can’t I?” she said again. “ Grandma , why can’t I?”

“You know why.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where all the boys go. I told you before. You’re getting too big for that.” Her mouth shut down hard; her face set in the lines of ugly and satisfied secrecy; now she looked up at May and looked at her until she brought up a flush of shame and anger. Some animation came into her own face. “Let the rest of them chase after the boys, see what it gets them.” She never once looked at Eunie and Heather Sue but when she said this they turned and fled out of the store. You could hear them running past the gas pumps and breaking into wild, somewhat desperate, whoops of laughter. The old woman did not let on she heard.

May did not say anything. She was exploring in the dark a new dimension of bitterness. She had a feeling that her grandmother did not believe in her own reasons any more, that she did not care, but would go on pulling these same reasons out of the bag, flourishing them nastily, only to see what damage they could do. Her grandmother said, “Heather-miss-what’s-her-name. I seen her, stepping out of the bus this morning.”

May walked out of the store straight through the back room and through the kitchen to the back yard. She went and sat down by the pump. An old wooden trough, green with decay, ran down from the spout of the pump to an island of cool mud in the dry clumps of grass. She sat there and after a while she saw a big toad, rather an old and tired one she thought, flopping around in the grass; she trapped it in her hands.

She heard the screen door shut; she did not look. She saw her grandmother’s shoes, her incredible ankles moving towards her across the grass. She held the toad in one hand and with the other she picked up a little stick; methodically she began to prod it in the belly.

“You quit that,” her grandmother said. May dropped the stick. “Let that miserable thing go,” she said, and very slowly May opened her fingers. In the close afternoon she could smell the peculiar flesh smell of her grandmother who stood over her; it was sweetish and corrupt like the smell of old apple peel going soft, and it penetrated and prevailed over the more commonplace odours of strong soap and dry ironed cotton and tobacco which she always carried around with her.

“I bet you don’t know,” her grandmother said loudly. “I bet you don’t know what’s been going through my head in there in the store.” May did not answer but bent down and began to pick with interest at a scab on her leg.

“I been thinking I might sell the store,” her grandmother said in this same loud monotonous voice as if she were talking to a deaf person or some larger power. Standing looking at the ragged pine-blue horizon, holding her apron down in an old woman’s gesture with her flat hands, she said, “You and me could get on the train and go out and see Lewis.” It was her son in California, whom she had not seen for about twenty years.

Then May had to look up to see if her grandmother was playing some kind of trick. The old woman had always said that the tourists were fools to think one place was any better than another and that they would have been better off at home.

“You and me could take a trip to the coast,” her grandmother said. “Wouldn’t cost so much, we could sit up nights and pack some food along. It’s better to pack your own food, you know what you’re getting.”

“You’re too old,” May said cruelly. “You’re seventy-eight.”

“People my age are travelling to the Old Country and all over, you look in the papers.”

“You might have a heart attack,” May said.

“They could put me in that car with the lettuce and tomatoes,” the old woman said, “and ship me home cold.” Meanwhile May could see the coast; she saw a long curve of sand like the beach at the lake only longer and brighter; the very words, The Coast , produced a feeling of coolness and delight in her. But she did not trust them, she could not understand; when in her life had her grandmother promised her any fine thing before?

There was a man standing at the front of the store drinking a lemon-lime. He was a small middle-aged man with a puffy, heat-shiny face; he wore a white shirt, not clean, a pale silk tie. The old woman had moved her stool up to the front counter and she sat there talking to him. May stood with her back to both of them looking out the front door. The clouds were dingy; the world was filled with an old, dusty unfriendly light that seemed to come not from the sky alone but from the flat brick walls, the white roads, the grey bush-leaves rustling and the metal signs flapping in the hot, monotonous wind. Ever since her grandmother had followed her into the back yard she had felt as if something had changed, something had cracked; yes, it was that new light she saw in the world. And she felt something about herself—like power, like the unsuspected still unexplored power of her own hostility, and she meant to hold it for a while and turn it like a cold coin in her hand.

“What company are you travelling for?” her grandmother said. The man said, “Rug Company.”