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

“Don’t they let a man go home to his family on the weekend?”

“I’m not travelling on business right now,” the man said. “At least I’m not travelling on rug business. You might say I’m travelling on private business.”

“Oh well,” the old woman said, in the tone of one who does not meddle with anybody’s private business. “Does it look to you like we’re going to have a rain?”

“Could be,” the man said. He took a big drink of lemon-lime and put the bottle down and wiped his mouth neatly with his handkerchief. He was the sort who would talk about his private business anyway; indeed he would not talk about anything else. “I’m on my way to see an acquaintance of mine, he’s staying at his summer cottage,” he said. “He has insomnia so bad he hasn’t had a good night’s rest in seven years.”

“Oh well,” the old woman said.

“I’m going to see if I can cure him of it. I’ve had pretty good success with some insomnia cases. Not one hundred per cent. Pretty good.”

“Are you a medical man too?”

“No, I’m not,” the little man said agreeably. “I’m a hypnotist. An amateur. I don’t think of myself as anything but an amateur.”

The old woman looked at him for several moments without saying anything. This did not displease him; he moved around the front of the store picking things up and looking at them in a lively and self-satisfied way. “I’ll bet you never saw anybody that said he was a hypnotist before in your life,” he said in a joking way to the old woman. “I look just like anybody else, don’t I? I look pretty tame.”

“I don’t believe in any of that kind of thing,” she said.

He just laughed. “What do you mean you don’t believe in it?”

“I don’t believe in any superstitious kind of thing.”

“It’s not superstition, lady, it’s a living fact.”

“I know what it is.”

“Well now a lot of people are of your opinion, a surprising lot of people. Maybe you didn’t happen to read an article that was published about two years ago in the Digest on this same subject? I wish I had it with me,” he said. “All I know is I cured a man of drinking. I cured people of all sorts of itches and rashes and bad habits. Nerves. I don’t claim I can cure everbody of their nervous habits but some people I can tell you have been very grateful to me. Very grateful.”

The old woman put her hands up to her head and did not answer.

“What’s the matter, lady, aren’t you feeling well. You got a headache?”

“I feel all right.”

“How did you cure those people?” May said boldly, though her grandmother had always told her: don’t let me catch you talking to strangers in the store.

The little man swung round attentively. “Why I hypnotize them, young lady. I hypnotize them. Are you asking me to explain to you what hypnotism is?”

May who did not know what she was asking flushed red and had no idea what to say. She saw her grandmother looking straight at her. The old woman looked out of her head at May and the whole world as if they had caught fire and she could do nothing about it, she could not even communicate the fact to them.

“She don’t know what she’s talking about,” her grandmother said.

“Well it’s very simple,” the man said directly to May, in a luxuriantly gentle voice he must think suitable for children. “It’s just like you put a person to sleep. Only they’re not really asleep, do you follow me honey? You can talk to them. And listen—listen to this—you can go way deep into their minds and find out things they wouldn’t even remember when they were awake. Find out their hidden worries and anxieties that’s causing them the trouble. Now isn’t that an amazing thing?”

“You couldn’t do that with me,” the old woman said. “I would know what was going on. You couldn’t do that with me.”

“I bet he could,” May said, and was so startled at herself her mouth stayed open. She did not know why she had said that. Time and again she had watched her grandmother’s encounters with the outside world, not with pride so much as a solid, fundamental conviction that the old woman would get the better of it. Now for the first time it seemed to her she saw the possibility of her grandmother’s defeat; in her grandmother’s face she saw it and not in the little man who must be crazy, she thought, and who made her want to laugh. The idea filled her with dismay and with a painful, irresistible excitement.

“Well you never can tell till you give it a try,” the man said, as if it were a joke. He looked at May. The old woman made up her mind. She said scornfully, “It don’t matter to me.” She put her elbows on the counter and held her head between her two hands, as if she were pressing something in. “Pity to take your time,” she said.

“You really ought to lay down so you can relax better.”

“Sitting down—” she said, and seemed to lose her breath a moment—“sitting down’s good enough for me.”

Then the man took a bottle-opener off a card of knick-knacks they had in the store and he walked over to stand in front of the counter. He was not in any hurry. When he spoke it was in a natural voice but it had changed a little; it had grown mild and unconcerned. “Now I know you’re resisting this idea,” he said softly. “I know you’re resisting it and I know why. It’s because you’re afraid.” The old woman made a noise of protest or alarm and he held up his hand, but gently. “You’re afraid,” he said, “and all I want to show you, all I mean to show you, is that there is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing. Nothing to be afraid of, I just want you to keep your eyes on this shiny metal object I’m holding in my hand. That’s right, just keep your eyes on this shiny metal object here in my hand. Just keep your eyes on it. Don’t think. Don’t worry. Just say to yourself, there’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be afraid of—” His voice sank; May could not make out the words. She stayed pressed against the soft-drink cooler. She wanted to laugh, she could not help it, watching the somehow disreputable back of this man’s head and his white, rounded, twitching shoulders. But she did not laugh because she had to wait to see what her grandmother would do. If her grandmother capitulated it would be as unsettling an event as an earthquake or a flood; it would crack the foundations of her life and set her terrifyingly free. The old woman stared with furious unblinking obedience at the bottle-opener in the man’s hand.

“Now I just want you to tell me,” he said, “if you can still see—if you can still see—” He bent forward to look into her face. “I just want you to tell me if you can still see—” The old woman’s face with its enormous cold eyes and its hard ferocious expression was on a level with his own. He stopped; he drew back.

“Hey what’s the matter?” he said, not in his hypnotizing but his ordinary voice—in fact a sharper voice than ordinary, which made May jump. “What’s the matter, lady, come on, wake up. Wake up,” he said, and touched her shoulder to give her a little shake. The old woman with a look of intemperate scorn still on her face fell forwards across the counter with a loud noise, scattering several packages of Kleenex, bubble gum, and cake decorations over the floor. The man dropped the bottle-opener and giving May an outraged look and crying, “I’m not responsible—it never happened before,” he ran out of the store to his car. May heard his car start and then she ran out after him, as if she wanted to call something, as if she wanted to call “Help” or “Stay.” But she did not call anything, she stood with her mouth open in the dust in front of the gas pumps, and he would not have heard her anyway; he gave one wildly negative wave out the window of his car and roared away to the north.