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

“She was gone sooner than anybody would have expected,” Aunt Annie said. I turned around surprised and she said, “Your mother.” Then I wondered if the clothes had been the main thing after all; perhaps they were only to serve as the introduction to a conversation about my mother’s death, which Aunt Annie might feel to be a necessary part of our visit. Auntie Lou would feel differently; she had an almost superstitious dislike of certain rituals of emotionalism; such a conversation could never take place with her about.

“Two months after she went into the hospital,” Aunt Annie said. “She was gone in two months.” I saw that she was crying distractedly, as old people do, with miserable scanty tears. She pulled a handkerchief out of her dress and rubbed at her face.

“Maddy told her it was nothing but a check-up,” she said. “Maddy told her it would be about three weeks. Your mother went in there and she thought she was coming out in three weeks.” She was whispering as if she was afraid of us being overheard. “Do you think she wanted to stay in there where nobody could make out what she was saying and they wouldn’t let her out of her bed? She wanted to come home!”

“But she was too sick,” I said.

“No, she wasn’t, she was just the way she’d always been, just getting a little worse and a little worse as time went on. But after she went in there she felt she would die, everything kind of closed in around her, and she went down so fast.”

“Maybe it would have happened anyway,” I said. “Maybe it was just the time.”

Aunt Annie paid no attention to me. “I went up to see her,” she said. “She was so glad to see me because I could tell what she was saying. She said Aunt Annie, they won’t keep me in here for good, will they? And I said to her, No. I said, No.

“And she said, Aunt Annie ask Maddy to take me home again or I’m going to die. She didn’t want to die. Don’t you ever think a person wants to die, just because it seems to everybody else they have got no reason to go on living. So I told Maddy. But she didn’t say anything. She went to the hospital every day and saw your mother and she wouldn’t take her home. Your mother told me Maddy said to her, I won’t take you home.”

“Mother didn’t always tell the truth,” I said. “Aunt Annie, you know that.”

“ Did you know your mother got out of the hospital? ”

“No,” I said. But strangely I felt no surprise, only a vague physical sense of terror, a longing not to be told—and beyond this a feeling that what I would be told I already knew, I had always known.

“Maddy, didn’t she tell you?”

“No.”

“Well she got out . She got out the side door where the ambulance comes in, it’s the only door that isn’t locked. It was at night when they haven’t so many nurses to watch them. She got her dressing gown and her slippers on, the first time she ever got anything on herself in years, and she went out and there it was January, snowing, but she didn’t go back in. She was away down the street when they caught her. After that they put the board across her bed.”

The snow, the dressing gown and slippers, the board across the bed . It was a picture I was much inclined to resist. Yet I had no doubt that this was true, all this was true and exactly as it happened. It was what she would do; all her life as long as I had known her led up to that flight.

“Where was she going?” I said, but I knew there was no answer.

“I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Oh, Helen, when they came after her she tried to run. She tried to run. ”

The flight that concerns everybody. Even behind my aunt’s soft familiar face there is another, more primitive old woman, capable of panic in some place her faith has never touched.

She began folding the clothes up and putting them back in the box. “They nailed a board across her bed. I saw it. You can’t blame the nurses. They can’t watch everybody. They haven’t the time.

“I said to Maddy after the funeral, Maddy, may it never happen like that to you. I couldn’t help it, that’s what I said.” She sat down on the bed herself now, folding things and putting them back in the box, making an effort to bring her voice back to normal—and pretty soon succeeding, for having lived this long who would not be an old hand at grief and self-control?

“We thought it was hard,” she said finally. “Lou and I thought it was hard.”

Is this the last function of old women, beyond making rag rugs and giving us five-dollar bills—making sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without?

She was afraid of Maddy—through fear, had cast her out for good. I thought of what Maddy had said: nobody speaks the same language.

When I got home Maddy was out in the back kitchen making a salad. Rectangles of sunlight lay on the rough linoleum. She had taken off her high-heeled shoes and was standing there in her bare feet. The back kitchen is a large untidy pleasant room with a view, behind the stove and the drying dishtowels, of the sloping back yard, the CPR station and the golden, marshy river that almost encircles the town of Jubilee. My children who had felt a little repressed in the other house immediately began to play under the table.

“Where have you been?” Maddy said.

“Nowhere. Just to see the Aunts.”

“Oh, how are they?”

“They’re fine. They’re indestructible.”

“Are they? Yes I guess they are. I haven’t been to see them for a while. I don’t actually see that much of them any more.”

“Don’t you?” I said, and she knew then what they had told me.

“They were beginning to get on my nerves a bit, after the funeral. And Fred got me this job and everything and I’ve been so busy—” She looked at me, waiting for what I would say, smiling a little derisively, patiently.

“Don’t be guilty, Maddy,” I said softly. All this time the children were running in and out and shrieking at each other between our legs.

“I’m not guilty,” she said. “Where did you get that? I’m not guilty.” She went to turn on the radio, talking to me over her shoulder. “Fred’s going to eat with us again since he’s alone. I got some raspberries for dessert. Raspberries are almost over for this year. Do they look all right to you?”

“They look all right,” I said. “Do you want me to finish this?”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll go and get a bowl.”

She went into the dining room and came back carrying a pink cut-glass bowl, for the raspberries.

“I couldn’t go on,” she said. “I wanted my life.”

She was standing on the little step between the kitchen and the dining room and suddenly she lost her grip on the bowl, either because her hands had begun to shake or because she had not picked it up properly in the first place; it was quite a heavy and elaborate old bowl. It slipped out of her hands and she tried to catch it and it smashed on the floor.

Maddy began to laugh. “Oh, hell,” she said. “Oh, hell, oh Hel -en,” she said, using one of our old foolish ritual phrases of despair. “Look what I’ve done now. In my bare feet yet. Get me a broom.”

“Take your life, Maddy. Take it.”

“Yes I will,” Maddy said. “Yes I will.”

“Go away, don’t stay here.”

“Yes I will.”

Then she bent down and began picking up the pieces of broken pink glass. My children stood back looking at her with awe and she was laughing and saying, “It’s no loss to me. I’ve got a whole shelf full of glass bowls. I’ve got enough glass bowls to do me the rest of my life. Oh, don’t stand there looking at me, go and get me a broom!” I went around the kitchen looking for a broom because I seemed to have forgotten where it was kept and she said, “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t I? ”