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

“What are they saying,” said Edith, putting on more coffee. She was surrounded in her kitchen by the ruins of the birthday party—cake and molded jellies and cookies with animal faces. A balloon rolled underfoot. The children had been fed, had posed for flash cameras and endured the birthday games; now they were playing in the back bedrooms and the basement, while their parents had coffee. “What are they saying in there?” said Edith.

“I wasn’t listening,” Mary said, holding the empty cream pitcher in her hand. She went to the sink window. The rent in the clouds had been torn wide open and the sun was shining. The house seemed too hot.

“Mrs. Fullerton’s house,” said Edith, hurrying back to the living-room. Mary knew what they were talking about. Her neighbours’ conversation, otherwise not troubling, might at any moment snag itself on this subject and eddy menacingly in familiar circles of complaint, causing her to look despairingly out of windows, or down into her lap, trying to find some wonderful explanatory word to bring it to a stop; she did not succeed. She had to go back; they were waiting for cream.

A dozen neighbourhood women sat around the living room, absently holding the balloons they had been given by their children. Because the children on the street were so young, and also because any gathering-together of the people who lived there was considered a healthy thing in itself, most birthday parties were attended by mothers as well as children. Women who saw each other every day met now in earrings, nylons and skirts, with their hair fixed and faces applied. Some of the men were there too—Steve, who was Edith’s husband, and others he had invited in for beer; they were all in their work clothes. The subject just introduced was one of the few on which male and female interest came together.

“I tell you what I’d do if I was next door to it, “Steve said, beaming good-naturedly in expectation of laughter. “I’d send my kids over there to play with matches.”

“Oh, funny,” Edith said. “It’s past joking. You joke, I try to do something. I even phoned the Municipal Hall.”

“What did they say?” said Mary Lou Ross.

“Well I said couldn’t they get her to paint it, at least, or pull down some of the shacks, and they said no they couldn’t. I said I thought there must be some kind of ordinance applied to people like that and they said they knew how I felt and they were very sorry— ”

“But no?”

“But no.”

“But what about the chickens, I thought—”

“Oh, they wouldn’t let you or me keep chickens, but she has some special dispensation about that too, I forgot how it goes.”

“I’m going to stop buying them,” Janie Inger said. “The supermarket’s cheaper and who cares that much about fresh? And my God, the smell. I said to Carl I knew we were coming to the sticks but I somehow didn’t picture us next door to a barnyard.”

“Across the street is worse than next door. It makes me wonder why we ever bothered with a picture window, whenever anybody comes to see us I want to draw the drapes so they won’t see what’s across from us.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve said, cutting heavily through these female voices. “What Carl and I started out to tell you was that, if we can work this lane deal, she has got to go. It’s simple and it’s legal. That’s the beauty of it.”

“What lane deal?”

“We are getting to that. Carl and I been cooking this for a couple of weeks, but we didn’t like to say anything in case it didn’t work out. Take it, Carl.”

“Well she’s on the lane allowance, that’s all,” Carl said. He was a real estate salesman, stocky, earnest, successful. “I had an idea it might be that way, so I went down to the Municipal Hall and looked it up.”

“What does that mean, dear?” said Janie, casual, wifely.

“This is it,” Carl said. “There’s an allowance for a lane, there always has been, the idea being if the area ever got built up they would put a lane through. But they never thought that would happen, people just built where they liked. She’s got part of her house and half a dozen shacks sitting right where the lane has to go through. So what we do now, we get the municipality to put through a lane. We need a lane anyway. Then she has to get out. It’s the law.”

“It’s the law,” said Steve, radiating admiration. “What a smart boy. These real estate operators are smart boys.”

“Does she get anything?” said Mary Lou. “I’m sick of looking at it and all but I don’t want to see anybody in the poorhouse.”

“Oh, she’ll get paid. More than it’s worth. Look, it’s to her advantage. She’ll get paid for it, and she couldn’t sell it, she couldn’t give it away.”

Mary set her coffee cup down before she spoke and hoped her voice would sound all right, not emotional or scared. “But remember she’s been here a long time,” she said. “She was here before most of us were born,” She was trying desperately to think of other words, words more sound and reasonable than these; she could not expose to this positive tide any notion that they might think flimsy and romantic, or she would destroy her argument. But she had no argument. She could try all night and never find any words to stand up to their words, which came at her now invincibly from all sides: shack, eyesore, filthy, property, value .

“Do you honestly think that people who let their property get so rundown have that much claim to our consideration?” Janie said, feeling her husband’s plan was being attacked.

“She’s been here forty years, now we’re here,” Carl said. “So it goes. And whether you realize it or not, just standing there that house is bringing down the resale value of every house on this street. I’m in the business, I know.”

And these were joined by other voices; it did not matter much what they said as long as they were full of self-assertion and anger. That was their strength, proof of their adulthood, of themselves and their seriousness. The spirit of anger rose among them, bearing up their young voices, sweeping them together as on a flood of intoxication, and they admired each other in this new behaviour as property-owners as people admire each other for being drunk.

“We might as well get everybody now,” Steve said. “Save going around to so many places.”

It was supper time, getting dark out. Everybody was preparing to go home, mothers buttoning their children’s coats, children clutching, without much delight, their balloons and whistles and paper baskets full of jelly beans. They had stopped fighting, almost stopped noticing each other; the party had disintegrated. The adults too had grown calmer and felt tired.

“Edith! Edith, have you got a pen?”

Edith brought a pen and they spread the petition for the lane, which Carl had drawn up, on the dining-room table, clearing away the paper plates with smears of dried ice cream. People began to sign mechanically as they said goodbye. Steve was still scowling slightly; Carl stood with one hand on the paper, businesslike, but proud. Mary knelt on the floor and struggled with Danny’s zipper. She got up and put on her own coat, smoothed her hair, put on her gloves and took them off again. When she could not think of anything else to do she walked past the dining-room table on her way to the door. Carl held out the pen.

“I can’t sign that,” she said. Her face flushed up, at once, her voice was trembling. Steve touched her shoulder.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“I don’t think we have the right. We haven’t the right.”

“Mary, don’t you care how things look? You live here too.”

“No, I—I don’t care.” Oh, wasn’t it strange, how in your imagination, when you stood up for something, your voice rang, people started, abashed; but in real life they all smiled in rather a special way and you saw that what you had really done was serve yourself up as a conversational delight for the next coffee party.