Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

This was the sort of thing I chose to tell to Ernie, who flushed and said that they should have got it in writing.

Kay and Beverly were a disappointment to me. They worked hard at Modern Languages, but their conversation and preoccupations seemed hardly different from those of girls who might work in banks or offices. They did their hair up in pin curls and painted their fingernails on Saturdays, because that was the night they had dates with their boyfriends. On Sundays they had to soothe their faces with lotion because of the whisker-burns the boyfriends had inflicted on them. I didn’t find either boyfriend in the least desirable, and I wondered how they could.

They said that they had once had some crazy idea of being translators at the United Nations, but now they figured they would teach high school, and with any luck get married.

They gave me unwelcome advice.

I had got a job in the college cafeteria. I pushed a cart around collecting dirty dishes off the tables and wiped the tables clean when they were empty. And I set out food to be picked up from the shelves.

They said that this job was not a good idea.

“Boys won’t ask you out if they see you at a job like that.”

I told Ernie this, and he said, “So, what did you say?”

I told him that I had said I would not want to go out with anybody who would make such a judgment, so what was the problem?

Now I’d hit the right note. Ernie glowed; he chopped his hands up and down in the air.

“Absolutely right,” he said. “That is absolutely the attitude to take. Honest work. Never listen to anybody who wants to put you down for doing honest work. Just go right ahead and ignore them. Keep your pride. Anybody that doesn’t like it, you tell them they can lump it.”

This speech of his, the righteousness and approval lighting his large face, the jerky enthusiasm of his movements, roused the first doubts in me, the first gloomy suspicion that the warning, after all, might have some weight to it.

There was a note under my door saying that Beth wanted to talk to me. I was afraid it would be about my coat hung over the bannister to dry, or my feet making too much noise on the stairs when her husband Blake (sometimes) and the babies (always) had to sleep in the daytime.

The door opened on the scene of misery and confusion in which it seemed that all Beth’s days were passed. Wet laundry-diapers and smelly baby woolens-was hanging from some ceiling racks, bottles in a sterilizer bubbled and rattled on the stove. The windows were steamed up, and soggy cloths or soiled stuffed toys were thrown on the chairs. The big baby was hanging on to the rungs of the playpen and letting out an accusing howl-Beth had obviously just set him in there-and the smaller baby was in the high chair, with some mushy pumpkin-colored food spread like a rash across his mouth and chin.

Beth peered out from all this with a tight expression of superiority on her small flat face, as if to say that not many people could put up with such a nightmare as well as she could, even if the world was too ungenerous to give her the least credit.

“You know when you moved in,” she said, then raised her voice to compete with the big baby, “when you moved in I mentioned to you that there was enough space up there for two?”

Not in the matter of headroom, I was about to say, but she continued right on, informing me that there was another girl moving in. She was going to be there from Tuesdays to Fridays. She would be auditing some courses at the college.

“Blake will get the daybed in tonight. She won’t take up much room. I don’t imagine she’ll bring many clothes-she lives in town. You’ve had it all to yourself for six weeks now, and you’ll still have it that way on weekends.”

No mention of any reduction in the rent.

Nina actually did not take up much room. She was small, and thoughtful in her movements-she never bumped her head against the rafters, as I did. She spent a lot of her time sitting cross-legged on the daybed, her brownish-blond hair falling over her face, a Japanese kimono loose over her childish white underwear. She had beautiful clothes-a camel’s hair coat, cashmere sweaters, a pleated tartan skirt with a large silver pin. Just the sort of clothes you would see in a magazine layout, with the heading: “Outfitting Your Junior Miss for Her New Life on Campus.” But the moment she got back from the college she discarded her costume for the kimono. She usually didn’t bother hanging anything up. I followed the same routine of getting out of my school clothes, but in my case it was to keep the press in my skirt and preserve a reasonable freshness in the blouse or sweater, so I hung everything up carefully. In the evenings I wore a woolly bathrobe. I had eaten an early supper at the college as part of my wages, and Nina too seemed to have eaten, though I didn’t know where. Perhaps her supper was just what she ate all evening-almonds and oranges and a supply of little chocolate kisses wrapped in red or gold or purple foil.

I asked her if she didn’t get cold, in that light kimono.

“Unh-unh,” she said. She grabbed my hand and pressed it to her neck. “I’m permanently warm,” she said, and in fact she was. Her skin even looked warm, though she said that was just her tan, and it was fading. And connected with this skin warmth was a particular odor which was nutty or spicy, not displeasing but not the odor of a body that was constantly bathed and showered. (Nor was I entirely fresh myself, due to Beth’s rule of one bath a week. Many people then bathed no more than once a week, and I have an idea that there was more human smell around, in spite of talcum and the gritty paste deodorants.)

I usually read some book until late at night. I had thought it might be harder to read with someone else in the room, but Nina was an easy presence. She peeled her oranges and chocolates, she laid out games of patience. When she had to stretch to move a card she would sometimes make a little noise, a groan or grunt, as if she complained of this slight adjustment of her body, but took pleasure in it, all the same. Otherwise she was content, and curled up to sleep with the light on anytime she was ready. And because there was no demand or special need for talk we soon began to talk, and tell about our lives.

Nina was twenty-two years old and this was what had happened to her since she was fifteen:

First, she had gotten herself pregnant (that was how she put it) and married the father, who wasn’t much older than she was. This was in a town somewhere out from Chicago. The name of the town was Laneyville, and the only jobs were at the grain elevator or fixing machinery, for the boys, and working in stores for the girls. Nina’s ambition was to be a hairdresser, but you had to go away and train for that. Laneyville wasn’t where she had always lived, it was where her grandmother lived, and she lived with her grandmother because her father had died and her mother got married again and her stepfather had kicked her out.

She had a second baby, another boy, and her husband was supposed to have a job promised in another town, so he went off there. He was going to send for her, but he never did. She left both the children with her grandmother and took the bus to Chicago.

On the bus she met a girl named Marcy who like her was headed for Chicago. Marcy knew a man there who owned a restaurant and would give them jobs. But when they got to Chicago and located the restaurant it turned out he didn’t own it but had only worked there and he had quit some time before. The man who did own it had an empty room upstairs and he let them stay there in return for cleaning the place up every night. They had to use the ladies’ in the restaurant but weren’t supposed to spend much time there in the daytime because it was for customers. They had to wash any clothes that needed it after closing time.