Alice Munro - Too Much Happiness

This was the idea I had got used to, and that made Nancy’s paint such an insult, a leering joke. I pushed her against the dresser as hard as I could and ran away from her, up the stairs. I think I was running to find a mirror, or even a person who could tell me that she was in the wrong. And once that was confirmed I could sink my teeth into pure hatred of her. I would punish her. I had no time at the moment to think how.

I ran through the cottage-Nancy’s mother was not anywhere to be seen, though it was Saturday-and I slammed its screened door. I ran on the gravel, then on the flagstone path between stalwart rows of gladioli. I saw my mother rise from the wicker chair where she sat reading, on our back verandah.

“Not red,” I shouted with gulps of angry tears. “I’m not red.” She came down the steps with a shocked face but so far no understanding. Then Nancy ran out of the cottage behind me all amazed, with her garish face.

My mother understood.

“You nasty little beast,” she cried at Nancy, in a voice that I had never heard. A loud, wild, shaking voice.

“Don’t you come near us. Don’t you dare. You are a bad bad girl. You have no decent human kindness in you, do you? You never have been taught-”

Nancy’s mother came out of the cottage, with streaming wet hair in her eyes. She was holding a towel.

“Jeez can’t I even wash my hair around here-”

My mother screamed at her too.

“Don’t you dare use that language in front of my son and me-”

“Oh blah blah,” said Nancy’s mother immediately. “Just listen to you yelling your head off-”

My mother took a deep breath.

“I am-not-yelling-my-head off. I just want to tell your cruel child she will never be welcome in our house again. She is a cruel spiteful child to mock my little boy for what he cannot help. You have never taught her anything, any manners, she did not even know enough to thank me when I took her with us to the beach, doesn’t even know how to say please and thank you, no wonder with a mother flaunting around in her wrapper-”

All this poured out of my mother as if there was a torrent of rage, of pain, of absurdity in her that would never stop. Even though by now I was pulling at her dress and saying, “Don’t, don’t.”

Then things got even worse as tears rose and swallowed her words and she choked and shook.

Nancy’s mother had pushed the wet hair out of her eyes and stood there observing.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she said. “You carry on like this and they’re going to take you to the loony bin. Can I help it if your husband hates you and you got a kid with a messed-up face?”

My mother held her head in both hands. She cried, “Oh-oh,” as if pains were devouring her. The woman who worked for us at that time-Velma-had come out on the verandah and was saying, “Missus. Come on, missus.” Then she raised her voice and called to Nancy’s mother.

“You go on. You go in your house. You scat.”

“Oh I will. Don’t worry, I will. Who do you think you are telling me what to do? And how do you like working for an ole witch with bats in the belfry?” Then she turned on Nancy.

“How in Jesus’ name am I ever going to get you cleaned up?”

After that she raised her voice again to make sure I could hear her.

“He’s a suck. Look at him hangin’ on to his ole lady. You’re not ever going to play with him again. Ole lady’s suck.”

Velma on one side and I on the other, we tried to ease my mother back to the house. She had stopped the noise she was making. She straightened herself and spoke in an unnaturally cheerful voice that could carry as far as the cottage.

“Fetch me my garden shears, would you Velma? While I’m out here I might as well trim the glads. Some of them are downright wilted.”

But by the time she was finished they were all over the path, not one standing, wilted or blooming.

All this must have happened on a Saturday, as I said, because Nancy’s mother was home and Velma was there, who did not come on Sundays. By Monday, or maybe sooner, I am sure the cottage was empty. Perhaps Velma got hold of my father in the clubhouse or on the greens or wherever he was, and he came home, impatient and rude but soon compliant. Compliant, that is, about Nancy and her mother getting out. I had no idea where they went. Maybe he put them up in a hotel till he could find another place for them. I don’t think Nancy’s mother would have made any fuss about leaving.

The fact that I would never see Nancy again dawned on me slowly. At first I was angry at her and did not care. Then when I inquired about her, my mother must have put me off with some vague reply, not wanting to recall the anguished scene to me or herself. It was surely at that time that she became serious about sending me away to school. In fact I think that I was installed at Lakefield that very autumn. She probably suspected that once I got used to being at a boys’ school the memory of having had a female playmate would grow dim and seem unworthy, even ridiculous.

On the day after my father’s funeral my mother surprised me by asking if I would take her out to dinner (of course it would be a case of her taking me) at a restaurant some miles along the lakeshore, where she hoped there would be nobody we knew.

“I just feel I’ve been penned up in this house forever,” she said. “I need some air.”

In the restaurant she looked around discreetly and an nounced that there was nobody she knew.

“Will you join me in a glass of wine?”

Had we driven all this way so that she could drink wine in public?

When the wine had come, and we had ordered, she said, “There is something I think you ought to know.”

These may be among the most unpleasant words that a person ever has to hear. There is a pretty good chance that whatever you ought to know will be burdensome, and that there will be a suggestion that other people have had to bear the burden, while you have been let off lightly, all this while.

“My father isn’t my real father?” I said. “Goody.”

“Don’t be silly. You remember your little friend Nancy?”

I actually did not remember, for a moment. Then I said, “Vaguely.”

At this time all my conversations with my mother seemed to call for strategy. I must keep myself lighthearted, jokey, unmoved. In her voice and face was a lurking sorrow. She never complained about her own plight, but there were so many innocent and ill-used people in the stories she told me, there were so many outrages, that I was surely meant, at the very least, to go off to my friends and my lucky life with a heavier heart.

I would not cooperate. All she wanted, possibly, was some sign of sympathy, or maybe of physical tenderness. I would not grant that. She was a fastidious woman not yet contaminated by age, but I backed off from her as if there was some danger of insistent dreariness, a contagious mold. I particularly backed off from any reference to my affliction, which it seemed to me she especially cherished-the shackle I could not loosen, that I had to admit to, that bound me to her from the womb.

“You would probably have known about it if you were around home much,” she said. “But it happened shortly before we sent you off to school.”

Nancy and her mother had gone to live in an apartment that belonged to my father, on the Square. There in the bright early fall morning Nancy’s mother had come upon her daughter, in the bathroom, using a razor blade to slice into her cheek. There was blood on the floor and in the sink and here and there on Nancy. But she had not given up on her purpose or made a sound of pain.

How did my mother know all this? I can only suppose it was a town drama, supposed to be hushed up but too gory-and that in the literal sense of the word-not to be related in detail.