Alice Munro - The Love Of A Good Woman

There had to be somebody at home all the time, to watch Mrs. Kirkham. So Iona worked the night shift at the bakery. She decorated cakes-even the fanciest wedding cakes-and she got the first round of bread loaves in the oven at five o’clock. Her hands, which shook so badly that she could not serve anybody a teacup, were strong and clever and patient, even inspired, at any solitary job.

One morning after Ailsa had gone off to work-this was during the short time that Jill was in the house before I was born-Iona hissed from the bedroom as Jill was going by. As if there was a secret. But who was there now in the house to keep a secret from? It couldn’t be Mrs. Kirkham.

Iona had to struggle to get a stuck drawer of her bureau open. “Darn,” she said, and giggled. “Darn it. There.”

The drawer was full of baby clothes-not plain necessary shirts and nightgowns such as Jill had bought at a shop that sold seconds, factory rejects, in Toronto, but knitted bonnets, sweaters and bootees and soakers, handmade tiny gowns. All possible pastel colors or combinations of colors-no blue or pink prejudice- with crocheted trimming and minute embroidered flowers and birds and lambs. The sort of stuff that Jill had barely known existed. She would have known, if she had done any thorough research in baby departments or peering into baby carriages, but she hadn’t.

“Of course I don’t know what you’ve got,” Iona said. “You may have got so many things already, or maybe you don’t like homemade, I don’t know-” Her giggling was a kind of punctuation of speech and it was also an extension of her tone of apology. Everything she said, every look and gesture, seemed to be clogged up, overlaid with a sticky honey or snuffled mucus of apology, and Jill did not know how to deal with this.

“It’s really nice,” she said flatly.

“Oh no, I didn’t know if you’d even want it. I didn’t know if you’d like it at all.” “It’s lovely.”

“I didn’t do it all, I bought some of it. I went to the church bazaar and the Hospital Auxiliary, their bazaar, I just thought it would be nice, but if you don’t like it or maybe you don’t need it I can just put it in the Missionary Bale.”

“I do need it,” Jill said. “I haven’t got anything like this at all.”

“Haven’t you really? What I did isn’t so good, but maybe what the church ladies did or the Auxiliary, maybe you’d think that was all right.”

Was this what George had meant about Iona’s being a nervous wreck? (According to Ailsa, her breakdown at the nursing school had been caused by her being a bit too thin-skinned and the supervisor’s being a bit too hard on her.) You might think she was clamoring for reassurance, but whatever reassurance you tried seemed to be not enough, or not to get through to her. Jill felt as if Iona’s words and giggles and sniffles and damp looks (no doubt she had damp hands as well) were things crawling on her-on Jill-mites trying to get under her skin.

But this was something she got used to, in time. Or Iona toned it down. Both she and Iona felt relief-it was as if a teacher had gone out of the room-when the door closed behind Ailsa in the morning. They took to having a second cup of coffee, while Mrs. Kirkham washed the dishes. She did this job very slowly- looking around for the drawer or shelf where each item should go-and with some lapses. But with rituals, too, which she never omitted, such as scattering the coffee grounds on a bush by the kitchen door.

“She thinks the coffee makes it grow,” Iona whispered. “Even if she puts it on the leaves not the ground. Every day we have to take the hose and rinse it off.”

Jill thought that Iona sounded like the girls who were most picked on at the orphanage. They were always eager to pick on somebody else. But once you got Iona past her strung-out apologies or barricades of humble accusations (“Of course I’m the last person they’d consult about anything down at the shop,” “Of course Ailsa wouldn’t listen to my opinion,” “Of course George never made any secret about how he despised me”) you might get her to talk about fairly interesting things. She told Jill about the house that had been their grandfather’s and was now the center wing of the hospital, about the specific shady deals that had lost their father his job, and about a romance that was going on between two married people at the bakery. She also mentioned the supposed previous history of the Shantzes, and even the fact that Ailsa was soft on Dr. Shantz. The shock treatment Iona had had after her nervous breakdown seemed perhaps to have blown a hole in her discretion, and the voice that came through this hole-once all the disguising rubbish had been cleared away-was baleful and sly.

And Jill might as well spend her time chatting-her fingers had got too puffy now to try to play the violin.

And then I was born and everything changed, especially for Iona.

Jill had to stay in bed for a week, and even after she got up she moved like a stiff old woman and breathed warily each time she lowered herself into a chair. She was all painfully stitched together, and her stomach and breasts were bound tight as a mummy’s-that was the custom then. Her milk came in plentifully; it was leaking through the binding and onto the sheets. Iona loosened the binding and tried to connect the nipple to my mouth. But I would not take it. I refused to take my mother’s breast. I screamed blue murder. The big stiff breast might just as well have been a snouted beast rummaging in my face. Iona held me, she gave me a little warm boiled water, and I quieted down. I was losing weight, though. I couldn’t live on water. So Iona mixed up a formula and took me out of Jill’s arms where I stiffened and wailed. Iona rocked and soothed me and touched my cheek with the rubber nipple and that turned out to be what I preferred. I drank the formula greedily and kept it down. Iona’s arms and the nipple that she was in charge of became my chosen home. Jill’s breasts had to be bound even tighter, and she had to forgo liquids

(remember, this was in the hot weather) and endure the ache until her milk dried up.

“What a monkey, what a monkey,” crooned Iona. “You are a monkey, you don’t want your mommy’s good milk.”

I soon got fatter and stronger. I could cry louder. I cried if anybody but Iona tried to hold me. I rejected Ailsa and Dr. Shantz with his thoughtfully warmed hands, but of course it was my aversion to Jill that got the most attention.

Once Jill was out of bed Iona got her sitting in the chair where she herself usually sat to feed me; she put her own blouse around Jill’s shoulders and the bottle in Jill’s hand.

No use, I was not fooled. I batted my cheek against the bottle and straightened my legs and hardened my abdomen into a ball. I would not accept the substitution. I cried. I would not give in.

My cries were still thin new-baby cries, but they were a disturbance in the house, and Iona was the only person who had the power to stop them. Touched or spoken to by a non-Iona, I cried. Put down to sleep, not rocked by Iona, I cried myself into exhaustion and slept for ten minutes and woke ready to go at it again. I had no good times or fussy times. I had the Iona-times and the Iona-desertion-times, which might become-oh, worse and worse-the other-people-times, mostly Jill-times.

How could Iona go back to work, then, once her two weeks were up? She couldn’t. There wasn’t any question of it. The bakery had to get someone else. Iona had gone from being the most negligible to being the most important person in the house; she was the one who stood between those who lived there and constant discordance, unanswerable complaint. She had to be up at all hours to keep the household in any sort of ease. Dr. Shantz was concerned; even Ailsa was concerned.