Alice Munro - The Love Of A Good Woman

Finished. She is finished altogether. The piece that she mastered months ago and perfected since, so that nothing in it remained formidable or even tricky, has completely defeated her.

It has shown her to herself as somebody emptied out, vandalized. Robbed overnight.

She doesn’t give up. She does the worst thing. In this state of desperation she starts in again; she will try the Beethoven. And of course it’s no good, it’s worse and worse, and she seems to be howling, heaving inside. She sets the bow and the violin down on the living-room sofa, then picks them up and shoves them underneath it, getting them out of sight because she has a picture of herself smashing and wrecking them against a chair back, in a sickening dramatic display.

I haven’t given up in all this time. Naturally I wouldn’t, against such competition.

Jill lies down on the hard sky-blue brocade sofa where nobody ever lies or even sits, unless there’s company, and she actually falls asleep. She wakes up after who knows how long with her hot face pushed down into the brocade, its pattern marked on her cheek, her mouth drooling a little and staining the sky-blue material. My racket still or again going on rising and falling like a hammering headache. And she has got a headache, too. She gets up and pushes her way-that’s what it feels like-through the hot air to the kitchen cupboard where Ailsa keeps the 222’s. The thick air makes her think of sewage. And why not? While she slept I dirtied my diaper, and its ripe smell has had time to fill the house.

222’s. Warm another bottle. Climb the stairs. She changes the diaper without lifting me from the crib. The sheet as well as the diaper is a mess. The 222’s are not working yet and her headache increases in fierceness as she bends over. Haul the mess out, wash off my scalded parts, pin on a clean diaper, and take the dirty diaper and sheet into the bathroom to be scrubbed off in the toilet. Put them in the pail of disinfectant which is already full to the brim because the usual baby wash has not been done today. Then get to me with the bottle. I quiet again enough to suck. It’s a wonder I have the energy left to do that, but I do. The feeding is more than an hour late, and I have real hunger to add to-but maybe also subvert-my store of grievance. I suck away, I finish the bottle, and then worn out I go to sleep, and this time actually stay asleep.

Jill’s headache dulls. Groggily, she washes out my diapers and shirts and gowns and sheets. Scrubs them and rinses them and even boils the diapers to defeat the diaper rash to which I am prone. She wrings them all out by hand. She hangs them up indoors because the next day is Sunday, and Ailsa, when she returns, will not want to see anything hanging outdoors on Sunday. Jill would just as soon not have to appear outside, anyway, especially now with evening thickening and people sitting out, taking advantage of the cool. She dreads being seen by the neighbors-even being greeted by the friendly Shantzes-after what they must have listened to today.

And such a long time it takes for today to be over. For the long reach of sunlight and stretched shadows to give out and the monumental heat to stir a. little, opening sweet cool cracks. Then all of a sudden the stars are out in clusters and the trees are enlarging themselves like clouds, shaking down peace. But not for long and not for Jill. Well before midnight comes a thin cry-you could not call it tentative, but thin at least, experimental, as if in spite of the day’s practice I have lost the knack. Or as if I actually wonder if it’s worth it. A little rest then, a false respite or giving up. But after that a thoroughgoing, an anguished, unforgiving resumption. Just when Jill had started to make more coffee, to deal with the remnants of her headache. Thinking that this time she might sit by the table and drink it.

Now she turns the burner off.

It’s almost time for the last bottle of the day. If the feeding before had not been delayed, I’d be ready now. Perhaps I am ready? While it’s warming, Jill thinks she’ll dose herself with a couple more 222’s. Then she thinks maybe that won’t do; she needs something stronger. In the bathroom cupboard she finds only Pepto-Bismol, laxatives, foot powder, prescriptions she wouldn’t touch. But she knows that Ailsa takes something strong for her menstrual cramps, and she goes into Ailsa’s room and looks through her bureau drawers until she finds a bottle of pain pills lying, logically, on top of a pile of sanitary pads. These are prescriptions pills, too, but the label says clearly what they’re for. She removes two of them and goes back to the kitchen and finds the water in the pan around the milk boiling, the milk too hot.

She holds the bottle under the tap to cool it-my cries coming down at her like the clamor of birds of prey over a gurgling river-and she looks at the pills waiting on the counter and she thinks, Yes. She gets out a knife and shaves a few grains off one of the pills, takes the nipple off the bottle, picks up the shaved grains on the blade of the knife, and sprinkles them-just a sprinkle of white dust-over the milk. Then she swallows one and seven-eighths or maybe one and eleven-twelfths or even one and fifteen-sixteenths of a pill herself, and takes the bottle upstairs. She lifts up my immediately rigid body and gets the nipple into my accusing mouth. The milk is still a little too warm for my liking and at first I spit it back at her. Then in a while I decide that it will do, and I swallow it all down.

Iona is screaming. Jill wakes up to a house full of hurtful sunlight and Iona’s screaming.

The plan was that Ailsa and Iona and their mother would visit with their relatives in Guelph until the late afternoon, avoiding driving during the hot part of the day. But after breakfast Iona began to make a fuss. She wanted to get home to the baby, she said she had hardly slept all night for worrying. It was embarrassing to keep on arguing with her in front of the relatives, so Ailsa gave in and they arrived home late in the morning and opened the door of the still house.

Ailsa said, “Phew. Is this what it always smells like in here, only we’re so used to it we don’t notice?”

Iona ducked past her and ran up the stairs. Now she’s screaming. Dead. Dead. Murderer.

She knows nothing about the pills. So why does she scream “Murderer”? It’s the blanket. She sees the blanket pulled up right over my head. Suffocation. Not poison. It has not taken her any time, not half a second, to get from “dead” to “murderer.” It’s an immediate flying leap. She grabs me from the crib, with the death blanket twisted round me, and holding the blanketed bundle squeezed against her body she runs screaming out of the room and into Jill’s room.

Jill is struggling up, dopily, after twelve or thirteen hours of sleep.

“You’ve killed my baby,” Iona is screaming at her.

Jill doesn’t correct her-she doesn’t say, Mine. Iona holds me out accusingly to show me to Jill, but before Jill can get any kind of a look at me I have been snatched back. Iona groans and doubles up as if she’s been shot in the stomach. Still holding on to me she stumbles down the stairs, bumping into Ailsa who is on her way up. Ailsa is almost knocked off her feet; she hangs on to the banister and Iona takes no notice; she seems to be trying to squeeze the bundle of me into a new terrifying hole in the middle of her body. Words come out of her between fresh groans of recognition.

Baby. Love my. Darling. Ooh. Oh. Get the. Suffocated. Blanket. Baby. Police.

Jill has slept with no covers over her and without changing into a nightdress. She is still in yesterday’s shorts and halter, and she’s not sure if she’s waking from a night’s sleep or a nap. She isn’t sure where she is or what day it is. And what did Iona say? Groping her way up out of a vat of warm wool, Jill sees rather than hears Iona’s cries, and they’re like red flashes, hot veins in the inside of her eyelids. She clings to the luxury of not having to understand, but then she knows she has understood. She knows it’s about me.