Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro Page A

the CNR station. It was the sort of house that looks bigger than it is; it had a high but sloping roof—the second storey wood, the first storey brick—and a bulging bay window in the dining room and verandahs front and back; the front verandah had a useless and in fact inaccessible little balcony stuck into its roof. All the wooden parts of the house were painted grey, probably because grey does not need to be repainted so often as white. In the warm weather the downstairs windows had awnings, striped and very faded; then the house with its bleached grey paint and sloping verandahs made me think of a beach—the sun, the tough windy grass.
    Yet it was a house that belonged to a town; things about it suggested leisure and formality, of a sort that were not possible out on the Flats Road. I would sometimes think of our old house, its flat pale face, the cement slab outside the kitchen door, with a forlorn, faintly guilty, tender pain, as you might think of a simple old grandparent whose entertainments you have outgrown. I missed the nearness of the river and the swamp, also the real anarchy of winter, blizzards that shut us up tight in our house as if it were the Ark. But I loved the order, the wholeness, the intricate arrangement of town life, that only an outsider could see. Going home from school, winter afternoons, I had a sense of the whole town around me, all the streets which were named River Street, Mason Street, John Street, Victoria Street, Huron Street, and strangely, Khartoum Street; the evening dresses gauzy and pale as crocuses in Krall’s Ladies’ Wear window; the Baptist Mission Band in the basement of their church, singing There’s a New Name Written Down in Glory, And its Mine, Mine, Mine! Canaries in their cages in the Selrite Store and books in the Library and mail in the Post Office and pictures of Olivia de Havilland and Errol Flynn in pirate and lady costumes outside the Lyceum Theatre—all these things, rituals and diversions, frail and bright, woven together—Town! In Town there were soldiers on leave, in their khaki uniforms which had an aura of anonymous brutality, like a smell of burning; there were beautiful, shining girls, whose names everybody knew—Margaret Bond, Dorothy Guest, Pat Mundy—and who in turn knew nobody’s name, except if they chose; I watched them coming downhill from the High School, in their fur-trimmed velvet boots. They travelled in a little cluster, casting a radiance like a night-lantern, blinding them to the rest of the world. Though one day one of them—Pat Mundy—had smiled at me in passing, and I made up daydreams about her—that she saved me from drowning, that she became a nurse and nursed me—risking her life rocking me in her velvet arms—when I nearly died of diphtheria.
    If it was a Wednesday afternoon my mother’s boarder, Fern Dogherty, would be at home, drinking tea, smoking, talking with my mother in the dining room. Fern’s talk was low, she would ramble and groan and laugh against my mother’s sharper, more economical commentary. They told stories about people in the town, about themselves; their talk was a river that never dried up. It was the drama, the ferment of life just beyond my reach. I would go to the deep mirror in the built-in sideboard and look at the reflection of the room—all dark wainscoting, dark beams, the brass lighting fixture like a little formal tree growing the wrong way, with five branches stiffly curved, ending in glass flowers. By getting them into a certain spot in the mirror I could make my mother and Fern Dogherty pull out like rubber bands, all wavering and hysterical, and I could make my own face droop disastrously down one side, as if I had had a stroke.
    I said to my mother, “Why didn’t you bring that picture in?”
    “What picture? What picture? ”
    “The one over the couch.”
    Because I had been thinking—every so often I had to think—of our kitchen out on the farm, where my father and Uncle Benny