Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro Page B

were at that moment probably frying potatoes for their supper, in an unwashed pan (why wash away good grease?), with mitts and scarves steaming dry on top of the stove. Major our dog—not allowed into the house during my mother’s reign—asleep on the dirty linoleum in front of the door. Newspapers spread on the table in place of a cloth, dog-haired blanket on the couch, guns and snowshoes and washtubs hung along the walls. Smelly bachelor comfort. Over the couch there was a picture actually painted by my mother, in the far-off early days—the possibly leisured, sunny, loving days—of her marriage. It showed a stony road and a river between mountains, and sheep driven along the road by a little girl in a red shawl. The mountains and the sheep looked alike, lumpy, woolly, purplish-grey. Long ago I had believed that the little girl was really my mother and that this was the desolate country of her early life. Then I learned that she had copied the scene from the National Geographic .
    “That one? Do you want that in here?”
    I didn’t really. As often in our conversations I was trying to lead her on, to get the answer, or the revelation, I particularly wanted. I wanted her to say she had left it for my father. I remembered she had said once that she had painted it for him, he was the one who had liked that scene.
    “I don’t want it hanging where people would see,” she said. “I’m no artist. I only painted it because I had nothing to do.”
    She gave a ladies’ party, to which she asked Mrs. Coutts, sometimes called Mrs. Lawyer Coutts, Mrs. Best whose husband was the manager of the Bank of Commerce, various other ladies she only knew to speak to on the street, as well as neighbours, Fern Dogherty’s coworkers from the Post Office, and of course Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace. (She asked them to make creamed chicken tarts and lemon tarts and matrimonial cake, which they did.) The party was all planned in advance. As soon as the ladies came into the front hall they had to guess how many beans in a jar, writing their guess on a slip of paper. The evening proceeded with guessing games, quizzes made up with the help of the encyclopedia, charades which never got going properly because many ladies could not be made to understand how to play, and were too shy anyway, and a pencil and paper game where you write a man’s name, fold it down and pass it on, write a verb, fold it down, write a lady’s name, and so on, and at the end all the papers are unfolded and read out. In a pink wool skirt and bolero, I joyfully passed peanuts.
    Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace kept busy in the kitchen, smiling and affronted. My mother was wearing a red dress, semitransparent, covered with little black and blue pansies, like embroidery. “We thought it was beetles she had on that dress,” whispered Aunt Elspeth to me. “It gave us a start!” After that it did seem to me the party was less beautiful than I had supposed; I noticed some ladies were not playing any games, that my mother’s face was feverish with excitement and her voice full of organizing fervour, that when she played the piano, and Fern Dogherty—who had studied to be a singer—sang, “What is Life without my Lover?” ladies contained themselves, and clapped from some kind distance, as if this might be showing-off.
    Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth would in fact say to me, off and on for the next year, “How is that ladyboarder of yours? How is she finding life without her lover?” I would explain to them that it was a song from an opera, a translation, and they would cry, “Oh, is that it? And we were all the time feeling so sorry for her!”
    My mother had hoped that her party would encourage other ladies to give parties of this sort, but it did not, or if it did we never heard of them; they continued giving bridge parties, which my mother said were silly and snobbish. She gave up on social life, gradually. She said that Mrs. Coutts was a stupid woman who in one