Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro

Author:Alice Munro [Munro, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Contemporary
ISBN: 9780375707490
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1970-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

Lives of Girls and Women

The snowbanks along the main street got to be so high that an archway was cut in one of them, between the street and the sidewalk, in front of the Post Office. A picture was taken of this and published in the Jubilee Herald-Advance, so that people could cut it out and send it to relatives and acquaintances living in less heroic climates, in England or Australia or Toronto. The redbrick Clocktower of the Post office was sticking up above the snow and two women were standing in the archway, to show it was no trick. Both these women worked in the Post Office, had put their coats on without buttoning them. One was Fern Dogherty, my mother’s boarder.

My mother cut this picture out, because it had Fern in it, and because she said I should keep it, to show to my children.

“They will never see a thing like that,” she said. “By then the snow will all be collected in machines and—dissipated. Or people will be living under transparent domes, with a controlled temperature. There will be no such thing as seasons anymore.”

How did she collect all her unsettling information about the future? She looked forward to a time when towns like Jubilee would be replaced by domes and mushrooms of concrete, with moving skyways to carry you from one to the other, when the countryside would be bound and tamed forever under broad sweeping ribbons of pavement. Nothing would be the same as we knew it today, no frying pans or bobby pins or printed pages or fountain pens would remain. My mother would not miss a thing.

Her speaking of my children amazed me too, for I never meant to have any. It was glory I was after, walking the streets of Jubilee like an exile or a spy, not sure from which direction fame would strike, or when, only convinced from my bones out that it had to. In this conviction my mother had shared, she had been my ally, but now I would no longer discuss it with her; she was indiscreet, and her expectations took too blatant a form.

Fern Dogherty. There she was in the paper, both hands coquettishly holding up the full collar of her good winter coat, which through pure luck she had worn to work that day. “I look the size of a watermelon,” she said. “In that coat.”

Mr. Chamberlain, looking with her, pinched her arm above the bracelet-wrinkle of the wrist.

“Tough rind, tough old watermelon.”

“Don’t get vicious,” said Fern. “I mean it.” Her voice was small for such a big woman, plaintive, putupon, but in the end good-humoured, yielding. All those qualities my mother had developed for her assault on life—sharpness, smartness, determination, selectiveness—seemed to have their opposites in Fern, with her diffuse complaints, lazy movements, indifferent agreeableness. She had a dark skin, not olive but dusty-looking, dim, with brown-pigmented spots as large as coins; it was like the dappled ground under a tree on a sunny day.

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