Who Do You Think You Are by Munro Alice

Author:Munro, Alice [Munro, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

Providence

Rose had a dream about Anna. This was after she had gone away and left Anna behind. She dreamed she met Anna walking up Gonzales Hill. She knew she was coming from school. She went up to speak to her but Anna walked past not speaking. No wonder. She was covered with clay that seemed to have leaves or branches in it, so that the effect was of dead garlands. Decoration; ruination. And the clay or mud was not dry, it was still dripping off her, so that she looked crude and sad, a botched heavy-headed idol.

“Do you want to come with me, do you want to stay with Daddy?” Rose had said to her, but Anna had refused to answer, saying instead, “I don’t want you to go.” Rose had got a job at a radio station in a town in the Kootenay mountains.

Anna was lying in the four-poster bed where Patrick and Rose used to sleep, where Patrick now slept alone. Rose slept in the den.

Anna would go to sleep in that bed, then Patrick would carry her to her own bed. Neither Patrick nor Rose knew when this stopped being occasional, and became essential. Everything in the house was out of kilter. Rose was packing her trunk. She did it in the daytime when Patrick and Anna were not around. She and Patrick spent the evenings in different parts of the house. Once she went into the dining room and found him putting fresh Scotch tape on the snapshots in the album. She was angry at him for doing this. She saw a snapshot of herself, pushing Anna on a swing in the park; herself smirking in a bikini; true lies.

“It wasn’t any better then,” she said. “Not really.” She meant that she had always been planning, at the back of her mind, to do what she was doing now. Even on her wedding day she had known this time would come, and that if it didn’t she might as well be dead. The betrayal was hers.

“I know that,” said Patrick angrily.

But of course it had been better, because she hadn’t started to try to make the break come, she had forgotten for long stretches that it would have to come. Even to say she had been planning to break, had started to break, was wrong, because she had done nothing deliberately, nothing at all intelligently, it had happened as painfully and ruinously as possible with all sorts of shilly-shallying and reconciling and berating, and right now she felt as if she was walking a swinging bridge and could only keep her eyes on the slats ahead, never look down or around.

“Which do you want?” she said softly to Anna. Instead of answering, Anna called out for Patrick. When he came she sat up and pulled them both down on the bed, one on each side of her. She held on to them, and began to sob and shake. A violently dramatic child, sometimes, a bare blade.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

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