“It seemed to her that life went on, after you finished school, as a series of further examinations to be passed. The first one was getting married. If you hadn’t done that by the time you were twenty-five, that examination had to all intents and purposes been failed. (She always signed her name “Mrs. Kent Mayberry”with a sense of relief and mild elation.) Then you thought about having the first baby. Waiting a year before you got pregnant was a good idea. Waiting two years was a little more prudent than necessary. And three years started people wondering. Then down the road somewhere was the second baby. After that the progression got dimmer and it was hard to be sure just when you had arrived at wherever it was you were going.” – Jakarta
*
It would be impossible to name my very favorite Munro story. There are so many. But the collection that comes to mind is Runaway, and within the book is a trilogy of linked stories: Chance, Soon, Silence. These stories represent all that I love about Munro–the shifting focus of characters, the passage of time, the absence of redemption.
The main character is Juliet, and we follow her through the three stories, first as a young single woman, then married with a child, and then older, with her own interests and career, whose daughter no longer speaks to her.
The daughter, Penelope, joins a six-month retreat, and then after the six months, never sees her mother again. We don’t know the exact impetus for this estrangement, though a leader from the retreat, upon meeting Juliet, says that Penelope “came to us here in great hunger. Hunger for things that were not available to her in her home.”
We learn that Juliet’s husband, Penelope’s dad Eric, had died years ago in a boating accident, and at his funeral, his body was burned as if on a pyre, and that Penelope missed both the death and the funeral because she was deep in the woods with a friend. When she returns, her father is dead, and she has missed it.
We never hear Penelope’s voice, so we are only left to assume that this trauma led to a search for some kind of spirituality, and ultimately, a complete severance from her mother.
When I first read Silence, I thought it was so sad and beautiful, an unexpected conclusion to Juliet’s story. But also, I admired Juliet’s life, her career as a local television star, and later, an academic researching the Greeks.
Now, the story encapsulates my deepest fears–that one of my children will grow up and no longer speak to me, because of some mistake that I have made in raising them, a mistake I may be making right now.
I return to Munro’s stories more than any other. They deepen every single time I revisit them, and they change and morph as I myself age. I first read her in my early twenties, an aspiring something, unbound to anyone but my own dreams and ambitions. Now, a forty something mother, so many dreams set aside because of my choices or because, like Penelope, they simply went away.
*
Okay, maybe I do have a favorite. In Jakarta (The Love of a Good Woman), Kath and Sonje are two friends who bond over their disdain of the other women in their beach town. Kath is a new mother. She dreads what she might become, a full-on mother, that is to say, just a mother. She and Sonje cling to their intelligence, reading books and discussing characters, in order to stave off becoming like a group of women they call “the Monicas.”
Kath is also disgusted and envious that Sonje is fully devoted to her husband, Cottar, on whom Sonje says, “My happiness depends.” Kath is married to Kent, hyper masculine, condescending, the type of man who later looks contemptuously at a book by Karl Marx. We don’t know why they got married, but we do know they end up divorced.
The bulk of the story takes place in the past, at a party on the beach. Kath has left her nursing baby at home with a babysitter. The party is thrown by “hippies,” members of a communal house who swap sexual partners frequently, including Sonje and Cottar. Kath dances with other men, and ultimately, has an exchange with one, before swiftly being called back to the house to nurse her hungry baby.
Suddenly, we shift. The story becomes Kent’s. He and his new wife, Deborah, are driving up the coast visiting various people when he decides to stop at Sonje’s house on a whim. She invites him inside after mistaking his young wife for his daughter (hate when that happens).
Sonje eventually reveals to Kent her theory that Cottar didn’t really die in Jakarta all those years ago, as a doctor’s letter had told her. She thinks he disappeared on purpose, stayed somewhere in Jakarta or maybe India or Hong Kong. She says she’s going to go to Jakarta, now, and track him down, or at least the truth about what happened to him. Kent thinks, but doesn’t say, that she’s crazy and an old loon, as he takes his pills for whatever ailment is beginning to attack his body. There is a sense of denouement in their conversation. We know that Sonje will never really go to Jakarta. It is too far and she is too old.
*
Munro’s characters make mistakes. They have affairs. They are deceitful. They choose the wrong partner, the wrong job. Their choices carry some consequences, but the consequences are not immense. Or rather, we have no idea if they are immense, because we do not know what was on the other side of them. There are no great redemptions or revelations, just the carrying on of a life, and the glancing backwards that we all as human beings must do, wondering if the path we chose was the right one and the sense that it wasn’t quite.
When Sonje first gets the letter from a doctor telling her Cottar has died from an infectious disease, she can’t see how she will get through the rest of her life without him. But she does. Life goes on, miserably or, more likely, not.
In A Real Life, Dorrie lives quite happily on the farm she once shared with her brother, the only home she has ever known. She is a self-sufficient woman who enjoys trapping muskrats. (No one captures rural Ontarion life with such attention as Munro.)
But one day a rather rich man visiting town is taken with her, and offers to marry her. Dorrie goes along with all the planning until she panics. She says that she cannot get married. She does not want to leave her home and all that is familiar to her.
Of course, Dorrie does get married, and moves to Australia. And, ultimately, she does end up having a good life. There is no tragedy waiting for her there. She gets fat, she rides horses. She dies while hiking up a volcano. She could have happily stayed on the farm, or she could have happily moved to Australia. Both versions are versions of a real life.
*
I wake up ten years from now. I am divorced. We get along, though he is remarried, and I am not. I’m okay with this except when I am very lonely.
My daughter is angry at me for breaking up our family, though her feminist beliefs don’t allow her to blame me. She uses other excuses to express her disdain at me—my political beliefs, my age, my apathy.
Fifteen years from now, my quiet, gentle son has joined the army. I wake up and go to sleep filled with dread. I wonder what made him choose such a path. The divorce? Some fear we instilled when he was young? Some glorification of violence? I miss sweeping his hair out of his eyes. I picture his little fingers, whose nails I used to trim, holding a gun. I long for his head on my shoulder one last time. He is across the world, in some unknowable place.
*
Munro’s stories unfold so slowly, so subtly, you don’t realize the mundane detail at the beginning of the story is actually a clue to the whole thing. There is no way to know how the story will end. Characters, who you assumed would be the main character, often die in the middle of the story, and the narrative is carried on by another. She is a master of interiority, such that when I think of her stories, I am both remembering the story and remembering the character’s thoughts, as if they were my own.
I found a copy of Selected Stories of Alice Munro in a thrift store for $3.99. Even though I already have all her books, I bought it. And there are some stories in there that, after all this time, are new to me.
In one story, Train, a man fresh from war jumps from a train to find work in a small town. He lodges with a woman named Belle, who later reveals a trauma from her childhood that possibly led to her father’s death.
Two thirds of the way through the story, and years after the story begins, Belle has died of cancer. Jackson has a near run-in with a woman he essentially ghosted in high school and feeling panicked, he jumps on another train to find work in a lumber town.
What is the point of this story? I have no idea. But the story has taken me somewhere. It resonates. I feel that something has taken place, though I’m not sure exactly what.
*
I was beautiful once, but that time is over. Now is the time of wrinkles and gray hair and an ever-expanding stomach. I am not young, not old. I must find a new way to exist in a world that has held me under its gaze for years and then dropped me from its orbit. I was never the fairest in all the land but now the mirror barely acknowledges my presence.
As women we are told, this is your childhood, this is your adolescence, this is your fertility, this is your menopause, and ah, yes, now, you can relax, now you mean nothing to procreation, so go, be yourself, finally. A relief, to be honest. Time, if you are able to get it, feels like a friend.
*
There is so much sex in Munro’s stories. So much. Everyone is aching with sexual desire. Sexual longing is the driving force of many of her stories. That, and loneliness. And spite. So much spite.
I would have liked to be friends with Alice Munro. Based on her stories, she had a wicked sense of humor. When asked in an interview if she ever kept diaries, she said, “I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people.”
In The Jack Randa Hotel, Gail’s lover, Will, leaves her for a younger woman. She follows him from Canada to Australia, with no particular purpose in mind. When she arrives, she roots through his mailbox and finds a letter that has been returned-to-sender. She assumes the identity of the recipient, and begins a correspondence with Will. She writes angry, disparaging letters to him under this identity, confusing him, gaslighting him. It’s old-fashioned catfishing. The level of pettiness and rage is, to be honest, quite admirable.
And, inverse to that, we have The Bear Came Over the Mountain, the exploration of forgiveness, long lasting love, and deep devotion, what happens when love outlasts capacity.
*
I’m an old lady. My children are grown and old themselves. They visit me once a year begrudgingly. It’s hard for them to see what they think is a sad life. But my life isn’t sad, not to me at least.
I wake up to the sun splicing my wall. I stay by the water all day, watching the landscape change before my eyes, the way the tide pulls up and leaves behind its dampness as it retreats, the way the waves are still as ice mid-day and raucous and playful by the afternoon. The ocean feels like better companionship than any human.
The tide pools are best just after sunrise, low tide. The creatures that inhabit the pools are so busy at this time, scurrying for survival and food. I like to watch the seriousness with which they take their lives. I like to know we aren’t the only ones.
*
I live in the mountains with my husband. I never thought I’d be the type of person to wake up every morning in time to see the sun rise, but here I am, watching yet another day arrive. Not just that, I look for birds! I listen for their distinct songs and make note of how lucky I am when I hear a golden crown. I paint mediocre pictures that no one buys. I have, finally, accepted the mediocrity of my life as a thing to be treasured.
*
I never married or had children. I was lonely. I was happy. My life was my own. It was full of books, love, constant possibilities, and the specter of something else over there.
*
We all have many real lives, the lives we’re living, the lives we wish to have, the lives occurring only in our minds.
To be human is to wonder. Perhaps the wondering is the penance for living.
Either way, thank you, Alice.
