And Iona’s love, which was certainly the most wholehearted love I will ever receive, didn’t decide me. Her cries and her crushing me into her body didn’t work, were not finally persuasive. Because it wasn’t Iona I had to settle for. (Could I have known that-could I even have known that it wasn’t Iona, in the end, who would do me the most good?) It was Jill. I had to settle for Jill and for what I could get from her, even if it might look like half a loaf.
To me it seems that it was only then that I became female. I know that the matter was decided long before I was born and was plain to everybody else since the beginning of my life, but I believe that it was only at the moment when I decided to come back, when I gave up the fight against my mother (which must have been a fight for something like her total surrender) and when in fact I chose survival over victory (death would have been victory), that I took on my female nature.
And to some extent Jill took on hers. Sobered and grateful, not even able to risk thinking about what she’d just escaped, she took on loving me, because the alternative to loving was disaster.
Dr. Shantz suspected something, but he let it go. He asked Jill how I had been the day before. Fussy? She said yes, very fussy. He said that premature babies, even slightly premature babies, were susceptible to shocks and you had to be careful with them. He recommended that I always be put to sleep on my back.
Iona did not have to have shock treatment. Dr. Shantz gave her pills. He said that she had overstrained herself looking after me. The woman who had taken over her job at the bakery wanted to give it up-she did not like working nights. So Iona went back there.
That’s what I remember best about my summer visits to my aunts, when I was six or seven years old. Being taken down to the bakery at the strange, usually forbidden hour of midnight and watching Iona put on her white hat and apron, watching her knead the great white mass of dough that shifted and bubbled like something alive. Then cutting out cookies and feeding me the leftover bits and on special occasions sculpting a wedding cake. How bright and white that big kitchen was, with night filling every window. I scraped the wedding icing from the bowl-the melting stabbing irresistible sugar.
Ailsa thought I should not be up so late, or eat so much sweet stuff. But she didn’t do anything about it. She said she wondered what my mother would say-as if Jill was the person who swung the weight, not herself. Ailsa had some rules that I didn’t have to observe at home-hang up that jacket, rinse that glass before you dry it, else it’ll have spots-but I never saw the harsh, hounding person Jill remembered.
Nothing slighting was ever said then, about Jill’s music. After all, she made our living at it. She had not been finally defeated by the Mendelssohn. She got her diploma; she graduated from the Conservatory. She cut her hair and got thin. She was able to rent a duplex near High Park in Toronto, and hire a woman to look after me part of the time, because she had her war widow’s pension. And then she found a job with a radio orchestra. She was to be proud that all her working life she was employed as a musician and never had to fall back on teaching. She said that she knew that she was not a great violinist, she had no marvellous gift or destiny, but at least she could make her living doing what she wanted to do. Even after she married my stepfather, after we moved with him to Edmonton (he was a geologist), she went on playing in the symphony orchestra there. She played up until a week before each of my half sisters was born. She was lucky, she said-her husband never objected.
Iona did have a couple of further setbacks, the more serious one when I was about twelve. She was taken to Morrisville for several weeks. I think she was given insulin there-she returned fat and loquacious. I came back to visit while she was away, and Jill came with me, bringing my first little sister who had been born shortly before. I understood from the talk between my mother and Ailsa that it would not have been advisable to bring a baby into the house if Iona was there; it might have “set her off.” I don’t know if the episode that sent her to Morrisville had anything to do with a baby.
I felt left out of things on that visit. Both Jill and Ailsa had taken up smoking, and they would sit up late at night, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, while they waited for the baby’s one o’clock feeding. (My mother fed this baby from her breasts-I was glad to hear that no such intimate body-heated meals had been served to me.) I remember coming downstairs sulkily because I couldn’t sleep, then turning talkative, full of giddy bravado, trying to break into their conversation. I understood that they were talking over things they didn’t want me to hear about. They had become, unaccountably, good friends.
I grabbed for a cigarette, and my mother said, “Go on now, leave those alone. We’re talking.” Ailsa told me to get something to drink out of the fridge, a Coke or a ginger ale. So I did, and instead of taking it upstairs I went outside.
I sat on the back step, but the women’s voices immediately went too low for me to make out any of their soft regretting or reassuring. So I went prowling around the backyard, beyond the patch of light thrown through the screen door.
The long white house with the glass-brick corners was occupied by new people now. The Shantzes had moved away, to live year-round in Florida. They sent my aunts oranges, which Ailsa said would make you forever disgusted with the kind of oranges you could buy in Canada. The new people had put in a swimming pool, which was used mostly by the two pretty teenage daughters-girls who would look right through me when they met me on the street-and by the daughters’ boyfriends. Some bushes had grown up fairly high between my aunts’ yard and theirs, but it was still possible for me to watch them running around the pool and pushing each other in, with great shrieks and splashes. I despised their antics because I took life seriously and had a much more lofty and tender notion of romance. But I would have liked to get their attention just the same. I would have liked for one of them to see my pale pajamas moving in the dark, and to scream out in earnest, thinking that I was a ghost.
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer and three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction. Widely considered one of the finest living English-language short story writers, her stories focus on human relationships looked at through the lens of daily life. While most of Munro's fiction is set in Southwestern Ontario, her reputation as a short-story writer is international. Her "accessible, moving stories" explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style. Munro's writing has established her as "one of our greatest contemporary writers of fiction," or, as Cynthia Ozick put it, "our Chekhov."
