Alice Munro's Best (69 page)

She jumped up and went to get the present she had brought, which in fact she had not forgotten about at all. She had not wanted to hand it to Carla right away, she had wanted the moment to come more naturally, and while she was speaking she had thought ahead to the moment when she could mention the sea, going swimming. And say, as she now said, “Swimming reminded me of this because it's a little replica, you know, it's a little replica of the horse they found under the sea. Cast in bronze. They dredged it up, after all this time. It's supposed to be from the second century
B
.
C
.”

When Carla had come in and looked around for work to do, Sylvia had said, “Oh, just sit down a minute, I haven't had anybody to talk to since I got back. Please.” Carla had sat down on the edge of a chair, legs apart, hands between her knees, looking somehow desolate. As if reaching for some distant politeness she had said, “How was Greece?”

Now she was standing, with the tissue paper crumpled around the horse, which she had not fully unwrapped.

“It's said to represent a racehorse,” Sylvia said. “Making that final spurt, the last effort in a race. The rider, too, the boy, you can see he's urging the horse on to the limit of its strength.”

She did not mention that the boy had made her think of Carla, and
she could not now have said why. He was only about ten or eleven years old. Maybe the strength and grace of the arm that must have held the reins, or the wrinkles in his childish forehead, the absorption and the pure effort there was in some way like Carla cleaning the big windows last spring. Her strong legs in her shorts, her broad shoulders, her big swipes at the glass, and then the way she had splayed herself out as a joke, inviting or even commanding Sylvia to laugh.

“You can see that,” Carla said, now conscientiously examining the little bronzy-green statue. “Thank you very much.”

“You are welcome. Let's have coffee, shall we? I've just made some. The coffee in Greece was quite strong, a little stronger than I liked, but the bread was heavenly. And the ripe figs, they were astounding. Sit down another moment, please do. You should stop me going on and on this way. What about here? How has life been here?”

“It's been raining most of the time.”

“I can see that. I can see it has,” Sylvia called from the kitchen end of the big room. Pouring the coffee, she decided that she would keep quiet about the other gift she had brought. It hadn't cost her anything (the horse had cost more than the girl could probably guess), it was only a beautiful small pinkish-white stone she had picked up along the road.

“This is for Carla,” she had said to her friend Maggie, who was walking beside her. “I know it's silly. I just want her to have a tiny piece of this land.”

She had already mentioned Carla to Maggie, and to Soraya, her other friend there, telling them how the girl's presence had come to mean more and more to her, how an indescribable bond had seemed to grow up between them, and had consoled her in the awful months of last spring.

“It was just to see somebody – somebody so fresh and full of health coming into the house.”

Maggie and Soraya had laughed in a kindly but annoying way.

“There's always a girl,” Soraya said, with an indolent stretch of her heavy brown arms, and Maggie said, “We all come to it sometime. A crush on a girl.”

Sylvia was obscurely angered by that dated word –
crush.

“Maybe it's because Leon and I never had children,” she said. “It's stupid. Displaced maternal love.”

Her friends spoke at the same time, saying in slightly different ways something to the effect that it might be stupid but it was, after all, love.

BUT THE GIRL
was not, today, anything like the Carla Sylvia had been remembering, not at all the calm bright spirit, the carefree and generous young creature who had kept her company in Greece.

She had been hardly interested in her gift. Almost sullen as she reached out for her mug of coffee.

“There was one thing I thought you would have liked a lot,” said Sylvia energetically. “The goats. They were quite small even when they were full-grown. Some spotty and some white, and they were leaping around up on the rocks just like – like the spirits of the place.” She laughed in an artificial way, she couldn't stop herself. “I wouldn't be surprised if they'd had wreaths on their horns. How is your little goat? I forget her name.”

Carla said, “Flora.”

“Flora.”

“She's gone.”

“Gone? Did you sell her?”

“She disappeared. We don't know where.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But isn't there a chance she'll turn up again?”

No answer. Sylvia looked directly at the girl, something that up to now she had not quite been able to do, and saw that her eyes were full of tears, her face blotchy – in fact it looked grubby – and that she seemed bloated with distress.

She didn't do anything to avoid Sylvia's look. She drew her lips tight over her teeth and shut her eyes and rocked back and forth as if in a soundless howl, and then, shockingly, she did howl. She howled and wept and gulped for air and tears ran down her cheeks and snot out of her nostrils and she began to look around wildly for something to wipe with. Sylvia ran and got handfuls of Kleenex.

“Don't worry, here you are, here, you're all right,” she said, thinking that maybe the thing to do would be to take the girl in her arms. But
she had not the least wish to do that, and it might make things worse. The girl might feel how little Sylvia wanted to do such a thing, how appalled she was in fact by this noisy fit.

Carla said something, said the same thing again.

“Awful,” she said. “Awful.”

“No it's not. We all have to cry sometimes. It's all right, don't worry.”

“It's awful.”

And Sylvia could not help feeling how, with every moment of this show of misery, the girl made herself more ordinary, more like one of those soggy students in her – Sylvia's – office. Some of them cried about their marks, but that was often tactical, a brief unconvincing bit of whimpering. The more infrequent, real waterworks would turn out to have something to do with a love affair, or their parents, or a pregnancy.

“It's not about your goat, is it?”

“No. No.”

“You better have a glass of water,” said Sylvia.

She took time to run it cold, trying to think what else she should do or say, and when she returned with it Carla was already calming down.

“Now. Now,” Sylvia said as the water was being swallowed. “Isn't that better?”

“Yes.”

“It's not the goat. What is it?”

Carla said, “I can't stand it anymore.”

What could she not stand?

It turned out to be the husband.

He was mad at her all the time. He acted as if he hated her. There was nothing she could do right, there was nothing she could say. Living with him was driving her crazy. Sometimes she thought she already was crazy. Sometimes she thought he was.

“Has he hurt you, Carla?”

No. He hadn't hurt her physically. But he hated her. He despised her. He could not stand it when she cried and she could not help crying because he was so mad.

She did not know what to do.

“Perhaps you do know what to do,” said Sylvia.

“Get away? I would if I could.” Carla began to wail again. “I'd give anything to get away. I can't. I haven't any money. I haven't anywhere in this world to go.”

“Well. Think. Is that altogether true?” said Sylvia in her best counselling manner. “Don't you have parents? Didn't you tell me you grew up in Kingston? Don't you have a family there?”

Her parents had moved to British Columbia. They hated Clark. They didn't care if she lived or died.

Brothers or sisters?

One brother nine years older. He was married and in Toronto. He didn't care either. He didn't like Clark. His wife was a snob.

“Have you ever thought of the Women's Shelter?”

“They don't want you there unless you've been beaten up. And everybody would find out and it would be bad for our business.”

Sylvia gently smiled.

“Is this a time to think about that?”

Then Carla actually laughed. “I know,” she said, “I'm insane.”

“Listen,” said Sylvia. “Listen to me. If you had the money to go, would you go? Where would you go? What would you do?”

“I would go to Toronto,” Carla said readily enough. “But I wouldn't go near my brother. I'd stay in a motel or something and I'd get a job at a riding stable.”

“You think you could do that?”

“I was working at a riding stable the summer I met Clark. I'm more experienced now than I was then. A lot more.”

“You sound as if you've figured this out,” said Sylvia thoughtfully.

Carla said, “I have now.”

“So when would you go, if you could go?”

“Now. Today. This minute.”

“All that's stopping you is lack of money?”

Carla took a deep breath. “All that's stopping me,” she said.

“All right,” said Sylvia. “Now listen to what I propose. I don't think you should go to a motel. I think you should take the bus to Toronto and go to stay with a friend of mine. Her name is Ruth Stiles. She has a big house and she lives alone and she won't mind having somebody
to stay. You can stay there till you find a job. I'll help you with some money. There must be lots and lots of riding stables around Toronto.”

“There are.”

“So what do you think? Do you want me to phone and find out what time the bus goes?”

Carla said yes. She was shivering. She ran her hands up and down her thighs and shook her head roughly from side to side.

“I can't believe it,” she said. “I'll pay you back. I mean, thank you. I'll pay you back. I don't know what to say.”

Sylvia was already at the phone, dialling the bus depot.

“Shh, I'm getting the times,” she said. She listened, and hung up. “I know you will. You agree about Ruth's? I'll let her know. There's one problem, though.” She looked critically at Carla's shorts and T-shirt. “You can't very well go in those clothes.”

“I can't go home to get anything,” said Carla in a panic. “I'll be all right.”

“The bus will be air-conditioned. You'll freeze. There must be something of mine you could wear. Aren't we about the same height?”

“You're ten times skinnier.”

“I didn't use to be.”

In the end they decided on a brown linen jacket, hardly worn – Sylvia had considered it to be a mistake for herself, the style too brusque – and a pair of tailored tan pants and a cream-colored silk shirt. Carla's sneakers would have to do with this outfit, because her feet were two sizes larger than Sylvia's.

Carla went to take a shower – something she had not bothered with in her state of mind that morning – and Sylvia phoned Ruth. Ruth was going to be out at a meeting that evening, but she would leave the key with her upstairs tenants and all Carla would have to do was ring their bell.

“She'll have to take a cab from the bus depot, though. I assume she's okay to manage that?” Ruth said.

Sylvia laughed. “She's not a lame duck, don't worry. She is just a person in a bad situation, the way it happens.”

“Well good. I mean good she's getting out.”

“Not a lame duck at all,” said Sylvia, thinking of Carla trying on the tailored pants and linen jacket. How quickly the young recover from a fit of despair and how handsome the girl had looked in the fresh clothes.

The bus would stop in town at twenty past two. Sylvia decided to make omelettes for lunch, to set the table with the dark-blue cloth, and to get down the crystal glasses and open a bottle of wine.

“I hope you're hungry enough to eat something,” she said, when Carla came out clean and shining in her borrowed clothes. Her softly freckled skin was flushed from the shower, and her hair was damp and darkened, out of its braid, the sweet frizz now flat against her head. She said she was hungry, but when she tried to get a forkful of the omelette to her mouth her trembling hands made it impossible.

“I don't know why I'm shaking like this,” she said. “I must be excited. I never knew it would be this easy.”

“It's very sudden,” said Sylvia. “Probably it doesn't seem quite real.”

“It does, though. Everything now seems really real. Like the time before now, that's when I was in a daze.”

“Maybe when you make up your mind to something, when you really make up your mind, that's how it is. Or that's how it should be.”

“If you've got a friend,” said Carla with a self-conscious smile and a flush spreading over her forehead. “If you've got a true friend. I mean like you.” She laid down the knife and fork and raised her wineglass awkwardly with both hands. “Drinking to a true friend,” she said, uncomfortably. “I probably shouldn't even take a sip, but I will.”

“Me too,” said Sylvia with a pretense of gaiety. She drank, but spoiled the moment by saying, “Are you going to phone him? Or what? He'll have to know. At least he'll have to know where you are by the time he'd be expecting you home.”

“Not the phone,” said Carla, alarmed. “I can't do it. Maybe if you –”

“No,” said Sylvia. “No.”

“No, that's stupid. I shouldn't have said that. It's just hard to think straight. What I maybe should do, I should put a note in the mailbox. But I don't want him to get it too soon. I don't want us to even drive past there when we're going into town. I want to go the back way. So
if I write it – if I write it, could you, could you maybe slip it in the box when you come back?”

Sylvia agreed to this, seeing no good alternative.

She brought pen and paper. She poured a little more wine. Carla sat thinking, then wrote a few words.