The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [50]
Frances was disgusted with her mother tonight for saying, “How about my library books?” She was disgusted with her mother’s callousness, her self-absorption, her feebleness, her survival, her wretched little legs and her arms on which the skin hung like wrinkled sleeves. But her mother was not more callous than she was herself. She went past the post office corner where there was no sign of an accident now, just fresh snow, snow blowing up the street from the south, from London (he would have to come back, no matter what happened he would have to come back). She felt fury at that child, at his stupidity, his stupid risk, his showing off, his breaking through into other people’s lives, into her life. She could not stand the thought of anybody right now. The thought of Adelaide, for instance. Adelaide, before she left, had followed Frances into the bedroom where Frances was taking off her satin blouse, because she could not cook supper in it. She had it open in front, she was undoing the sleeve buttons; she was standing in front of Adelaide just as she had stood in front of Ted a while before.
“Frances,” said Adelaide in a tense whisper, “are you feeling all right?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think it was paying back for you and him?”
“What?”
“God paying him back,” said Adelaide. Excitement, satisfaction, self-satisfaction shone out of her. Before her marriage to Frances’ stubborn and innocent younger brother, she had enjoyed a year or two of sexual popularity, or notoriety, puns being frequently made on her name. Her figure was stocky and maternal, her eyes slightly crossed. Frances could not understand what had driven her into such a friendship, or alliance, or whatever it could be called. Sitting in Adelaide’s kitchen on the nights when Clark was out coaching the junior hockey team, spiking their coffee with Clark’s precious whiskey (they watered what was left), with the diapers drying beside the stove, some cheap metal toy-train tracks and a hideous, eyeless, armless doll on the table in front of them, they had talked about sex and men. A shameful relief, a guilty indulgence, a bad mistake. God had not entered into Adelaide’s conversation at that time. She had never heard the word penis, tried it but couldn’t get used to it. Pecker, she said. Whipped out his pecker, she said, with the same disturbing gusto as she said on the slab.
“You don’t look all right, I’ll tell you that,” she said to Frances. “You look like it knocked you silly. You look sick.”
“Go home,” said Frances.
How was she going to have to pay for that?
Two men were putting Christmas lights on the blue spruce trees in front of the post office. Why were they doing it at this hour? They must have got started before the accident, then had to leave it. They must have spent the time off getting drunk, at least one of them must have. Cal Callaghan had got himself tangled up in a string of lights. The other man, Boss Creer, who had got his name because he would never be boss of anything, stood by waiting for Cal to get himself out of his difficulties in his own time. Boss Creer did not know how to read or write, but he knew how to be comfortable. The back of their truck was full of wreaths of artificial holly and ropes of red and green stuff still to be hung. Frances, because of her involvement with concerts and recitals and almost everything in the way of public festivity the town could think up, had got to know where the trappings were kept and she knew that these decorations lay year after year in the attic of the Town Hall, forgotten, then remembered and hauled out when somebody on the town council said, “Well, now. We had better think what we are going to do about Christmas.” Leaving these two fools to get the ropes and lights up somehow, and the wreaths hung, Frances was despising them. The incompetence, the ratty wreaths and ropes, the air of ordinary drudgery, all set in motion by some irrational sense of seasonal obligation. At another time, she might have found it touching, faintly admirable.