The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [53]
She had asked one question.
“What was the wallpaper like? That you and your wife put on the hall?”
He had to think.
“It’s striped. It’s white and silver stripes.”
The choice of wallpaper made Greta seem harder, shrewder, more ambitious, than she seemed on the street or shopping in the Superior Grocery Store, in her soft, dowdy, flowered dresses, her loose checked slacks, a bandana over her hair. A big, fair, freckled housewife, who once bumped Frances’ arm with her grocery basket and said, “Excuse me.” The only words Frances had ever heard her say. A thickly accented, cold and timid voice. The voice Ted heard every day of his life, the body he slept beside every night. Frances’ knees weakened and trembled, there in the Superior Grocery Store in front of the shelves of Kraft Dinner and pork and beans. Just to be so close to this big, mysterious woman, so innocent and powerful, was blurring her mind and making her shake in her shoes.
ON SATURDAY MORNING Frances found a note in her mailbox, asking her to let Ted into the church that night. She was as nervous all day as she had been when waiting to meet him for the first time, in Beattie’s Bush. She waited, in the dark, by the Sunday-schoolroom door. It was a bad night, Saturday, either the minister or the janitor was likely to be there, and both had been, earlier, when Frances was distractedly playing the organ. They had gone home, she hoped for good.
They usually made love here in the dark, but tonight Frances thought they would need a light on, they would need to talk. She led the way at once to a Sunday-school classroom behind the choir loft. It was a long, narrow, stuffy room with no outside windows. The Sunday-school chairs had been stacked in one corner. There was a strange thing on the teacher’s table—an ash tray with two cigarette stubs in it. Frances held it up.
“Somebody else must come here, too.”
She had to talk about something besides the accident, because she was sure she could never say the right thing about that.
“Whole relay of lovers,” said Ted, to her relief. “I wouldn’t be surprised.” He named some possible pairs. The school secretary and the principal. Frances’ sister-in-law and the minister of this church. But he spoke drearily.
“We’ll have to set up a schedule.”
They didn’t bother taking the chairs down, but sat on the floor with their backs against the wall, under a picture of Jesus walking by the Sea of Galilee.
“I have never put in such a week in my life,” Ted said. “I don’t know where to start. We came back from London Tuesday, and Wednesday, Greta’s family descended on us. They drove all night, two nights. I don’t know how they did it. They commandeered a snowplow to go ahead of them for about fifty miles in one place. Those women are capable of anything. The father’s just a shadow. The women are terrors. Kartrud is the worst. She has eight children of her own and she’s never stopped running her sisters and her sisters’ families and anybody else who’ll allow her. Greta is just useless against her.”
He said that trouble had started right away, about the funeral. Ted had decided on a nonreligious funeral. He had made up his mind long ago that if any of his family died, he would not call in the church. The undertaker didn’t like it, but agreed. Greta said it was all right. Ted wrote out a few memorial paragraphs he intended to read himself. That would be all. No hymn-singing, no prayers. There was nothing new about this. They all knew how he felt. Greta knew. Her family knew. Nevertheless, they started to carry on as if this was a new and horrifying revelation. They acted as if atheism itself was an unheard-of position. They had