Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [30]
Nina had bought the textbooks for the courses she was auditing. She had bought notebooks and pens—the best fountain pens of that time—in matching colors. Red for Middle-American Pre-Columbian Civilizations, blue for the Romantic Poets, green for Victorian and Georgian English Novelists, yellow for Fairy Tales from Perrault to Andersen. She went to every lecture, sitting in the back row because she thought that was the proper place for her. She spoke as if she enjoyed walking through the Arts building with the throng of other students, finding her seat, opening her textbook at the page specified, taking out her pen. But her notebooks remained empty.
The trouble was, as I saw it, that she had no pegs to hang anything on. She did not know what Victorian meant, or Romantic, or Pre-Columbian. She had been to Japan, and Barbados, and many of the countries in Europe, but she could never have found those places on a map. She wouldn’t have known whether or not the French Revolution came before the First World War.
I wondered how these courses had been chosen for her. Did she like the sound of them, had Mr. Purvis thought she could master them, or had he perhaps chosen them cynically, so that she would soon get her fill of being a student?
When I was looking for the book I wanted, I caught sight of Ernie Botts. He had an armful of mysteries, which he had picked up for an old friend of his mother’s. He had told me how he always did that, just as he always played checkers on Saturday mornings with a crony of his father’s out in the War Veterans’ Home.
I introduced him to Nina. I had told him about her moving in, but nothing, of course, about her former or even her present life.
He shook Nina’s hand and said he was pleased to meet her and asked at once if he could give us a ride home.
I was about to say no thanks, we’d get a ride on the bus, when Nina asked him where his car was parked.
“In the back,” he said.
“Is there a back door?”
“Yes, yes. It’s a sedan.”
“No, I didn’t mean that,” said Nina nicely. “I meant in the library. In the building.”
“Yes. Yes, there is,” said Ernie in a fluster. “I’m sorry, I thought you meant the car. Yes. A back door in the library. I came in that way myself. I’m sorry.” Now he was blushing, and he would have gone on apologizing if Nina had not broken in with a kind, even flattering, laugh.
“Well then,” she said. “We can go out the back door. So that’s settled. Thanks.”
Ernie drove us home. He asked if we would like to detour by his place, for a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate.
“Sorry, we’re sort of in a rush,” said Nina. “But thanks for asking.”
“I guess you’ve got homework.”
“Homework, yes,” she said. “We sure do.”
I was thinking that he had never once asked me to his house. Propriety. One girl, no. Two girls, okay.
No black car across the street when we said our thanks and good nights. No black car when we looked through the attic window. In a short time the phone rang, for Nina, and I heard her saying, on the landing, “Oh no, we just went in the library and got a book and came straight home on the bus. There was one right away, yes. I’m fine. Absolutely. Night-night.”
She came swaying and smiling up the stairs.
“Mrs. Winner’s got herself in hot water tonight.”
Then she made a little leap and started to tickle me, as she did every once in a while, without the least warning, having discovered that I was extraordinarily ticklish.
One morning Nina did not get out of bed. She said she had a sore throat, a fever.
“Touch me.”
“You always feel hot to me.”
“Today I’m hotter.”
It was a Friday. She asked me to call Mr. Purvis, to tell him she wanted to stay here for the weekend.
“He’ll let me—he can’t stand anybody being sick around him. He’s a nut that way.”
Mr. Purvis wondered if he should send a doctor. Nina had foreseen that, and told me to say she just needed to rest, and she’d phone him, or I would, if she got any worse. Well then, tell her to take care, he said, and thanked me for phoning, and for