Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [36]
She grabbed my hands, which were stiff with cold inside my gloves. Each of them had been holding on to the handle of a shopping bag.
“Frozen,” she said. “Come on, we’ll get them into some warm water.”
“They are not frozen,” I said. “Just frozen.”
But she went ahead and helped me off with my things, and took me into the kitchen and ran a bowlful of water, and then as the blood returned painfully to my fingers she told me how Ernest (Ernie) had come to the rooming house on Saturday night. He was bringing a magazine that had a lot of pictures of old ruins and castles and things that he thought might interest me. She got herself out of bed and came downstairs, because of course he could not go upstairs, and when he saw how sick she was he said she had to come home with him so he could look after her. Which he had done so well that her sore throat was practically gone and her fever completely gone. And then they had decided that she would stay here. She would just stay with him and never go back to where she was before.
She seemed unwilling even to mention Mr. Purvis’s name.
“But it has to be a huge big secret,” she said. “You are the only one to know. Because you’re our friend and you are the reason we met.”
She was making coffee. “Look up there,” she said, waving at the open cupboard. “Look at the way he keeps things. Mugs here. Cups and saucers here. Every cup has got its own hook. Isn’t it tidy? The house is just like that all over. I love it.
“You are the reason we met,” she repeated. “If we have a baby and it’s a girl, we could name it after you.”
I held my hands round the mug, still feeling a throb in my fingers. There were African violets on the windowsill over the sink. His mother’s order in the cupboards, his mother’s house-plants. The big fern was probably still in front of the living room window, and the doilies on the armchairs. What she had said, in regard to herself and Ernie, seemed brazen and—especially when I thought of the Ernie part of it—abundantly distasteful.
“You’re going to get married?”
“Well.”
“You said if you have a baby.”
“Well, you never know, we might have started that without being married,” said Nina, ducking her head mischievously.
“With Ernie?” I said. “With Ernie?”
“Well, why not? Ernie’s nice,” she said. “And anyway I’m calling him Ernest.” She hugged the bathrobe around herself.
“What about Mr. Purvis?”
“What about him?”
“Well, if it’s something happening already, couldn’t it be his?”
Everything changed about Nina. Her face turned mean and sour. “Him,” she said with contempt. “What do you want to talk about him for? He never had it in him.”
“Oh?” I said, and was going to ask what about Gemma, but she interrupted.
“What do you want to talk about the past for? Don’t make me sick. That’s all dead and gone. It doesn’t matter to me and Ernest. We’re together now. We’re in love now.”
In love. With Ernie. Ernest. Now.
“Okay,” I said.
“Sorry I yelled at you. Did I yell? I’m sorry. You’re our friend and you brought me my things and I appreciate it. You’re Ernest’s cousin and you’re our family.”
She slipped behind me and her fingers darted into my armpits and she began to tickle me, at first lazily and then furiously, saying, “Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”
I tried to get free, but I couldn’t. I went into spasms of suffering laughter and wriggled and cried out and begged her to stop. Which she did, when she had me quite helpless, and both of us were out of breath.
“You’re the ticklishest person I ever met.”
I had to wait a long time for the bus, stamping my feet on the pavement. When I got to the college I had missed my second as well as my first class, and I was late for my work in the cafeteria. I changed into my green cotton uniform in the broom closet and pushed my mop of black hair (the worst hair in the world for showing up in food, as the manager had warned me) under a cotton snood.
I was supposed to get the sandwiches and salads out on the shelves before the doors opened for lunch, but now I had to do it with an impatient