Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [66]
“My father isn’t my real father?” I said. “Goody.”
“Don’t be silly. You remember your little friend Nancy?”
I actually did not remember, for a moment. Then I said, “Vaguely.”
At this time all my conversations with my mother seemed to call for strategy. I must keep myself lighthearted, jokey, unmoved. In her voice and face was a lurking sorrow. She never complained about her own plight, but there were so many innocent and ill-used people in the stories she told me, there were so many outrages, that I was surely meant, at the very least, to go off to my friends and my lucky life with a heavier heart.
I would not cooperate. All she wanted, possibly, was some sign of sympathy, or maybe of physical tenderness. I would not grant that. She was a fastidious woman not yet contaminated by age, but I backed off from her as if there was some danger of insistent dreariness, a contagious mold. I particularly backed off from any reference to my affliction, which it seemed to me she especially cherished—the shackle I could not loosen, that I had to admit to, that bound me to her from the womb.
“You would probably have known about it if you were around home much,” she said. “But it happened shortly before we sent you off to school.”
Nancy and her mother had gone to live in an apartment that belonged to my father, on the Square. There in the bright early fall morning Nancy’s mother had come upon her daughter, in the bathroom, using a razor blade to slice into her cheek. There was blood on the floor and in the sink and here and there on Nancy. But she had not given up on her purpose or made a sound of pain.
How did my mother know all this? I can only suppose it was a town drama, supposed to be hushed up but too gory—and that in the literal sense of the word—not to be related in detail.
Nancy’s mother wrapped a towel around her and somehow got her to the hospital. There was no ambulance at that time. She probably flagged a car on the Square. Why did she not phone my father? No matter—she didn’t. The cuts were not deep and the blood loss was not so great in spite of the splatters—there was no cut to any major blood vessel. Nancy’s mother kept berating the child that whole time and asking was she right in the head.
“You’re just my luck,” she kept saying. “A kid like you.”
“If there had been social workers around at that time,” said my mother, “no doubt that poor little thing would have been made a ward of the Children’s Aid.
“It was the same cheek,” she said. “Like yours.”
I tried to keep silent, pretending not to know what she was talking about. But I had to speak.
“The paint was over her whole face,” I said.
“Yes. But she was doing it more carefully this time, she cut open just that one cheek, trying the best she could to make herself look like you.”
This time I did manage to keep quiet.
“If she had been a boy it would have been different. But what an awful thing for a girl.”
“Plastic surgeons can do remarkable things nowadays.”
“Oh, maybe they can.”
After a moment she said, “Such deep feelings. Children have.”
“They get over that.”
She said she did not know what had become of them, the child or her mother. She said she was glad I had never asked, because she would have hated to tell me anything so distressing, when I was still young.
I don’t know what bearing it has on anything, but I have to say that my mother changed completely in extreme old age, becoming ribald and fanciful. She claimed that my father had been a magnificent lover and that she herself had been “a pretty bad girl.” She announced that I should have married “that girl who sliced up her face” because neither one of us would be able to crow over the other about doing a good deed. One of us, she cackled, would be just as much a mess as the other.
I agreed. I liked her then quite a bit.
· · ·
A few days ago I was stung