Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [78]
Sylvia took Mr. Crozier away to a rented cottage on the lake, where he died sometime before the leaves were off.
The Hoy family moved on, as mechanics’ families often did.
My mother struggled with a crippling disease, which put an end to all her moneymaking dreams.
Dorothy Crozier had a stroke, but recovered, and famously bought Halloween candy for the children whose older brothers and sisters she had ordered from her door.
I grew up, and old.
Child’s Play
I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards.
How sad, how awful. (My mother.)
There should have been supervision. Where were the counsellors? (My father.)
It is possible that if we ever passed the yellow house my mother said, “Remember? Remember you used to be so scared of her? The poor thing.”
My mother had a habit of hanging on to—even treasuring—the foibles of my distant infantile state.
Every year, when you’re a child, you become a different person. Generally it’s in the fall, when you reenter school, take your place in a higher grade, leave behind the muddle and lethargy of the summer vacation. That’s when you register the change most sharply. Afterwards you are not sure of the month or year but the changes go on, just the same. For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don’t vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there’s a switchback, what’s been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it’s plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done.
Marlene and Charlene. People thought we must be twins. There was a fashion in those days for naming twins in rhyme. Bonnie and Connie. Ronald and Donald. And then of course we—Charlene and I—had matching hats. Coolie hats, they were called, wide shallow cones of woven straw with some sort of tie or elastic under the chin. They became familiar later on in the century, from television shots of the war in Vietnam. Men on bicycles riding along a street in Saigon would be wearing them, or women walking in the road against the background of a bombed village.
It was possible at that time—I mean the time when Charlene and I were at camp—to say coolie, without a thought of offense. Or darkie, or to talk about jewing a price down. I was in my teens, I think, before I ever related that verb to the noun.
So we had those names and those hats, and at the first roll call the counsellor—the jolly one we liked, Mavis, though we didn’t like her as well as the pretty one, Pauline—pointed at us and called out, “Hey. Twins,” and went on calling out other names before we had time to deny it.
Even before that we must have noticed the hats and approved of each other. Otherwise one or both of us would have pulled off those brand-new articles, and been ready to shove them under our cots, declaring that our mothers had made us wear them and we hated them, and so on.
I may have approved of Charlene, but I was not sure how to make friends with her. Girls nine or ten years old—that was the general range of this crop, though there were a few a bit older—do not pick friends or pair off as easily as girls do at six or seven. I simply followed some other girls from my town—none of them my particular friends—to one of the cabins where there were some unclaimed cots, and dumped my things on top of the brown blanket. Then I heard a voice behind me say, “Could I please be next to my twin sister?”
It was Charlene, speaking to somebody I didn’t know. The dormitory cabin held perhaps two dozen girls. The girl she had spoken to said, “Sure,” and moved along.
Charlene had used a special voice. Ingratiating, teasing, self-mocking, and with a seductive merriment in it, like a trill of bells. It was evident