Too much happiness_ stories - Alice Munro [80]
Grown-up women do the same sort of thing that Charlene and I did. Not counting the moles on each other’s backs and comparing toe lengths, maybe. But when they meet and feel a particular sympathy with each other they also feel a need to set out the important information, the big events whether public or secret, and then go ahead to fill in all the blanks between. If they feel this warmth and eagerness it is quite impossible for them to bore each other. They will laugh at the very triviality and silliness of what they’re telling, or at the revelation of some appalling selfishness, deception, meanness, sheer badness.
There has to be great trust, of course, but that trust can be established at once, in an instant.
I’ve observed this. It’s supposed to have begun in those long periods of sitting around the campfire stirring the manioc porridge or whatever while the men were out in the bush deprived of conversation because it would warn off the wild animals. (I am an anthropologist by training though a rather slack one.) I’ve observed but never taken part in these female exchanges. Not truly. Sometimes I’ve pretended because it seemed to be required, but the woman I was supposed to be making friends with always got wind of my pretense and became confused and cautious.
As a rule, I’ve felt less wary with men. They don’t expect such transactions and are seldom really interested.
This intimacy I’m talking about—with women—is not erotic, or pre-erotic. I’ve experienced that as well, before puberty. Then too there would be confidences, probably lies, maybe leading to games. A certain hot temporary excitement, with or without genital teasing. Followed by ill feeling, denial, disgust.
Charlene did tell me about her brother, but with true repugnance. This was the brother now in the Navy. She went into his room looking for her cat and there he was doing it to his girlfriend. They never knew she saw them.
She said they slapped as he went up and down.
You mean they slapped on the bed, I said.
No, she said. It was his thing slapped when it was going in and out. It was gross. Sickening.
And his bare white bum had pimples on it. Sickening.
I told her about Verna.
Up until the time I was seven years old my parents had lived in what was called a double house. The word “duplex” was perhaps not in use at that time, and anyway the house was not evenly divided. Verna’s grandmother rented the rooms at the back and we rented the rooms at the front. The house was tall and bare and ugly, painted yellow. The town we lived in was too small to have residential divisions that amounted to anything, but I suppose that as far as there were divisions, that house was right on the boundary between decent and fairly dilapidated. I am speaking of the way things were just before the Second World War, at the end of the Depression. (That word, I believe, was unknown to us.)
My father being a teacher had a regular job but little money. The street petered out beyond us between the houses of those who had neither. Verna’s grandmother must have had a little money because she spoke contemptuously of people who were On Relief. I believe my mother argued with her, unsuccessfully, that it was Not Their Fault. The two women were not particular friends but they were cordial about clothesline arrangements.
The grandmother’s name was Mrs. Home. A man came to see her occasionally. My mother spoke of him as Mrs. Home’s friend.
You are not to speak to Mrs. Home’s friend.
In fact I was not even allowed to play outside when he came, so there was not much chance of my speaking to him. I don’t even remember what he looked like, though I remember his car, which was dark blue, a Ford V-8. I took a special interest in cars, probably because we didn’t have one.
Then Verna