Runaway

by Alice Munro

It was as if she had a murderous needle somewhere in her lungs, and by breathing carefully, she could avoid feeling it. But every once in a while she had to take a deep breath, and it was still there.

But before you get even so far as Horseshoe Bay, real forest, not park forest, closes in. And from then on—water and rocks, dark trees, hanging moss. Occasionally a trail of smoke from some damp and battered-looking little house, with a yard full of firewood, lumber and tires, cars and parts of cars, broken or usable bikes, toys, all the things that have to sit outside when people are lacking garages or basements.

The problem was that she was a girl. If she got married—which might happen, as she was not bad-looking for a scholarship girl, she was not bad-looking at all—she would waste all her hard work and theirs, and if she did not get married she would probably become bleak and isolated, losing out on promotions to men (who needed them more, as they had to support families). And she would not be able to defend the oddity of her choice of Classics, to accept what people would see as its irrelevance, or dreariness, to slough that off the way a man could. Odd choices were simply easier for men, most of whom would find women glad to marry them. Not so the other way around.

In the town where she grew up her sort of intelligence was often put in the same category as a limp or an extra thumb, and people had been quick to point out the expected accompanying drawbacks—her inability to run a sewing machine or tie up a neat parcel, or notice that her slip was showing. What would become of her, was the question.

Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary—and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.

Across from her, a child four or five years old was slashing a crayon across the pages of a coloring book.

perfect verb choice

“That’s what she said. Full of blood. So it must have splashed in when the train went over—”

absent from Julieta

she was now walking with some children (students?) on the surface of a lake. Everywhere each of them stepped there appeared a five-sided crack, all of these beautifully even, so that the ice became like a tiled floor. The children asked her the name of these ice tiles, and she answered with confidence, iambic pentameter. But they laughed and with this laughter the cracks widened. She realized her mistake then and knew that only the right word would save the situation, but she could not grasp it.

Which made him probably thirty-five or thirty-six. His hair was dark and curly with some gray at the sides, his forehead wide and weathered, his shoulders strong and a little stooped. He was hardly any taller than she was. His eyes were wide set, dark, and eager but also wary. His chin was rounded, dimpled, pugnacious.

Almodóvar made him younger

“We did not use to bother locking here, but now there are too many strangers.”

Nothing is much to her liking on this coast. The trees are too large and crowded together and do not have any personality of their own—they simply make a forest. The mountains are too grand and implausible and the islands that float upon the waters of the Strait of Georgia are too persistently picturesque.

That is what happens. You put it away for a little while, and now and again you look in the closet for something else and you remember, and you think, soon. Then it becomes something that is just there, in the closet, and other things get crowded in front of it and on top of it and finally you don’t think about it at all. The thing that was your bright treasure. You don’t think about it. A loss you could not contemplate at one time, and now it becomes something you can barely remember. That is what happens.

This felt very relatable for childhood hobbies or career hopes and dreams from young adulthood.

The car was the same Pontiac that Sam had got secondhand maybe ten years ago. The original blue paint showed in streaks here and there but was mostly faded to gray, and the effects of winter road salt could be seen in its petticoat fringe of rust. “The old gray mare,” said Sara, almost out of breath after the short walk from the railway platform. “She hasn’t given up,” said Juliet. She spoke admiringly, as seemed to be expected. She had forgotten that this was what they called the car, though it was the name she had thought up herself.

So many perfectly captured images: "petticoat fringe of rust"

The real audience consisted of broken or simply banished furniture, old trunks, an immensely heavy buffalo coat, the purple martin house (a present from long-ago students of Sam’s, which had failed to attract any purple martins), the German helmet supposed to have been brought home by Sam’s father from the First World War, and an unintentionally comic amateur painting of the Empress of Ireland sinking in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with matchstick figures flying off in all directions.

Love these specific details especially the painting

“Daddy doesn’t mind disagreeing with people that are over him,” Sara said, taking a deep breath. “But you know how he is with people that are under him. He’ll do anything to make sure they don’t feel he’s any different from them, he just has to put himself down on their level—” Juliet did know, of course. She knew the way Sam talked to the boy at the gas pumps, the way he joked in the hardware store. But she said nothing.

When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self.

but you know, sometimes there’s a dimension that is missing, grown-up children feel that they’ve missed out on something—” “Oh yes,” says Juliet. “I know that grown-up children can have all sorts of complaints.”

burn

(Old friends, at that stage in life, meaning somebody you had not seen for half a year.)

(to someone her daughter's age) Burn!

Eric, on the other hand, would have liked nothing better than to see their trouble smoothed over, hidden out of the way. To Eric’s way of thinking, civility would restore good feeling, the semblance of love would be enough to get by on until love itself might be rediscovered. And if there was never anything more than a semblance—well, that would have to do. Eric could manage with that.

So Juliet shortly found herself living in a different world, in a large spotless house brightly and thoughtfully decorated, with what are called conveniences—but to her were luxuries— on every hand.

The cleanness, tidiness, and manageability of city life kept surprising her. This was how people lived where the man’s work did not take place out of doors, and where various operations connected with it did not end up indoors. And where the weather might be a factor in your mood but never in your life,

You don’t go on forever, appearing on television. However agreeable the viewers have found your face, there comes a time when they’d prefer somebody different.

I must have acted as if it would have been good enough if she turned out like me. Would that sicken her?”

A short while ago people had been having a Thanksgiving picnic here—there was still some smoke rising from the outdoor fireplace, and a smell of hamburgers in the air. The smell did not make Grace hungry, exactly—it made her remember being hungry in other circumstances.

Outside, Eileen said, “How do they manage to get that fat? I don’t understand it. You’d have to eat day and night to get that fat.” “Strange,” said Harry. “Those were canned green beans,” she said. “In August. Isn’t that when green beans are ripe? And out here in the middle of the country, where they are supposed to grow things?” “Stranger than strange,” he said happily.

Like Mr. Palagian, Eileen managed easily to look different from anybody else in that town, but unlike him she was beautiful, with her cropped black hair and her thin gold earrings like exclamation points, and her faintly mauve eyelids. Her manner in the newspaper office was crisp and her expression remote, but this was broken by strategic, vivid smiles.

On that same holiday she had sneaked out with other children to watch fathers slipping by sly agreement into the tents of mothers who were not their wives. One of the boys had suggested sex to her and she had agreed, but he could not make any progress and they became cross with each other and later she hated the sight of him.

“Now, you want to tell me what you learned in school today?” Lauren said, “Well—” Delphine’s wide face broke into a smile. “I just asked you that for a joke. I used to hate it, people asking me that. For one thing, I could never remember anything I learned that day. And for another thing, I could do without talking about school when I wasn’t at it. So we skip that.”

The feeling in her stomach was of both a swelling and a hollow. It seemed as if she might get rid of that just by eating the right sort of food, so when she got into the house she went straight to the kitchen cupboard and poured herself a bowl of the familiar breakfast cereal.

There wasn’t any wind, so the ashes just fell where Harry and Eileen and Delphine let them drop, into the snow.

so dark

Yet those few hours filled her with an assurance that the life she was going back to, which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, was only temporary and could easily be put up with.

A certain kind of seriousness in a girl could cancel out looks.

more confident, a more experienced, woman would have felt anger and walked away in a fine fury. Piss on him. Robin had heard a woman at work talk about a man who had abandoned her. You can’t trust anything in trousers.

Nobody was cutting the grass, this being Sunday. In fact there was nobody out in the backyards at all and the houses had a closed-up, proud, and sheltering look, as if inside every one of them there were dignified people like Nancy’s father, temporarily dead to the world as they took their Well Earned Rest.

Tessa set the pie plate down and began to ladle filling into it from a large, no-brand tin labelled Blueberry. The filling looked rather thin and glutinous.

Always go lighter than your own color, the hairdresser had said. Her own color was dark, dark brown, nearly black. No, it wasn’t. Her own color now was white.

A short walk from the house he had a bathtub sunk in the earth, in the middle of a bed of sweet herbs. He would carry hot water to it by the pailful and lounge there under the stars, even in the winter.

But there were others, more up-to-date, who gave these casual-sounding yet practiced speeches in which it was said that life was indeed a bumpy road, but misfortunes had pointed the way to better things, lessons were learned, and without a doubt joy came in the morning.