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Summary
Summary
A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory--a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life. The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a "frizz of reddish hair," just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl's practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family furniture stumbles on a long-hidden secret and its meaning in her own life. An inveterate philanderer finds the tables turned when he puts his wife into an old-age home. A young cancer patient stunned by good news discovers a perfect bridge to her suddenly regained future. A woman recollecting an afternoon's wild lovemaking with a stranger realizes how the memory of that encounter has both changed for her and sustained her through a lifetime. Men and women are subtly revealed. Personal histories, both complex and simple, unfold in rich detail of circumstance and feeling. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage provides the deep pleasures and rewards that Alice Munro's large and ever- growing audience has come to expect.
Author Notes
Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw in Wingham, Ontario on July 10, 1931. She published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, while a student at the University of Western Ontario in 1950. She left the university in 1951 to get married and start a family. In 1972 she became Writer in Residence at the University of Western Ontario. Her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, was published in 1968 and won the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary prize. Her other works include Lives of Girls and Women, The View from Castle Rock, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, Too Much Happiness, and Dear Life.
She has received several awards including the Governor General's Award for fiction for Who Do You Think You Are? and The Progress of Love, the Giller Prize for Runaway in 2004, the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her lifetime body of work, and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. Also, in 2013, her title Dear Life: Stories made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A writer of Munro's ilk hardly needs a hook like the intriguing title of her 10th collection to pull readers into her orbit. Serving as a teasing introduction to these nine brilliantly executed tales, the range of mentioned relationships merely suggests a few of the nuances of human behavior that Munro evokes with the skill of a psychological magician. Johanna Parry, the protagonist of the title story, stands alone among her fictional sisters in achieving her goal by force of will. A rough, uneducated country girl, blatantly plain ("her teeth were crowded into the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument"), she seems doomed to heartbreak because of a teenager's trick, but the bracingly ironic denouement turns the reader's dire expectations into glee. The women in the other stories generally cannot control their fate. Having finally been reunited with the soul mate of her youth, the narrator of "Nettles" discovers that apparently benevolent fate can be cruel. In a similar moment of perception that signals the end of hope, Lorna in "Post and Beam" realizes that she is condemned to a life of submission to her overbearing, supercilious husband; ironically, her frowsy country cousin envies Lorna's luck in escaping their common origin. In nearly every story, there's a contrast between the behavior and expectations of country people and those who have made it to Toronto or Vancouver. Regardless of situation, however, the basics of survival are endured in stoic sorrow. Only the institutionalized wife of a philanderer in "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" manages to outwit her husband, and she has to lose her sanity to do it. All of the stories share Munro's characteristic style, looping gracefully from the present to the past, interpolating vignettes that seem extraneous and bringing the strands together in a deceptively gentle windup whose impact takes the breath away. Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay. (Nov.) Forecast: Munro's collections are true modern classics, as the 75,000 first printing of her latest attests. Expect vigorous sales. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
It's said that the devil is in the details, but in Munro's pristine and enrapturing stories, the details hold magic. Her celebrated stories work not only because her characters are so utterly human in their mixed feelings but also because she lavishes keen attention on every article of clothing, body feature, setting, and carefully dealt line of dialogue. Munro's people are insular country folk living simply and earnestly in small towns in Ontario or outside Vancouver, and while they chafe against tradition, they are leery of outright conflict or any talk that might seem intrusive or self-aggrandizing. Thoughts and feelings, especially women's, are to be kept to one's self. Munro's male characters, such as the biology teacher done in by creationists in "Comfort," are fascinating, but her piercing and witty stories revolve around women navigating the vagaries of marriage, bolstering frail egos and burying desire while coming to the rescue in the face of illness and death. But there are women, too, who walk away from duty, seeking solitude, even the solace of writing. Opulent in their beauty and gem-bright psychology, the extraordinary stories in Munro's tenth stellar collection span the spectrum from romance to tales of manners to deep meditations on love and mortality, and all evince Munro's profound understanding of the power of memories and the stories we tell ourselves. Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro 323pp, Chatto & Windus, pounds 14.99 The Complete Short Stories by Muriel Spark 407pp, Viking, pounds 20 The Music At Long Verney by Sylvia Townsend Warner 193pp, Harvill, pounds 14.99 Dogwalker by Arthur Bradford 144pp, Hamish Hamilton, pounds 10.99 Brevity is all around us, and it is confusing. Does the recent flurry of short books, including new offerings from Alan Bennett and Louis de Bernieres and potted biographies of Nabokov and Kafka, denote foreshortened ambition on the part of the writers or a sensitive regard for the limited attention spans and harassed schedules of their readership? When a fiction writer publishes a collection of stories, are we to feel cheated of a proper novel or appreciative of the parade of characters, plot lines and settings placed before us? Offcuts or experimentation? Fillers or gems? The answer is that you get a bit of both, although the distinction between bespoke collections and more apparently random gatherings, frequently made under the aegis of product-hungry publishers at various (often posthumous) points in a writer's career, is not a particularly reliable index to quality. But even the offcuts - where a short story might be seen as something like a doodle in the margin or a balled-up piece of paper - have something to tell us about the furtive preoccupations or abandoned hobbyhorses of their creators. It would be hard to accuse the Canadian writer Alice Munro of treating the short story as a glory hole of the imagination. In a lengthy and distinguished career, she has written only one novel, preferring to concentrate on what Lorna Sage, writing of another obsessive miniaturist, Katherine Mansfield, described as "intensely crafted and evocative objects-on-the-page". But Munro's stories spurn the idea of the short form as a fleeting glimpse of disposable characters' lives, a casually sophisticated backheel from the writer propelling them into a tidy ending. In her new collection, a narrator- writer who has been caught out making fiction from a relative's life defends herself by reflecting that her business is "more like grabbing something out of air than constructing stories". Munro deals in people whose fates have slowly worked themselves out over decades, and whose situations are richly complex and hedged about by history; if a writer must grab their stories out of air, then the resulting snapshots must be understood to be provisional. In the title story, taken from an adolescent counting game, we come as close as we will to a jeu d'esprit in the story of Johanna, a dowdy housekeeper of near invisibility who stakes her future on an uncharacteristic leap into the dark. Her teenage charge Sabitha, trembling with sexual awakening and uncomfortable spite, fabricates a letter from her widowed father revealing chaste love for Johanna, and pockets the latter's cautious replies. When Johanna purloins some squabbled-over furniture, marshals her savings and heads out into the unknown, we fear a horrible payoff of rejection and disillusionment, prefigured by the agonising moment when she recklessly buys herself a dress in which to be married. The moment of crisis never comes; Johanna and the widower rub along together in mutual dependency, and a son is born to them offstage. We will never know whether their union has been serendipitously happy or acrimoniously disappointing. It is left to Sabitha's accomplice to ponder the fruits of her deception: "It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her - it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying to get its hooks into her." Here, and throughout a collection peopled with escape artists and stay-at-homes, romancers and romanced, comes Munro's exceptional gift for undercutting her own conjuring tricks, as her characters, pinned to the mast of coincidence and invention, wriggle free and prove themselves ungovernable. "It looked like adventures," as an elderly lady deep in recollection notes, "but it was all according to script, if you know what I mean." There is a sense of script, too, in Muriel Spark's characteristically acerbic and humorously retributive stories, which span half a century of writing that, even in her novels, relies on a glancing sensibility and an elliptical archness. We are aware of a cool arranger behind the multitude of narrative voices, and a sardonic distance that immediately alerts the reader to the making of seductive patterns. Although these pieces follow no clear organising principle, there is a kind of convention in placing the most substantial at the head. "The Go-Away Bird", which first appeared in 1958, is a cautionary tale smattered with farce and very much in the Spark mould. Daphne, who has grown up in South Africa, longs plaintively for England until she actually goes there, and is mistreated by men and rapacious matrons alike; returning to what she must now call "home", she meets the violent and sinister end that seems, all along, to have been her destiny. One can only think of this as a blueprint. Indulging her taste for fantastical and occasionally demonic creatures, Spark also introduces us to a seraph, a dragon and various lunatic ghosts, including a hapless wraith who was once the visionary founder of the Society for the Abolition of Christmas, from which we gather that you mess around with rituals at your peril. Spark's determinedly light touch is enjoyable, but it serves mainly to direct us back to the novels. In Sylvia Townsend Warner's case, a collection of 20 short stories - many published in the New Yorker but none before appearing in book form - feels far more like the discovery of something unaccountably overlooked. Warner is squandered on equilibrium; the best approach to these diminutive masterpieces is to wait for a freak wind of depression or a bout of toothache and then hand yourself over to be enchanted. Her tableaux seem to break open the world, despite their long-disappeared settings and minor keys. Each is perfectly complete but highly suggestive, filled with quotidian trivia and then floated free on a gently rippling surface. Distant wars summarily subtract sons and husbands; scorching milk pans throw together disagreeable companions; random Christmas presents lurk beneath the surface of devoted marriages. At the heart of the book are five stories set in an old- fashioned, connoisseurial antiques shop, in which Warner moves effortlessly between Wodehousian comedy and unbearably poignant reminiscence. "English Mosaic" sees Mr Edom, the shop's proprietor, convinced of an imminent attack on his china collection by a troublesome assistant; he sits guard all night with claret and grouse sandwiches, only for the utterly harmless Miss Hartley to disappear on the arm of a handsome customer. Her successor, far more Mr Edom's glass of claret, suddenly sheds the mantle of deference to narrate an extraordinary boyhood tale in "The Candles". From this antiques shop, a repository for discarded objects and a magnet for those searching for something lost, Warner could have magicked a novel, if not several. One could hardly find a greater contrast in writing or publishing styles than that between Warner and Arthur Bradford. Warner's book creeps on to the market with respectful, quasi-academic apparatus; Bradford's Dogwalker lurches brashly in, adorned with endorsements from Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers. Smith warns us that Bradford isn't as cute as the huge doggy face on his book jacket might suggest, but hey, we'd better "get used to it". Eggers tells us: "If you don't like Arthur's stories, then you are not my friend." Resigned to being disowned and somehow judged not up to the task, we step anxiously into a parallel universe in which giant slugs are discovered in glove compartments, slacker types found dynasties of dog-children after a bit of hanky-panky with a pet, and a feline- featured flatmate turns out to be part of an entire family of circus freaks. The strange thing is, it takes no time at all to get used to this mildly diverting, passingly charming nonsense; after all, no story is strikingly different from another, and we are well used to doggy sex and gigantic insects these days. It doesn't exactly break open the world, but then again, not everything has to. It does, however, suggest that literary appreciation is fast becoming a matter of cultural grooves, in which if you don't care for antiques, you might dig dogs. To order any of these books call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-shorty.1 [Muriel Spark]'s determinedly light touch is enjoyable, but it serves mainly to direct us back to the novels. In [Sylvia Townsend Warner]'s case, a collection of 20 short stories - many published in the New Yorker but none before appearing in book form - feels far more like the discovery of something unaccountably overlooked. Warner is squandered on equilibrium; the best approach to these diminutive masterpieces is to wait for a freak wind of depression or a bout of toothache and then hand yourself over to be enchanted. Her tableaux seem to break open the world, despite their long-disappeared settings and minor keys. Each is perfectly complete but highly suggestive, filled with quotidian trivia and then floated free on a gently rippling surface. Distant wars summarily subtract sons and husbands; scorching milk pans throw together disagreeable companions; random Christmas presents lurk beneath the surface of devoted marriages. At the heart of the book are five stories set in an old- fashioned, connoisseurial antiques shop, in which Warner moves effortlessly between Wodehousian comedy and unbearably poignant reminiscence. "English Mosaic" sees Mr Edom, the shop's proprietor, convinced of an imminent attack on his china collection by a troublesome assistant; he sits guard all night with claret and grouse sandwiches, only for the utterly harmless Miss Hartley to disappear on the arm of a handsome customer. Her successor, far more Mr Edom's glass of claret, suddenly sheds the mantle of deference to narrate an extraordinary boyhood tale in "The Candles". From this antiques shop, a repository for discarded objects and a magnet for those searching for something lost, Warner could have magicked a novel, if not several. One could hardly find a greater contrast in writing or publishing styles than that between Warner and [Arthur Bradford]. Warner's book creeps on to the market with respectful, quasi-academic apparatus; Bradford's Dogwalker lurches brashly in, adorned with endorsements from Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers. Smith warns us that Bradford isn't as cute as the huge doggy face on his book jacket might suggest, but hey, we'd better "get used to it". Eggers tells us: "If you don't like Arthur's stories, then you are not my friend." - Alex Clark.
Kirkus Review
Its dreadful title is just about the only thing wrong with this stunning tenth collection from Canada's matchless chronicler of women's external fates, inner lives, and painful journeys toward and away from self-understanding (The Love of a Good Woman, 1998, etc.). Munro's nine tales are set mostly in her native Ontario or in western Canada (often Vancouver island), and realized with steely precise statement and in meticulously deployed specific local detail. Their scrupulously seen protagonists include a young wife who'll keep forever the clandestine glimpse of "another sort of life she could have had," caught during her one brief extramarital adventure ("What is Remembered"); a cancer victim impulsively seizing a moment of romantic escape from her distracted husband's inconsistent devotion ("Floating bridge"); and a woman writer who eventually realizes (in "Family Furnishings") how she has used the image of her "fervent and dashing," simultaneously ridiculous and stoical, unmarried aunt to avoid confronting her own fears and failings. The fusion of memory with present experience is accomplished with impressive subtlety in "Queenie" (previously published by itself in chapbook form), the tale of a rootless girl who creates a consoling fantasy about her "wild" stepsister's seemingly comfortable marriage, and also in "Comfort," a piece that artfully discloses the strategies by which a submissive faculty wife has adjusted to her volatile husband's scorn for "sentimentality." We work our way slowly into these multileveled stories, gradually learning how the minutiae of their characters' past experiences and unlived dreams have shaped such developments as a lonely housekeeper's gritty victory over a heartless prank that might have destroyed her (in the fine title story), or a faithless husband's chastened adaptation to the happiness his wife finds in a nursing home ("The Bear Came Over the Mountain"). Or, in the unforgettable "Nettles," a middle-aged woman's bittersweet chance meeting with the man who was the love of her childhood-a "Love [she now knows] that was not usable, that knew its place." Rich, mature, authoritative stories veined with respectful attention to the complexity and singularity of vagrant, cluttered and compromised lives. First printing of 75,000
Library Journal Review
Another collection from the incomparable Munro, this one with a 75,000-copy first printing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture. The station agent often tried a little teasing with women, especially the plain ones who seemed to appreciate it. "Furniture?" he said, as if nobody had ever had such an idea before. "Well. Now. What kind of furniture are we talking about?" A dining-room table and six chairs. A full bedroom suite, a sofa, a coffee table, end tables, a floor lamp. Also a china cabinet and a buffet. "Whoa there. You mean a houseful." "It shouldn't count as that much," she said. "There's no kitchen things and only enough for one bedroom." Her teeth were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument. "You'll be needing the truck," he said. "No. I want to send it on the train. It's going out west, to Saskatchewan." She spoke to him in a loud voice as if he was deaf or stupid, and there was something wrong with the way she pronounced her words. An accent. He thought of Dutch--the Dutch were moving in around here--but she didn't have the heft of the Dutch women or the nice pink skin or the fair hair. She might have been under forty, but what did it matter? No beauty queen, ever. He turned all business. "First you'll need the truck to get it to here from wherever you got it. And we better see if it's a place in Saskatchewan where the train goes through. Otherways you'd have to arrange to get it picked up, say, in Regina." "It's Gdynia," she said. "The train goes through." He took down a greasy-covered directory that was hanging from a nail and asked how she would spell that. She helped herself to the pencil that was also on a string and wrote on a piece of paper from her purse: G D Y N I A. "What kind of nationality would that be?" She said she didn't know. He took back the pencil to follow from line to line. "A lot of places out there it's all Czechs or Hungarians or Ukrainians," he said. It came to him as he said this that she might be one of those. But so what, he was only stating a fact. "Here it is, all right, it's on the line." "Yes," she said. "I want to ship it Friday--can you do that?" "We can ship it, but I can't promise what day it'll get there," he said. "It all depends on the priorities. Somebody going to be on the lookout for it when it comes in?" "Yes." "It's a mixed train Friday, two-eighteen p.m. Truck picks it up Friday morning. You live here in town?" She nodded, writing down the address. 106 Exhibition Road. It was only recently that the houses in town had been numbered, and he couldn't picture the place, though he knew where Exhibition Road was. If she'd said the name McCauley at that time he might have taken more of an interest, and things might have turned out differently. There were new houses out there, built since the war, though they were called "wartime houses." He supposed it must be one of those. "Pay when you ship," he told her. "Also, I want a ticket for myself on the same train. Friday afternoon." "Going same place?" "Yes." "You can travel on the same train to Toronto, but then you have to wait for the Transcontinental, goes out ten-thirty at night. You want sleeper or coach? Sleeper you get a berth, coach you sit up in the day car." She said she would sit up. "Wait in Sudbury for the Montreal train, but you won't get off there, they'll just shunt you around and hitch on the Montreal cars. Then on to Port Arthur and then to Kenora. You don't get off till Regina, and there you have to get off and catch the branch-line train." She nodded as if he should just get on and give her the ticket. Slowing down, he said, "But I won't promise your furniture'll arrive when you do, I wouldn't think it would get in till a day or two after. It's all the priorities. Somebody coming to meet you?" "Yes." "Good. Because it won't likely be much of a station. Towns out there, they're not like here. They're mostly pretty rudimentary affairs." She paid for the passenger ticket now, from a roll of bills in a cloth bag in her purse. Like an old lady. She counted her change, too. But not the way an old lady would count it--she held it in her hand and flicked her eyes over it, but you could tell she didn't miss a penny. Then she turned away rudely, without a good-bye. "See you Friday," he called out. She wore a long, drab coat on this warm September day, also a pair of clunky laced-up shoes, and ankle socks. He was getting a coffee out of his thermos when she came back and rapped on the wicket. "The furniture I'm sending," she said. "It's all good furniture, it's like new. I wouldn't want it to get scratched or banged up or in any way damaged. I don't want it to smell like livestock, either." "Oh, well," he said. "The railway's pretty used to shipping things. And they don't use the same cars for shipping furniture they use for shipping pigs." "I'm concerned that it gets there in just as good a shape as it leaves here." "Well, you know, when you buy your furniture, it's in the store, right? But did you ever think how it got there? It wasn't made in the store, was it? No. It was made in some factory someplace, and it got shipped to the store, and that was done quite possibly by train. So that being the case, doesn't it stand to reason the railway knows how to look after it?" She continued to look at him without a smile or any admission of her female foolishness. "I hope so," she said. "I hope they do." The station agent would have said, without thinking about it, that he knew everybody in town. Which meant that he knew about half of them. And most of those he knew were the core people, the ones who really were "in town" in the sense that they had not arrived yesterday and had no plans to move on. He did not know the woman who was going to Saskatchewan because she did not go to his church or teach his children in school or work in any store or restaurant or office that he went into. Nor was she married to any of the men he knew in the Elks or the Oddfellows or the Lions Club or the Legion. A look at her left hand while she was getting the money out had told him--and he was not surprised--that she was not married to anybody. With those shoes, and ankle socks instead of stockings, and no hat or gloves in the afternoon, she might have been a farm woman. But she didn't have the hesitation they generally had, the embarrassment. She didn't have country manners--in fact, she had no manners at all. She had treated him as if he was an information machine. Besides, she had written a town address--Exhibition Road. The person she really reminded him of was a plainclothes nun he had seen on television, talking about the missionary work she did somewhere in the jungle--probably they had got out of their nuns' clothes there because it made it easier for them to clamber around. This nun had smiled once in a while to show that her religion was supposed to make people happy, but most of the time she looked out at her audience as if she believed that other people were mainly in the world for her to boss around. One more thing Johanna meant to do she had been putting off doing. She had to go into the dress shop called Milady's and buy herself an outfit. She had never been inside that shop--when she had to buy anything, like socks, she went to Callaghans Mens Ladies and Childrens Wear. She had lots of clothes inherited from Mrs. Willets, things like this coat that would never wear out. And Sabitha--the girl she looked after, in Mr. McCauley's house--was showered with costly hand-me-downs from her cousins. In Milady's window there were two mannequins wearing suits with quite short skirts and boxy jackets. One suit was a rusty-gold color and the other a soft deep green. Big gaudy paper maple leaves were scattered round the mannequins' feet and pasted here and there on the window. At the time of year when most people's concern was to rake up leaves and burn them, here they were the chosen thing. A sign written in flowing black script was stuck diagonally across the glass. It said: Simple Elegance, the Mode for Fall. She opened the door and went inside. Right ahead of her, a full-length mirror showed her in Mrs. Willets's high-quality but shapeless long coat, with a few inches of lumpy bare legs above the ankle socks. They did that on purpose, of course. They set the mirror there so you could get a proper notion of your deficiencies, right away, and then--they hoped--you would jump to the conclusion that you had to buy something to alter the picture. Such a transparent trick that it would have made her walk out, if she had not come in determined, knowing what she had to get. Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodices, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss. It was two or three minutes before anybody came. Maybe they had a peephole and were eyeing her, thinking she wasn't their kind of customer and hoping she would go away. She would not. She moved beyond the mirror's reflection--stepping from the linoleum by the door to a plushy rug--and at long last the curtain at the back of the store opened and out stepped Milady herself, dressed in a black suit with glittery buttons. High heels, thin ankles, girdle so tight her nylons rasped, gold hair skinned back from her made-up face. "I thought I could try on the suit in the window," Johanna said in a rehearsed voice. "The green one." "Oh, that's a lovely suit," the woman said. "The one in the window happens to be a size ten. Now you look to be--maybe a fourteen?" She rasped ahead of Johanna back to the part of the store where the ordinary clothes, the suits and daytime dresses, were hung. "You're in luck. Fourteen coming up." The first thing Johanna did was look at the price tag. Easily twice what she'd expected, and she was not going to pretend otherwise. "It's expensive enough." "It's very fine wool." The woman monkeyed around till she found the label, then read off a description of the material that Johanna wasn't really listening to because she had caught at the hem to examine the workmanship. "It feels as light as silk, but it wears like iron. You can see it's lined throughout, lovely silk-and-rayon lining. You won't find it bagging in the seat and going out of shape the way the cheap suits do. Look at the velvet cuffs and collar and the little velvet buttons on the sleeve." "I see them." "That's the kind of detail you pay for, you just do not get it otherwise. I love the velvet touch. It's only on the green one, you know--the apricot one doesn't have it, even though they're exactly the same price." Indeed it was the velvet collar and cuffs that gave the suit, in Johanna's eyes, its subtle look of luxury and made her long to buy it. But she was not going to say so. "I might as well go ahead and try it on." This was what she'd come prepared for, after all. Clean underwear and fresh talcum powder under her arms. The woman had enough sense to leave her alone in the bright cubicle. Johanna avoided the glass like poison till she'd got the skirt straight and the jacket done up. At first she just looked at the suit. It was all right. The fit was all right--the skirt shorter than what she was used to, but then what she was used to was not the style. There was no problem with the suit. The problem was with what stuck out of it. Her neck and her face and her hair and her big hands and thick legs. "How are you getting on? Mind if I take a peek?" Peek all you want to, Johanna thought, it's a case of a sow's ear, as you'll soon see. The woman tried looking from one side, then the other. "Of course, you'll need your nylons on and your heels. How does it feel? Comfortable?" "The suit feels fine," Johanna said. "There's nothing the matter with the suit." The woman's face changed in the mirror. She stopped smiling. She looked disappointed and tired, but kinder. "Sometimes that's just the way it is. You never really know until you try something on. The thing is," she said, with a new, more moderate conviction growing in her voice, "the thing is you have a fine figure, but it's a strong figure. You have large bones and what's the matter with that? Dinky little velvet-covered buttons are not for you. Don't bother with it anymore. Just take it off." Then when Johanna had got down to her underwear there was a tap and a hand through the curtain. "Just slip this on, for the heck of it." A brown wool dress, lined, with a full skirt gracefully gathered, three-quarter sleeves and a plain round neckline. About as plain as you could get, except for a narrow gold belt. Not as expensive as the suit, but still the price seemed like a lot, when you considered all there was to it. At least the skirt was a more decent length and the fabric made a noble swirl around her legs. She steeled herself and looked in the glass... Excerpted from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories by Alice Munro All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Hateship |
| Friendship |
| Courtship |
| Loveship |
| Marriage |
| Floating Bridge |
| Family Furnishings |
| Comfort |
| Nettles |
| Post and Beam |
| What Is Remembered |
| Queenie |
| The Bear Came Over the Mountain |
