WEAVING ALICE - a short story

The best thing in winter was driving home, after her day teaching music in the Rough River schools. It would already be dark, and on the upper streets of the town snow might be falling, while rain lashed the car on the coastal highway. Joyce drove beyond the limits of the town into the forest, and though it was a real forest with great Douglas firs and cedar trees, there were people living in it every quarter mile or so.

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Also the services advertised beside the road, and more particular to this part of the world—tarot readings, herbal massage, conflict resolution. Some people lived in trailers; others had built their own houses, incorporating thatched roofs and log ends, and still others, like Jon and Joyce, were renovating old farmhouses. For example, I mean, like her. Nobody on the same level. Corrie was right across the table, looking their guest in the eye.

She seemed to think this was funny. Fifty years ago, Grace and Avie were waiting at the university gates, in the freezing cold. A bus would come eventually, and take them north, through the dark, thinly populated countryside, to their homes. Forty miles to go for Avie, maybe twice that for Grace.

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They were carrying large books with solemn titles: At that time we were living beside a gravel pit. Not a large one, hollowed out by monster machinery, just a minor pit that a farmer must have made some money from years before.

In fact, the pit was shallow enough to lead you to think that there might have been some other intention for it—foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further. In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were. Morgan Holly was the owner and the projectionist. He might have expected this—she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show—but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.

This is a slow train anyway, and it has slowed some more for the curve.

Jackson is the only passenger left, and the next stop is about twenty miles ahead. Then the stop at Ripley, then Kincardine and the lake. Already he has taken his ticket stub out of its overhead notch. On the bench outside the station, I sat and waited. The station had been open when the train arrived, but now it was locked. Another woman sat at the end of the bench, holding between her knees a string bag full of parcels wrapped in oiled paper. I could smell it. All this happened in the seventies, though in that town and other small towns like it the seventies were not as we picture them now, or as I had known them even in Vancouver.

When my mother was growing up, she and her whole family would go to dances. These would be held in the schoolhouse, or sometimes in a farmhouse with a big enough front room. Young and old would be in attendance. Someone would play the piano — the household piano or the one in the school — and someone would have brought a violin. The square dancing had complicated patterns or steps, which a person known for a special facility would call out at the top of his voice it was always a man and in a strange desperate sort of haste which was of no use at all unless you knew the dance already.

As everybody did, having learned them all by the time they were ten or twelve years old. There was also, in a corner of the kitchen, a floor lamp Flo had won at Bingo; its shade was permanently wrapped in wide strips of cellophane. Henshawe seemed to think, it was not just deprivation. It meant having those ugly tube lights and being proud of them. It meant continual talk of money and malicious talk about new things people had bought and whether they were paid for.

It meant pride and jealousy flaring over something like the new pair of plastic curtains, imitating lace, that Flo had bought for the front window. That as well as hanging your clothes on nails behind the door and being able to hear every sound from the bathroom. She becomes class-conscious; moreover, her initial reaction is embarrassment, although limited primarily to representations of material culture.

Patrick comes from a rich family owning a chain of department stores in British Columbia. As their shy romance begins to develop, Rose invites him for a visit to her hometown, after having undertaken a similar trip to his parents. Only at this moment does Rose recognize the distance existing between her family and his, which is most apparent in language: Once more the notion of the center and margin comes to mind.

Like her heroine, the young Munro, in the years before she achieved recognition, also experienced a feeling of being disconnected, being an outsider, an intruder from the geographical and cul- tural peripheries. The author of Dance of the Happy Shades indeed focuses on locality, envisioning a region as a place that is geo- graphical as well as it is mental, cultural, and ultimately an anthropological space of meaning that also holds the possibility of transgressing particular spatial divisions in order to bring out the universal qualities rooted in local contexts.

Although, when compared to pre- vious book-length short-story cycles described above or The View from Castle Rock from , this three-piece narrative may seem much less demanding on the reader, and most certainly is much less complex in terms of construction or investigated themes, it is nonetheless another instance of Munro challenging the tradition of the short story genre by enhancing it with in-depth characterization more proper for a novel.

The stories work well together primarily because they share the common heroine, but unlike a novel, the structure of each individual story rests upon a chosen theme, a detailed case study of an event in her life, which may then progress further, or return in an expanded form in another story. The story takes place in the year Juliet decides to accept a temporary teaching position in a remote small town, essentially wishing to distance herself, at least for some time, from the academic community.

In just a few words Munro brilliantly sketches the nature of sexism that her protagonist is exposed to at the university, with male professors explicitly stating their displeasure with the fact that a young girl, not a boy, is interested in classic languages, since: Momentarily intrigued by each other, the pair spends the night together. Six months later a letter arrives at her school, inviting Juliet to visit the man, now a fresh widower.

The story revolves around the tension that comes to the surface when Juliet is subjected to the conservatism of her previous surroundings, the small-town community of the late s. Juliet, of all people. Juliet experiences an identity crisis. She sees herself in the eyes of others, cast into a marginal or even liminal position of a double outsider, a perspective that grants her a sudden clearness and double-consciousness. Her past and present identity are no longer corresponding— she is forced to search for a new understanding of herself. Her relationship with her parents, Sara and Sam, serves as a connection between these two planes, or rather a sign of disconnection, since the young mother quickly comes to a sad realization: In a similar vein as in Lives of Girls and Women, Munro enlists religion as one of the constraints of individual freedom, here represented by a supposedly friendly pastor, an acquaintance of her mother, who confronts Juliet and tries to pressure her into feeling guilty.

In the letter Juliet presents a false account of the visit, self-consciously ignoring and censoring all of the unpleasant remarks and situations. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered.

Some shift concerning where home was. Not at Whale Bay with Eric but back where it had been before, all her life before. The reader is informed that Penelope left for a retreat of sorts, initially planning to go away only for a couple of months. Is this what she has found in her relationship with Ladner? Does Bea acknowledge its full extent, or does she deceive herself?

Topics for discussion of Open Secrets 1. How do the various women in these stories respond to sex and motherhood? Can these women, different as they are, be said to hold certain characteristics in common? Why do so many of the women, particularly those of the older generation, find sex to be unpleasant, while still considering marriage their goal? Munro has said that she has always been interested in "the way women circumvented the rules," and all of the women in these stories function within firm limits posed by convention, class, and gender.

To what degree do such limits rule their lives? What does Munro achieve with these moments? Munro is constantly experimenting with different narrative techniques. Why does she choose to tell each story from its own particular, sometimes oblique point of view? Why do you think that Munro has decided to cover entire life spans in her stories, rather than using the "slice of life" technique that so many short story writers favor?

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Most of the stories in this collection contain letters. What particular importance do they have? How do the characters use letters to hide their real motives or to present alternative versions of themselves? In she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron. Alice Munro is an acknowledged master of the short story, and her newest collection has garnered the very highest praise. Introduction The central characters in the stories are all women: Munro explores female themes with great depth and power, but the range of her vision is not exclusively female: Questions and Topics for Discussion 1.

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