The Children Stay by Alice Munro. Part 1.
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CThirty years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband’s parents.
What perfect weather. Every morning, every morning it’s like this, the first pure sunlight falling through the high branches, burning away the mist over the still water of Georgia Strait. The tide out, a great empty stretch of sand still damp but easy to walk on, like cement in its very last stage of drying. The tide is actually less far out; every morning, the pavilion of sand is shrinking, but it still seems ample enough. The changes in the tide are a matter of great interest to the grandfather, not so much to anyone else.
Pauline, the young mother, doesn’t really like the beach as well as she likes the road that runs behind the cottages for a mile or so north till it stops at the bank of the little river that runs into the sea.
If it wasn’t for the tide, it would be hard to remember that this is the sea. You look across the water to the mountains on the mainland, the ranges that are the western wall of the continent of North America. These humps and peaks coming clear now through the mist and glimpsed here and there through the trees, by Pauline as she pushes her daughter’s stroller along the road, are also of interest to the grandfather. And to his son Brian, who is Pauline’s husband. The two men are continually trying to decide which is what. Which of these shapes are actual continental mountains and which are improbable heights of the islands that ride in front of the shore? It’s hard to sort things out when the array is so complicated and parts of it shift their distance in the day’s changing light.
But there is a map, set up under glass, between the cottages and the beach. You can stand there looking at the map, then looking at what’s in front of you, looking back at the map again, until you get things sorted out. The grandfather and Brian do this every day, usually getting into an argument — though you’d think there would not be much room for disagreement with the map right there.
Brian chooses to see the map as inexact. But his father will not hear a word of criticism about any aspect of this place, which was his choice for the holiday. The map, like the accommodation and the weather, is perfect.
Brian’s mother won’t look at the map. She says it boggles her mind. The men laugh at her, they accept that her mind is boggled. Her husband believes that this is because she is a female. Brian believes that it’s because she’s his mother. Her concern is always about whether anybody is hungry yet, or thirsty, whether the children have their sun hats on and have been rubbed with protective lotion. And what is the strange bite on Caitlin’s arm that doesn’t look like the bite of a mosquito?
She makes her husband wear a floppy cotton hat and thinks that Brian should wear one too – she reminds him of how sick he got from the sun, that summer they went to the Okanagan, when he was a child. Sometimes Brian says to her, “Oh, dry up, Mother”. His tone is mostly affectionate, but his father may ask him if that’s the way he thinks he can talk to his mother nowadays.
“She doesn’t mind,” says Brian.
“How do you know?” says his father.
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” says his mother.
Pauline slides out of bed as soon as she’s awake every morning, slides out of reach of Brian’s long, sleepily searching arms and legs. What wakes her are the first squeaks and mutters of the baby, Mara, in the children’s room, then the creak of the crib as Mara – sixteen months old now, getting to the end of babyhood — pulls herself up to stand hanging on to the railing. She continues her soft amiable talk as Pauline lifts her out—Caitlin, nearly five, shifting about but not waking, in her nearby bed—and as she is carried into the kitchen to be changed, on the floor. Then she is settled into her stroller, with a biscuit and a bottle of apple juice, while Pauline gets into her sundress and sandals, goes to the bathroom, combs out her hair—all as quickly and quietly as possible. They leave the cottage; they head past some other cottages for the bumpy unpaved road that is still mostly in deep morning shadow, the floor of a tunnel under fir and cedar trees.
The grandfather, also an early riser, sees them from the porch of his cottage, and Pauline sees him. But all that is necessary is a wave. He and Pauline never have much to say to each other (though sometimes there’s an affinity they feel, in the midst of some long-drawn-out antics of Brian’s or some apologetic but insistent fuss made by the grandmother; there’s an awareness of not looking at each other, lest their look should reveal a bleakness that would discredit others).
On this holiday Pauline steals time to be by herself-being with Mara is still almost the same thing as being by herself. Early morning walks, the late-morning hour when she washes and hangs out the diapers. She could have had another hour or so in the afternoons, while Mara is napping. But Brian has fixed up a shelter on the beach, and he carries the playpen down every day, so that Mara can nap there and Pauline won’t have to absent herself. He says his parents may be offended if she’s always sneaking off. He agrees though that she does need some time to go over her lines for the play she’s going to be in, back in Victoria, this September.
Pauline is not an actress. This is an amateur production, but she is not even an amateur actress.
She didn’t try out for the role, though it happened that she had already read the play. Eurydice by Jean Anouilh. But then, Pauline has read all sorts of things.