First Things First, page 24
(E) You get a second chance and make the most of it! Your popularity continues to grow. Use wit but not sarcasm to make a point.
If Belinda is reading David’s horoscope, it says
(A) Career demands begin to get to you. Take a long weekend and recoup. Someone may be trying to deceive you by withholding facts.
(B) Be careful not to pledge something you cannot afford to give. Real estate transactions look good. Speculative ventures, romance, and meetings with siblings are favoured.
(C) Partner is more sensitive to your ideas and needs. Long-term financial security should be a top priority now.
(D) You may have more than your usual work to cope with. Your ability to produce when under pressure will impress an influential person. A family member’s problems are not as serious as they seem.
(E) The world could be at your feet if you play your cards right. Get some exercise instead of a large lunch at noon.
This is like in high school when they played the Top Ten on the radio every night at 10 p.m. and, if Belinda could guess all ten songs right and in order, then the next day would be a good day. The next day
(A) they would not have to play basketball.
(B) Mrs. Sanderson, the biology teacher, would be away and they would not have to learn any more about those stupid fungi.
(C) they would have tacos for lunch in the cafeteria.
(D) her hair would look just right.
(E) David would walk her home after school, carrying her books and holding her hand.
This is like Belinda playing solitaire to pass the time when David isn’t around and, if she beats the devil on the first try, tomorrow
(A) she will not have to make a funeral wreath.
(B) Mr. MacKay, her boss, will be in a good mood all day.
(C) the other girls from the plant store will invite her to lunch at Red Lobster.
(D) her hair will look just right.
(E) David will tell her he still loves her, without her having to say it first.
David does not appear to be around right now. He has
(A) gone to the basement to play with his model train set.
(B) gone next door to watch the hockey game with Al.
(C) gone out to walk the dog.
(D) gone to bed.
(E) gone.
Just before The National news comes on at ten o’clock, there is a knock at the back door. Not sure whether to answer it or not, Belinda turns on the outside light, temporarily blinding a man who has come to
(A) read the meter in the basement.
(B) demonstrate a new improved Electrolux vacuum cleaner.
(C) sell her a lifetime subscription to Better Homes and Gardens.
(D) mystify her with magic tricks, pulling parakeets out of a hat, plucking gold coins from her eyelids, turning purple orchids into flying fish.
(E) let her in on the meaning of life.
In the immaculate kitchen, the man says
(A) Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
(B) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me: And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
(C) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.
(D) Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
(E) Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Belinda asks
(A) Who are you?
(B) Where have you come from?
(C) Why are you here?
(D) Am I guilty?
(E) What am I guilty of?
In the cosy living room, the man says
(A) Thou shalt not kill.
(B) Thou shalt not commit adultery.
(C) Thou shalt not steal.
(D) Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
(E) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, not his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.
Belinda says
(A) I believe you.
(B) I believe you.
(C) I believe you.
(D) Yes, I believe you.
(E) Yes, yes, I see what you mean.
The man leaves
(A) suddenly.
(B) silently.
(C) very carefully, stepping over the dog.
(D) satisfied.
(E) sanctified.
When David reappears about an hour later, Belinda is
(A) still sitting on the sectional still painting her toes.
(B) lying in bed with her head covered up.
(C) laughing.
(D) crying.
(E) levitating somewhere over the kitchen sink.
Belinda
(A) tells him.
(B) doesn’t.
(C) tells him.
(D) doesn’t.
(E) does.
If Belinda tells him, David says she must be
(A) crazy.
(B) drunk.
(C) dreaming.
(D) premenstrual.
(E) truly blessed.
Because of this night, the lives of David and Belinda Boyce are forever
(A) changed.
(B) unchanged.
(C) fulfilled.
(D) unfulfilled.
(E) forever finished for better or worse.
In her later life, Belinda Boyce will
(A) become manager of the plant store and proceed inconspicuously over the years to stock the shelves exclusively with thousands of Prayer Plants and Venus Fly Traps, until the place finally goes bankrupt and is replaced by a massage parlour.
(B) give birth to a charming cherubic child named Joshua, who will give true meaning to her heretofore shallow life.
(C) write a bestselling book about her blessing and go on Phil Donahue talking in tongues.
(D) do twenty-five years in the Prison for Women for hijacking a jumbo jet to Jerusalem on which the in-flight movie was Oh God II.
(E) die peacefully at the age of eighty-seven, sleeping between the mauve sheets in the master bedroom of the house on Edelweiss Crescent, never knowing what hit her.
In his later life, David Boyce will
(A) buy a Cadillac Fleetwood, GM Executive, V8 loaded, air conditioning, power windows, power steering, power brakes, cruise control, gold, and die in a twenty-seven-car pile-up on the 401.
(B) join the Hell’s Angels and die in a gang war.
(C) buy a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise and die in a grease fire.
(D) take up windsurfing and die in a tidal wave.
(E) suffer eternal unenlightened life.
In his later life, the man who came to the back door will become
(A) a television evangelist.
(B) a Rosicrucian.
(C) a family man.
(D) a mass murderer.
(E) the burning bush.
No matter what happens in the rest of their lives, tonight, in other parts of the city,
(A) a contented woman may be tucking in her babies in a bungalow on Amethyst Crescent, kissing their smooth fair foreheads, singing them a lullaby sweetly, the one about how when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.
(B) a carefree, only occasionally depressed, woman may be getting ready for bed on Baker Street, taking her face off with cool gobs of Noxzema, doing an Apricot Facial Scrub, brushing and flossing her pretty straight teeth, studying them closely in the mirror, so happy to see she hasn’t changed a bit.
(C) an innocent woman may be down on her knees beside the brass four-poster waterbed on Francis Street, praying fervently for forgiveness.
(D) a tired, only occasionally peculiar, woman may be sitting at her typewriter in her study on Dunlop Street (the only room on the block with the lights still on, like a beacon in the night or, less obviously, an anchor), writing a story in which she tries, for no apparent reason, to make a connection between Christianity, astrology, and the Consumers Distributing catalogue.
(E) none of the above.
HOW MYRNA
SURVIVES
(1987)
They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
— Alice Munro, “Accident” in The Moons of Jupiter
1. Myrna Lillian Waxman is thirty-two years old and lying on the couch all the cool afternoon. The couch is a cautious grey corduroy which wears well and doesn’t show the dirt. Myrna has covered herself with a green-and-yellow quilt made by her distant cousin, Annette, before she was hit by a freight train at the level crossing a quarter-mile from her house, which she had travelled over twice a day for twenty years. On the wall above the couch there is a silk-screen print of footprints in the snow in which the bushes are black, the snow is blue, and the footprints, white, are those of a small desperate animal with only three legs.
There is a certain amount of guilt attached to sleeping in the daytime but Myrna has managed to convince herself that she needs or deserves it. She is letting her mind wander between waking and sleep, willing herself to sustain this surreal state for much longer than any normal person would, because this, she is convinced, is where her best ideas come from and where all of her problems are solved. (This may also happen, though less reliably, when she is having a bath or driving alone in the car.) In the end, though, she usually falls asleep anyway and dreams about sex or love or a staircase transformed into eggshells beneath her bare feet, or maybe all three.
This habit of napping in the afternoon can be tricky for Myrna at this time of year, late autumn, because there is a certain quality of light at a certain advanced hour which she finds she must avoid waking up into. It is that time of the day when, normally, you would be going through rooms turning on lights without thinking about it, your husband (if you had one) would be driving home from work, and you would be stirring something savoury on the stove. It is a cold light in the late afternoon, and grey, sinking, heartless. It is almost fluorescent in the way it magnifies all of your flaws and failures till you barely recognize yourself. It is when you know for sure the day is over, you’ve had your chance and missed it, there is nothing to be done about it now, and so you go on into evening.
Before she lies down, Myrna puts her little travel alarm clock on the coffee table beside her and sets it so she can be safely up and doing something when the light, defeated, goes down and the day slops, or at least drains, out of her like blood. What she likes to be doing best is folding laundry.
She heaps her clean clothes on the couch, extracts each article (t-shirt, underwear, blue jeans, towels, that black-and-white flowered skirt with the elasticized waist which hangs so prettily and which she will wear out to dinner if anybody asks her) and smooths it out on the coffee table, taking the time to pick off the lint balls and appreciate the new-improved-fresh-scent of the detergent. She folds carefully and slowly, with calm concentration, depositing each item in its appropriate pile. While she folds, she thinks about her ex-roommate, Rose. She is teaching herself to do things the way Rose did them. Rose, who could spend an hour folding and patting her sweaters, arranging them like woolly pillows in piles on the top shelf of her closet. Rose, who got up an hour early every morning to iron her clothes for work so that by the time Myrna came to, the kitchen was filled with the nurturing smells of coffee and hot cotton. Rose, who brought to every little thing she did such a serenity and single-mindedness that you just knew her mind was perfectly clear, healthy, and good.
Rose has since married and moved to Vancouver. Myrna hasn’t heard from her in nearly a year. She automatically assumes this unnatural lapse to be somehow her fault but, as of yet, has done nothing to make amends.
Emulating Rose, arranging all her clean clothes in her clean closet, with every button buttoned and all the wrinkles shaken out, Myrna is filled with a distinct sense of accomplishment. She feels competent. She feels content. She feels like a good person for the time being and the dangerous hour has safely passed.
With the alarm clock set and the washing machine spinning sturdily in the basement, Myrna on the couch is thinking now, unaccountably, of when she was twenty-one, an undergraduate student in English Lit, engaged to marry Gordon Bates, a Business Admin major. Both she and Gord had a night class Thursdays from seven till ten. His was Advanced Accounting and hers was Creative Writing, her favourite. She was secretly in love with her professor, Dr. Diamond. Either good old Gord hadn’t figured this out yet or, if he had, he wasn’t letting it bother him.
Dr. Diamond (or Bernie, as he encouraged his students to call him—something which Myrna never could bring herself to do, this name being so colloquial or trivial, so unsuitable) was married to a dilettante sculptor named Jocelyn Bringhurst, who was always telling the story at university parties of how she’d once met Salvador Dali and Moon Dog at a coffeehouse in New York City in the sixties. Myrna cannot now remember who or what Moon Dog was anyway.
Dr. Diamond and Jocelyn Bringhurst had two small sons, Adrian and Damian, of whom Dr. Diamond often spoke at length, joyfully. One Thursday he brought them to the writing class when the babysitter unexpectedly broke her leg.
And where was Jocelyn? Never around when he needed her, Myrna supposed with satisfaction. And why had she kept her maiden name anyway?
The children played quietly in the corner of the classroom with their crayons and their little trucks, little angels. Myrna fantasized about how Dr. Diamond would finally come to his senses and leave Jocelyn, taking the children with him, of course, and she, Myrna, would bring them up beautifully.
After class each Thursday night, Gord would take Myrna down to Dino’s Pizzeria for a couple of beer and a fifteen-inch double pepperoni with double cheese. The few nights they decided to be daring and order something different, Myrna went home feeling cheated, irritable, not even full yet. If they didn’t go to Dino’s, they went to the A&W for teenburgers or to Country Style Donuts for cinnamon crullers. These variations too left Myrna feeling unsatisfied and surly.
Over their food, Myrna and Gord talked about their respective classes: debits, credits, dialogue, description, and suspense. Dr. Diamond was a demanding teacher with impeccable literary standards and occasionally his sarcastic comments on her earnest efforts reduced the hopeful Myrna to tears over her pizza. Once he told her she was too normal to ever be a really good writer anyway, and she didn’t drink enough either. Gord thought his Accounting prof was a bona fide idiot and so was always imbued with righteous anger after his class. So they had plenty to talk about while they ate, sucking back their beer and waving their hands around, energized but ineffectual. And then they would go home around midnight to their respective parents’ houses, where they both still lived.
All of this was more or less unremarkable at the time and, Myrna realizes, probably still is. Being twenty-one was, in itself, unremarkable. And, if the truth were told, nothing had turned out the way Myrna thought it would. She’d gained twenty pounds but got an A in the course. The last night they had a party at Dr. Diamond’s house instead of a regular class. They sat cross-legged in a circle on his green Persian rug, drinking dark rum and reading poetry tensely to each other. Myrna surreptitiously studied his bookshelves and snooped in the medicine chest and two kitchen cupboards. Dr. Diamond drove her home last and kissed her once, sideways in the car. A year later he left Jocelyn and married Maureen, a mousy graduate student in Renaissance Lit. Jocelyn got Adrian and Damian but Dr. Diamond and Maureen soon produced two more offspring of their own, Chloe and Cassandra.
Myrna and Gordon Bates never did get married. She lost interest somewhere around the time she was supposed to be choosing her china pattern for the Bridal Registry at Birks. Gord soon after became a card-carrying member of the Progressive Conservative Party and married an ex-beauty queen whose father owned a furniture store.
But knowing all this now does not cloud Myrna’s sense of the state she had lived in then: that quality of twenty-oneness when absolutely everything was a promise, when her expectations were inchoate and unbounded, not yet unbearable, when there were just never enough hours in any given day, and sometimes she couldn’t get to sleep at night for the sheer jumble of joy and the future working through her. This is a state of being which she is always trying now to get back, to get back to.
An image comes to her of her twenty-one-year-old self strolling down the street (any street in any weather) and she is thinking and thinking, always thinking, carrying a book bag, tossing her high head, and her posture is loose-limbed but perfect. This picture is like one of those in a child’s colouring book where every object, including the cumulus clouds, is outlined in black and those pure Crayola colours all stay neatly inside the lines, absolute. Except you always have to leave the hands and faces white because there is never a good flesh colour in the crayon box.
Now at thirty-two Myrna feels, by comparison, muddied. She has to admit that sometimes she gets tired of herself. She has come or is coming to understand that her life can no longer be seen as a temporary condition. She has to admit that maybe her old friend, Jane, was right when she said, “It’s not true that it gets easier as you get older. No. It only gets harder. Too much water under the bridge.” Jane has now vanished southward, to California or Arizona, Myrna forgets which, so maybe that makes a difference.
