Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

had a sundae. What kind? Rose and Brian wanted to know when she got home, and they would be disappointed if it was only pineapple or butterscotch, pleased if it was a Tin Roof, or Black and White. Then she smoked a cigarette. She had some ready-rolled that she carried with her, so that she wouldn’t have to roll one in public. Smoking was the one thing she did that she would have called showing off in anybody else. It was a habit left over from her working days, from Toronto. She knew it was asking for trouble. Once, the Catholic priest came over to her right in the Queen’s Hotel, and flashed his lighter at her before she could get her matches out. She thanked him but did not enter into conversation, lest he should try to convert her.
    Another time, on the way home, she saw at the town end of the bridge a boy in a blue jacket, apparently looking at the water. Eighteen, nineteen years old. Nobody she knew. Skinny, weakly-looking, something the matter with him, she saw at once. Was he thinking of jumping? Just as she came up even with him, what does he do but turn and display himself, holding his jacket open, also his pants. What he must have suffered from the cold, on a day that had Flo holding her coat collar tight around her throat.
    When she first saw what he had in his hand, Flo said, all she could think of was What is he doing out here with a baloney sausage?
    She could say that. It was offered as truth; no joke. She maintained that she despised dirty talk. She would go out and yell at the old men sitting in front of her store.
    “If you want to stay where you are you better clean your mouths out!”
    Saturday, then. For some reason Flo is not going uptown, has decided to stay home and scrub the kitchen floor. Perhaps this has put her in a bad mood. Perhaps she was in a bad mood anyway, due to people notpaying their bills, or the stirring-up of feelings in spring. The wrangle with Rose has already commenced, has been going on forever, like a dream that goes back and back into other dreams, over hills and through doorways, maddeningly dim and populous and familiar and elusive. They are carting all the chairs out of the kitchen preparatory to the scrubbing, and they have also got to move some extra provisions for the store, some cartons of canned goods, tins of maple syrup, coal-oil cans, jars of vinegar. They take these things out to the woodshed. Brian, who is five or six by this time, is helping drag the tins.
    “Yes,” says Flo, carrying on from our lost starting point. “Yes, and that filth you taught to Brian.”
    “What filth?”
    “And he doesn’t know any better.”
    There is one step down from the kitchen to the woodshed, a bit of carpet on it so worn Rose can’t ever remember seeing the pattern. Brian loosens it, dragging a tin.
    “Two Vancouvers,” she says softly.
    Flo is back in the kitchen. Brian looks from Flo to Rose and Rose says again in a slightly louder voice, an encouraging singsong, “Two Vancouvers–”
    “Fried in snot!” finishes Brian, not able to control himself any longer.
    “Two pickled arseholes–”
    “–tied in a knot!”
    There it is. The filth.
Two Vancouvers fried in snot!
Two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!
    Rose has known that for years, learned it when she first went to school. She came home and asked Flo, what is a Vancouver?
    “It’s a city. It’s a long ways away.”
    “What else besides a city?”
    Flo said, what did she mean, what else? How could it be fried, Rose said, approaching the dangerous moment, the delightful moment, when she would have to come out with the whole thing.
    “Two Vancouvers fried in snot!/Two pickled arseholes tied in a knot!”
    “You’re going to get it!” cried Flo in a predictable rage. “Say that again and you’ll get a good clout!”
    Rose couldn’t stop herself. She hummed it tenderly, tried saying the innocent words aloud, humming through the others. It was not just the words snot and arsehole that gave her pleasure,