Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

you going to have a stroke?”
    “No. I have low blood pressure. That is just the opposite of what gives you strokes.”
    “So, are you not going to get sick at all?” I said, pushing further. I was very much relieved that she had decided against strokes, and that I would not have to be the mother, and wash and wipe and feed her lying in bed, as Aunt Dodie had had to do with her mother. For I did feel it was she who decided, she gave her consent. As long as she lived, and through all the changes that happened to her, and after I had received the medical explanations of what was happening, I still felt secretly that she had given her consent. For her own purposes, I felt she did it: display, of a sort; revenge of a sort as well. More, that nobody could ever understand.
    She did not answer me, but walked on ahead. We were going from Aunt Dodie’s place to Uncle James’s, following a path through the humpy cow pasture that made the trip shorter than going by the road.
    “Is your arm going to stop shaking?” I pursued recklessly, stubbornly.
    I demanded of her now, that she turn and promise me what I needed.
    But she did not do it. For the first time she held out altogether against me. She went on as if she had not heard, her familiar bulk ahead of me turning strange, indifferent. She withdrew, she darkened in front of me, though all she did in fact was keep on walking along the path that she and Aunt Dodie had made when they were girls running back and forth to see each other; it was still there.

    One night my mother and Aunt Dodie sat on the porch and recited poetry. How this started I forget; with one of them thinking of a quotation, likely, and the other one matching it. Uncle James was leaning against the railing, smoking. Because we were visiting, he had permitted himself to come.
    “How can a man die better,”
cried Aunt Dodie cheerfully,
    “Than facing fearful odds
,
    For the ashes of his fathers
    And the temples of his gods?”
    “And all day long the noise of battle rolled,”
my mother declared,
    “Among the mountains by the winter sea.”
    “Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note
,
    As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried.…”
    “For I am going a long way
    To the island-valley of Avalon
    Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.…”
    My mother’s voice had taken on an embarrassing tremor, so I was glad when Aunt Dodie interrupted.
    “Heavens, wasn’t it all sad, the stuff they put in the old readers?”
    “I don’t remember a bit of it,” said Uncle James. “Except—” and he recited without a break:
    Along the line of smoky hills
    The crimson forest stands
    And all day long the bluejay calls
    Throughout the autumn lands
.
    “Good for you,” said Aunt Dodie, and she and my mother joined in, so they were all reciting together, and laughing at each other:
    Now by great marshes wrapped in mist
,
    Or past some river’s mouth
,
    Throughout the long still autumn day
    Wild birds are flying south
.
    “Though when you come to think of it, even that has kind of a sad ring,” Aunt Dodie said.

    If I had been making a proper story out of this, I would have ended it, I think, with my mother not answering and going ahead of me across the pasture. That would have done. I didn’t stop there, I suppose, because I wanted to find out more, remember more. I wanted to bring back all I could. Now I look at what I have done and it is like a series of snapshots, like the brownish snapshots with fancy borders that my parents’ old camera used to take. In these snapshots Aunt Dodie and Uncle James and even Aunt Lena, even her children, come out clear enough. (All these people dead now except the children who have turned into decent friendly wage earners, not a criminal or as far as I know even a neurotic among them.) The problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to illumine, to celebrate, to
get rid
, of her; and it did not work, for she looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and flow. Which means she has stuck to me as close as ever and refused to fall away, and I could go on, and on, applying what skills I have, using what tricks I know, and it would always be the same.

New from
Alice Munro
D EAR L IFE

    With this brilliant