2020-10-17 Family Furnishings by Alice Munroe (c)2014

A collection of short stories written between 1995-2014

Post and Beam

Lionel attends his mother putting on makeup just before her death.

Some time prior the math prodigy Lionel visited his one time math professor, Brendon and young wife Lorna while recovering from a breakdown. Lionel had given up on math and taken a job at an Anglican publishing house.

Lorna had grown up with her father living next door to her religious grandmother, aunt and cousin Polly. The aunt's husband was out of the picture. Lorna had barely the snippet of a memory of her own mother.

Lionel sent poems to Lorna about once a week, not love poems as Brendon would have assumed. Now Polly, Lorna's elder by 5 years, decided to come visit somehow reminding Lorna of her own reticence at marrying Brendon. Brendon found out about the visit when Polly called collect on her way there.

Polly rubs Brendon the wrong way continually. She tells Lorna that her father's friendly boss sold the hardware store and the new boss/owner is making life miserable. And Polly reports her mother and grandmother argue constantly to the father's chagrin.

After Lorna and Polly and kids spend a day at the beach, Polly cries in bed thinking her dreamy plan to escape her life and join Lorna wasn't working out. Lorna and Brendon go off to a wedding and on their return, Lorna has a premonition that Polly has hanged herself in the kitchen. Worrying all the way home, she arrives to find Polly and Lionel chatting in the back yard, Lionel seeming to have shed his special feeling towards Lorna. Lorna had made a wishful prayer on the way home bargaining with God in hopes that Polly would not have hanged herself. Now she found that her end of the bargain was to live a conventional life with nothing much surprising about it.

"It was a long time ago that this happened." ... "When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining."

The story's title "Post and Beam" refers to the plain bare architectural style of Lorna and Brendon's house in that long ago time. Polly had criticized it before she came to understand whose house it was.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain (2020-10-24)

Fiona and Grant lived with Fiona's Icelandic parents, a docile cardiologist father and a left wing radical mother in a university town.

Jump to 70yoa Fiona leaving a house of 12 years for the last time. About a year earlier Grant had noticed her post-it notes to herself were suggesting a mental deterioration. Fiona's memory fails to where Grant puts her in a place called Meadowlake where policy is he cannot contact her for the first month.

Grant has been a prototypical philanderer with young women at the college. He dreams one of their lesbian roommates warned him of a danger of suicide. In real life one had painted "rat" on his office door and caused him to fall out of favor socially at the college. He was sort of relieved that the dangers of his everyday philandering were diminishing.

When he finally visits Fiona at Meadowlake she is friendly, but treats him like an acquaintance returning to her place beside a new friend, Aubrey, at a card game after a short chat. Her nurse, Kristy, counsels him to not take her new posture too seriously, that he will come to accomadate himself to her new social posiitoning. Grant gets more annoyed with Fiona's relationship with Aubrey as the weeks wear on. It is like she is being openly unfaithful. All the while an awareness of the second floor is in the background, the floor where those who can no longer participate in the social life below are moved to.

On one visit he encounters Fiona consoling Aubrey who is dressed up and is to be taken away by his family somewhere. Following Aubrey's departure Fiona falls into a depression and conceals her dislike for Grant less successfully. The supervisor met with Grant in her office and advised Fiona was nearing a state where she would have to be moved to the second floor.

Grant visits Aubrey's wife who initially thinks he is there to quarrel that Aubrey has seduced Fionna. She reveals that Aubrey got into trouble at work and they could barely afford to put him in the home, and she has him home now and doesn't want to put him back because she would have to sell the house to do it. When Grant gets home, he finds a tentative message from Marian (Aubrey's wife) inviting him to a Lodge dance. This opened up his speculation that he might be able get her to let Aubrey visit Fiona again.

A man visits Fiona and she is moved that he has returned. The man's identity isn't revealed.

Runaway (2020-11-28)

Carla, Clark's wife, spots Mrs. Sylvia Jamieson driving home from her vacation in Greece following her husband's death. Carla and her husband ran a small stable and earn an uncertain living giving riding lessons to locals and vacationers. Clark got in scrapes with various townspeople including the librarian, Joy Tucker, who boarded her horse with him. Flora, their little white goat went missing. Mrs. Jamieson called and had Clark relay a message for Carla requesting she come clean her house. Mrs. Jamieson was the widow of a poet who had won a big cash prize and Clark had got an idea to extort the widow to get some of it. His scheme was to revolve around Mr. Jamieson's come ons to Carla when she helped care for him in his dying days. Now Carla has answered the call and Sylvia has her in for coffee to relieve the loneliness. Carla breaks down and confesses she is distraught because her husband hates her. She reveals her thoughts of running off to Toronto to work at a riding stable. Sylvia talks her into making her thoughts a reality, offering to put her up with a friend and give her some seed money. She talks Carla into leaving a note in the mailbox for Clark. Carla had married Clark right out of high school, Clark being her riding instructor. Her step father had dispised Clark as a gypsy and she married anyway almost out of spite. Sylvia drove Carla to the bus stop and put her note in Clark's mailbox on the way home. Carla began to realize running away was the real thing when the bus got to the next town over. Two more towns and she got off and called Clark to come get her. Later Clark showed up and scared Mrs. Jamison. While talking to her, Flora the goat appeared out of the night fog. As the summer wore on business picked back up and Carla and Clark resumed their symbiotic marraige, though Clark never did mention about Flora's return. One day a letter from Sylvia arrives trying to put a close to Sylvia's unease with her role in helping Carla run away. In it she writes of Flora's miraculous reappearance. Carla burned the letter and resisted the temptation to go out to the treeline where buzzards had been scavaging for fear of finding Flora's remains. She let Flora's fate remain a mystery.