Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

responsibilities there made after-school obligations difficult for her.
    Instead, Alice Laidlaw is listed in the paper as among the highest-scoring students in the Wingham High School. Reflecting the work ethic Munro has written about and spoken of as characteristic of the Scots-Irish of Huron County, and an accepted journalistic practice at the time, each student’s final test grades were printed each term in the
Advance-Times
. At the end of Grade 9, for instance, Munro was promoted to Grade 10 with the second-highest score, 80.7 per cent, with Mary Ross at 84.4 per cent. They were the only students to score above 80 (June 28, 1945). The next year, they were listed along with another student obtaining “Class I (75% and over)” ranking as they were promoted to Grade 11 (June 27, 1946). Munro slipped slightly as the students were promoted to Grade 12 – Ross scored over 75 per cent on all of her subjects, Donna Henry, another good friend, was just behind with first-class marks save a second-class in English, while Alice Laidlaw had all firsts but for a third-class mark in algebra (June 26, 1947). Munro regained her second-place standing as the students were passed to Grade 13, although mathematics remained her bane – she obtained a third-class mark in geometry along with firsts in everything else. Ross, for her part, continued to earn all firsts (June 23, 1948).
    In “Red Dress – 1946” – the year in the title biographically precise to the year Munro was in Grade 11, since its dance is on a Christmas theme – Munro draws on her high school experiences to recreate what certainly look like her own feelings of being “sick with nerves.” In a long paragraph in which the narrator explains why she hates each subject she is taking, hating them because of her feelings of inadequacy or ineptitude, Munro offers characteristically funny and appalling description. The narrator hates English, for example,
    because the boys played bingo in the back of the room while the teacher, a stout, gentle girl, slightly cross-eyed, read Wordsworth at the front. She threatened them, she begged them, her face red and her voice as unreliable as mine. They offered burlesqued apologies and when she started to read again they took up rapt postures, made swooning faces, crossed their eyes, flung their hands over their hearts. Sometimes she would burst into tears, there was no help for it, she had to run out into the hall. The boys then made loud mooing noises; our hungry laughter – oh, mine too – pursued her. There was a carnival atmosphere of brutality in the room at such times, scaring weak and suspect people like me.
    But what was really going on in the school was not Business Practice and Science and English, there was something else that gave life its urgency and brightness. That old building, with its rock-walled clammy basements and black cloakroom and pictures of dead royalties and lost explorers, was full of the tension and excitement of sexual competition, and in this, in spite of daydreams of vast successes, I had premonitions of total defeat. Something had to happen, to keep me from that dance.
    “Red Dress – 1946” begins “My mother was making me a dress.” While its prime focus is on the dynamic of the dance and how the narrator navigates it, the story also treats the narrator’s mother’s expectations for her daughter. The mother, who is “not really a good sewer,” “liked to make things. That is different.” Unlike the narrator’s aunt andgrandmother, who were proficient in “the fine points of tailoring,” the narrator’s mother “started off with an inspiration, a brave and dazzling idea; from that moment on, her pleasure ran downhill.” Munro then details a succession of outfits the mother had made for her daughter, variously garish, that the narrator had worn when she “was unaware of the world’s opinion.” One teacher – who probably chaperoned the dance on which this story is based, since she taught dancing in her physical education classes – remembers Munro in a red velvet dress very like the one described in the story. When the dance is over and the narrator has succeeded in it – even being walked home the considerable distance out from the town by a boy who bestowed a kiss “with the air of one who knew his job when he saw it” – she looks in the kitchen window of the house and sees her mother “sitting with her feet on the open oven door, drinking tea out of a cup