Alice Munros Best

Beryl had done the same. The idea of sharing my bed with a grownup was a torment to me. But I did get to see the contents of what Beryl called her beauty kit. Hand-painted glass jars contained puffs of cotton wool, talcum powder, milky lotion, ice-blue astringent. Little pots of red and mauve rouge – rather greasy-looking. Blue and black pencils. Emery boards, a pumice stone, nail polish with an overpowering smell of bananas, face powder in a celluloid box shaped like a shell, with the name of a dessert – Apricot Delight.
    I had heated some water on the coal-oil stove we used in summertime. Beryl scrubbed her face clean, and there was such a change that I almost expected to see makeup lying in strips in the washbowl, like the old wallpaper we had soaked and peeled. Beryl’s skin was pale now, covered with fine cracks, rather like the shiny mud at the bottom of puddles drying up in early summer.
    “Look what happened to my skin,” she said. “Dieting. I weighed a hundred and sixty-nine pounds once, I took it off too fast and my face fell in on me. Now I’ve got this cream, though. It’s made from a secret formula and you can’t even buy it commercially. Smell it. See, it doesn’t smell all perfumy. It smells serious.”
    She was patting the cream on her face with puffs of cotton wool, patting away until there was nothing to be seen on the surface.
    “It smells like lard,” I said.
    “Christ Almighty, I hope I haven’t been paying that kind of money to rub lard on my face. Don’t tell your mother I swear.”
    She poured clean water into the drinking glass and wet her comb, then combed her hair wet and twisted each strand round her finger, clamping the twisted strand to her head with two crossed pins. I would be doing the same myself, a couple of years later.
    “Always do your hair wet, else it’s no good doing it up at all,” Beryl said. “And always roll it under even if you want it to flip up. See?”
    When I was doing my hair up – as I did for years – I sometimes thought of this, and thought that of all the pieces of advice people had given me, this was the one I had followed most carefully.
    We put the lamp out and got into bed, and Beryl said, “I never knew it could get so dark. I’ve never known a dark that was as dark as this.” She was whispering. I was slow to understand that she was comparing country nights to city nights, and I wondered if the darkness in Netterfield County could really be greater than that in California.
    “Honey?” whispered Beryl. “Are there any animals outside?”
    “Cows,” I said.
    “Yes, but wild animals? Are there bears?”
    “Yes,” I said. My father had once found bear tracks and droppings in the bush, and the apples had all been torn off a wild apple tree. That was years ago, when he was a young man.
    Beryl moaned and giggled. “Think if Mr. Florence had to go out in the night and he ran into a bear!”
    NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. Beryl and Mr. Florence drove my brothers and me to Sunday school in the Chrysler. That was at ten o’clock in the morning. They came back at eleven to bring my parents to church.
    “Hop in,” Beryl said to me. “You too,” she said to the boys. “We’re going for a drive.”
    Beryl was dressed up in a satiny ivory dress with red dots, and a red-lined frill over the hips, and red high-heeled shoes. Mr. Florence wore a pale-blue summer suit.
    “Aren’t you going to church?” I said. That was what people dressed up for, in my experience.
    Beryl laughed. “Honey, this isn’t Mr. Florence’s kind of religion.”
    I was used to going straight from Sunday school into church, and sitting for another hour and a half. In summer, the open windows let in the cedary smell of the graveyard and the occasional, almost sacrilegious sound of a car swooshing by on the road. Today we spent this time driving through country I had never seen before. I had never seen it, though it was less than twenty miles from home. Our truckwent to the cheese factory, to church, and to town on Saturday nights. The nearest thing to a drive was when it went to the dump. I had seen the near end of Bell’s Lake, because that was where my father cut the ice in winter. You couldn’t get close to it in summer; the shoreline was all choked up with bulrushes. I had thought that the other end of the lake would look pretty much the same, but when we drove there today, I saw cottages, docks and boats, dark water reflecting the trees. All this and I