Alice Munros Best

horrid secretions. But this was more. And the accompanying anger had nothing sharp and self-respecting about it. There was no release, as when I would finally bend and pick up a stone and throw it at Steve Gauley. It could not be understood or expressed, though it died down after a while into a heaviness, then just a taste, an occasional taste – a thin, familiar misgiving.
    TWENTY YEARS OR so later, in 1961, my husband, Andrew, and I got a brand-new car, our first – that is, our first brand-new. It was a Morris Oxford, oyster-colored (the dealer had some fancier name for the color) – a big small car, with plenty of room for us and our two children. Cynthia was six and Meg three and a half.
    Andrew took a picture of me standing beside the car. I was wearing white pants, a black turtleneck, and sunglasses. I lounged against the car door, canting my hips to make myself look slim.
    “Wonderful,” Andrew said. “Great. You look like Jackie Kennedy.” All over this continent probably, dark-haired, reasonably slender youngwomen were told, when they were stylishly dressed or getting their pictures taken, that they looked like Jackie Kennedy.
    Andrew took a lot of pictures of me, and of the children, our house, our garden, our excursions and possessions. He got copies made, labelled them carefully, and sent them back to his mother and his aunt and uncle in Ontario. He got copies for me to send to my father, who also lived in Ontario, and I did so, but less regularly than he sent his. When he saw pictures he thought I had already sent lying around the house, Andrew was perplexed and annoyed. He liked to have this record go forth.
    That summer, we were presenting ourselves, not pictures. We were driving back from Vancouver, where we lived, to Ontario, which we still called “home,” in our new car. Five days to get there, ten days there, five days back. For the first time, Andrew had three weeks’ holiday. He worked in the legal department at B. C. Hydro.
    On a Saturday morning, we loaded suitcases, two thermos bottles – one filled with coffee and one with lemonade – some fruit and sandwiches, picture books and coloring books, crayons, drawing pads, insect repellent, sweaters (in case it got cold in the mountains), and our two children into the car. Andrew locked the house, and Cynthia said ceremoniously, “Goodbye, house.”
    Meg said, “Goodbye, house.” Then she said, “Where will we live now?”
    “It’s not goodbye forever,” said Cynthia. “We’re coming back. Mother! Meg thought we weren’t ever coming back!”
    “I did not,” said Meg, kicking the back of my seat.
    Andrew and I put on our sunglasses, and we drove away, over the Lions Gate Bridge and through the main part of Vancouver. We shed our house, the neighborhood, the city, and – at the crossing point between Washington and British Columbia – our country. We were driving east across the United States, taking the most northerly route, and would cross into Canada again at Sarnia, Ontario. I don’t know if we chose this route because the Trans-Canada Highway was not completely finished at the time or if we just wanted the feeling of driving through a foreign, a very slightly foreign, country – that extra bit of interest and adventure.
    We were both in high spirits. Andrew congratulated the car several times. He said he felt so much better driving it than our old car, a 1951 Austin that slowed down dismally on the hills and had a fussy-old-lady image. So Andrew said now.
    “What kind of image does this one have?” said Cynthia. She listened to us carefully and liked to try out new words such as
image.
Usually she got them right.
    “Lively,” I said. “Slightly sporty. It’s not show-off.”
    “It’s sensible, but it has class,” Andrew said. “Like my image.”
    Cynthia thought that over and said with a cautious pride, “That means like you think you want to be, Daddy?”
    As for me, I was happy because of the shedding. I loved taking off. In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide – sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on trips there was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and