Alice Munros Best

much difference.” After a silence, I said, “Don’t be mad.”
    “I’m not mad. I like lettuce on sandwiches.”
    “I just didn’t think it mattered that much.”
    “How would it be if I didn’t bother to fill up the gas tank?”
    “That’s not the same thing.”
    “Sing a song,” said Cynthia. She started to sing:
    “Five little ducks went out one day,
Over the hills and far away.
One little duck went
‘Quack-quack-quack.’
Four little ducks came swimming back.”
    Andrew squeezed my hand and said, “Let’s not fight.”
    “You’re right. I should have got lettuce.”
    “It doesn’t matter that much.”
    I wished that I could get my feelings about Andrew to come together into a serviceable and dependable feeling. I had even tried writing two lists, one of things I liked about him, one of things I disliked – in the cauldron of intimate life, things I loved and things I hated – as if I hoped by this to prove something, to come to a conclusion one way or the other. But I gave it up when I saw that all it proved was what I already knew – that I had violent contradictions. Sometimes the very sound of his footsteps seemed to me tyrannical, the set of his mouth smug and mean, his hard, straight body a barrier interposed – quite consciously, even dutifully, and with a nasty pleasure in its masculine authority – between me and whatever joy or lightness I could get in life. Then, with not much warning, he became my good friend and most essential companion. I felt the sweetness of his light bones and serious ideas, the vulnerability of his love, which I imagined to be much purer and more straightforward than my own. I could be greatly moved by an inflexibility, a harsh propriety, that at other times I scorned. I would think how humble he was, really, taking on such a ready-made role of husband, father, breadwinner, and how I myself in comparison was really a secret monster of egotism. Not so secret, either – not from him.
    At the bottom of our fights, we served up what we thought were the ugliest truths. “I know there is something basically selfish and basically untrustworthy about you,” Andrew once said. “I’ve always known it. I also know that that is why I fell in love with you.”
    “Yes,” I said, feeling sorrowful but complacent.
    “I know that I’d be better off without you.”
    “Yes. You would.”
    “You’d be happier without me.”
    “Yes.”
    And finally – finally – wracked and purged, we clasped hands and laughed, laughed at those two benighted people, ourselves. Their grudges, their grievances, their self-justification. We leapfrogged over them. Wedeclared them liars. We would have wine with dinner, or decide to give a party.
    I haven’t seen Andrew for years, don’t know if he is still thin, has gone completely gray, insists on lettuce, tells the truth, or is hearty and disappointed.
    WE STAYED THE night in Wenatchee, Washington, where it hadn’t rained for weeks. We ate dinner in a restaurant built about a tree – not a sapling in a tub but a tall, sturdy cottonwood. In the early-morning light, we climbed out of the irrigated valley, up dry, rocky, very steep hillsides that would seem to lead to more hills, and there on the top was a wide plateau, cut by the great Spokane and Columbia rivers. Grainland and grassland, mile after mile. There were straight roads here, and little farming towns with grain elevators. In fact, there was a sign announcing that this county we were going through, Douglas County, had the second-highest wheat yield of any county in the United States. The towns had planted shade trees. At least, I thought they had been planted, because there were no such big trees in the countryside.
    All this was marvellously welcome to me. “Why do I love it so much?” I said to Andrew. “Is it because it isn’t scenery?”
    “It reminds you of home,” said Andrew. “A bout of severe nostalgia.” But he said this kindly.
    When we said “home” and meant Ontario, we had very different places in mind. My home was a turkey farm, where my father lived as a widower, and though it was the same house my mother had lived in, had papered, painted, cleaned, furnished, it showed the effects now of neglect and of some wild sociability. A life went on in it that my mother could not have predicted or condoned. There were parties for the turkey crew, the gutters and pluckers, and sometimes one or two of the young men would be living there temporarily,