Alice Munros Best

stone. First the two for the parents, then the two for the children, but these were placed in such a way that there was room for a third, to complete the fan. I paced out from CATHERINE the same number of steps that it took to get from CATHERINE to WILLIAM , and at this spot I began pulling grass and scrabbling in the dirt with my bare hands. Soon I felt the stone and knew that I was right. I worked away and got the whole stone clearand I read the name MEDA. There it was with the others, staring at the sky.
    I made sure I had got to the edge of the stone. That was all the name there was – Meda. So it was true that she was called by that name in the family. Not just in the poem. Or perhaps she chose her name from the poem, to be written on her stone.
    I thought that there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection. And I would be the last person to do so. But perhaps this isn’t so. People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.
    And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.

DIFFERENTLY
    GEORGIA ONCE TOOK a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.
    Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out.
    The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together. They still live together, in Ontario, on a farm. They sell raspberries, and run a small publishing business. When Georgia can get the money together, she goes to Vancouver to visit her sons. This fall Saturday she has taken the ferry across to Victoria, where she used to live. She did this on an impulse that she doesn’t really trust, and by midafternoon, when she walks up the driveway of the splendid stone house where she used to visit Maya, she has already been taken over some fairly shaky ground.
    When she phoned Raymond, she wasn’t sure that he would ask her to the house. She wasn’t sure that she even wanted to go there. She had no notion of how welcome she would be. But Raymond opens the door before she can touch the bell, and he hugs her around the shoulders and kisses her twice (surely he didn’t use to do this?) and introduces his wife, Anne. He says he has told her what great friends they were, Georgia and Ben and he and Maya. Great friends.
    Maya is dead. Georgia and Ben are long divorced.
    They go to sit in what Maya used to call, with a certain flat cheerfulness, “the family room.”
    (One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.”
    “Listen, old man, you don’t do it with pillows,” Ben said boisterously. They were all a little drunk. “I thought you were the expert on all the apparatus, but I can see that you and I are going to have to have a little talk.”
    Raymond was an obstetrician and gynecologist.
    By that time Georgia knew all about the abortion in Seattle, which had been set up by Maya’s lover, Harvey. Harvey was also a doctor, a surgeon. The bleak apartment in the run-down building, the bad-tempered old woman who was knitting a sweater, the doctor arriving in his shirtsleeves, carrying a brown-paper bag that Maya hysterically believed must contain the tools of his trade. In fact, it contained his lunch – an egg-and-onion sandwich. Maya had the smell of that in her face all the time he and Mme. Defarge were working her over.
    Maya and Georgia smiled at each other primly while their husbands continued their playful conversation.)
    Raymond’s curly brown