Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro Read Free Book Online Page A

paralysis when I had to get something from the bedroom, or he would leap around the livingroom ascking me what he was (a rhinoceros who thinks he is a gazelle, Chairman Mao dancing a war dance in a dream dreamt by John Foster Dulles) and then kiss me all over the neck and throat with hungry gobbling noises. I was cut off from the source of these glad or bad moods, I did not affect them. I teased him sourly:
    â€œSuppose after we have the baby the house is on fire and the baby and the play are both in there, which would you save?”
    â€œBoth.”
    â€œBut supposing you can just save one? Never mind the baby, suppose
I
am in there, no, suppose I am drowning
here
and you are
here
and cannot possibly reach us both—”
    â€œYou’re making it tough for me.”
    â€œI know I am. I know I am. Don’t you hate me?”
    â€œOf course I hate you.” After this we might go to bed, playful, squealing, mock-fighting, excited. All our life together, the successful part of our life together, was games. We made up conversations to startle people on the bus. Once we sat in a beer parlor and he berated me for going out with other men and leaving the children alone while he was off in the bush working to support us. He pleaded with me to remember my duty as a wife and as a mother. I blew smoke in his face. People around us were looking stern and gratified. When we got outside we laughed till we had to hold each other up, against the wall. We played in bed that I was Lady Chatterley and he was Mellors.
    â€œWhere be that little rascal John Thomas?” he said thickly. “I canna find John Thomas!”
    â€œFrightfully sorry, I think I must have swallowed him,” I said, ladylike.

    There was a water pump in the basement. It made a steady, thumping noise. The house was on fairly low-lying ground not far from the Fraser River, and during the rainyweather the pump had to work most of the time to keep the basement from being flooded. We had a dark rainy January, as is usual in Vancouver, and this was followed by a dark rainy February. Hugo and I felt gloomy. I slept a lot of the time. Hugo couldn’t sleep. He claimed it was the pump that kept him awake. He couldn’t work because of it in the daytime and he couldn’t sleep because of it at night. The pump had replaced Dotty’s piano-playing as the thing that most enraged and depressed him in our house. Not only because of its noise, but because of the money it was costing us. Its entire cost went onto our electricity bill, though it was Dotty who lived in the basement and reaped the benefits of not being flooded. He said I should speak to Dotty and I said Dotty could not pay the expenses she already had. He said she could turn more tricks. I told him to shut up. As I became more pregnant, slower and heavier and more confined to the house, I got fonder of Dotty, used to her, less likely to store up and repeat what she said. I felt more at home with her than I did sometimes with Hugo and our friends.
    All right, Hugo said, I ought to phone the landlady. I said he ought. He said he had far too much to do. The truth was we both shrank from a confrontation with the landlady, knowing in advance how she would confuse and defeat us with shrill evasive prattle.
    In the middle of the night in the middle of a rainy week I woke up and wondered what had wakened me. It was the silence.
    â€œHugo, wake up. The pump’s broken. I can’t hear the pump.”
    â€œI am awake,” Hugo said.
    â€œIt’s still raining and the pump isn’t going. It must be broken.”
    â€œNo, it isn’t. It’s shut off. I shut it off.”
    I sat up and turned on the light. He was lying on his back, squinting and trying to give me a hard look at the same time.
    â€œYou didn’t turn it off.”
    â€œAll right, I didn’t.”
    â€œYou did.”
    â€œI could not stand the goddamn expense any more. I could not stand