"Postcards," from her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, is much lighter fare than "Friend of My Youth," but it's drawn from the same quarry. It's female, powerfully so, and features a beleaguered young woman who is trying to determine what it means to be a woman in the world of a small town named Jubilee, Ontario.
She's given herself away, never a particularly good idea, even if the odds are in your favor. She's made a habit of sleeping with a son of the town's meager aristocracy, and been promised, tacitly, that she will be the man's bride once his crochety old lady finally leaves the upstairs bedroom and the planet.
She has reason to doubt him--a reaction others of her friends and family share; but this man, Clare, is what Munro calls a "public man," perhaps of no greater significance than anyone else, but a man who comes from an echelon of small-town nobility that is somehow superior to others. In short his "public" character, a kindly disposition, makes people fall in love with him, including Helen, or at least treasure his company.
It's a fit that does her well, or so she reasons, sex for his promises, until Clare's promise crash and burn. He marries someone on a warm week in the cold winter, someone from Nebraska, someone he met in Florida, where he's been vacationing. The news hits poor Helen where it hurts . What she doesn't know (at one point she tells the reader she was anxious to hear what she was going to say to the man) is how to react, and in the single scene which dominates the story, she parks her car (a gift from him by the way) on the street just outside his home and lays on the horn time after time, yelling at Clare to get is butt out of his marital bed to talk to her.
She's been jilted, and every last soul old enough to understand knows very well that she has, which only increases her pain.
I'm not doing the story credit, but I'm assuming that few who read these words know or remember the story. The fact of the matter is the story is a hoot, and while we feel for poor Helen, the doggone story itself is hilarious. Poor Helen captures our sympathies, but mostly she's a cartoon.
So let's return, for a minute, to blasted thesis that got me into this: Alice Munro, who died at 92 years old last week, was the finest short story writer in Canada, in North America, and--who knows?--the world!
Why and how? Those questions made a teacher out of me again after so many years. "Postcards" is wonderfully entertaining, as her earliest stories tended to be. They require little reflection and introspection, and, like "Postcards" can be downright hilarious.
Which is not to say Munro doesn't have something serious to say, in this case, once again about being female in (at least) Jubilee, Ontario. Here's Helen's summary as she second-guesses her fate:
If I had really thought about what he was like, Clare MacQuarrie, if I had paid attention, I would have started out much differently with him and maybe felt differently too, though heaven knows that would have mattered, in the end.
So, all of this trauma, whose fault is it?
Hers. Maybe.
Than again, maybe not.
Is there a warning in this story for young women? Maybe. But that's not what Munro is about. She's not trying to change behavior, only to examine it--for its sadness and its humor--and hope we enjoy the examination.
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If you would like to know Munro's work better, go to your library and ask for Select Stories (Vintage, 1996). You may have to get it on inter-library loan, but your friendly librarian will be glad to do that. I'll take the stories I talk about (maybe ten or so) from that collection. Next class, let's try "The Ottawa Valley."
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