Alice Munros Best Read Free Page B

tomind—though there are many—is from
Lives of Girls and Women
, in which the teacher who’d staged the high school’s airy and joyful operettas drowns herself in the river.
    Miss Farris in her velvet skating costume … Miss Farris
con brio …
Miss Farris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash River, six days before she was found. Though there is no plausible way of hanging those pictures together—if the last one is true then must it not alter the others?—they are going to have to stay together now.
    For Munro, a thing can be true, but not true, but true nonetheless. “It is real and dishonest,” thinks Georgia, of her remorse, in “Differently.” “How hard it is for me to believe that I made that up,” says the narrator of “The Progress of Love.” “It seems so much the truth it is the truth; it’s what I believe about them. I haven’t stopped believing it.” The world is profane
and
sacred. It must be swallowed whole. There is always more to be known about it than you can ever know.

    In a story called “Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You,” jealous Et describes her sister’s former lover—a promiscuous ladies’ man—and the look he gives to every woman, a look “that made him seem to want to be a deep-sea diver diving down, down through all the emptiness and cold and wreckage to discover the one thing he had set his heart on, something small and precious, hard to locate, as a ruby maybe on the ocean floor.”
    Munro’s stories abound in such questionable seekers and well-fingered ploys. But they abound also in such insights: within any story, within any human being, there may be a dangerous treasure, a priceless ruby. A heart’s desire.
    Margaret Atwood
    MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of
The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin
, and
Oryx and Crake.

ROYAL BEATINGS
    ROYAL BEATING.
That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.
    The word
Royal
lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that was stronger than the need to stay out of trouble, and instead of taking this threat to heart she pondered: How is a beating royal? She came up with a tree-lined avenue, a crowd of formal spectators, some white horses and black slaves. Someone knelt, and the blood came leaping out like banners. An occasion both savage and splendid. In real life they didn’t approach such dignity, and it was only Flo who tried to supply the event with some high air of necessity and regret. Rose and her father soon got beyond anything presentable.
    Her father was king of the royal beatings. Those Flo gave never amounted to much; they were quick cuffs and slaps dashed off while her attention remained elsewhere. You get out of my road, she would say. You mind your own business. You take that look off your face.
    They lived behind a store in Hanratty, Ontario. There were four of them: Rose, her father, Flo, Rose’s young half brother, Brian. The store was really a house, bought by Rose’s father and mother when they married and set up here in the furniture-and upholstery-repair business. Her mother could do upholstery. From both parents Rose should have inherited clever hands, a quick sympathy with materials, an eye for the nicest turns of mending, but she hadn’t. She was clumsy, and when something broke she couldn’t wait to sweep it up and throw it away.
    Her mother had died. She said to Rose’s father during the afternoon, “I have a feeling that is so hard to describe. It’s like a boiled egg in my chest, with the shell left on.” She died before night, she had a blood clot on her lung. Rose was a baby in a basket at the time, so of course couldnot remember any of this. She heard it from Flo, who must have heard it from her father. Flo came along soon afterward, to take over Rose in the basket, marry her father, open up the front room to make a grocery store. Rose, who had known the house only as a store, who had