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Fiction
OCTOBER 21, 2013 ISSUE
The Bear Came Over the Mountain
BY ALICE MUNRO
减脂训练F PHOTOGRAPH BY BRYAN ADAMS / TRUNK ARCHIVE
(This story originally appeared in the December 27,1999, issue of the magazine.)
iona lived in her parents’ hou, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed hou that emed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs
crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the
table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subrvient at home,where he would listen to his wife’s strange tirades with an abntminded smile. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and her mother’s political activity was probably the reason. Not that she cared. Sororities were a joke to her, and so was politics—though she liked to play “The Four Insurgent Generals” on the phonograph, and sometimes also the “Internationale,” very loud, if there was a guest she thought she could make nervous. A curly-haired gloomy-looking foreigner was courting her—she said he was a Visigoth—and so were two or three quite respectable and uneasy young interns. She made fun of them all and of Grant as well. She would drolly repeat some of his small-town phras. He thought maybe she was joking when she propod to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stingi
ng their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?”
He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.
J O ust before they left their hou Fiona noticed a mark on the kitchen floor. It came from the cheap black hou shoes she had been wearing earlier in the day.“I thought they’d quit doing that,” she said in a tone of ordinary annoyance and perplexity, rubbing at the gray smear that looked as if it had been made by a greasy crayon.She remarked that she’d never have to do this again, since she wasn’t taking tho shoes with her.
“I guess I’ll be dresd up all the time,” she said. “Or mi-dresd up. It’ll be sort of like in a hotel.”
She rind out the rag she’d been using and hung it on the rack inside the door under the sink. Then she put on her golden-brown, fur-collared ski jacket, over a white turtleneck sweater and tailored fawn slacks. She was a tall, narrow-shouldered woman,venty years old but still upright and trim, with long legs and long feet, delicate wrists and ankles, and tiny, almost comical-looking ears. Her hair that was as light as milkweed fluff had gone from pale blond to white somehow without Grant’s n
oticing exactly when, and she still wore it down to her shoulders, as her mother had done.(That was the thing that had alarmed Grant’s own mother, a small-town widow who worked as a doctor’s receptionist. The long white hair on Fiona’s mother, even more than the state of the hou, had told her all she needed to know about attitudes and politics.) But otherwi Fiona, with her fine bones and small sapphire eyes, was nothing like her mother. She had a slightly crooked mouth, which she emphasized now with red lipstick—usually the last thing she did before she left the hou.She looked just like herlf on this day—direct and vague as in fact she was, sweet and ironic.
ver a year ago, Grant had started noticing so many little yellow notes stuck up all over the hou. That was not entirely new. Fiona had always written things down—the title of a book she’d heard mentioned on the radio or the jobs she wanted to make sure she got done that day. Even her morning schedule was written down. He
found it mystifying and touching in its precision: “7 A.M. yoga. 7:30–7:45 teeth face hair. 7:45–8:15 walk. 8:15 Grant and breakfast.”The new notes were different. Stuck onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dish-towels,Knives. Couldn’t she just open the drawers and e what was inside?
Wor things were coming. She went to town and phoned Grant from a booth to ask him how to driv
e home. She went for her usual walk across the field into the woods and came home by the fence line—a very long way round. She said that she’d counted on fences always taking you somewhere.
It was hard to figure out. She’d said that about fences as if it were a joke, and she had remembered the phone number without any trouble.
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” she said. “I expect I’m just losing my mind.”
He asked if she had been taking sleeping pills.
闺蜜过生日“If I am I don’t remember,” she said. Then she said she was sorry to sound so flippant.“I’m sure I haven’t been taking anything. Maybe I should be. Maybe vitamins.”Vitamins didn’t help. She would stand in doorways trying to figure out where she was going. She forgot to turn on the burner under the vegetables or put water in the coffeemaker. She asked Grant when they’d moved to this hou.
“Was it last year or the year before?”
“It was twelve years ago,” he said.
“That’s shocking.”
“She’s always been a bit like this,” Grant said to the doctor. He tried without success to explain how Fiona’s surpri and apologies now emed somehow like routine courtesy, not quite concealing a private amument. As if she’d stumbled on some unexpected adventure. Or begun playing a game that she hoped he would catch on to.“Yes, well,” the doctor said. “It might be lective at first. We don’t know, do we? Till we e the pattern of the deterioration, we really can’t say.”
丽江玉湖村In a while it hardly mattered what label was put on it. Fiona, who no longer went shopping alone, disappeared from the supermarket while Grant had his back turned.
A policeman picked her up as she was walking down the middle of the road, blocks away. He asked her name and she answered readily. Then he asked her the name of the Prime Minister.
“If you don’t know that, young man, you really shouldn’t be in such a responsible job.”
T He laughed. But then she made the mistake of asking if he’d en Boris and Natasha.The were the now dead Russian wolfhounds she had adopted many years ago, as a favor to a friend, then devoted herlf to for the rest of their lives. Her taking them over might have coincided with the discovery that she was not likely to have children.Something about her tubes being blocked, or twisted—Grant could not remember now. He had always avoided thinking about all that female appa
阳光小美女电影ratus. Or it might have been after her mother died. The dogs’ long legs and silky hair, their narrow,gentle, intransigent faces made a fine match for her when she took them out for walks.And Grant himlf, in tho days, landing his first job at the university (his father-in-law’s money welcome there in spite of the political taint), might have emed to some people to have been picked up on another of Fiona’s eccentric whims, and groomed and tended and favored—though, fortunately, he didn’t understand this until much later.
here was a rule that nobody could be admitted to Meadowlake during the month of December. The holiday ason had so many emotional pitfalls. So they
made the twenty-minute drive in January. Before they reached the highway the country road dipped through a swampy hollow now completely frozen over.Fiona said, “Oh, remember.”
Grant said, “I was thinking about that, too.”
鹌鹑蛋和鸡蛋“Only it was in the moonlight,” she said.She was talking about the time that they had gone out skiing at night under the full moon and over the black-striped snow, in this place that you could get into only in the depths of winter. They had heard the branches cracking in the cold.If she could remember that, so vividly and correctly, could there really be so much the matter with her? It was all he could d
o not to turn around and drive home.
There was another rule that the supervisor explained to him. New residents were not to be visited during the first thirty days. Most people needed that time to get ttled in. Before the rule had been put in place, there had been pleas and tears and tantrums,even from tho who had come in willingly. Around the third or fourth day they would start lamenting and begging to be taken home. And some relatives could be susceptible to that, so you would have people being carted home who would not get on there any better than they had before. Six months or sometimes only a few weeks
later, the whole uptting hassle would have to be gone through again.
T “Whereas we find,” the supervisor said, “we find that if they’re left on their own the first month they usually end up happy as clams.”
hey had in fact gone over to Meadowlake a few times veral years ago to visit Mr. Farquhar, the old bachelor farmer who had been their neighbor. He had lived by himlf in a drafty brick hou unaltered since the early years of the century,except for the addition of a refrigerator and a television t. Now, just as Mr.Farquhar’s hou was gone, replaced by a gimcrack sort of castle that was the weekend home of some people from Toronto, the old Meadow-lake was gone, though it had dated o
nly from the fifties. The new building was a spacious, vaulted place, who air
was faintly, pleasantly pine-scented. Profu and genuine greenery sprouted out of giant crocks in the hallways.Nevertheless, it was the old Meadowlake that Grant found himlf picturing Fiona in,during the long month he had to get through without eing her. He phoned every day and hoped to get the nur who name was Kristy. She emed a little amud at his constancy, but she would give him a fuller report than any other nur he got stuck with.Fiona had caught a cold the first week, she said, but that was not unusual for newcomers. “Like when your kids start school,” Kristy said. “There’s a whole bunch of new germs they’re expod to and for a while they just catch everything.”Then the cold got better. She was off the antibiotics and she didn’t em as confud as she had been when she came in. (This was the first Grant had heard about either the antibiotics or the confusion.) Her appetite was pretty good and she emed to enjoy sitting in the sunroom. And she was making some friends, Kristy said.
迎接村>回天无力的意思是什么“They’ll be expecting adagio. Go with allegro.”
If anybody phoned, he let the machine pick up.The people they saw socially, occasionally, were not clo neighbors but people who lived around the country, who were retired, as they were, and who often went away without notice. They would imagine that he and Fiona were away on some such trip at prent.无理取闹的意思
Grant skied for exerci. He skied around and around in the field behind the hou as
