Queenie
This story was first published in the STORYCUTS series by Vintage Digital 2011
Taken from the collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.
Copyright © Alice Munro 2001
Alice Munro has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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Copyright
Queenie
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We hope you enjoyed this story. If you want to read more stories by Alice Munro, try her other contributions to the Storycuts series such as
Post and Beam 9781448128471
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 9781448128402
Comfort 9781448128372
Alternatively, read the original parent collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage 9780099422747.
Queenie
“MAYBE YOU BETTER stop calling me that,” Queenie said, when she met me at Union Station.
I said, “What? Queenie?”
“Stan doesn’t like it,” she said. “He says it reminds him of a horse.”
It was more of a surprise to me to hear her say “Stan” than it was to have her let me know she wasn’t Queenie anymore, she was Lena. But I could hardly have expected that she would still be calling her husband Mr. Vorguilla after a year and a half of marriage. During that time I hadn’t seen her, and when I’d caught sight of her a moment ago, in the group of people waiting in the station, I almost hadn’t recognized her.
Her hair was dyed black and puffed up around her face in whatever style it was that in those days succeeded the beehive. Its beautiful corn-syrup color—gold on top and dark underneath—as well as its silky length, was forever lost. She wore a yellow print dress that skimmed her body and ended inches above her knees. The Cleopatra lines drawn heavily around her eyes, and the purply shadow, made her eyes seem smaller, not larger, as if they were deliberately hiding. She had pierced ears now, gold hoops swinging from them.
I saw her look at me with some surprise as well. I tried to be bold and easygoing. I said, “Is that a dress or a frill around your bum?” She laughed, and I said, “Was it ever hot on the train. I’m sweating like a pig.”
I could hear how my voice sounded, as twangy and hearty as my stepmother Bet’s.
Sweating like a pig.
Now on the streetcar going to Queenie’s place I couldn’t stop sounding stupid. I said, “Are we still downtown?” The high buildings had been quickly left behind, but I didn’t think you could call this area residential. The same sort of shops and buildings went on over and over again—a dry cleaner, a florist, a grocery store, a restaurant. Boxes of fruit and vegetables out on the sidewalk, signs for dentists and dressmakers and plumbing suppliers in the second-story windows. Hardly a building higher than that, hardly a tree.
“It’s not the real downtown,” said Queenie. “Remember I showed you where Simpson’s was? Where we got on the streetcar? That’s the real.”
“So are we nearly there?” I said.
She said, “We got a ways to go yet.”
Then she said, “‘Way.’ Stan doesn’t like me saying ‘ways’ either.”
The repetition of things, or maybe the heat, was making me feel anxious and rather sick. We were holding my suitcase on our knees and only a couple of inches ahead of my fingers was a man’s fat neck and bald head. A few black, sweaty long hairs clung to his scalp. For some reason I had to think of Mr. Vorguilla’s teeth in the medicine cabinet, which Queenie showed me when she worked for the Vorguillas next door. That was long before Mr. Vorguilla could ever be thought of as Stan.
Two joined teeth sitting beside his razor and shaving brush and the wooden bowl holding his hairy and disgusting shaving soap.
“That’s his bridge,” Queenie had said.
Bridge?
“Bridge of teeth.”
“Yuck,” I said.
“These are his extras,” she said. “He’s wearing his others.”
“Yuck. Aren’t they yellow?”
Queenie put her hand over my mouth. She didn’t want Mrs. Vorguilla to hear us. Mrs. Vorguilla was lying downstairs on the dining-room couch. Her eyes were closed most of the time, but she might not be sleeping.
When we got off the streetcar at last we had to walk up a steep hill, trying awkwardly to share the weight of the suitcase. The houses were not quite all the same, though at first they looked like it. Some of the roofs came down over the walls like caps, or else the whole second story was like a roof, and covered in shingles. The shingles were dark green or maroon or brown. The porches came to within a few feet of the sidewalk, and the spaces between the houses seemed narrow enough for people to reach out the side windows and shake hands. Children were playing on the sidewalk, but Queenie took no more notice of them than if they were birds pecking in the cracks. A very fat man, naked from the waist up, sat on his front steps staring at us in such a fixed and gloomy way that I was sure he had something to say. Queenie marched on past him.
She turned in partway up the hill, following a gravel path between some garbage tins. Out of an upstairs window a woman called something that I found unintelligible. Queenie called back, “It’s just my sister, she’s visiting.”
“Our landlady,” she said. “They live in the front and upstairs. They’re Greeks. She doesn’t speak hardly any English.”
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