Alice Munro’s Queenie

Alice Munro’s Queenie, from London Review of Books

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n15/alice-munro/queenie

11,653 words

 27 pages printed out (5 pages in London Review)

Here we have another wonderful Alice Munro story about young women and friendship, a story that feels so vividly detailed and true, that we wonder if it’s autobiographical. Who knows? I always feel as if Munro has reached back into her youth and is describing “real people” she knew intimately. But this just a credit to her writing. She brings these characters so vividly to life by giving them such specific, concrete details, that we think these characters could only be based on real people. I suspect that she borrows details from real life people, but then the story and the characters take on shapes and lives of their own so successfully that the story becomes entirely a work of fiction.

On to the story of Alice Munro’s dissatisfied, reaching, thoughtful, observant young women.  The characters here, the protagonist Chrissie and the antagonist, Queenie, her stepsister from her father’s second marriage, are both at important points in their lives. Queen is newly married, and doesn’t want the narrator to call her Queenie anymore because her new husband might object. Chrissy is going to visit her for the first time in several years. This is how the story opens---with pointed dialogue. 

“Queenie said, ‘Maybe you better stop calling me that,’ and I said, ‘What?’"

“Stan doesn’t like it,” she said. “Queenie."

This is an intriguing way to start a short story: Who is Stan, we want to know? And why does he get to decide what Queen is called? This brings us to what always has to be our next question: Why is the writer writing about today? Well, today is the day the narrator has gone to see her stepsister, who is now married to someone she once called Mr. Vorguilla. That’s interesting, and a bit unsettling. Queen has changed in appearance too, and a character coming upon a sudden change, at the beginning of a short story, is a great idea. It answers the question, ‘Why today?” Why is Chrissy writing about today? Because today is the day she went to see her stepsister for the first time in years, and she was startled by the sight and the circiumstances she was living in.

Note the great, specific details of the narrator and Queenie's first meeting. We see Queen for the first time, along with the narrator:

“It was a worse surprise to me to hear her stay ‘Stan’ than to have her tell me to call her by her right name, which was Lena. But I could hardly expect her to go on calling him Mr. Vorguilla, now that they were married, and had been for nearly two years. During that time I hadn’t seen her, and for a moment when I saw her in the group of people waiting for the train at Union Station, I hadn’t recognized her. Her hair was dyed black, and puffed up around her face in whatever style it was that in those succeeded the beehive. Its beautiful corn-syrup colour---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 purely shadow, made her eyes seem smaller, not larger, as if they were deliberately hiding. She had pierced ears now, gold hoops swinging from them…”

This level of detail helps us see the story’s title character, vividly. We know something is wrong---Queenie’s beautiful, long, blonde hair is gone and her eyes, which most women want to make larger, look smaller.

On page 2, Munro begins a subtle flashback, to a time when the narrator remembers Mr. Vorguilla’s yellow teeth, razor, shaving brush and “possibly hairy” shaving soap. These are great, disgusting details, and remind the reader that both girls once called Mr. Vorguilla “Mister” and there was a time when Mrs. Vorguilla was still in the picture. This is intriguing---what happened? Did Queenie seduce a married man whom the narrator found disgusting? Where did Mrs. Vorguilla go? These unanswered questions push us along and we will find out the answers to them soon enough.

Some of what Munro does so well here and elsewhere is to establish neighborhoods via smells, sounds, and vivid physical descriptions of buildings and their residents. As the two young women get off the streetcar, “trying awkwardly to share the weight of the suitcase…” the narrator tells us what she sees. “Some of the roofs came down over the walls like caps, or else the whole second storey was like a roof, 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 peeking in the cracks. A very fat man, naked from the waist up, sat on his front staring at us in such a fixed and gloomy way that I was sure he had something to say to us. But Queenie marched on past him.  She turned in partway up the hill, following a gravel path between some garbage cans…”

This is great, visual description. And then we get this unsettling but memorable piece of news:“It turned out that Queenie and Mr. Vorguilla shared a bathroom with the Greeks. You took your roll of toilet paper with you---if you forgot, there wasn’t any. I had to go in there at once, because I was menstruating heavily and had to change my pad. For years afterwards, the sight of certain city streets on hot days, certain shades of brown brick and dark painted shingles, and the noise of streetcars, would bring back to me the memory of cramps low in the belly, waves of flushing, bodily leakage and confusion…The cot in the sun porch was where I was to sleep. Close outside the windows the landlord and another man were fixing a motorcycle. The smell of oil, of metal and machinery mixed wit the smell of ripe tomatoes in the sun. There was a radio blaring music out of an upstairs window.” This is wonderful, specific memorable detail. Perhaps unpleasant to come upon---limited access to toilet paper, menstrual cramps and pads, the smell of oil and the sound of a radio blaring---but you won’t forget it, and it all establishes a mood----Queenie is living in difficult, noisy, crowded, smelly circumstances, and the narrator will not have great memories of visiting her.

What’s also important to note here is that even though the narrator isn’t happy about the life she’s sees Queenie inhabit, it’s great material. A character who is in reduced circumstances, married to a difficult man (or woman) makes for an intriguing story, especially when that character has known a better life. We learn a bit about the fun the narrator and Queenie had together as children (which we learn on pages 4-7 when we read that Queenie’s mother Bet married the narrator’s father, and then Queenie ran off with Mr. Vorguilla, a much older man who she works for, a week or so after his wife died.) It’s not clear yet whether this story is a tragedy or not, but we would be surprised if Queenie had a fairy tale ending. No matter. The sadder, more difficult stories tend to be more interesting to read and often much easier to write.

On pages 8-9, Mr. Vorguilla makes his entrance and he’s not particularly appealing: “(Queenie) half got up, as if to touch him, but he veered toward the sink…” This is a great gesture---he doesn’t want to be touched by his wife. Coupled with what he know about his fake teeth and the fact that he doesn’t want Queenie to be called Queenie, we begin to suspect that this marriage is a difficult one and the narrator is there to witness it. And to reinforce this impression, Munro gives us this flashback to Mr. Vorguilla, when he was still married to Mrs. Vorguilla, teaching music at school and giving piano lessons at home: “He ran a glass of water and drank it all down, standing with his back to us. Exactly as he used to do when Mrs. Vorguilla and Queenie and I were sitting at the kitchen table in that other house, the Vorguillas’ house next door. Mr Vorguilla would come from a practice somewhere, or he would be taking a break from teaching a piano lesson in the front room. At the sound of his steps Mrs. Vorguila would have given us a warning smile. And we all looked down at our Scrabble letters, giving him the option of noticing us or not. Sometimes he didn’t. The opening of the cupboard, the turning of the tap, the setting of the glass down on the counter, were like a series of little explosions. AS if he dared anybody to breathe while he was there.” (page 9)

It is clearly unfortunate that Queenie married this man. At this point, we are 1/3 of the way through the story, and done with the first act. Is there enough here to keep us reading? I think there is. At this point, we want to know: What kind of man is Mr. V. and why does Queenie stay married to him? We want to rubberneck and look deeper inside of this marriage.

On pages 11-13, we learn that Queenie failed her year at high school, went to work for the Vorguilla’s when Mrs. Vorguilla became sick, and that after Queenie and Mr. V. married and moved to Toronto, they had to sell some of the nicer furniture, in order to make ends meet. Queenie found work at the movie theater and was trying to make ends meet.  And then, on page 15, we get to the stressful heart of the story. In a 27-page story, this is towards the end of the second act (pages 10-18) and a great place for tension to rise to a crescendo. Stan accuses Queenie of getting drunk and losing a Christmas cake. He insists she gave the Christmas cake to Andrew, a dental student who had come to their holiday party. He moves to hit her (page 16):

“He got up and came at her with his hand raised, saying not to tell him that he’d been drunk, never to tell him that. Queenie cried out, ’I won’t. I won’t. I’m sorry.’ And he didn’t hit her. But she began to cry. She kept crying while she tried to persuade him. Why would she give away the cake she had worked so hard to make? Why would he not believe her? Why would she lie to him?

“Everybody lies,” Stan said. And the more she cried and begged him to believe her, the more cool and sarcastic he became.

“Use a little logic,” he said. “If it’s here, get up and find it. If it isn’t here, then you gave it away.”

 Queenie said that wasn’t logic. It didn’t have to be given away, just because she could not find it. Then he came close to her again in such a calm half-smiling way that she thought for a moment he was going to kiss her. Instead he closed his hands around her throat and just for a second cut off her breath. He didn’t even leave any marks. ‘Now,’ he said. “now---are you going to teach me about logic?’”

This is difficult material to read but read on we do. We’re smack in the middle of the story and by this point, we want to know: What happens next? On page 17, Stan stops speaking to Queenie. He pretends she doesn’t exist. He won’t have sex with her. Finally, she breaks down, begs Stan to forgive her, says she must have given the cake to Andrew, and they make up by having sex (page 17.) Stan is a manipulative monster and Queenie is stuck with him. (And on page 18, we learn that Queenie finds the cake on the back porch but never tells Stan.)

By this point, we feel for Queenie. But Queenie doesn’t seem terribly put out by it. “Her voice which had been so woeful in the bad parts of the story was now sly and full of laughter, as if all the time she been telling me a joke, and throwing out the cake was the final, ridiculous point of it…Well you and me are very different Chrissy,” she tells the narrator. Very different. ‘ She sighed. She said, “I am a creature of love.” And, what about our narrator? How does she feel? “I had to pull my head out of my hands and turn around and look at her.” She is appalled. But different strokes for different folks. And what can she do to help her stepsister? Very little, especially given that Queenie’s mother and Chrissy’s father want nothing to do with Queenie.

Over the next few pages, the narrator gets a job at a drugstore and is fired. She goes home to Queenie (page 22): “Queenie was in the kitchen, wearing another of her skimpy dresses, and all her make-up. She had bangles on her arms. She was setting tea-cups on a tray. I was dizzy for a moment coming out of the sunlight, and every inch of my skim bloomed with sweat.” We learn that Stan sometimes go through Queenie’s purse (bottom of page 22) so she has to hide letters in her underpants and receive them in a secret mailbox. (As we’ve discussed, secrets, lies and deceptions are great for stories.)

On page 25, we learn that “Queenie ran away again.” We’re almost at the end of the story now. Are we surprised that Queenie ran away from Stan? Upon first reading this story, I was. I was half-expecting Stan to kill her. So I was glad and relieved that she ran off with another man. As for the narrator, how does this impact her? Against all odds, she continues a Christmas card relationship with Mr. V. As for Queenie, the narrator never sees her again. Little is made of this tragedy (and it is a tragedy, that two young women, who were close family and related, if not by blood, then by true attachment to each other). The narrator flashes forward. On page 26, we learn that she has married and had children and her children are grown up and her husband retired. She’s old now, as she “tells us” this story. She thinks she has been seeing Queenie in various locations: “She wore a spotty suede jacket that time and she did not look either prosperous or well. Another time she was stopped at a crosswalk, leading a string of nursery school children on their way to the swimming pool or the park. It was a hot day and her thick middle aged figure was frankly and comfortably on view, in flowered shorts and a sloganed T-shirt.

The last and strangest time was in a supermarket in Twin Falls, Idaho. I came around a corner carrying the few things I had collected for a picnic lunch, and there was an old woman on her shopping cart, as if waiting for me. A little wrinkled woman with a crooked mouth and an unhealthy looking brownish skin. Hair in yellow-brown bristles, purple pants hitched up over the small mound of her stomach---she was one of those thin women who have nevertheless, with age, lost the convenience of a waistline. The pants could have come from some thrift shop and so could the gaily coloured but matted and shrunken sweater buttoned over a chest no bigger than a ten-year-old’s.

The narrator looks at her and then ignores her. Then, she goes back in the store to find her long-lost stepsister. “Then in the parking lot I made an excuse to my husband, said I’d forgotten something, and hurried back into the store. I went up and down the aisles, looking. And in just that little time the old woman seemed to have gone. She might have gone right after I did, and be making her way along the streets of Twin Falls. On foot, or in a car driven by some relative or neighbor, or even in a car she drove herself. It was possible but hardly likely that she was still in the store, and that we kept going up and down the aisles, just missing each other.”

What a sad ending. Two step-sisters, who had once spent so much time laughing and living together as girls, and then as adults, Queenie trying to help Chrissy get a job in Toronto, and Chrissy dreaming of ways to rescue Queenie from her difficult marriage, and us, as readers, becoming very invested in both of their stories (though I did feel more invested in Queenie’s trajectory than I did with the narrator’s.) Ultimately, these two semi-sisters end up as utter strangers to each other, the narrator having no idea what ultimately happened to Queenie, but knowing that in some way, they have abandoned each other.

This is an intricately detailed, intensely absorbing, disturbing and ultimately surprising story about women, friendship, marriage and the unpredictability of life. God is in the details here and by the end of the story, we have come to know and admire Queenie, despite her many flaws, and I suspect that Munro wants us to wonder: What happened to Queenie?