Character Analysis: The Shining Houses

ALICE MUNRO

(1931- )

The Shining Houses
Mary sat on the back steps of Mrs. Fullerton’s house, talking — or really listening
— to Mrs. Fullerton, who sold her eggs. She had come in to pay the egg money, on her way to Edith’s Debbie’s birthday party. Mrs. Fullerton did not pay calls herself and she did not invite them, but, once a business pretext was established, she liked to talk. And Mary found herself exploring her neighbor’s life as she had once explored the lives of grandmothers and aunts — by pretending to know less than she did, asking for some story she had before; this way, remembered episodes emerged each time with slight differences of content, meaning, color, yet with a pure reality that usually attaches to things
Mrs. Fullerton had no doubts or questions of this kind. How was it possible, for instance, not to take seriously the broad blithe back of Mr. Fullerton, disappearing down the road on a summer day, not to return?
“I didn’t know that,” said Mary. “I always thought Mr. Fullerton was dead.” “He’s no more dead than I am,” said Mrs. Fullerton, sitting up straight. A bold Plymouth Rock walked across the bottom step and Mary’s little boy, Danny, got up to give rather cautious chase. “He’s just gone off on his travels, that’s what he is. May of gone up north, may of gone to the States, I don’t know. But he’s not dead. I would of felt it. He’s not old, neither, you know, not old like I am. He was my second husband, he was younger. I never made any secret of it.
I had this place and raised my children and buried my first husband, before ever
Mr. Fullerton came upon the scene. Why, one time down in the post office we was standing together by the wicket and I went over to put a letter in the box and left my bag behind me, and Mr. Fullerton turns to go after me and the girl calls
Mary shook out her last cigarette and left it with her, saying she had another package in her purse. Mrs. Fullerton was fond of a cigarette but would not accept one unless you took her by surprise. Baby-sitting would pay for them,
Mary thought. At the same time she was rather pleased with Mrs. Fullerton for being so unaccommodating. When Mary came out of this place, she always felt as if she were passing through barricades. The house and its surroundings were so self-sufficient, with their complicated and seemingly unalterable layout of vegetables and flower beds, apple and cherry trees, wired chicken-run, berry patch and wooden walks, woodpile, a great many roughly built dark little sheds, for hens or rabbits or a goat. Here was no open or straightforward plan, no order that an outsider could understand; yet what was haphazard time had made final. The place had become fixed, impregnable, all its accumulations necessary, until it seemed that even the washtubs, mops, couch springs and stacks of old police magazines on the back porch were there to stay.
Mary and Danny walked down the road that had been called, in Mrs.
Fullerton’s time, Wicks Road, but now was marked on the maps of