Storystorm

[Warning: this Storystorm contains a story spoiler. If you haven't read Alice Munro's “How I Met My Husband,” you can do so here. Then come right back, ok?]In the afternoons I babysit for a twelve-year-old girl.If you're a woman and you're reading this, I know you just drew your breath. I know you did because you heard “girl” and “twelve years old” and you remembered that awful time when you were twelve years old and lonely and your skin went slick like melted cheese and you fell in love with a boy whose name you can't remember and everyone except you started smoking pot and sneaking liquor from the top shelves of their parents' cabinets and feeling each other up behind the bleachers and you lost all of your friends and you felt like no one understood you and you hated everyone.Being a girl and being in middle school is maybe the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone.So when the girl I babysit talks to me about her friends or boys or how much she hates school, I want to click my tongue and shake my head and say, “Honey, I know,” and “It gets better.” But when I do, when I try to interrupt her impossibly paced recounting of her day, her eyes glaze over and she moves onto the next story: her friend who got a note from a boy or how the girls in her grade are broken up into three groups based on popularity, group A, B, and C. And I don't blame her. Most of the time, whether we are twelve or twenty-nine, we can't see much beyond our limited perspective—the here, the now, the what-I-am-feeling-in-this-moment. Our perception is our reality, so when someone suggests something different—that none of this will matter in the long run, that it will be something you laugh about, something you write about casually, seventeen years later, in a blog post—it is impossible to see the things that consume our whole lives today as things that could one day be insignificant.Except if that someone is Alice Munro. Munro's stories are all about perspective, shining a far-reaching light on our otherwise nearsighted lives. In “How I Met My Husband,” for instance, the narrative progresses in a way that is comfortable and even predictive. Especially if this is the first Munro story you've read, you might read it as fairly straight forward, its conversational tone, prophetic title, and first person narrator pulling you through the story like a calm current. Considering the story is titled, “How I Met My Husband,” the story you are being told is the one you perceive to be important: Edie and Mr. Watters meeting, Edie baking him cakes, Mr. Watters telling her she is beautiful and taking her into his tent. Even when Mr. Watters's fiancé shows up, you still anticipate that Mr. Watters will become Edie's husband. Even when he runs away without telling anyone where he is going, he promises Edie that he will write, and so we, like Edie, anticipate Mr. Watters' letter. Even when we are on the last page of the story, waiting with Edie for that damn letter to arrive, we tell ourselves it has to be Mr. Watters who comes around and redeems himself to Edie even though he cheated on his fiancé and left town without a word to anyone and is a total shit bag because there are only so many sentences left and love stories work that way, right? Right?But then, in the last two sentences—THE SKILL OF THIS, THE MASTERY—the story is upended, and we learn that Mr. Watters is not the man Edie marries, but rather the mail carrier who comes each day to deliver her disappointment. The mail carrier? Yes. The mail carrier, who has been interpreting Edie's presence at the mailbox, her occasional smiles and greetings as she waits for Mr. Watters's letter, as her pursuing him all along.Good, right?These sudden dips, these delightful turns through time, are what I love so much about Alice Munro's work. They force us to see that what we think matters now, what we think is the entire story of our lives, is only a blip in the story of our entire lives. “How I Met My Husband” was first published in Alice Munro's collection Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You in 1974.