Dainty Monstrosities: Transference in Alice Munro’s “Vandals”
A Fiction Review/Essay by Michael Greenstein
Alice Munro’s short story, “Vandals,” begins with a letter written by Bea Doud and addressed to her younger neighbour Liza, but never delivered: “Liza, my dear, I have never written you to thank you for going out to our house (poor old Dismal, I guess it really deserves the name now) in the teeth or anyway the aftermath of the storm last February and for letting us know what you found there.” The storm is not simply meteorological, for the pathetic fallacy transfers to the vandalism in Dismal, as well as the traumatic tempest within Liza. The story’s pluralized title refers not only to Liza and her husband Warren who vandalize the property of Bea and her partner Ladner, but also to Ladner who in the past had abused the bodies of Liza and her brother Kenny. In other words, the recent acts of vandalism act as post-traumatic retribution against Ladner who had molested Liza as a child; he is the teeth of the storm, and she bites back in the transference and counter-transference between Bea and Liza.
Written in quotation marks and addressed in inverted syntax, the letter hovers between intimate endearment and a more formal, distanced approach to its serious subject, and between an oral, dramatic tone and a written document. Bea’s unfinished and undelivered letter is purloined by herself – in effect, “never written,” but rather re-written after Edgar Allan Poe. To name the house “Dismal” is to draw attention to its poor old etymology of “bad days,” but also to the displacement of its function as a noun for swamp. The fall of the house of Ladner or Dismal and this purloined letter place Munro squarely in Poe’s gothic tradition. Bea thanks Liza and her husband, for she suspects that he was the one “to board up the broken window to keep out the savage beasts, etc.” She falsifies details, for the savage beasts are within the house in the et cetera of Ladner. Her abrupt transfer to the Bible – “Lay not up treasure on earth where moth and dust not to mention teenagers doth corrupt” – prepares for the presentation of Liza’s turn to Christianity. Yet it is an adult who is corrupt in his violation of children. Gothic moth and dust corrupt Munro’s text, which is filled with modes of transference between a motherless daughter and a childless woman. Munro’s shifting perspectives and pronouns, abrupt changes in time frames, and hidden and revealed messages participate in fictional transference.
The opening paragraph concludes with two exclamations framing a question: “I hear you are a Christian now, Liza, what a splendid thing to be! Are you born again? I always liked the sound of that!” If Liza is baptized as a shortened form of Elizabeth, then Bea as truncated Beatrice becomes the “thing to be” – a being whose humanity is called into question. The ontological Bea likes the sound of being born again, the delivery from the womb into lurking screams of torment and the silence of moth and dust. Secular Bea lords it over Liza’s Christian rebirth. She has to come to terms with her complicity in the past, which is couched in the return of the repressed and the dust disturbed: “Oh, Liza, I know it’s boring of me but I still think of you and poor little Kenny as pretty sunburned children slipping out from behind the trees to startle me and leaping and diving in the pond.” The innocent children are burned by experience in Ladner’s cauldron, and slip out during rebirth, while “boring” assumes a second meaning of Bea probing into Liza’s life. In the short story’s uncanny family furnishings and open secrets Bea is not the only one to be startled by little disturbances, transference, and dislocation. No one is at home in this house of fiction.
Munro vandalizes time as well as space, disordering present and past events in cubist sequences like “animal tracks in straight lines and loops and circles.” Bea pulls back from her remembrance to focus on the immediacy of Ladner’s surgery: “Ladner had not the least premonition of death on the night before his operation – or maybe it was the night before that.” Bea’s uncertainty about exact timing and her inability to finish writing this letter call into question her reliability, which applies equally to Ladner who “did not think about being mortal.” Morality and mortality come into play in the failure of his “simple bypass,” which points to larger forms of bypassing the truth in “Vandals.” The letter writer examines the nature of “calamity.” Bea mistakes not only the perpetrators of this calamity, but also its nature: “the odd thing was it just looked natural to me.” The inverted world order is natural for her: “What would seem unnatural would be to get to work and clean it up.” She fails to clean up the mess from the past and the present; she prefers instead “to light a match and let everything go up in smoke, but I imagine that if I did that I would find myself locked up.” In the story’s conflagration she would be incarcerated and incinerated, for she has been locked up in her body and emotions. In the story’s finale and transference, Liza locks up and atmospheric smoke recurs. Unlocking conscience and consciousness is a prelude to vandalizing Munro’s house of fiction in the compression of short genre and small-town Ontario.
In the same way that she doesn’t touch her vandalized house, she also fails to cremate Ladner. Instead, “I just put him here in the Doud plot to surprise my father and my stepmother.” The plot of burial and short story overlap, for each contains bodies that are buried in different ways in life’s and death’s surprises. This quick visit to the underworld leads to an abrupt detour of the subconscious: “But now I must tell you, the other night I had a dream!” Exclamation and telltale imperative are balanced, because Munro’s characters are tellers of truths and lies, compelled to tell and withhold through deceptive secrets. She dreams that she was “around behind” the Canadian Tire Store – two adverbs and prepositions that locate the self with respect to place, yet circumvent and dislocate the dreamer. She is on her way of interpreting dreams that include her “annual load of salvia and impatiens” – floral equivalents of salvation and impatience, destination and the rushed route to get there. This annual burden stretches to “Seven years sure goes by in a hurry!” – that exclamation answered once again by a rhetorical question: “Is it because of what you might politely call the conduct of my life?”
The readerly “you” politely calls the conduct of her life, while she shifts to an interpretation of her own dream, which has something to do with seven biblical years, but which she sees differently. She has come to the plastic tent for Ladner’s bones since he had been buried seven years earlier. In a series of questions, she wonders about the meaning of this custom, which she ascribes to “Greece or somewhere”: “Is it pagan or Christian or what?” In this gothic parable she interprets dreams, bones, and the meaning of pagan: “I’ve lived around here all my life but I still get this look – is it the word pagan?” An etymologist as well as an anatomist, Bea knows that pagan derives from pays, rustic, and fasten – each of those connotations of place within plastic bags in a plastic tent. Necromancy borders on necrophilia since Bea is still attracted to Ladner’s physique without flesh: “thinking of Ladner’s strong leg bones and wide shoulder bones and intelligent skull all washed and polished by some bath-and-brush apparatus no doubt concealed in the plastic tent.” This concealed cleaning apparatus is one more means of posthumous catharsis, which contrasts with the polluting vandalism at Dismal house. Indeed, whereas Ladner is a taxidermist arranging the way of all flesh, Bea is a paleontologist sifting through the fossils of fantasies. Her annual load of salvia or impatiens becomes the perennial burden of happy shades: “I was so happy, though, to receive my load and other people were happy too.”
Too much happiness in Munro’s fiction is a state of questionable felicity. Her protagonist’s bagged load of bones displaces annual flowers. Yet her interpretation of these polished bones remains as incomplete as the letter itself, another conveyor of ambiguity. “This seemed to have something to do with my feelings for him and his for me being purified, but the idea was more interesting and subtle than that.” Subtlety and interest remain under wraps. Not only does she speculate about graveyards being overcrowded, but she also mistakes the identity of the bones, which belong to Liza rather than Ladner. “What little girl? I thought, but I was already getting confused about everything and had a suspicion that I might be dreaming.” Her suspicious dream is one instance of transference involving Bea, the reader, and other characters. The seven-year hiatus switches from Ladner to Kenny, who had died in a car accident. Placing the accident in parentheses, Bea conflates the later fatal accident with the earlier abuse of the siblings: “(I hope it doesn’t hurt you, Liza, that I mention this – also I know that Kenny was no longer little when the accident happened.)” Bea has already hurt Liza and these words would wound her again.
Coming out of her dream, she thinks that she must ask Ladner about its meaning, even though she knows “that Ladner’s body is not beside me and that the sense of him I have, of his weight and heat and smell, are memories.” Even in his absence, he is very much present in her lingering necrophilia. As she comes out of her dream, she relives her nightmare: “I feel as if I had a couple of wooden planks lying across my chest, which doesn’t incline me to get up. A common experience I’m having. But at the moment I’m not having it, just describing it, and in fact I am rather happy sitting here with my bottle of red wine.” Those wooden planks suggest a kind of crucifixion as well as a vampire experience in “Vandals,” where red wine symbolizes blood and a false catharsis or escape from the burden of planks, plants, and Ladner. Her “common experience” is doubly denied in that it is hardly common and in that she isn’t “having it.” Her “happy” state is dubious, for she is not inclined to get up. Her missive goes missing, and her mirror represents a messy state that contrasts with Ladner’s order and control.
Just as Bea comes out of her dream sequence and interpretation, so the narrative emerges to reflect upon her incomplete letter. “In her big, neglected house in Carstairs, she had entered a period of musing and drinking, of what looked to everybody else like a slow decline, but to her seemed, after all, sadly pleasurable, like a convalescence.” The house has been neglected in more ways than one; Carstairs points to modes of transportation from snowmobile to Canadian Tire, while stairs focus on the storeys within the sedimented house; and the similes of decline and convalescence bracket the oxymoronic “sadly pleasurable” state of being in the distinction between fiction and life. Given the story’s preoccupation with death, it is not surprising that Bea’s family name is Doud. Furthermore, repeated references to Bea’s M.A. degree point not only to her mastery of the arts of language, literature, and deception, but also to her abbreviated motherhood flanked by a stepmother and her own inability to act as a mother to Liza.
Her initial meeting with Ladner is mediated through Peter Parr, who represents “decency and good faith and good humor” – in short, an orderly life in contrast to Ladner’s sub-par abusiveness. Parr’s wife is in a nursing home since she suffers from multiple sclerosis, “and most understood his need to have a steady girlfriend.” In this marital replacement Munro is attuned to the majority’s opinion in the lives of small-town Ontario, where understanding is also questionable. Indeed, the narrator follows this judgment with her own parenthetical examination of girlfriend: “(a word Bea said she found appalling.)” “Vandals” is filled with appalling words and actions that speak louder than bracketed and silenced language. Bea’s “checkered career” makes her unsuitable for Parr and vulnerable to the likes of Ladner. Divorced, Bea has carried on a number of love affairs: “They were sweet, they were sour; she was happy in them, she was miserable.” This checkered sentence captures her bittersweet life, and the transition from black and white into technicolor meanings: “But she still felt the first signal of a love affair like the warmth of sun on her skin, like music through a doorway, or the moment … when the black-and-white television commercial bursts into color.” This progression from soft skin to a burst of color is sexual, but also sinister in her encounter with Ladner who hardens skins.
Ladner has a “single name” in keeping with his status as a “hermit”: “He had turned his back on corrupt and warring and competitive society.” Not only is he corrupt, but he turns his back on himself, turning back taxidermy and innocent children, while his side has been burned during World War Two. He bought up four hundred acres of unproductive land, for he is a twisted lander – anagrammatic and enigmatic. He takes his wounds out on the world. Bea eventually learns that the details about him are “untrue or only partly true.” Their paths cross since he left England, and she lived in England, but soon divorced. Yet their initial meeting is a confrontation. “Ladner came around the house and confronted them. It was Bea’s impression that he had a fierce dog with him. But this was not the case. Ladner did not own a dog. He was his own fierce dog.” Bea’s impression is wrong, as she ends up with a ferocious canine. Objective correlatives abound where land and place are interchangeable in the cartography of mediated seeing. Peter Parr says to Ladner, “I’ve heard so much about this wonderful place you’ve made here,” but the owner is more concerned with putting people in place rather than in place itself. A man who had been wounded in the worst way wounds everyone around him.
Her encounter with Ladner puts an end to Bea’s relationship with Peter Parr, which is “now more or less dust and ashes,” for it is not in her perverse nature to be good. She actually sends letters to her friends to explain this turn in her life. She writes that “she would hate to think that she had gone after Ladner because he was rude and testy and slightly savage, with the splotch on the side of his face that shone like metal in the sunlight coming through the trees.” The stain of Cain marks Munro’s post-Eden world after the fall, as triple adjectives build toward a savagery that taints the landscape. Her self-awareness in no way mitigates her guilt, which is exhibited in parallelisms of thought that seem rational, but are not: “She would hate to think so, because wasn’t that the way in all the dreary romances – some brute gets the woman tingling, and then it’s goodbye to Mr. Fine-and-Decent?” The dreary romances transfer to Bea once the savage beast tingles her.
She has to come to terms with her own animal instincts and attraction to indecent Ladner. Bea’s tainted history takes a turn for the worse: “No, she wrote, but what she did think – and she knew that this was very regressive and bad form – what she did think was that some women, women like herself, might be always on the lookout for an insanity – that could contain them.” From the negative opening she regresses towards a contained insanity, contained like so many other containers and their contents arranged and rearranged throughout the short story. Her repetitions of “insanity” are a means of rationalizing but not exorcizing that insanity. Ladner’s insanity is big enough to satisfy her, whereas Peter Parr’s “was not a suitable insanity.” For the first six months with him she explains her condition and wonders about the other women who had been with Ladner who hadn’t let them stay. He jokes that none of them had any money. And the first subsection of the story ends abruptly with the “punch” line of rhetorical witnesses in italics and parenthesis: “A joke. I am slit top to bottom with jokes. (Now she wrote her letters only in her head.)” Her anatomical slit is no joke, as she cuts herself off from writing letters to others. Munro’s prose contains her insanity: Bea’s slit self is no laughing matter, as she seeks to justify the ways of man and woman to herself and her reader.
Driving out to Ladner’s place a few days after she had first met him, Bea examines her “state” of “Lust and terror.” She feels sorry for herself for being a victim of desire, while she admires his “work at some hard job, when he is forgetful of you and works well, in a way that is tidy and rhythmical, nothing like it to heat the blood.” His head shines silver “like the metallic-looking patch of skin” that slits her from top to bottom in spurts of hot blood. Touring his place, she spots a pair of swans circling each other, “their bodies serene but their necks mettlesome, their beaks letting out bitter squawks” – as if mimicking the fraught human relationship. The sound of “mettlesome” barely echoes Ladner’s metal patch of skin near his neck, while the bitter squawks capture the abuses of Bea, Liza, and Kenny. These live birds have their counterparts in “a glass-fronted case containing a stuffed golden eagle with its wings spread.” The captured predator is in “an old gutted freezer, with a window set in its side and a camouflage of gray and green swirls of paint.” Camouflaged and contained, Munro’s characters are simultaneously displayed and concealed through the swirls and rituals of her style. The freezer is gutted, as are the animals and the human victims of Ladner’s habitat. When Ladner says, “I use what I can get,” we know the nature of his abuse.
Sentences glide between the external natural world and the encased taxidermy, constantly displacing both. “He showed her the beaver meadow, the pointed stumps of trees the beavers had chewed down, their heaped, untidy construction, the two richly furred beavers in their case.” Munro’s prose chews down and heaps up tidy and untidy constructions, as she arranges and rearranges Ladner’s toxic taxidermy. “Then in turn she looked at a red fox, a golden mink, a white ferret, a dainty family of skunks, a porcupine, and a fisher, which Ladner had told her was intrepid enough to kill porcupines.” The dainty family of Kenny and Liza precedes Ladner’s carnivorous fisher which is courageous enough to kill the bearer of quills, writing instruments that pen unsent letters. The list grows in size, culminating in a small bear. “He couldn’t afford to keep the big ones, he said – they brought too good a price.” Like the women who couldn’t stay with him because they didn’t have any money, so the large bears form part of his financial calculations. Ladner preys on the little ones who can’t fetch a high price.
Munro’s ecosystem progresses from mammals to birds – wild turkeys, ruffed grouse, a pheasant with a bright-red ring around its eye. Like the red fox and wolf poised to howl, the blood-coloured ring around the eye is anything but sanguine; instead, it suggests a circumferential mode of seeing, a peripheral vision that takes in everything while remaining blind to other things, so that the artifice is a trompe l’oeil, a misleading map of reading. Ladner’s taxonomy meets the eye, but blinds it through his metallic-looking patch of skin. A semiotics of a disturbed, controlling psyche: “Signs told their habitat, their Latin names, food preferences, and styles of behavior. Some of the trees were labelled too. Tight, accurate, complicated information” – all written within the confines and compression of a short story. The writing signs are on the gothic, cubist wall where boundaries between domestic order and wilderness blur and break down.
“Other signs presented quotations” to match the opening biblical reference, for the Bea devil can cite Scripture, while Ladner quotes Aristotle (“Nature does nothing uselessly”) and Rousseau (“Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.”) Rousseau’s state of nature is tempered by compassion, whereas Ladner’s temper is ruled by repressed passion. When Bea stops to read these signs, it seems to her that Ladner is impatient, “that he scowled a little.” Understatement underscores the subtext and subconscious. “She no longer made comments on anything she saw.” Disoriented, she “couldn’t keep track of their direction or get any idea of the layout of the property,” since she has lost her moral compass. The vegetable world mirrors the animal: “yellow skunk cabbage bursting out of bogholes” follow the dainty family of skunks. The skunk cabbage emits an unpleasant odour, which attracts pollinators: Bea identifies herself to Liza and Kenny as “Bea. Bzzz,” for she is a pollinator who stings and spreads Ladner’s polluted words and ways.
Ladner is a fallen Adam who names his lost paradise, while Bea is Eve who fails to identify growth in “an old apple orchard” with “treacherous tree rot underfoot.” He directs her to look for mushrooms; he finds five, which he doesn’t offer to share. “She confused them with last year’s rotted apples.” She has tasted from the treacherous tree rot without life or knowledge. The path becomes increasingly treacherous as they ascend Fox Hill cluttered with little barbed hawthorn trees in bloom. “Mind the branches, they have thorns,” warns Ladner, for one branch of the hawthorn is The Scarlet Letter. When Bea asks him if he has children, he laughs because he has “had” kids from across the road.
After this tour and ascent, the allure of her silk underwear wears off. “By this time lust was lost to her altogether, though the smell of the hawthorn blossoms seemed to her an intimate one, musty or yeasty.” The sounds in the sentence create a certain buzz for the pollinator who transfers senses. Munro’s floating signifiers transfer meaning from character to character, undermining Ladner’s rigidity, as well as Bea’s inaction.
Paradise and lust are lost, and hardly regained. Bea stops fixing her eyes on a spot between his shoulder blades, and no longer wills him to turn around and embrace her. It occurs to her that this tour “might be a joke on her, a punishment for being, after all, such a tiresome vamp and fraud.” As a vamp, she shares in the guilt and blame of discourse and intercourse, “As later on – but not on this day – she would learn to match him with some of the same pride in the hard-hearted energy of sex.” In their match and rematch, gender equality means that Bea’s complicity is as reprehensible as Ladner’s actions. His hard-heartedness leads to his unsuccessful bypass.
Once inside the house the smell of hides greets her. The hides and the hidden: skins in piles, folded inside-out, ghoulish holes everywhere. “He told her the body would be built up with papier-mâché.” Ladner’s paper fits into Munro’s montage with its pastiche of past and present, and abrupt shifts of focus and settings. Later or sooner, “Ladner fitted the skin around a body in which nothing was real. A bird’s body could be all of one piece, carved of wood, but an animal’s larger body was a wonderful construction of wires and burlap and glue and mushed-up paper and clay.” Munro deconstructs Ladner’s construction, inverting and reversing “Vandals” from a series of taxidermic perspectives. The paper books in his house cover histories of wars that reflect “his orderly solitude, his systematic reading and barren contentment.” The control freak arranges everything – the “layers of information” for other readers to decipher. Although Lolita does not sit on the shelves, it is embedded in “Vandals.”
When Bea is about to leave Ladner’s place, they stand in the open doorway, and she looks back on that “moment as the real beginning,” but real beginnings in Munro’s fiction are jumbled because of the looking back and forth. Her threshold vision is problematic because he says that she is a person he could live with, but he can’t say that he wanted to live with her. Desire is thwarted, even as it is indulged. “He could say, but he didn’t.” This refusal to say applies to other characters in the reticence of responsibility and repression. She has to learn not just about taxidermy but also about taciturnity: “she had to learn … what he would say and wouldn’t say.” The moral imperative of what ought to be said disappears in silence. “It seemed that she had to be cured of all her froth and vanity and all her old notions of love.” Any cure merely covers up festering wounds: she may learn how to cure animal skins, but fails to cure herself and Liza.
The sudden shift from third-person narration to Bea’s first-person words in italics demonstrates Munro’s technique of displacement and transference of point of view: “One night I got into his bed and he did not take his eyes from his book.” Neglect and separate beds reveal her shame as she crawls out of his bed. In the morning, however, he gets into her bed “and all went as usual.” She concludes her internal monologue in a kind of dead end: “I came up against blocks of solid darkness.” Bea’s dark block switches to third-person narration, and these abrupt shifts address not only Munro’s technique, but also the identity of her characters who are presented through cubist lenses. “She learned, she changed. Age was a help to her. Drink also.” She seeks catharsis in the bottle for all of her bottled up emotions. Once they settle into a routine of numbness, Ladner “took a kinder comfort from her body.” He takes from Bea’s body, and once again the narrative cuts abruptly like a scalpel to the hospital bed, which ends part I of the story: “On the night before the operation they lay side by side on the strange bed, with all available bare skin touching – legs, arms, haunches.” This strange bed is a deathbed where anatomy is destiny, and skins are both vulnerable and guilty right to the touch of haunches.
Part II
Part II opens with another twice-told tale of “Liza told Warren that a woman named Bea Doud had phoned from Toronto.” (In parentheses Liza says that Ladner is not actually Bea’s husband.) The operation is identified as a heart bypass not just because the story bypasses matters of the heart, but also because heart failure shunts to Ladner’s house “Because the pipes might burst.” Liza knows where the key is, which is the reason Bea has called her. When Warren asks Liza if Bea and Ladner had met in church, she replies, “Let’s not be funny” – another reminder that jokes form part of Munro’s sinister humour, as well as Liza’s and Warren’s religious background. Although Bea and Ladner did not meet in church, Liza and Warren do meet at the Fellowship of the Saviour Bible Chapel in Walley. That Liza works in the government liquor store reflects on Bea’s drinking habit as well as Kenny’s teenage death caused by a drunk driver.
Liza and Warren snowmobile to Ladner’s property through an ominous route of animal tracks and piled snow, the “snowmobiles carving the trails and assaulting the day with such roars and swirls of snow.” If the assaulted day recalls the trauma of yesteryear, then the swirls of noise are synaesthetic binders of sight and sound echoing the swirls of paint that camouflage the crime. Ladner’s landscape is painted in demonizing layers of brushstrokes “choked with snow” returning cinematically to the primal scene: “Black trunks against the snow flashed by in a repetition that was faintly sickening.”
The narrative lens swoops from the black swamp at a distance to a closeup of Liza directing Warren “with light blows of her hand on his leg to a back road full as a bed, and finally hit him hard to stop.” Transferred epithets, crossing roads, and transgressive beds all belong to Munro’s canvas of transference. The full bed revives the strange bed where Bea and Ladner have their final touching, as well as the primal scene of Ladner’s abuse of Liza. Her attempts at humour cover up her childhood trauma: she “kids” Warren about the house she used to inhabit and explains the sign “Lesser Dismal” as an allusion to a swamp in the United States called Great Dismal Swamp. “A joke.” Other signs are equally serious – “No Trespassing.” “No Hunting.” “Keep Out.” – even though Ladner had trespassed on his own property by hunting Liza and Kenny in their childhood.
The key to the back door is in an “odd place,” befitting the rest of the property and meaning of the story: it is in a plastic bag inside a hole in a tree – the plastic bag carrying not only the key but also Bea’s earlier bag of bones. The hole in the tree has tar around it to keep out squirrels. Liza points out a profile emphasized by a knife following cracks in the bark – a profane site of violation where taxidermied victims are tarred and feathered in symbolic dislocations: “A long nose, a down-slanting eye and mouth, and a big drop – that was the tarred hole – right at the end of the nose.” Key and clue are on the tip of the tongue, right under the nose, and big drop of the traumatic fall and tarred transference. “Pretty funny?” says Liza, deflecting from the earlier tragedy. She says that the house is as cold as a grave, and changes the exclamation “Hell” to “help,” a traumatic transference. Warren wonders if they should take their boots off to walk “around” – that recurrent preposition and adverb of talking around the subject. Liza responds with “What’s the matter with good clean snow?” The matter with her image is that the blank slate covers earlier sullied snow where the trace of trauma never entirely disappears.
Liza begins her act of vandalism and retribution for what had been done to her. Emptying drawers, she makes a funny noise – “an admiring cluck of her tongue, as if the drawers had done this on their own.” Grammatical ambiguity equates tongue and drawer, as if the drawers are capable of clucking and emptying simultaneously in the onomatopoeia of trauma. As Liza trashes Ladner’s place, Warren turns his back in time through television; and the narrator turns her vision back to when Warren and Liza went to a dance with its own ripples: “it was Liza who slid under, right away, it was Liza who caught the eye – the vigilant, unhappy eye – of the Youth Leader, who was grinning and clapping uncertainly on the sidelines.” This ocular dance performance in flashback comments on Liza’s exclamation – “Bull’s-eye!” – when she shatters the whisky bottle against the stove, thereby shattering the bully perpetrator from the past. Warren watches her “slithery spirit,” as she tears her way through the music, “supplicated and curled around it … and blinded herself to everything around her.” Her frenzy blinds her momentarily to the traumatic adverb and preposition – the ubiquitous “around.”
During Liza’s rampage she smashes a liquor bottle against the window and cracks the glass. A pool of liquid streams out of the bottle onto the floor: “Dark-green blood.” Liza’s disorder counters Ladner’s order. “The window glass had filled with thousands of radiating cracks, and turned as white as a halo.” As the glass bottle empties but remains intact, the window fills with patterns of release and disruption. Liza’s attack runs through Ladner’s controlled collection. In contrast to Ladner’s heavy-handed approach in the past, “Liza stepped delicately among the torn, spattered books and broken glass, the smeared, stomped birds, the pools of whisky and maple syrup and the sticks of charred wood dragged from the stove to make black tracks on the rugs, the ashes and gummed flour and feathers.” The inventory goes on as taxonomy replaces taxidermy in this dance of dainty monsters. Another flashback to Warren’s childhood depicts his vandalism of finger painting with ketchup on wallpaper, “Beware! Blood!” In this running history of bloodlines décor is disrupted, and the writing on the wallpaper is a pentimento for underlying patterns from hidden pasts. Now Warren uses tomato sauce and writes “Beware! This is your blood!” These exclamation marks displace the burst pipes and failed bypass. With her Magic Marker Liza writes above Warren’s “fake blood”: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” The Bible travels in the story from treasures to wages to comment on Ladner’s affordability and Bea’s complicity.
After this orgiastic outpouring Liza recites peacefully “Liza Minelli, stick it in your belly!” and she doesn’t know whether the boys at school had said it or whether she made it up herself. In the aftermath she utters “Bea?” in a “soft, hurt, hesitant voice,” and then turns the question to an exclamation, “Oh, Bea!” As if in a trance she recounts the destruction over the phone. Her hurt voice describes the vandalism including sticks out of the stove and ashes, for the charred wood makes black tracks on the rug. After she hangs up the phone she says to Warren: “It was here …. I already told you what she did to me.” In this exchange Bea’s complicity is exposed and the motive transferred and dislocated in sending Liza to college. As in so many other scenes, a nervous laughter ensues: “That started them both laughing.” The laughing matter covers up tears of tragedy and trauma.
Act II concludes with Warren asking her if she cares if Ladner “croaks,” and in the transference of ventriloquism “Liza made croaking noises to stop him being thoughtful. Then she touched her teeth, her pointed tongue to his neck.” Bea is not the only vamp in “Vandals” where punctuation alternates between croaking question marks and the puncture of exclamation marks on the tip of the tongue.
Part III
Part III opens with another scene of instruction: “Bea asked Liza and Kenny a lot of questions.” Included in the list are favourite TV shows, colours, animals, and earliest memories. Although there is laughter among the characters, Liza thinks that Bea is lying. When Ladner introduces Bea to the children as Miss Doud, she shifts her identity, as if swallowing “something surprising,” to “Bea. Bzzz. My name is Bea.” She has swallowed part of Ladner and fairy tale romances, captivating Liza who “could not stand the thought of her ever going away.” Motherless Liza attaches herself to daughterless Bzzz.
The narrative flashes back to the first time Liza and Kenny had been on Ladner’s property, when he confronts them “like a murderer on television, with a little axe, from behind a tree.” He is indeed a murderer of innocence. When he asks them if they can read his signs, Kenny replies “A fox run in here.” Not only do the children fail to read the signs correctly, but they mistake the fox’s habitat because their father had told them that “Bugger’s living in Ladner’s bush.” Hardly a Freudian slip for buggery, the word also echoes Kenny’s earliest memory of “eating boogers.” Ladner corrects them by identifying the den as the habitat, and insulting them as dumb kids who watch TV all day. Den displaces bush garden for Munro whose father ran a fox farm. The father in this story warns his children that if they cross Ladner he will skin them alive, as he does “with his other stuff.”
They watch Ladner scrape the skins. “Tanning put a poison in them so they would never crack.” The taxidermist cracks himself and the children. “Ladner fitted the skin around a body in which nothing was real,” in imitation of his creator who practices dermatology of the real and unreal through circuits of surrealism. The children wash their hands in Borax soap, though nothing can cleanse their indelible scars. They learn imitative disharmony – “Compan-ee!” for the blackbird and “Please-please-please, can I have a piece of cheese?” for the Jenny wren. If the blackbird’s sound rhymes with Kenny, then the wren’s is even more enticing since it contains the sound of Liza to echo the earlier Liza Minelli. Liza knows “that the swelling on a goldenrod stem contains a little white worm that can live nowhere else in the world.” Munro transfers registers from the plant world to the human and eventually silences the child: “She knew not to talk about all she knew.” There are limits to omniscient narration and the tree of knowledge.
Munro’s prismatic consciousness refracts light and time in her abrupt shifts of sequences. Breaks between subsections force the reader to stitch Liza’s goldenrod stem to Bea on the bank of the pond where Liza thinks “Like a family.” This transference of parental care in a family romance extends to the author herself. The narrator-dermatologist examines Bea’s skin with her “dim freckles, and she was just a bit too soft all over.” Little pouches collect along her jaw and under her eyes. There is a gradual unfolding of these features in almost floral details, from little pouches (more containers) that ripple to hollows that contain “shadowy damage.” Dermatological damage interacts with topographical erosion in the pond where Liza and Bea circle each other in fraught affection. “She turned around to face Liza, who had swum around behind her with the intention of splashing.” Their watery displacement transfers to aural delight in Bea’s “happy silly chant,” a triad of sounds: “Oh-woo, oh-woo, oh-woo.” Yet it is a warning sound that strikes at identities of “who” and mockingbird as Ladner mocks Bea behind her back. His body is “stiff” and narcissistic, “as if carried away with admiration for himself.” Ladner copies Bea but in an “ugly way.” Liza reacts to this mimicry and mocking of pretense, her face “trembling with the need to laugh.” This mixture of laughter with fear and trembling spreads to greater implication in Liza’s psychological damage: “Part of her wanted to make Ladner stop, to stop at once, before the damage was done, and part of her longed for that very damage, the damage Ladner could do, the ripping open, the final delight of it.” Repeatedly, Ladner slits Bea and Liza from top to bottom, the tear and torment of body and soul.
Liza kicks up “a distracting storm,” then dives down into the deep part of the pond. “Deep, deep, to where it’s dark, where the carp live.” Munro covers various species from human-avian activity to fish under water. Liza surfaces near Ladner who tries to grab her “between the legs.” This pretense and mockery point to the Jekyll and Hyde personality of a predator: “At the same time he made a pious, shocked face, as if the person in his head was having a fit at what his hand might do.” The abuser is split between head and hand, super-ego and id, so that the ego cannot fit within the confines of society. Ladner taxidermies human beings, even as he tries to arrange and control himself. The narcissistic internal transference mirrors and masks his treatment of others: “He could switch from one person to another and make it your fault if you remembered.” Munro shifts pronouns to displace characters, memory, and the representation of reality through fiction. Pronouns may be replaced by single initials carved into a beech tree: “One ‘L’ for Ladner, another for Liza, a ‘K’ for Kenny.”
Single letters become interchangeable in the alphabet’s displacement of significance. “P.D.P.” stands for “Pull down your pants!” in Kenny’s traumatic reading where he bangs his fist against the letters. Ladner tries to correct him with “a serious pretend rap on the head,” and “Proceed down path.” Ladner’s path does not really differ from Kenny’s interpretation, any more than the “pretend” of the head rap diverges from the pretend grab at Liza’s body. Munro’s pretense covers signs and meanings: the arrow that curves “around the trunk” proceeds down the path of duplicity, complicity, curving, carving, and the transfer of meaning from episode to episode in a roundabout way. “Vandals” becomes a scavenger hunt for invasive species.
Liza is entrapped in Ladner’s web: “In the secret life she had with him, what was terrible was always funny, badness was always mixed up with silliness, you always had to join in with dopey faces and voices and pretending he was a cartoon monster.” “You” implicates the perverse reader who pretends and participates in this tragedy of errors. Liza can’t face Ladner’s house as she crosses the road to her pink house, which has been painted to look as if it had a woman inside it, even though her mother is no longer present. Her house is a mess, as if to prepare for the vandalism at Ladner’s. In her bedroom she retrieves “her little bag of precious things” that is stuffed in an old rubber boot. The bag contains a stolen Barbie-doll dress and a painted wooden egg “(with a smaller egg inside it and a still smaller egg inside that)” – these parentheses containing the contents of the story within the short story.
The bag also contains a rhinestone earring that she found on the road that separates her house from Ladner’s. “The design of the earring is complicated and graceful, with teardrop rhinestones dangling from the loops and scallops of smaller stones.” For a long time, Liza had believed that the rhinestones were diamonds: her mis-identification of the jewel is accentuated by the rococo design of the earring, which in turn reflects the shape of the story. The earring in her palm is “a blazing knot” implicated in shame, guilt, and secrecy. Her secret bag contrasts with “no secret places” around the house.
Munro pays close attention to crossroads and crossing roads in her fiction, where the devil lurks in the details. “But when you cross the road – as Liza is doing now, trotting on the gravel – when you cross into Ladner’s territory.” Like the territorial fox on the property, Liza’s foxtrot transfers between herself and “you.” There is a sense of “tropical threats and complications” that carry back to her earring’s complicated design. The narrative casts a hypnotic spell through the repetition of “place” that highlights checkered pasts and hidden mystery. “In different places the sun falls differently and in some places not at all. In some places the air is thick and private, and in other places you feel an energetic breeze.” This syntactical chiaroscuro highlights contrasts of mood, transfers of senses, and modes of implication: “certain stones are set a jump apart so that they call out for craziness.” They also call out for the rhinestones of previous paragraphs, as part of “scenes of serious instruction.” All of these places culminate in a frenzied craziness: “places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.” Actions are transferred from body to landscape, geography to psyche. What has been repressed now returns in signs, letters, sounds, and touch – all the senses gathering in enclosed forms within the prison house of language’s whispers, screams, and silence.
P.D.P.
Squeegey-boy.
Rub-a-dub-dub.
Squeegey is compressed between the first and third lines, as it cleans the dirt of defilement. The trauma is constantly transferred, inscribed, and shouted from word to word. The abuser is a machine of spasms: “When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in a jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires.” Kenny and Liza feel that it is a transgression to look at him in a series of transgressions, as if innocent victims are to blame. After the “rub-a-dub-dub,” Ladner utters “Bad-bad-bad,” as if to prepare for the sudden sound of Bea Doud’s voice that follows.
Examining Liza’s gift of her earring, Bea asks her if it had belonged to her mother in another link in the chain of transferences. Indeed, Liza tells her that she could put it in a chain around her neck, a silver chain within an imaginary golden bowl and the final link in a chain of “around-ness.” Ordinary objects get displaced to symbols in the process of transference. Ladner further displaces the object of exchange by suggesting that Bea could wear it in her nose. As if repeating Liza’s earlier gestures, Bea trickles the rhinestones through her fingers. Furthermore, Bea has changed into a long dress that hangs loose from her shoulders, much as the earring hangs from Liza’s ear and almost brushes her shoulders. The two victims are almost interchangeable as mother-daughter figures in the grip of male sexuality. Bea forgives Ladner, “or made a bargain not to remember.” Bea’s bargain of amnesia becomes Liza’s memorial and testimony. The Doud pollinator would have to be transformed, however: “Bea could spread safety,” but she would need to be a different sort of woman, a hyphenated rescuer – “a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping.” Bea fails to draw the line, rescue the children, make them all good. She is blind to the truth. “Only Liza sees.” Part III ends on this note of blindness and insight where the child is mother to the woman.
Part IV
Part IV disabuses the reader of the notion that only Liza sees; only the omniscient narrator sees. Liza forgets to cover her tracks after the vandalism, and Warren knows that he has to break a window in order for it to seem that strangers had broken into Ladner’s house. “Liza locked the back door as you had to, from the outside.” Intrusive pronoun and disruptive syntax dislocate interior and exterior, and the senses in which Liza is both locked in to her trauma and locked out of childhood innocence. Rewinding the reel, she puts the key in the plastic bag and the bag in the hole in the tree. After her vandalism she tries to establish order, to put everything in the right place. Taking us back to an earlier part of the story, she wonders if a bear is still on the property. As Warren is about to tell her that bears don’t venture this far south, she doesn’t give him the time to respond since the story is about to end on a timely note – not much after three o’clock. Before that telling of time, however, they have to perform taxonomy on trees. She asks, “Can you tell what trees they are by their bark?” Munro’s trees bark in sound and inscription, on wood or paper. Warren “couldn’t even tell from their leaves,” but Munro writes the tree leaves, tells the forest from the trees whose different species contain telltale signs: “You’ve got to know the cedars …. And that one with the bark like gray skin? That’s a beech. See, it had letters carved on it, but they’ve spread out, they just look like any old blotches now.” From Bea’s unfinished letters to these carved letters that transfer to old blotches, Munro locks doors and opens secrets.
The final simile describes physical sublimation when solid matter turns to vapour, which is the equivalent of psychic sublimation in “Vandals”: “you could feel the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow.” Munro’s molecules collect darkness, as the snow smoulders across blank pages, white birch, and sullied innocence; and in the diabolical sublime, life skins the line.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
