Alice Munro, “How I Met My Husband”

We moved into the “Love and Hate” section with “The Storm,” but it was more “Lust and
Heat.” So here’s a fun love story.

Munro uses a first person protagonist narrator, but there’s a little twist. Edie tells her
story basically from the perspective of the innocent fifteen year old, occasionally adding
a more mature perspective.

Edie’s young, rambling voice is established immediately on the first page as she moves
casually from one topic to another, adding information seemingly willy nilly as it occurs
to her: “the first close-up plane I ever saw,” “Joey was his name,” “like any doctor,”
“where the fairgrounds used to be….”

The advantage is that Munro can “have her cake and eat it too.” That is, she can have the
young narrator with all her innocence and naiveté most of the time but allow the adult
narrator to show mature understanding when it’s appropriate, as when she says “That was
just when the trend was starting of town people buying up old farms, not to work them
but to live on them” (4). The adult voice ends the story of course.

As Loretta Bird arrives, Edie betrays some of her standards or prejudices. She notes that
her employers, the Peebleses, thought Loretta Bird “was a country-woman, they didn’t
know the difference. She and her husband didn’t farm, he worked on the roads and had a
bad name for drinking …. and couldn’t get credit at the HiWay Grocery store” (10).

Though Edie likes Mrs. Peebles, she comes up short in another of Edie’s judgments:
“’Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,’ my mother used to say, but Mrs.
Peebles operated differently” (11). And later Edie knows that her mother, listening to
Mrs Peebles complain, could only wonder “what on earth it would be like to have only
two children and no barn work” (23).

In my previous four paragraphs, note how often we see that times, standards, people,
“things” are changing. This isn’t a major theme as in “A Rose for Emily,” but don’t miss
the point.

The general changing times motif mirrors the new experiences which Edie faces in the
short amount of time the story covers: the airplane, the long dress she tries on, getting
caught in it by Chris Watters, “necking” or “petting” with Chris, her first crush, meeting a
“city woman,” being called a “Loose little bitch,” misunderstanding and then learning the
word “intimate.” A few days filled with unforgettable moments for the innocent fifteen
year old.

The plot thickens as “the other woman” arrives. The instant Alice Kelling introduces
herself as “Mr. Watters;’ fiancée, Edie’s jealousy flames. Reread paragraphs 94 and 112,
for example. Later she watches the two arrive at the house that night, admitting she
didn’t know what she thought she was going to see (116). But at the end of the
paragraph, her memories of conversations with Muriel Lowe make it clear that, however
innocent or naïve, her thoughts are sexual.

The next day in an act of subconscious Freudian symbolism, she takes a cake to Chris.
Already indicating he’s leaving, he begins kissing her and then she says he “rolled on top
of me and we were sort of rocking together” (143). But fortunately for her, Chris decides
he can’t take advantage of her naivete (Alcee and Calixta in Asumption) and literally
splashes cold water on them both.

He promises to write and flies off. Alice returns, finds Chris gone. How many times has
he “flown the coop” (couldn’t resist, sorry) and she tracked him down? When she
arrived, admitting she was “chasing after him,” he prophetically responded, “You’re
going to spend a lot on gas that way” (114).

Surely recognizing but refusing to admit that Chris avoiding her, Alice attacks Edie
savagely. The misunderstanding over “intimate” is cleared up and Edie is sent to her
room.

And now begins waiting for the promised letter from Chris.

At this point were you beginning to wonder what the title had to do with the story? As
Edie begins to tell her conversations with the mailman, did you say “Ohhhhhh”?

Finally she decides “If there were women all through life waiting, and women busy and
not waiting, I knew which kind I had to be. Even though there might be things the
second kind of women have to pass up and never know about, it is still better” (198).

With that decision the story reaches one of its major issues. Obviously Edie can’t go on
waiting the rest of her life for the letter that never will come. But, how long
can/should/must we wait for the thing we thought we wanted, the thing we thought was
going to happen, the thing, person, we had to have? How long before we “move on”?

There is of course no set answer. If your “significant other” decides one afternoon that
the two of you need “more space,” you probably shouldn’t hit on the Domino delivery
person that night. But how long do you wait for the “other” to come back to you? How
do we know how long? After discovering that the calculus requirement will prevent you
from getting that engineering degree you wanted, what new path, plan, do you take? See
the first sentence of this paragraph.

A second issue, and this can be stated as a theme, is that things don’t always go as we
expected, as we hoped. I think it was John Lennon who said, “Life is what happens while
we’re making plans.” While we’re all been crushed at the moment something didn’t
work out, we also can look back at a plan or a relationship we had in the past and be very
happy it didn’t work. And sometimes great things happen serendipitously. But was it
really just a “fortunate accident” or was it “predestinated”? Easy answer. We can’t know.