" Before the Change "

by Alice Munro

 "Before the Change" appeared as the seventh story in the collection  The Love of a Good Woman (1998).
The book includes the following stories:

• "The Love of a Good Woman"
• "Jakarta"
• "Cortes Island"
• "Save the Reaper"
• "The Children Stay"
• "Rich as Stink"
• "Before the Change"
• "My Mother's Dream"

  This short story is in fact letters combined together to make it in a story. The letters are written by a young woman who writes to a Dear R.  Right at the beginning we know that it’s taking place in 1960 since her father had just got a television and they are watching Kennedy debate Nixon.

            She starts her first letter with her arriving home and explains that her father bought himself a television and placed it in a weird place, the dining room. She tells him that nobody bothered to ask for how long she would be home and that instead of kissing her father at her arrival, she hugged Mrs. B, the woman working for her father.

            “R. Lots for me to do here and not time to – as they say – mope.” She explains that she wants to paint the waiting-room and change the reader’s Digest for new magazines but her father refused the painting “The smell the next day would upset too many stomachs”. The only thing she was allowed was to change the old magazines for new ones. But even then her father said there would be complaints and that patients would miss there jokes they remembered, she didn’t care. After that she wanted to put order in his filing cabinet and the minute he saw her, he told to leave it alone.

            She tells him that Mrs. B. asked her “Where’s that Mr. So-and-so you were supposed to be engaged to?” and that she responded that she imagined in Toronto, and then continues explaining that Mrs. B. had seen them on Christmas walking outside, but the thing is Mrs. B. didn’t know their conversation. They were outside to get away from the house so that they could continue their fight.

            Then she explains that Mrs. B. started working for her dad when she left for school in Ottawa, that before her they had a young woman she liked, but she married, or work in war plants. When she was nine or ten she asked her father “Why does our maid have to eat with us? Other people’s maids don’t eat with them?” and he said that if she didn’t like it she could go eat in the woodshed. So she tried to make conversation with Mrs. B. and laughed about it at school.

             She makes him remember the first time they saw each other. He looked at her like he remembered her from somewhere. She was in the class that he had to make a lecture because the teacher was sick. He hesitated to say hello so she said “The former King of France is bald” and example he had given about a statement that makes no sense.

            She talks about her father’s patients, noisy grubby patients, children and mothers and old people in the afternoon and quieter ones in the evenings. She tells him that she used to spy on then when she was young, sitting near a pear tree but she grew tired of it.

            Along the story she learns that her father did abortions, and soon after that Mrs. B. gets hurt and his father asked her to help him with a patient. So she sees how the abortion goes and tells Robin all about it. She tells him that one morning she was drinking her coffee with her father and told him their story. That she was pregnant once had a baby but gave it in adoption. She never knew what gender and what the baby looked like. She went for a long time explaining that she had gone in a fight with Robin because he wanted her to have an abortion and she couldn’t do it. When she finished her story her father wasn’t moving, just staring at her and at that moment Mrs. B. came in and yelled “What are you doing sitting there? What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see the man is dead?” Her father just had a stroke and died not long after that.

            So she tells Robin that her father didn’t have any money in bank. She had the house in heritage but nothing else. And soon she found out that Mrs. B. just bought a brand new car. She figured that her father gave her all his money before his death, she just laughed about it.

            At the end she sends Robin her love and tells him to take care of himself, says it feels akward to send love by letter and she ends the letter by telling him her quote “Remember – the present king of France in bald.”