Read Online Runaway by Alice Munro - Free Book Online

She lowered her eyes to her book.
    “Ah,” he said, as if things were opening up in a comfortable way. “And how far are you going?”
    “Vancouver.”
    “Me too. All the way across the country. May as well see it all while you’re at it, isn’t that right?”
    “Mm.”
    But he persisted.
    “Did you get on at Toronto too?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s my home, Toronto. I lived there all my life. Your home there too?”
    “No,” said Juliet, looking at her book again and trying hard to prolong the pause. But something—her upbringing, her embarrassment, God knows perhaps her pity, was too strong for her, and she dealt out the name of her hometown, then placed it for him by giving its distance from various larger towns, its position as regarded Lake Huron, Georgian Bay.
    “I’ve got a cousin in Collingwood. That’s nice country, up there. I went up to see her and her family, a couple of times. You travelling on your own? Like me?”
    He kept flapping his hands one over the other.
    “Yes.” No more, she thinks. No more.
    “This is the first time I went on a major trip anywhere. Quite a trip, all on your own.”
    Juliet said nothing.
    “I just saw you there reading your book all by yourself and I thought, maybe she’s all by herself and got a long way to go too, so maybe we could just sort of chum around together?”
    At those words,
chum around
, a cold turbulence rose in Juliet. She understood that he was not trying to pick her up. One of the demoralizing things that sometimes happened was that rather awkward and lonely and unattractive men would make a bald bid for her, implying that she had to be in the same boat as they were. But he wasn’t doing that. He wanted a friend, not a girlfriend. He wanted a
chum
.
    Juliet knew that, to many people, she might seem to be odd and solitary—and so, in a way, she was. But she had also had the experience, for much of her life, of feeling surrounded by people who wanted to drain away her attention and her time and her soul. And usually, she let them.
    Be available, be friendly (especially if you are not
popular)
—that was what you learned in a small town and also in a girls’ dormitory. Be accommodating to anybody who wants to suck you dry, even if they know nothing about who you are.
    She looked straight at this man and did not smile. He saw her resolve, there was a twitch of alarm in his face.
    “Good book you got there? What’s it about?”
    She was not going to say that it was about ancient Greece and the considerable attachment that the Greeks had to the irrational. She would not be teaching Greek, but was supposed to be teaching a course called Greek Thought, so she was reading Dodd again to see what she could pick up. She said, “I do want to read. I think I’ll go to the observation car.”
    And she got up and walked away, thinking that she shouldn’t have said where she was going, it was possible that he might getup and follow her, apologizing, working up to another plea. Also, that it would be cold in the observation car, and she would wish that she had brought her sweater. Impossible to go back now to get it.
    The wraparound view from the observation car, at the back of the train, seemed less satisfying to her than the view from the sleeping-car window. There was now always the intrusion of the train itself, in front of you.
    Perhaps the problem was that she was cold, just as she had thought she would be. And disturbed. But not sorry. One moment more and his clammy hand would have been proffered—she thought that it would have been either clammy or dry and scaly—names would have been exchanged, she would have been locked in. It was the first victory of this sort that she had ever managed, and it was against the most pitiable, the saddest opponent. She could hear him now, chewing on the words
chum around
. Apology and insolence. Apology his habit. And insolence the result of some hope or determination breaking the surface of his loneliness, his