Reflecting a fictional timeline into the reader’s world adds another layer of credibility to the tale.
It’s that much easier to imagine the characters in “Labor Day Dinner” taking shape, when you’re reading it as Labour Day weekend approaches.
Structurally, the story is complex, although at first glance it is simple, beginning with the arrival of a family for a holiday dinner and ending with their departure.
At the beginning of the story, Roberta “thinks how ugly the corn looks — a monotonous, coarse-leaved crop, a foolish army”.
At the end of “Labor Day Dinner”, the corn is an offering, like the gibbous moon, something dark and a symbol of terror and thanksgiving, simultaneously.
In between that arrival and departure, the history of Roberta’s relationships is dabbled throughout like the paprika garnishing the potato salad.
The dinner is an event, pageantry in a country farmhouse in Grey County. When George and Roberta and Eva and Angela arrive at Valerie’s house, they “are costumed in a way that would suggest they were going to four different dinner parties”. Each is acting with a different intent.
Angela and Eva, at seventeen and twelve, have dressed themselves out of a box of old curtains found in the upstairs of George’s house.
It’s plausible enough, but the symbolism of wearing curtains is palpable: what is on display, what is concealed from view, what is altered when one knows there is an audience in attendance. It adds a disturbing sense of heightened awareness to the story.
By the end of “Labor Day Dinner”, Roberta is either still acting or no longer acting: the reader is unsure, as is Roberta herself.
“She yawns, and there is a private sound to her yawn. This isn’t tactics, though she knows indifference is attractive. The real thing is. He can spot an imitation; he can always withstand tactics. she has to go all the way, to where she doesn’t care. Then he feels how light and distant she is and his love revives.”
Roberta is poised on the edge of caring and not caring, of once having cared and of no longer caring.
“Labor Day Dinner” unfolds in an evening of nearly’s and almost’s, against a backdrop of once’s.
Roberta thought “her skin looked like a piece of waxed paper that had been crumpled into a tight ball and then smoothed out”.
An apparition “fills the air right in front of them the way a big flat fish will glide into view suddenly in an aquarium tank”.
What is transitory, what endured.
What is annihilation, what mercy.
What is loved, what lost.
“Labor Day Dinner” may make you grateful for the absence of a Labour Day Dinner to attend.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, beginning with with Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You and Who Do You Think You Are? (The Beggar Maid). I aim to read through her work to date. She is one of my MRE authors.
The next in The Moons of Jupiter is “Mrs Cross and Mrs Kidd”; one story will be discussed on each Thursday. Please feel free to join in, for the series, or for a single story
Now if only you’d been reading it over dinner, Sandra! I peeked at the next collection today and — short of travelling to Miles City, Montana — I don’t see any of that kind of synchronous potential from scanning the chapter titles, but who knows what will arise in content!
The quotes you’ve shared are perfect; I, too, especially appreciated that line of George’s suggesting that he wasn’t dismissing his first impressions either. What you’ve mentioned about the “erratic gravitational patterns” also brings another layer of meaning to the end of this story: hits and near misses…talk about erratic. And, with that in mind, I’m exceptionally curious about the (last) title story now!
Just finished reading Labor Day Dinner on Labour Day: neat piece of synchronicity. As always, impressed by Munro’s insights (“At first Roberta kept an idea of the whole place in her mind – all the things that had been done, that were being done, and that were yet to do. Now she doesn’t think of the work that way – she has no general picture of it – but stays in the kitchen and does jobs as they arise.”) and humour (“Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people,” says Valerie moodily.”) I most particularly appreciated Munro’s observations on George’s changing vision of Roberta: “courageous, truthful, without vanity” changes to “touchiness, tearfulness, weariness, such a threat of collapse he cannot imagine.” Then his conclusion: “But the first impression is worth respecting he thinks.” I liked this character as Munro wrote him. Coral Ann Howells in Alice Munro (Contemporary World Writers series) writes that Moons of Jupiter’s eleven stories ” ‘orbit’ around one another in shifting relationships analagous with the apparently erratic gravitational patterns of the satellites of the planet Jupiter.” Having come back (thanks to your inspiration) to Munro after an extended absence, I am anxious to catch up with you by going back to the first story. Also looking forward to Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd.