Five Points: What Happened to Maria?

(I only have this story in Swedish, so I can't quote from it in an English-speaking blog. I hate making translations of translations. My apologies.)

I was deeply shocked by this story. I know I shouldn't be; sexual abuse happens all the time. Yet there's something even more disturbing about a fat girl who pays boys to have sex with her, and the boys blackmailing her. It's not exactly rape, or prostitution, but it comes close to both of those things, and Maria was only 13. And of course, like so often in these stories, the girl is found out and disgraced. To add insult to injury, her parents sue her for stealing. She ends up in an institution, all alone, while the boys are never held accountable. They all lie for each other, and no one can prove anything.And maybe no one wants to believe it of their own boys; Maria is, after all, an immigrant and a stranger to the town. There's something callous and scary about it all, a dark side of human nature. And they say the old days were innocent and simpler times. (Although I love Munro for never depicting them that way in her stories.)

It also disturbs me that Brenda, upon hearing the story, seems to focus only on one thing: Maria's attractiveness or lack thereof. She ponders that Maria could be pretty now. That would fix everything, wouldn't it? The scars of the sex and being abused by the boys, of her parents abanadoning her, the rough years in the institution. And one must ask why 13-year-old Maria would want to pay boys for sex in the first place. Maybe she was a victim of sexual abuse or incest, which led to overly sexualized behavior. Maybe that accounts for the weight as well - an eating disorder brought on by trauma. (Although I must add that fat isn't always the result of some mental problem.) What is her life like when she comes out of an institution, shunned by her family? It's likely she turned to prostitution, unless they were able to give her some good therapy. And I doubt they were.

The story is full of disturbing details. Even before Maria's parents abandoned and sued her, they had already put her in a role far too heavy for a 13-year-old. She was in charge of the store, in charge of finances. She went to school and worked late into the night. So her life, even before the sex, must not have been very good. Maybe she never got to be a child. It could be a cultural thing, or an old-timey thing, but it still reeks of abuse to me. And if they did this to Maria, what did they do to Lisa who stayed with them? Did she take on the same role?

I feel that as a woman, Brenda should be siding with Maria, openly condemning the boys' behavior. Perhaps thinking of Maria's looks is a distraction. Perhaps she's too horrified to think about what it must be like to be Maria. Or is it just because this is the olden days, and women used to be more allowing when it came to men's sexuality?

Also, Brenda's lover Neil is one of the men who abused Maria, even if he doesn't admit it at first. Surely Brenda can tell that this is the very reason he tells the story. It's not just his younger brother - which would probably be bad enough, too close for comfort - but Neil himself who did it. He seems to be ashamed of it now at least; he shares it as a regret. But he did do it.

As Neil recounts the story, the couple - adulterers, like in so many Munro stories - have their first fight. The fight might mean that Brenda judges Neil more than she lets on, and Neil has to respond by acting like a sexist jerk. It's perhaps significant that he says Brenda has a fat ass (like fat Maria?).

There are so many layers to this story. I see myself saying "might" and "perhaps" a lot, and I can't really say anything for certain. It's an utterly fascinating, disturbing story. I choose to believe Munro is a feminist and is using this story to say that men do horrible things to women and get away with them, that society will judge a whore but not the man who uses her services. But I can't be sure of even this. Munro might just be saying nobody's perfect; like Neil, everyone has a skeleton in the closet and you can't have an easy adultery. I doubt she'd be that simplistic about it, but who knows?

Who is Munro anyway? Who is any of us? Almost all of her stories make me ask these questions. This is why I love her.