It’s been some time since I wrote this appreciation of “Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink”. I am more and more interested in Munro’s terrific empathy for Callie – for her bravery and for her dilemma. The Intersex Society of America has a history of intersex on its website that gives Munro’s story context. (http://www.isna.org/faq/history)

The article actually helps credit Munro with her remarkable insight and intelligence regarding the human condition, intersex not being a term in common usage until after Munro wrote this piece.

What makes Munro so important is this combination: total refusal to adhere to dogma of any kind (regarding sex or anything else!) and an ease with this fact of life – that knowing is important, but what we know changes with time, and what we know is always limited by the mystery that constitutes being human.

Betsy, I’m confused. From the initial discussion of the story there is the suggestion (through wearing male clothes and “passing” as male) that Callie might be transgender, but I did not get the sense from anything in either what you or Trevor wrote that there might be reason to think Callie is intersex. Being transgender is about psychological identity and being intersex about bodily identity, so they are very different things.
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When reading the commentaries (I have not read the story) I was reminded of Munro’s famous “Boys and Girls” (which I first read in junior high school a very long time ago). There the main character is a girl who seems to clearly identify as a girl, but she wants to do the things that are traditionally only allowed for boys. Munro critiques the social construction of gender without questioning the gender identity of the character, a fairly conventional feminist critique of social roles. So with Callie I thought Munro might be thinking something similar – a girl who likes to be seen as a boy because of what it allows her to be able to do, not because she identifies as other than female. But the idea that Callie might be intersex is a whole different story. Especially given that she has sex with the two male characters, it would be odd if there were no specific commentary on Callie’s physical status. Did I miss something here?

David – Welcome! thank you for your commentary. And your doubts! Several things.

First: Munro hints at Callie being not quite right, or small, or or underdeveloped, and she also is adamant that despite being married since 20 or so, Callie has never had children. In addition, there is Sam’s doubt that his sex with her was successful, whatever he meant by that. Remember, these are virgin, provincial boys, so Callie would be able to put almost anything over on them. In addition, when Callie actually traps Edgar in her web, Edgar has suffered some kind of brain damage from the virus that sent him home.

Second: Munro is often mysterious about things. Callie is a mystery. I understand that Munro is terrifically interested in gender assigned roles. I think this story goes in a slightly different direction. After all, the story is primarily about personal determination to be an actor in your own life. Sam simply admires Callie’s ability to do that.

So, yes, I think that what you missed was the part about Callie wanted to be the captain of her own life.

Third: Intersex is a physical condition which is, in itself, mysterious, and which occurs in degrees, one way or another. I don’t think it was even a term in any common usage when Munro was writing the piece. Mostly, in the twentieth century, the condition of being born intersex was deemed to be something, like cleft palate, that should be fixed

Munro could have known about John Money, at Johns Hopkins, who was the pioneer in “fixing” intersex. The problem was, that it is easier to create a girl than a boy. If, and I only say if, Munro knew anything about this, she would have wondered about what happened when country children were not taken to Johns Hopkins. Callie was deemed a girl, but she easily passed as a boy. That could be, as you say, merely Callie assigning herself a role she was comfortable to play. Or it could have been more complex. Never doubt that Munro is anything but complex!!!

In the nineties, things changed. Attitudes toward “fixing” people changed somewhat.

Fourth, or First!!!: You have to read the story!!!! After that, get back to us!

David – I am reading the Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro at the moment. All of the 10 essayists, to one degree or another, speak to the complexity of Munro.

The last essay, by Helene Venturi, addresses Munro’s use of songs, ballads, and myth. This essay is startling and masterful. Beneath what appears to be an almost homespun but admittedly ironic narrative voice, Venturi maintains that Munro also builds a “clandestine” reality to challenge and engage the reader who is up to it.

Venturi’s analysis of of Munro’s use of song, ballad and myth reveals a mind (in Munro) that is encyclopedic, lyric, ironic, and artful at the same time. Some readers could read Munro without catching any of her allusions; only the most erudite reader would catch them all.

Somewhere Munro has said she spends months on a story and thinks a reader could spend quite a bit of time on the stories as well.

So my reading into the story what is not explicitly stated is not the reverse of what Munro intended.

I offer one other support regarding Callie’s possible intersex. Callie’s guardian (and slave-master) says that Callie was given to her. An intersex baby is one that might have been “given” away. That her guardian treats her as a slave gives both motive for running away and some explanation that the guardian does not see Callie as an equal.

Harri, your discussion is exactly the sense of it I had.

Ok, I have read the story and given it a lot of thought. I should warn people at the start that this will be long and entirely about the issues of sexuality, sexual identity, and gender as they pertain to the story. I will be going over a number of passages in some detail. If that does not interest you, you probably should stop reading this comment now. You have been warned! Let’s begin.
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In the first two paragraphs of the story we are introduced to the older Callie. She is described in ways that are unmistakably intended to indicate femininity. Twice she is associated with the colour pink. We are told about her “pinkish-blond wig” and the “jiggly balls of pink and white wool” on her sweater. Another feminine indicator is that she was “quite painted up”. We are also told she is reading a book called My Love Where the High Winds Blow by Veronica Gray. The book does not really exist, but from the title it sounds like a trashy romance novel of the type that is read more often by women than men. The one possible element of doubt in all that is the spelling of “blond”. “Blond” is the masculine spelling and “blonde” the feminine spelling. Munro’s use of the masculine spelling suggests that it is possible that the hairstyle of the wig is masculine. It’s even more interesting that the masculine “blond” is joined by a hyphen to the feminine colour “pinkish”. This could be done to subtly suggest a hyphenated duality of her gender. (By the way, I did look it up and in French the word “wig” is feminine, so Munro is not just going with a convention of referring to wigs as masculine. And when I googled “blond wig” it asked me if I really meant “blonde wig”, but not vice versa.)
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The first specific description we get of Callie in the flashback to her youth is that when she was nineteen she could have passed for twelve. It’s hard to know what, if anything, this might indicate. On the one hand, someone her age who is FTM transgender and presenting as male tends to look much younger, so that could be what is being suggested. On the other hand, to say a nineteen year old female could pass for twelve might be a polite way of saying she is short, flat-chested, and doesn’t have curvy hips. But for someone who is intersex rather than female, it is more likely that at age nineteen Callie would be appear more masculine than like a younger girl. So I’m not sure what to make of this except that it seems a better fit to the idea that Callie is transgender than to the idea that she is intersex.
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When the trio go to the skating rink, Callie wears boys’ clothes, climbs like boys do, and walks like a boy does. Munro describes them as “three boys” and the other two call Callie “Cal”. It could be that Callie is just a tomboy, although it is less usual for a tomboy to want to be thought of as actually a boy (and called by a boy’s name). It is more usual to just want to be accepted as equal to the boys and allowed to do the things boys do. So the more literal descriptions of Callie as a boy does suggest something more is going on here. The issue, however, is gender, not her sex. There is nothing about how she dresses and acts that says anything about her genetic anatomy, so there is really nothing here to lead us to think that she is intersex rather than being transgender and biologically female, as most MTF transgender people are.
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When Sam and Edgar discuss having sex with females, they literally discuss everyone before Edgar finally mentions Callie. It’s not that they see her as a sister or a friend so they don’t consider her sooner. The suggestion is that it is because they do not really see her as a girl. Sam does not resist when they talk about sex with teachers like “manish-looking Miss Lewisohn” or several “grotesque” choices. But when it comes to Callie, “the fact that she, too, was female came to [Sam] as an embarrassment. You would think he had discovered something disgusting and pitiable about himself.” Here it seems the fact they normally don’t think of Callie’s as female might call into question their own sexuality. Why would they want to have sex with Callie if they think of her more as a boy than a girl? The question of sexual identity takes a bit of a turn here. When they are working on persuading her to agree to having sex with them, they “didn’t think of stroking or flattering her as if she were a girl.” Here again Munro seems to be confirming her identity as male and their acceptance of that. It is also worth noting that Edgar seems more up for having sex with Callie and Sam needs some convincing, so it might be an indication that thinking of her as a boy is more of a dealbreaker for Sam than it is for Edgar.
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When the trio do get down to doing the “stupid business”, Callie seems to have no apprehension about them seeing her body. We get a description of how Edgar saw her genital area, and there is no suggestion that anything is unusual there. If she were intersex and not had any surgical alteration then surely she would not be so carefree about the boys seeing her naked and Edgar might have seen some indication of male genitalia. But maybe Callie was surgically altered at birth. This would explain her reaction and what Edgar did (or didn’t) see. But remember that Callie was probably born around 1915, well over a decade before any such surgical procedures had even been attempted. So if Callie were born intersex, she would still have the genitals she was born with. The sex scene seems to contradict the possibility that she is intersex.
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When Edgar begins to worry that Callie is pregnant, Sam’s first response is “She isn’t old enough”, but then he remembers her real age. Earlier, when they were trying to persuade her to have sex with them we are told “they must have known, by then, her real age, but they still treated her as if she were an imp to be cajoled”. It seems odd this repeated forgetting her age, but it does reinforce the idea that they seem to see her as a younger boy, not an older girl. And again, when Callie joins the boys on the train, we get two paragraphs reminding us that Callie is a boy. The word “boy” is used four times in just the first of those paragraphs. The realization that Callie is the boy who sat down with them is one that comes to them gradually, perhaps symbolizing the gradual understanding they came to that Callie was a boy, not a girl, after all.
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There are a couple of references in the story to Edgar and figure skating. When they are skating at the Orange Street rink we are told that he was “not so ruthless a racer – he could have done fancy skating, if boys did it then.” So there is a hint there that Edgar is not like the other boys and has some interest in defying gender stereotypes. Near the end of the story, the older Edgar watches figure skating on television. “He smiles as he watches the skaters in their twinkly outfits.” These two passages, however brief and general, seem to suggest something more feminine and less masculine about Edgar.
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Finally, we get a brief discussion of Edgar and Callie’s wedding picture. Sam realizes that the picture was not taken on the actual wedding day and with them not wearing their actual wedding clothes. The idea that the picture is a false record of their wedding suggests that perhaps their marriage was, in some sense, not a real marriage at all either.
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So looking at all this evidence I wonder what, if anything, it all adds up to. I still think that Munro could be just presenting characters who, in various ways, challenge traditional gender roles and that it’s nothing more than that. But if there is something more it seems to me that it might be this: Callie is transgender, explaining why she (he) so often dressed, moved, and acted like a boy and was seen, even by Sam and Edgar, as a boy. Edgar is gay. Suggesting that he and Sam have sex with Callie is the closest he can come to expressing his sexual interest in boys. During the time when Edgar was sick and missed school, it is possible that he and Callie developed a closer bond and a closer personal connection due to their different, but very socially unacceptable natures. When Sam and Edgar leave town, Callie comes after them because she (he) needs Edgar. They decide to get married not because they have to, but because they need each other. Their marriage is not a “real” one in the traditional sense. It is one of close companionship, friendship, and mutual understanding based on their identities. There is a love between them, but not a romantic love. This would also explain why they never had children. That’s not the kind of family they were.
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I don’t claim that this is what Munro was thinking when she wrote the story or even that it is the best way to read it. But if the issues of sexuality, sexual identity, and gender are viewed as significant to the story, it seems to me that this is the best way to understand it. There is a lot about the story that does not make sense to me (like why Miss Kernaghan makes up the story she does about Callie’s birth and why she tells it to the boys), so I am not confident about this reading. I am fairly confident that it is at least consistent with everything that is in the story and the idea that Callie is intersex is not clearly consistent, but beyond that I do think this is just speculation.

Margaret – love your comment about mental gymnastics being required when faced with a world that forces people into rigid and gendered roles.

Also loved your comment about the story portraying Sam at a moment when he poised between a variety of pairs of worlds.

Betsy, thanks for the long reply. I enjoyed it. I’ll comment on just three points. First, I was so caught up in the interpretation of the colour of the “jiggly balls” of wool it did not occur to me that they might stand symbolically as artificial testicles, suggesting issues of gender and false public ways of demonstrating it.
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Secondly, I had thought to comment before about the title of the story. I am not sure why Munro thought the moon in the rink was a significant enough symbol to use it for the title, but again the idea that it is an artificial representation of the real moon could have something to do with it. I wondered of the idea of how the moon can be used in navigation and the image of the kids skating in circles under it might be meant as a prominent metaphor. But I also wondered about the street name itself. Maybe it was just the name of a real street and Munro liked it. But your mention of authors who might have influenced her reminded me that Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson was published in 1985, almost exactly a year before this story appeared in The New Yorker. I wonder if the use of “orange” in the title is meant as an oblique reference to that book as well.
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Thirdly, you said, “Munro thus makes of you a thinking reader and to a degree, a co-writer”. Thinking reader is fine with me, but co-writer goes too far. I used the jigsaw puzzle metaphor in discussing both of the two recent stories by Yiyun Li. For “On The Street Where You Live” I said it ultimately seemed like we got a bunch of pieces from several different puzzles, so it never came together as a single complete story. For “A Small Flame” I said it seemed like this time the pieces were all from the same puzzle, but many were missing. Give me a very complicated puzzle that is difficult to solve, but don’t give me one that cannot be solved because pieces are missing. Readers who want to be invited in as co-writers tend to be people who want to show off how clever they think they are. Authors who leave gaps that readers need to fill in either don’t really have complete ideas they want to share or are afraid to give an audience a full picture they might not like. They think it’s safer to let the audience finish the story for them. So stories that are not complete puzzles generally score poorly with me. I don’t know if this story really should fall in that category or not, but I generally find when I read Munro that I am unsure why she thought the story was worth telling. She clearly has great talent as a writer, but I generally don’t really enjoy reading her.

Harri – thank you for the correction! I am embarrassed to have typoed that. I actually looked it up and then I was tired and miss typed it. So glad you caught me. I knew that it was later – but that’s a bad glitch not to have caught myself – Thanks.

David – about your carefully considered discussion of whether Alice Munro invites the reader to participate in the writing of her stories:

You remark: “Readers who want to be invited in as co-writers tend to be people who want to show off how clever they think they are.”

Maybe. But then there are people like me who well may want to be considered clever, but actually have a deeper interest in the author. Alice Munro’s style of writing has several/many aspects. One is that she layers characters one against another, stories one against another, situations one against another, truths one against another, such that the reader is left to draw their own conclusions. If you are like me, the only satisfactory way to respond to one of her stories is to write about it, write about my take on it, write about my questions, write about what the story means to me. So I don’t think I write primarily for the purpose of showing off. I write primarily for myself: to save the experience of reading the story, to identify what in it matters to me, to sort out what I do not know, to treasure what strikes me deeply.

You also remark: “Authors who leave gaps that readers need to fill in either don’t really have complete ideas they want to share or are afraid to give an audience a full picture they might not like. ”

This I must disagree with. Munro is neither afraid nor is she incomplete. She shares her vision of life almost fearlessly, given that she wrote for her entire life, steadily, steadily, steadily, on topics personal to her that would strike fear into any ordinary woman’s heart (incest, abortion, disability, madness, murder, abuse, betrayal and self delusion…).

As for being incomplete, I cannot charge her vast body of work with anything but completion. Her attitude, over and over, is that we necessarily, being human, have an incomplete perception of the truth, although with care, by paying attention, we may deepen what we know, and that ability to deepen what we know may take central importance in our lives, may play a role religion used to play. Explanation, fixed belief, dogma, ideology, or, for instance, the corset of gender roles that society imposes, are all up for question, however.

Munro has complete ideas regarding assigned gender roles, marriage, sex, sexuality, motherhood, religion, education, psychology, self-determination, sorrow, redemption, the uses of memory, and more. Part of her “complete” idea is that there are a lot of ways life skins a cat. The manner of the expression of these ideas is to often present the differing realities that these take in different people’s lives. Her point, I think, is that for different people, forces of life play out differently and have different effects and importance.

She leaves it to the reader to “write” themselves into the story – to compare their own experience to that of the characters, to judge for themselves what relationship these differing situations have for the reader. Munro has said that she early on saw herself as an outsider. One of the things she does is provide a “big sky” vision of life, and one of the things her fans may like is how this vision has room to include all types, even them.

I will admit, though, she’s tough on men. But she’s also tough on women.

Her style is that she writes in disjunctive sections, mimicking, in a way, the way the mind jumps around, or flashes around. She leaves the reader to build their web of connections between the disparate sections, much as a person is left to build a web of meaning around the disparate events that get left in memory.

So this is very general. You could respond you want these ideas in relation to one particular story. I would just remark that Sam, Callie, and Edgar (as well as Miss K.) present rich, differing ideas about sexuality, marriage, motherhood, self-determination, artistry, I am left to figure out where I fit in, or what I think of them. So I’m no outsider in her world.

Is her work complete enough for you? Maybe not. Is it complete enough for me? Maybe so, except that I would love to have years more of it.

PS The title appears to encompass differing and opposed truths: the impassioned (and possibly impossibly rigid) beliefs of the Protestant Scotch Irish who are the descendants of the “Orangemen” of 1795; the fact that the name “Orange” is preserved in the place names of everywhere these people settled – thus indicating a state of mind; the skating rink, which represents skill and work and fun and determination and youth; the “moon” which represents art, or represents fake, depending on how you look at it. The rigidity represented by the Orangemen confronts the delightful fakery of the artificial moon; the Orangemen also stand opposed to a life of art; fun also stands opposed to art, given that it would distract from the practice of the skill. And more. Just in the title. There’s also the history, the death and destruction.

PPS I love the fun of the place – its other-worldliness – its rinky-dinks.

But I will yield to you the last word. This week, despite my age, is full of obligation. I look forward to reading whatever you will respond! But have no time to write back. So you will have the last word – as do all of Alice’s readers.

Brilliant, probably encyclopedic in her knowledge but unpretentious, Munro is generous – the reader doesn’t have to be articulate or eloquent to be a “co-writer” with her. That would be me, left with inarticulate but intense wonder and vague but profound perception when I read her stories.