
“Rich as Stink”
by Alice Munro
from The Love of a Good Woman
Trevor
While children have played a role in many of Munro’s stories leading up to “Rich as Stink,” it’s been a while — a few books’ worth of stories, at least — since Munro wrote from the perspective of an adolescent girl, something we got quite often in her first collections. It’s nice — very nice — to be back. Munro’s explorations of adolescence are disturbing in profound ways, as is the case here.
“Rich as Stink” introduces us to Karin, an eleven-year-old girl who spends her school year with her father, Ted, and his wife and the summer months with her mother, Rosemary. When the story begins, Karin is getting off the plane in Toronto for another summertime with her mom.
Karin is very young, but she’s pushing up against womanhood, potentially in an alarming manner. Before she exits the plane, she applies bright red lipstick, dons a black beret, and clamps a long cigarette holder in her fingers. It’s a joke, a game she means to play with Derek, the man who spent a lot of time with Rosemary, and consequently with Karin, the summer prior. Just why Karin is looking to play not just a woman but Irma la Douce, the popular prostitute in Billy Wilder’s Irma la Douce, is not clear but it is disturbing. Derek, it turns out, is not at the airport. It’s just Rosemary waiting, tired, “bereft,” and Karin is disappointed.
At this point we don’t entirely know who Derek is, and Munro complicates our expectations when Karin asks about him and Rosemary simply says, “We aren’t seeing each other anymore. We aren’t working together.” When Karin asks if they’ve broken up, Rosemary says, “If people like us can break up.”
We learn that Derek and Rosemary had a very strange working relationship. He was writing a book, and she is an editor, so they were working together. Meanwhile, Ann, Derek’s wife, stays sequestered in her home down the street. Karin visits Ann frequently, and it is clear to us that, while Karin can sense feelings, she doesn’t always understand what spawns disappointment, regret, sorrow, etc.
What emerges as “Rich as Stink” goes on is a dark look at a young girl who, as she is at the start of the story, is adopting the roles of older, usually sexualize women in an attempt to navigate her own complicated feelings toward her mom and Derek, culminating in a terrifying sequence in which Karin has put on an old taffeta wedding dress.
Karin is caught up in something she cannot understand, though she can feel the powerful currents. What side she should move toward is unclear to her.
At this Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes — he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.
So what did I do this time?
“She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her — Karin — in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.
It’s a dangerous world Karin is waking up to. She recognizes this sometimes, even in ways others don’t. For example, on their way from the Toronto airport, Rosemary stops to get some coffee at a doughnut shop. At the counter is an old, wrinkled man.
While the women were shaking their heads and laughing, and Rosemary was picking out her almond croissant, he gave Karin a wink that was lewd and conspiratorial. It made her realize that she was still wearing lipstick. “Can’t resist, eh?” he said to Rosemary, and she laughed, taking this for country friendliness.
“Never can,” she said. “You’re sure?” she said to Karin. “Not a thing?”
“Little girl watching her figure?” that wrinkled man said.
But Karin doesn’t recognize the brutality — particularly the emotional brutality — of Derek. Instead she sides with him, has a crush on him.
It was the truth, that there were people whom you positively ached to please. Derek was one of them. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in there minds where they could keep you and have contempt for you forever.
It’s a very sad story. Ann is certainly in kept in a dark space, pushed there by contempt and knowledge that her husband is pretty much done with her. Ann’s anxiety is palpable, and it’s not just about the relationship between her husband and Rosemary. Rosemary has also feared failing Derek, but now that they’re no longer working together — quite the euphemism — she says she’s regaining her self respect. How quickly she might lose it again, since it seems she too might “positively ache to please” him.
And then there’s young Karin, aching to please also, and paying for this mess in ways she cannot imagine.
Betsy
A stunning story. The reader is born along on a stream of impending danger. How much can parents neglect their children before something really bad will happen?
“Rich as Stink” reminds me of the 1897 Henry James novel What Maisie Knew. Maisie’s wealthy parents are divorced, and she is subject to their mutual hatred, their cheating, and their neglect. She spends six months a year with one and six months with the other, and then no time with either as she chooses a more dependable guardian for herself. In “Rich as Stink,” Munro considers how a modern daughter would be able to assert herself and declare independence. Not easily. Notice, too, how the title “Rich as Stink” plays off against What Maisie Knew. One of James’s investigations was whether and how money corrupted and could it ever be used for good. Munro’s locution is so un-Jamesian! So direct. So concise. No wasted words. Money stinks.
In a lesser way, the predation of the mother’s boyfriend in “Rich as Stink” reminds me of Nabokov’s Lolita. In this story, the difference is that the predation is offhand and commonplace, whereas in Nabokov it is alien and exotic. In “Vandals,” a story from Munro’s previous collection, the predation on children is not commonplace: it is the studied work of a monster, and both the setting and the man are alien. In “Rich as Stink,” the predation is arguably the worst, given its ordinariness. And Munro makes it clear that the predation is created by the non-protection offered by the two women cultivating the predator and in the process, neglecting the child.
In Lolita, Nabokov presents predation as a form of possession, a form of slavery, and a form of mind control. Lolita never considers a means of escape. Munro, instead, votes for the inevitable spunk of an eleven year old girl. This girl asserts herself, as Lolita does not. Munro’s Karin asserts herself from the beginning and continually. But the man’s casual predation and the women’s casual neglect put Karin and her natural self-assertion continually at risk.
Does the child in “Rich as Stink” have the love of a good woman? No. Will the man in “Rich as Stink” have the love of a good woman? No.
When “Rich as Stink” opens, it’s 1974, and eleven-year-old Karin is getting off a plane in Toronto wearing a black beret and lipstick and dangling a cigarette holder from her mouth. The reader is worried about all this misplaced self-confidence making an eleven year old marked prey. Karin is disappointed not to see Derek, who is her mother’s married boyfriend. She does see her mother, looking older and looking about in a “dazed, discouraged way.” The reader registers that eleven year old Karin is somehow inappropriately attached to Derek — dressing and acting in a way that has a Lolita aspect to it.
As the situation unravels, we learn that Derek is a geologist who lives out in the bush with Ann, who is older. Rosemary, who is Karin’s mother, is divorced, and, it turns out, rich. Karin just visits her mother summers. Rosemary, despite her wealth, lives in a trailer. She has been helping Derek edit his book. Rosemary is simultaneously friends with Ann and for some time has been having an affair with Derek.
The summer before, Karin had witnessed and been drawn into fights: her mother would get hurt and would then withdraw. Derek would say he couldn’t deal with Rosemary when she “was like this.” Derek would ask Karin (the child) to deal with it. Derek would ask Karin to calm her mother down. Karin would.
In the meantime, Derek’s wife Ann has encouraged Derek to take Karin under his wing, taking her on hikes, teaching her about geology.
Karin has been quite determined to see Derek, her mother’s erstwhile writing partner and boyfriend. He’s not at the airport, and Karen asks if they’re having a fight. No, her mother replies, they “aren’t seeing each other any more.” We learn that Rosemary, who may not be glad to be free of Derek, is glad to be free of his book, which was a “tangle” and “confused.”
It troubles the reader that when Rosemary and Karin stop for donuts, there’s an old wizened man who appears to hit on Karin.
The three adults, the mother, the writing partner, and the writer’s wife, draw the child into their confidences for their own reasons. Rosemary allows her child to act the mother, calming her down, and Rosemary allows her daughter to see her making “kissy faces” behind Ann’s back. Ann, the spurned and childless wife, offers the child a kind of motherly comfort and companionship. Karin goes up to see Ann and announces herself:
It’s me, it’s me. Your lost child.
But it’s a devil’s bargain Ann has made. We hear that in the previous year, when Karin came to visit her mother, the place she liked the most was Ann’s. But Karin, the child, is privy to all the shenanigans that are going on. Karin jokes cruelly with Ann.
Can this marriage be saved?
The women seem oblivious to the fact that the child has been made aware of the adult betrayals of each other or that the child could suffer at all from her knowledge.
Derek, however, appears to the reader to want to blunt what it is that Karin knows. Neither Ann or Rosemary would ever smoke the weed that Derek offered them. But he has also offered it to Karin! And taught her how to inhale! At ten years old!
Rosemary had noticed that Karin smelled of pot. It never occurred to her that Karin was smoking it. It never occurs to her that Derek has given it to Karin, taught her, coached her, and praised her for smoking it. As a teacher, I have run into desperate parents who gave themselves moments of sanity by giving their hyperactive and unmanageable twelve year olds weed. I know this is a fact. I don’t like it at all, but it is almost understandable. But in the case of Derek giving Karin weed, we are in Humbert Humbert territory. Mind control. All the reader can see is Derek’s desire to control the child. Make her confused. Make her forget what she knows. Make her oblivious to what he is doing.
Rosemary is so engulfed in her own tidal emotions she doesn’t read what’s right in front of her. As for Ann, it’s as if she offers Karin to Derek.
Some people would describe what the three adults are doing as adultifying the child. But to me, each adult in this story is in addition a kind of predator.
Twenty pages to go. I am fed up. Rosemary needs to shape up. Needs to get her act together. Derek is a dangerous person. This is Judith Herman territory again: remember Bea and Ladner in “Vandals.” Herman’s thesis is that incestuous behavior from the father or the boyfriend directed at an innocent child occurs when the girlfriend or mother refuses to see.
Ann lets Karin try on her wedding dress.
Derek isn’t one for wedding pictures. He wasn’t even one for weddings.
When Karin sees herself in the mirror, her beauty, she thinks there’s “something fated about it, and something foolish.”
Ann wonders what Derek would say if he saw the girl in the wedding dress. Karin replies, “He’d say, What kind of stupid outfit is that?”
The reader reacts in alarm and pain. As does Ann.
But Derek comes back in the house, and they’ve invited Rosemary. Karin had overheard Derek and Rosemary:
[Derek] seemed to be teasing pleading, comforting, promising to reward her, all at once. Karin was so afraid that words would surface out of this — words she would understand and never forget — that she went banging down the stairs.”
James emphasized what it was Maisie knew, what Maisie understood. But James cannot bear to let Maisie suffer forever and rescues her with a court-appointed guardian. Munro, in contrast, faces what Karin’s knowledge and comprehension does to her. It scars her. Munro makes a point of the scarring, given that Karin ends up, end of story, in the hospital for burns suffered when her dream wedding veil catches fire.
Karin is put in the position of doing what kids do: telling the truth. When faced with a sugar coated version of her parents’ impending divorce, Karen had pointed out, “Yes, but will you live there.”
With Ann, she blurts out that she’s been watching the “lover-dovers.”
Ann and Derek and Rosemary appear to think that what Karin knows matters very little. But then Karin acts out her feelings. We’ve been warned. The story is bookended with two scenes in which Karin dons a costume that endangers her. Eleven year old Karin is traveling on the plane alone and wearing lipstick and a beret. Now, at the end Karin puts on Ann’s wedding dress, ties the veil on with a tie of Derek’s, stuffs the breasts, applies rouge. She would like to be Derek’s bride. She knows that Ann is not his true bride. She knows that her mother, with all her upsets, is not Derek’s true bride. But she also knows that she herself is not Derek’s true bride either, given she knows Derek will say, despite her beauty, “What kind of stupid outfit is that?”
But by donning the wedding dress and its veil, and by applying the rouge, she acts out the sham of marriage. She goes downstairs in her costume, the costume that the reader knows is the means she is using to confront them with the joke that they all are.
But the veil catches fire. It burns her neck, but not her face. But the burns are bad enough that she is hospitalized. When she wakes up in the hospital, she pretends it’s Ann in the room, not her mother. Karin has changed. She knows she’s different.
. . . that was what Karin had become — something immense and shimmering and sufficient [like a continent] ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out otherwise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, at any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. . . . she was on her own.
Footnote: I have just finished reading Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ Small Fry. Lisa is the illegitimate daughter of the fabulously wealthy Steve Jobs. Lisa wants a father and a mother who are completely present and she wants this with the same intense desire that Karin does. I am stunned at the similarities between Karin and Lisa. Both are utterly neglected by both of their parents. In addition, both Karin and Lisa Brennan-Jobs were assigned, as children, the job of calming their erratic and irresponsible mothers down. Both Derek and Steve Jobs allow themselves to be weird teachers, the one instructing Karin about weed, the other instructing Lisa, bizarrely, about sex. Both Lisa Jobs and Karin are subjected to being aware and almost complicit in their parents’ betrayals of their friends and spouses. And finally, the natural self-assertiveness of Karin and Lisa leads them over a cliff into self-destruction.
I would note that James cannot bear to unfairly punish Maisie the way he sometimes has reality punish his adult heroines. Curiously, life provides Lisa Brennan-Jobs a similar reprieve. She is rescued by a neighbor somewhat the way Maisie is rescued by a court appointed guardian.
But Munro’s Karin? Karin can only survive if fate allows her a mechanism that will separate herself from her mother’s abuse. And, as Munro makes clear in story after story, the job of being an eleven year old girl is to slowly separate from her mother and develop an independence that will sustain her later on. Except for this: the job of separating from the mother is so complicated and so difficult that danger and the possibility of self-destruction are part of the dive. And yet Munro insists that girls, if they are to survive, must make this leap.
Munro is a psychologist of almost terrifying insight.
SHORT PLOT SUMMARY
A precocious schoolgirl tries to navigate the relationships involved in her mother’s menage a trois.
SCORE
08/10
I really like this story but I don’t find it a dark one. Yes, the incident in the doughnut shop is succinctly and splendidly creepy. Yes, Rosemary’s religious upbringing (her ‘awful childhood’ as Derek calls it) probably amounts to what we’d call abuse these days. Yes, Derek was very irresponsible in giving marijuana to a ten year old. Yes, that’s a really horrible, life changing accident that Karin has. But I don’t find all those elements add up to a dark story.
It’s the first Munro I’ve read which is from a child’s perspective. Of course she does it wonderfully.
By the by: a short while ago I think I suggested that, despite frequently including hippies and other ‘alternative society’ figures, Munro rarely – if ever – features illegal drugs in her stories. So I was interested to be reminded that this story does indeed feature them.
THE TITLE
On my first reading I was intrigued by the title and didn’t really understand it. (‘Shirley Temple And Chips’ would’ve been a far better title, no? Ha ha.) But now I’ve had a chance to review the story again, and what I feel I missed on my initial reading(s) was the importance of the theme of loyalty. Karin’s very precocious, and one of the joys of the story is seeing how the three adults deal with this (we see all this through Karin’s eyes of course). So when Derek bluntly describes her mother as ‘rich as stink’, Karin is suddenly conflicted. Yes, she’s very drawn to Derek, anxious to gain his approval etc, but with this phrase he goes too far. He is, after all, talking about her mother – and she’s still too young to be a full-blown teenage rebel. Hence Karin nearly bursts into tears. It echoes a scene earlier, when Karin’s voice is ‘full of shame’ because again she’s conflicted – Derek testing her loyalties again:
‘ ….. Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes—he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.
So what did I do this time?
“She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her—Karin—in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.’
So by choosing ‘Rich As Stink’ as the title, Munro is highlighting the importance of this theme and its impact on Karin’s coming of age.
But the title ‘Rich As Stink’ also suddenly made me consider a possibility regarding the plot. When Karin’s looking down from the landing window at Derek and Rosemary coming towards the house, there’s a puzzling sentence:
‘Rosemary at this moment doesn’t know what to do, but thinks she doesn’t yet have to do anything. Look at her spinning around in her cage of rosy colors. Her cage of spun sugar. Look at Rosemary twittering and beguiling.
Rich as stink, he said.’
What is it that Rosemary ‘doesn’t know what to do, but thinks she doesn’t yet have to do anything’? I suggest that Derek, earlier that day, had asked her to help him and Ann out financially. Probably with Ann’s agreement – given the trouble Ann goes to over preparing the meal. And that Rosemary is intending to put off coming to a decision about this until later, after the meal, tomorrow, whenever. In the meantime she can enjoy all the attention Derek is suddenly paying her (again?). Just a suggestion! Yes, I may be speculating slightly wildly here.
By the by again. I’m a Brit and ‘rich as stink’ is not, as far as I know, a common phrase in Britain. But we certainly use “filthy rich” and “stinking rich”.
Hi Howard –
Really liked your comment that the story necessitated a second read. This is so true for me, too.
Also, really liked your observations about Karin’s loyalty to her mother and that Karin’s age makes her still liable to be loyal, or at least torn. .
Also, am really interested in your observation that Rosemary’s money is key – that Derek and Ann have asked for money and that Rosemary is tempted to be bought –
Yes, great insights, Howard.
I like that the money is in the background for us. The only thing Karin really feels is that her mom has money and that when it came up in her conversation with Derek the way he expressed it was filled with bile and resentment. He married Ann for the property; it makes sense he will continue to use Rosemary for all she has as well. I think it’s so sad because Rosemary knows this, to some extent.
Trevor, I don’t agree about Derek’s character. I think he’s quite a benign character. Munro tells us when he’s talking to Karin he’s ‘matter-of-fact’ about Rosemary’s money:
‘“Someday you will be rich,” Derek said matter-of-factly. “But not soon enough.” He was putting the camera away in its case. “Keep on the right side of your mother,” he said. “She’s rich as stink.”’
Call me naive, but I also think he only married Ann ‘for the property’ in the sense that he has a genuine (if perhaps somewhat amateur interest) in geology. Early in the story:
‘Derek said that he wished he had been a geologist because he loved rocks. But he wouldn’t have loved making money for mining companies. And history drew him too—it was an odd combination. History for the indoor man, geology for the outdoor man, he said, with a solemnity that told [Karin] he was making a joke of himself.’
When on their expedition Karin wants to take mineral samples. Derek is protective of the land:
‘Derek said she should take just one piece and that for a private keepsake, not to be shown to people. “Keep it under your hat,” he said. “I don’t want talk about this place.”’
And here I believe Ann is speaking affectionately:
‘Derek had told [Karin] that there were mines all through this country. Almost every known mineral was there but usually not enough to make them profitable … “The first time I brought him home he just disappeared up the ridge and found a mine,” Ann said. “I knew then that he’d probably marry me.”
In Rosemary’s words he’s ‘a dedicated old pothead’. A sardonic, charismatic dreamer. As an anti-capitalist old hippy, he doesn’t officially ‘approve’ of Rosemary having money (hence the somewhat disparaging ‘rich as stink’), but he still loves Ann and wants her to be able to keep her childhood home, including the land that interests him so much. Yes, he’s two-timing the two women, but everyone’s quite open about it.
Of course he’s far from perfect. His response to Karin’s precociousness is to treat her more or less as an adult, which she of course likes, but which isn’t always appropriate. As I say, trying to get her to smoke marijuana was very irresponsible. And the way, when her mother’s upset, he tries to get her to ‘collude’ with him against Rosemary is somewhat distasteful. But I don’t find these to be hanging offences. No wish to make excuses for him, but he and Ann have no children, so arguably he’s not very experienced with kids. I see no evidence of him being a sexual predator. I guess I see him as another version of Cottar in ‘Jakarta’.
I may have got it wrong. (Ha ha.)
I’ve been pondering more on the idea that Derek asks Rosemary for financial help for Ann (and himself) …
I believe this all kicks off when ‘Shirley Temple’ Karin says to him about Ann’s property: “If I was rich I could buy it … Then you could go on like now.” So I suggest it’s this conversation that plants the seed in Derek’s mind. He then disappears off into town, supposedly to get his film developed, and meanwhile Karin gets to try on Ann’s wedding dress. Derek then returns and Karin listens from upstairs: ‘Derek’s voice had changed. He wasn’t mad anymore. He was eager to make friends.’ She hears him tell Ann that Rosemary’s coming to join them for the meal, and then:
‘Then there was some muttering or whispering from Derek to Ann. He must be standing very close to her and talking against her hair or her ear. He seemed to be teasing, pleading, comforting, promising to reward her, all at once. Karin was so afraid that words would surface out of this—words she would understand and never forget—that she went banging down the stairs and into the kitchen, calling, “Who’s this Rosemary? Did I hear ‘Rosemary’?” ‘
I think this is when Derek tells Ann he’s just asked Rosemary to help them out. We’re then told: ‘All the tight displeasure was gone. He was full of challenges and high spirits, as he’d been sometimes last summer.’ The section ends with: ‘Derek glided a hand round [Ann’s] shoulders. He said, “All will be well.”’
Derek is, as it were, the ne’er-do-well bum in the middle, stuck between his wife who owns property and his ‘rich as stink’ mistress. Between the two, he’s on the verge of negotiating a deal. So he’s justifiably pleased with himself.
I think he’s benign in the way many of the people who surround us every day are benign. They aren’t criminal masterminds and they don’t necessarily want to hurt anyone, but they have their own interests at heart and will work hard to get what they feel they deserve — even better if they can couch their grievances in terms of systematic injustice, which is how I think Derek sees some of this.
One thing I love about Munro is that she doesn’t usually write about overtly awful people. They’re usually very recognizable. But I think that’s part of her work: to show the sadness and dangers that come from recognizable, even acceptable patterns of behavior.
I do think Derek is a bit dangerous. I think Rosemary knows this, but can’t get over it, as shown when she shows up for dinner playing with him despite telling Karin earlier that she was glad to be rid of him because he took away her self respect. I think Karin sees only the charm, which is why I think the story turns quite dark. I don’t think Derek is doing this to ruin anyone, but his looking-out-for-number-one is hurting Ann, Rosemary, and Karin. Karin’s burning somehow helps them see a bit better what is going on, so the situation changes, fizzles out, after that.
It seems to me that this is a story about three highly irresponsible adults, and one spirited little girl who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Is Karin precocious? In many ways, yes. But I firmly believe that Karin does *NOT* fully understand the strange relationship between her mother, Derek, and Ann. And because the story is told from a child’s perspective, that relationship is made fairly opaque for us as readers, too. As adults, however, we’re given enough hints to glean some details Karin probably doesn’t fully comprehend: That Karin has developed somewhat of a schoolgirl crush and/or comradeship with Derek. That Derek might be described as a juvenile slacker, one who exploits Karin’s feelings by irresponsibly encouraging her to adopt various far-too-adult behaviors (mothering Rosemary, smoking weed). That Derek himself is quite possibly playing an ongoing game that involves repeatedly getting back on the “good side” of Rosemary — because he hopes to benefit from her wealth somehow. Also, that Ann is allowing all this atrocious behavior because she thinks it may yield some financial benefit, as well.
I don’t personally think Karin “knows” nearly as much as she’s been given credit for in the post above. Just my own respectful opinion, of course. I think she makes mischievous (arguably, even bratty) comments that are a mixture of little-girl playfulness and things she’s probably read or overheard (“can this marriage be saved,” “lover-dovers,” “what kind of stupid outfit is that”). These comments, of course, land with a hugely painful thud for Ann, and for us readers. Even though some of the motivations and intricacies of this odd love triangle aren’t clear, we have an adult vantage point Karin does not. We understand, based upon experience, that this pre-teen is hitting an excruciating nerve over and over and over with her remarks. But Karin herself, in her comparative youth and innocence, only senses the surface of this effect. That, to me, is what makes the ending so especially tragic. Nobody is even noticing Karin enough to rein her in. Nobody is responsible enough to say “what are we doing, there’s a little girl in the room.” This weird lovers’ dance is going on all around Karin, and every adult surrounding her is absorbed by it in some way. In the end, of course, the child is the one who gets irreparably burned.
[…] commentator at the Mookse and Gripes blog likens “Rich As Stink” to What Maisie Knew, which was also my first thought. I’ve […]