The Bear Came over the Mountain

“He thought maybe she was joking when she proposed to him, on a cold bright day on the beach at Port Stanley. Sand was stinging their faces and the waves delivered crashing loads of gravel at their feet.

‘Do you think it would be fun—’ Fiona shouted. ‘Do you think it would be fun if we got married?’

He took her up on it, he shouted yes.”

Having come from an untraditional family herself, Fiona challenges traditional gender roles by proposing to Grant in an informal, unplanned way. For Grant, the thrill of falling in love with a woman so different from those who are familiar to him encourages him to chase her and follow “the spark of life” that she holds (286).

“The new notes were different. Taped onto the kitchen drawers—Cutlery, Dishtowels, Knives. Couldn’t she have just opened the drawers and seen what was inside?”

This is the first clue that Fiona is losing her memory, and when it comes to the onset of Alzheimer's, memory loss that makes daily life challenging is one of the first signs. Fiona forgetting what’s in the drawers to the point of needing to label them impedes her schedule notes, changing the narrative of what she uses note taking for. This is also the first moment of Grant trivializing Fiona’s condition, alluding to the denial that he carries and wrestles with throughout the narrative.

“They always had their games—nonsense dialects, characters they invented. Some of Fiona’s made-up voices, chirping or wheedling (he couldn’t tell the doctor this), had mimicked uncannily the voices of women of his that she had never met or known about.”

Grant’s unfaithfulness has stayed with him even now, as he must explain what he knows about Fiona’s memory. He worries that Fiona knows about his infidelities with Jacqui Adams, younger women, and his students and that she now makes a game of mocking him whenever she can get away with it. He fears Fiona is doing this to punish him for cheating, even though he’s never made a confession.

“‘Shallowlake, Shillylake,’ she said, as if they were engaged in a playful competition. ‘Sillylake. Sillylake it is.’”

Meadowlake is a mental health facility as well as a nursing home. To call it Sillylake so flippantly implies that Fiona does know what goes on there and who lives there, but she feels as though she won’t be there long enough to call Meadowlake by its proper name or consider it a proper home.

“Fiona had caught a cold, but that was not unusual for new-comers.

‘Like when your kids start school,’ Kristy said. ‘There’s a whole bunch of new germs they’re exposed to, and for a while they just catch everything.’”

Kristy infantilizes Fiona, who is an elderly woman in her 70s facing severe memory loss, displaying a level of nonchalance toward elder patient health that Kristy has throughout the story. She says this to soothe Grant’s worries about Fiona getting sick, but she only creates more tension, as Grant and Fiona are childless and would not know the experience of worrying about a sick child.

“Many times he had catered to a woman’s pride, to her fragility, by offering more affection—or a rougher passion—than anything he really felt. All so that he could now find himself accused of wounding and exploiting and destroying self-esteem. And of deceiving Fiona—as of course he had deceived her—but would it have been better if he had done as others had done with their wives and left her?

He had never thought of such a thing.”

Grant believes he was doing Fiona a favor by staying with her. He presents a skewed sense of loyalty, musing that although he cheated, which is an act of disloyalty, he still came home to Fiona and was loyal to their marriage despite straying. He reasons away his infidelity by saying that he never thought of leaving Fiona and that he was simply providing for these women what they weren’t getting anywhere else. There’s a sense of heroism and martyrdom in Grant’s follies.

“Boris and Natasha had died by this time. One of them got sick and died first—Grant forgot which one—and then the other died, more or less out of sympathy.”

The dogs act as a foil to Grant and Fiona because their love for one another stretched a lifetime, and grief did not keep them apart for long. The bittersweet anecdote about the dogs makes Grant’s claims seem more like excuses for his actions by comparison: The dogs can be more loyal to each other than Grant is to his wife.

“In the town near Meadowlake he found a florist’s shop and bought a large bouquet. He had never presented flowers to Fiona before. Or to anyone else. He entered the building feeling like a hopeless lover or a guilty husband in a cartoon.”

That Grant feels guilty and cartoonish bringing Fiona flowers after dreaming about his infidelities and spending his days alone illustrates how ashamed he is of leaving Fiona at Meadowlake and of his disloyalty. He is doing things he’s never done before, including something so simple as buying his wife flowers, yet he still feels guilty.

“If I leave you now, you can entertain yourself? It must all seem strange to you, but you’ll be surprised how soon you get used to it. You’ll get to know who everybody is. Except that some of them are pretty well off in the clouds, you know—you can’t expect them all to get to know who you are.”

Fiona seems to believe Grant is a new resident at Meadowlake and not her husband of 50 years. She treats him with the same flippancy as she did her suitors back when they met, Grant included. The emphasis on “you” in this quote suggests that Fiona might be teasing, and Grant cannot expect anyone to remember how important of a person he is to anyone—even her.

“Meadowlake was short on mirrors, so he did not have to catch sight of himself stalking and prowling. But every once in a while it came to him how foolish and pathetic and perhaps unhinged he must look, trailing around after Fiona and Aubrey. And having no luck in confronting her, or him.”

Grant reaches a breaking point with Fiona and Aubrey’s romance and the narration displays how tense, uncomfortable, and angry their relationship makes him, though he cannot interfere because he doesn’t want to seem jealous or foolish. Ironically, he displays jealousy and foolishness with his stubborn visits and his scowling thoughts about the two of them.

“They had cut her hair, too. They had cut away her angelic halo.”

Grant views Meadowlake as taking away his wife as he knew her, which becomes physical when they cut her hair. Cutting her hair, which she always wore long, is a signifier of change. Fiona says she never missed it when Grant demands to know why, showing that things are tumbling out of Grant’s control and highlighting his frustrations toward losing Fiona to another person and her new life at Meadowlake.

“A whirlwind had hit him, as it did many others, wish becoming action in a way that made him wonder if there wasn’t something missed. But who had time for regrets? He heard of simultaneous liaisons, savage and risky encounters. Scandals burst wide open, with high and painful drama all round but a feeling that somehow it was better so. There were reprisals—there were firings. But those fired went off to teach at smaller, more tolerant colleges or Open Learning Centers, and many wives left behind got over the shock and took up the costumes, the sexual nonchalance of the girls who had tempted their men. Academic parties, which used to be so predictable, became a minefield. An epidemic had broken out, it was spreading like the Spanish flu. Only this time people ran after contagion, and few between sixteen and sixty seemed willing to be left out.”

Grant is confessing his infidelity to the reader, blaming his indiscretions on being swept up in the times. As the story is set in 2000, Grant’s memories likely take place in or after the 1960s, during the age of “free love” and after birth control was invented. Further, Grant focuses on the fact that there were few consequences to having so many affairs, and he doesn’t take full accountability for his actions, instead blaming the energy of the era for his misbehavior.

“Fiona seemed to have taken a dislike to him, though she tried to cover it up. Perhaps she was reminded, every time she saw him, of her last minutes with Aubrey, when she had asked him for help and he hadn’t helped her.

He didn’t see much point in mentioning their marriage, now.”

Even during the worst of Fiona’s heartbreak, Grant can’t help but think about their marriage and the state of it. His desire to have Fiona remember their marriage is cast aside once again as she mourns the loss of Aubrey and considers Grant someone who helped in taking Aubrey away from her. The consternation Fiona should have felt for Grant during all his cheating comes out, or at least he perceives it that way, as he tries to fill the space Aubrey left.