by Alice Munro
I had never been on a tennis court and the idea of going out in a sailboat or getting up on a horse terrified me. I could swim, but not very well. Golf to me was something that silly-looking men did in cartoons. The adults I knew never played any games that involved physical action. They sat down and rested when they were not working, which wasn’t often. Though on winter evenings they might play cards. Euchre. Lost Heir. Not the kind of cards Mrs. Montjoy ever played.
“Everybody I know works too hard to do any sports,” I said. “We don’t even have a tennis court in our town and there isn’t any golf course either.” (Actually we had once had both these things, but there hadn’t been the money to keep them up during the Depression and they had not been restored since.) “Nobody I know has a sailboat.”
I did not mention that my town did have a hockey rink and a baseball park.
“Really?” said Mary Anne thoughtfully. “What do they do then?”
“Work. And they never have any money, all of their lives.”
Then I told her that most people I knew had never seen a flush toilet unless it was in a public building and that sometimes old people (that is, people too old to work) had to stay in bed all winter in order to keep warm. Children walked barefoot until the frost came in order to save on shoe leather, and died of stomach aches that were really appendicitis because their parents had no money for a doctor. Sometimes people had eaten dandelion leaves, nothing else, for supper.
Not one of these statements—even the one about dandelion leaves—was completely a lie. I had heard of such things. The one about flush toilets perhaps came closest to the truth, but it applied to country people, not town people, and most of those it applied to would be of a generation before mine. But as I talked to Mary Anne all the isolated incidents and bizarre stories I had heard spread out in my mind, so that I could almost believe that I myself had walked with bare blue feet on cold mud—I who had benefited from cod liver oil and inoculations and been bundled up for school within an inch of my life, and had gone to bed hungry only because I refused to eat such things as junket or bread pudding or fried liver. And this false impression I was giving seemed justified, as if my exaggerations or near lies were substitutes for something I could not make clear.
How to make clear, for instance, the difference between the Montjoys’ kitchen and our kitchen at home. You could not do that simply by mentioning the perfectly fresh and shining floor surfaces of one and the worn-out linoleum of the other, or the fact of soft water being pumped from a cistern into the sink contrasted with hot and cold water coming out of taps. You would have to say that you had in one case a kitchen that followed with absolute correctness a current notion of what a kitchen ought to be, and in the other a kitchen that changed occasionally with use and improvisation, but in many ways never changed at all, and belonged entirely to one family and to the years and decades of that family’s life. And when I thought of that kitchen, with the combination wood and electric stove that I polished with waxed-paper bread wrappers, the dark old spice tins with their rusty rims kept from year to year in the cupboards, the barn clothes hanging by the door, it seemed as if I had to protect it from contempt—as if I had to protect a whole precious and intimate though hardly pleasant way of life from contempt. Contempt was what I imagined to be always waiting, swinging along on live wires, just under the skin and just behind the perceptions of people like the Montjoys.
“That isn’t fair,” said Mary Anne. “That’s awful. I didn’t know people could eat dandelion leaves.” But then she brightened. “Why don’t they go and catch some fish?”
“People who don’t need the fish have come and caught them all already. Rich people. For fun.”
Of course some of the people at home did catch fish when they had time, though others, including me, found the fish from our river too bony. But I thought that would keep Mary Anne quiet, especially since I knew that Mr. Montjoy went on fishing trips with his friends.
She could not stop mulling over the problem. “Couldn’t they go to the Salvation Army?”
“They’re too proud.”
“Well I feel sorry for them,” she said. “I feel really sorry for them, but I think that’s stupid. What about the little babies and the children? They ought to think about them. Are the children too proud too?”
“Everybody’s proud.”
—
WHEN MR. MONTJOY CAME to the island on weekends, there was always a great deal of noise and activity. Some of that was because there were visitors who came by boat to swim and have drinks and watch sailing races. But a lot of it was generated by Mr. Montjoy himself. He had a loud blustery voice and a thick body with a skin that would never take a tan. Every weekend he turned red from the sun, and during the week the burned skin peeled away and left him pink and muddy with freckles, ready to be burned again. When he took off his glasses you could see that one eye was quick and squinty and the other boldly blue but helpless-looking, as if caught in a trap.
His blustering was often about things that he had misplaced, or dropped, or bumped into. “Where the hell is the—?” he would say, or “You didn’t happen to see the—?” So it seemed that he had also misplaced, or failed to grasp in the first place, even the name of the thing he was looking for. To console himself he might grab up a handful of peanuts or pretzels or whatever was nearby, and eat handful after handful until they were all gone. Then he would stare at the empty bowl as if that too astounded him.
One morning I heard him say, “Now where in hell is that—?” He was crashing around out on the deck.
“Your book?” said Mrs. Montjoy, in a tone of bright control. She was having her midmorning coffee.
“I thought I had it out here,” he said. “I was reading it.”
“The Book-of-the-Month one?” she said. “I think you left it in the living room.”
She was right. I was vacuuming the living room, and a few moments before I had picked up a book pushed partway under the sofa. Its title was Seven Gothic Tales. The title made me want to open it, and even as I overheard the Montjoys’ conversation I was reading, holding the book open in one hand and guiding the vacuum cleaner with the other. They couldn’t see me from the deck.
“Nay, I speak from my heart,” said Mira. “I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.”
“There it is,” said Mr. Montjoy, who for a wonder had come into the room without his usual bumping and banging—or none at least that I had heard. “Good girl, you found my book. Now I remember. Last night I was reading it on the sofa.”
“It was on the floor,” I said. “I just picked it up.”
He must have seen me reading it. He said, “It’s a queer kind of book, but sometimes you want to read a book that isn’t like all the others.”
“I couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mrs. Montjoy, coming in with the coffee tray. “We’ll have to get out of the way here and let her get on with the vacuuming.”
Mr. Montjoy went back to the mainland, and to the city, that evening. He was a bank director. That did not mean, apparently, that he worked in a bank. The day after he had gone I looked everywhere. I looked under the chairs and behind the curtains, in case he might have left that book behind. But I could not find it.
—
“I ALWAYS THOUGHT it would be nice to live up here all the year round, the way you people do,” said Mrs. Foley. She must have cast me again as the girl who brought the groceries. Some days she said, “I know who you are now. You’re the new girl helping the Dutch woman in the kitchen. But I’m sorry, I just can’t recall your name.” And other days she let me walk by without giving any greeting or showing the least interest.
“We used to come up here in the winter,” she said. “The bay would be frozen over and there would be a road across the ice. We used to go snowshoeing. Now that’s something people don’
t do anymore. Do they? Snowshoeing?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She leaned towards me. “Can you tell me something?” she said with embarrassment, speaking almost in a whisper. “Can you tell me where Jane is? I haven’t seen her running around here for the longest time.”
I said that I didn’t know. She smiled as if I was teasing her, and reached out a hand to touch my face. I had been stooping down to listen to her, but now I straightened up, and her hand grazed my chest instead. It was a hot day and I was wearing my halter, so it happened that she touched my skin. Her hand was light and dry as a wood shaving, but the nail scraped me.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said.
After that I simply waved if she spoke to me and hurried on my way.
—
ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON towards the end of August, the Montjoys gave a cocktail party. The party was given in honor of the friends they had staying with them that weekend—Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. A good many small silver forks and spoons had to be polished in preparation for this event, so Mrs. Montjoy decided that all the silver might as well be done at the same time. I did the polishing and she stood beside me, inspecting it.
On the day of the party, people arrived in motorboats and sailboats. Some of them went swimming, then sat around on the rocks in their bathing suits, or lay on the dock in the sun. Others came up to the house immediately and started drinking and talking in the living room or out on the deck. Some children had come with their parents, and older children by themselves, in their own boats. They were not children of Mary Anne’s age—Mary Anne had been taken to stay with her friend Susan, on another island. There were a few very young ones, who came supplied with folding cribs and playpens, but most were around the same age as I was. Girls and boys fifteen or sixteen years old. They spent most of the afternoon in the water, shouting and diving and having races to the raft.
Mrs. Montjoy and I had been busy all morning, making all the different things to eat, which we now arranged on platters and offered to people. Making them had been fiddly and exasperating work. Stuffing various mixtures into mushroom caps and sticking one tiny slice of something on top of a tiny slice of something else on top of a precise fragment of toast or bread. All the shapes had to be perfect—perfect triangles, perfect rounds and squares, perfect diamonds.
Mrs. Hammond came into the kitchen several times and admired what we were doing.
“How marvellous everything looks,” she said. “You notice I’m not offering to help. I’m a perfect mutt at this kind of thing.”
I liked the way she said that. I’m a perfect mutt. I admired her husky voice, its weary good-humored tone, and the way she seemed to suggest that tiny geometrical bits of food were not so necessary, might even be a trifle silly. I wished I could be her, in a sleek black bathing suit with a tan like dark toast, shoulder-length smooth dark hair, orchid-colored lipstick.
Not that she looked happy. But her air of sullenness and complaint seemed glamorous to me, her hints of cloudy drama enviable. She and her husband were an altogether different type of rich people from Mr. and Mrs. Montjoy. They were more like the people I had read about in magazine stories and in books like The Hucksters—people who drank a lot and had love affairs and went to psychiatrists.
Her name was Carol and her husband’s name was Ivan. I thought of them already by their first names—something I had never been tempted to do with the Montjoys.
Mrs. Montjoy had asked me to put on a dress, so I wore the pink and white striped cotton, with the smudged material at its waist tucked under the elasticized belt. Nearly everybody else was in shorts and bathing suits. I passed among them, offering food. I was not sure how to do this. Sometimes people were laughing or talking with such vigor that they didn’t notice me, and I was afraid that their gestures would send the food bits flying. So I said, “Excuse me—would you like one of these?” in a raised voice that sounded very determined or even reproving. Then they looked at me with startled amusement, and I had the feeling that my interruption had become another joke.
“Enough passing for now,” said Mrs. Montjoy. She gathered up some glasses and told me to wash them. “People never keep track of their own,” she said. “It’s easier just to wash them and bring in clean ones. And it’s time to get the meatballs out of the fridge and heat them up. Could you do that? Watch the oven—it won’t take long.”
While I was busy in the kitchen I heard Mrs. Hammond calling, “Ivan! Ivan!” She was roaming through the back rooms of the house. But Mr. Hammond had come in through the kitchen door that led to the woods. He stood there and did not answer her. He came over to the counter and poured gin into his glass.
“Oh, Ivan, there you are,” said Mrs. Hammond, coming in from the living room.
“Here I am,” said Mr. Hammond.
“Me, too,” she said. She shoved her glass along the counter.
He didn’t pick it up. He pushed the gin towards her and spoke to me. “Are you having fun, Minnie?”
Mrs. Hammond gave a yelp of laughter. “Minnie? Where did you get the idea her name was Minnie?”
“Minnie,” said Mr. Hammond. Ivan. He spoke in an artificial, dreamy voice. “Are you having fun, Minnie?”
“Oh yes,” I said, in a voice that I meant to make as artificial as his. I was busy lifting the tiny Swedish meatballs from the oven and I wanted the Hammonds out of my way in case I dropped some. They would think that a big joke and probably report on me to Mrs. Montjoy, who would make me throw the dropped meatballs out and be annoyed at the waste. If I was alone when it happened I could just scoop them up off the floor.
Mr. Hammond said, “Good.”
“I swam around the point,” Mrs. Hammond said. “I’m working up to swimming around the entire island.”
“Congratulations,” Mr. Hammond said, in the same way that he had said “Good.”
I wished that I hadn’t sounded so chirpy and silly. I wished that I had matched his deeply skeptical and sophisticated tone.
“Well then,” said Mrs. Hammond. Carol. “I’ll leave you to it.”
I had begun to spear the meatballs with toothpicks and arrange them on a platter. Ivan said, “Care for some help?” and tried to do the same, but his toothpicks missed and sent meatballs skittering onto the counter.
“Well,” he said, but he seemed to lose track of his thoughts, so he turned away and took another drink. “Well, Minnie.”
I knew something about him. I knew that the Hammonds were here for a special holiday because Mr. Hammond had lost his job. Mary Anne had told me this. “He’s very depressed about it,” she had said. “They won’t be poor, though. Aunt Carol is rich.”
He did not seem depressed to me. He seemed impatient—chiefly with Mrs. Hammond—but on the whole rather pleased with himself. He was tall and thin, he had dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and his mustache was an ironic line above his upper lip. When he talked to me he leaned forward, as I had seen him doing earlier, when he talked to women in the living room. I had thought then that the word for him was courtly.
“Where do you go swimming, Minnie? Do you go swimming?”
“Yes,” I said. “Down by the boathouse.” I decided that his calling me Minnie was a special joke between us.
“Is that a good place?”
“Yes.” It was, for me, because I liked being close to the dock. I had never, till this summer, swum in water that was over my head.
“Do you ever go in without your bathing suit on?”
I said, “No.”
“You should try it.”
Mrs. Montjoy came through the living-room doorway, asking if the meatballs were ready.
“This is certainly a hungry crowd,” she said. “It’s the swimming does it. How are you getting on, Ivan? Carol was just looking for you.”
“She was here,” said Mr. Hammond.
Mrs. Montjoy dropped parsley here and there among the meatballs. “Now,” she said to me. “I think you’ve done abou
t all you need to here. I think I can manage now. Why don’t you just make yourself a sandwich and run along down to the boathouse?”
I said I wasn’t hungry. Mr. Hammond had helped himself to more gin and ice cubes and had gone into the living room.
“Well. You’d better take something,” Mrs. Montjoy said. “You’ll be hungry later.”
She meant that I was not to come back.
On my way to the boathouse I met a couple of the guests—girls of my own age, barefoot and in their wet bathing suits, breathlessly laughing. They had probably swum partway round the island and climbed out of the water at the boathouse. Now they were sneaking back to surprise somebody. They stepped aside politely, not to drip water on me, but did not stop laughing. Making way for my body without a glance at my face.
They were the sort of girls who would have squealed and made a fuss over me, if I had been a dog or a cat.
—
THE NOISE OF THE PARTY continued to rise. I lay down on my cot without taking off my dress. I had been on the go since early morning and I was tired. But I could not relax. After a while I got up and changed into my bathing suit and went down to swim. I climbed down the ladder into the water cautiously as I always did—I thought that I would go straight to the bottom and never come up if I jumped—and swam around in the shadows. The water washing my limbs made me think of what Mr. Hammond had said and I worked the straps of my bathing suit down, finally pulling out one arm after the other so that my breasts could float free. I swam that way, with the water sweetly dividing at my nipples…
I thought it was not impossible that Mr. Hammond might come looking for me. I thought of him touching me. (I could not figure out exactly how he would get into the water—I did not care to think of him stripping off his clothes. Perhaps he would squat down on the deck and I would swim over to him.) His fingers stroking my bare skin like ribbons of light. The thought of being touched and desired by a man that old—forty, forty-five?—was in some way repulsive, but I knew I would get pleasure from it, rather as you might get pleasure from being caressed by an amorous tame crocodile. Mr. Hammond’s—Ivan’s—skin might be smooth, but age and knowledge and corruptness would be on him like invisible warts and scales.