“Thanks,” he said. “I sure could use it.”
It was a good thing, I thought, that I had done that, for at my gate, when I said, “Well, good night,” and after he said, “Oh, yeah. Good night,” he leaned towards me and kissed me, briefly, with the air of one who knew his job when he saw it, on the corner of my mouth. Then he turned back to town, never knowing he had been my rescuer, that he had brought me from Mary Fortune’s territory into the ordinary world.
I went around the house to the back door, thinking, I have been to a dance and a boy has walked me home and kissed me. It was all true. My life was possible. I went past the kitchen window and I saw my mother. She was sitting with her feet on the open oven door, drinking tea out of a cup without a saucer. She was just sitting and waiting for me to come home and tell her everything that had happened. And I would not do it, I never would. But when I saw the waiting kitchen, and my mother in her faded, fuzzy Paisley kimono, with her sleepy but doggedly expectant face, I understood what a mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time, and she would not know.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON
Mrs. Gannett came into the kitchen walking delicately to a melody played in her head, flashing the polished cotton skirts of a flowered sundress. Alva was there, washing glasses. It was half-past two; people had started coming in for drinks about half-past twelve. They were the usual people; Alva had seen most of them a couple of times before, in the three weeks she had been working for the Gannetts. There was Mrs. Gannett’s brother, and his wife, and the Vances and the Fredericks; Mrs. Gannett’s parents came in for a little while, after service at St. Martin’s bringing with them a young nephew, or cousin, who stayed when they went home. Mrs. Gannett’s side of the family was the right side; she had three sisters, all fair, forthright and unreflective women, rather more athletic than she, and these magnificently outspoken and handsome parents, both of them with pure white hair. It was Mrs. Gannett’s father who owned the island in Georgian Bay, where he had built summer homes for each of his daughters, the island that in a week’s time Alva was to see. Mr. Gannett’s mother, on the other hand, lived in half of the red brick house in a treeless street of exactly similar red brick houses, almost downtown. Once a week Mrs. Gannett picked her up and took her for a drive and home to supper, and nobody drank anything but grape juice until she had been taken home. Once when Mr. and Mrs. Gannett had to go out immediately after supper she came into the kitchen and put away the dishes for Alva; she was rather cranky and aloof, as the women in Alva’s own family would have been with a maid, and Alva minded this less than the practised, considerate affability of Mrs. Gannett’s sisters.
Mrs. Gannett opened the refrigerator and stood there, holding the door. Finally she said, with something like a giggle, “Alva, I think we could have lunch—”
“All right,” Alva said. Mrs. Gannett looked at her. Alva never said anything wrong, really wrong, that is rude, and Mrs. Gannett was not so unrealistic as to expect a high-school girl, even a country high-school girl, to answer, “Yes, ma’am,” as the old maids did in her mother’s kitchen; but there was often in Alva’s tone an affected ease, a note of exaggerated carelessness and agreeability that was all the more irritating because Mrs. Gannett could not think of any way to object to it. At any rate it stopped her giggling; her tanned, painted face grew suddenly depressed and sober.
“The potato salad,” she said. “Aspic and tongue. Don’t forget to heat the rolls. Did you peel the tomatoes? Fine—Oh, look Alva, I don’t think those radishes look awfully attractive, do you? You better slice them—Jean used to do roses, you know the way they cut petals around—they used to look lovely.”
Alva began clumsily to cut radishes. Mrs. Gannett walked around the kitchen, frowning, sliding her fingertips along the blue and coral counters. She was wearing her hair pulled up into a topknot, showing her neck very thin, brown and rather sun-coarsened; her deep tan made her look sinewy and dried. Nevertheless Alva, who was hardly tanned at all because she spent the hot part of the day in the house, and who at seventeen was thicker than she would have liked in the legs and the waist, envied her this brown and splintery elegance; Mrs. Gannett had a look of being made of entirely synthetic and superior substances.
“Cut the angel food with a string, you know that, and I’ll tell you how many sherbet and how many maple mousse. Plain vanilla for Mr. Gannett, it’s in the freezer—There’s plenty of either for your own dessert—Oh, Derek, you monster!” Mrs. Gannett ran out to the patio, crying, “Derek, Derek!” in tones of shrill and happy outrage. Alva, who knew that Derek was Mr. Vance, a stockbroker, just remembered in time not to peer out the top of the Dutch door to see what was happening. That was one of her difficulties on Sundays, when they were all drinking, and becoming relaxed and excited; she had to remember that it was not permissible for her to show a little relaxation and excitement too. Of course, she was not drinking, except out of the bottoms of glasses when they were brought back to the kitchen—and then only if it was gin, cold, and sweetened.
But the feeling of unreality, of alternate apathy and recklessness, became very strong in the house by the middle of afternoon. Alva would meet people coming from the bathroom, absorbed and melancholy, she would glimpse women in the dim bedrooms swaying towards their reflections in the mirror, very slowly applying their lipstick, and someone would have fallen asleep on the long chesterfield in the den. By this time the drapes would have been drawn across the glass walls of living room and dining room, against the heat of the sun; those long, curtained and carpeted rooms, with their cool colours, seemed floating in an underwater light. Alva found it already hard to remember that the rooms at home, such small rooms, could hold so many things; here were such bland unbroken surfaces, such spaces—a whole long, wide passage empty, except for two tall Danish vases standing against the farthest wall, carpet, walls and ceiling all done in blue variants of grey; Alva, walking down this hallway, not making any sound, wished for a mirror, or something to bump into; she did not know if she was there or not.
Before she carried the lunch out to the patio she combed her hair at a little mirror at the end of the kitchen counter, pushing curls up around her face. She retied her apron, pulling its wide band very tight. It was all she could do; the uniform had belonged to Jean, and Alva had asked, the first time she tried it on, if maybe it was too big; but Mrs. Gannett did not think so. The uniform was blue, the predominant kitchen colour; it had white cuffs and collar and scalloped apron. She had to wear stockings too, and white Cuban-heeled shoes that clomped on the stones of the patio—making, in contrast to the sandals and pumps, a heavy, purposeful, plebian sound. But nobody looked around at her, as she carried plates, napkins, dishes of food to a long wrought-iron table. Only Mrs. Gannett came, and rearranged things. The way Alva had of putting things down on a table always seemed to lack something, though there, too, she did not make any real mistakes.
While they were eating she ate her own lunch, sitting at the kitchen table, looking through an old copy of Time. There was no bell, of course, on the patio; Mrs. Gannett called, “All right, Alva!” or simply, “Alva!” in tones as discreet and penetrating as those of the bell. It was queer to hear her call this, in the middle of talking to someone, and then begin laughing again; it seemed as if she had a mechanical voice, even a button she pushed, for Alva.