“To the Ojibway. The hotel. They have dances every weekend, everybody goes down in their boats. Friday night is for kids and Saturday night is for parents and other people—That is I will be going,” Margaret said rather grimly, “if I’m not a social flop. Both the Davis girls are.”
“Don’t worry,” Alva said a little patronizingly. “You’ll be fine.”
“I don’t really like dancing,” Margaret said. “Not the way I like sailing, for instance. But you have to do it.”
“You’ll get to like it,” Alva said. So there would be dances, they would go down in the boats, she would see them going and hear them coming home. All these things, which she should have expected—
Margaret sitting cross-legged on the floor, looked up at her with a blunt, clean face, and said, “Do you think I ought to start to neck this summer?”
“Yes,” said Alva. “I would,” she added almost vindictively. Margaret looked puzzled; she said, “I heard that’s why Scotty didn’t ask me at Easter—”
There was no sound, but Margaret slipped to her feet. “Mother’s coming,” she said with her lips only, and almost at once Mrs. Gannett came into the room, smiled with a good deal of control, and said, “Oh, Alva. This is where you are.”
Margaret said, “I was telling her about the Island, Mummy.”
“Oh. There are an awful lot of glasses sitting around down there Alva, maybe you could whisk them through now and they’d be out of the way when you want to get dinner—And Alva, do you have a fresh apron?”
“The yellow is so too tight, Mummy, I tried it on—”
“Look, darling, it’s no use getting all that fripfrap out yet, there’s still a week before we go—”
Alva went downstairs, passed along the blue hall, heard people talking seriously, a little drunkenly, in the den, and saw the door of the sewing-room closed softly, from within, as she approached. She went into the kitchen. She was thinking of the Island now. A whole island that they owned; nothing in sight that was not theirs. The rocks, the sun, the pine trees, and the deep, cold water of the Bay. What would she do there, what did the maids do? She could go swimming, at odd hours, go for walks by herself, and sometimes—when they went for groceries, perhaps—she would go along in the boat. There would not be so much work to do as there was here, Mrs. Gannett had said. She said the maids always enjoyed it. Alva thought of the other maids, those more talented, more accommodating girls; did they really enjoy it? What kind of freedom or content had they found, that she had not?
She filled the sink, got out the draining rack again and began to wash glasses. Nothing was the matter, but she felt heavy, heavy with the heat and tired and uncaring, hearing all around her an incomprehensible faint noise—of other people’s lives, of boats and cars and dances—and seeing this street, that promised island, in a harsh and continuous dazzle of sun. She could not make a sound here, not a dint.
She must remember, before dinner time, to go up and put on a clean apron.
She heard the door open; someone came in from the patio. It was Mrs. Gannett’s cousin.
“Here’s another glass for you,” he said. “Where’ll I put it?”
“Anywhere,” said Alva.
“Say thanks,” Mrs. Gannett’s cousin said, and Alva turned around wiping her hands on her apron, surprised, and then in a very short time not surprised. She waited, her back to the counter, and Mrs. Gannett’s cousin took hold of her lightly, as in a familiar game, and spent some time kissing her mouth.
“She asked me up to the Island some weekend in August,” he said.
Someone on the patio called him, and he went out, moving with the graceful, rather mocking stealth of some slight people. Alva stood still with her back to the counter.
This stranger’s touch had eased her; her body was simply grateful and expectant, and she felt a lightness and confidence she had not known in this house. So there were things she had not taken into account, about herself, about them, and ways of living with them that were not so unreal. She would not mind thinking of the Island now, the bare sunny rocks and the black little pine trees. She saw it differently now; it was even possible that she wanted to go there. But things always came together; there was something she would not explore yet—a tender spot, a new and still mysterious humiliation.
A TRIP TO THE COAST
The place called Black Horse is marked on the map but there is nothing there except a store and three houses and an old cemetery and a livery shed which belonged to a church that burned down. It is a hot place in summer, with no shade on the road and no creek nearby. The houses and the store are built of red brick of a faded, gingery colour, with a random decoration of grey or white bricks across the chimneys and around the windows. Behind them the fields are full of milkweed and goldenrod and big purple thistles. People who are passing through, on their way to the Lakes of Muskoka and the northern bush, may notice that around here the bountiful landscape thins and flattens, worn elbows of rock appear in the diminishing fields and the deep, harmonious woodlots of elm and maple give way to a denser, less hospitable scrub-forest of birch and poplar, spruce and pine—where in the heat of the afternoon the pointed trees at the end of the road turn blue, transparent, retreating into the distance like a company of ghosts.
May was lying in a big room full of boxes at the back of the store. That was where she slept in the summer, when it got too hot upstairs. Hazel slept in the front room on the chesterfield and played the radio half the night; her grandmother still slept upstairs, in a tight little room full of big furniture and old photographs that smelled of hot oilcloth and old women’s woollen stockings. May could not tell what time it was because she hardly ever woke up this early. Most mornings when she woke up there was a patch of hot sun on the floor at her feet and the farmers’ milk trucks were rattling past on the highway and her grandmother was scuttling back and forth from the store to the kitchen, where she had put a pot of coffee and a pan of thick bacon on the stove. Passing the old porch couch where May slept (its cushions still smelled faintly of mould and pine) she would twitch automatically at the sheet, saying, “Get up now, get up, do you think you’re going to sleep till dinner-time? There’s a man wants gas.”
And if May did not get up but clung to the sheet, muttering angrily, her grandmother would come through next time with a little cold water in a dipper, which she dumped in passing on her granddaughter’s feet. Then May would jump up, pushing her long switch of hair back from her face, which was sulky with sleepiness but not resentful; she accepted the rule of her grandmother as she accepted a rain squall or a stomach ache, with a tough, basic certainty that such things would pass. She put on all her clothes under her nightgown, with her arms underneath free of the sleeves; she was eleven years old and had entered a period of furious modesty during which she refused to receive a vaccination on her buttocks and screamed with rage if Hazel or her grandmother came into a room where she was dressing—which they did, she thought, for their own amusement and to ridicule the very idea of her privacy. She would go out and put gas in the car and come back wide awake, hungry; she would eat for breakfast four or five toast sandwiches with marmalade, peanut butter and bacon.
But this morning when she woke up it was just beginning to be light in the back room; she could just make out the printing on the cardboard boxes. Heinz Tomato Soup, she read, Golden Valley Apricots. She went through a private ritual of dividing the letters into threes; if they came out evenly it meant she would be lucky that day. While she was doing this she thought she heard a noise, as if someone was moving in the yard; a marvellous uneasiness took hold of her body at the soles of her feet and made her curl her toes and stretch her legs until she touched the end of the couch. She had a feeling through her whole body like the feeling inside her head when she was going to sneeze. She got up as quietly as she could and walked carefully across the bare boards of the back room, which felt sandy and springy underfoot, to the rough kitchen linoleum. She was wearing an old cotton nightgown of Hazel’s, which billowed out in a soft, ghostly way behind her.