by Alice Munro
“We called our maids hired girls,” I added. “That was what we called them, at home.”
“Did you?” she said. A moment of silence passed. “And the colander on that hook there.”
Why did I have to say what I had said? Why was it necessary to mention that we had hired girls at home?
Anybody could see why. To put myself somewhere near her level. As if that was possible. As if anything I had to say about myself or the house I came from could interest or impress her.
—
IT WAS TRUE, though, about the hired girls. In my early life there was a procession of them. There was Olive, a soft drowsy girl who didn’t like me because I called her Olive Oyl. Even after I was made to apologize she didn’t like me. Maybe she didn’t like any of us much because she was a Bible Christian, which made her mistrustful and reserved. She used to sing as she washed the dishes and I dried. There is a Balm in Gilead…If I tried to sing with her she stopped.
Then came Jeanie, whom I liked, because she was pretty and she did my hair up in pin curls at night when she did her own. She kept a list of the boys she went out with and made peculiar signs after their names: x x x o o * *. She did not last long.
Neither did Dorothy, who hung the clothes on the line in an eccentric way—pinned up by the collar, or by one sleeve or one leg—and swept the dirt into a corner and propped the broom up to hide it.
And when I was around ten years old hired girls became a thing of the past. I don’t know if it was because we became poorer or because I was considered old enough to be a steady help. Both things were true.
Now I was seventeen and able to be hired out myself, though only as summer help because I had one more year to go at high school. My sister was twelve, so she could take over at home.
—
MRS. MONTJOY had picked me up at the railway station in Pointe au Baril, and transported me in an outboard-motor boat to the island. It was the woman in the Pointe au Baril store who had recommended me for the job. She was an old friend of my mother’s—they had taught school together. Mrs. Montjoy had asked her if she knew of a country girl, used to doing housework, who would be available for the summer, and the woman had thought that it would be the very thing for me. I thought so too—I was eager to see more of the world.
Mrs. Montjoy wore khaki shorts and a tucked-in shirt. Her short, sun-bleached hair was pushed behind her ears. She leapt aboard the boat like a boy and gave a fierce tug to the motor, and we were flung out on the choppy evening waters of Georgian Bay. For thirty or forty minutes we dodged around rocky and wooded islands with their lone cottages and boats bobbing beside the docks. Pine trees jutted out at odd angles, just as they do in the paintings.
I held on to the sides of the boat and shivered in my flimsy dress.
“Feeling a tad sick?” said Mrs. Montjoy, with the briefest possible smile. It was like the signal for a smile, when the occasion did not warrant the real thing. She had large white teeth in a long tanned face, and her natural expression seemed to be one of impatience barely held in check. She probably knew that what I was feeling was fear, not sickness, and she threw out this question so that I—and she—need not be embarrassed.
Here was a difference, already, from the world I was used to. In that world, fear was commonplace, at least for females. You could be afraid of snakes, thunderstorms, deep water, heights, the dark, the bull, and the lonely road through the swamp, and nobody thought any the worse of you. In Mrs. Montjoy’s world, however, fear was shameful and always something to be conquered.
The island that was our destination had a name—Nausicaa. The name was written on a board at the end of the dock. I said it aloud, trying to show that I was at ease and quietly appreciative, and Mrs. Montjoy said with slight surprise, “Oh, yes. That was the name it already had when Daddy bought it. It’s for some character in Shakespeare.”
I opened up my mouth to say no, no, not Shakespeare, and to tell her that Nausicaa was the girl on the beach, playing ball with her friends, surprised by Ulysses when he woke up from his nap. I had learned by this time that most of the people I lived amongst did not welcome this kind of information, and I would probably have kept quiet even if the teacher had asked us in school, but I believed that people out in the world—the real world—would be different. Just in time I recognized the briskness of Mrs. Montjoy’s tone when she said “some character in Shakespeare”—the suggestion that Nausicaa, and Shakespeare, as well as any observations of mine, were things she could reasonably do without.
The dress I was wearing for my arrival was one I had made myself, out of pink and white striped cotton. The material had been cheap, the reason being that it was not really meant for a dress but for a blouse or a nightgown, and the style I had chosen—the full-skirted, tight-waisted style of those days—was a mistake. When I walked, the cloth bunched up between my legs, and I kept having to yank it loose. Today was the first day the dress had been worn, and I still thought that the trouble might be temporary—with a firm enough yank the material might be made to hang properly. But I found when I took off my belt that the day’s heat and my hot ride on the train had created a worse problem. The belt was wide and elasticized, and of a burgundy color, which had run. The waistline of the dress was circled with strawberry dye.
I made this discovery when I was getting undressed in the loft of the boathouse, which I was to share with Mrs. Montjoy’s ten-year-old daughter, Mary Anne.
“What happened to your dress?” Mary Anne said. “Do you sweat a lot? That’s too bad.”
I said that it was an old dress anyway and that I hadn’t wanted to wear anything good on the train.
Mary Anne was fair-haired and freckled, with a long face like her mother’s. But she didn’t have her mother’s look of quick judgments marshalled at the surface, ready to leap out at you. Her expression was benign and serious, and she wore heavy glasses even when sitting up in bed. She was to tell me soon that she had had an operation to get her eyes straightened, but even so her eyesight was poor.
“I’ve got Daddy’s eyes,” she said. “I’m intelligent like him too so it’s too bad I’m not a boy.”
Another difference. Where I came from, it was generally held to be more suspect for boys to be smart than for girls to be, though not particularly advantageous for one or the other. Girls could go on to be teachers, and that was all right—though quite often they became old maids—but for boys to continue with school usually meant they were sissies.
All night long you could hear the water slapping against the boards of the boathouse. Morning came early. I wondered whether I was far enough north of home for the sun to actually be rising sooner. I got up and looked out. Through the front window, I saw the silky water, dark underneath but flashing back from its surface the light of the sky. The rocky shores of this little cove, the moored sailboats, the open channel beyond, the mound of another island or two, shores and channels beyond that. I thought that I would never, on my own, be able to find my way back to the mainland.
I did not yet understand that maids didn’t have to find their way anywhere. They stayed put, where the work was. It was the people who made the work who could come and go.
The back window looked out on a gray rock that was like a slanting wall, with shelves and crevices on it where little pine and cedar trees and blueberry bushes had got a foothold. Down at the foot of this wall was a path—which I would take later on—through the woods, to Mrs. Montjoy’s house. Here everything was still damp and almost dark, though if you craned you could see bits of the sky whitening through the trees on top of the rock. Nearly all of the trees were strict-looking, fragrant evergreens, with heavy boughs that didn’t allow much growth underneath—no riot of grapevine and brambles and saplings such as I was used to in the hardwood forest. I had noticed that when I looked out from the train on the day before—how what we called the bush turned into the more authentic-looking forest, which had eliminated all lavishness and confusion and seasonal change. It seemed to
me that this real forest belonged to rich people—it was their proper though sombre playground—and to Indians, who served the rich people as guides and exotic dependents, living out of sight and out of mind, somewhere that the train didn’t go.
Nevertheless, on this morning I was really looking out, eagerly, as if this was a place where I would live and everything would become familiar to me. And everything did become familiar, at least in the places where my work was and where I was supposed to go. But a barrier was up. Perhaps barrier is too strong a word—there was not a warning so much as something like a shimmer in the air, an indolent reminder. Not for you. It wasn’t a thing that had to be said. Or put on a sign.
Not for you. And though I felt it, I would not quite admit to myself that such a barrier was there. I would not admit that I ever felt humbled or lonely, or that I was a real servant. But I stopped thinking about leaving the path, exploring among the trees. If anybody saw me I would have to explain what I was doing, and they—Mrs. Montjoy—would not like it.
And to tell the truth, this wasn’t so different from the way things were at home, where taking any impractical notice of the out-of-doors, or mooning around about Nature—even using that word, Nature—could get you laughed at.
—
MARY ANNE LIKED TO TALK when we were lying on our cots at night. She told me that her favorite book was Kon-Tiki and that she did not believe in God or Heaven.
“My sister is dead,” she said. “And I don’t believe she is floating around somewhere in a white nightie. She is just dead, she is just nothing.
“My sister was pretty,” she said. “Compared to me she was, anyway. Mother wasn’t ever pretty and Daddy is really ugly. Aunt Margaret used to be pretty but now she’s fat, and Nana used to be pretty but now she’s old. My friend Helen is pretty but my friend Susan isn’t. You’re pretty, but it doesn’t count because you’re the maid. Does it hurt your feelings for me to say that?”
I said no.
“I’m only the maid when I’m here.”
It wasn’t that I was the only servant on the island. The other servants were a married couple, Henry and Corrie. They did not feel diminished by their jobs—they were grateful for them. They had come to Canada from Holland a few years before and had been hired by Mr. and Mrs. Foley, who were Mrs. Montjoy’s parents. It was Mr. and Mrs. Foley who owned the island, and lived in the large white bungalow, with its awnings and verandas, that crowned the highest point of land. Henry cut the grass and looked after the tennis court and repainted the lawn chairs and helped Mr. Foley with the boats and the clearing of paths and the repairs to the dock. Corrie did the housework and cooked the meals and looked after Mrs. Foley.
Mrs. Foley spent every sunny morning sitting outside on a deck chair, with her feet stretched out to get the sun and an awning attached to the chair protecting her head. Corrie came out and shifted her around as the sun moved, and took her to the bathroom, and brought her cups of tea and glasses of iced coffee. I was witness to this when I went up to the Foleys’ house from the Montjoys’ house on some errand, or to put something into or remove something from the freezer. Home freezers were still rather a novelty and a luxury at this time, and there wasn’t one in the Montjoys’ cottage.
“You are not going to suck the ice cubes,” I heard Corrie say to Mrs. Foley. Apparently Mrs. Foley paid no attention and proceeded to suck an ice cube, and Corrie said, “Bad. No. Spit out. Spit right out in Corrie’s hand. Bad. You didn’t do what Corrie say.”
Catching up to me on the way into the house, she said, “I tell them she could choke to death. But Mr. Foley always say, give her the ice cubes, she wants a drink like everybody else. So I tell her and tell her. Do not suck ice cubes. But she won’t do what I say.”
Sometimes I was sent up to help Corrie polish the furniture or buff the floors. She was very exacting. She never just wiped the kitchen counters—she scoured them. Every move she made had the energy and concentration of somebody rowing a boat against the current and every word she said was flung out as if into a high wind of opposition. When she wrung out a cleaning rag she might have been wringing the neck of a chicken. I thought it might be interesting if I could get her to talk about the war, but all she would say was that everybody was very hungry and they saved the potato skins to make soup.
“No good,” she said. “No good to talk about that.”
She preferred the future. She and Henry were saving their money to go into business. They meant to start up a nursing home. “Lots of people like her,” said Corrie, throwing her head back as she worked to indicate Mrs. Foley out on the lawn. “Soon more and more. Because they give them the medicine, that makes them not die so soon. Who will be taking care?”
One day Mrs. Foley called out to me as I crossed the lawn.
“Now, where are you off to in such a hurry?” she said. “Come and sit down by me and have a little rest.”
Her white hair was tucked up under a floppy straw hat, and when she leaned forward the sun came though the holes in the straw, sprinkling the pink and pale-brown patches of her face with pimples of light. Her eyes were a color so nearly extinct I couldn’t make it out and her shape was curious—a narrow flat chest and a swollen stomach under layers of loose, pale clothing. The skin of the legs she stuck out into the sunlight was shiny and discolored and covered with faint cracks.
“Pardon my not having put my stockings on,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m feeling rather lazy today. But aren’t you the remarkable girl. Coming all that way by yourself. Did Henry help you carry the groceries up from the dock?”
Mrs. Montjoy waved to us. She was on her way to the tennis court, to give Mary Anne her lesson. Every morning she gave Mary Anne a lesson, and at lunch they discussed what Mary Anne had done wrong.
“There’s that woman who comes to play tennis,” Mrs. Foley said of her daughter. “She comes every day, so I suppose it’s all right. She may as well use it if she hasn’t a court of her own.”
Mrs. Montjoy said to me later, “Did Mrs. Foley ask you to come over and sit on the grass?”
I said yes. “She thought I was somebody who’d brought the groceries.”
“I believe there was a grocery girl who used to run a boat. There hasn’t been any grocery delivery in years. Mrs. Foley does get her wires crossed now and then.”
“She said you were a woman who came to play tennis.”
“Did she really?” Mrs. Montjoy said.
—
THE WORK THAT I HAD TO DO here was not hard for me. I knew how to bake, and iron, and clean an oven. Nobody tracked barnyard mud into this kitchen and there were no heavy men’s work clothes to wrestle through the wringer. There was just the business of putting everything perfectly in place and doing quite a bit of polishing. Polish the rims of the burners of the stove after every use, polish the taps, polish the glass door to the deck till the glass disappears and people are in danger of smashing their faces against it.
The Montjoys’ house was modern, with a flat roof and a deck extending over the water and a great many windows, which Mrs. Montjoy would have liked to see become as invisible as the glass door.
“But I have to be realistic,” she said. “I know if you did that you’d hardly have time for anything else.” She was not by any means a slave driver. Her tone with me was firm and slightly irritable, but that was the way it was with everybody. She was always on the lookout for inattention or incompetence, which she detested. Sloppy was a favorite word of condemnation. Others were wishy-washy and unnecessary. A lot of things that people did were unnecessary, and some of these were also wishy-washy. Other people might have used the words arty or intellectual or permissive. Mrs. Montjoy swept all those distinctions out of the way.
I ate my meals alone, between serving whoever was eating on the deck or in the dining room. I had almost made a horrible mistake about that. When Mrs. Montjoy caught me heading out to the deck with three plates—held in a show-off waitress-style—for the first lunch, she said, “Thr
ee plates there? Oh, yes, two out on the deck and yours in here. Right?”
I read as I ate. I had found a stack of old magazines—Life and Look and Time and Collier’s—at the back of the broom closet. I could tell that Mrs. Montjoy did not like the idea of my sitting reading these magazines as I ate my lunch, but I did not quite know why. Was it because it was bad manners to eat as you read, or because I had not asked permission? More likely she saw my interest in things that had nothing to do with my work as a subtle kind of impudence. Unnecessary.
All she said was, “Those old magazines must be dreadfully dusty.”
I said that I always wiped them off.
Sometimes there was a guest for lunch, a woman friend who had come over from one of the nearby islands. I heard Mrs. Montjoy say, “…have to keep your girls happy or they’ll be off to the hotel, off to the port. They can get jobs there so easily. It’s not the way it used to be.”
The other woman said, “That’s so true.”
“So you just make allowances,” said Mrs. Montjoy. “You do the best with them you can.” It took me a moment to realize who they were talking about. Me. “Girls” meant girls like me. I wondered, then, how I was being kept happy. By being taken along on the occasional alarming boat ride when Mrs. Montjoy went to get supplies? By being allowed to wear shorts and a blouse, or even a halter, instead of a uniform with a white collar and cuffs?
And what hotel was this? What port?
—
“WHAT ARE YOU BEST AT?” Mary Anne said. “What sports?”
After a moment’s consideration, I said, “Volleyball.” We had to play volleyball at school. I wasn’t very good at it, but it was my best sport because it was the only one.
“Oh, I don’t mean team sports,” said Mary Anne. “I mean, what are you best at. Such as tennis. Or swimming or riding or what? My really best thing is riding, because that doesn’t depend so much on your eyesight. Aunt Margaret’s best used to be tennis and Nana’s used to be tennis too, and Grandad’s was always sailing, and Daddy’s is swimming I guess and Uncle Stewart’s is golf and sailing and Mother’s is golf and swimming and sailing and tennis and everything, but maybe tennis a little bit the best of all. If my sister Jane hadn’t died I don’t know what hers would have been, but it might have been swimming because she could swim already and she was only three.”
