What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we’re right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we’re right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational Church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old freeloaders tearing up the main street because the sewer broke again. It’s not as if we’re on the Cape; we’re north of Boston and there’s people in this town haven’t seen the ocean for twenty years.
The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it.
· · ·
Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it’s sad, but I don’t think it’s so sad myself. The store’s pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice? I’ve often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money’s coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute.
Then everybody’s luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked manager behind which he hides all day, when the girls touch his eye. Lengel’s pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn’t miss that much. He comes over and says, “Girls, this isn’t the beach.”
Queenie blushes, though maybe it’s just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. “My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks.” Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of toney, too, the way it ticked over “pick up” and “snacks.” All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big glass plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it’s a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with “They’ll Do It Every Time” cartoons stencilled on.
“That’s all right,” Lengel said. “But this isn’t the beach.” His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn’t like my smiling—as I say, he doesn’t miss much—but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare.
Queenie’s blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back—a really sweet backside—pipes up, “We weren’t doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing.”
“That makes no difference,” Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn’t noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. “We want you decently dressed when you come in here.”
“We are decent,” Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes.
“Girls, I don’t want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It’s our policy.” He turns his back. That’s policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency.
All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, “Sammy, have you rung up their purchase?”
I thought and said “No” but it wasn’t about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT—it’s more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case “Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)!” the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking.
The girls, and who’d blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say “I quit” to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they’ll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow.
“Did you say something, Sammy?”
“I said I quit.”
“I thought you did.”
“You didn’t have to embarrass them.”
“It was they who were embarrassing us.”
I started to say something that came out “Fiddle-de-doo.” It’s a saying of my grandmother’s, and I know she would have been pleased.
“I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” Lengel said.
“I know you don’t,” I said. “But I do.” I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute.
Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He’s been a friend of my parents for years. “Sammy, you don’t want to do this to your Mom and Dad,” he tells me. It’s true, I don’t. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it’s fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, “Sammy” stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on it. “You’ll feel this for the rest of your life,” Lengel says, and I know that’s true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs “pee-pul” and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there’s no fumbling around getting your coat and ear muffs, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt.
I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-bl
ue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.
Mavis Gallant
SEPTEMBER 29, 1962
BETWEEN FRIDAY NIGHT and Saturday noon, the courtyard filled with cars and station wagons, lined up like animals feeding along the wall of the hunting lodge. The license plates were mostly 75s, from Paris, but some of the numbers meant Lyon and one was as far away from Sologne as Avignon. Across the court, under the oak trees, the dogs, each chained to his kennel, barked insanely. Only two of the shooting party had brought dogs; the twelve chained dogs belonged to M. Maitrepierre, who had let the shooting rights to his estate for the season. Walking under the oak trees to have a better look at the dogs, the men in their boots trod on acorns and snails. The men were stout and middle-aged but dressed like the slimmer, handsomer models in Adam. A recent issue of Adam, advising a wardrobe for the hunting season, was on the windowsill of the dining room reserved for the party. There was also Entreprise, a business journal, and several copies of Tintin.
The hunters slammed doors the whole morning and carried bushels of equipment from the cars to the lodge. M. Scapa, a repatriated pied-noir from Algiers, had brought a chauffeur to look after his guns, his own case of whiskey, and his plaid-covered ice bucket. The lodge was ugly and awkward and had been built two hundred years after the other buildings on the estate. The big house was sold. M. Maitrepierre reserved for himself, his wife, and his married daughter and her family a cottage separated from the lodge by a locked gate and a wall. The shooting rights, which were high, were not his only source of income; he ran a sheep farm and half a dozen of the secret French economic tangles that come to light during family squabbles or taxation lawsuits. He built blocks of flats in Paris, sold a hotel in Normandy, bought part of a clothing factory in Lille. He kept his family tamed by the threat that they were doomed and bankrupt and on the verge of singing for their supper on some rainy street.
The shooting season had been open for over a month, but game was still so plentiful here in Sologne that pheasants, with their suicidal curiosity about automobiles, stood along the roads. Small hunter-colored couples, they were parodies of hunters. Anyone gathering mushrooms or chestnuts raised pheasant and quail. In pastures the hind legs of hares were glimpsed in the long grass. Saturdays and Sundays the farmers tied their dogs and kept the children inside, for the men who arrived in the big cars with the smart equipment shot without aiming; they shot at anything. A man wearing a suède jacket had been mistaken for a deer and wounded in the shoulder. There were any number of shot cats, turkeys, and ducks. Every season someone told of a punctured sheep. Casual poachers who left their cars drawn up on the edge of the highway came back to find a hole in the windshield and a web of cracked glass.
This was flat country in a season of rich colors—brown, dark red, gold.
· · ·
Philip Graves, who was in love with M. Maitrepierre’s married daughter, Jeanne, and younger than she was by nine years, had been put in the lodge. The lodge smelled like a school. Philip had not come to shoot but to be near Jeanne. Now that he was here, and saw that he was to sleep in the lodge, and that Jeanne’s husband had arrived, he wondered if there had been a mistake—if he had turned up on the wrong weekend. The hunters strode and stamped, carrying whiskey glasses. The wooden stairs shook under their boots. Some went out on Saturday afternoon, but most of the party waited for Sunday morning. They ate enormous meals. They neither washed nor shaved. It was part of the ritual of being away from their women.
Philip had been given a room with a camp bed and a lamp and a ewer of cold water, and a bucket with an enamel cover. Jeanne showed him the room and let him start to undress her on the bed before changing her mind. She worried about what the family would think—so she said—and she left him there, furious and demented. Was it because of the husband? No, she swore the husband had nothing to do with it. She talked rapidly, fastening her cardigan. Nothing went on between Jeanne and the husband. It had gone wrong years ago. Well, one year ago, at least. The husband’s room in the lodge was next to Philip’s. Jeanne was to spend the night in her own girlhood bed, in her father’s house. What other evidence did Philip want?
He was the only foreigner here. He was a bad shot, and loathed killing. He supposed that everyone looked at him and guessed his situation. Why was he here? She had invited him; but she had not told him her husband was coming, too, or that she would be sleeping in another house. They were an odd couple. Philip was slight and fair. He was in Paris, translating Jules Renard’s letters. He had met Jeanne because it was through one of her father’s multitudinous enterprises he had found a place to live. Jeanne was Spanish-looking, and rather fat since the birth of her second daughter. Philip loved her beyond reason and cherished dreams in which the husband, the two little girls, and Jeanne’s own common sense about money were somehow mislaid.
· · ·
On Sunday morning, he walked with a party of women. There were three: Jeanne, her mother, and Jeanne’s closest woman friend. If he included Jeanne’s little girls, he had five females in all. The lover trailed behind the women, peevish as a child. They were walking far from the shooting party, on the shore of a shallow pond. Along the path he saw a snail and trod on it, afterward wiping his shoe on fallen leaves. Most galling to him was the way the women admired Jeanne; there was no mistaking the admiration in their eyes. She was bringing off a situation they could only applaud; she was getting away with murder. She had put her husband and her lover in adjacent rooms while she slept in calm privacy in her father’s house. Now here she was, fat and placid, with the lover tagging like a spaniel. What was the good of keeping slim, starving oneself, paying out fortunes to be smart, when fat Jeanne could keep two men on the string without half trying? Philip saw this in the other women’s eyes.
He knew they thought she was his mother; but the maternal part of her life disgusted him. The idea of her having ever been a mother—the confirmation, the two girls, ran along before the women (Philip was like one of the women now! )—made him sick. Early that morning, Jeanne’s father had taken Philip on a tour of the sheep farm, and at the sight of a lambing chart on the wall of a pen—a pen called le nursery—Philip had been puzzled by the diagram of a lamb blind and doubled up in a kind of labyrinth. His mind first told him, “Surrealistic drawing”; then he realized what it was and was revolted. The thought of Jeanne on a level with animals—ewes, bitches, mares—was unbearable. He could not decide if he wanted her as a woman or a goddess. When he returned from the sheep pens, he found that Jeanne, meanwhile, had been attending to her husband—unpacking for him, and giving him breakfast.
The children, the women, and Philip walked along the edge of the pond, and separated the strands of barbed wire that marked someone else’s property. Before them, at the end of a long terrace, among oak and acacia trees, rose a shuttered house. It was an ugly and pretentious house, built fifty years ago, imitating without grace a deeper past. He saw the women admiring it, and Jeanne yearning for it—for a large, shuttered, empty, pretentious house. Jeanne was already seeing what she would “do” to the place. She described the tubs of hydrangeas along the façade and the wrought-iron baskets dripping with geraniums. He pressed her arm as if afraid. What will become of us? What will happen if we quarrel?
The two women, Jeanne’s mother and Jeanne’s best friend, were as kind to Philip as if he were a dog. He felt the justice of it. He had the dog’s fear of being left behind. He was like the dog shut up in the automobile who has no means of knowing his owner will ever return. He had seen dogs’ eyes yellow with anxiety….The most abject of lovers can be saved by pride. He dropped her arm, made her sense he was moving away. It was no accident he had chosen as a subject of
work conceited Jules Renard. The hideous house belonged to a broker who had fumbled or gone crooked on a speculation, but (explained Jeanne) luckily had this place to fall back on. He seldom lived in the house, but he owned it. It was his; it was real. He knew it was there. Jeanne could admire storybook castles, but she never wanted them. Storybook castles were what Philip wanted her to want, because they were all he could give her. He hadn’t a penny. She was waiting for an inheritance from her father, and another from her mother. Her husband hadn’t quite gone through her marriage settlement; not yet.
Jeanne stuffed her pockets with acorns and cracked them with her teeth. She was always making motions of eating, of biting. She bit acorns, chestnuts, twigs. She was solid as this house, and solidity was what she wanted: something safe, something she could fall back on. She spat a chewed acorn out of her mouth into her palm. “You’re too young to remember the war, Philip,” she said, smiling at him. “We used to make coffee out of these filthy things.”
· · ·
Sunday night the bag was divided, the courtyard slowly rid of its cars. Philip, earlier, had walked around the tableau de chasse, the still-life spread on the ground, pretending admiration. He saw hares so riddled they would never be clean of shot. He was sick for the larks. He was to spend Sunday night at the cottage, with Jeanne’s father and mother. Her father would drive him up to Paris on Monday morning. He was to sleep in Jeanne’s girlhood bed. His sheets had been thriftily moved from the lodge and carried the smell of the unwashed house. Jeanne’s husband all at once wanted to be in Paris. He wanted to pack the car and leave now. The weekend was over; there was no reason to remain another second. Fat and placid Jeanne screamed at him, “You have imposed a dinner party on me for tomorrow night. Now, take your choice. We leave now, this minute, and you take tomorrow’s guests to a restaurant. Or you wait until the game is divided and we have a hare.” The family were not entitled to any of the game, except by courtesy. Jeanne’s husband had gone out with the shooting party, but he had not paid his share of the shooting rights on his father-in-law’s property; he had no claim to so much as a dead thrush.
The 60s Page 79
