The Cost of Living

by Mavis Gallant

  “All right,” Emma said.

  “We’ll have fun,” Mrs. Ellenger said, pleading. “Didn’t we have fun today, when we were ashore, when I got you the nice bracelet? Next year, we’ll go someplace else. We’ll go anywhere you want.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere,” Emma said.

  But her mother wasn’t listening. Sobbing quietly, she went to sleep. Her arm across Emma grew heavy and slack. Emma lay still; then she saw that the bathroom light had been left on. Carefully, carrying the tiger, she crawled out over the foot of the bed. Before turning out the light, she looked at the tiger. Already, his coat had begun to flake away. The ears were chipped. Turning it over, inspecting the damage, she saw, stamped in blue: “Made in Japan.” The man in the shop had been mistaken, then. It was not an African tiger, good for ten wishes, but something quite ordinary.

  She put the light out and, in the dim stateroom turning gray with dawn, she got into her mother’s empty bed. Still holding the tiger, she lay, hearing her mother’s low breathing and the unhappy words she muttered out of her sleep.

  Mr. Oliver, Emma thought, trying to sort things over, one at a time. Mr. Oliver would be with them for the rest of the cruise. Tomorrow, they would go ashore together. “I think you might call Mr. Oliver Uncle Boyd,” her mother might say.

  Emma’s grasp on the tiger relaxed. There was no magic about it; it did not matter, really, where it had come from. There was nothing to be gained by keeping it hidden under a pillow. Still, she had loved it for an afternoon, she would not throw it away or inter it, like the bracelet, in a suitcase. She put it on the table by the bed and said softly, trying out the sound, “I’m too old to call you Uncle Boyd. I’m thirteen next year. I’ll call you Boyd or Mr. Oliver, whatever you choose. I’d rather choose Mr. Oliver.” What her mother might say then Emma could not imagine. At the moment, she seemed very helpless, very sad, and Emma turned over with her face to the wall. Imagining probable behavior was a terrible strain; this was as far as she could go.

  Tomorrow, she thought, Europe began. When she got up, they would be docked in a new harbor, facing the outline of a new, mysterious place. “Gibraltar,” she said aloud. Africa was over, this was something else. The cabin grew steadily lighter. Across the cabin, the hinge of the porthole creaked, the curtain blew in. Lying still, she heard another sound, the rusty cri-cri-cri of sea gulls. That meant they were getting close. She got up, crossed the cabin, and, carefully avoiding the hump of her mother’s feet under the blanket, knelt on the end of her bed. She pushed the curtain away. Yes, they were nearly there. She could see the gulls swooping and soaring, and something on the horizon—a shape, a rock, a whole continent untouched and unexplored. A tide of newness came in with the salty air: she thought of new land, new dresses, clean, untouched, unworn. A new life. She knelt, patient, holding the curtain, waiting to see the approach to shore.

  1954

  AUTUMN DAY

  I WAS EIGHTEEN when I married Walt and nineteen when I followed him to Salzburg, where he was posted with the Army of Occupation. We’d been married eleven months, but separated for so much of it that my marriage really began that autumn day, when I got down from the train at Salzburg station. Walt was waiting, of course. I could see him in the crowd of soldiers, tall and anxious-looking, already a little bald even though he was only twenty-nine. The first thought that came into my head wasn’t a very nice one: I thought what a pity it was he didn’t look more like my brother-in-law. Walt and my brother-in-law were first cousins; that was how we happened to meet. I had always liked my brother-in-law and felt my sister was lucky to have him, and I suppose that was really why I wanted Walt. I thought it would be the same kind of marriage.

  I waved at Walt, smiling, the way girls do in illustrations. I could almost see myself, fresh and pretty, waving to someone in uniform. This was eight years ago, soon after the war; the whole idea of arriving to meet a soldier somewhere seemed touching and brave and romantic. When Walt took me in his arms, right in front of everyone, I was so engulfed by the idea of the picture it made that I thought I would cry. But then I remembered my luggage and turned away so that I could keep an eye on it. I had matching blue plaid suitcases, given me by my married sister as a going-away present, and I didn’t want to lose them right at the start of my married life.

  “Oh, Walt,” I said, nearly in tears, “I don’t see the hatbox.”

  Those were the first words I’d spoken, except for hello or something like that.

  Walt laughed and said something just as silly. He said, “You look around ten years old.”

  Immediately, I felt defensive. I looked down at my camel’s-hair coat and my scuffed, familiar moccasins, and I thought, What’s wrong with looking young? Walt didn’t know, of course, that my married sister had already scolded me for dressing like a little girl instead of a grownup.

  “You’re not getting ready to go back to school, Cissy,” she’d said. “You’re married. You’re going over there to be with your husband. You’ll be mixing with grown-up married couples. And for goodness’ sake stop sucking your pearls. Of all the baby habits!”

  “Well,” I told her, “you brought me up, practically. Whose fault is it if I’m a baby now?”

  My pearls were always pink with lipstick, because I had a trick of putting them in my mouth when I was pretending to be stubborn or puzzled about something. Up till now, my sister had always thought it cute. I had always been the baby of the family, the motherless child; even my wedding had seemed a kind of game, like dressing up for a party. Now they were pushing me out, buying luggage, criticizing my clothes, sending me off to live thousands of miles away with a strange man. I couldn’t understand the change. It turned all my poses into real feelings: I became truly stubborn, and honestly perplexed. I took the trousseau check my father had given me and bought exactly the sort of clothes I’d always worn, the skirts and sweaters, the blouses with Peter Pan collars. There wasn’t one grown-up dress, not even a pair of high-heeled shoes. I wanted to make my sister sorry, to make her see that I was too young to be going away. Then, too, I couldn’t imagine another way of dressing. I felt safer in my girlhood uniforms, the way you feel in a familiar house.

  I remembered all that as I walked along the station platform with Walt, awkwardly holding hands, and I thought, I suppose now I’ll have to change. But not too soon, not too fast.

  That was how I began my married life.

  In those days, Salzburg was still coming out of the war. All the people you saw on the streets looked angry and in a hurry. There were so many trucks and jeeps clogging the roads, so many soldiers, so much scaffolding over the narrow sidewalks that you could hardly get around. We couldn’t find a place to live. The Army had taken over whole blocks of apartments, but even with the rebuilding and the requisitioning, Walt and I had to wait three months before there was anything ready for us. During those months—October, November, December—we lived in a farmhouse not far out of town. It was a real farm, not a hotel. The owner of the place, Herr Enrich, was a polite man and spoke English. When he first saw me, he said right away that he had taken in boarders before the war, but quite a different type—artists and opera singers, people who had come for the Salzburg Festival. “Now,” he said politely, “one cannot choose.” I wondered if that was meant for us. I looked at Walt, but he didn’t seem to care. Later, Walt told me not to listen to Herr Enrich. He told me not to talk about the war, not to mix with the other people on the farm, to make friends with Army wives. Go for walks. I wrote it all down on a slip of paper like a little girl: Don’t talk war. Avoid people on farm. Meet Army wives. Go for walks. Years later, I came across this list and I showed it to Walt, but he didn’t remember what it was about. When I told him this was a line of conduct he had laid down for me, he didn’t believe it. He hardly remembers our life on the farm. Yet those three months stand out in my memory like a special little lifetime, neither girlhood nor marriage. It was a time when I didn’t like what I was, but didn’t know
what I wanted to be. In a way, I tried to do the right things. I followed Walt’s instructions.

  I didn’t talk about the war; there was no one to talk to. I didn’t mix with the people on the farm. They didn’t want to mix with me. There were six boarders besides us: a Hungarian couple named de Kende—dark and fat with gold teeth; and a family from Vienna with two children. The family from Vienna looked like rabbits. They had moist noses and pink eyes. All four wore the Salzburg costume, and they looked like rabbits dressed up. Sometimes I smiled at the two children, but they never smiled back. I wondered if they had been told not to, and if they had a list of instructions like mine: Don’t mix with Americans. Don’t talk to Army wives…We ate at a long table in the dining room, all of us together. There was a tiled stove in a corner, and the room was often so hot that the windows steamed and ran as if it were raining inside. Most of the time Walt ate with the Army. He was always away for lunch, and then I would be alone with these people—the Enrichs, the de Kendes from Hungary, and the rabbity family from Vienna. Only Mr. de Kende and his wife ever tried to speak to me in English. Mr. de Kende had a terrible accent, but I once understood him to say that he had been a wealthy man in his own country and had owned four factories. Now he traveled around Austria in an old car selling dental supplies. “What do you think of that for Yalta justice?” he said, pointing his fork at me over the table. The others all suddenly stared at me, alert and silent, waiting for my reply. But I didn’t understand. All I could think of then was that my brother-in-law was a dentist, and I remembered how he’d taken me into his home when my mother died, and how kind he had been, and I had to hold my breath to keep from crying in front of them all. At last, I said, “Well, goodness, it’s quite a coincidence, because my sister happens to be married to a dental surgeon.” Mr. de Kende just grunted, and they all went back to their food.

  I told Walt about it, but all he said was, “Don’t bother with them. Why don’t you get to know some Army wives?”

  He didn’t understand how hard it was. We lived out of town, and I didn’t know how to go about meeting anyone on my own. I thought it was up to Walt to take me around and introduce me to people, but he had only one friend in Salzburg and seemed to think that was enough. Walt’s friend’s name was Marvin McColl. He and Walt came from the same town and had gone to the same school. He seemed to have more in common with Marv than with me, but they were the same age, so it seemed only natural. Walt wanted me to be friends with Marv’s wife, Laura.

  He said we were going to be together a lot and it would help if we girls were friends. Laura was twenty-six. She had long hair and big eyes and always looked as if someone had just hurt her feelings. She had no girlfriends in Salzburg, other than me. She hated foreigners and couldn’t stand Army wives. Three times a week, or more, Walt and I went out with the McColls. We went to the movies or drank beer in their apartment. Marv hardly spoke to me, except when he’d been drinking. Then he would get tears in his eyes and tell me I was the first and only girl Walt had ever taken seriously, and how they’d never thought Walt would ever marry. He said I was lucky to get Walt, and he hoped I’d make him happy.

  “Dry your tears, Marv,” Laura would say, rather sarcastically. She would leave Walt and Marv together and take me to another part of the room, so that we could talk. Our conversations were always the same. I would talk about home, and Laura would tell me how much she hated Salzburg and how Marv didn’t understand her and her problems. Meanwhile, Marv and Walt drank beer and talked about people I didn’t know and places I’d never been. On the way home, Walt would always ask me if I’d had a good time, and before I could answer he’d tell me again that Marv was his best friend and what a lot of fun the four of us were going to have together in Salzburg. I didn’t mind the evenings so much, but I didn’t care one bit for the afternoons I had to spend alone with Laura, because then she would curl up with a drink, girls together, and tell me the most awful things about her private life with Marv—the sort of thing my married sister would never have said. As for me, they could have cut my tongue out before I’d have talked about Walt. Naturally, I never repeated any of this to Walt. The truth was that he and I never talked much about anything. I didn’t know him well enough, and I kept feeling that our real married life hadn’t started, that there was nothing to say and wouldn’t be for years.

  I don’t know if I was unhappy or happy in those days. It wasn’t what I’d expected, none of it, being married, or being an Army wife, or living in Europe. Everything—even conversation—seemed so much in the future that I couldn’t get my feet on the ground and start living. It seemed to me it had been that way all my life, and that being married hadn’t settled anything at all. My mother died when I was little, and my father married again, and then I went to live with my married sister. Whenever I seemed low or moody, my sister would say, “Wait till you grow up. Wait till you have a home. Everything will seem different.” Now I was married, and I still didn’t have a home, and there was Walt saying, “We’ll have our own place soon. You’ll be all right then.” I never told him I was unhappy—I wasn’t sure myself if that was exactly the trouble—but often I could see that he was trying to think of the right thing to say to me, hesitating as if he was baffled or just didn’t know me well enough to speak out. I was lonely in the daytimes, and terribly shy and unhappy at night. Walt was silent a lot, and often I simply burst into tears for no reason at all. Tears didn’t seem to bother him. He expected girls to be nervous and difficult at times; he didn’t like it, but he thought it was part of married life. I think he and Marv talked it over, and Marv told him how it was with Laura. Maybe Laura had been worse before they’d got the apartment. I know they had waited seven months, living in one room. Laura wouldn’t be easy in one room. Anyway, I don’t know where the notion came from, but Walt truly believed, if I was silent, or pale, or forlorn, that an apartment would make everything right.

  I never thought about the apartment, except when Walt mentioned it. I wanted to be away from the farm, but I didn’t know where I wanted to be. Our room at the farm was small, cold, and coldly clean. We slept in twin beds. At night, after Walt left me and went back to his own bed and went straight off to sleep, I lay close to the wall, trying to imagine it was a wall somewhere else—but where? At my married sister’s, I had slept on a couch in the dining room. I didn’t want to be there again. The daytime was worse, in a way, because I had to be up and around, and didn’t know what to do with myself. I did a lot of laundering; I washed my sweaters until the wool matted. I’d always been clean, but now, being married, I felt I couldn’t get things clean enough anymore. Walt had told me to go for walks. Once every day, at least, I set out for a walk, a scarf over my hair, my head bent into the wind. I never went far—I was afraid of getting lost—and I felt that I looked like a miserable cat as I skirted the muddy tracks on the road outside the farm. I had never lived in the country before, and it seemed crazy to just walk around with nothing special to look at. The sky was always gray and low, as if you could touch it. It seemed made of felt. The sky at home was never like that; at least, it didn’t press down on you. Herr Enrich said this was the Salzburg autumn sky, and that the clouds were low because they were holding snow. It was frightening, in a way, to think that behind all that felt there were tireless whirlpools of snow, moving and silent.

  One afternoon when I was tramping aimlessly around the yard, I heard somebody singing. I couldn’t tell if the singer was a man or a woman, and I couldn’t make out the words of the song. But the voice was the nicest I had ever heard. I stood still with my hands pulled up into my sleeves, because of the cold, and I looked up to the top of the house, where the voice was coming from. I wondered if it was the radio in someone’s room, but then the singer stopped and sang the same phrase four or five times. The kitchenmaids were sitting on a bench in the yard, plucking chickens for supper in front of an open brazier. They stopped talking and listened, too, very still, and the yard was like one of those fairy tales where ever
yone is suddenly frozen for a thousand years. But then the voice stopped completely, and we became ourselves again, the girls working and giggling, and me trudging about on my eternal walks.

  That night, Herr Enrich mentioned the singer. It was an American, a woman. Her name was Dorothy West. She had finished a concert tour in three countries and was here to rest. She was tired and didn’t want to meet people and was having all her meals in her room.

  “She used to come to us before the war,” Herr Enrich said, looking conceited. “We are so pleased that she has remembered us and come back.”

  I said, timidly, “I’m American, too. Maybe she’d like to just meet me.”

  Herr Enrich said, “No, no one,” like a dragon, so, of course, I didn’t say more.

  Every day, then, I heard Miss West. Her voice, deep and sure, filled the sky, and I heard her even in the woods far behind the house, where I dragged my feet on my dull walks. The people at the table told me she sang in French and Italian as well as English and German, but I didn’t recognize a thing. Having her there had made them somewhat friendlier with me; also, I was beginning to understand a little German. It made a nicer atmosphere, but not one you would call home. Some days, Miss West’s accompanist came out from Salzburg, where he stayed in a hotel. He was a small man in a shabby raincoat; it was a surprise to me that she should have anyone so poor. When he came, everyone was locked out of the dining room (the only really warm room of the house, because it contained the stove), and they worked together at a piano there. The accompanist had written a new song for her; that is, he had set a poem to music. The Enrichs stood out in the hall, where they could listen. Afterward, Herr Enrich told me it was a famous poem called “Herbsttag,” which meant “Autumn Day,” and he translated it for me. The translation was slow and clumsy, and didn’t rhyme the way a real poem should. But when he came to the part about it being autumn and not having a house to live in, I suddenly felt that this poem had something to do with me. It was autumn here, and Walt and I hadn’t a house, either. It was the first time I had ever had this feeling about a poem—that it had something to do with me. I got Herr Enrich to write it down in German, and I memorized the line, “Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.” The rest was all about writing letters and going for lonely walks—exactly the life I was leading. I wished more than ever that I might meet Miss West and tell her how much I liked her singing, and even how much this poet had understood me. I wanted to know someone outside my marriage. I felt that I would never get to know Walt, partly because he was ten years older, but more simply because he was a man. It seemed to me that a girlfriend was the only real friend you could have. I don’t know why I attached so much to the idea of Miss West: I thought that because I had liked her voice this gave me some sort of claim on her. I realize now what a crazy idea this was, but I was only nineteen and in a foreign country.