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It was not as if I had given up on passion. Passion, indeed, wholehearted, even destructive passion, was what I was after. Demand and submission. I did not exclude a certain kind of brutality. But no confusion, no double-dealing, or sleazy sort of surprise or humiliation. I could wait, and all my due would come to me, I thought, when I was full-blown.
Hired Girl
Mrs. Montjoy was showing me how to put the pots and pans away. I had put some of them in the wrong places.
Above all things, she said, she hated a higgledy-piggledy cupboard.
“You waste more time,” she said. “You waste more time looking for something because it wasn’t where it was last time.”
“That’s the way it was with our hired girls at home,” I said. “The first few days they were there they were always putting things away where we couldn’t find them.
“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-pi
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 ta
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 A
“What happened to your dress?” Mary A
I said that it was an old dress anyway and that I hadn’t wanted to wear anything good on the train.
Mary A
“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 cha