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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 u
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, “Three 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 ma
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 A
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 A
I had never been on a te
“Everybody I know works too hard to do any sports,” I said. “We don’t even have a te
I did not mention that my town did have a hockey rink and a baseball park.
“Really?” said Mary A
“ Work. And they never have any money, all of their lives.”
Then I told her that most people I knew had never seen a flush toilet unless it was in a public building and that sometimes old people (that is, people too old to work) had to stay in bed all winter in order to keep warm. Children walked barefoot until the frost came in order to save on shoe leather, and died of stomach aches that were really appendicitis because their parents had no money for a doctor. Sometimes people had eaten dandelion leaves, nothing else, for supper.
Not one of these statements-even the one about dandelion leaves-was completely a lie. I had heard of such things. The one about flush toilets perhaps came closest to the truth, but it applied to country people, not town people, and most of those it applied to would be of a generation before mine. But as I talked to Mary A
How to make clear, for instance, the difference between the Montjoys’ kitchen and our kitchen at home. You could not do that simply by mentioning the perfectly fresh and shining floor surfaces of one and the worn-out linoleum of the other, or the fact of soft water being pumped from a cistern into the sink contrasted with hot and cold water coming out of taps. You would have to say that you had in one case a kitchen that followed with absolute correctness a current notion of what a kitchen ought to be, and in the other a kitchen that changed occasionally with use and improvisation, but in many ways never changed at all, and belonged entirely to one family and to the years and decades of that family’s life. And when I thought of that kitchen, with the combination wood and electric stove that I polished with waxed-paper bread wrappers, the dark old spice tins with their rusty rims kept from year to year in the cupboards, the barn clothes hanging by the door, it seemed as if I had to protect it from contempt-as if I had to protect a whole precious and intimate though hardly pleasant way of life from contempt. Contempt was what I imagined to be always waiting, swinging along on live wires, just under the skin and just behind the perceptions of people like the Montjoys.
“That isn’t fair,” said Mary A
“People who don’t need the fish have come and caught them all already. Rich people. For fun.”
Of course some of the people at home did catch fish when they had time, though others, including me, found the fish from our river too bony. But I thought that would keep Mary A
She could not stop mulling over the problem. “Couldn’t they go to the Salvation Army?”