The View from Castle Rock

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-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 lavish-ness 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, “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 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.”

I had never been on a tennis court and the idea of going out in a sailboat or getting up on a horse terrified me. I could swim, but not very well. Golf to me was something that silly-looking men did in cartoons. The adults I knew never played any games that involved physical action. They sat down and rested when they were not working, which wasn’t often. Though on winter evenings they might play cards. Euchre. Lost Heir. Not the kind of cards Mrs. Montjoy ever played.

“Everybody I know works too hard to do any sports,” I said. “We don’t even have a tennis court in our town and there isn’t any golf course either.” (Actually we had once had both these things, but there hadn’t been the money to keep them up during the Depression and they had not been restored since.) “Nobody I know has a sailboat.”

I did not mention that my town did have a hockey rink and a baseball park.

“Really?” said Mary Anne thoughtfully. “What do they do then?”

“ 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 Anne all the isolated incidents and bizarre stories I had heard spread out in my mind, so that I could almost believe that I myself had walked with bare blue feet on cold mud-I who had benefited from cod liver oil and inoculations and been bundled up for school within an inch of my life, and had gone to bed hungry only because I refused to eat such things as junket or bread pudding or fried liver. And this false impression I was giving seemed justified, as if my exaggerations or near lies were substitutes for something I could not make clear.

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 Anne. “That’s awful. I didn’t know people could eat dandelion leaves.” But then she brightened. “Why don’t they go and catch some fish?”

“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 Anne quiet, especially since I knew that Mr. Montjoy went on fishing trips with his friends.

She could not stop mulling over the problem. “Couldn’t they go to the Salvation Army?”

“They’re too proud.”

“Well I feel sorry for them,” she said. “I feel really sorry for them, but I think that’s stupid. What about the little babies and the children? They ought to think about them. Are the children too proud too?”

“Everybody’s proud.”

When Mr. Montjoy came to the island on weekends, there was always a great deal of noise and activity. Some of that was because there were visitors who came by boat to swim and have drinks and watch sailing races. But a lot of it was generated by Mr. Montjoy himself. He had a loud blustery voice and a thick body with a skin that would never take a tan. Every weekend he turned red from the sun, and during the week the burned skin peeled away and left him pink and muddy with freckles, ready to be burned again. When he took off his glasses you could see that one eye was quick and squinty and the other boldly blue but helpless-looking, as if caught in a trap.

His blustering was often about things that he had misplaced, or dropped, or bumped into. “Where the hell is the-?” he would say, or “You didn’t happen to see the-?” So it seemed that he had also misplaced, or failed to grasp in the first place, even the name of the thing he was looking for. To console himself he might grab up a handful of peanuts or pretzels or whatever was nearby, and eat handful after handful until they were all gone. Then he would stare at the empty bowl as if that too astounded him.

One morning I heard him say, “Now where in hell is that-?” He was crashing around out on the deck.

“Your book?” said Mrs. Montjoy, in a tone of bright control. She was having her midmorning coffee.

“I thought I had it out here,” he said. “I was reading it.” “The Book-of-the-Month one?” she said. “I think you left it in the living room.”

She was right. I was vacuuming the living room, and a few moments before I had picked up a book pushed partway under the sofa. Its title was Seven Gothic Tales. The title made me want to open it, and even as I overheard the Montjoys’ conversation I was reading, holding the book open in one hand and guiding the vacuum cleaner with the other. They couldn’t see me from the deck.

“Nay, I speak from the heart,” said Mira. “I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.”

“There it is,” said Mr. Montjoy, who for a wonder had come into the room without his usual bumping and banging-or none at least that I had heard. “Good girl, you found my book. Now I remember. Last night I was reading it on the sofa.”

“It was on the floor,” I said. “I just picked it up.”

He must have seen me reading it. He said, “It’s a queer kind of book, but sometimes you want to read a book that isn’t like all the others.”

“I couldn’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mrs. Montjoy, coming in with the coffee tray. “We’ll have to get out of the way here and let her get on with the vacuuming.”

Mr. Montjoy went back to the mainland, and to the city, that evening. He was a bank director. That did not mean, apparently, that he worked in a bank. The day after he had gone I looked everywhere. I looked under the chairs and behind the curtains, in case he might have left that book behind. But I could not find it.

“I always thought it would be nice to live up here all the year round, the way you people do,” said Mrs. Foley. She must have cast me again as the girl who brought the groceries. Some days she said, “I know who you are now. You’re the new girl helping the Dutch woman in the kitchen. But I’m sorry, I just can’t recall your name.” And other days she let me walk by without giving any greeting or showing the least interest.

“We used to come up here in the winter,” she said. “The bay would be frozen over and there would be a road across the ice. We used to go snowshoeing. Now that’s something people don’t do anymore. Do they? Snowshoeing?”

She didn’t wait for me to answer. She leaned towards me. “Can you tell me something?” she said with embarrassment, speaking almost in a whisper. “Can you tell me where Jane is? I haven’t seen her running around here for the longest time.”

I said that I didn’t know. She smiled as if I was teasing her, and reached out a hand to touch my face. I had been stooping down to listen to her, but now I straightened up, and her hand grazed my chest instead. It was a hot day and I was wearing my halter, so it happened that she touched my skin. Her hand was light and dry as a wood shaving, but the nail scraped me.

“I’m sure it’s all right,” she said.

After that I simply waved if she spoke to me and hurried on my way.

On a Saturday afternoon towards the end of August, the Montjoys gave a cocktail party. The party was given in honor of the friends they had staying with them that weekend-Mr. and Mrs. Hammond. A good many small silver forks and spoons had to be polished in preparation for this event, so Mrs. Montjoy decided that all the silver might as well be done at the same time. I did the polishing and she stood beside me, inspecting it.

On the day of the party, people arrived in motorboats and sailboats. Some of them went swimming, then sat around on the rocks in their bathing suits, or lay on the dock in the sun. Others came up to the house immediately and started drinking and talking in the living room or out on the deck. Some children had come with their parents, and older children by themselves, in their own boats. They were not children of Mary Anne’s age-Mary Anne had been taken to stay with her friend Susan, on another island. There were a few very young ones, who came supplied with folding cribs and playpens, but most were around the same age as I was. Girls and boys fifteen or sixteen years old. They spent most of the afternoon in the water, shouting and diving and having races to the raft.

Mrs. Montjoy and I had been busy all morning, making all the different things to eat, which we now arranged on platters and offered to people. Making them had been fiddly and exasperating work. Stuffing various mixtures into mushroom caps and sticking one tiny slice of something on top of a tiny slice of something else on top of a precise fragment of toast or bread. All the shapes had to be perfect-perfect triangles, perfect rounds and squares, perfect diamonds.

Mrs. Hammond came into the kitchen several times and admired what we were doing.

“How marvellous everything looks,” she said. “You notice I’m not offering to help. I’m a perfect mutt at this kind of thing.”

I liked the way she said that. I’m a perfect mutt. I admired her husky voice, its weary good-humored tone, and the way she seemed to suggest that tiny geometrical bits of food were not so necessary, might even be a trifle silly. I wished I could be her, in a sleek black bathing suit with a tan like dark toast, shoulder-length smooth dark hair, orchid-colored lipstick.

Not that she looked happy. But her air of sullenness and complaint seemed glamorous to me, her hints of cloudy drama enviable. She and her husband were an altogether different type of rich people from Mr. and Mrs. Montjoy. They were more like the people I had read about in magazine stories and in books like The Hucksters-people who drank a lot and had love affairs and went to psychiatrists.

Her name was Carol and her husband’s name was Ivan. I thought of them already by their first names-something I had never been tempted to do with the Montjoys.

Mrs. Montjoy had asked me to put on a dress, so I wore the pink and white striped cotton, with the smudged material at its waist tucked under the elasticized belt. Nearly everybody else was in shorts and bathing suits. I passed among them, offering food. I was not sure how to do this. Sometimes people were laughing or talking with such vigor that they didn’t notice me, and I was afraid that their gestures would send the food bits flying. So I said, “Excuse me-would you like one of these?” in a raised voice that sounded very determined or even reproving. Then they looked at me with startled amusement, and I had the feeling that my interruption had become another joke.

“Enough passing for now,” said Mrs. Montjoy. She gathered up some glasses and told me to wash them. “People never keep track of their own,” she said. “It’s easier just to wash them and bring in clean ones. And it’s time to get the meatballs out of the fridge and heat them up. Could you do that? Watch the oven-it won’t take long.”

While I was busy in the kitchen I heard Mrs. Hammond calling, “Ivan! Ivan!” She was roaming through the back rooms of the house. But Mr. Hammond had come in through the kitchen door that led to the woods. He stood there and did not answer her. He came over to the counter and poured gin into his glass.

“Oh, Ivan, there you are,” said Mrs. Hammond, coming in from the living room,

“Here I am,” said Mr. Hammond.

“Me, too,” she said. She shoved her glass along the counter.

He didn’t pick it up. He pushed the gin towards her and spoke to me. “Are you having fun, Minnie?”

Mrs. Hammond gave a yelp of laughter. “Minnie? Where did you get the idea her name was Minnie?”

“Minnie,” said Mr. Hammond. Ivan. He spoke in an artificial, dreamy voice. “Are you having fun, Minnie?”

“Oh yes,” I said, in a voice that I meant to make as artificial as his. I was busy lifting the tiny Swedish meatballs from the oven and I wanted the Hammonds out of my way in case I dropped some. They would think that a big joke and probably report on me to Mrs. Montjoy, who would make me throw the dropped meatballs out and be annoyed at the waste. If I was alone when it happened I could just scoop them up off the floor.

Mr. Hammond said, “Good.”

“I swam around the point,” Mrs. Hammond said. “I’m working up to swimming around the entire island.”

“Congratulations,” Mr. Hammond said, in the same way that he had said “Good.”

I wished that I hadn’t sounded so chirpy and silly. I wished that I had matched his deeply skeptical and sophisticated tone.

“Well then,” said Mrs. Hammond. Carol. “I’ll leave you to it.

I had begun to spear the meatballs with toothpicks and arrange them on a platter. Ivan said, “Care for some help?” and tried to do the same, but his toothpicks missed and sent meatballs skittering onto the counter.

“Well,” he said, but he seemed to lose track of his thoughts, so he turned away and took another drink. “Well, Minnie.”

I knew something about him. I knew that the Hammonds were here for a special holiday because Mr. Hammond had lost his job. Mary Anne had told me this. “He’s very depressed about it,” she had said. “They won’t be poor, though. Aunt Carol is rich.”

He did not seem depressed to me. He seemed impatient-chiefly with Mrs. Hammond-but on the whole rather pleased with himself. He was tall and thin, he had dark hair combed straight back from his forehead, and his mustache was an ironic line above his upper lip. When he talked to me he leaned forward, as I had seen him doing earlier, when he talked to women in the living room. I had thought then that the word for him was courtly.

“Where do you go swimming, Minnie? Do you go swimming?”

“Yes,” I said. “Down by the boathouse.” I decided that his calling me Minnie was a special joke between us.

“Is that a good place?”

“Yes.” It was, for me, because I liked being close to the dock. I had never, till this summer, swum in water that was over my head.

“Do you ever go in without your bathing suit on?”

I said, “No.”

“You should try it.”

Mrs. Montjoy came through the living-room doorway, asking if the meatballs were ready.

“This is certainly a hungry crowd,” she said. “It’s the swimming does it. How are you getting on, Ivan? Carol was just looking for you.”

“She was here,” said Mr. Hammond.

Mrs. Montjoy dropped parsley here and there among the meatballs. “Now,” she said to me. “I think you’ve done about all you need to here. I think I can manage now. Why don’t you just make yourself a sandwich and run along down to the boat-house?”

I said I wasn’t hungry. Mr. Hammond had helped himself to more gin and ice cubes and had gone into the living room.

“Well. You’d better take something,” Mrs. Montjoy said. “You’ll be hungry later.”

She meant that I was not to come back.

On my way to the boathouse I met a couple of the guests-girls of my own age, barefoot and in their wet bathing suits, breathlessly laughing. They had probably swum partway round the island and climbed out of the water at the boat-house. Now they were sneaking back to surprise somebody. They stepped aside politely, not to drip water on me, but did not stop laughing. Making way for my body without a glance at my face.

They were the sort of girls who would have squealed and made a fuss over me, if I had been a dog or a cat.

The noise of the party continued to rise. I lay down on my cot without taking off my dress. I had been on the go since early morning and I was tired. But I could not relax. After a while I got up and changed into my bathing suit and went down to swim. I climbed down the ladder into the water cautiously as I always did-I thought that I would go straight to the bottom and never come up if I jumped-and swam around in the shadows. The water washing my limbs made me think of what Mr. Hammond had said and I worked the straps of my bathing suit down, finally pulling out one arm after the other so that my breasts could float free. I swam that way, with the water sweetly dividing at my nipples…

I thought it was not impossible that Mr. Hammond might come looking for me. I thought of him touching me. (I could not figure out exactly how he would get into the water-I did not care to think of him stripping off his clothes. Perhaps he would squat down on the deck and I would swim over to him.) His fingers stroking my bare skin like ribbons of light. The thought of being touched and desired by a man that old-forty, forty-five?-was in some way repulsive, but I knew I would get pleasure from it, rather as you might get pleasure from being caressed by an amorous tame crocodile. Mr. Hammond’s-Ivan’s-skin might be smooth, but age and knowledge and corruptness would be on him like invisible warts and scales.

I dared to lift myself partly out of the water, holding with one hand to the dock. I bobbed up and down and rose into the air like a mermaid. Gleaming, with nobody to see.

Now I heard steps. I heard somebody coming. I sank down into the water and held still.

For a moment I believed that it was Mr. Hammond, and that I had actually entered the world of secret signals, abrupt and wordless forays of desire. I did not cover myself but shrank against the dock, in a paralyzed moment of horror and submission.

The boathouse light was switched on, and I turned around noiselessly in the water and saw that it was old Mr. Foley, still in his party outfit of white trousers and yachting cap and blazer. He had stayed for a couple of drinks and explained to everybody that Mrs. Foley was not up to the strain of seeing so many people but sent her best wishes to all.

He was moving things around on the tool shelf. Soon he either found what he wanted or put back what he had intended to put back, and he switched off the light and left. He never knew that I was there.

I pulled up my bathing suit and got out of the water and went up the stairs. My body seemed such a weight to me that I was out of breath when I got to the top.

The sound of the cocktail party went on and on. I had to do something to hold my own against it, so I started to write a letter to Dawna, who was my best friend at that time. I described the cocktail party in lurid terms-people vomited over the deck railing and a woman passed out, falling down on the sofa in such a way that part of her dress slid off and exposed a purple-nippled old breast (I called it a bezoom). I spoke of Mr. Hammond as a letch, though I added that he was very good-looking. I said that he had fondled me in the kitchen while my hands were busy with the meatballs and that later he had followed me to the boathouse and grabbed me on the stairs. But I had kicked him where he wouldn’t forget and he had retreated. Scurried away, I said.

“So hold your breath for the next installment,” I wrote. “Entitled, ’Sordid Adventures of a Kitchen Maid.’ Or ’Ravaged on the Rocks of Georgian Bay.’“

When I saw that I had written “ravaged” instead of “ravished,” I thought I could let it go, because Dawna would never know the difference. But I realized that the part about Mr. Hammond was overdone, even for that sort of letter, and then the whole thing filled me with shame and a sense of my own failure and loneliness. I crumpled it up. There had not been any point in writing this letter except to assure myself that I had some contact with the world and that exciting things-sexual things-happened to me. And I hadn’t. They didn’t.

“Mrs. Foley asked me where Jane was,” I had said, when Mrs. Montjoy and I were doing the silver-or when she was keeping an eye on me doing the silver. “Was Jane one of the other girls who worked here in the summer?”

I thought for a moment that she might not answer, but she did.

“Jane was my other daughter,” she said. “She was Mary Anne’s sister. She died.”

I said, “Oh. I didn’t know.” I said, “Oh. I’m sorry.

“Did she die of polio?” I said, because I did not have the sense, or you might say the decency, not to go on. And in those days children still died of polio, every summer.

“No,” said Mrs. Montjoy. “She was killed when my husband moved the dresser in our bedroom. He was looking for something he thought he might have dropped behind it. He didn’t realize she was in the way. One of the casters caught on the rug and the whole thing toppled over on her.”

I knew every bit of this, of course. Mary Anne had already told me. She had told me even before Mrs. Foley asked me where Jane was and clawed at my breast.

“How awful,” I said.

“Well. It was just one of those things.”

My deception made me feel queasy. I dropped a fork on the floor.

Mrs. Montjoy picked it up.

“Remember to wash this again.”

How strange that I did not question my right to pry, to barge in and bring this to the surface. Part of the reason must have been that in the society I came from, things like that were never buried for good, but ritualistically resurrected, and that such horrors were like a badge people wore-or, mostly, that women wore-throughout their lives.

Also it may have been because I would never quite give up when it came to demanding intimacy, or at least some kind of equality, even with a person I did not like.

Cruelty was a thing I could not recognize in myself. I thought I was blameless here, and in any dealings with this family. All because of being young, and poor, and knowing about Nausicaa.

I did not have the grace or fortitude to be a servant.

On my last Sunday I was alone in the boathouse, packing up my things in the suitcase I had brought-the same suitcase that had gone with my mother and father on their wedding trip and the only one we had in the house. When I pulled it out from under my cot and opened it up, it smelled of home-of the closet at the end of the upstairs hall where it usually sat, close to the mothballed winter coats and the rubber sheet once used on children’s beds. But when you got it out at home it always smelled faintly of trains and coal fires and cities-of travel.

I heard steps on the path, a stumbling step into the boat-house, a rapping on the wall. It was Mr. Montjoy.

“Are you up there? Are you up there?”

His voice was boisterous, jovial, as I had heard it before when he had been drinking. As of course he had been drinking-for once again there were people visiting, celebrating the end of summer. I came to the top of the stairs. He had a hand against the wall to steady himself-a boat had gone by out in the channel and sent its waves into the boathouse.

“See here,” said Mr. Montjoy, looking up at me with frowning concentration. “See here-I thought I might as well bring this down and give it to you while I thought of it.

“This book,” he said.

He was holding Seven Gothic Tales.

“Because I saw you were looking in it that day,” he said. “It seemed to me you were interested. So now I finished it and I thought I might as well pass it along to you. It occurred to me to pass it along to you. I thought, maybe you might enjoy it.”

I said, “Thank you.”

“I’m probably not going to read it again though I thought it was very interesting. Very unusual.”

“Thank you very much.”

“That’s all right. I thought you might enjoy it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well then. I hope you will.”

“Thank you.”

“Well then,” he said. “Good-bye.”

I said, “Thank you. Good-bye.”

Why were we saying good-bye when we were certain to see each other again before we left the island, and before I got on the train? It might have meant that this incident, of his giving me the book, was to be closed, and I was not to reveal or refer to it. Which I didn’t. Or it might have been just that he was drunk and did not realize that he would see me later. Drunk or not, I see him now as pure of motive, leaning against the boat-house wall. A person who could think me worthy of this gift. Of this book.

At the moment, though, I didn’t feel particularly pleased, or grateful, in spite of my repeated thank-yous. I was too startled, and in some way embarrassed. The thought of having a little corner of myself come to light, and be truly understood, stirred up alarm, just as much as being taken no notice of stirred up resentment. And Mr. Mountjoy was probably the person who interested me least, whose regard meant the least to me, of all the people I had met that summer.

He left the boathouse and I heard him stumping along the path, back to his wife and his guests. I pushed the suitcase aside and sat down on the cot. I opened the book just anywhere, as I had done the first time, and began to read.

The walls of the room had once been painted crimson, but with time the colour had faded into a richness of hues, like a glassful of dying roses… Some potpourri was being burned on the tall stove, on the sides of which Neptune, with a trident, steered his team of horses through high waves…

I forgot Mr. Mountjoy almost immediately. In hardly any time at all I came to believe that this gift had always belonged to me.