Mavis Gallant - The Cost of Living - Early and Uncollected Stories

He started up the stairs, free. Bernadette was on her knees, washing the painted baseboard. Her hair, matted with a cheap permanent, had been flattened into curls that looked like snails, each snail held with two crossed bobby pins. She was young, with a touching attractiveness that owed everything to youth.

“ Bonjour, Bernadette .”

“’ Jour .”

Bending, she plunged her hands into the bucket of soapy water. A moment earlier, she had thought of throwing herself down the stairs and making it seem an accident. Robbie’s sudden appearance had frightened her into stillness. She wiped her forehead, waiting until he had closed the door behind him. Then she flung herself at the baseboard, cloth in hand. Did she feel something — a tugging, a pain? “ Merci, mon Dieu ,” she whispered. But there was nothing to be thankful for, in spite of the walls and the buckets of water and the bending and the stretching.

Now it was late December, the hundred and twenty-sixth day, and Bernadette could no longer pretend not to be certain. The Knights were giving a party. Bernadette put the calendar back in the drawer, under her folded slips. She had counted on it so much that she felt it bore witness to her fears; anyone seeing it would know at once.

For weeks she had lived in a black sea of nausea and fear. The Knights had offered to send her home to Abitibi for Christmas, had even wanted to pay her fare. But she knew that her father would know the instant he saw her, and would kill her. She preferred going on among familiar things, as if the normality, the repeated routine of getting up in the morning and putting on Mr. Knight’s coffee and Mrs. Knight’s tea would, by force of pattern, cause things to be the way they had been before October. So far, the Knights had noticed nothing, although the girls, home for Christmas, teased her about getting fat. Thanks to St. Joseph, the girls had now been sent north to ski with friends, and there was no longer any danger of their drawing attention to Bernadette’s waist.

Because of the party, Bernadette was to wear a uniform, which she had not done for some time. She pressed it and put it back on its hanger without trying it on, numb with apprehension, frightened beyond all thought. She had spent the morning cleaning the living room. Now it was neat, unreal, like a room prepared for a color photo in a magazine. There were flowers and plenty of ashtrays. It was a room waiting for disorder to set in.

“Thank you, Bernadette,” Nora had said, taking, as always, the attitude that Bernadette had done her an unexpected service. “It looks lovely.”

Nora liked the room; it was comfortable and fitted in with her horror of ostentation. Early in her marriage she had decided that her taste was uncertain; confusing elegance with luxury, she had avoided both. Later, she had discovered French-Canadian furniture, which enabled her to refer to her rooms in terms of the simple, the charming, even the amusing. The bar, for example, was a prie-dieu Nora had discovered during one of her forays into rural Quebec just after the war, before American tourists with a nose for a bargain had (as she said) cleaned out the province of its greatest heritage. She had found the prie-dieu in a barn and had bought it for three dollars. Sandpapered, waxed, its interior recess deepened to hold bottles, it was considered one of Nora’s best trouvailles . The party that evening was being given in honor of a priest — a liberal priest from Belgium, a champion of modern ecclesiastical art, and another of Nora’s finds. (Who but Nora would have dreamed of throwing a party for a priest?)

Robbie wondered if the prie-dieu might not offend him. “Maybe you ought to keep the lid up, so he won’t see the cross,” he said.

But Nora felt that would be cheating. If the priest accepted her hospitality, he must also accept her views.

“He doesn’t know your views,” Robbie said. “If he did, he probably wouldn’t come.” He had a cold, and was spending the day at home, in order to be well for the party. The cold made him interfering and quarrelsome.

“Go to bed, Robbie,” said Nora kindly. “Haven’t you anything to read? What about all the books you got for Christmas?”

Considering him dismissed, she coached Bernadette for the evening. They rehearsed the handing around of the tray, the unobtrusive clearing of ashtrays. Nora noticed that Bernadette seemed less shy. She kept a blank, hypnotized stare, concentrating hard. After a whole year in the household, she was just beginning to grasp what was expected. She understood work, she had worked all her life, but she did not always understand what these terrifying, well-meaning people wanted. If, dusting a bookcase, she slowed her arm, lingering, thinking of nothing in particular, one of them would be there, like a phantom, frightening her out of her wits.

“Would you like to borrow one of these books, Bernadette?”

Gentle, tolerant, infinitely baffling, Mr. or Mrs. Knight would offer her a book in French.

“For me?”

“Yes. You can read in the afternoon, while you are resting.”

Read while resting? How could you do both? During her afternoon rest periods, Bernadette would lie on the bed, looking out the window. When she had a whole day to herself, she went downtown in a bus and looked in the windows of stores. Often, by the end of the afternoon, she had met someone, a stranger, a man who would take her for a drive in a car or up to his room. She accepted these adventures as inevitable; she had been so overwarned before leaving home. Cunning prevented her giving her address or name, and if one of her partners wanted to see her again, and named a time and a street number, she was likely to forget or to meet someone else on the way. She was just as happy in the cinema, alone, or looking at displays of eau de cologne in shops.

Reduced to perplexity, she would glance again at the book. Read?

“I might get it dirty.”

“But books are to be read, Bernadette.”

She would hang her head, wondering what they wanted, wishing they would go away. At last she had given in. It was in the autumn, the start of her period of fear. She had been dusting in Robbie’s room. Unexpectedly, in that ghostly way they had, he was beside her at the bookcase. Blindly shy, she remembered what Mrs. Knight, all tact and kindness and firm common sense, had said that morning: that Bernadette sometimes smelled of perspiration, and that this was unpleasant. Probably Mr. Knight was thinking this now. In a panicky motion her hand flew to L’Amant de Lady Chatterley , which Nora had brought from Paris so that she could test the blundering ways of censorship. (The English version had been held at customs, the French let through, which gave Nora ammunition for a whole winter.)

“You won’t like that,” Robbie had said. “Still…” He pulled it out of the bookcase. She took the book to her room, wrapped it carefully in newspaper, and placed it in a drawer. A few days later she knocked on the door of Robbie’s room and returned L’Amant de Lady Chatterley .

“You enjoyed it?”

“ Oui. Merci .”

He gave her La Porte Etroite . She wrapped it in newspaper and placed it in a drawer for five days. When she gave it back, he chose for her one of the Claudine series, and then, rather doubtfully, Le Rouge et le Noir .

“Did you like the book by Stendhal, Bernadette?”

“ Oui. Merci .”

To dinner guests, Nora now said, “Oh, our Bernadette! Not a year out of Abitibi, and she was reading Gide and Colette. She knows more about French literature than we do. She goes through Stendhal like a breeze. She adores Giraudoux.” When Bernadette, grim with the effort of remembering what to do next, entered the room, everyone would look at her and she would wonder what she had done wrong.