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

We do, however, exchange presents. I am bearing gifts to Grandmother — three drawings on parchment, and a heavy book. We arrive at Grandmother’s without adventure. And here the hallucination begins.

Her name is Rose. She is about thirteen, with long hair that lies in ribbons on a velvet coat. The coat has braid trimming and gilt buttons. She wears a fur beret. She carries a muff. Her fur-and-velvet overshoes are in the hall closet, where my navy reefer has been hung. The overshoes are the first excitement; who is here? My cousins are boys. No girl comes to Grandmother’s but me. Now someone has come — Rose.

I wear a Ferris waist, two pairs of bloomers because of the cold, a middy blouse with a whistle on a cord, a blue skirt, white stockings, black patent-leather shoes. I have left my coat and my gloves in the hall, but kept my hat: H.M.S. Halifax . From either side of the hat sprout braids and powder-blue grosgrain bows. I am much younger than Rose, and considerably smaller. She bends down to me; she smells of cold and of snow. The room is oddly dark. She cries, “Oh, this is Irmgard. Oh, isn’t she cute!”

I wait for Grandmother to gather her thunderbolts, balance them, and let fly. I might conceivably be allowed to swear, but I would be husbanded from human society if I said “cute.” “Cute” is an abomination, like Wagner, canaries, the radio, motorcycles, small dogs, chintz. There are no thunderbolts. My grandmother — our grandmother — smiles at Rose out of her cold hazel eyes. She smirks at her, doting . Rose responds with a positive simper. They would eat each other, like spun sugar, if they could.

Obviously, Germaine and I have come too early. We have broken into their tea. I have known of only one cake at Grandmother’s — a lemon-scented yellow loaf my mother derisively calls “Lutheran folly.” But Rose has a layer cake decorated with cherries. She has large, thick cookies, saucer-sized, iced with pink and white, sprinkled with colored sugar. She has ginger biscuits, crescents, stars, delicately iced. She has snowmen with cherry noses and currant eyes. They disappear, wrapped in spangled paper, into Rose’s muff.

In the dark, warm, scented parlor Germaine winds the gramophone, and we hear bells from a foreign cathedral and shrill little voices crying “ Süsser die Glocken nie klingen ….” Doors fly open, Rose has a tree. Beyond the doors is a sweet-smelling pagan cave; the sitting room is a blaze of candles, stars, moons, planets; a tree. Rose sits on Grandmother’s lap; Grandmother smooths her hair. Rose is crying. Then, laden with presents, weeping, Rose departs.

It has the true quality of a hallucination, because I take no part. I can see them, but they cannot see me. And then (this is the very thing my grandmother had taught us — her own children, then me — to suspect and scorn) singing infants, little biscuits, shed tears, slops. For she worked on my education — hard; not as she had with her own children, for she knew it had failed, but with endless instructions, and kneadings and pummelings of the mind. Her Germany was hard and thin, shadeless and plain, thin and cold, a landscape illuminated with a cold lemon sun, without warmth or regular clouds. She read to me in German. I was expected to understand. I was expected to sit and listen and form my understanding of people and the way they behaved, on the things she read. But there was a heavy brown veil between us — the German tongue. I knew two words for everything, one in English and one in French. I could not admit three. My grandmother read; I sat on a chair, so high and steep that my legs stuck out before me and went to sleep. She read and read, and one day the veil melted. I began to see a woman in long skirts, walking to and fro, talking, explaining. Suddenly she stops and throws a glance into a mirror. She peeps into a mirror, and what she sees — her own face — will always be as important to her as anything she has to say. I knew instantly what grown women were like and how I would be one day. Voilà les grandes . The veil must have reappeared; I remember nothing else.

Now, was this grandmother mine, or Rose’s? Was her Germany the dark, spruce-scented cave, of which I was given a glimpse, or the shadeless landscape, the clear lemon sun? Did Rose carry hers all her life as I did mine — hers mournful, mine sad; hers tearful, mine grim; her rich, mine thin? But here is the problem, and why it can never be answered: I never saw Rose at all. But if I never saw Rose, then everything fades with her: the tree, the bells, the dark parlor, the candles, the hanging suns.

The next day, the sitting room doors were closed, the rooms had been aired. My present — a book, of course — was by my plate at breakfast. My grandmother and I exchanged a diffident kiss. I saw that she had written on the flyleaf “ für Irmgard .”

On the journey home, Germain and I do not discuss Rose. I suspect Germaine of being an accomplice. She wound the gramophone. But I tell my parents, I say that we saw Rose, that there were biscuits and a tree.

“Oh, she wouldn’t .”

But they exchange a look, which I catch. They say I am making it up. “We shall ask Grandmother,” they warn.

Instinct now says that Grandmother is old and tired, and will lie. She has failed, and will now say anything for the sake of peace and to bind the family to her.

They turn to Germaine. “What was she like, Germaine? What was she wearing?”

Germaine racks her brain, which means she is set down in an unknown country and stumbles over tree roots and rocks. “She had on a navy-blue coat, a sailor hat, a sailor blouse, a…”

But no! I am the one with the middy, the whistle, the stockings, the H.M.S Halifax hat. I see that they know perfectly well Rose exists and are curious, for they would love to know more. They would love to know how she looked and how she was dressed, but they have no more belief in my velvet coat and fur beret than in Germaine’s navy-blue reefer and sailor hat. My mother is excited. She lights a cigarette, puts it out, lights another. She admires her brother-in-law for having “brought it off.” He brought it off — kept out of prison, where he belongs, and there he is, in Mexico, in the sun. Her brother-in-law’s wickedness, his escape, excites something ruthless in her own nature. He is in Mexico; she is in Canada, which she hates. My mother would like to hear about Rose. Rose’s circumstances are more interesting than mine. Her legitimacy is in doubt, she is a Catholic, her father has “brought it off” and lives in a warm climate.

My circumstances are boring. My mother knows all about my clothes. I wake, I dress, I am taken to school by Germaine, I play with dolls. They would have preferred a boy. Well, it is too late now. I am here. They should have thought of it sooner. They should have stopped bickering for a moment and come to a decision. Now I am here, and we shall just have to put up with one another. Rose needn’t put up with anyone; her father is in Mexico, shedding five-dollar bills like leaves.

Since Rose is favored from the start, why is she given things I am told are abomination? It is for Rose that Grandmother’s sitting room is a dark, enchanted cave. And so the questions begin again. Did it amuse our grandmother to give us different glimpses of her world? Mine was surely the noblest and best, but there was a coarse, sentimental Lumpendeutsch part of her nature reserved for Rose?

Did she see her often? Did she like her best?

There is a core of the whole business; and even now the child’s puppy ego wakes and shows its teeth: prefer me, if you don’t mind.

Catching Germaine off guard, I ask cunningly, “ Rose est jolie ?”

“ Jolie !” cries Germaine. “She has pretty hair, but an ugly face. She smiles like a monkey.”