Alice Munro - Dance of the Happy Shades - And Other Stories

—and the houses, all the others too, are just tremendous, mostly quite modern. There isn’t a weed in the lawns, they have a gardener spend a whole day every week just cleaning out what looks to be perfect already. I think the men are rather sappy, the fuss they make over perfect lawns and things like that. They do go out and rough it every once in a while but that is all very complicated and everything has to be just so. It is like that with everything they do and everywhere they go.

Don’t worry about me being lonesome and downtrodden and all that maid sort of thing. I wouldn’t let anybody get away with anything like that. Besides I’m not a maid really, it’s just for the summer. I don’t feel lonesome, why should I? I just observe and am interested. Mother, of course I can’t eat with them. Don’t be ridiculous. It’s not the same thing as a hired girl at all. Also I prefer to eat alone. If you wrote Mrs. Gannett a letter she wouldn’t know what you were talking about, and I don’t mind. So don’t!

Also I think it would be better when Marion comes down if I took my afternoon off and met her downtown. I don’t want particularly to have her come here. I’m not sure how maids’ relatives come. Of course it’s all right if she wants to. I can’t always tell how Mrs. Gannett will react, that’s all, and I try to take it easy around her without letting her get away with anything. She is all right though.

In a week we will be leaving for Georgian Bay and of course I am looking forward to that. I will be able to go swimming every day, she (Mrs. Gannett) says and—

Her room was really too hot. She put the unfinished letter under the blotter on the desk. A radio was playing in Margaret’s room. She walked down the hall towards Margaret’s door, hoping it would be open. Margaret was not quite fourteen; the difference in age compensated for other differences, and it was not too bad to be with Margaret.

The door was open, and there spread out on the bed were Margaret’s crinolines and summer dresses. Alva had not known she had so many.

“I’m not really packing,” Margaret said. “I know it would be crazy. I’m just seeing what I’ve got. I hope my stuff is all right,” she said. “I hope it’s not too—”

Alva touched the clothes on the bed, feeling a great delight in these delicate colours, in the smooth little bodices, expensively tucked and shaped, the crinolines with their crisp and fanciful bursts of net; in these clothes there was a very pretty artificial innocence. Alva was not envious; no, this had nothing to do with her; this was part of Margaret’s world, that rigid pattern of private school (short tunics and long black stockings), hockey, choir, sailing in summer, parties, boys who wore blazers—

“Where are you going to wear them?” Alva said.

“To the Ojibway. The hotel. They have dances every weekend, everybody goes down in their boats. Friday night is for kids and Saturday night is for parents and other people—That is I will be going,” Margaret said rather grimly, “if I’m not a social flop. Both the Davis girls are.”

“Don’t worry,” Alva said a little patronizingly. “You’ll be fine.”

“I don’t really like dancing,” Margaret said. “Not the way I like sailing, for instance. But you have to do it.”

“You’ll get to like it,” Alva said. So there would be dances, they would go down in the boats, she would see them going and hear them coming home. All these things, which she should have expected—

Margaret sitting cross-legged on the floor, looked up at her with a blunt, clean face, and said, “Do you think I ought to start to neck this summer?”

“Yes,” said Alva. “ I would,” she added almost vindictively. Margaret looked puzzled; she said, “I heard that’s why Scotty didn’t ask me at Easter—”

There was no sound, but Margaret slipped to her feet. “Mother’s coming,” she said with her lips only, and almost at once Mrs. Gannett came into the room, smiled with a good deal of control, and said, “Oh, Alva. This is where you are.”

Margaret said, “I was telling her about the Island, Mummy.”

“Oh. There are an awful lot of glasses sitting around down there Alva, maybe you could whisk them through now and they’d be out of the way when you want to get dinner—And Alva, do you have a fresh apron?”

“The yellow is so too tight, Mummy, I tried it on—”

“Look, darling, it’s no use getting all that fripfrap out yet, there’s still a week before we go—”

Alva went downstairs, passed along the blue hall, heard people talking seriously, a little drunkenly, in the den, and saw the door of the sewing-room closed softly, from within, as she approached. She went into the kitchen. She was thinking of the Island now. A whole island that they owned; nothing in sight that was not theirs. The rocks, the sun, the pine trees, and the deep, cold water of the Bay. What would she do there, what did the maids do? She could go swimming, at odd hours, go for walks by herself, and sometimes—when they went for groceries, perhaps—she would go along in the boat. There would not be so much work to do as there was here, Mrs. Gannett had said. She said the maids always enjoyed it. Alva thought of the other maids, those more talented, more accommodating girls; did they really enjoy it? What kind of freedom or content had they found, that she had not?

She filled the sink, got out the draining rack again and began to wash glasses. Nothing was the matter, but she felt heavy, heavy with the heat and tired and uncaring, hearing all around her an incomprehensible faint noise—of other people’s lives, of boats and cars and dances—and seeing this street, that promised island, in a harsh and continuous dazzle of sun. She could not make a sound here, not a dint.

She must remember, before dinner time, to go up and put on a clean apron.

She heard the door open; someone came in from the patio. It was Mrs. Gannett’s cousin.

“Here’s another glass for you,” he said. “Where’ll I put it?”

“Anywhere,” said Alva.

“Say thanks,” Mrs. Gannett’s cousin said, and Alva turned around wiping her hands on her apron, surprised, and then in a very short time not surprised. She waited, her back to the counter, and Mrs. Gannett’s cousin took hold of her lightly, as in a familiar game, and spent some time kissing her mouth.

“She asked me up to the Island some weekend in August,” he said.

Someone on the patio called him, and he went out, moving with the graceful, rather mocking stealth of some slight people. Alva stood still with her back to the counter.

This stranger’s touch had eased her; her body was simply grateful and expectant, and she felt a lightness and confidence she had not known in this house. So there were things she had not taken into account, about herself, about them, and ways of living with them that were not so unreal. She would not mind thinking of the Island now, the bare sunny rocks and the black little pine trees. She saw it differently now; it was even possible that she wanted to go there. But things always came together; there was something she would not explore yet—a tender spot, a new and still mysterious humiliation.

The place called Black Horse is marked on the map but there is nothing there except a store and three houses and an old cemetery and a livery shed which belonged to a church that burned down. It is a hot place in summer, with no shade on the road and no creek nearby. The houses and the store are built of red brick of a faded, gingery colour, with a random decoration of grey or white bricks across the chimneys and around the windows. Behind them the fields are full of milkweed and goldenrod and big purple thistles. People who are passing through, on their way to the Lakes of Muskoka and the northern bush, may notice that around here the bountiful landscape thins and flattens, worn elbows of rock appear in the diminishing fields and the deep, harmonious woodlots of elm and maple give way to a denser, less hospitable scrub-forest of birch and poplar, spruce and pine—where in the heat of the afternoon the pointed trees at the end of the road turn blue, transparent, retreating into the distance like a company of ghosts.