Lying Under the Apple Tree (62 page)

“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.

T
HE 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?

“W
HAT 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.”

W
HEN
M
R
. 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.