The Cost of Living Read online

  Veronica and Jim’s casual cohabitation is an exception in this collection. Most of the couples are married, most of them unhappily. Infidelity runs through the stories as a matter of course. A wedding ring is flung, unforgettably, into the twilight. A number of the characters are either divorced or in overburdened, disillusioned relationships. Wives declare to their husbands that they do not like men. “Bernadette” is a particularly damning instance of a loveless marriage, and is also an indictment of domestic life in Fifties suburbia. The couple, Nora and Robbie, had once been campus liberals, writing plays, drinking beer out of old pickle jars, hoping to change the world. Now they live in a large pseudo-Tudor home outside Montreal, with a lawyer’s salary, a live-in maid, and two daughters in boarding school. Nora’s activism takes the form of cocktail parties, and Robbie, who serially seduces other women and is serially forgiven, is also seduced by sentimental literary images of the working class. Curious about the kitchen in which their maid, Bernadette, grew up, he asks her to describe it to him, and is told, simply, “It’s big.” The reality—the table “masked with oilcloth…always set between meals, the thick plates turned upside down, the spoons in a glass jar…butter, vinegar, canned jam with the lid of the can half opened and wrenched back, ketchup, a tin of molasses glued to its saucer”—is impossible for Bernadette to articulate, or for her employer to comprehend.

  Women of my generation, born after the mid-Sixties, were raised to believe that having a career and raising a family were not mutually exclusive pursuits, but for the women in Gallant’s early stories, they almost always are. “You’ll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?” Mike asks Barbara, a teenaged girl who has failed out of one of New York City’s best schools, in “One Morning in May.” His remark “strike[s] her into silence, ” but moments later Barbara wonders if Mike might be the solution: “It had occurred to her many times in this lonely winter that only marriage would save her from disgrace, from growing up with no skills and no profession.” This was a time before the pill, before the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and Roe versus Wade. Gilles, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” remembers the women of the generation just prior to those landmark struggles and reforms:

  “They were made out of butter. They had round faces and dimples and curly hair. Bright lipstick…They could have fallen in the Seine and never drowned—they’d have floated downstream on their petticoats. They wore Italian shoes that were a disaster. All those girls have ruined feet now. They looked like children dressed up—too much skirt, mother’s shoes. They smiled and smiled and wanted to get married. They were infantile, underdeveloped. Retarded.”

  His brutal condescension shocks our ears, revealing a misogyny that has since become less socially acceptable. Though marriage tended to be a girl’s only option for establishing herself in adulthood, it was often a premature one. Nineteen-year-old Cissy, in “Autumn Day,” is an example of this: unsure of herself, fuzzy about the facts of life, dressed in Peter Pan collars and drinking sugary alcoholic drinks. Her husband, ten years older, is more of a parent than a sexual partner, telling her what to do and how to behave: “Don’t talk war. Avoid people on farm. Meet Army wives. Go for walks.” True to their time, in most of these marriages the husband works and the wife stays home to raise the family (the fashion model in “Thieves and Rascals,” afraid to cry because she has a photo shoot the next morning and does not want puffy eyes, is an exception). Alongside economic dependence for women in traditional marriages, there are women who depend on other women (“The Cost of Living” and “Acceptance of Their Ways”) and men who depend on women (“Travelers Must Be Content”). The dependency in these relationships is not so much emotional as literal, and it frequently turns parasitic. Characters in these stories may not connect to each other, but they need each other to survive.

  Human dependency is at its most basic when it comes to children, and this book is filled with them. Only they have little to count on. Children are deemed a nuisance, a burden, “a remote, alarming race.” This was an era when people began families young, when they were still essentially children themselves. Mothers resent their offspring for turning them ugly and spoiling their figures. Chaperones are typical, children left in the care of friends, extended family, and hired help. Or they are shipped off to boarding school (Nora, the wife in “Bernadette,” sends away her daughters because she “didn’t trust herself to bring them up”). There is a refusal, on the part of parents, to accept their children as they are. In “Thieves and Rascals,” the father is annoyed that his daughter is “gauche and untidy,” and that her Swiss governess has not groomed “a model little girl, clean and silent as a watch.” Between mothers and daughters, there is often competition—mothers wanting to be mistaken for their daughters’ sisters, for example—and there is also some meanness. In “The Wedding Ring,” the mother tells her brunette daughter to cover her head with a hat lest the sun turn her hair into a “rusty old stove lid.”

  Perhaps these parents are feckless, perhaps they too young or self-centered to care for offspring, perhaps they are simply undeserving of them. Whatever the reason, parents maintain a distance from their children, physical as well as emotional, relinquishing their responsibilities, or regarding them as an afterthought. Even when aware of their shortcomings, parents have little motivation to change. “We can’t lie here and discuss her character and all her little ways,” the mother in “Thieves and Rascals” says to her husband, after their daughter has been expelled from boarding school for spending a weekend in a hotel with a young man. “Evidently neither of us knows anything about them. We can talk about what lousy parents we are. That won’t help either. We might as well sleep, if we can.”

  While this was not an era when mothers chose to raise children without partners, as they are free to do today, there is a significant number of single mothers in these pages. Two are women of lesser economic means, and both happen to be Canadian. Bea, in “Malcolm and Bea,” who lives with her father and sisters in a house “behind a dried-up garden” with “seven Dwarfs on the fake chimneypiece,” bears a child out of wedlock, having slept with its father “only the once.” Bernadette, who does not even know the name of the man who impregnates her, is a maid. The rest are single because they are widows, or divorced, or because their husbands are fundamentally absent. “The Rejection” turns the tables on the single-mother theme; here we see a divorced father and his daughter, utterly estranged. For the most part, though, the spouseless parents are women, both young and middle-aged. Mrs. Tracy in “Madeline’s Birthday,” who only sees her husband on weekends, presents a relatively quotidian version, while Laure, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” mother to two daughters in Paris, only sees her husband, who lives in New Haven, two months out of the year. In “Travelers Must Be Content,” Bonnie is divorced and living in Europe with her teenaged daughter, Flor. In “A Day Like Any Other,” Mrs. Kennedy’s husband is convalescent, indulging “an obscure stomach complaint and a touchy liver” (and meanwhile smuggling wine to his bedside). He forces his family into a peripatetic lifestyle, retreating from one nursing home to the next, and hardly interacting with his daughters:

  The rules of the private clinics he frequented were all in his favor. In any case, he seldom asked to see the girls, for he felt that they were not at an interesting age. Wistfully, his wife sometimes wondered when their interesting age would begin—when they were old enough to be sent away to school, perhaps, or better still, safely disposed of in the handsome marriages that gave her so much concern.

  Both Bonnie and Mrs. Kennedy, stranded by the men in their own lives, are nevertheless obsessed with their daughters’ matrimonial destinies. Mrs. Kennedy repeatedly and grandiosely envisions the wedding ceremony of her daughters (“Chartres would be nice, though damp”); it is only hypothetically, and also at the ritual moment when they are no longer in her charge, that she feels closest to them.

  “Going Ashore” is about a widowed mother and daughter
literally adrift, on a cruise, seeking new horizons after the mother’s latest romance has soured. The mother, Mrs. Ellenger, is distraught to be without male companionship. She is at once a defensive and delinquent parent, drinking brandy and reading old issues of Vogue instead of entertaining her daughter, Emma. At the end of the story, in a desperate plea, Mrs. Ellenger warns Emma never to marry. “Don’t have anything to do with men,” she says, lying with her daughter in bed. “We should always stick together, you and I. Promise me we’ll always stay together.” For Mrs. Ellenger, Emma becomes a substitute spouse; the child she resents is the only person who will not abandon her—at least, for as long as Emma has no choice in the matter. Perhaps due to the very lack of attention, Gallant’s children are a flinty, self-sufficient breed. Madeline is perfectly content on her own in Manhattan, living off liverwurst sandwiches and going to the movies every day. And twelve-year-old Emma, whose mother retreats to her cabin, spends much of the cruise befriending the bartender and conversing with other adults. The children, in other words, learn to fend for themselves; throughout these stories, it’s the adults who need taking care of.

  “The Burgundy Weekend,” the last, novella-like piece in this collection, was published in 1971, a year after Gallant’s second novel, A Fairly Good Time. The story, which has not been reprinted since it appeared in The Tamarack Review, is written in five chapter-like sections, with the amplitude of a writer now accustomed to greater distance and range. Lucie and Jérôme Girard, a Canadian couple, are visiting France, and travel one weekend to see Madame Arrieu, a former acquaintance of Jérôme’s. Madame Arrieu’s granddaughter, Nadine, is a French version of Madeline, a solitary and disaffected teenager whose parents are cruising around the coast of Yugoslavia. Lucie is unlike many women in the preceding stories. She waits until her late twenties to marry Jérôme, who is an unemployed, neurotic intellectual dwelling in a self-concocted world. Because Jérôme has squandered his money, she continues working after marriage, as a nurse. It is Lucie who is the breadwinner, and the caretaker. In spite of the challenges of being married to Jérôme, she takes pride in being the only one able to understand and manage him: “She had a special ear for him, as a person conscious of mice can detect the faintest rustling.” Though made to feel unwelcome by Nadine, who proceeds to flirt with Jérôme, Lucie holds her own during the weekend. Capable and grounded, she is not only a woman of her times but an indication that times have changed.

  The story’s central subject, in fact, is the passage of time, and it straddles the chronological sweep of this collection—looking back at the Fifties, taking place at the start of the Seventies, with the Sixties sandwiched in between. It encompasses three generations and numerous layers of history—layers at once living and dying. Members of the Resistance are literally dying off; Madame Arrieu, a survivor of World War Two, is at a televised memorial service for war deportees when the Girards arrive in Burgundy. Jérôme, who was a student in Paris in the Fifties and for whom this journey marks a return in midlife to the same house he visited twenty years ago, is assaulted by a changed, modern France. He seeks shelter in memories, in a numbing hybrid of present and past: seeing de Gaulle in Quebec in 1943; his first winter in Paris; falling in with left-wing activists concerned with reform in Morocco and Algeria. He recalls police brutality at a protest: “A head hitting a curb made one sound, a stick on a head made another. In those days you still remembered the brain beneath the bone: no one ever thought of that now.” What Madame Arrieu previously predicted—that one day France would lose her colonies—is now the case. Whereas servants once boiled sheets with wood ash, a task that bloodied their hands, and then spread them on the grass to dry, now they use washing machines. The Beatles have already become yesterday’s band, and no one is going to church on Sundays.

  Like her character Jérôme, Gallant would eventually circle back in her writing, revisiting the past in her later work. But most of these stories were written in the present moment, marching forward, composed looking time in the face. They form the straight line Gallant likened them to during our interview, emerging with rapid momentum and, though she refers to herself as a slow writer, often at lightning speed. Here, in these twenty stories from twenty years, is a young writer paving her way, who in fact knew exactly where she was going; a writer spreading her wings and finding herself in glorious flight. Take for example the cadenza that opens “Travelers Must Be Content,” an extended, probing passage that reads like theater curtains majestically parting, offering up the flesh and blood of a character. The first sentence is pure poetry: “Dreams of chaos were Wishart’s meat; he was proud of their diversity, and of his trick of emerging from mortal danger unscathed.” This is a secure and seasoned writer at work, one still in her thirties, one who demands intelligence from her readers and who rewards them with nothing short of genius.

  Certainly there is a broad spectrum here, from traditional scene- and dialogue-based fiction, to compressed dreamlike narratives, to virtuosic character studies that radically redefine our notion of the short story. As the years pass Gallant’s work deepens, but her humor is never abandoned, the exemplary tension of her language, even in longer works, never compromised. The smallest details stick like burrs: a web of warm milk skimmed from coffee, the peppery scent of geraniums. In her vast and searching stories, images have the intimate resonance of still-life painting: a small church is “a pink and white room with an almond pastry ceiling”; two servants sit “at opposite ends of a scrubbed table plucking ducks.” In this collection, Gallant journeys from the New World to the Old, arriving in a creative territory uniquely her own. In the process, she transforms from a writer breaking ground to one in full flower, earning her place as one of the greatest literary artists of her time. Never have characters so adrift been so effectively anchored.

  —JHUMPA LAHIRI

  THE COST OF LIVING

  To Alberto Manguel

  Imagine that

  it were given back to me to be

  the child who knew departure would be sweet,

  the boy who drew square-rigged ships, the girl who knew

  truck routes from Ottawa to Mexico,

  the one who found a door in Latin verse

  and made a map out of hexameters.

  —MARILYN HACKER

  “A Sunday After Easter”

  MADELINE’S BIRTHDAY

  THE MORNING of Madeline Farr’s seventeenth birthday, Mrs. Tracy awoke remembering that she had forgotten to order a cake. It was doubtful if this would matter to Madeline, who would probably make a point of not caring. But it does matter to me, Mrs. Tracy thought. Observances are important and it is, after all, my house.

  She did not spring up at once but lay in a wash of morning sunlight, surveying her tanned arms, stretched overhead, while her mind opened doors and went from room to room of the eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse. She knew exactly how the curtains blew into Madeline’s room, which had once been hers, and why there was silence on one floor and sound on the other. It was a house, she told herself, in which she had never known an unhappy moment.

  “I cannot cope with it here,” Madeline had written to her father shortly after she arrived. “One at a time would be all right but not all the Tracys and this German.” “Cope” was a word Madeline had learned from her mother, who had divorced Madeline’s father because she could not cope with him, and then had fled to Europe because she could not cope with the idea of his remarriage. “Can you take Madeline for the summer?” she had written to Anna Tracy, who was a girlhood friend. “You are so much better able to cope.”

  In the kitchen, directly beneath Mrs. Tracy’s bedroom, Doris, who came in every day from the village, had turned on the radio. “McIntoshes were lively yesterday,” the announcer said, “but Roman Beauties were quiet.” Propelled out of the house to the orchard by this statement, Mrs. Tracy brought herself back to hear Doris’s deliberate tread across the kitchen. She heard the refrigerator door slam and then, together with a shar
p bite of static, the whir of the electric mixer. That would be Madeline’s cake, which must, after all, have been mentioned. Or else Doris, her imagination uncommonly fired, had decided to make waffles for breakfast. The cake was more probable. Satisfied, Mrs. Tracy turned her thoughts to the upper floor.

  She skimmed quickly over her husband’s bed, which was firmly made up with a starched coverlet across the pillow. Edward spent only weekends in the country. She did not dwell on his life in town five days of the week. When he spoke of what he did, it sounded dull, a mélange of dust and air-conditioning, a heat-stricken party somewhere, and So-and-So, who had called and wanted to have lunch and been put off.

  In the next room, Allie Tracy, who was nearly six, stirred and murmured in her bed. In less than a minute, she would be wide awake, paddling across the hall to the bathroom she shared with her mother. She would run water on her washcloth and flick her toothbrush under the faucet. She would pick up yesterday’s overalls, which Mrs. Tracy had forgotten to put in the laundry, and pull them on, muttering fretfully at the buttons. Hairbrush in hand, Allie would then begin her morning chant: “Isn’t anybody going to do my hair? If nobody does it, I want it cut off. I’m the only one at the beach who still has braids.”