The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [32]
Lydia made a sound of doubtful assent. She knew she had been rude, even cruel. She knew she would have to apologize. She went to the sideboard and poured herself another cup of coffee.
The woman of the house came in from the kitchen.
“Is it keeping hot? I think I’ll have a cup, too. Are you really going today? Sometimes I think I’d like to get on a boat and go too. It’s lovely here and I love it but you know how you get.”
They drank their coffee standing by the sideboard. Lydia did not want to go back to the table, but knew that she would have to. Mr. Stanley looked frail and solitary, with his narrow shoulders, his neat bald head, his brown checked sports jacket which was slightly too large. He took the trouble to be clean and tidy, and it must have been a trouble, with his eyesight. Of all people he did not deserve rudeness.
“Oh, I forgot,” the woman said.
She went into the kitchen and came back with a large brown-paper bag.
“Vincent left you this. He said you liked it. Do you?”
Lydia opened the bag and saw long, dark, ragged leaves of dulse, oily-looking even when dry.
“Well,” she said.
The woman laughed. “I know. You have to be born here to have the taste.”
“No, I do like it,” said Lydia. “I was getting to like it.”
“You must have made a hit.”
Lydia took the bag back to the table and showed it to Mr. Stanley.
She tried a conciliatory joke.
“I wonder if Willa Cather ever ate dulse?”
“Dulse,” said Mr. Stanley thoughtfully. He reached into the bag and pulled out some leaves and looked at them. Lydia knew he was seeing what Willa Cather might have seen. “She would most certainly have known about it. She would have known.”
But was she lucky or was she not, and was it all right with that woman? How did she live? That was what Lydia wanted to say. Would Mr. Stanley have known what she was talking about? If she had asked how did Willa Cather live, would he not have replied that she did not have to find a way to live, as other people did, that she was Willa Cather?
What a lovely, durable shelter he had made for himself. He could carry it everywhere and nobody could interfere with it. The day may come when Lydia will count herself lucky to do the same. In the meantime, she’ll be up and down. “Up and down,” they used to say in her childhood, talking of the health of people who weren’t going to recover. “Ah. She’s up and down.”
Yet look how this present slyly warmed her, from a distance.
The Turkey Season
TO JOE RADFORD
When I was fourteen I got a job at the Turkey Barn for the Christmas season. I was still too young to get a job working in a store or as a part-time waitress; I was also too nervous.
I was a turkey gutter. The other people who worked at the Turkey Barn were Lily and Marjorie and Gladys, who were also gutters; Irene and Henry, who were pluckers; Herb Abbott, the foreman, who superintended the whole operation and filled in wherever he was needed. Morgan Elliott was the owner and boss. He and his son, Morgy, did the killing.
Morgy I knew from school. I thought him stupid and despicable and was uneasy about having to consider him in a new and possibly superior guise, as the boss’s son. But his father treated him so roughly, yelling and swearing at him, that he seemed no more than the lowest of the workers. The other person related to the boss was Gladys. She was his sister, and in her case there did seem to be some privilege of position. She worked slowly and went home if she was not feeling well, and was not friendly to Lily and Marjorie, although she was, a little, to me. She had come back to live with Morgan and his family after working for many years in Toronto, in a bank. This was not the sort of job she was used to. Lily and Marjorie, talking about her when she wasn’t there, said she had had a nervous breakdown. They said Morgan made her work in the Turkey Barn to pay for her keep. They also said, with no worry about the contradiction, that she had taken the job because she was after