The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [75]
“Eventually,” says Roberta. At present all George’s work is in the front of the house, in the old parlor. Some half-finished and nearly finished pieces are there, covered up with dusty sheets, and also some blocks of wood (George works only in wood)—a big chunk of seasoned oak and pieces of kiln-dried butternut and cherry. His ripsaw, his chisels and gouges, his linseed oil and turpentine and beeswax and resins are all there, the lids dusty and screwed tight. Eva and Angela used to go around and, standing on tiptoe in the rubble and weeds, peer in the front window at the shrouded shapes.
“Ugh, they look spooky,” Eva said to George. “What are they underneath?”
“Wooden doughnuts,” George said. “Pop sculpt.”
“Really?”
“A potato and a two-headed baby.”
Next time they went to look they found a sheet tacked up over the window. This was a grayish-colored sheet, torn at the top. To anybody driving by it made the house look even more bleak and neglected.
“Do you know I had cigarettes all the time?” Valerie says. “I have half a carton. I hid them in the cupboard in my room.”
She has sent David and Kimberly into town, telling them she’s out of cigarettes. Valerie can’t stop smoking, though she takes vitamin pills and is careful not to eat anything with red food coloring in it. “I couldn’t think of anything else to say I was out of, and I had to have them clear off for a while. Now I don’t dare smoke one or they’ll smell it when they get back and know I was a liar. And I want one.”
“Drink instead,” says Roberta. When she got here she thought she couldn’t talk to anybody—she was going to say her head ached and ask if she could lie down. But Valerie steadies her, as always. Valerie makes what isn’t bearable interesting.
“So how are you?” Valerie says.
“Ohhh,” says Roberta.
“Life would be grand if it weren’t for the people,” says Valerie moodily. “That sounds like a quotation, but I think I just made it up. The problem is that Kimberly is a Christian. Well, that’s fine. We could use a Christian or two. For that matter, I am not an un-Christian. But she is very noticeably a Christian, don’t you think? I’m amazed how mean she makes me feel.”
GEORGE IS ENJOYING the scything. For one thing, he likes working without spectators. Whenever he works at home these days, he is aware of a crowd of female spectators. Even if they’re nowhere in sight, he feels as if they’re watching—taking their ease, regarding his labors with mystification and amusement. He admits, if he thinks about it, that Roberta does do some work, though she has done nothing to earn money as far as he knows; she hasn’t been in touch with her publishers, and she hasn’t worked on ideas of her own. She permits her daughters to do nothing all day long, all summer long. Yesterday morning he got up feeling tired and disheartened—he had gone to sleep thinking of the work he had to do on the barn, and this preoccupation had seeped into his dreams, which were full of collapses, miscalculations, structural treacheries—and he went out to the deck off the kitchen, thinking to eat his eggs there and brood about the day’s jobs. This deck is the only thing he has built as yet, the only change he has made in the house. He built it last spring in response to Roberta’s complaints about the darkness of the house and the bad ventilation. He told her that the people who built these houses did so much work in the sun that they never thought of sitting in it.
He came out on the deck, then, carrying his plate and mug, and all three of them were already there. Angela was dressed in a sapphire-blue leotard; she was doing ballet exercises by the deck railing. Eva was sitting with her back against the wall of the house, spooning up bran flakes out of a soup bowl; she did this with such enthusiasm that many were spilled on the deck floor. Roberta, in a deck chair, had the everlasting mug of coffee clasped in both hands. She had one knee up and her back hunched, and with her dark glasses on she looked tense and mournful. He knows she weeps behind those