The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [76]
Angela lowered her leg and said, “Greetings, Master!”
“I don’t see you bumping your head on the ground,” said George.
He usually joked with the girls no matter what he felt like. Rough joking was his habit, and it had been hugely successful in the classroom, where he had maintained a somewhat overdrawn, occasionally brutal, consistently entertaining character. He had done this with most of the other teachers as well, expressing his contempt for them so colorfully that they could not believe he meant it.
Eva loved to act out any suggestion of this sort. She stretched herself full length on the deck and knocked her head hard on the boards.
“You’ll get a concussion,” Roberta said.
“No, I won’t. I’ll just give myself a lobotomy.”
“George, do you realize that in four brief days we will be gone?” said Angela. “Isn’t your heart broken?”
“In twain.”
“But will you let Mom take care of Diana when we’re gone?” said Eva, sitting upright and feeling her head for bruises. Diana was a stray cat she was feeding in the barn.
“What do you mean, let?” said Roberta, and George at the same time said, “Certainly not. I’ll tie her to the bedpost if she ever tries to go near the barn.”
This cat is a sore point. If Angela sees the farm as a stage for herself, or sometimes as Nature—a begetter of thoughts and poems, to which she yields herself, wandering and dreaming—Eva sees it as a place to look for animals, with some of her attention left over for insects, minnows, rocks, and slugs. Both of them see it, certainly, as vacationland, spread out before them for whatever use or pleasure they can get out of it; neither sees the jobs waiting to be done under their noses. Eva has spent the summer stalking groundhogs and rabbits, trapping frogs and letting them go, catching minnows in a jar, trying to figure out how various animals could be housed in the barn. George holds her responsible—out of the very strength of her desire—for luring the deer out of the bush, so that he had to stop everything else that he was doing and build an eight-foot-high wire fence around the garden. The only animal she has managed to install in the barn is Diana, rail-thin, ugly, and half wild, whose dangling teats show that she is maintaining a family of kittens elsewhere. Much of Eva’s time has been spent trying to discover the whereabouts of these kittens.
George sees the cat as a freeloader, a potential great nuisance, an invader of his property. By feeding it and encouraging it, Eva has embarked on a course of minor but significant treachery, which Roberta has implicitly supported. He knows his feelings on this matter are exaggerated, even comical; that does not help him. One of the things he has never wanted to be, and has avoided being, is a comic dad, a fulminator, a bungler. But it is Roberta’s behavior that bothers him, more than Eva’s. Here Roberta shows most plainly the mistake she has made in bringing up her children. In his mind he can hear Roberta talking to somebody at a party. “Eva has adopted a horrible cat, a really nasty-looking vagabond—that’s her summer achievement. And Angela spends the whole day doing jetés and sulking at us.” He has not actually heard Roberta say this—they have not been to any parties—but he can well imagine it. She would summon her children up for the entertainment of others; she would make them into characters, from whom nothing serious was to be expected. This seems to George not only frivolous but heartless. Roberta,