The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [79]
EVA AND RUTH are decorating the dinner table on the veranda. Ruth is wearing a white shirt belonging to her brother, his striped pajama bottoms, and a monumental black turban. She looks like a proud but good-natured Sikh.
“I think the table ought to be strewn,” says Ruth. “Subtlety is out, Eva.”
At intervals they set orange and gold dahlias and beautifully striped pepper squash, zucchini, yellow gourds, Indian corn.
Under cover of the music Eva says, “Angela has more problems living here than I do. She thinks that whenever they fight it’s about her.”
“Do they fight?” says Ruth softly. Then she says, “It’s none of my business.” She was in love with George when she was thirteen or fourteen. It was when her mother first became friends with him. She used to hate his wife, and was glad when they separated. She remembers that the wife was the daughter of a gynecologist, and that this was cited by her mother as a reason George and his wife could never get on. It was probably the father’s prosperity her mother was talking about, or the way the daughter had been brought up. But to Ruth the word “gynecologist” seemed sharp and appalling, and she saw the gynecologist’s daughter dressed in an outfit of cold, jagged metal.
“They have silent fights. We can tell. Angela is so self-interested she thinks everything revolves around her. That’s what happens when you become an adolescent. I don’t want it to happen to me.”
There is a pause in Angela’s playing, and Eva says sharply, “Oh, I don’t want to leave! I hate leaving.”
“Do you?”
“I hate to leave Diana. I don’t know what will happen to her. I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. I don’t think I’ll ever see the deer again. I hate having to leave things.”
Now that the piano is silent, Eva can be heard outside, where Valerie and Roberta are sitting. Roberta hears what Eva says, and waits, expecting to hear her say something about next summer. She braces herself to hear it.
Instead, Eva says, “You know, I understand George. I don’t mind about him the way Angela does. I know how to be jokey. I understand him.”
Roberta and Valerie look at each other, and Roberta smiles, shakes her head, and shivers. She has been afraid, sometimes, that George would hurt her children, not physically but by some turnabout, some revelation of dislike, that they could never forget. It seems to her that she has instructed them, by example, that he is to be accommodated, his silences respected, his joking responded to. What if he should turn, within this safety, and deal them a memorable blow? If it happened, it would be she who would have betrayed them into it. And she can feel a danger. For instance, when George was pruning the apple trees she heard Angela say, “My father’s got an apple tree and a cherry tree now.”
(That was information. Would he take it as competition?)
“I suppose he has some minions come and prune them for him?”
George said.
“He has hundreds,” said Angela cheerfully. “Dwarfs. He makes them all wear little Navy uniforms.”
Angela was on thin ice at that moment. But Roberta thinks now that the real danger is not to Angela, who would find a way to welcome insult, would be ready to reap some advantage. (Roberta has read parts of the journal.) It is Eva, with her claims of understanding, her hopes of all-round conciliation, who could be smashed and stranded.
OVER COLD APPLE-AND-WATERCRESS SOUP Eva has switched back to her enfant terrible style to tell the table, “They went out and got drunk last night. They were polluted.”
David says he hasn’t heard that expression in a long time. Valerie says, “How awful for you little ones.”
“We considered phoning the Children’s Aid,” says Angela, looking very unchildlike in the candlelight—looking like a queen, in fact— and aware that David is watching her, though with David it’s hard to say whether he’s watching with approval or with reservations. It seems as if it might be approval. Kimberly has taken over his reservations.
“Did you have a dissolute time?” said Valerie. “Roberta, you never told me. Where did