Dance of the Happy Shades

He was thin and leathery-looking, like Mrs. Gannett, though dark. He said, “You don’t happen to have any more coffee here, do you?” Alva poured him what there was, half a cup. He stood and drank it, watching her stack the dishes. Then he said, “Lots of fun, eh?” and when she looked up, laughed, and went out.
    Alva was free after she finished the dishes; dinner would be late. She could not actually leave the house; Mrs. Gannett might want her for something. And she could not go outside; they were out there. She went upstairs; then, remembering that Mrs. Gannett had said she could read any of the books in the den, she went down again to get one. In the hall she met Mr. Gannett, who looked at her very seriously, attentively, but seemed about to go past without saying anything; then he said, “See here, Alva—see here, are you getting enough to eat?”
    It was not a joke, since Mr. Gannett did not make them. It was, in fact, something he had asked her two or three times before. It seemed that he felt a responsibility for her, when he saw her in his house; the important thing seemed to be, that she should be well fed. Alva reassured him, flushing with annoyance; was she a heifer? She said, “Iwas going to the den to get a book. Mrs. Gannett said it would be all right—”
    “Yes, yes, any book you like,” Mr. Gannett said, and he unexpectedly opened the door of the den for her and led her to the bookshelves, where he stood frowning. “What book would you like?” he said. He reached toward the shelf of brightly jacketed mysteries and historical novels, but Alva said, “I’ve never read
King Lear.
”
    “
King Lear,
” said Mr. Gannett. “Oh.” He did not know where to look for it, so Alva got it down herself. “Nor
The Red and the Black,
” she said. That did not impress him so much, but it was something she might really read; she could not go back to her room with just
King Lear
. She went out of the room feeling well-pleased; she had shown him she did something besides eat. A man would be more impressed by
King Lear
than a woman. Nothing could make any difference to Mrs. Gannett; a maid was a maid.
    But in her room, she did not want to read. Her room was over the garage, and very hot. Sitting on the bed rumpled her uniform, and she did not have another ironed. She could take it off and sit in her slip, but Mrs. Gannett might call her, and want her at once. She stood at the window, looking up and down the street. The street was a crescent, a wide slow curve, with no sidewalks; Alva had felt a little conspicuous, the once or twice she had walked along it; you never saw people walking. The houses were set far apart, far back from the street, behind brilliant lawns and rockeries and ornamental trees; in this area in front of the houses, no one ever spent time but the Chinese gardeners; the lawn furniture, the swings and garden tables were set out on the back lawns, which were surrounded by hedges, stone walls, pseudo-rustic fences. The street was lined with parked cars this afternoon; from behind the houses came sounds of conversation and a great deal of laughter. In spite of the heat,there was no blur on the day, up here; everything—the stone and white stucco houses, the flowers, the flower-coloured cars—looked hard and glittering, exact and perfect. There was no haphazard thing in sight. The street, like an advertisement, had an almost aggressive look of bright summer spirits; Alva felt dazzled by this, by the laughter, by people whose lives were relevant to the street. She sat down on a hard chair in front of an old-fashioned child’s desk—all the furniture in this room had come out of other rooms that had been redecorated; it was the only place in the house where you could find things unmatched, unrelated to each other, and wooden things that were not large, low and pale. She began to write a letter to her family.
    —and the houses, all the others too, are just tremendous, mostly quite modern. There isn’t a weed in the lawns, they have a gardener spend a whole day every week just cleaning out what looks to be perfect already. I think the men are rather sappy, the fuss they make over perfect lawns and things like that. They do go out and rough it every once in a while but that is all very complicated and everything has to be just so. It is like that with everything they do and everywhere they go.
    Don’t worry about me being lonesome and downtrodden and all that maid sort of thing. I