The View from Castle Rock

was that I had picked up. I had read them all before, all the novels in that bookcase. There were not many.
The Sun Is My Undoing. Gone with the Wind. The Robe. Sleep in Peace. My Son, My Son. Wuthering Heights. The Last Days of Pompeii.
The selection did not reflect any particular taste, and in fact my parents often could not say how a certain book came to be there-whether it had been bought or borrowed or whether somebody had left it behind.
    It must have meant something, though, that at this turn of my life I grabbed up a book. Because it was in books that I would find, for the next few years, my lovers. They were men, not boys. They were self-possessed and sardonic, with a ferocious streak in them, reserves of gloom. Not Edgar Linton, not Ashley Wilkes. Not one of them companionable or kind.
    It was not as if I had given up on passion. Passion, indeed, wholehearted, even destructive passion, was what I was after. Demand and submission. I did not exclude a certain kind of brutality. But no confusion, no double-dealing, or sleazy sort of surprise or humiliation. I could wait, and all my due would come to me, I thought, when I was full-blown.

Hired Girl
    Mrs. Montjoy was showing me how to put the pots and pans away. I had put some of them in the wrong places.
    Above all things, she said, she hated a higgledy-piggledy cupboard.
    “You waste more time,” she said. “You waste more time looking for something because it wasn’t where it was last time.”
    “That’s the way it was with our hired girls at home,” I said. “The first few days they were there they were always putting things away where we couldn’t find them.
    “We called our maids hired girls,” I added. “That was what we called them, at home.”
    “Did you?” she said. A moment of silence passed. “And the colander on that hook there.”
    Why did I have to say what I had said? Why was it necessary to mention that we had hired girls at home?
    Anybody could see why. To put myself somewhere near her level. As if that was possible. As if anything I had to say about myself or the house I came from could interest or impress her.

    It was true, though, about the hired girls. In my early life there was a procession of them. There was Olive, a soft drowsy girl who didn’t like me because I called her Olive Oyl. Even after I was made to apologize she didn’t like me. Maybe she didn’t like any of us much because she was a Bible Christian, which made her mistrustful and reserved. She used to sing as she washed the dishes and I dried.
There is a Balm in Gilead
… If I tried to sing with her she stopped.
    Then came Jeanie, whom I liked, because she was pretty and she did my hair up in pin curls at night when she did her own. She kept a list of the boys she went out with and made peculiar signs after their names: x x x o o * *. She did not last long.
    Neither did Dorothy, who hung the clothes on the line in an eccentric way-pinned up by the collar, or by one sleeve or one leg-and swept the dirt into a corner and propped the broom up to hide it.
    And when I was around ten years old hired girls became a thing of the past. I don’t know if it was because we became poorer or because I was considered old enough to be a steady help. Both things were true.
    Now I was seventeen and able to be hired out myself, though only as summer help because I had one more year to go at high school. My sister was twelve, so she could take over at home.

    Mrs. Montjoy had picked me up at the railway station in Pointe au Baril, and transported me in an outboard-motor boat to the island. It was the woman in the Pointe au Baril store who had recommended me for the job. She was an old friend of my mother’s-they had taught school together. Mrs. Montjoy had asked her if she knew of a country girl, used to doing housework, who would be available for the summer, and the woman had thought that it would be the very thing for me. I thought so too-I was eager to see more of the world.
    Mrs. Montjoy wore khaki shorts and a tucked-in shirt. Her short, sun-bleached hair was pushed behind her ears. She leapt aboard the boat like a boy and gave a fierce tug to the motor, and we were flung out on the choppy evening waters of Georgian Bay. For thirty or forty minutes we dodged around rocky and wooded islands with their lone cottages and boats bobbing beside the docks. Pine trees jutted out at odd angles, just as they do in the paintings.
    I held on to the sides of the boat and shivered