The View from Castle Rock

one in the Montjoys’ cottage.
    “You are not going to suck the ice cubes,” I heard Corrie say to Mrs. Foley. Apparently Mrs. Foley paid no attention and proceeded to suck an ice cube, and Corrie said, “Bad. No. Spit out. Spit right out in Corrie’s hand. Bad. You didn’t do what Corrie say.”
    Catching up to me on the way into the house, she said, “I tell them she could choke to death. But Mr. Foley always say, give her the ice cubes, she wants a drink like everybody else. So I tell her and tell her. Do not suck ice cubes. But she won’t do what I say.”
    Sometimes I was sent up to help Corrie polish the furniture or buff the floors. She was very exacting. She never just wiped the kitchen counters-she scoured them. Every move she made had the energy and concentration of somebody rowing a boat against the current and every word she said was flung out as if into a high wind of opposition. When she wrung out a cleaning rag she might have been wringing the neck of a chicken. I thought it might be interesting if I could get her to talk about the war, but all she would say was that everybody was very hungry and they saved the potato skins to make soup.
    “No good,” she said. “No good to talk about that.”
    She preferred the future. She and Henry were saving their money to go into business. They meant to start up a nursing home. “Lots of people like her,” said Corrie, throwing her head back as she worked to indicate Mrs. Foley out on the lawn. “Soon more and more. Because they give them the medicine, that makes them not die so soon. Who will be taking care?”
    One day Mrs. Foley called out to me as I crossed the lawn.
    “Now, where are you off to in such a hurry?” she said. “Come and sit down by me and have a little rest.”
    Her white hair was tucked up under a floppy straw hat, and when she leaned forward the sun came though the holes in the straw, sprinkling the pink and pale-brown patches of her face with pimples of light. Her eyes were a color so nearly extinct I couldn’t make it out and her shape was curious-a narrow flat chest and a swollen stomach under layers of loose, pale clothing. The skin of the legs she stuck out into the sunlight was shiny and discolored and covered with faint cracks.
    “Pardon my not having put my stockings on,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m feeling rather lazy today. But aren’t you the remarkable girl. Coming all that way by yourself. Did Henry help you carry the groceries up from the dock?”
    Mrs. Montjoy waved to us. She was on her way to the tennis court, to give Mary Anne her lesson. Every morning she gave Mary Anne a lesson, and at lunch they discussed what Mary Anne had done wrong.
    “There’s that woman who comes to play tennis,” Mrs. Foley said of her daughter. “She comes every day, so I suppose it’s all right. She may as well use it if she hasn’t a court of her own.”

    Mrs. Montjoy said to me later, “Did Mrs. Foley ask you to come over and sit on the grass?”
    I said yes. “She thought I was somebody who’d brought the groceries.”
    “I believe there was a grocery girl who used to run a boat. There hasn’t been any grocery delivery in years. Mrs. Foley does get her wires crossed now and then.”
    “She said you were a woman who came to play tennis.”
    “Did she really?” Mrs. Montjoy said.

    The work that I had to do here was not hard for me. I knew how to bake, and iron, and clean an oven. Nobody tracked barnyard mud into this kitchen and there were no heavy men’s work clothes to wrestle through the wringer. There was just the business of putting everything perfectly in place and doing quite a bit of polishing. Polish the rims of the burners of the stove after every use, polish the taps, polish the glass door to the deck till the glass disappears and people are in danger of smashing their faces against it.
    The Montjoys’ house was modern, with a flat roof and a deck extending over the water and a great many windows, which Mrs. Montjoy would have liked to see become as invisible as the glass door.
    “But I have to be realistic,” she said. “I know if you did that you’d hardly have time for anything else.” She was not by any means a slave driver. Her tone with me was firm and slightly irritable, but that was the way it was with everybody. She was always on the lookout for inattention or incompetence, which she detested.
Sloppy
was a favorite word of condemnation. Others were
wishy-washy
and
unnecessary.
A