The Cost of Living Read Free Page A

asks her to describe it to him, and is told, simply, “It’s big.” The reality—the table “masked with oilcloth…always set between meals, the thick plates turned upside down, the spoons in a glass jar…butter, vinegar, canned jam with the lid of the can half opened and wrenched back, ketchup, a tin of molasses glued to its saucer”—is impossible for Bernadette to articulate, or for her employer to comprehend.
    Women of my generation, born after the mid-Sixties, were raised to believe that having a career and raising a family were not mutually exclusive pursuits, but for the women in Gallant’s early stories, they almost always are. “You’ll probably get married sometime, anyway, so what does it matter what you learn?” Mike asks Barbara, a teenaged girl who has failed out of one of New York City’s best schools, in “One Morning in May.” His remark “strike[s] her into silence, ” but moments later Barbara wonders if Mike might be the solution: “It had occurred to her many times in this lonely winter that only marriage would save her from disgrace, from growing up with no skills and no profession.” This was a time before the pill, before the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment and
Roe versus Wade
. Gilles, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” remembers the women of the generation just prior to those landmark struggles and reforms:
    â€œThey were made out of butter. They had round faces and dimples and curly hair. Bright lipstick…They could have fallen in the Seine and never drowned—they’d have floated downstream on their petticoats. They wore Italian shoes that were a disaster. All those girls have ruined feet now. They looked like children dressed up—too much skirt, mother’s shoes. They smiled and smiled and wanted to get married. They were infantile, underdeveloped. Retarded.”
    His brutal condescension shocks our ears, revealing a misogyny that has since become less socially acceptable. Though marriage tended to be a girl’s only option for establishing herself in adulthood, it was often a premature one. Nineteen-year-old Cissy, in “Autumn Day,” is an example of this: unsure of herself, fuzzy about the facts of life, dressed in Peter Pan collars and drinking sugary alcoholic drinks. Her husband, ten years older, is more of a parent than a sexual partner, telling her what to do and how to behave: “Don’t talk war. Avoid people on farm. Meet Army wives. Go for walks.” True to their time, in most of these marriages the husband works and the wife stays home to raise the family (the fashion model in “Thieves and Rascals,” afraid to cry because she has a photo shoot the next morning and does not want puffy eyes, is an exception). Alongside economic dependence for women in traditional marriages, there are women who depend on other women (“The Cost of Living” and “Acceptance of Their Ways”) and men who depend on women (“Travelers Must Be Content”). The dependency in these relationships is not so much emotional as literal, and it frequently turns parasitic. Characters in these stories may not connect to each other, but they need each other to survive.
    Human dependency is at its most basic when it comes to children, and this book is filled with them. Only they have little to count on. Children are deemed a nuisance, a burden, “a remote, alarming race.” This was an era when people began families young, when they were still essentially children themselves. Mothers resent their offspring for turning them ugly and spoiling their figures. Chaperones are typical, children left in the care of friends, extended family, and hired help. Or they are shipped off to boarding school (Nora, the wife in “Bernadette,” sends away her daughters because she “didn’t trust herself to bring them up”). There is a refusal, on the part of