The Stories of John Cheever Read Free Page B

please him. Wouldn’t he like to sail to Barin’s cove, or go fishing?
    And now I remember that while Lawrence was visiting us, we went swimming oftener than we usually do, and I think there was a reason for this. When the irritability that accumulated as a result of his company began to lessen our patience, not only with Lawrence but with one another, we would all go swimming and shed our animus in the cold water. I can see the family now, smarting from Lawrence’s rebukes as they sat on the sand, and I can see them wading and diving and surface-diving and hear in their voices the restoration of patience and the rediscovery of inexhaustible good will. If Lawrence noticed this change—this illusion of purification—I suppose that he would have found in the vocabulary of psychiatry, or the mythology of the Atlantic, some circumspect name for it, but I don’t think he noticed the change. He neglected to name the curative powers of the open sea, but it was one of the few chances for diminution that he missed.
    The cook we had that year was a Polish woman named Anna Ostrovick, a summer cook. She was first-rate—a big, fat, hearty, industrious woman who took her work seriously. She liked to cook and to have the food she cooked appreciated and eaten, and whenever we saw her, she always urged us to eat. She cooked hot bread—crescents and brioches—for breakfast two or three times a week, and she would bring these into the dining room herself and say, “Eat, eat, eat!” When the maid took the serving dishes back into the pantry, we could sometimes hear Anna, who was standing there, say, “Good! They eat.” She fed the garbage man, the milkman, and the gardener. “Eat!” she told them. “Eat, eat!” On Thursday afternoons, she went to the movies with the maid, but she didn’t enjoy the movies, because the actors were all so thin. She would sit in the dark theatre for an hour and a half watching the screen anxiously for the appearance of someone who had enjoyed his food. Bette Davis merely left with Anna the impression of a woman who has not eaten well. “They are all so skinny,” she would say when she left the movies. In the evenings, after she had gorged all of us, and washed the pots and pans, she would collect the table scraps and go out to feed the creation. We had a few chickens that year, and although they would have roosted by then, she would dump food into their troughs and urge the sleeping fowl to eat. She fed the songbirds in the orchard and the chipmunks in the yard. Her appearance at the edge of the garden and her urgent voice—we could hear her calling “Eat, eat, eat”—had become, like the sunset gun at the boat club and the passage of light from Cape Heron, attached to that hour. “Eat, eat, eat,” we could hear Anna say. “Eat, eat …” Then it would be dark.
    When Lawrence had been there three days, Anna called me into the kitchen. “You tell your mother,” she said, “that
he
doesn’t come into my kitchen. If
he
comes into my kitchen all the time, I go.
He
is always coming into my kitchen to tell me what a sad woman I am. He is always telling me that I work too hard and that I don’t get paid enough and that I should belong to a union with vacations. Ha! He is so skinny but he is always coming into my kitchen when I am busy to pity me, but I am as good as him, I am as good as
anybody
, and I do not have to have people like that getting into my way all the time and feeling sorry for me. I am a famous and a wonderful cook and I have jobs everywhere and the only reason I come here to work this summer is because I was never before on an island, but I can have other jobs tomorrow, and if he is always coming into my kitchen to pity me, you tell your mother I am going. I am as good as
anybody
and I do not have to have that skinny all the time telling how poor I am.”
    I was pleased to find that the cook was on our side, but I felt that the situation was delicate. If Mother asked