The Cost of Living Read Online Free Page A

What Madame Arrieu previously predicted—that one day France would lose her colonies—is now the case. Whereas servants once boiled sheets with wood ash, a task that bloodied their hands, and then spread them on the grass to dry, now they use washing machines. The Beatles have already become yesterday’s band, and no one is going to church on Sundays.
    Like her character Jérôme, Gallant would eventually circle back in her writing, revisiting the past in her later work. But most of these stories were written in the present moment, marching forward, composed looking time in the face. They form the straight line Gallant likened them to during our interview, emerging with rapid momentum and, though she refers to herself as a slow writer, often at lightning speed. Here, in these twenty stories from twenty years, is a young writer paving her way, who in fact knew exactly where she was going; a writer spreading her wings and finding herself in glorious flight. Take for example the cadenza that opens “Travelers Must Be Content,” an extended, probing passage that reads like theater curtains majestically parting, offering up the flesh and blood of a character. The first sentence is pure poetry: “Dreams of chaos were Wishart’s meat; he was proud of their diversity, and of his trick of emerging from mortal danger unscathed.” This is a secure and seasoned writer at work, one still in her thirties, one who demands intelligence from her readers and who rewards them with nothing short of genius.
    Certainly there is a broad spectrum here, from traditional scene- and dialogue-based fiction, to compressed dreamlike narratives, to virtuosic character studies that radically redefine our notion of the short story. As the years pass Gallant’s work deepens, but her humor is never abandoned, the exemplary tension of her language, even in longer works, never compromised. The smallest details stick like burrs: a web of warm milk skimmed from coffee, the peppery scent of geraniums. In her vast and searching stories, images have the intimate resonance of still-life painting: a small church is “a pink and white room with an almond pastry ceiling”; two servants sit “at opposite ends of a scrubbed table plucking ducks.” In this collection, Gallant journeys from the New World to the Old, arriving in a creative territory uniquely her own. In the process, she transforms from a writer breaking ground to one in full flower, earning her place as one of the greatest literary artists of her time. Never have characters so adrift been so effectively anchored.
    â€”J HUMPA L AHIRI

THE COST OF LIVING

To Alberto Manguel

Imagine that
    it were given back to me to be
    the child who knew departure would be sweet,
    the boy who drew square-rigged ships, the girl who knew
    truck routes from Ottawa to Mexico,
    the one who found a door in Latin verse
    and made a map out of hexameters.
    â€”M ARILYN H ACKER
    â€œA Sunday After Easter”

MADELINE’S BIRTHDAY
    T HE MORNING of Madeline Farr’s seventeenth birthday, Mrs. Tracy awoke remembering that she had forgotten to order a cake. It was doubtful if this would matter to Madeline, who would probably make a point of not caring. But it does matter to me, Mrs. Tracy thought. Observances are important and it is, after all, my house.
    She did not spring up at once but lay in a wash of morning sunlight, surveying her tanned arms, stretched overhead, while her mind opened doors and went from room to room of the eighteenth-century Connecticut farmhouse. She knew exactly how the curtains blew into Madeline’s room, which had once been hers, and why there was silence on one floor and sound on the other. It was a house, she told herself, in which she had never known an unhappy moment.
    â€œI cannot cope with it here,” Madeline had written to her father shortly after she arrived. “One at a time would be all right but not all the Tracys and