Friend of My Youth

New from Alice Munro DEAR LIFE With this brilliant collection, Munro explores the lives of various inhabitants of the countryside and towns around Lake Huron. in stories about departure, beginnings, accidents, and homecomings both virtual and real, Alice Munro paints a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange and remarkable“dear life” can be. Available November 2012 from Knopf Please visit aaknopf.com ALSO BY ALICE MUNRO THE BEGGAR MAID In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world. Fiction/Short Stories HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE In the nine breathtaking stories that make up this celebrated collection, Munro achieves new heights, creating narratives that loop and swerve like memory and conjuring up characters as thorny and contradictory as people we know ourselves. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is tirelessly observant, serenely free of illusion, and deeply and gloriously humane. Fiction/literature/short stories THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, these tales lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest individuals. Munro evokes the vagaries of love, the tension and deceit that lie in wait under the polite surfaces of society, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart. Fiction/Literature/short stories/ THE MOONS OF JUPITER In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen; there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force. Fiction/Short Stories OPEN SECRETS In Open Secrets, Munro uncovers the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished young schoolgirls, indentured frontier brides, an eccentric recluse who finds love at a dinner party, and a Canadian woman fleeing a husband and a lover. These stories resonate with sorrow, humor, and wisdom, confirming Munro as one of the most gifted writers of our time. Fiction/Literature/Short Stories THE PROGRESS OF LOVE A divorced woman returns to her childhood home and confronts the memory of her parents’ confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A man brings his lover on a visit to his ex-wife, only to feel unexpectedly closer to his estranged partner. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, Munro reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love. Fiction/Literature/Short Stories THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK Alice Munro mines her rich family background, melding it with her own experiences and the transforming power of her brilliant imagination to create perhaps her most powerful and personal collection yet. A young boy, taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock to look across the sea to America, catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. Scottish immigrants experience love and loss on a journey that leads them to rural Ontario. Wives, mothers, fathers, and children move through uncertainty, ambivalence, and contemplation in these stories of hope, adversity, and wonder. Fiction/Literature/short stories SOMETHING I’VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL YOU In these thirteen stories, Munro demonstrates the precise observation, straightforward prose style, and masterful technique that led no less a critic than John Updike to compare her to Chekhov. The sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts, grandmothers, and friends in these stories shimmer with hope and love, anger and reconciliation, as they contend with their histories and their present, and what they can see of the future. Fiction/Literature/Short Stories ALSO AVAILABLE Away from Her Dance of the Happy Shades Friend of My Youth Lives of Girls and Women Selected Stories Too Much Happiness Vintage Munro VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL Available wherever books are sold. www.randomhouse.com Alice Munro Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published twelve collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and two of its Giller Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, the Lannan Literary Award, England’s W. H. Smith Book Award, the United States’ National Book Critics Circle Award, the Edward MacDowell Medal in literature, and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron. To the memory of my mother Friend of My Youth WITH THANKS TO R. J. T. I used to dream about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same. The dream stopped, I suppose because it was too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness. In the dream I would be the age I really was, living the life I was really living, and I would discover that my mother was still alive. (The fact is, she died when I was in my early twenties and she in her early fifties.) Sometimes I would find myself in our old kitchen, where my mother would be rolling out piecrust on the table, or washing the dishes in the battered cream-colored dishpan with the red rim. But other times I would run into her on the street, in places where I would never have expected to see her. She might be walking through a handsome hotel lobby, or lining up in an airport. She would be looking quite well—not exactly youthful, not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that I would be astonished. Oh, I just have this little tremor in my arm, she would say, and a little stiffness up this side of my face. It is a nuisance but I get around. I recovered then what in waking life I had lost—my mother’s liveliness of face and voice before her throat muscles stiffened and a woeful, impersonal mask fastened itself over her features. How could I have forgotten this, I would think in the dream—the casual humor she had, not ironic but merry, the lightness and impatience and confidence? I would say that I was sorry I hadn’t been to see her in such a long time—meaning not that I felt guilty but that I was sorry I had kept a bugbear in my mind, instead of this reality—and the strangest, kindest thing of all to me was her matter-of-fact reply. Oh, well, she said, better late than never. I was sure I’d see you someday. When my mother was a young woman with a soft, mischievous face and shiny, opaque silk stockings on her plump legs (I have seen a photograph of her, with her pupils), she went to teach at a one-room school, called Grieves School, in the Ottawa Valley. The school was on a corner of the farm that belonged to the Grieves family—a very good farm for that country. Well-drained fields with none of the Precambrian rock shouldering through the soil, a little willow-edged river running alongside, a sugar bush, log barns, and a large, unornamented house whose wooden walls had never been painted but had been left to weather. And when wood weathers in the Ottawa Valley, my mother said, I do not know why this is, but it never turns gray, it turns black. There must be something in the air, she said. She often spoke of the Ottawa Valley, which was her home—she had grown up about twenty miles away from Grieves School—in a dogmatic, mystified way, emphasizing things about it that distinguished it from any other place on earth. Houses turn black, maple syrup has a taste no maple syrup produced elsewhere can equal, bears amble within sight of farmhouses. Of course I was disappointed when I finally got to see this place. It was not a valley at all, if by that you mean a cleft between hills; it was a mixture of flat fields and low rocks and heavy bush and little lakes—a scrambled, disarranged sort of country with no easy harmony about it, not yielding readily to any description. The log barns and unpainted house, common enough on poor farms, were not in the Grieveses’ case a sign of poverty but of policy. They had the money but they did not spend it. That was what people told my mother. The Grieveses worked hard and they were far from ignorant, but they were very backward. They didn’t have a car or electricity or a telephone or a tractor. Some people thought this was because they were Cameronians—they were the only people in the school district who were of that religion—but in fact their church (which they themselves always called the Reformed Presbyterian) did not forbid engines or electricity or any inventions of that sort, just card playing, dancing, movies, and, on Sundays, any activity at all that was not religious or unavoidable. My mother could not say who the Cameronians were or why they were called that. Some freak religion from Scotland, she said from the perch of her obedient and lighthearted Anglicanism. The teacher always boarded with the Grieveses, and my mother was a little daunted at the thought of going to live in that black board house with its paralytic Sundays and coal-oil lamps and primitive notions. But she was engaged by that time, she wanted to work on her trousseau instead of running around the country having a good time, and she figured she could get home one Sunday out of three. (On Sundays at the Grieveses’ house, you could light a fire for heat but not for cooking, you could not even boil the kettle to make tea, and you were not supposed to write a letter or swat a fly. But it turned out that my mother was exempt from these rules. “No, no,” said Flora Grieves, laughing at her. “That doesn’t mean you. You must just go on as you’re used to doing.” And after a while my mother had made friends with Flora to such an extent that she wasn’t even going home on the Sundays when she’d planned to.) Flora and Ellie Grieves were the two sisters left of the family. Ellie was married, to a man called Robert Deal, who lived there and worked the farm but had not changed its name to Deal’s in anyone’s mind. By the way people spoke, my mother expected the Grieves sisters and Robert Deal to be middle-aged at least, but Ellie, the younger sister, was only about thirty, and Flora seven or eight years older. Robert Deal might be in between. The house was divided in an unexpected way. The married couple didn’t live with Flora. At the time of their marriage, she had given them the parlor and the dining room, the front bedrooms and staircase, the winter kitchen. There was no need to decide about the bathroom, because there wasn’t one. Flora had the summer kitchen, with its open rafters and uncovered brick walls, the old pantry made into a narrow dining room and sitting room, and the two back bedrooms, one of which was my mother’s. The teacher was housed with Flora, in the poorer part of the house. But my mother didn’t mind. She immediately preferred Flora, and Flora’s cheerfulness, to the silence and sickroom atmosphere of the front rooms. In Flora’s domain it was not even true that all amusements were forbidden. She had a crokinole board—she taught my mother how to play. The division had been made, of course, in the expectation that Robert and Ellie would have a family, and that they would need the room. This hadn’t happened. They had been married for more than a dozen years and there had not been a live child. Time and again Ellie had been pregnant, but two babies had been stillborn, and the rest she had miscarried. During my mother’s first year, Ellie seemed to be staying in bed more and more of the time, and my mother thought that she must be pregnant again, but there was no mention of it. Such people would not mention it. You could not tell from the look of Ellie, when she got up and walked around, because she showed a stretched and ruined though slack-chested shape. She carried a sickbed odor, and she fretted in a childish way about everything. Flora took care of her and did all the work. She washed the clothes and tidied up the rooms and cooked the meals served in both sides of the house, as well as helping Robert with the milking and separating. She was up before daylight and never seemed to tire. During the first spring my mother was there, a great housecleaning was embarked upon, during which Flora climbed the ladders herself and carried down the storm windows, washed and stacked them away, carried all the furniture out of one room after another so that she could scrub the woodwork and varnish the floors. She washed every dish and glass that was sitting in the cupboards supposedly clean already. She scalded every pot and spoon. Such need and energy possessed her that she could hardly sleep—my mother would wake up to the sound of stovepipes being taken down, or the broom, draped in a dish towel, whacking at the smoky cobwebs. Through the washed uncurtained windows came a torrent of unmerciful light. The cleanliness was devastating. My mother slept now on sheets that had been bleached and starched and that gave her a rash. Sick Ellie complained daily of the smell of varnish and cleansing powders. Flora’s hands were raw. But her disposition remained topnotch. Her kerchief and apron and Robert’s baggy overalls that she donned for the climbing jobs gave her the air of a comedian—sportive, unpredictable. My mother called her a whirling dervish. “You’re a regular whirling dervish, Flora,” she said, and Flora halted. She wanted to know what was meant. My mother went ahead and explained, though she was a little afraid lest piety should be offended. (Not piety exactly—you could not call it that. Religious strictness.) Of course it wasn’t. There was not a trace of nastiness or smug vigilance in Flora’s observance of her religion. She had no fear of heathens—she had always lived in the midst of them. She liked the idea of being a dervish, and went to tell her sister. “Do you know what the teacher says I am?” Flora and Ellie were both dark-haired, dark-eyed women, tall and narrow-shouldered and long-legged. Ellie was a wreck, of course, but Flora was still superbly straight and graceful. She could look like a queen, my mother said—even riding into town in that cart they had. For church they used a buggy or a cutter, but when they went to town they often had to transport sacks of wool—they kept a few sheep—or of produce, to sell, and they had to bring provisions home. The trip of a few miles was not made often. Robert rode in front, to drive the horse—Flora could drive a horse perfectly well, but it must always be the man who drove. Flora would be standing behind holding on to the sacks. She rode to town and back standing up, keeping an easy balance, wearing her black hat. Almost ridiculous but not quite. A gypsy queen, my mother thought she looked like, with her black hair and her skin that always looked slightly tanned, and her lithe and bold serenity. Of course she lacked the gold bangles and the bright clothes. My mother envied her her slenderness, and her cheekbones. Returning in the fall for her second year, my mother learned what was the matter with Ellie. “My sister has a growth,” Flora said. Nobody then spoke of cancer. My mother had heard that before. People suspected it. My mother knew many people in the district by that time. She had made particular friends with a young woman who worked in the post office; this woman was going to be one of my mother’s bridesmaids. The story of Flora and Ellie and Robert had been told—or all that people knew of it—in various versions. My mother did not feel that she was listening to gossip, because she was always on the alert for any disparaging remarks about Flora—she would not put up with that. But indeed nobody offered any. Everybody said that Flora had behaved like a saint. Even when she went to extremes, as in dividing up the house—that was like a saint. Robert came to work at Grieveses’ some months before the girls’ father died. They knew him already, from church. (Oh, that church, my mother said, having attended it once, out of curiosity—that drear building miles on the other side of town, no organ or piano and plain glass in the windows and a doddery old minister with his hours-long sermon, a man hitting a tuning fork for the singing.) Robert had come out from Scotland and was on his way west. He had stopped with relatives or people he knew, members of the scanty congregation. To earn some money, probably, he came to Grieveses’. Soon he and Flora were engaged. They could not go to dances or to card parties like other couples, but they went for long walks. The chaperone—unofficially—was Ellie. Ellie was then a wild tease, a long-haired, impudent, childish girl full of lolloping energy. She would run up hills and smite the mullein stalks with a stick, shouting and prancing and pretending to be a warrior on horseback. That, or the horse itself. This when she was fifteen, sixteen years old. Nobody but Flora could control her, and generally Flora just laughed at her, being too used to her to wonder if she was quite right in the head. They were wonderfully fond of each other. Ellie, with her long skinny body, her long pale face, was like a copy of Flora—the kind of copy you often see in families, in which because of some carelessness or exaggeration of features or coloring, the handsomeness of one person passes into the plainness—or almost plainness—of the other. But Ellie had no jealousy about this. She loved to comb out Flora’s hair and pin it up. They had great times, washing each other’s hair. Ellie would press her face into Flora’s throat, like a colt nuzzling its mother. So when Robert laid claim to Flora, or Flora to him—nobody knew how it was—Ellie had to be included. She didn’t show any spite toward Robert, but she pursued and waylaid them on their walks; she sprung on them out of the bushes or sneaked up behind them so softly that she could blow on their necks. People saw her do it. And they heard of her jokes. She had always been terrible for jokes and sometimes it had got her into trouble with her father, but Flora had protected her. Now she put thistles in Robert’s bed. She set his place at the table with the knife and fork the wrong way around. She switched the milk pails to give him the old one with the hole in it. For Flora’s sake, maybe, Robert humored her. The father had made Flora and Robert set the wedding day a year ahead, and after he died they did not move it any closer. Robert went on living in the house. Nobody knew how to speak to Flora about this being scandalous, or looking scandalous. Flora would just ask why. Instead of putting the wedding ahead, she put it back—from next spring to early fall, so that there should be a full year between it and her father’s death. A year from wedding to funeral—that seemed proper to her. She trusted fully in Robert’s patience and in her own purity. So she might. But in the winter a commotion started. There was Ellie, vomiting, weeping, running off and hiding in the haymow, howling when they found her and pulled her out, jumping to the barn floor, running around in circles, rolling in the snow. Ellie was deranged. Flora had to call the doctor. She told him that her sister’s periods had stopped—could the backup of blood be driving her wild? Robert had had to catch her and tie her up, and together he and Flora had put her to bed. She would not take food, just whipped her head from side to side, howling. It looked as if she would die speechless. But somehow the truth came out. Not from the doctor, who could not get close enough to examine her, with all her thrashing about. Probably, Robert confessed. Flora finally got wind of the truth, through all her high-mindedness. Now there had to be a wedding, though not the one that had been planned. No cake, no new clothes, no wedding trip, no congratulations. Just a shameful hurry-up visit to the manse. Some people, seeing the names in the paper, thought the editor must have got the sisters mixed up. They thought it must be Flora. A hurry-up wedding for Flora! But no—it was Flora who pressed Robert’s suit—it must have been—and got Ellie out of bed and washed her and made her presentable. It would have been Flora who picked one geranium from the window plant and pinned it to her sister’s dress. And Ellie hadn’t torn it out. Ellie was meek now, no longer flailing or crying. She let Flora fix her up, she let herself be married, she was never wild from that day on. Flora had the house divided. She herself helped Robert build the necessary partitions. The baby was carried full term—nobody even pretended that it was early—but it was born dead after a long, tearing labor. Perhaps Ellie had damaged it when she jumped from the barn beam and rolled in the snow and beat on herself. Even if she hadn’t done that, people would have expected something to go wrong, with that child or maybe one that came later. God dealt out punishment for hurry-up marriages—not just Presbyterians but almost everybody else believed that. God rewarded lust with dead babies, idiots, harelips and withered limbs and clubfeet. In this case the punishment continued. Ellie had one miscarriage after another, then another stillbirth and more miscarriages. She was constantly pregnant, and the pregnancies were full of vomiting fits that lasted for days, headaches, cramps, dizzy spells. The miscarriages were as agonizing as full-term births. Ellie could not do her own work. She walked around holding on to chairs. Her numb silence passed off, and she became a complainer. If anybody came to visit, she would talk about the peculiarities of her headaches or describe her latest fainting fit, or even—in front of men, in front of unmarried girls or children—go into bloody detail about what Flora called her “disappointments.” When people changed the subject or dragged the children away, she turned sullen. She demanded new medicine, reviled the doctor, nagged Flora. She accused Flora of washing the dishes with a great clang and clatter, out of spite, of pulling her—Elite’s—hair when she combed it out, of stingily substituting water-and-molasses for her real medicine. No matter what she said, Flora soothed her. Everybody who came into the house had some story of that kind to tell. Flora said, “Where’s my little girl, then? Where’s my Ellie? This isn’t my Ellie, this is some crosspatch got in here in place of her!” In the winter evenings after she came in from helping Robert with the barn chores, Flora would wash and change her clothes and go next door to read Ellie to sleep. My mother might invite herself along, taking whatever sewing she was doing, on some item of her trousseau. Ellie’s bed was set up in the big dining room, where there was a gas lamp over the table. My mother sat on one side of the table, sewing, and Flora sat on the other side, reading aloud. Sometimes Ellie said, “I can’t hear you.” Or if Flora paused for a little rest Ellie said, “I’m not asleep yet.” What did Flora read? Stories about Scottish life—not classics. Stories about urchins and comic grandmothers. The only title my mother could remember was Wee Macgregor. She could not follow the stories very well, or laugh when Flora laughed and Ellie gave a whimper, because so much was in Scots dialect or read with that thick accent. She was surprised that Flora could do it—it wasn’t the way Flora ordinarily talked, at all. (But wouldn’t it be the way Robert talked? Perhaps that is why my mother never reports anything that Robert said, never has him contributing to the scene. He must have been there, he must have been sitting there in the room. They would only heat the main room of the house. I see him black-haired, heavy-shouldered, with the strength of a plow horse, and the same kind of sombre, shackled beauty.) Then Flora would say, “That’s all of that for tonight.” She would pick up another book, an old book written by some preacher of their faith. There was in it such stuff as my mother had never heard. What stuff? She couldn’t say. All the stuff that was in their monstrous old religion. That put Ellie to sleep, or made her pretend she was asleep, after a couple of pages. All that configuration of the elect and the damned, my mother must have meant—all the arguments about the illusion and necessity of free will. Doom and slippery redemption. The torturing, defeating, but for some minds irresistible pileup of interlocking and contradictory notions. My mother could resist it. Her faith was easy, her spirits at that time robust. Ideas were not what she was curious about, ever. But what sort of thing was that, she asked (silently), to read to a dying woman? This was the nearest she got to criticizing Flora. The answer—that it was the only thing, if you believed it—never seemed to have occurred to her. By spring a nurse had arrived. That was the way things were done then. People died at home, and a nurse came in to manage it. The nurse’s name was Audrey Atkinson. She was a stout woman with corsets as stiff as barrel hoops, marcelled hair the color of brass candlesticks, a mouth shaped by lipstick beyond its own stingy outlines. She drove a car into the yard—her own car, a dark-green coupé, shiny and smart. News of Audrey Atkinson and her car spread quickly. Questions were asked. Where did she get the money? Had some rich fool altered his will on her behalf? Had she exercised influence? Or simply helped herself to a stash of bills under the mattress? How was she to be trusted? Hers was the first car ever to sit in the Grieveses’ yard overnight. Audrey Atkinson said that she had never been called out to tend a case in so primitive a house. It was beyond her, she said, how people could live in such a way. “It’s not that they’re poor, even,” she said to my mother. “It isn’t, is it? That I could understand. Or it’s not even their religion. So what is it? They do not care!” She tried at first to cozy up to my mother, as if they would be natural allies in this benighted place. She spoke as if they were around the same age—both stylish, intelligent women who liked a good time and had modern ideas. She offered to teach my mother to drive the car. She offered her cigarettes. My mother was more tempted by the idea of learning to drive than she was by the cigarettes. But she said no, she would wait for her husband to teach her. Audrey Atkinson raised her pinkish-orange eyebrows at my mother behind Flora’s back, and my mother was furious. She disliked the nurse far more than Flora did. “I knew what she was like and Flora didn’t,” my mother said. She meant that she caught a whiff of a cheap life, maybe even of drinking establishments and unsavory men, of hard bargains, which Flora was too unworldly to notice. Flora started into the great housecleaning again. She had the curtains spread out on stretchers, she beat the rugs on the line, she leapt up on the stepladder to attack the dust on the molding. But she was impeded all the time by Nurse Atkinson’s complaining. “I wondered if we could have a little less of the running and clattering?” said Nurse Atkinson with offensive politeness. “I only ask for my patient’s sake.” She always spoke of Ellie as “my patient” and pretended that she was the only one to protect her and compel respect. But she was not so respectful of Ellie herself. “Allee-oop,” she would say, dragging the poor creature up on her pillows. And she told Ellie she was not going to stand for fretting and whimpering. “You don’t do yourself any good that way,” she said. “And you certainly don’t make me come any quicker. What you just as well might do is learn to control yourself.” She exclaimed at Ellie’s bedsores in a scolding way, as if they were a further disgrace of the house. She demanded lotions, ointments, expensive soap—most of them, no doubt, to protect her own skin, which she claimed suffered from the hard water. (How could it be hard, my mother asked her—sticking up for the household when nobody else would—how could it be hard when it came straight from the rain barrel?) Nurse Atkinson wanted cream, too—she said that they should hold some back, not sell it all to the creamery. She wanted to make nourishing soups and puddings for her patient. She did make puddings, and jellies, from packaged mixes such as had never before entered this house. My mother was convinced that she ate them all herself. Flora still read to Ellie, but now it was only short bits from the Bible. When she finished and stood up, Ellie tried to cling to her. Ellie wept, sometimes she made ridiculous complaints. She said there was a horned cow outside, trying to get into the room and kill her. “They often get some kind of idea like that,” Nurse Atkinson said. “You mustn’t give in to her or she won’t let you go day or night. That’s what they’re like, they only think about themselves. Now, when I’m here alone with her, she behaves herself quite nice. I don’t have any trouble at all. But after you been in here I have trouble all over again because she sees you and she gets upset. You don’t want to make my job harder for me, do you? I mean, you brought me here to take charge, didn’t you?” “Ellie, now, Ellie dear, I must go,” said Flora, and to the nurse she said, “I understand. I do understand that you have to be in charge and I admire you, I admire you for your work. In your work you have to have so much patience and kindness.” My mother wondered at this—was Flora really so blinded, or did she hope by this undeserved praise to exhort Nurse Atkinson to the patience and kindness that she didn’t have? Nurse Atkinson was too thick-skinned and self-approving for any trick like that to work. “It is a hard job, all right, and not many can do it,” she said. “It’s not like those nurses in the hospital, where they got everything laid out for them.” She had no time for more conversation—she was trying to bring in “Make-Believe Ballroom” on her battery radio. My mother was busy with the final exams and the June exercises at the school. She was getting ready for her wedding in July. Friends came in cars and whisked her off to the dressmaker’s, to parties, to choose the invitations and order the cake. The lilacs came out, the evenings lengthened, the birds were back and nesting, my mother bloomed in everybody’s attention, about to set out on the deliciously solemn adventure of marriage. Her dress was to be appliquéd with silk roses, her veil held by a cap of seed pearls. She belonged to the first generation of young women who saved their money and paid for their own weddings—far fancier than their parents could have afforded. On her last evening, the friend from the post office came to drive her away, with her clothes and her books and the things she had made for her trousseau and the gifts her pupils and others had given her. There was great fuss and laughter about getting everything loaded into the car. Flora came out and helped. This getting married is even more of a nuisance than I thought, said Flora, laughing. She gave my mother a dresser scarf, which she had crocheted in secret. Nurse Atkinson could not be shut out of an important occasion—she presented a spray bottle of cologne. Flora stood on the slope at the side of the house to wave goodbye. She had been invited to the wedding, but of course she had said she could not come, she could not “go out” at such a time. The last my mother ever saw of her was this solitary, energetically waving figure in her housecleaning apron and bandanna, on the green slope by the black-walled house, in the evening light. “Well, maybe now she’ll get what she should’ve got the first time round,” the friend from the post office said. “Maybe now they’ll be able to get married. Is she too old to start a family? How old is she, anyway?” My mother thought that this was a crude way of talking about Flora and replied that she didn’t know. But she had to admit to herself that she had been thinking the very same thing. When she was married and settled in her own home, three hundred miles away, my mother got a letter from Flora. Ellie was dead. She had died firm in her faith, Flora said, and grateful for her release. Nurse Atkinson was staying on for a little while, until it was time for her to go off to her next case. This was late in the summer. News of what happened next did not come from Flora. When she wrote at Christmas, she seemed to take for granted that information would have gone ahead of her. “You have in all probability heard,” wrote Flora, “that Robert and Nurse Atkinson have been married. They are living on here, in Robert’s part of the house. They are fixing it up to suit themselves. It is very impolite of me to call her Nurse Atkinson, as I see I have done. I ought to have called her Audrey.” Of course the post-office friend had written, and so had others. It was a great shock and scandal and a matter that excited the district—the wedding as secret and surprising as Robert’s first one had been (though surely not for the same reason), Nurse Atkinson permanently installed in the community, Flora losing out for the second time. Nobody had been aware of any courtship, and they asked how the woman could have enticed him. Did she promise children, lying about her age? The surprises were not to stop with the wedding. The bride got down to business immediately with the “fixing up” that Flora mentioned. In came the electricity and then the telephone. Now Nurse Atkinson—she would always be called Nurse Atkinson—was heard on the party line lambasting painters and paperhangers and delivery services. She was having everything done over. She was buying an electric stove and putting in a bathroom, and who knew where the money was coming from? Was it all hers, got in her deathbed dealings, in shady bequests? Was it Robert’s, was he claiming his share? Ellie’s share, left to him and Nurse Atkinson to enjoy themselves with, the shameless pair? All these improvements took place on one side of the house only. Flora’s side remained just as it was. No electric lights there, no fresh wallpaper or new venetian blinds. When the house was painted on the outside—cream with dark-green trim—Flora’s side was left bare. This strange open statement was greeted at first with pity and disapproval, then with less sympathy, as a sign of Flora’s stubbornness and eccentricity (she could have bought her own paint and made it look decent), and finally as a joke. People drove out of their way to see it. There was always a dance given in the schoolhouse for a newly married couple. A cash collection—called “a purse of money”—was presented to them. Nurse Atkinson sent out word that she would not mind seeing this custom followed, even though it happened that the family she had married into was opposed to dancing. Some people thought it would be a disgrace to gratify her, a slap in the face to Flora. Others were too curious to hold back. They wanted to see how the newlyweds would behave. Would Robert dance? What sort of outfit would the bride show up in? They delayed a while, but finally the dance was held, and my mother got her report. The bride wore the dress she had worn at her wedding, or so she said. But who would wear such a dress for a wedding at the manse? More than likely it was bought specially for her appearance at the dance. Pure-white satin with a sweetheart neckline, idiotically youthful. The groom was got up in a new dark-blue suit, and she had stuck a flower in his buttonhole. They were a sight. Her hair was freshly done to blind the eye with brassy reflections, and her face looked as if it would come off on a man’s jacket, should she lay it against his shoulder in the dancing. Of course she did dance. She danced with every man present except the groom, who sat scrunched into one of the school desks along the wall. She danced with every man present—they all claimed they had to do it, it was the custom—and then she dragged Robert out to receive the money and to thank everybody for their best wishes. To the ladies in the cloakroom she even hinted that she was feeling unwell, for the usual newlywed reason. Nobody believed her, and indeed nothing ever came of this hope, if she really had it. Some of the women thought that she was lying to them out of malice, insulting them, making them out to be so credulous. But nobody challenged her, nobody was rude to her—maybe because it was plain that she could summon a rudeness of her own to knock anybody flat. Flora was not present at the dance. “My sister-in-law is not a dancer,” said Nurse Atkinson. “She is stuck in the olden times.” She invited them to laugh at Flora, whom she always called her sister-in-law, though she had no right to do so. My mother wrote a letter to Flora after hearing about all these things. Being removed from the scene, and perhaps in a flurry of importance due to her own newly married state, she may have lost sight of the kind of person she was writing to. She offered sympathy and showed outrage, and said blunt disparaging things about the woman who had—as my mother saw it—dealt Flora such a blow. Back came a letter from Flora saying that she did not know where my mother had been getting her information, but that it seemed she had misunderstood, or listened to malicious people, or jumped to unjustified conclusions. What happened in Flora’s family was nobody else’s business, and certainly nobody needed to feel sorry for her or angry on her behalf. Flora said that she was happy and satisfied in her life, as she always had been, and she did not interfere with what others did or wanted, because such things did not concern her. She wished my mother all happiness in her marriage and hoped that she would soon be too busy with her own responsibilities to worry about the lives of people that she used to know. This well-written letter cut my mother, as she said, to the quick. She and Flora stopped corresponding. My mother did become busy with her own life and finally a prisoner in it. But she thought about Flora. In later years, when she sometimes talked about the things she might have been, or done, she would say, “If I could have been a writer—I do think I could have been; I could have been a writer—then I would have written the story of Flora’s life. And do you know what I would have called it? ‘The Maiden Lady.’ ” The Maiden Lady. She said these words in a solemn and sentimental tone of voice that I had no use for. I knew, or thought I knew, exactly the value she found in them. The stateliness and mystery. The hint of derision turning to reverence. I was fifteen or sixteen years old by that time, and I believed that I could see into my mother’s mind. I could see what she would do with Flora, what she had already done. She would make her into a noble figure, one who accepts defection, treachery, who forgives and stands aside, not once but twice. Never a moment of complaint. Flora goes about her cheerful labors, she cleans the house and shovels out the cow byre, she removes some bloody mess from her sister’s bed, and when at last the future seems to open up for her—Ellie will die and Robert will beg forgiveness and Flora will silence him with the proud gift of herself—it is time for Audrey Atkinson to drive into the yard and shut Flora out again, more inexplicably and thoroughly the second time than the first. She must endure the painting of the house, the electric lights, all the prosperous activity next door. “Make-Believe Ballroom,” “Amos ’n’ Andy.” No more Scottish comedies or ancient sermons. She must see them drive off to the dance—her old lover and that coldhearted, stupid, by no means beautiful woman in the white satin wedding dress. She is mocked. (And of course she has made over the farm to Ellie and Robert, of course he has inherited it, and now everything belongs to Audrey Atkinson.) The wicked flourish. But it is all right. It is all right—the elect are veiled in patience and humility and lighted by a certainty that events cannot disturb. That was what I believed my mother would make of things. In her own plight her notions had turned mystical, and there was sometimes a hush, a solemn thrill in her voice that grated on me, alerted me to what seemed a personal danger. I felt a great fog of platitudes and pieties lurking, an incontestable crippled-mother power, which could capture and choke me. There would be no end to it. I had to keep myself sharp-tongued and cynical, arguing and deflating. Eventually I gave up even that recognition and opposed her in silence. This is a fancy way of saying that I was no comfort and poor company to her when she had almost nowhere else to turn. I had my own ideas about Flora’s story. I didn’t think that I could have written a novel but that I would write one. I would take a different tack. I saw through my mother’s story and put in what she left out. My Flora would be as black as hers was white. Rejoicing in the bad turns done to her and in her own forgiveness, spying on the shambles of her sister’s life. A Presbyterian witch, reading out of her poisonous book. It takes a rival ruthlessness, the comparatively innocent brutality of the thick-skinned nurse, to drive her back, to flourish in her shade. But she is driven back; the power of sex and ordinary greed drive her back and shut her up in her own part of the house with the coal-oil lamps. She shrinks, she caves in, her bones harden and her joints thicken, and—oh, this is it, this is it, I see the bare beauty of the ending I will contrive!—she becomes crippled herself, with arthritis, hardly able to move. Now Audrey Atkinson comes into her full power—she demands the whole house. She wants those partitions knocked out that Robert put up with Flora’s help when he married Ellie. She will provide Flora with a room, she will take care of her. (Audrey Atkinson does not wish to be seen as a monster, and perhaps she really isn’t one.) So one day Robert carries Flora—for the first and last time he carries her in his arms—to the room that his wife Audrey has prepared for her. And once Flora is settled in her well-lit, well-heated corner Audrey Atkinson undertakes to clean out the newly vacated rooms, Flora’s rooms. She carries a heap of old books out into the yard. It’s spring again, housecleaning time, the season when Flora herself performed such feats, and now the pale face of Flora appears behind the new net curtains. She has dragged herself from her corner, she sees the light-blue sky with its high skidding clouds over the watery fields, the contending crows, the flooded creeks, the reddening tree branches. She sees the smoke rise out of the incinerator in the yard, where her books are burning. Those smelly old books, as Audrey has called them. Words and pages, the ominous dark spines. The elect, the damned, the slim hopes, the mighty torments—up in smoke. There was the ending. To me the really mysterious person in the story, as my mother told it, was Robert. He never has a word to say. He gets engaged to Flora. He is walking beside her along the river when Ellie leaps out at them. He finds Ellie’s thistles in his bed. He does the carpentry made necessary by his and Ellie’s marriage. He listens or does not listen while Flora reads. Finally he sits scrunched up in the school desk while his flashy bride dances by with all the men. So much for his public acts and appearances. But he was the one who started everything, in secret. He did it to Ellie. He did it to that skinny wild girl at a time when he was engaged to her sister, and he did it to her again and again when she was nothing but a poor botched body, a failed childbearer, lying in bed. He must have done it to Audrey Atkinson, too, but with less disastrous results. Those words, did it to—the words my mother, no more than Flora, would never bring herself to speak—were simply exciting to me. I didn’t feel any decent revulsion or reasonable indignation. I refused the warning. Not even the fate of Ellie could put me off. Not when I thought of that first encounter—the desperation of it, the ripping and striving. I used to sneak longing looks at men in those days. I admired their wrists and their necks and any bit of their chests a loose button let show, and even their ears and their feet in shoes. I expected nothing reasonable of them, only to be engulfed by their passion. I had similar thoughts about Robert. What made Flora evil in my story was just what made her admirable in my mother’s—her turning away from sex. I fought against everything my mother wanted to tell me on this subject; I despised even the drop in her voice, the gloomy caution, with which she approached it. My mother had grown up in a time and in a place where sex was a dark undertaking for women. She knew that you could die of it. So she honored the decency, the prudery, the frigidity, that might protect you. And I grew up in horror of that very protection, the dainty tyranny that seemed to me to extend to all areas of life, to enforce tea parties and white gloves and all other sorts of tinkling inanities. I favored bad words and a breakthrough, I teased myself with the thought of a man’s recklessness and domination. The odd thing is that my mother’s ideas were in line with some progressive notions of her times, and mine echoed the notions that were favored in my time. This in spite of the fact that we both believed ourselves independent, and lived in backwaters that did not register such changes. It’s as if tendencies that seem most deeply rooted in our minds, most private and singular, have come in as spores on the prevailing wind, looking for any likely place to land, any welcome. Not long before she died, but when I was still at home, my mother got a letter from the real Flora. It came from that town near the farm, the town that Flora used to ride to, with Robert, in the cart, holding on to the sacks of wool or potatoes. Flora wrote that she was no longer living on the farm. “Robert and Audrey are still there,” she wrote. “Robert has some trouble with his back but otherwise he is very well. Audrey has poor circulation and is often short of breath. The doctor says she must lose weight but none of the diets seem to work. The farm has been doing very well. They are out of sheep entirely and into dairy cattle. As you may have heard, the chief thing nowadays is to get your milk quota from the government and then you are set. The old stable is all fixed up with milking machines and the latest modern equipment, it is quite a marvel. When I go out there to visit I hardly know where I am.” She went on to say that she had been living in town for some years now, and that she had a job clerking in a store. She must have said what kind of a store this was, but I cannot now remember. She said nothing, of course, about what had led her to this decision—whether she had in fact been put off her own farm, or had sold out her share, apparently not to much advantage. She stressed the fact of her friendliness with Robert and Audrey. She said her health was good. “I hear that you have not been so lucky in that way,” she wrote. “I ran into Cleta Barnes who used to be Cleta Stapleton at the post office out at home, and she told me that there is some problem with your muscles and she said your speech is affected too. This is sad to hear but they can do such wonderful things nowadays so I am hoping that the doctors may be able to help you.” An unsettling letter, leaving so many things out. Nothing in it about God’s will or His role in our afflictions. No mention of whether Flora still went to that church. I don’t think my mother ever answered. Her fine legible handwriting, her schoolteacher’s writing, had deteriorated, and she had difficulty holding a pen. She was always beginning letters and not finishing them. I would find them lying around the house. My dearest Mary, they began. My darling Ruth, My dear little Joanne (though I realize you are not little anymore), My dear old friend Cleta, My lovely Margaret. These women were friends from her teaching days, her Normal School days, and from high school. A few were former pupils. I have friends all over the country, she would say defiantly. I have dear, dear friends. I remember seeing one letter that started out: Friend of my Youth. I don’t know whom it was to. They were all friends of her youth. I don’t recall one that began with My dear and most admired Flora. I would always look at them, try to read the salutation and the few sentences she had written, and because I could not bear to feel sadness I would feel an impatience with the flowery language, the direct appeal for love and pity. She would get more of that, I thought (more from myself, I meant), if she could manage to withdraw with dignity, instead of reaching out all the time to cast her stricken shadow. I had lost interest in Flora by then. I was always thinking of stories, and by this time I probably had a new one on my mind. But I have thought of her since. I have wondered what kind of a store. A hardware store or a five-and-ten, where she has to wear a coverall, or a drugstore, where she is uniformed like a nurse, or a Ladies’ Wear, where she is expected to be genteelly fashionable? She might have had to learn about food blenders or chain saws, negligees, cosmetics, even condoms. She would have to work all day under electric lights, and operate a cash register. Would she get a permanent, paint her nails, put on lipstick? She must have found a place to live—a little apartment with a kitchenette, overlooking the main street, or a room in a boarding house. How could she go on being a Cameronian? How could she get to that out-of-the-way church unless she managed to buy a car and learned to drive it? And if she did that she might drive not only to church but to other places. She might go on holidays. She might rent a cottage on a lake for a week, learn to swim, visit a city. She might eat meals in a restaurant, possibly in a restaurant where drinks were served. She might make friends with women who were divorced. She might meet a man. A friend’s widowed brother, perhaps. A man who did not know that she was a Cameronian or what Cameronians were. Who knew nothing of her story. A man who had never heard about the partial painting of the house or the two betrayals, or that it took all her dignity and innocence to keep her from being a joke. He might want to take her dancing, and she would have to explain that she could not go. He would be surprised but not put off—all that Cameronian business might seem quaint to him, almost charming. So it would to everybody. She was brought up in some weird religion, people would say. She lived a long time out on some godforsaken farm. She is a little bit strange but really quite nice. Nice-looking, too. Especially since she went and got her hair done. I might go into a store and find her. No, no. She would be dead a long time now. But suppose I had gone into a store—perhaps a department store. I see a place with the brisk atmosphere, the straightforward displays, the old-fashioned modern look of the fifties. Suppose a tall, handsome woman, nicely turned out, had come to wait on me, and I had known, somehow, in spite of the sprayed and puffed hair and the pink or coral lips and fingernails—I had known that this was Flora. I would have wanted to tell her that I knew, I knew her story, though we had never met. I imagine myself trying to tell her. (This is a dream now, I understand it as a dream.) I imagine her listening, with a pleasant composure. But she shakes her head. She smiles at me, and in her smile there is a degree of mockery, a faint, self-assured malice. Weariness, as well. She is not surprised that I am telling her this, but she is weary of it, of me and my idea of her, my information, my notion that I can know anything about her. Of course it’s my mother I’m thinking of, my mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It’s nothing, just this little tremor; saying with such astonishing lighthearted forgiveness, Oh, I knew you’d come someday. My mother surprising me, and doing it almost indifferently. Her mask, her fate, and most of her affliction taken away. How relieved I was, and happy. But I now recall that I was disconcerted as well. I would have to say that I felt slightly cheated. Yes. Offended, tricked, cheated, by this welcome turnaround, this reprieve. My mother moving rather carelessly out of her old prison, showing options and powers I never dreamed she had, changes more than herself. She changes the bitter lump of love I have carried all this time into a phantom—something useless and uncalled for, like a phantom pregnancy. The Cameronians, I have discovered, are or were an uncompromising remnant of the Covenanters—those Scots who in the seventeenth century bound themselves, with God, to resist prayer books, bishops, any taint of popery or interference by the King. Their name comes from Richard Cameron, an outlawed, or “field,” preacher, soon cut down. The Cameronians—for a long time they have preferred to be called the Reformed Presbyterians—went into battle singing the seventy-fourth and the seventy-eighth Psalms. They hacked the haughty Bishop of St. Andrews to death on the highway and rode their horses over his body. One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world. Five Points While they drink vodka and orange juice in the trailer park on the cliffs above Lake Huron, Neil Bauer tells Brenda a story. It happened a long way away, in Victoria, British Columbia, where Neil grew up. Neil is not much younger than Brenda—less than three years—but it sometimes feels to her like a generation gap, because she grew up here, and stayed here, marrying Cornelius Zendt when she was twenty years old, and Neil grew up on the West Coast, where things were very different, and he left home at sixteen to travel and work all over. What Brenda has seen of Victoria, in pictures, is flowers and horses. Flowers spilling out of baskets hanging from old-fashioned lampposts, filling grottoes and decorating parks; horses carrying wagonloads of people to look at the sights. “That’s all just tourist shit,” Neil says. “About half the place is nothing but tourist shit. That’s not where I’m talking about.” He is talking about Five Points, which was—is—a section, or maybe just a corner, of the city, where there was a school and a drugstore and a Chinese grocery and a candy store. When Neil was in public school, the candy store was run by a grouchy old woman with painted-on eyebrows. She used to let her cat sprawl in the sun in the window. After she died, some new people, Europeans, not Poles or Czechs but from some smaller country—Croatia; is that a country?—took over the candy store and changed it. They cleared out all the stale candy and the balloons that wouldn’t blow up and the ballpoint pens that wouldn’t write and the dead Mexican jumping beans. They painted the place top to bottom and put in a few chairs and tables. They still sold candy—in clean jars now, instead of cat-pissed cardboard boxes—and rulers and erasers. But they also started to operate as a kind of neighborhood café, with coffee and soft drinks and homemade cakes. The wife, who made the cakes, was very shy and fussy, and if you came up and tried to pay her she would call for her husband in Croatian, or whatever—let’s say it was Croatian—in such a startled way you’d think that you’d broken into her house and interrupted her private life. The husband spoke English pretty well. He was a little bald guy, polite and nervous, a chain-smoker, and she was a big, heavy woman with bent shoulders, always wearing an apron and a cardigan sweater. He washed the windows and swept off the sidewalk and took the money, and she baked the buns and cakes and made things that people had never seen before but that quickly became popular, like pierogi and poppy-seed loaf. Their two daughters spoke English just like Canadians, and went to the convent school. They showed up in their school uniforms in the late afternoon and got right to work. The younger one washed the coffee cups and glasses and wiped the tables, and the older one did everything else. She waited on customers, worked the cash register, filled the trays, and shooed away the little kids who were hanging around not buying anything. When the younger one finished washing up, she would sit in the back room doing her homework, but the older one never sat down. If there was nothing to do at the moment, she just stood by the cash register, watching. The younger one was called Lisa, the older one Maria. Lisa was small and nice enough looking—just a little kid. But Maria, by the age of maybe thirteen, had big, saggy breasts and a rounded-out stomach and thick legs. She wore glasses, and her hair was done in braids around her head. She looked about fifty years old. And she acted it, the way she took over the store. Both parents seemed willing to take a back seat to her. The mother retreated to the back room, and the father became a handyman-helper. Maria understood English and money and wasn’t fazed by anything. All the little kids said, “Ugh, that Maria—isn’t she gross?” But they were scared of her. She looked like she already knew all about running a business. Brenda and her husband also run a business. They bought a farm just south of Logan and filled the barn with used appliances (which Cornelius knows how to fix) and secondhand furniture and all the other things—the dishes, pictures, knives and forks and ornaments and jewelry—that people like to poke through and think they’re buying cheap. It’s called Zendt’s Furniture Barn. Locally, a lot of people refer to it as the Used Furniture on the Highway. They didn’t always do this. Brenda used to teach nursery school, and Cornelius, who is twelve years older than she is, worked in the salt mine at Walley, on the lake. After his accident they had to think of something he could do sitting down most of the time, and they used the money they got to buy a worn-out farm with good buildings. Brenda quit her job, because there was too much for Cornelius to handle by himself. There are hours in the day and sometimes whole days when he has to lie down and watch television, or just lie on the living room floor, coping with the pain. In the evenings Cornelius likes to drive over to Walley. Brenda never offers—she waits for him to say, “Why don’t you drive?” if he doesn’t want the movement of his arms or legs to jar his back. The kids used to go along, but now that they’re in high school—Lorna in grade eleven and Mark in grade nine—they usually don’t want to. Brenda and Cornelius sit in the parked van and look at the sea gulls lining up out on the breakwater, the grain elevators, the great green-lighted shafts and ramps of the mine where Cornelius used to work, the pyramids of coarse gray salt. Sometimes there is a long lake boat in port. Of course, there are pleasure boats in the summer, wind surfers out on the water, people fishing off the pier. The time of the sunset is posted daily on a board on the beach then; people come especially to watch it. Now, in October, the board is bare and the lights are turned on along the pier—one or two diehards are still fishing—and the water is choppy and cold-looking, the harbor entirely businesslike. There is still work going on on the beach. Since early last spring, boulders have been set up in some places, sand has been poured down in others, a long rocky spit has been constructed, all making a protected curve of beach, with a rough road along it, on which they drive. Never mind Cornelius’s back—he wants to see. Trucks, earthmovers, bulldozers have been busy all day, and they are still sitting there, temporarily tame and useless monsters, in the evening. This is where Neil works. He drives these things—he hauls the rocks around, clears the space, and makes the road for Brenda and Cornelius to drive on. He works for the Fordyce Construction Company, from Logan, which has the contract. Cornelius looks at everything. He knows what the boats are loading (soft wheat, salt, corn) and where they’re going, he understands how the harbor is being deepened, and he always wants to get a look at the huge pipe running at an angle onto the beach and crossing it, finally letting out water and sludge and rocks from the lake bottom that have never before seen the light of day. He goes and stands beside this pipe to listen to the commotion inside it, the banging and groaning of the rocks and water rushing on their way. He asks what a rough winter will do to all this changing and arranging if the lake just picks up the rocks and beach and flings them aside and eats away at the clay cliffs, as before. Brenda listens to Cornelius and thinks about Neil. She derives pleasure from being in the place where Neil spends his days. She likes to think of the noise and the steady strength of these machines and of the men in the cabs bare-armed, easy with this power, as if they knew naturally what all this roaring and chomping up the shore was leading to. Their casual, good-humored authority. She loves the smell of work on their bodies, the language of it they speak, their absorption in it, their disregard of her. She loves to get a man fresh from all that. When she is down there with Cornelius and hasn’t seen Neil for a while, she can feel uneasy and forlorn, as if this might be a world that could turn its back on her. Just after she has been with Neil, it’s her kingdom—but what isn’t, then? The night before they are to meet—last night, for instance—she should be feeling happy and expectant, but to tell the truth the last twenty-four hours, even the last two or three days, seem too full of pitfalls, too momentous, for her to feel anything much but caution and anxiety. It’s a countdown—she actually counts the hours. She has a tendency to fill them with good deeds—cleaning jobs around the house that she was putting off, mowing the lawn, doing a reorganization at the Furniture Barn, even weeding the rock garden. The morning of the day itself is when the hours pass most laggingly and are full of dangers. She always has a story about where she’s supposed to be going that afternoon, but her expedition can’t be an absolutely necessary one—that would be calling too much attention to it—so there’s the chance, always, that something will come up to make Cornelius say, “Can’t you put that off till later in the week? Can’t you do it some other day?” It’s not so much that she wouldn’t then be able to get in touch with Neil that bothers her. Neil would wait an hour or so, then figure out what had happened. It’s that she thinks she couldn’t bear it. To be so close, then have to do without. Yet she doesn’t feel any physical craving during those last torturing hours; even her secret preparations—her washing, shaving, oiling, and perfuming—don’t arouse her. She stays numb, harassed by details, lies, arrangements, until the moment when she actually sees Neil’s car. The fear that she won’t be able to get away is succeeded, during the fifteen-minute drive, by the fear that he won’t show up, in that lonely, dead-end spot in the swamp which is their meeting place. What she’s looking forward to, during those last hours, gets to be less of a physical thing—so that missing it would be like missing not a meal you’re hungry for but a ceremony on which your life or salvation depended. By the time Neil was an older teenager—but not old enough to get into bars, still hanging around at the Five Points Confectionery (the Croatians kept the old name for it)—the change had arrived, which everybody who was alive then remembers. (That’s what Neil thinks, but Brenda says, “I don’t know—as far as I was concerned, all that was just sort of going on someplace else.”) Nobody knew what to do about it, nobody was prepared. Some schools were strict about long hair (on boys), some thought it best to let that go and concentrate on serious things. Just hold it back with an elastic band was all they asked. And what about clothes? Chains and seed beads, rope sandals, Indian cotton, African patterns, everything all of a sudden soft and loose and bright. In Victoria the change may not have been contained so well as in some other places. It spilled over. Maybe the climate softened people up, not just young people. There was a big burst of paper flowers and marijuana fumes and music (the stuff that seemed so wild then, Neil says, and seems so tame now), and that music rolling out of downtown windows hung with dishonored flags, over the flower beds in Beacon Hill Park to the yellow broom on the sea cliffs to the happy beaches looking over at the magic peaks of the Olympics. Everybody was in on the act. University professors wandered around with flowers behind their ears, and people’s mothers turned up in those outfits. Neil and his friends had contempt for these people, naturally—these hip oldsters, toe-dippers. Neil and his friends took the world of drugs and music seriously. When they wanted to do drugs, they went outside the Confectionery. Sometimes they went as far as the cemetery and sat on the seawall. Sometimes they sat beside the shed that was in back of the store. They couldn’t go in; the shed was locked. Then they went back inside the Confectionery and drank Cokes and ate hamburgers and cheeseburgers and cinnamon buns and cakes, because they got very hungry. They leaned back on their chairs and watched the patterns move on the old pressed-tin ceiling, which the Croatians had painted white. Flowers, towers, birds, and monsters detached themselves, swam overhead. “What were you taking?” Brenda says. “Pretty good stuff, unless we got sold something rotten. Hash, acid, mescaline sometimes. Combinations sometimes Nothing too serious.” “All I ever did was smoke about a third of a joint on the beach when at first I wasn’t even sure what it was, and when I got home my father slapped my face.” (That’s not the truth. It was Cornelius. Cornelius slapped her face. It was before they were married, when Cornelius was working nights in the mine and she would sit around on the beach after dark with some friends of her own age. Next day she told him, and he slapped her face.) All they did in the Confectionery was eat, and moon around, happily stoned, and play stupid games, such as racing toy cars along the tabletops. Once, a guy lay down on the floor and they squirted ketchup at him. Nobody cared. The daytime customers—the housewives buying bakery goods and the pensioners killing time with a coffee—never came in at night. The mother and Lisa had gone home on the bus, to wherever they lived. Then even the father started going home, a little after suppertime. Maria was left in charge. She didn’t care what they did, as long as they didn’t do damage and as long as they paid. This was the world of drugs that belonged to the older boys, that they kept the younger boys out of. It was a while before they noticed that the younger ones had something, too. They had some secret of their own. They were growing insolent and self-important. Some of them were always pestering the older boys to let them buy drugs. That was how it became evident that they had quite a bit of unexplained money. Neil had—he has—a younger brother named Jonathan. Very straight now, married, a teacher. Jonathan began dropping hints; other boys did the same thing, they couldn’t keep the secret to themselves, and pretty soon it was all out in the open. They were getting their money from Maria. Maria was paying them to have sex with her. They did it in the back shed after she closed the store up at night. She had the key to the shed. She also had the day-to-day control of the money. She emptied the till at night, she kept the books. Her parents trusted her to do this. Why not? She was good at arithmetic, and she was devoted to the business. She understood the whole operation better than they did. It seemed that they were very uncertain and superstitious about money, and they did not want to put it in the bank. They kept it in a safe or maybe just a strongbox somewhere, and got it as they needed it. They must have felt they couldn’t trust anybody, banks or anybody, outside of the family. What a godsend Maria must have seemed to them—steady and smart, not pretty enough to be tempted to put her hopes or energies into anything but the business. A pillar, Maria. She was a head taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier than those boys she paid. There are always a few bad moments after Brenda turns off the highway—where she has some excuse to be driving, should anyone see her—and onto the side road. The van is noticeable, unmistakable. But once she has taken the plunge, driving where she shouldn’t be, she feels stronger. When she turns onto the dead-end swamp road, there’s no excuse possible. Spotted here, she’s finished. She has about half a mile to drive out in the open before she gets to the trees. She’d hoped that they would plant corn, which would grow tall and shelter her, but they hadn’t, they’d planted beans. At least the roadsides here hadn’t been sprayed; the grass and weeds and berry bushes had grown tall, though not tall enough to hide a van. There was goldenrod and milkweed, with the pods burst open, and dangling bunches of bright, poisonous fruit, and wild grapevine flung over everything, even creeping onto the road. And finally she was in, she was into the tunnel of trees. Cedar, hemlock, farther back in the wetter ground the wispy-looking tamarack, lots of soft maples with leaves spotty yellow and brown. No standing water, no black pools, even far back in the trees. They’d had luck, with the dry summer and fall. She and Neil had had luck, not the farmers. If it had been a wet year, they could never have used this place. The hard ruts she eases the van through would have been slick mud and the turnaround spot at the end a soggy sinkhole. That’s about a mile and a half in. There are some tricky spots to drive—a couple of bumpy little hills rising out of the swamp, and a narrow log bridge over a creek where she can’t see any water, just choking, yellowy cress and nettles, sucking at dry mud. Neil drives an old blue Mercury—dark blue that can turn into a pool, a spot of swampy darkness under the trees. She strains to see it. She doesn’t mind getting there a few minutes ahead of him, to compose herself, brush out her hair and check her face and spray her throat with purse cologne (sometimes between her legs as well). More than a few minutes makes her nervous. She isn’t afraid of wild dogs or rapists or eyes watching her out of thickets—she used to pick berries in here when she was a child; that’s how she knew about the place. She is afraid of what may not be there, not what is. The absence of Neil, the possibility of his defection, his sudden denial of her. That can turn any place, any thing, ugly and menacing and stupid. Trees or gardens or parking meters or coffee tables—it wouldn’t matter. Once, he didn’t come; he was sick: food poisoning or the most incredible hangover of his life—something terrible, he told her on the phone that night—and she had to pretend it was somebody calling to sell them a sofa. She never forgot the wait, the draining of hope, the heat and the bugs—it was in July—and her body oozing sweat, here on the seat of the van, like some sickly admission of defeat. He is there, he’s there first; she can see one eye of the Mercury in the deep cedar shade. It’s like hitting water when you’re dead of heat and scratched and bitten all over from picking berries in the summer bush—the lapping sweetness of it, the cool kindness soaking up all your troubles in its sudden depths. She gets the van parked and fluffs out her hair and jumps out, tries the door to show it’s locked, else he’ll send her running back, just like Cornelius—are you sure you locked the van? She walks across the little sunny space, the leaf-scattered ground, seeing herself walk, in her tight white pants and turquoise top and low-slung white belt and high heels, her bag over her shoulder. A shapely woman, with fair, freckled skin and blue eyes rimmed with blue shadow and liner, screwed up appealingly against any light. Her reddish-blond hair—touched up yesterday—catching the sun like a crown of petals. She wears heels just for this walk, just for this moment of crossing the road with his eyes on her, the extra bit of pelvic movement and leg length they give her. Often, often, they’ve made love in his car, right here at their meeting place, though they always keep telling each other to wait. Stop; wait till we get to the trailer. “Wait” means the opposite of what it says, after a while. Once, they started as they drove. Brenda slipped off her pants and pulled up her loose summer skirt, not saying a word, looking straight ahead, and they ended up stopping beside the highway, taking a shocking risk. Now when they pass this spot, she always says something like “Don’t go off the road here,” or “Somebody should put up a warning sign.” “Historical marker,” Neil says. They have a history of passion, the way families have a history, or people who have gone to school together. They don’t have much else. They’ve never eaten a meal with each other, or seen a movie. But they’ve come through some complicated adventures together, and dangers—not just of the stopping-on-the-highway kind. They’ve taken risks, surprising each other, always correctly. In dreams you can have the feeling that you’ve had this dream before, that you have this dream over and over again, and you know that it’s really nothing that simple. You know that there’s a whole underground system that you call “dreams,” having nothing better to call them, and that this system is not like roads or tunnels but more like a live body network, all coiling and stretching, unpredictable but finally familiar—where you are now, where you’ve always been. That was the way it was with them and sex, going somewhere like that, and they understood the same things about it and trusted each other, so far. Another time on the highway, Brenda saw a white convertible approaching, an old white Mustang convertible with the top down—this was in the summer—and she slid to the floor. “Who’s in that car?” she said. “Look! Quick! Tell me.” “Girls,” Neil said. “Four or five girls. Out looking for guys.” “My daughter,” Brenda said, scrambling up again. “Good thing I wasn’t wearing my seat belt.” “You got a daughter old enough to drive? You got a daughter owns a convertible?” “Her friend owns it. Lorna doesn’t drive yet. But she could—she’s sixteen.” She felt there were things in the air then that he could have said, that she hoped he wouldn’t. The things men feel obliged to say about young girls. “You could have one that age yourself,” she said. “Maybe you do and don’t know it. Also, she lied to me. She said she was going to play tennis.” Again he didn’t say anything she hoped not to hear, any sly reminder about lies. A danger past. All he said was, “Easy. Take it easy. Nothing happened.” She had no way of knowing how much he understood of her feelings at that moment, or if he understood anything. They almost never mentioned that part of her life. They never mentioned Cornelius, though he was the one Neil talked to the first time he came to the Furniture Barn. He came to look for a bicycle—just a cheap bike to ride on the country roads. They had no bikes around at that time, but he stayed and talked to Cornelius for a while, about the kind he wanted, ways of repairing or improving that kind, how they should watch out for one. He said he would drop by again. He did that, very soon, and only Brenda was there. Cornelius had gone to the house to lie down; it was one of his bad days. Neil and Brenda made everything clear to each other then, without saying anything definite. When he phoned and asked her to have a drink with him, in a tavern on the lakeshore road, she knew what he was asking and she knew what she would answer. She told him she hadn’t done anything like this before. That was a lie in one way and in another way true. During store hours, Maria didn’t let one sort of transaction interfere with another. Everybody paid as usual. She didn’t behave any differently; she was still in charge. The boys knew that they had some bargaining power, but they were never sure how much. A dollar. Two dollars. Five. It wasn’t as if she had to depend on one or two of them. There were always several friends outside, waiting and willing, when she took one of them into the shed before she caught the bus home. She warned them that she would stop dealing with them if they talked, and for a while they believed her. She didn’t hire them regularly at first, or all that often. That was at first. Over a few months’ time, things began to change. Maria’s needs increased. The bargaining got to be more open and obstreperous. The news got out. Maria’s powers were being chipped, then hammered, away. Come on, Maria, give me a ten. Me, too. Maria, give me a ten, too. Come on, Maria, you know me. Twenty, Maria. Give me twenty. Come on. Twenty bucks. You owe me, Maria. Come on, now. You don’t want me to tell. Come on, Maria. A twenty, a twenty, a twenty. Maria is forking over. She is going to the shed every night. And if that isn’t bad enough for her, some boys start refusing. They want the money first. They take the money and then they say no. They say she never paid them. She paid them, she paid them in front of witnesses, and all the witnesses deny that she did. They shake their heads, they taunt her. No. You never paid him. I never saw you. You pay me now and I’ll go. I promise I will. I’ll go. You pay me twenty, Maria. And the older boys, who have learned from their younger brothers what is going on, are coming up to her at the cash register and saying, “How about me, Maria? You know me, too. Come on, Maria, how about a twenty?” Those boys never go to the shed with her, never. Did she think they would? They never even promise, they just ask her for money. You know me a long time, Maria. They threaten, they wheedle. Aren’t I your friend, too, Maria? Nobody was Maria’s friend. Maria’s matronly, watchful calm was gone—she looked wild and sullen and mean. She gave them looks full of hate, but she continued giving them money. She kept handing over the bills. Not even trying to bargain, or to argue or refuse, anymore. In a rage she did it—a silent rage. The more they taunted her, the more readily the twenty-dollar bills flew out of the till. Very little, perhaps nothing, was done to earn them now. They’re stoned all the time, Neil and his friends. All the time, now that they have this money. They see sweet streams of atoms flowing in the Formica tabletops. Their colored souls are shooting out under their fingernails. Maria has gone crazy, the store is bleeding money. How can this go on? How is it going to end? Maria must be into the strongbox now; the till at the end of the day wouldn’t have enough for her. And all the time her mother keeps on baking buns and making pierogi, and the father keeps sweeping the sidewalk and greeting the customers. Nobody has told them. They go on just the same. They had to find out on their own. They found a bill that Maria hadn’t paid—something like that, somebody coming in with an unpaid bill—and they went to get the money to pay it, and they found that there was no money. The money wasn’t where they kept it, in the safe or strongbox or wherever, and it wasn’t anywhere else—the money was gone. That was how they found out. Maria had succeeded in giving away everything. All they had saved, all their slowly accumulated profits, all the money on which they operated their business. Truly, everything. They could not pay the rent now, they could not pay the electricity bill or their suppliers. They could not keep on running the Confectionery. At least they believed they couldn’t. Maybe they simply had not the heart to go on. The store was locked. A sign went up on the door: “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.” Nearly a year went by before the place was reopened. It had been turned into a laundromat. People said it was Maria’s mother, that big, meek, bent-over woman, who insisted on bringing charges against her daughter. She was scared of the English language and the cash register, but she brought Maria into court. Of course, Maria could only be charged as a juvenile, and she could only be sent to a place for young offenders, and nothing could be done about the boys at all. They all lied anyway—they said it wasn’t them. Maria’s parents must have found jobs, they must have gone on living in Victoria, because Lisa did. She still swam at the Y, and in a few years she was working at Eaton’s, in Cosmetics. She was very glamorous and haughty by that time. Neil always has vodka and orange juice for them to drink. That’s Brenda’s choice. She read somewhere that orange juice replenishes the vitamin C that the liquor leeches away, and she hopes the vodka really can’t be detected on your breath. Neil tidies up the trailer, too—or so she thinks, because of the paper bag full of beer cans leaning against the cupboard, a pile of newspapers pushed together, not really folded, a pair of socks kicked into a corner. Maybe his housemate does it. A man called Gary, whom Brenda has never met or seen a picture of, and wouldn’t know if they met on the street. Would he know her? He knows she comes here, he knows when; does he even know her name? Does he recognize her perfume, the smell of her sex, when he comes home in the evening? She likes the trailer, the way nothing in it has been made to look balanced or permanent. Things set down just wherever they will be convenient. No curtains or placemats, not even a pair of salt and pepper shakers—just the salt box and pepper tin, the way they come from the store. She loves the sight of Neil’s bed—badly made, with a rough plaid blanket and a flat pillow, not a marriage bed or a bed of illness, comfort, complication. The bed of his lust and sleep, equally strenuous and oblivious. She loves the life of his body, so sure of its rights. She wants commands from him, never requests. She wants to be his territory. It’s only in the bathroom that the dirt bothers her a bit, like anybody else’s dirt, and she wishes they’d done a better job of cleaning the toilet and the washbasin. They sit at the table to drink, looking out through the trailer window at the steely, glittering, choppy water of the lake. Here the trees, exposed to lake winds, are almost bare. Birch bones and poplars stiff and bright as straw frame the water. There may be snow in another month. Certainly in two months. The seaway will close, the lake boats will be tied up for the winter, there’ll be a wild landscape of ice thrown up between the shore and the open water. Neil says he doesn’t know what he’ll do, once the work on the beach is over. Maybe stay on, try to get another job. Maybe go on unemployment insurance for a while, get a snowmobile, enjoy the winter. Or he could go and look for work somewhere else, visit friends. He has friends all over the continent of North America and out of it. He has friends in Peru. “So what happened?” Brenda says. “Don’t you have any idea what happened to Maria?” Neil says no, he has no idea. The story won’t leave Brenda alone; it stays with her like a coating on the tongue, a taste in the mouth. “Well, maybe she got married,” she says. “After she got out. Lots of people get married who are no beauties. That’s for sure. She might’ve lost weight and be looking good even.” “Sure,” says Neil. “Maybe have guys paying her, instead of the other way round.” “Or she might still be just sitting in one of those places. One of those places where they put people.” Now she feels a pain between her legs. Not unusual after one of these sessions. If she were to stand up at this moment, she’d feel a throb there, she’d feel the blood flowing back down through all the little veins and arteries that have been squashed and bruised, she’d feel herself throbbing like a big swollen blister. She takes a long drink and says, “So how much money did you get out of her?” “I never got anything,” Neil says. “I just knew these other guys who did. It was my brother Jonathan made the money off her. I wonder what he’d say if I reminded him now.” “Older guys, too—you said older guys, too. Don’t tell me you just sat back and watched and never got your share.” “That’s what I am telling you. I never got anything.” Brenda clicks her tongue, tut-tut, and empties her glass and moves it around on the table, looking skeptically at the wet circles. “Want another?” Neil says. He takes the glass out of her hand. “I’ve got to go,” she says. “Soon.” You can make love in a hurry if you have to, but you need time for a fight. Is that what they’re starting on? A fight? She feels edgy but happy. Her happiness is tight and private, not the sort that flows out from you and fuzzes everything up and makes you good-naturedly careless about what you say. The very opposite. She feels light and sharp and unconnected. When Neil brings her back a full glass, she takes a drink from it at once, to safeguard this feeling. “You’ve got the same name as my husband,” she says. “It’s funny I never thought of that before.” She has thought of it before. She just hasn’t mentioned it, knowing it’s not something Neil would like to hear. “Cornelius isn’t the same as Neil,” he says. “It’s Dutch. Some Dutch people shorten it to Neil.” “Yeah, but I’m not Dutch, and I wasn’t named Cornelius, just Neil.” “Still, if his had been shortened you’d be named the same.” “His isn’t shortened.” “I never said it was. I said if it had been.” “So why say that if it isn’t?” He must feel the same thing she does—the slow but irresistible rise of a new excitement, the need to say, and hear, dire things. What a sharp, releasing pleasure there is in the first blow, and what a dazzling temptation ahead—destruction. You don’t stop to think why you want that destruction. You just do. “Why do we have to drink every time?” Neil says abruptly. “Do we want to turn ourselves into alcoholics or something?” Brenda takes a quick sip and pushes her glass away. “Who has to drink?” she says. She thinks he means they should drink coffee, or Cokes. But he gets up and goes to the dresser where he keeps his clothes, opens a drawer, and says, “Come over here.” “I don’t want to look at any of that stuff,” she says. “You don’t even know what it is.” “Sure I do.” Of course she doesn’t—not specifically. “You think it’s going to bite you?” Brenda drinks again and keeps looking out the window. The sun is getting down in the sky already, pushing the bright light across the table to warm her hands. “You don’t approve,” Neil says. “I don’t approve or disapprove,” she says, aware of having lost some control, of not being as happy as she was. “I don’t care what you do. That’s you.” “I don’t approve or disapprove,” says Neil, in a mincing voice. “Don’t care what you do.” That’s the signal, which one or the other had to give. A flash of hate, pure meanness, like the glint of a blade. The signal that the fight can come out into the open. Brenda takes a deep drink, as if she very much deserved it. She feels a desolate satisfaction. She stands up and says, “Time for me to go.” “What if I’m not ready to go yet?” Neil says. “I said me, not you.” “Oh. You got a car outside?” “I can walk.” “That’s five miles back to where the van is.” “People have walked five miles.” “In shoes like that?” says Neil. They both look at her yellow shoes, which match the appliquéd-satin birds on her turquoise sweater. Both things bought and worn for him! “You didn’t wear those shoes for walking,” he says. “You wore them so every step you took would show off your fat arse.” She walks along the lakeshore road, in the gravel, which bruises her feet through the shoes and makes her pay attention to each step, lest she should twist an ankle. The afternoon is now too cold for just a sweater. The wind off the lake blows at her sideways, and every time a vehicle passes, particularly a truck, an eddy of stiff wind whirls around her and grit blows into her face. Some of the trucks slow down, of course, and some cars do, too, and men yell at her out of the windows. One car skids onto the gravel and stops ahead of her. She stands still, she cannot think what else to do, and after a moment he churns back onto the pavement and she starts walking again. That’s all right, she’s not in any real danger. She doesn’t even worry about being seen by someone she knows. She feels too free to care. She thinks about the first time Neil came to the Furniture Barn, how he put his arm around Samson’s neck and said, “Not much of a watchdog you got here, Ma’am.” She thought the “Ma’am” was impudent, phony, out of some old Elvis Presley movie. And what he said next was worse. She looked at Samson, and she said, “He’s better at night.” And Neil said, “So am I.” Impudent, swaggering, conceited, she thought. And he’s not young enough to get away with it. Her opinion didn’t even change so much the second time. What happened was that all that became just something to get past. It was something she could let him know he didn’t have to do. It was her job to take his gifts seriously, so that he could be serious, too, and easy and grateful. How was she sure so soon that what she didn’t like about him wasn’t real? When she’s in the second mile, or maybe just the second half of the first mile, the Mercury catches up to her. It pulls onto the gravel across the road. She goes over and gets in. She doesn’t see why not. It doesn’t mean that she is going to talk to him, or be with him any longer than the few minutes it will take to drive to the swamp road and the van. His presence doesn’t need to weigh on her any more than the grit blowing beside the road. She winds the window all the way down so that there will be a rush of chilly wind across anything he may have to say. “I want to beg your pardon for the personal remarks,” he says. “Why?” she says. “It’s true. It is fat.” “No.” “It is,” she says, in a tone of bored finality that is quite sincere. It shuts him up for a few miles, until they’ve turned down the swamp road and are driving in under the trees. “If you thought there was a needle there in the drawer, there wasn’t.” “It isn’t any of my business what there was,” she says. “All that was in there was some Percs and Quaaludes and a little hash.” She remembers a fight she had with Cornelius, one that almost broke their engagement. It wasn’t the time he slapped her for smoking marijuana. They made that up quickly. It wasn’t about anything to do with their own lives. They were talking about a man Cornelius worked with at the mine, and his wife, and their retarded child. This child was just a vegetable, Cornelius said; all it did was gibber away in a sort of pen in a corner of the living room and mess its pants. It was about six or seven years old, and that was all it would ever do. Cornelius said he believed that if anybody had a child like that they had a right to get rid of it. He said that was what he would do. No question about it. There were a lot of ways you could do it and never get caught, and he bet that was what a lot of people did. He and Brenda had a terrible fight about this. But all the time they were arguing and fighting Brenda suspected that this was not something Cornelius would really do. It was something he had to say he would do. To her. To her, he had to insist that he would do it. And this actually made her angrier at him than she would have been if she believed he was entirely and brutally sincere. He wanted her to argue with him about this. He wanted her protest, her horror, and why was that? Men wanted you to make a fuss, about disposing of vegetable babies or taking drugs or driving a car like a bat out of hell, and why was that? So they could have your marshmallow sissy goodness to preen against, with their hard showoff badness? So that they finally could give in to you, growling, and not have to be so bad and reckless anymore? Whatever it was, you got sick of it. In the mine accident, Cornelius could have been crushed to death. He was working the night shift when it happened. In the great walls of rock salt an undercut is made, then there are holes drilled for explosives, and the charges are fitted in; an explosion goes off every night at five minutes to midnight. The huge slice of salt slides loose, to be started on its journey to the surface. Cornelius was lifted up in a cage on the end of the arm of the scaler. He was to break off the loose material on the roof and fix in the bolts that held it for the explosion. Something went wrong with the hydraulic controls he was operating—he stalled, tried for a little power and got a surge that lifted him, so that he saw the rock ceiling closing down on him like a lid. He ducked, the cage halted, a rocky outcrop struck him in the back. He had worked in the mine for seven years before that and hardly ever spoke to Brenda about what it was like. Now he tells her. It’s a world of its own, he says—caverns and pillars, miles out under the lake. If you get in a passage where there are no machines to light the gray walls, the salt-dusty air, and you turn your headlamp off, you can find out what real darkness is like, the darkness people on the surface of the earth never get to see. The machines stay down there forever. Some are assembled down there, taken down in parts; all are repaired there; and finally they’re ransacked for usable parts, then piled into a dead-end passage that is sealed up—a tomb for these underground machines. They make a ferocious noise all the time they’re working; the noise of the machines and the ventilating fans cuts out any human voice. And now there’s a new machine that can do what Cornelius went up in the cage to do. It can do it by itself, without a man. Brenda doesn’t know if he misses being down there. He says he doesn’t. He says he just can’t look at the surface of the water without seeing all that underneath, which nobody who hasn’t seen it could imagine. Neil and Brenda drive along under the trees, where suddenly you could hardly feel the wind at all. “Also, I did take some money,” Neil says. “I got forty dollars, which, compared to what some guys got, was just nothing. I swear that’s all, forty dollars. I never got any more.” She doesn’t say anything. “I wasn’t looking to confess it,” he says. “I just wanted to talk about it. Then what pisses me off is I lied anyway.” Now that she can hear his voice better, she notices that it’s nearly as flat and tired as her own. She sees his hands on the wheel and thinks what a hard time she would have describing what he looks like. At a distance—in the car, waiting for her—he’s always been a bright blur, his presence a relief and a promise. Close up, he’s been certain separate areas—silky or toughened skin, wiry hair or shaved prickles, smells that are unique or shared with other men. But it’s chiefly an energy, a quality of his self that she can see in his blunt, short fingers or the tanned curve of his forehead. And even to call it energy is not exact—it’s more like the sap of him, rising from the roots, clear and on the move, filling him to bursting. That’s what she has set herself to follow—the sap, the current, under the skin, as if that were the one true thing. If she turned sideways now, she would see him for what he is—that tanned curved forehead, the receding fringe of curly brown hair, heavy eyebrows with a few gray hairs in them, deep-set light-colored eyes, and a mouth that enjoys itself, rather sulky and proud. A boyish man beginning to age—though he still feels light and wild on top of her, after Cornelius’s bulk settling down possessively, like a ton of blankets. A responsibility, Brenda feels then. Is she going to feel the same about this one? Neil turns the car around, he points it ready to drive back, and it’s time for her to get out and go across to the van. He takes his hands off the wheel with the engine running, flexes his fingers, then grabs the wheel hard again—hard enough, you’d think, to squeeze it to pulp. “Christ, don’t get out yet!” he says. “Don’t get out of the car!” She hasn’t even put a hand on the door, she hasn’t made a move to leave. Doesn’t he know what’s happening? Maybe you need the experience of a lot of married fights to know it. To know that what you think—and, for a while, hope—is the absolute end for you can turn out to be only the start of a new stage, a continuation. That’s what’s happening, that’s what has happened. He has lost some of his sheen for her; he may not get it back. Probably the same goes for her, with him. She feels his heaviness and anger and surprise. She feels that also in herself. She thinks that up till now was easy. Meneseteung I Columbine, bloodroot, And wild bergamot, Gathering armfuls, Giddily we go. Offerings the book is called. Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover. The author’s full name underneath: Almeda Joynt Roth. The local paper, the Vidette, referred to her as “our poetess.” There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex—or for their predictable conjuncture. In the front of the book is a photograph, with the photographer’s name in one corner, and the date: 1865. The book was published later, in 1873. The poetess has a long face; a rather long nose; full, sombre dark eyes, which seem ready to roll down her cheeks like giant tears; a lot of dark hair gathered around her face in droopy rolls and curtains. A streak of gray hair plain to see, although she is, in this picture, only twenty-five. Not a pretty girl but the sort of woman who may age well, who probably won’t get fat. She wears a tucked and braid-trimmed dark dress or jacket, with a lacy, floppy arrangement of white material—frills or a bow—filling the deep V at the neck. She also wears a hat, which might be made of velvet, in a dark color to match the dress. It’s the untrimmed, shapeless hat, something like a soft beret, that makes me see artistic intentions, or at least a shy and stubborn eccentricity, in this young woman, whose long neck and forward-inclining head indicate as well that she is tall and slender and somewhat awkward. From the waist up, she looks like a young nobleman of another century. But perhaps it was the fashion. “In 1854,” she writes in the preface to her book, “my father brought us—my mother, my sister Catherine, my brother William, and me—to the wilds of Canada West (as it then was). My father was a harness-maker by trade, but a cultivated man who could quote by heart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the writings of Edmund Burke. He prospered in this newly opened land and was able to set up a harness and leather-goods store, and after a year to build the comfortable house in which I live (alone) today. I was fourteen years old, the eldest of the children, when we came into this country from Kingston, a town whose handsome streets I have not seen again but often remember. My sister was eleven and my brother nine. The third summer that we lived here, my brother and sister were taken ill of a prevalent fever and died within a few days of each other. My dear mother did not regain her spirits after this blow to our family. Her health declined, and after another three years she died. I then became housekeeper to my father and was happy to make his home for twelve years, until he died suddenly one morning at his shop. “From my earliest years I have delighted in verse and I have occupied myself—and sometimes allayed my griefs, which have been no more, I know, than any sojourner on earth must encounter—with many floundering efforts at its composition. My fingers, indeed, were always too clumsy for crochetwork, and those dazzling productions of embroidery which one sees often today—the overflowing fruit and flower baskets, the little Dutch boys, the bonneted maidens with their watering cans—have likewise proved to be beyond my skill. So I offer instead, as the product of my leisure hours, these rude posies, these ballads, couplets, reflections.” Titles of some of the poems: “Children at Their Games,” “The Gypsy Fair,” “A Visit to My Family,” “Angels in the Snow,” “Champlain at the Mouth of the Meneseteung,” “The Passing of the Old Forest,” and “A Garden Medley.” There are other, shorter poems, about birds and wildflowers and snowstorms. There is some comically intentioned doggerel about what people are thinking about as they listen to the sermon in church. “Children at Their Games”: The writer, a child, is playing with her brother and sister—one of those games in which children on different sides try to entice and catch each other. She plays on in the deepening twilight, until she realizes that she is alone, and much older. Still she hears the (ghostly) voices of her brother and sister calling. Come over, come over, let Meda come over. (Perhaps Almeda was called Meda in the family, or perhaps she shortened her name to fit the poem.) “The Gypsy Fair”: The Gypsies have an encampment near the town, a “fair,” where they sell cloth and trinkets, and the writer as a child is afraid that she may be stolen by them, taken away from her family. Instead, her family has been taken away from her, stolen by Gypsies she can’t locate or bargain with. “A Visit to My Family”: A visit to the cemetery, a one-sided conversation. “Angels in the Snow”: The writer once taught her brother and sister to make “angels” by lying down in the snow and moving their arms to create wing shapes. Her brother always jumped up carelessly, leaving an angel with a crippled wing. Will this be made perfect in Heaven, or will he be flying with his own makeshift, in circles? “Champlain at the Mouth of the Meneseteung”: This poem celebrates the popular, untrue belief that the explorer sailed down the eastern shore of Lake Huron and landed at the mouth of the major river. “The Passing of the Old Forest”: A list of all the trees—their names, appearance, and uses—that were cut down in the original forest, with a general description of the bears, wolves, eagles, deer, waterfowl. “A Garden Medley”: Perhaps planned as a companion to the forest poem. Catalogue of plants brought from European countries, with bits of history and legend attached, and final Canadianness resulting from this mixture. The poems are written in quatrains or couplets. There are a couple of attempts at sonnets, but mostly the rhyme scheme is simple—a b a b or a b c b. The rhyme used is what was once called “masculine” (“shore”/”before”), though once in a while it is “feminine” (“quiver”/”river”). Are those terms familiar anymore? No poem is unrhymed. II White roses cold as snow Bloom where those “ ’angels” lie. Do they but rest below Or, in God’s wonder, fly? In 1879, Almeda Roth was still living in the house at the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets, the house her father had built for his family. The house is there today; the manager of the liquor store lives in it. It’s covered with aluminum siding; a closed-in porch has replaced the veranda. The woodshed, the fence, the gates, the privy, the barn—all these are gone. A photograph taken in the eighteen-eighties shows them all in place. The house and fence look a little shabby, in need of paint, but perhaps that is just because of the bleached-out look of the brownish photograph. The lace-curtained windows look like white eyes. No big shade tree is in sight, and, in fact, the tall elms that overshadowed the town until the nineteen-fifties, as well as the maples that shade it now, are skinny young trees with rough fences around them to protect them from the cows. Without the shelter of those trees, there is a great exposure—back yards, clotheslines, woodpiles, patchy sheds and barns and privies—all bare, exposed, provisional-looking. Few houses would have anything like a lawn, just a patch of plantains and anthills and raked dirt. Perhaps petunias growing on top of a stump, in a round box. Only the main street is gravelled; the other streets are dirt roads, muddy or dusty according to season. Yards must be fenced to keep animals out. Cows are tethered in vacant lots or pastured in back yards, but sometimes they get loose. Pigs get loose, too, and dogs roam free or nap in a lordly way on the boardwalks. The town has taken root, it’s not going to vanish, yet it still has some of the look of an encampment. And, like an encampment, it’s busy all the time—full of people, who, within the town, usually walk wherever they’re going; full of animals, which leave horse buns, cow pats, dog turds that ladies have to hitch up their skirts for; full of the noise of building and of drivers shouting at their horses and of the trains that come in several times a day. I read about that life in the Vidette. The population is younger than it is now, than it will ever be again. People past fifty usually don’t come to a raw, new place. There are quite a few people in the cemetery already, but most of them died young, in accidents or childbirth or epidemics. It’s youth that’s in evidence in town. Children—boys—rove through the streets in gangs. School is compulsory for only four months a year, and there are lots of occasional jobs that even a child of eight or nine can do—pulling flax, holding horses, delivering groceries, sweeping the boardwalk in front of stores. A good deal of time they spend looking for adventures. One day they follow an old woman, a drunk nicknamed Queen Aggie. They get her into a wheelbarrow and trundle her all over town, then dump her into a ditch to sober her up. They also spend a lot of time around the railway station. They jump on shunting cars and dart between them and dare each other to take chances, which once in a while result in their getting maimed or killed. And they keep an eye out for any strangers coming into town. They follow them, offer to carry their bags, and direct them (for a five-cent piece) to a hotel. Strangers who don’t look so prosperous are taunted and tormented. Speculation surrounds all of them—it’s like a cloud of flies. Are they coming to town to start up a new business, to persuade people to invest in some scheme, to sell cures or gimmicks, to preach on the street corners? All these things are possible any day of the week. Be on your guard, the Vidette tells people. These are times of opportunity and danger. Tramps, confidence men, hucksters, shysters, plain thieves are travelling the roads, and particularly the railroads. Thefts are announced: money invested and never seen again, a pair of trousers taken from the clothesline, wood from the woodpile, eggs from the henhouse. Such incidents increase in the hot weather. Hot weather brings accidents, too. More horses run wild then, upsetting buggies. Hands caught in the wringer while doing the washing, a man lopped in two at the sawmill, a leaping boy killed in a fall of lumber at the lumberyard. Nobody sleeps well. Babies wither with summer complaint, and fat people can’t catch their breath. Bodies must be buried in a hurry. One day a man goes through the streets ringing a cowbell and calling, “Repent! Repent!” It’s not a stranger this time, it’s a young man who works at the butcher shop. Take him home, wrap him in cold wet cloths, give him some nerve medicine, keep him in bed, pray for his wits. If he doesn’t recover, he must go to the asylum. Almeda Roth’s house faces on Dufferin Street, which is a street of considerable respectability. On this street, merchants, a mill owner, an operator of salt wells have their houses. But Pearl Street, which her back windows overlook and her back gate opens onto, is another story. Workmen’s houses are adjacent to hers. Small but decent row houses—that is all right. Things deteriorate toward the end of the block, and the next, last one becomes dismal. Nobody but the poorest people, the unrespectable and undeserving poor, would live there at the edge of a boghole (drained since then), called the Pearl Street Swamp. Bushy and luxuriant weeds grow there, makeshift shacks have been put up, there are piles of refuse and debris and crowds of runty children, slops are flung from doorways. The town tries to compel these people to build privies, but they would just as soon go in the bushes. If a gang of boys goes down there in search of adventure, it’s likely they’ll get more than they bargained for. It is said that even the town constable won’t go down Pearl Street on a Saturday night. Almeda Roth has never walked past the row housing. In one of those houses lives the young girl Annie, who helps her with her housecleaning. That young girl herself, being a decent girl, has never walked down to the last block or the swamp. No decent woman ever would. But that same swamp, lying to the east of Almeda Roth’s house, presents a fine sight at dawn. Almeda sleeps at the back of the house. She keeps to the same bedroom she once shared with her sister Catherine—she would not think of moving to the large front bedroom, where her mother used to lie in bed all day, and which was later the solitary domain of her father. From her window she can see the sun rising, the swamp mist filling with light, the bulky, nearest trees floating against that mist and the trees behind turning transparent. Swamp oaks, soft maples, tamarack, bitternut. III Here where the river meets the inland sea, Spreading her blue skirts from the solemn wood, I think of birds and beasts and vanished men, Whose pointed dwellings on these pale sands stood. One of the strangers who arrived at the railway station a few years ago was Jarvis Poulter, who now occupies the next house to Almeda Roth’s—separated from hers by a vacant lot, which he has bought, on Dufferin Street. The house is plainer than the Roth house and has no fruit trees or flowers planted around it. It is understood that this is a natural result of Jarvis Poulter’s being a widower and living alone. A man may keep his house decent, but he will never—if he is a proper man—do much to decorate it. Marriage forces him to live with more ornament as well as sentiment, and it protects him, also, from the extremities of his own nature—from a frigid parsimony or a luxuriant sloth, from squalor, and from excessive sleeping or reading, drinking, smoking, or freethinking. In the interests of economy, it is believed, a certain estimable gentleman of our town persists in fetching water from the public tap and supplementing his fuel supply by picking up the loose coal along the railway track. Does he think to repay the town or the railway company with a supply of free salt? This is the Vidette, full of shy jokes, innuendo, plain accusation that no newspaper would get away with today. It’s Jarvis Poulter they’re talking about—though in other passages he is spoken of with great respect, as a civil magistrate, an employer, a churchman. He is close, that’s all. An eccentric, to a degree. All of which may be a result of his single condition, his widower’s life. Even carrying his water from the town tap and filling his coal pail along the railway track. This is a decent citizen, prosperous: a tall—slightly paunchy?—man in a dark suit with polished boots. A beard? Black hair streaked with gray. A severe and self-possessed air, and a large pale wart among the bushy hairs of one eyebrow? People talk about a young, pretty, beloved wife, dead in childbirth or some horrible accident, like a house fire or a railway disaster. There is no ground for this, but it adds interest. All he has told them is that his wife is dead. He came to this part of the country looking for oil. The first oil well in the world was sunk in Lambton County, south of here, in the eighteen-fifties. Drilling for oil, Jarvis Poulter discovered salt. He set to work to make the most of that. When he walks home from church with Almeda Roth, he tells her about his salt wells. They are twelve hundred feet deep. Heated water is pumped down into them, and that dissolves the salt. Then the brine is pumped to the surface. It is poured into great evaporator pans over slow, steady fires, so that the water is steamed off and the pure, excellent salt remains. A commodity for which the demand will never fail. “The salt of the earth,” Almeda says. “Yes,” he says, frowning. He may think this disrespectful. She did not intend it so. He speaks of competitors in other towns who are following his lead and trying to hog the market. Fortunately, their wells are not drilled so deep, or their evaporating is not done so efficiently. There is salt everywhere under this land, but it is not so easy to come by as some people think. Does this not mean, Almeda says, that there was once a great sea? Very likely, Jarvis Poulter says. Very likely. He goes on to tell her about other enterprises of his—a brickyard, a limekiln. And he explains to her how this operates, and where the good clay is found. He also owns two farms, whose woodlots supply the fuel for his operations. Among the couples strolling home from church on a recent, sunny Sabbath morning we noted a certain salty gentleman and literary lady, not perhaps in their first youth but by no means blighted by the frosts of age. May we surmise? This kind of thing pops up in the Vidette all the time. May they surmise, and is this courting? Almeda Roth has a bit of money, which her father left her, and she has her house. She is not too old to have a couple of children. She is a good enough housekeeper, with the tendency toward fancy iced cakes and decorated tarts that is seen fairly often in old maids. (Honorable mention at the Fall Fair.) There is nothing wrong with her looks, and naturally she is in better shape than most married women of her age, not having been loaded down with work and children. But why was she passed over in her earlier, more marriageable years, in a place that needs women to be partnered and fruitful? She was a rather gloomy girl—that may have been the trouble. The deaths of her brother and sister, and then of her mother, who lost her reason, in fact, a year before she died, and lay in her bed talking nonsense—those weighed on her, so she was not lively company. And all that reading and poetry—it seemed more of a drawback, a barrier, an obsession, in the young girl than in the middle-aged woman, who needed something, after all, to fill her time. Anyway, it’s five years since her book was published, so perhaps she has got over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father encouraging her? Everyone takes it for granted that Almeda Roth is thinking of Jarvis Poulter as a husband and would say yes if he asked her. And she is thinking of him. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up too much, she doesn’t want to make a fool of herself. She would like a signal. If he attended church on Sunday evenings, there would be a chance, during some months of the year, to walk home after dark. He would carry a lantern. (There is as yet no street lighting in town.) He would swing the lantern to light the way in front of the lady’s feet and observe their narrow and delicate shape. He might catch her arm as they step off the boardwalk. But he does not go to church at night. Nor does he call for her, and walk with her to church on Sunday mornings. That would be a declaration. He walks her home, past his gate as far as hers; he lifts his hat then and leaves her. She does not invite him to come in—a woman living alone could never do such a thing. As soon as a man and woman of almost any age are alone together within four walls, it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, an attack of passion. Brute instinct, triumph of the senses. What possibilities men and women must see in each other to infer such dangers. Or, believing in the dangers, how often they must think about the possibilities. When they walk side by side, she can smell his shaving soap, the barber’s oil, his pipe tobacco, the wool and linen and leather smell of his manly clothes. The correct, orderly, heavy clothes are like those she used to brush and starch and iron for her father. She misses that job—her father’s appreciation, his dark, kind authority. Jarvis Poulter’s garments, his smell, his movements all cause the skin on the side of her body next to him to tingle hopefully, and a meek shiver raises the hairs on her arms. Is this to be taken as a sign of love? She thinks of him coming into her—their—bedroom in his long underwear and his hat. She knows this outfit is ridiculous, but in her mind he does not look so; he has the solemn effrontery of a figure in a dream. He comes into the room and lies down on the bed beside her, preparing to take her in his arms. Surely he removes his hat? She doesn’t know, for at this point a fit of welcome and submission overtakes her, a buried gasp. He would be her husband. One thing she has noticed about married women, and that is how many of them have to go about creating their husbands. They have to start ascribing preferences, opinions, dictatorial ways. Oh, yes, they say, my husband is very particular. He won’t touch turnips. He won’t eat fried meat. (Or he will only eat fried meat.) He likes me to wear blue (brown) all the time. He can’t stand organ music. He hates to see a woman go out bareheaded. He would kill me if I took one puff of tobacco. This way, bewildered, sidelong-looking men are made over, made into husbands, heads of households. Almeda Roth cannot imagine herself doing that. She wants a man who doesn’t have to be made, who is firm already and determined and mysterious to her. She does not look for companionship. Men—except for her father—seem to her deprived in some way, incurious. No doubt that is necessary, so that they will do what they have to do. Would she herself, knowing that there was salt in the earth, discover how to get it out and sell it? Not likely. She would be thinking about the ancient sea. That kind of speculation is what Jarvis Poulter has, quite properly, no time for. Instead of calling for her and walking her to church, Jarvis Poulter might make another, more venturesome declaration. He could hire a horse and take her for a drive out to the country. If he did this, she would be both glad and sorry. Glad to be beside him, driven by him, receiving this attention from him in front of the world. And sorry to have the countryside removed for her—filmed over, in a way, by his talk and preoccupations. The countryside that she has written about in her poems actually takes diligence and determination to see. Some things must be disregarded. Manure piles, of course, and boggy fields full of high, charred stumps, and great heaps of brush waiting for a good day for burning. The meandering creeks have been straightened, turned into ditches with high, muddy banks. Some of the crop fields and pasture fields are fenced with big, clumsy uprooted stumps; others are held in a crude stitchery of rail fences. The trees have all been cleared back to the woodlots. And the woodlots are all second growth. No trees along the roads or lanes or around the farmhouses, except a few that are newly planted, young and weedy-looking. Clusters of log barns—the grand barns that are to dominate the countryside for the next hundred years are just beginning to be built—and mean-looking log houses, and every four or five miles a ragged little settlement with a church and school and store and a blacksmith shop. A raw countryside just wrenched from the forest, but swarming with people. Every hundred acres is a farm, every farm has a family, most families have ten or twelve children. (This is the country that will send out wave after wave of settlers—it’s already starting to send them—to northern Ontario and the West.) It’s true that you can gather wildflowers in spring in the woodlots, but you’d have to walk through herds of horned cows to get to them. IV The Gypsies have departed. Their camping-ground is bare. Oh, boldly would I bargain now At the Gypsy Fair. Almeda suffers a good deal from sleeplessness, and the doctor has given her bromides and nerve medicine. She takes the bromides, but the drops gave her dreams that were too vivid and disturbing, so she has put the bottle by for an emergency. She told the doctor her eyeballs felt dry, like hot glass, and her joints ached. Don’t read so much, he said, don’t study; get yourself good and tired out with housework, take exercise. He believes that her troubles would clear up if she got married. He believes this in spite of the fact that most of his nerve medicine is prescribed for married women. So Almeda cleans house and helps clean the church, she lends a hand to friends who are wallpapering or getting ready for a wedding, she bakes one of her famous cakes for the Sunday-school picnic. On a hot Saturday in August, she decides to make some grape jelly. Little jars of grape jelly will make fine Christmas presents, or offerings to the sick. But she started late in the day and the jelly is not made by nightfall. In fact, the hot pulp has just been dumped into the cheesecloth bag to strain out the juice. Almeda drinks some tea and eats a slice of cake with butter (a childish indulgence of hers), and that’s all she wants for supper. She washes her hair at the sink and sponges off her body to be clean for Sunday. She doesn’t light a lamp. She lies down on the bed with the window wide open and a sheet just up to her waist, and she does feel wonderfully tired. She can even feel a little breeze. When she wakes up, the night seems fiery hot and full of threats. She lies sweating on her bed, and she has the impression that the noises she hears are knives and saws and axes—all angry implements chopping and jabbing and boring within her head. But it isn’t true. As she comes further awake, she recognizes the sounds that she has heard sometimes before—the fracas of a summer Saturday night on Pearl Street. Usually the noise centers on a fight. People are drunk, there is a lot of protest and encouragement concerning the fight, somebody will scream, “Murder!” Once, there was a murder. But it didn’t happen in a fight. An old man was stabbed to death in his shack, perhaps for a few dollars he kept in the mattress. She gets out of bed and goes to the window. The night sky is clear, with no moon and with bright stars. Pegasus hangs straight ahead, over the swamp. Her father taught her that constellation—automatically, she counts its stars. Now she can make out distinct voices, individual contributions to the row. Some people, like herself, have evidently been wakened from sleep. “Shut up!” they are yelling. “Shut up that caterwauling or I’m going to come down and tan the arse off yez!” But nobody shuts up. It’s as if there were a ball of fire rolling up Pearl Street, shooting off sparks—only the fire is noise; it’s yells and laughter and shrieks and curses, and the sparks are voices that shoot off alone. Two voices gradually distinguish themselves—a rising and falling howling cry and a steady throbbing, low-pitched stream of abuse that contains all those words which Almeda associates with danger and depravity and foul smells and disgusting sights. Someone—the person crying out, “Kill me! Kill me now!”—is being beaten. A woman is being beaten. She keeps crying, “Kill me! Kill me!” and sometimes her mouth seems choked with blood. Yet there is something taunting and triumphant about her cry. There is something theatrical about it. And the people around are calling out, “Stop it! Stop that!” or “Kill her! Kill her!” in a frenzy, as if at the theatre or a sporting match or a prizefight. Yes, thinks Almeda, she has noticed that before—it is always partly a charade with these people; there is a clumsy sort of parody, an exaggeration, a missed connection. As if anything they did—even a murder—might be something they didn’t quite believe but were powerless to stop. Now there is the sound of something thrown—a chair, a plank?—and of a woodpile or part of a fence giving way. A lot of newly surprised cries, the sound of running, people getting out of the way, and the commotion has come much closer. Almeda can see a figure in a light dress, bent over and running. That will be the woman. She has got hold of something like a stick of wood or a shingle, and she turns and flings it at the darker figure running after her. “Ah, go get her!” the voices cry. “Go baste her one!” Many fall back now; just the two figures come on and grapple, and break loose again, and finally fall down against Almeda’s fence. The sound they make becomes very confused—gagging, vomiting, grunting, pounding. Then a long, vibrating, choking sound of pain and self-abasement, self-abandonment, which could come from either or both of them. Almeda has backed away from the window and sat down on the bed. Is that the sound of murder she has heard? What is to be done, what is she to do? She must light a lantern, she must go downstairs and light a lantern—she must go out into the yard, she must go downstairs. Into the yard. The lantern. She falls over on her bed and pulls the pillow to her face. In a minute. The stairs, the lantern. She sees herself already down there, in the back hall, drawing the bolt of the back door. She falls asleep. She wakes, startled, in the early light. She thinks there is a big crow sitting on her windowsill, talking in a disapproving but unsurprised way about the events of the night before. “Wake up and move the wheelbarrow!” it says to her, scolding, and she understands that it means something else by “wheelbarrow”—something foul and sorrowful. Then she is awake and sees that there is no such bird. She gets up at once and looks out the window. Down against her fence there is a pale lump pressed—a body. Wheelbarrow. She puts a wrapper over her nightdress and goes downstairs. The front rooms are still shadowy, the blinds down in the kitchen. Something goes plop, plup, in a leisurely, censorious way, reminding her of the conversation of the crow. It’s just the grape juice, straining overnight. She pulls the bolt and goes out the back door. Spiders have draped their webs over the doorway in the night, and the hollyhocks are drooping, heavy with dew. By the fence, she parts the sticky hollyhocks and looks down and she can see. A woman’s body heaped up there, turned on her side with her face squashed down into the earth. Almeda can’t see her face. But there is a bare breast let loose, brown nipple pulled long like a cow’s teat, and a bare haunch and leg, the haunch showing a bruise as big as a sunflower. The unbruised skin is grayish, like a plucked, raw drumstick. Some kind of nightgown or all-purpose dress she has on. Smelling of vomit. Urine, drink, vomit. Barefoot, in her nightgown and flimsy wrapper, Almeda runs away. She runs around the side of her house between the apple trees and the veranda; she opens the front gate and flees down Dufferin Street to Jarvis Poulter’s house, which is the nearest to hers. She slaps the flat of her hand many times against the door. “There is the body of a woman,” she says when Jarvis Poulter appears at last. He is in his dark trousers, held up with braces, and his shirt is half unbuttoned, his face unshaven, his hair standing up on his head. “Mr. Poulter, excuse me. A body of a woman. At my back gate.” He looks at her fiercely. “Is she dead?” His breath is dank, his face creased, his eyes bloodshot. “Yes. I think murdered,” says Almeda. She can see a little of his cheerless front hall. His hat on a chair. “In the night I woke up. I heard a racket down on Pearl Street,” she says, straggling to keep her voice low and sensible. “I could hear this—pair. I could hear a man and a woman fighting.” He picks up his hat and puts it on his head. He closes and locks the front door, and puts the key in his pocket. They walk along the boardwalk and she sees that she is in her bare feet. She holds back what she feels a need to say next—that she is responsible, she could have run out with a lantern, she could have screamed (but who needed more screams?), she could have beat the man off. She could have run for help then, not now. They turn down Pearl Street, instead of entering the Roth yard. Of course the body is still there. Hunched up, half bare, the same as before. Jarvis Poulter doesn’t hurry or halt. He walks straight over to the body and looks down at it, nudges the leg with the toe of his boot, just as you’d nudge a dog or a sow. “You,” he says, not too loudly but firmly, and nudges again. Almeda tastes bile at the back of her throat. “Alive,” says Jarvis Poulter, and the woman confirms this. She stirs, she grunts weakly. Almeda says, “I will get the doctor.” If she had touched the woman, if she had forced herself to touch her, she would not have made such a mistake. “Wait, “says Jarvis Poulter. “Wait. Let’s see if she can get up.” “Get up, now,” he says to the woman. “Come on. Up, now. Up.” Now a startling thing happens. The body heaves itself onto all fours, the head is lifted—the hair all matted with blood and vomit—and the woman begins to bang this head, hard and rhythmically, against Almeda Roth’s picket fence. As she bangs her head, she finds her voice and lets out an openmouthed yowl, full of strength and what sounds like an anguished pleasure. “Far from dead,” says Jarvis Poulter. “And I wouldn’t bother the doctor.” “There’s blood,” says Almeda as the woman turns her smeared face. “From her nose,” he says. “Not fresh.” He bends down and catches the horrid hair close to the scalp to stop the head-banging. “You stop that, now,” he says. “Stop it. Gwan home, now. Gwan home, where you belong.” The sound coming out of the woman’s mouth has stopped. He shakes her head slightly, warning her, before he lets go of her hair. “Gwan home!” Released, the woman lunges forward, pulls herself to her feet. She can walk. She weaves and stumbles down the street, making intermittent, cautious noises of protest. Jarvis Poulter watches her for a moment to make sure that she’s on her way. Then he finds a large burdock leaf, on which he wipes his hand. He says, “There goes your dead body!” The back gate being locked, they walk around to the front. The front gate stands open. Almeda still feels sick. Her abdomen is bloated; she is hot and dizzy. “The front door is locked,” she says faintly. “I came out by the kitchen.” If only he would leave her, she could go straight to the privy. But he follows. He follows her as far as the back door and into the back hall. He speaks to her in a tone of harsh joviality that she has never before heard from him. “No need for alarm,” he says. “It’s only the consequences of drink. A lady oughtn’t to be living alone so close to a bad neighborhood.” He takes hold of her arm just above the elbow. She can’t open her mouth to speak to him, to say thank you. If she opened her mouth, she would retch. What Jarvis Poulter feels for Almeda Roth at this moment is just what he has not felt during all those circumspect walks and all his own solitary calculations of her probable worth, undoubted respectability, adequate comeliness. He has not been able to imagine her as a wife. Now that is possible. He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair—prematurely gray but thick and soft—her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need? “I will call on you later,” he says to her. “I will walk with you to church.” At the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets last Sunday morning there was discovered, by a lady resident there, the body of a certain woman of Pearl Street, thought to be dead but only, as it turned out, dead drunk. She was roused from her heavenly—or otherwise—stupor by the firm persuasion of Mr. Poulter, a neighbour and a Civil Magistrate, who had been summoned by the lady resident. Incidents of this sort, unseemly, troublesome, and disgraceful to our town, have of late become all too common. V I sit at the bottom of sleep, As on the floor of the sea. And fanciful Citizens of the Deep Are graciously greeting me. As soon as Jarvis Poulter has gone and she has heard her front gate close, Almeda rushes to the privy. Her relief is not complete, however, and she realizes that the pain and fullness in her lower body come from an accumulation of menstrual blood that has not yet started to flow. She closes and locks the back door. Then, remembering Jarvis Poulter’s words about church, she writes on a piece of paper, “I am not well, and wish to rest today.” She sticks this firmly into the outside frame of the little window in the front door. She locks that door, too. She is trembling, as if from a great shock or danger. But she builds a fire, so that she can make tea. She boils water, measures the tea leaves, makes a large pot of tea, whose steam and smell sicken her further. She pours out a cup while the tea is still quite weak and adds to it several dark drops of nerve medicine. She sits to drink it without raising the kitchen blind. There, in the middle of the floor, is the cheesecloth bag hanging on its broom handle between the two chairbacks. The grape pulp and juice has stained the swollen cloth a dark purple. Plop, plup, into the basin beneath. She can’t sit and look at such a thing. She takes her cup, the teapot, and the bottle of medicine into the dining room. She is still sitting there when the horses start to go by on the way to church, stirring up clouds of dust. The roads will be getting hot as ashes. She is there when the gate is opened and a man’s confident steps sound on her veranda. Her hearing is so sharp she seems to hear the paper taken out of the frame and unfolded—she can almost hear him reading it, hear the words in his mind. Then the footsteps go the other way, down the steps. The gate closes. An image comes to her of tombstones—it makes her laugh. Tombstones are marching down the street on their little booted feet, their long bodies inclined forward, their expressions preoccupied and severe. The church bells are ringing. Then the clock in the hall strikes twelve and an hour has passed. The house is getting hot. She drinks more tea and adds more medicine. She knows that the medicine is affecting her. It is responsible for her extraordinary languor, her perfect immobility, her unresisting surrender to her surroundings. That is all right. It seems necessary. Her surroundings—some of her surroundings—in the dining room are these: walls covered with dark-green garlanded wallpaper, lace curtains and mulberry velvet curtains on the windows, a table with a crocheted cloth and a bowl of wax fruit, a pinkish-gray carpet with nosegays of blue and pink roses, a sideboard spread with embroidered runners and holding various patterned plates and jugs and the silver tea things. A lot of things to watch. For every one of these patterns, decorations seems charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter. Or possibly to explode. Almeda Roth’s occupation throughout the day is to keep an eye on them. Not to prevent their alteration so much as to catch them at it—to understand it, to be a part of it. So much is going on in this room that there is no need to leave it. There is not even the thought of leaving it. Of course, Almeda in her observations cannot escape words. She may think she can, but she can’t. Soon this glowing and swelling begins to suggest words—not specific words but a flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her. Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem. Isn’t that the idea—one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems, the poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags? Stars and flowers and birds and trees and angels in the snow and dead children at twilight—that is not the half of it. You have to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter’s boot and the plucked-chicken haunch with its blue-black flower. Almeda is a long way now from human sympathies or fears or cozy household considerations. She doesn’t think about what could be done for that woman or about keeping Jarvis Poulter’s dinner warm and hanging his long underwear on the line. The basin of grape juice has overflowed and is running over her kitchen floor, staining the boards of the floor, and the stain will never come out. She has to think of so many things at once—Champlain and the naked Indians and the salt deep in the earth, but as well as the salt the money, the money-making intent brewing forever in heads like Jarvis Poulter’s. Also the brutal storms of winter and the clumsy and benighted deeds on Pearl Street. The changes of climate are often violent, and if you think about it there is no peace even in the stars. All this can be borne only if it is channelled into a poem, and the word “channelled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be—it is—“The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem—with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods. Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth, and she sees the crocheted roses floating. They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s crocheted roses—they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves do seem to her so admirable. A hopeful sign. Meneseteung. She doesn’t leave the room until dusk, when she goes out to the privy again and discovers that she is bleeding, her flow has started. She will have to get a towel, strap it on, bandage herself up. Never before, in health, has she passed a whole day in her nightdress. She doesn’t feel any particular anxiety about this. On her way through the kitchen, she walks through the pool of grape juice. She knows that she will have to mop it up, but not yet, and she walks upstairs leaving purple footprints and smelling her escaping blood and the sweat of her body that has sat all day in the closed hot room. No need for alarm. For she hasn’t thought that crocheted roses could float away or that tombstones could hurry down the street. She doesn’t mistake that for reality, and neither does she mistake anything else for reality, and that is how she knows that she is sane. VI I dream of you by night, I visit you by day. Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Have you no word to say? April 22, 1903. At her residence, on Tuesday last, between three and four o’clock in the afternoon, there passed away a lady of talent and refinement whose pen, in days gone by, enriched our local literature with a volume of sensitive, eloquent verse. It is a sad misfortune that in later years the mind of this fine person had become somewhat clouded and her behaviour, in consequence, somewhat rash and unusual. Her attention to decorum and to the care and adornment of her person had suffered, to the degree that she had become, in the eyes of those unmindful of her former pride and daintiness, a familiar eccentric, or even, sadly, a figure of fun. But now all such lapses pass from memory and what is recalled is her excellent published verse, her labours informer days in the Sunday school, her dutiful care of her parents, her noble womanly nature, charitable concerns, and unfailing religious faith. Her last illness was of mercifully short duration. She caught cold, after having become thoroughly wet from a ramble in the Pearl Street bog. (It has been said that some urchins chased her into the water, and such is the boldness and cruelty of some of our youth, and their observed persecution of this lady, that the tale cannot be entirely discounted.) The cold developed into pneumonia, and she died, attended at the last by a former neighbour, Mrs. Bert (Annie) Friels, who witnessed her calm and faithful end. January, 1904. One of the founders of our community, an early maker and shaker of this town, was abruptly removed from our midst on Monday morning last, whilst attending to his correspondence in the office of his company. Mr. Jarvis Poulter possessed a keen and lively commercial spirit, which was instrumental in the creation of not one but several local enterprises, bringing the benefits of industry, productivity, and employment to our town. So the Vidette runs on, copious and assured. Hardly a death goes undescribed, or a life unevaluated. I looked for Almeda Roth in the graveyard. I found the family stone. There was just one name on it—Roth. Then I noticed two flat stones in the ground, a distance of a few feet—six feet?—from the upright stone. One of these said “Papa,” the other “Mama.” Farther out from these I found two other flat stones, with the names William and Catherine on them. I had to clear away some overgrowing grass and dirt to see the full name of Catherine. No birth or death dates for anybody, nothing about being dearly beloved. It was a private sort of memorializing, not for the world. There were no roses, either—no sign of a rosebush. But perhaps it was taken out. The grounds keeper doesn’t like such things; they are a nuisance to the lawnmower, and if there is nobody left to object he will pull them out. I thought that Almeda must have been buried somewhere else. When this plot was bought—at the time of the two children’s deaths—she would still have been expected to marry, and to lie finally beside her husband. They might not have left room for her here. Then I saw that the stones in the ground fanned out from the upright stone. First the two for the parents, then the two for the children, but these were placed in such a way that there was room for a third, to complete the fan. I paced out from “Catherine” the same number of steps that it took to get from “Catherine” to “William,” and at this spot I began pulling grass and scrabbling in the dirt with my bare hands. Soon I felt the stone and knew that I was right. I worked away and got the whole stone clear and I read the name “Meda.” There it was with the others, staring at the sky. I made sure I had got to the edge of the stone. That was all the name there was—Meda. So it was true that she was called by that name in the family. Not just in the poem. Or perhaps she chose her name from the poem, to be written on her stone. I thought that there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection. And I would be the last person to do so. But perhaps this isn’t so. People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish. And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly. Differently Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think. Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out. The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together. They still live together, in Ontario, on a farm. They sell raspberries, and run a small publishing business. When Georgia can get the money together, she goes to Vancouver to visit her sons. This fall Saturday she has taken the ferry across to Victoria, where she used to live. She did this on an impulse that she doesn’t really trust, and by midafternoon, when she walks up the driveway of the splendid stone house where she used to visit Maya, she has already been taken over some fairly shaky ground. When she phoned Raymond, she wasn’t sure that he would ask her to the house. She wasn’t sure that she even wanted to go there. She had no notion of how welcome she would be. But Raymond opens the door before she can touch the bell, and he hugs her around the shoulders and kisses her twice (surely he didn’t use to do this?) and introduces his wife, Anne. He says he has told her what great friends they were, Georgia and Ben and he and Maya. Great friends. Maya is dead. Georgia and Ben are long divorced. They go to sit in what Maya used to call, with a certain flat cheerfulness, “the family room.” (One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.” “Listen, old man, you don’t do it with pillows,” Ben said boisterously. They were all a little drunk. “I thought you were the expert on all the apparatus, but I can see that you and I are going to have to have a little talk.” Raymond was an obstetrician and gynecologist. By that time Georgia knew all about the abortion in Seattle, which had been set up by Maya’s lover, Harvey. Harvey was also a doctor, a surgeon. The bleak apartment in the run-down building, the bad-tempered old woman who was knitting a sweater, the doctor arriving in his shirtsleeves, carrying a brown-paper bag that Maya hysterically believed must contain the tools of his trade. In fact, it contained his lunch—an egg-and-onion sandwich. Maya had the smell of that in her face all the time he and Mme. Defarge were working her over. Maya and Georgia smiled at each other primly while their husbands continued their playful conversation.) Raymond’s curly brown hair has turned into a silvery fluff, and his face is lined. But nothing dreadful has happened to him—no pouches or jowls or alcoholic flush or sardonic droop of defeat. He is still thin, and straight, and sharp-shouldered, still fresh-smelling, spotless, appropriately, expensively dressed. He’ll make a brittle, elegant old man, with an obliging boy’s smile. There’s that sort of shine on both of them, Maya once said glumly. She was speaking of Raymond and Ben. Maybe we should soak them in vinegar, she said. The room has changed more than Raymond has. An ivory leather sofa has replaced Maya’s tapestry-covered couch, and of course all the old opium-den clutter, Maya’s cushions and pampas grass and the gorgeous multicolored elephant with the tiny sewn-on mirrors—that’s all gone. The room is beige and ivory, smooth and comfortable as the new blond wife, who sits on the arm of Raymond’s chair and maneuvers his arm around her, placing his hand on her thigh. She wears slick-looking white pants and a cream-on-white appliquéd sweater, with gold jewelry. Raymond gives her a couple of hearty and defiant pats. “Are you going someplace?” he says. “Possibly shopping?” “Righto,” says the wife. “Old times.” She smiles at Georgia. “It’s O.K.,” she says. “I really do have to go shopping.” When she has gone, Raymond pours drinks for Georgia and himself. “Anne is a worrywart about the booze,” he says. “She won’t put salt on the table. She threw out all the curtains in the house to get rid of the smell of Maya’s cigarettes. I know what you may be thinking: Friend Raymond has got hold of a luscious blonde. But this is actually a very serious girl, and a very steady girl. I had her in my office, you know, quite a while before Maya died. I mean, I had her working in my office. I don’t mean that the way it sounds! She isn’t as young as she looks, either. She’s thirty-six.” Georgia had thought forty. She is tired of the visit already, but she has to tell about herself. No, she is not married. Yes, she works. She and the friend she lives with have a farm and a publishing business. Touch and go, not much money. Interesting. A male friend, yes. “I’ve lost all track of Ben somehow,” Raymond says. “The last I heard, he was living on a boat.” “He and his wife sail around the West Coast every summer,” Georgia says. “In the winter they go to Hawaii. The Navy lets you retire early.” “Marvellous,” says Raymond. Seeing Raymond has made Georgia think that she has no idea what Ben looks like now. Has he gone white-haired, has he thickened around the middle? Both of these things have happened to her—she has turned into a chunky woman with a healthy olive skin, a crest of white hair, wearing loose and rather splashy clothes. When she thinks of Ben, she sees him still as a handsome Navy officer, with a perfect Navy look—keen and serious and self-effacing. The look of someone who longed, bravely, to be given orders. Her sons must have pictures of him around—they both see him, they spend holidays on his boat. Perhaps they put the pictures away when she comes to visit. Perhaps they think of protecting these images of him from one who did him hurt. On the way to Maya’s house—Raymond’s house—Georgia walked past another house, which she could easily have avoided. A house in Oak Bay, which in fact she had to go out of her way to see. It was still the house that she and Ben had read about in the real-estate columns of the Victoria Colonist. Roomy bungalow under picturesque oak trees. Arbutus, dogwood, window seats, fireplace, diamond-paned windows, character. Georgia stood outside the gate and felt a most predictable pain. Here Ben had cut the grass, here the children had made their paths and hideaways in the bushes, and laid out a graveyard for the birds and snakes killed by the black cat, Domino. She could recall the inside of the house perfectly—the oak floors she and Ben had laboriously sanded, the walls they had painted, the room where she had lain in drugged misery after having her wisdom teeth out. Ben had read aloud to her, from Dubliners. She couldn’t remember the title of the story. It was about a timid poetic sort of young man, with a mean pretty wife. Poor bugger, said Ben when he’d finished it. Ben liked fiction, which was surprising in a man who also liked sports, and had been popular at school. She ought to have stayed away from this neighborhood. Everywhere she walked here, under the chestnut trees with their flat gold leaves, and the red-limbed arbutus, and the tall Garry oaks, which suggested fairy stories, European forests, woodcutters, witches—everywhere her footsteps reproached her, saying what-for, what-for, what-for. This reproach was just what she had expected—it was what she courted—and there was something cheap about doing such a thing. Something cheap and useless. She knew it. But what-for, what-for, what-for, wrong-and-waste, wrong-and-waste went her silly, censorious feet. Raymond wants Georgia to look at the garden, which he says was made for Maya during the last months of her life. Maya designed it; then she lay on the tapestry couch (setting fire to it twice, Raymond says, by dozing off with a cigarette lit), and she was able to see it all take shape. Georgia sees a pond, a stone-rimmed pond with an island in the middle. The head of a wicked-looking stone beast—a mountain goat?—rears up on the island, spouting water. Around the pond a jungle of Shasta daisies, pink and purple cosmos, dwarf pines and cypresses, some other miniature tree with glossy red leaves. On the island, now that she looks more closely, are mossy stone walls—the ruins of a tiny tower. “She hired a young chap to do the work,” Raymond says. “She lay there and watched him. It took all summer. She just lay all day and watched him making her garden. Then he’d come in and they’d have tea, and talk about it. You know, Maya didn’t just design that garden. She imagined it. She’d tell him what she’d been imagining about it, and he’d take off from there. I mean, this to them was not just a garden. The pond was a lake in this country they had some name for, and all around the lake were forests and territories where different tribes and factions lived. Do you get the picture?” “Yes,” says Georgia. “Maya had a dazzling imagination. She could have written fantasy or science fiction. Whatever. She was a creative person, without any doubt about it. But you could not get her to seriously use her creativity. That goat was one of the gods of that country, and the island was like a sacred place with a former temple on it. You can see the ruins. They had the religion all worked out. Oh, and the literature, the poems and the legends and the history—everything. They had a song that the queen would sing. Of course it was supposed to be a translation, from that language. They had some of that figured out, too. There had been a queen that was shut up in that ruin. That temple. I forget why. She was getting sacrificed, probably. Getting her heart torn out or some gruesome thing. It was all complicated and melodramatic. But think of the effort that went into it. The creativity. The young chap was an artist by profession. I believe he thought of himself as an artist. I don’t know how she got hold of him, actually. She knew people. He supported himself doing this kind of thing, I imagine. He did a good job. He laid the pipes, everything. He showed up every day. Every day he came in when he was finished and had tea and talked to her. Well, in my opinion, they didn’t have just tea. To my knowledge, not just tea. He would bring a little substance, they would have a little smoke. I told Maya she should write it all down. “But you know, the instant he was finished, off he went. Off he went. I don’t know. Maybe he got another job. It didn’t seem to me that it was my place to ask. But I did think that even if he had got a job he could have come back and visited her now and then. Or if he’d gone off on a trip somewhere he could have written letters. I thought he could have. I expected that much of him. It wouldn’t have been any skin off his back. Not as I see it. It would have been nice of him to make her think that it hadn’t been just a case of—of hired friendship, you know, all along.” Raymond is smiling. He cannot repress, or perhaps is not aware of, this smile. “For that was the conclusion she must have come to,” he says. “After all that nice time and imagining together and egging each other on. She must have been disappointed. She must have been. Even at that stage, such a thing would matter a lot to her. You and I know it, Georgia. It would have mattered. He could have treated her a little more kindly. It wouldn’t have had to be for very long.” Maya died a year ago, in the fall, but Georgia did not hear about it until Christmas. She got the news in Hilda’s Christmas letter. Hilda, who used to be married to Harvey, is now married to another doctor, in a town in the interior of British Columbia. A few years ago she and Georgia, both visitors, met by chance on a Vancouver street, and they have written occasional letters since. “Of course you knew Maya so much better than I did,” Hilda wrote. “But I’ve been surprised how often I’ve thought about her. I’ve been thinking of all of us, really, how we were, fifteen or so years ago, and I think we were just as vulnerable in some ways as the kids with their acid trips and so on, that were supposed to be marked for life. Weren’t we marked—all of us smashing up our marriages and going out looking for adventure? Of course, Maya didn’t smash up her marriage, she of all people stayed where she was, so I suppose it doesn’t make much sense what I’m saying. But Maya seemed the most vulnerable person of all to me, so gifted and brittle. I remember I could hardly bear to look at that vein in her temple where she parted her hair.” What an odd letter for Hilda to write, thought Georgia. She remembered Hilda’s expensive pastel plaid shirtdresses, her neat, short, fair hair, her good manners. Did Hilda really think she had smashed up her marriage and gone out looking for adventure under the influence of dope and rock music and revolutionary costumes? Georgia’s impression was that Hilda had left Harvey, once she found out what he was up to—or some of what he was up to—and gone to the town in the interior where she sensibly took up her old profession of nursing and in due time married another, presumably more trustworthy doctor. Maya and Georgia had never thought of Hilda as a woman like themselves. And Hilda and Maya had not been close—they had particular reason not to be. But Hilda had kept track; she knew of Maya’s death, she wrote these generous words. Without Hilda, Georgia would not have known. She would still have been thinking that someday she might write to Maya, there might come a time when their friendship could be mended. The first time that Ben and Georgia went to Maya’s house, Harvey and Hilda were there. Maya was having a dinner party for just the six of them. Georgia and Ben had recently moved to Victoria, and Ben had phoned Raymond, who had been a friend of his at school. Ben had never met Maya, but he told Georgia that he had heard that she was very clever, and weird. People said that she was weird. But she was rich—an heiress—so she could get away with it. Georgia groaned at the news that Maya was rich, and she groaned again at the sight of the house—the great stone-block house with its terraced lawns and clipped bushes and circular drive. Georgia and Ben came from the same small town in Ontario, and had the same sort of families. It was a fluke that Ben had been sent to a good private school—the money had come from a great-aunt. Even in her teens, when she was proud of being Ben’s girl and prouder than she liked to let on about being asked to the dances at that school, Georgia had a low opinion of the girls she met there. She thought rich girls were spoiled and brainless. She called them twits. She thought of herself as a girl—and then a woman—who didn’t much like other girls and women. She called the other Navy wives “the Navy ladies.” Ben was sometimes entertained by her opinions of people and at other times asked if it was really necessary to be so critical. He had an inkling, he said, that she was going to like Maya. This didn’t predispose Georgia in Maya’s favor. But Ben turned out to be right. He was very happy then, to have come up with somebody like Maya as an offering to Georgia, to have found a couple with whom he and Georgia could willingly link up as friends. “It’ll be good for us to have some non-Navy friends,” he was to say. “Some wife for you to knock around with who isn’t so conventional. You can’t say Maya’s conventional.” Georgia couldn’t. The house was more or less what she had expected—soon she learned that Maya called it “your friendly neighborhood fortress”—but Maya was a surprise. She opened the door herself, barefoot, wearing a long shapeless robe of coarse brown cloth that looked like burlap. Her hair was long and straight, parted high at one temple. It was almost the same dull-brown color as the robe. She did not wear lipstick, and her skin was rough and pale, with marks like faint bird tracks in the hollows of her cheeks. This lack of color, this roughness of texture about her seemed a splendid assertion of quality. How indifferent she looked, how arrogant and indifferent, with her bare feet, her unpainted toenails, her queer robe. The only thing that she had done to her face was to paint her eyebrows blue—to pluck out all the hairs of her eyebrows, in fact, and paint the skin blue. Not an arched line—just a little daub of blue over each eye, like a swollen vein. Georgia, whose dark hair was teased, whose eyes were painted in the style of the time, whose breasts were stylishly proferred, found all this disconcerting, and wonderful. Harvey was the other person there whose looks Georgia found impressive. He was a short man with heavy shoulders, a slight potbelly, puffy blue eyes, and a pugnacious expression. He came from Lancashire. His gray hair was thin on top but worn long at the sides—combed over his ears in a way that made him look more like an artist than a surgeon. “He doesn’t even look to me exactly clean enough to be a surgeon,” Georgia said to Ben afterward. “Wouldn’t you think he’d be something like a sculptor? With gritty fingernails? I expect he treats women badly.” She was recalling how he had looked at her breasts. “Not like Raymond,” she said. “Raymond worships Maya. And he is extremely clean.” (Raymond has the kind of looks everybody’s mother is crazy about, Maya was to say to Georgia, with slashing accuracy, a few weeks after this.) The food that Maya served was no better than you would expect at a family dinner, and the heavy silver forks were slightly tarnished. But Raymond poured good wine that he would have liked to talk about. He did not manage to interrupt Harvey, who told scandalous and indiscreet hospital stories, and was blandly outrageous about necrophilia and masturbation. Later, in the living room, the coffee was made and served with some ceremony. Raymond got everybody’s attention as he ground the beans in a Turkish cylinder. He talked about the importance of the aromatic oils. Harvey, halted in mid-anecdote, watched with an unkindly smirk, Hilda with patient polite attention. It was Maya who gave her husband radiant encouragement, hung about him like an acolyte, meekly and gracefully assisting. She served the coffee in beautiful little Turkish cups, which she and Raymond had bought in a shop in San Francisco, along with the coffee grinder. She listened demurely to Raymond talking about the shop, as if she recalled other holiday pleasures. Harvey and Hilda were the first to leave. Maya hung on Raymond’s shoulder, saying goodbye. But she detached herself once they were gone, her slithery grace and wifely demeanor discarded. She stretched out casually and awkwardly on the sofa and said, “Now, don’t you go yet. Nobody gets half a chance to talk while Harvey is around—you have to talk after.” And Georgia saw how it was. She saw that Maya was hoping not to be left alone with the husband whom she had aroused—for whatever purposes—by her showy attentions. She saw that Maya was mournful and filled with a familiar dread at the end of her dinner party. Raymond was happy. He sat down on the end of the sofa, lifting Maya’s reluctant feet to do so. He rubbed one of her feet between his hands. “What a savage,” Raymond said. “This is a woman who won’t wear shoes.” “Brandy!” said Maya, springing up. “I knew there was something else you did at dinner parties. You drink brandy!” “He loves her but she doesn’t love him,” said Georgia to Ben, just after she had remarked on Raymond’s worshipping Maya and being very clean. But Ben, perhaps not listening carefully, thought she was talking about Harvey and Hilda. “No, no, no. There I think it’s the other way round. It’s hard to tell with English people. Maya was putting on an act for them. I have an idea about why.” “You have an idea about everything,” said Ben. Georgia and Maya became friends on two levels. On the first level, they were friends as wives; on the second as themselves. On the first level, they had dinner at each other’s houses. They listened to their husbands talk about their school days. The jokes and fights, the conspiracies and disasters, the bullies and the victims. Terrifying or pitiable schoolfellows and teachers, treats and humiliations. Maya asked if they were sure they hadn’t read all that in a book. “It sounds just like a story,” she said. “A boys’ story about school.” They said that their experiences were what the books were all about. When they had talked enough about school, they talked about movies, politics, public personalities, places they had travelled to or wanted to travel to. Maya and Georgia could join in then. Ben and Raymond did not believe in leaving women out of the conversation. They believed that women were every bit as intelligent as men. On the second level, Georgia and Maya talked in each other’s kitchens, over coffee. Or they had lunch downtown. There were two places, and only two, where Maya liked to have lunch. One was the Moghul’s Court—a seedy, grandiose bar in a large, grim railway hotel. The Moghul’s Court had curtains of moth-eaten pumpkin-colored velvet, and desiccated ferns, and waiters who wore turbans. Maya always dressed up to go there, in droopy, silky dresses and not very clean white gloves and amazing hats that she found in secondhand stores. She pretended to be a widow who had served with her husband in various outposts of the Empire. She spoke in fluty tones to the sullen young waiters, asking them, “Could you be so good as to …” and then telling them they had been terribly, terribly kind. She and Georgia worked out the history of the Empire widow, and Georgia was added to the story as a grumpy, secretly Socialistic hired companion named Miss Amy Jukes. The widow’s name was Mrs. Allegra Forbes-Bellyea. Her husband had been Nigel Forbes-Bellyea. Sometimes Sir Nigel. Most of one rainy afternoon in the Moghul’s Court was spent in devising the horrors of the Forbes-Bellyea honeymoon, in a damp hotel in Wales. The other place that Maya liked was a hippie restaurant on Blanshard Street, where you sat on dirty plush cushions tied to the tops of stumps and ate brown rice with slimy vegetables and drank cloudy cider. (At the Moghul’s Court, Maya and Georgia drank only gin.) When they lunched at the hippie restaurant, they wore long, cheap, pretty Indian cotton dresses and pretended to be refugees from a commune, where they had both been the attendants or concubines of a folksinger named Bill Bones. They made up several songs for Bill Bones, all mild and tender blue-eyed songs that contrasted appallingly with his greedy and licentious ways. Bill Bones had very curious personal habits. When they weren’t playing these games, they talked in a headlong fashion about their lives, childhoods, problems, husbands. “That was a horrible place,” Maya said. “That school.” Georgia agreed. “They were poor boys at a rich kids’ school,” Maya said. “So they had to try hard. They had to be a credit to their families.” Georgia would not have thought Ben’s family poor, but she knew that there were different ways of looking at such things. Maya said that whenever they had people in for dinner or the evening, Raymond would pick out beforehand all the records he thought suitable and put them in a suitable order. “I think sometime he’ll hand out conversational topics at the door,” Maya said. Georgia revealed that Ben wrote a letter every week to the great-aunt who had sent him to school. “Is it a nice letter?” said Maya. “Yes. Oh, yes. It’s very nice.” They looked at each other bleakly, and laughed. Then they announced—they admitted—what weighed on them. It was the innocence of these husbands—the hearty, decent, firm, contented innocence. That is a wearying and finally discouraging thing. It makes intimacy a chore. “But do you feel badly,” Georgia said, “talking like this?” “Of course,” said Maya, grinning and showing her large perfect teeth—the product of expensive dental work from the days before she had charge of her own looks. “I have another reason to feel badly,” she said. “But I don’t know whether I do. I do and I don’t.” “I know,” said Georgia, who up until that moment hadn’t known, for sure. “You’re very smart,” Maya said. “Or I’m very obvious. What do you think of him?” “A lot of trouble,” Georgia said judiciously. She was pleased with that answer, which didn’t show how flattered she felt by the disclosure, or how heady she found this conversation. “You aren’t just a-whistlin’ ‘Dixie,’ ” Maya said, and she told the story about the abortion. “I am going to break up with him,” she said. “Any day now.” But she kept on seeing Harvey. She would relate, at lunch, some very disillusioning facts about him, then announce that she had to go, she was meeting him at a motel out on the Gorge Road, or at the cabin he had on Prospect Lake. “Must scrub,” she said. She had left Raymond once. Not for Harvey. She had run away with, or to, a musician. A pianist—Nordic and sleepy-looking but bad-tempered—from her society-lady, symphony-benefit days. She travelled with him for five weeks, and he deserted her in a hotel in Cincinnati. She then developed frightful chest pains, appropriate to a breaking heart. What she really had was a gallbladder attack. Raymond was sent for, and he came and got her out of the hospital. They had a little holiday in Mexico before they came home. “That was it, for me,” Maya said. “That was your true and desperate love. Nevermore.” What then, was Harvey? “Exercise,” said Maya. Georgia got a part-time job in a bookstore, working several evenings a week. Ben went away on his yearly cruise. The summer turned out to be unusually hot and sunny for the West Coast. Georgia combed her hair out and stopped using most of her makeup and bought a couple of short halter dresses. Sitting on her stool at the front of the store, showing her bare brown shoulders and sturdy brown legs, she looked like a college girl—clever but full of energy and bold opinions. The people who came into the store liked the look of a girl—a woman—like Georgia. They liked to talk to her. Most of them came in alone. They were not exactly lonely people, but they were lonely for somebody to talk to about books. Georgia plugged in the kettle behind the desk and made mugs of raspberry tea. Some favored customers brought in their own mugs. Maya came to visit and lurked about in the background, amused and envious. “You know what you’ve got?” she said to Georgia. “You’ve got a salon! Oh, I’d like to have a job like that! I’d even like an ordinary job in an ordinary store, where you fold things up and find things for people and make change and say thank you very much, and colder out today, will it rain?” “You could get a job like that,” said Georgia. “No, I couldn’t. I don’t have the discipline. I was too badly brought up. I can’t even keep house without Mrs. Hanna and Mrs. Cheng and Sadie.” It was true. Maya had a lot of servants, for a modern woman, though they came at different times and did separate things and were nothing like an old-fashioned household staff. Even the food at her dinner parties, which seemed to show her own indifferent touch, had been prepared by someone else. Usually, Maya was busy in the evenings. Georgia was just as glad, because she didn’t really want Maya coming into the store, asking for crazy titles that she had made up, making Georgia’s employment there a kind of joke. Georgia took the store seriously. She had a serious, secret liking for it that she could not explain. It was a long, narrow store with an old-fashioned funnelled entryway between two angled display windows. From her stool behind the desk Georgia was able to see the reflections in one window reflected in the other. This street was not one of those decked out to receive tourists. It was a wide east-west street filled in the early evening with a faintly yellow light, a light reflected off pale stucco buildings that were not very high, plain storefronts, nearly empty sidewalks. Georgia found this plainness liberating after the winding shady streets, the flowery yards and vine-framed windows of Oak Bay. Here the books could come into their own, as they never could in a more artful and enticing suburban bookshop. Straight long rows of paperbacks. (Most of the Penguins then still had their orange-and-white or blue-and-white covers, with no designs or pictures, just the unadorned, unexplained titles.) The store was a straight avenue of bounty, of plausible promises. Certain books that Georgia had never read, and probably never would read, were important to her, because of the stateliness or mystery of their titles. In Praise of Folly. The Roots of Coincidence. The Flowering of New England. Ideas and Integrities. Sometimes she got up and put the books in stricter order. The fiction was shelved alphabetically, by author, which was sensible but not very interesting. The history books, however, and the philosophy and psychology and other science books were arranged according to certain intricate and delightful rules—having to do with chronology and content—that Georgia grasped immediately and even elaborated on. She did not need to read much of a book to know about it. She got a sense of it easily, almost at once, as if by smell. At times the store was empty, and she felt an abundant calm. It was not even the books that mattered then. She sat on the stool and watched the street—patient, expectant, by herself, in a finely balanced and suspended state. She saw Miles’ reflection—his helmeted ghost parking his motorcycle at the curb—before she saw him. She believed that she had noted his valiant profile, his pallor, his dusty red hair (he took off his helmet and shook out his hair before coming into the store), and his quick, slouching, insolent, invading way of moving, even in the glass. It was no surprise that he soon began to talk to her, as others did. He told her that he was a diver. He looked for wrecks, and lost airplanes, and dead bodies. He had been hired by a rich couple in Victoria who were planning a treasure-hunting cruise, getting it together at the moment. Their names, the destination were all secrets. Treasure-hunting was a lunatic business. He had done it before. His home was in Seattle, where he had a wife and a little daughter. Everything he told her could easily have been a lie. He showed her pictures in books—photographs and drawings, of mollusks, jellyfish, the Portuguese man-of-war, sargasso weed, the Caribbean flying fish, the girdle of Venus. He pointed out which pictures were accurate, which were fakes. Then he went away and paid no more attention to her, even slipping out of the store while she was busy with a customer. Not a hint of a goodbye. But he came in another evening, and told her about a drowned man wedged into the cabin of a boat, looking out the watery window in an interested way. By attention and avoidance, impersonal conversations in close proximity, by his oblivious prowling, and unsmiling, lengthy, gray-eyed looks, he soon had Georgia in a disturbed and not disagreeable state. He stayed away two nights in a row, then came in and asked her, abruptly, if she would like a ride home on his motorcycle. Georgia said yes. She had never ridden on a motorcycle in her life. Her car was in the parking lot; she knew what was bound to happen. She told him where she lived. “Just a few blocks up from the beach,” she said. “We’ll go to the beach, then. We’ll go and sit on the logs.” That was what they did. They sat for a while on the logs. Then, though the beach was not quite dark or completely deserted, they made love in the imperfect shelter of some broombushes. Georgia walked home, a strengthened and lightened woman, not in the least in love, favored by the universe. “My car wouldn’t start,” she told the baby-sitter, a grandmother from down the street. “I walked all the way home. It was lovely, walking. Lovely. I enjoyed it so much.” Her hair was wild, her lips were swollen, her clothes were full of sand. Her life filled up with such lies. Her car would be parked beside outlying beaches, on the logging roads so conveniently close to the city, on the wandering back roads of the Saanich Peninsula. The map of the city that she had held in her mind up till now, with its routes to shops and work and friends’ houses, was overlaid with another map, of circuitous routes followed in fear (not shame) and excitement, of flimsy shelters, temporary hiding places, where she and Miles made love, often within hearing distance of passing traffic or a hiking party or a family picnic. And Georgia herself, watching her children on the roundabout, or feeling the excellent shape of a lemon in her hand at the supermarket, contained another woman, who only a few hours before had been whimpering and tussling on the ferns, on the sand, on the bare ground, or, during a rainstorm, in her own car—who had been driven hard and gloriously out of her mind and drifted loose and gathered her wits and made her way home again. Was this a common story? Georgia cast an eye over the other women at the supermarket. She looked for signs—of dreaminess or flaunting, a sense of drama in a woman’s ways of dressing, a special rhythm in her movements. How many, she asked Maya. “God knows,” said Maya. “Do a survey.” Trouble began, perhaps, as soon as they said that they loved each other. Why did they do that—defining, inflating, obscuring whatever it was they did feel? It seemed to be demanded, that was all—just the way changes, variations, elaborations in the lovemaking itself might be demanded. It was a way of going further. So they said it, and that night Georgia couldn’t sleep. She did not regret what had been said or think that it was a lie, though she knew that it was absurd. She thought of the way Miles sought to have her look into his eyes during lovemaking—something Ben expressly did not do—and she thought of how his eyes, at first bright and challenging, became cloudy and calm and sombre. That way she trusted him—it was the only way. She thought of being launched out on a gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea. Love. “I didn’t know this was going to happen,” she said in Maya’s kitchen the next day, drinking her coffee. The day was warm, but she had put on a sweater to huddle in. She felt shaken, and submissive. “No. And you don’t know,” said Maya rather sharply. “Did he say it, too? Did he say he loved you, too?” Yes, said Georgia, yes, of course. “Look out, then. Look out for next time. Next time is always pretty tricky when they’ve said that.” And so it was. Next time a rift opened. At first they simply tested it, to see if it was there. It was almost like a new diversion to them. But it widened, it widened. Before any words were said to confirm that it was there, Georgia felt it widen, she coldly felt it widen, though she was desperate for it to close. Did he feel the same thing? She didn’t know. He, too, seemed cold—pale, deliberate, glittering with some new malicious intent. They were sitting recklessly, late at night, in Georgia’s car among the other lovers at Clover Point. “Everybody here in these cars doing the same thing we’re doing,” Miles had said. “Doesn’t that idea turn you on?” He had said that at the very moment in their ritual when they had been moved, last time, to speak brokenly and solemnly of love. “You ever think of that?” he said. “I mean, we could start with Ben and Laura. You ever imagine how it would be with you and me and Ben and Laura?” Laura was his wife, at home in Seattle. He had not spoken of her before, except to tell Georgia her name. He had spoken of Ben, in a way that Georgia didn’t like but passed over. “What does Ben think you do for fun,” he’d said, “while he is off cruising the ocean blue?” “Do you and Ben usually have a big time when he gets back?” “Does Ben like that outfit as much as I do?” He spoke as if he and Ben were friends in some way, or at least partners, co-proprietors. “You and me and Ben and Laura,” he said, in a tone that seemed to Georgia insistently and artificially lecherous, sly, derisive. “Spread the joy around.” He tried to fondle her, pretending not to notice how offended she was, how bitterly stricken. He described the generous exchanges that would take place among the four of them abed. He asked whether she was getting excited. She said no, disgusted. Ah, you are but you won’t give in to it, he said. His voice, his caresses grew more bullying. What is so special about you, he asked softly, despisingly, with a hard squeeze at her breasts. Georgia, why do you think you’re such a queen? “You are being cruel and you know you’re being cruel,” said Georgia, pulling at his hands. “Why are you being like this?” “Honey, I’m not being cruel,” said Miles, in a slippery mock-tender voice. “I’m being horny. I’m horny again is all.” He began to pull Georgia around, to arrange her for his use. She told him to get out of the car. “Squeamish,” he said, in that same artificially and hatefully tender voice, as if he were licking fanatically at something loathsome. “You’re a squeamish little slut.” Georgia told him that she would lean on the horn if he didn’t stop. She would lean on the horn if he didn’t get out of the car. She would yell for somebody to call the police. She did lean against the horn as they struggled. He pushed her away, with a whimpering curse such as she’d heard from him at other times, when it meant something different. He got out. She could not believe that such ill will had erupted, that things had so stunningly turned around. When she thought of this afterward—a good long time afterward—she thought that perhaps he had acted for conscience’s sake, to mark her off from Laura. Or to blot out what he had said to her last time. To humiliate her because he was frightened. Perhaps. Or perhaps all this seemed to him simply a further, and genuinely interesting, development in lovemaking. She would have liked to talk it over with Maya. But the possibility of talking anything over with Maya had disappeared. Their friendship had come suddenly to an end. The night after the incident at Clover Point, Georgia was sitting on the living-room floor playing a bedtime card game with her sons. The phone rang, and she was sure that it was Miles. She had been thinking all day that he would call, he would have to call to explain himself, to beg her pardon, to say that he had been testing her, in a way, or had been temporarily deranged by circumstances that she knew nothing about. She would not forgive him immediately. But she would not hang up. It was Maya. “Guess what weird thing happened,” Maya said. “Miles phoned me. Your Miles. It’s O.K., Raymond isn’t here. How did he even know my name?” “I don’t know,” said Georgia. She had told him it, of course. She had offered wild Maya up for his entertainment, or to point out what a novice at this game she herself was—a relatively chaste prize. “He says he wants to come and talk to me,” Maya said. “What do you think? What’s the matter with him? Did you have a fight?… Yes? Oh, well, he probably wants me to persuade you to make up. I must say he picked the right night. Raymond’s at the hospital. He’s got this balky woman in labor; he may have to stay and do a section on her. I’ll phone and tell you how it goes. Shall I?” After a couple of hours, with the children long asleep, Georgia began to expect Maya’s call. She watched the television news, to take her mind off expecting it. She picked up the phone to make sure there was a dial tone. She turned off the television after the news, then turned it on again. She started to watch a movie; she watched it through three commercial breaks without going to the kitchen to look at the clock. At half past midnight she went out and got into her car and drove to Maya’s house. She had no idea what she would do there. And she did not do much of anything. She drove around the circular drive with the lights off. The house was dark. She could see that the garage was open and Raymond’s car was not there. The motorcycle was nowhere in sight. She had left her children alone, the doors unlocked. Nothing happened to them. They didn’t wake up and discover her defection. No burglar, or prowler, or murderer surprised her on her return. That was a piece of luck that she did not even appreciate. She had gone out leaving the door open and the lights on, and when she came back she hardly recognized her folly, though she closed the door and turned out some lights and lay down on the living-room sofa. She didn’t sleep. She lay still, as if the smallest movement would sharpen her suffering, until she saw the day getting light and heard the birds waking. Her limbs were stiff. She got up and went to the phone and listened again for the dial tone. She walked stiffly to the kitchen and put on the kettle and said to herself the words a paralysis of grief. A paralysis of grief. What was she thinking of? That was what she would feel, how she might describe the way she would feel, if one of her children had died. Grief is for serious matters, important losses. She knew that. She would not have bartered away an hour of her children’s lives to have had the phone ring at ten o’clock last night, to have heard Maya say, “Georgia, he’s desperate. He’s sorry; he loves you very much.” No. But it seemed that such a phone call would have given her a happiness that no look or word from her children could give her. Than anything could give her, ever again. She phoned Maya before nine o’clock. As she was dialling, she thought that there were still some possibilities to pray for. Maya’s phone had been temporarily out of order. Maya had been ill last night. Raymond had been in a car accident on his way home from the hospital. All these possibilities vanished at the first sound of Maya’s voice, which was sleepy (pretending to be sleepy?) and silky with deceit. “Georgia? Is that Georgia? Oh, I thought it was going to be Raymond. He had to stay over at the hospital in case this poor wretched woman needed a C-section. He was going to call me—” “You told me that last night,” said Georgia. “He was going to call me—Oh, Georgia, I was supposed to call you! Now I remember. Yes. I was supposed to call you, but I thought it was probably too late. I thought the phone might wake up the children. I thought, Oh better just leave it till morning!” “How late was it?” “Not awfully. I just thought.” “What happened?” “What do you mean, what happened?” Maya laughed, like a lady in a silly play. “Georgia, are you in a state?” “What happened?” “Oh, Georgia,” said Maya, groaning magnanimously but showing an edge of nerves. “Georgia, I’m sorry. It was nothing. It was just nothing. I’ve been rotten, but I didn’t mean to be. I offered him a beer. Isn’t that what you do when somebody rides up to your house on a motorcycle? You offer him a beer. But then he came on very lordly and said he only drank Scotch. And he said he’d only drink Scotch if I would drink with him. I thought he was pretty high-handed. Pretty high-handed pose. But I really was doing this for you, Georgia—I was wanting to find out what was on his mind. So I told him to put the motorcycle behind the garage, and I took him to sit in the back garden. That was so if I heard Raymond’s car I could chase him out the back way and he could walk the motorcycle down the lane. I am not about to unload anything new onto Raymond at this point. I mean even something innocent, which this started out to be.” Georgia, with her teeth chattering, hung up the phone. She never spoke to Maya again. Maya appeared at her door, of course, a little while later, and Georgia had to let her in, because the children were playing in the yard. Maya sat down contritely at the kitchen table and asked if she could smoke. Georgia did not answer. Maya said she would smoke anyway and she hoped it was all right. Georgia pretended that Maya wasn’t there. While Maya smoked, Georgia cleaned the stove, dismantling the elements and putting them back together again. She wiped the counters and polished the taps and straightened out the cutlery drawer. She mopped the floor around Maya’s feet. She worked briskly, thoroughly, and never quite looked at Maya. At first she was not sure whether she could keep this up. But it got easier. The more earnest Maya became—the further she slipped from sensible remonstrance, half-amused confession, into true and fearful regret—the more fixed Georgia was in her resolve, the more grimly satisfied in her heart. She took care, however, not to appear grim. She moved about lightly. She was almost humming. She took a knife to scrape out the grease from between the counter tiles by the stove. She had let things get into a bad way. Maya smoked one cigarette after another, stubbing them out in a saucer that she fetched for herself from the cupboard. She said, “Georgia, this is so stupid. I can tell you, he’s not worth it. It was nothing. All it was was Scotch and opportunity.” She said, “I am really sorry. Truly sorry. I know you don’t believe me. How can I say it so you will?” And, “Georgia, listen. You are humiliating me. Fine. Fine. Maybe I deserve it. I do deserve it. But after you’ve humiliated me enough we’ll go back to being friends and we’ll laugh about this. When we’re old ladies, I swear we’ll laugh. We won’t be able to remember his name. We’ll call him the motorcycle sheikh. We will.” Then, “Georgia, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to throw myself on the floor? I’m about ready to. I’m trying to keep myself from snivelling, and I can’t. I’m snivelling, Georgia. O.K.?” She had begun to cry. Georgia put on her rubber gloves and started to clean the oven. “You win,” said Maya. “I’ll pick up my cigarettes and go home.” She phoned a few times. Georgia hung up on her. Miles phoned, and Georgia hung up on him, too. She thought he sounded cautious but smug. He phoned again and his voice trembled, as if he were striving just for candor and humility, bare love. Georgia hung up at once. She felt violated, shaken. Maya wrote a letter, which said, in part, “I suppose you know that Miles is going back to Seattle and whatever home fires he keeps burning there. It seems the treasure thing had fallen through. But you must have known he was bound to go sometime and you’d have felt rotten then, so now you’ve got the rotten feeling over with. So isn’t that O.K.? I don’t say this to excuse myself. I know I was weak and putrid. But can’t we put it behind us now?” She went on to say that she and Raymond were going on a long-planned holiday to Greece and Turkey, and that she hoped very much that she would get a note from Georgia before she left. But if she didn’t get any word she would try to understand what Georgia was telling her, and she would not make a nuisance of herself by writing again. She kept her word. She didn’t write again. She sent, from Turkey, a pretty piece of striped cloth large enough for a tablecloth. Georgia folded it up and put it away. She left it for Ben to find after she moved out, several months later. “I’m happy,” Raymond tells Georgia. “I’m very happy, and the reason is that I’m content to be an ordinary sort of person with an ordinary calm life. I am not looking for any big revelation or any big drama or any messiah of the opposite sex. I don’t go around figuring out how to make things more interesting. I can say to you quite frankly I think Maya made a mistake. I don’t mean she wasn’t very gifted and intelligent and creative and so on, but she was looking for something—maybe she was looking for something that just is not there. And she tended to despise a lot that she had. It’s true. She didn’t want the privileges she had. We’d travel, for example, and she wouldn’t want to stay in a comfortable hotel. No. She had to go on some trek that involved riding on poor, miserable donkeys and drinking sour milk for breakfast. I suppose I sound very square. Well, I suppose I am. I am square. You know, she had such beautiful silver. Magnificent silver. It was passed down through her family. And she couldn’t be bothered to polish it or get the cleaning woman to polish it. She wrapped it all up in plastic and hid it away. She hid it away—you’d think it was a disgrace. How do you think she envisaged herself? As some kind of hippie, maybe? Some kind of free spirit? She didn’t even realize it was her money that kept her afloat. I’ll tell you, some of the free spirits I’ve seen pass in and out of this house wouldn’t have been long around her without it. “I did all I could,” said Raymond. “I didn’t scoot off and leave her, like her Prince of Fantasy Land.” Georgia got a vengeful pleasure out of breaking with Maya. She was pleased with the controlled manner in which she did it. The deaf ear. She was surprised to find herself capable of such control, such thoroughgoing punishment. She punished Maya. She punished Miles, through Maya, as much as she could. What she had to do, and she knew it, was to scrape herself raw, to root out all addiction to the gifts of those two pale prodigies. Miles and Maya. Both of them slippery, shimmery—liars, seducers, finaglers. But you would have thought that after such scourging she’d have scuttled back into her marriage and locked its doors, and appreciated what she had there as never before. That was not what happened. She broke with Ben. Within a year, she was gone. Her way of breaking was strenuous and unkind. She told him about Miles, though she spared her own pride by leaving out the part about Miles and Maya. She took no care—she had hardly any wish—to avoid unkindness. On the night when she waited for Maya to call, some bitter, yeasty spirit entered into her. She saw herself as a person surrounded by, living by, sham. Because she had been so readily unfaithful, her marriage was a sham. Because she had gone so far out of it, so quickly, it was a sham. She dreaded, now, a life like Maya’s. She dreaded just as much a life like her own before this happened. She could not but destroy. Such cold energy was building in her she had to blow her own house down. She had entered with Ben, when they were both so young, a world of ceremony, of safety, of gestures, concealment. Fond appearances. More than appearances. Fond contrivance. (She thought when she left that she would have no use for contrivance anymore.) She had been happy there, from time to time. She had been sullen, restless, bewildered, and happy. But she said most vehemently, Never, never. I was never happy, she said. People always say that. People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine. Just the same, Georgia knows that her remorse about the way she changed her life is dishonest. It is real and dishonest. Listening to Raymond, she knows that whatever she did she would have to do again. She would have to do it again, supposing that she had to be the person she was. Raymond does not want to let Georgia go. He does not want to part with her. He offers to drive her downtown. When she has gone, he won’t be able to talk about Maya. Very likely Anne has told him that she does not want to hear any more on the subject of Maya. “Thank you for coming,” he says on the doorstep. “Are you sure about the ride? Are you sure you can’t stay to dinner?” Georgia reminds him again about the bus, the last ferry. She says no, no, she really wants to walk. It’s only a couple of miles. The late afternoon so lovely, Victoria so lovely. I had forgotten, she says. Raymond says once more, “Thank you for coming.” “Thank you for the drinks,” Georgia says. “Thank you, too. I guess we never believe we are going to die.” “Now, now,” says Raymond. “No. I mean we never behave—we never behave as if we believed we were going to die.” Raymond smiles more and more and puts a hand on her shoulder. “How should we behave?” he says. “Differently,” says Georgia. She puts a foolish stress on the word, meaning that her answer is so lame that she can offer it only as a joke. Raymond hugs her, then involves her in a long chilly kiss. He fastens onto her with an appetite that is grievous but unconvincing. A parody of passion, whose intention neither one of them, surely, will try to figure out. She doesn’t think about that as she walks back to town through the yellow-leafed streets with their autumn smells and silences. Past Clover Point, the cliffs crowned with broombushes, the mountains across the water. The mountains of the Olympic Peninsula, assembled like a blatant backdrop, a cutout of rainbow tissue paper. She doesn’t think about Raymond, or Miles, or Maya, or even Ben. She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows. The accidental clarity. Wigtime When her mother was dying in the Walley Hospital, Anita came home to take care of her—though nursing was not what she did anymore. She was stopped one day in the corridor by a short, broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with clipped grayish-brown hair. “I heard you were here, Anita,” this woman said, with a laugh that seemed both aggressive and embarrassed. “Don’t look so dumfounded!” It was Margot, whom Anita had not seen for more than thirty years. “I want you to come out to the house,” Margot said. “Give yourself a break. Come out soon.” Anita took a day off and went to see her. Margot and her husband had built a new house overlooking the harbor, on a spot where there used to be nothing but scrubby bushes and children’s secret paths. It was built of gray brick and was long and low. But high enough at that, Anita suggested—high enough to put some noses out of joint across the street, in the handsome hundred-year-old houses with their prize view. “Bugger them,” said Margot. “They took up a petition against us. They went to the Committee.” But Margot’s husband already had the Committee sewed up. Margot’s husband had done well. Anita had already heard that. He owned a fleet of buses that took children to school and senior citizens to see the blossoms in Niagara and the fall leaves in Haliburton. Sometimes they carried singles clubs and other holidayers on more adventurous trips—to Nashville or Las Vegas. Margot showed her around. The kitchen was done in almond—Anita made a mistake, calling it cream—with teal-green and butter-yellow trim. Margot said that all that natural-wood look was passé. They did not enter the living room, with its rose carpet, striped silk chairs, and yards and yards of swooping pale-green figured curtains. They admired it from the doorway—all exquisite, shadowy, inviolate. The master bedroom and its bath were done in white and gold and poppy red. There was a Jacuzzi and a sauna. “I might have liked something not so bright myself,” said Margot. “But you can’t ask a man to sleep in pastels.” Anita asked her if she ever thought about getting a job. Margot flung back her head and snorted with laughter. “Are you kidding? Anyway, I do have a job. Wait till you see the big lunks I have to feed. Plus this place doesn’t exactly run itself on magic horsepower.” She took a pitcher of sangria out of the refrigerator and put it on a tray, with two matching glasses. “You like this stuff? Good. We’ll sit and drink out on the deck.” Margot was wearing green flowered shorts and a matching top. Her legs were thick and marked with swollen veins, the flesh of her upper arms was dented, her skin was brown, mole-spotted, leathery from lots of sun. “How come you’re still thin?” she asked with amusement. She flipped Anita’s hair. “How come you’re not gray? Any help from the drugstore? You look pretty.” She said this without envy, as if speaking to somebody younger than herself, still untried and unseasoned. It looked as if all her care, all her vanity, went into the house. Margot and Anita both grew up on farms in Ashfield Township. Anita lived in a drafty shell of a brick house that hadn’t had any new wallpaper or linoleum for twenty years, but there was a stove in the parlor that could be lit, and she sat in there in peace and comfort to do her homework. Margot often did her homework sitting up in the bed she had to share with two little sisters. Anita seldom went to Margot’s house, because of the crowdedness and confusion, and the terrible temper of Margot’s father. Once, she had gone there when they were getting ducks ready for market. Feathers floated everywhere. There were feathers in the milk jug and a horrible smell of feathers burning on the stove. Blood was puddled on the oilclothed table and dripping to the floor. Margot seldom went to Anita’s house, because without exactly saying so Anita’s mother disapproved of the friendship. When Anita’s mother looked at Margot, she seemed to be totting things up—the blood and feathers, the stovepipe sticking through the kitchen roof, Margot’s father yelling that he’d tan somebody’s arse. But they met every morning, struggling head down against the snow that blew off Lake Huron, or walking as fast as they could through a predawn world of white fields, icy swamps, pink sky, and fading stars and murderous cold. Away beyond the ice on the lake they could see a ribbon of open water, ink-blue or robin’s-egg, depending upon the light. Pressed against their chests were notebooks, textbooks, homework. They wore the skirts, blouses, and sweaters that had been acquired with difficulty (in Margot’s case there had been subterfuge and blows) and were kept decent with great effort. They bore the stamp of Walley High School, where they were bound, and they greeted each other with relief. They had got up in the dark in cold rooms with frost-whitened windows and pulled underwear on under their nightclothes, while stove lids banged in the kitchen, dampers were shut, younger brothers and sisters scurried to dress themselves downstairs. Margot and her mother took turns going out to the barn to milk cows and fork down hay. The father drove them all hard, and Margot said they’d think he was sick if he didn’t hit somebody before breakfast. Anita could count herself lucky, having brothers to do the barn work and a father who did not usually hit anybody. But she still felt, these mornings, as if she’d come up through deep dark water. “Think of the coffee,” they told each other, battling on toward the store on the highway, a ramshackle haven. Strong tea, steeped black in the country way, was the drink in both their houses. Teresa Gault unlocked the store before eight o’clock, to let them in. Pressed against the door, they saw the fluorescent lights come on, blue spurts darting from the ends of the tubes, wavering, almost losing heart, then blazing white. Teresa came smiling like a hostess, edging around the cash register, holding a cherry-red quilted satin dressing gown tight at the throat, as if that could protect her from the freezing air when she opened the door. Her eyebrows were black wings made with a pencil, and she used another pencil—a red one—to outline her mouth. The bow in the upper lip looked as if it had been cut with scissors. What a relief, what a joy, then, to get inside, into the light, to smell the oil heater and set their books on the counter and take their hands out of their mittens and rub the pain from their fingers. Then they bent over and rubbed their legs—the bare inch or so that was numb and in danger of freezing. They did not wear stockings, because it wasn’t the style. They wore ankle socks inside their boots (their saddle shoes were left at school). Their skirts were long—this was the winter of 1948–49—but there was still a crucial bit of leg left unprotected. Some country girls wore stockings under their socks. Some even wore ski pants pulled up bulkily under their skirts. Margot and Anita would never do that. They would risk freezing rather than risk getting themselves laughed at for such countrified contrivances. Teresa brought them cups of coffee, hot black coffee, very sweet and strong. She marvelled at their courage. She touched a finger to their cheeks or their hands and gave a little shriek and a shudder. “Like ice! Like ice!” To her it was amazing that anybody would go out in the Canadian winter, let alone walk a mile in it. What they did every day to get to school made them heroic and strange in her eyes, and a bit grotesque. This seemed to be particularly so because they were girls. She wanted to know if such exposure interfered with their periods. “Will it not freeze the eggs?” was what she actually said. Margot and Anita figured this out and made a point, thereafter, of warning each other not to get their eggs frozen. Teresa was not vulgar—she was just foreign. Reuel had met and married her overseas, in Alsace-Lorraine, and after he went home she followed on the boat with all the other war brides. It was Reuel who ran the school bus, this year when Margot and Anita were seventeen and in grade twelve. Its run started here at the store and gas station that the Gaults had bought on the Kincardine highway, within sight of the lake. Teresa told about her two miscarriages. The first one took place in Walley, before they moved out here and before they owned a car. Reuel scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the hospital. (The thought of being scooped up in Reuel’s arms caused such a pleasant commotion in Anita’s body that in order to experience it she was almost ready to put up with the agony that Teresa said she had undergone.) The second time happened here in the store. Reuel, working in the garage, could not hear her weak cries as she lay on the floor in her blood. A customer came in and found her. Thank God, said Teresa, for Reuel’s sake even more than her own. Reuel would not have forgiven himself. Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes did a devout downward swoop, when she referred to Reuel and their intimate life together. While Teresa talked, Reuel would be passing in and out of the store. He went out and got the engine running, then left the bus to warm up and went back into the living quarters, without acknowledging any of them, or even answering Teresa, who interrupted herself to ask if he had forgotten his cigarettes, or did he want more coffee, or perhaps he should have warmer gloves. He stomped the snow from his boots in a way that was more an announcement of his presence than a sign of any concern for floors. His tall, striding body brought a fan of cold air behind it, and the tail of his open parka usually managed to knock something down—Jell-O boxes or tins of corn, arranged in a fancy way by Teresa. He didn’t turn around to look. Teresa gave her age as twenty-eight—the same age as Reuel’s. Everybody believed she was older—up to ten years older. Margot and Anita examined her close up and decided that she looked burned. Something about her skin, particularly at the hairline and around the mouth and eyes, made you think of a pie left too long in the oven, so that it was not charred but dark brown around the edges. Her hair was thin, as if affected by the same drought or fever, and it was too black—they were certain it was dyed. She was short, and small-boned, with tiny wrists and feet, but her body seemed puffed out below the waist, as if it had never recovered from those brief, dire pregnancies. Her smell was like something sweet cooking—spicy jam. She would ask anything, just as she would tell anything. She asked Margot and Anita if they were going out with boys yet. “Oh, why not? Does your fathers not let you? I was attracting to boys by the time I was fourteen, but my father would not let me. They come and whistle under my window, he chases them away. You should pluck your eyebrows. You both. That would make you look nicer. Boys like a girl when she makes herself all nice. That is something I never forget. When I was on the boat coming across the Atlantic Ocean with all the other wives, I spend all my time preparing myself for my husband. Some of those wives, they just sat and played cards. Not me! I was washing my hair and putting on a beautiful oil to soften my skin, and I rubbed and rubbed with a stone to get the rough spots off my feet. I forget what you call them—the rough spots on the feet’s skin? And polish my nails and pluck my eyebrows and do myself all up like a prize! For my husband to meet me in Halifax. While all those others do is sit and play cards and gossiping, gossiping with each other.” They had heard a different story about Teresa’s second miscarriage. They had heard that it happened because Reuel told her he was sick of her and wanted her to go back to Europe, and in her despair she had thrown herself against a table and dislodged the baby. At side roads and at farm gates Reuel stopped to pick up students who were waiting, stomping their feet to keep warm or scuffling in the snowbanks. Margot and Anita were the only girls of their age riding the bus that year. Most of the others were boys in grades nine and ten. They could have been hard to handle, but Reuel quelled them even as they came up the steps. “Cut it out. Hurry up. On board if you’re coming on board.” And if there was any start of a fracas on the bus, any hooting or grabbing or punching, or even any moving from seat to seat or too much laughing and loud talk, Reuel would call out, “Smarten up if you don’t want to walk! Yes, you there—I mean you!” Once, he had put a boy out for smoking, miles from Walley. Reuel himself smoked all the time. He had the lid of a mayonnaise jar sitting on the dashboard for an ashtray. Nobody challenged him, ever, about anything he did. His temper was well known. It was thought to go naturally with his red hair. People said he had red hair, but Margot and Anita remarked that only his mustache and the hair right above his ears was red. The rest of it, the hair receding from the temples but thick and wavy elsewhere, especially in the back, which was the part they most often got to see—the rest was a tawny color like the pelt of a fox they had seen one morning crossing the white road. And the hair of his heavy eyebrows, the hair along his arms and on the backs of his hands, was still more faded, though it glinted in any light. How had his mustache kept its fire? They spoke of this. They discussed in detail, coolly, everything about him. Was he good-looking or was he not? He had a redhead’s flushed and spotty skin, a high, shining forehead, light-colored eyes that seemed ferocious but indifferent. Not good-looking, they decided. Queer-looking, actually. But when Anita was anywhere near him she had a feeling of controlled desperation along the surface of her skin. It was something like the far-off beginning of a sneeze. This feeling was at its worst when she had to get off the bus and he was standing beside the step. The tension flitted from her front to her back as she went past him. She never spoke of this to Margot, whose contempt for men seemed to her firmer than her own. Margot’s mother dreaded Margot’s father’s lovemaking as much as the children dreaded his cuffs and kicks, and had once slept all night in the granary, with the door bolted, to avoid it. Margot called lovemaking “carrying on.” She spoke disparagingly of Teresa’s “carrying on” with Reuel. But it had occurred to Anita that this very scorn of Margot’s, her sullenness and disdain, might be a thing that men could find attractive. Margot might be attractive in a way that she herself was not. It had nothing to do with prettiness. Anita thought that she was prettier, though it was plain that Teresa wouldn’t give high marks to either of them. It had to do with a bold lassitude that Margot showed sometimes in movement, with the serious breadth of her hips and the already womanly curve of her stomach, and a look that would come over her large brown eyes—a look both defiant and helpless, not matching up with anything Anita had ever heard her say. By the time they reached Walley, the day had started. Not a star to be seen anymore, nor a hint of pink in the sky. The town, with its buildings, streets, and interposing routines, was set up like a barricade against the stormy or frozen-still world they’d woken up in. Of course their houses were barricades, too, and so was the store, but those were nothing compared to town. A block inside town, it was as if the countryside didn’t exist. The great drifts of snow on the roads and the wind tearing and howling through the trees—that didn’t exist. In town, you had to behave as if you’d always been in town. Town students, now thronging the streets around the high school, led lives of privilege and ease. They got up at eight o’clock in houses with heated bedrooms and bathrooms. (This was not always the case, but Margot and Anita believed it was.) They were apt not to know your name. They expected you to know theirs, and you did. The high school was like a fortress, with its narrow windows and decorative ramparts of dark-red brick, its long flight of steps and daunting doors, and the Latin words cut in stone: Scientia Atque Probitas. When they got inside those doors, at about a quarter to nine, they had come all the way from home, and home and all stages of the journey seemed improbable. The effects of the coffee had worn off. Nervous yawns overtook them, under the harsh lights of the assembly hall. Ranged ahead were the demands of the day: Latin, English, geometry, chemistry, history, French, geography, physical training. Bells rang at ten to the hour, briefly releasing them. Upstairs, downstairs, clutching books and ink bottles, they made their anxious way, under the hanging lights and the pictures of royalty and dead educators. The wainscoting, varnished every summer, had the same merciless gleam as the principal’s glasses. Humiliation was imminent. Their stomachs ached and threatened to growl as the morning wore on. They feared sweat under their arms and blood on their skirts. They shivered going into English or geometry classes, not because they did badly in those classes (the fact was that they did quite well in almost everything) but because of the danger of being asked to get up and read something, say a poem off by heart or write the solution to a problem on the blackboard in front of the class. In front of the class—those were dreadful words to them. Then, three times a week, came physical training—a special problem for Margot, who had not been able to get the money out of her father to buy a gym suit. She had to say that she had left her suit at home, or borrow one from some girl who was being excused. But once she did get a suit on she was able to loosen up and run around the gym, enjoying herself, yelling for the basketball to be thrown to her, while Anita went into such rigors of self-consciousness that she allowed the ball to hit her on the head. Better moments intervened. At noon hour they walked downtown and looked in the windows of a beautiful carpeted store that sold only wedding and evening clothes. Anita planned a springtime wedding, with bridesmaids in pink-and-green silk and overskirts of white organza. Margot’s wedding was to take place in the fall, with the bridesmaids wearing apricot velvet. In Woolworth’s they looked at lipsticks and earrings. They dashed into the drugstore and sprayed themselves with sample cologne. If they had any money to buy some necessity for their mothers, they spent some of the change on cherry Cokes or sponge toffee. They could never be deeply unhappy, because they believed that something remarkable was bound to happen to them. They could become heroines; love and power of some sort were surely waiting. Teresa welcomed them, when they got back, with coffee, or hot chocolate with cream. She dug into a package of store cookies and gave them Fig Newtons or marshmallow puffs dusted with colored coconut. She took a look at their books and asked what homework they had. Whatever they mentioned, she, too, had studied. In every class, she had been a star. “English—perfect marks in my English! But I never knew then that I would fall in love and come to Canada. Canada! I think it is only polar bears living in Canada!” Reuel wouldn’t have come in. He’d be fooling around with the bus or with something in the garage. His mood was usually fairly good as they got on the bus. “All aboard that’s coming aboard!” he would call. “Fasten your seat belts! Adjust your oxygen masks! Say your prayers! We’re takin’ to the highway!” Then he’d sing to himself, just under the racket of the bus, as they got clear of town. Nearer home his mood of the morning took over, with its aloofness and unspecific contempt. He might say, “Here you are, ladies—end of a perfect day,” as they got off. Or he might say nothing. But indoors Teresa was full of chat. Those school days she talked about led into wartime adventures: a German soldier hiding in the garden, to whom she had taken a little cabbage soup; then the first Americans she saw—black Americans—arriving on tanks and creating a foolish and wonderful impression that the tanks and the men were all somehow joined together. Then her little wartime wedding dress being made out of her mother’s lace tablecloth. Pink roses pinned in her hair. Unfortunately, the dress had been torn up for rags to use in the garage. How could Reuel know? Sometimes Teresa was deep in conversation with a customer. No treats or hot drinks then—all they got was a flutter of her hand, as if she were being borne past in a ceremonial carriage. They heard bits of the same stories. The German soldier, the black Americans, another German blown to pieces, his leg, in its boot, ending up at the church door, where it remained, everybody walking by to look at it. The brides on the boat. Teresa’s amazement at the length of time it took to get from Halifax to here on the train. The miscarriages. They heard her say that Reuel was afraid for her to have another baby. “So now he always uses protections.” There were people who said they never went into that store anymore, because you never knew what you’d have to listen to, or when you’d get out. In all but the worst weather Margot and Anita lingered at the spot where they had to separate. They spun the day out a little longer, talking. Any subject would do. Did the geography teacher look better with or without his mustache? Did Teresa and Reuel still actually carry on, as Teresa implied? They talked so easily and endlessly that it seemed they talked about everything. But there were things they held back. Anita held back two ambitions of hers, which she did not reveal to anybody. One of them—to be an archeologist—was too odd, and the other—to be a fashion model—was too conceited. Margot told her ambition, which was to be a nurse. You didn’t need any money to get into it—not like university—and once you graduated you could go anywhere and get a job. New York City, Hawaii—you could get as far away as you liked. The thing that Margot kept back, Anita thought, was how it must really be at home, with her father. According to her, it was all like some movie comedy. Her father beside himself, a hapless comedian, racing around in vain pursuit (of fleet, mocking Margot) and rattling locked doors (the granary) and shouting monstrous threats and waving over his head whatever weapon he could get hold of—a chair or a hatchet or a stick of firewood. He tripped over his own feet and got mixed up in his own accusations. And no matter what he did, Margot laughed. She laughed, she despised him, she forestalled him. Never, never did she shed a tear or cry out in terror. Not like her mother. So she said. After Anita graduated as a nurse, she went to work in the Yukon. There she met and married a doctor. This should have been the end of her story, and a good end, too, as things were reckoned in Walley. But she got a divorce, she moved on. She worked again and saved money and went to the University of British Columbia, where she studied anthropology. When she came home to look after her mother, she had just completed her Ph.D. She did not have any children. “So what will you do, now you’re through?” said Margot. People who approved of the course Anita had taken in life usually told her so. Often an older woman would say, “Good for you!” or, “I wish I’d had the nerve to do that, when I was still young enough for it to make any difference.” Approval came sometimes from unlikely quarters. It was not to be found everywhere, of course. Anita’s mother did not feel it, and that was why, for many years, Anita had not come home. Even in her present sunken, hallucinatory state, her mother had recognized her, and gathered her strength to mutter, “Down the drain.” Anita bent closer. “Life,” her mother said. “Down the drain.” But another time, after Anita had dressed her sores, she said, “So glad. So glad to have—a daughter.” Margot didn’t seem to approve or disapprove. She seemed puzzled, in an indolent way. Anita began talking to her about some things she might do, but they kept being interrupted. Margot’s sons had come in, bringing friends. The sons were tall, with hair of varying redness. Two of them were in high school and one was home from college. There was one even older, who was married and living in the West. Margot was a grandmother. Her sons carried on shouted conversations with her about the whereabouts of their clothes, and what supplies of food, beer, and soft drinks there were in the house, also which cars would be going where at what times. Then they all went out to swim in the pool beside the house, and Margot called, “Don’t anybody dare go in that pool that’s got suntan lotion on!” One of the sons called back, “Nobody’s got it on,” with a great show of weariness and patience. “Well, somebody had it on yesterday, and they went in the pool, all right,” replied Margot. “So I guess it was just somebody that snuck up from the beach, eh?” Her daughter Debbie arrived home from dancing class and showed them the costume she was going to wear when her dancing school put on a program at the shopping mall. She was to impersonate a dragonfly. She was ten years old, brown-haired, and stocky, like Margot. “Pretty hefty dragonfly,” said Margot, lolling back in the deck chair. Her daughter did not arouse in her the warring energy that her sons did. Debbie tried for a sip of the sangria, and Margot batted her away. “Go get yourself a drink out of the fridge,” she said. “Listen. This is our visit. O.K.? Why don’t you go phone up Rosalie?” Debbie left, trailing an automatic complaint. “I wish it wasn’t pink lemonade. Why do you always make pink lemonade?” Margot got up and shut the sliding doors to the kitchen. “Peace,” she said. “Drink up. After a while I’ll get us some sandwiches.” Spring in that part of Ontario comes in a rush. The ice breaks up into grinding, jostling chunks on the rivers and along the lakeshore; it slides underwater in the pond and turns the water green. The snow melts and the creeks flood, and in no time comes a day when you open your coat and stuff your scarf and mittens in your pockets. There is still snow in the woods when the blackflies are out and the spring wheat showing. Teresa didn’t like spring any better than winter. The lake was too big and the fields too wide and the traffic went by too fast on the highway. Now that the mornings had turned balmy, Margot and Anita didn’t need the store’s shelter. They were tired of Teresa. Anita read in a magazine that coffee discolored your skin. They talked about whether miscarriages could cause chemical changes in your brain. They stood outside the store, wondering whether they should go in, just to be polite. Teresa came to the door and waved at them, peekaboo. They waved back with a little flap of their hands the way Reuel waved back every morning—just lifting a hand from the steering wheel at the last moment before he turned onto the highway. Reuel was singing in the bus one afternoon when he had dropped off all the other passengers. “He knew the world was round-o,” he sang. “And uh-uhm could be found-o.” He was singing a word in the second line so softly they couldn’t catch it. He was doing it on purpose, teasing. Then he sang it again, loud and clear so that there was no mistake. “He knew the world was round-o, And tail-o could be found-o.” They didn’t look at each other or say anything till they were walking down the highway. Then Margot said, “Big fat nerve he’s got, singing that song in front of us. Big fat nerve,” she said, spitting the word out like the worm in an apple. But only the next day, shortly before the bus reached the end of its run, Margot started humming. She invited Anita to join, poking her in the side and rolling her eyes. They hummed the tune of Reuel’s song; then they started working words into the humming, muffling one word, then clearly singing the next, until they finally got their courage up and sang the whole two lines, bland and sweet as “Jesus Loves Me.” “He knew the world was round-o, And tail-o could be found-o.” Reuel did not say a word. He didn’t look at them. He got off the bus ahead of them and didn’t wait by the door. Yet less than an hour before, in the school driveway, he had been most genial. One of the other drivers looked at Margot and Anita and said, “Nice load you got there,” and Reuel said, “Eyes front, Buster,” moving so that the other driver could not watch them stepping onto the bus. Next morning before he pulled away from the store, he delivered a lecture. “I hope I’m going to have a couple of ladies on my bus today and not like yesterday. A girl saying certain things is not like a man saying them. Same thing as a woman getting drunk. A girl gets drunk or talks dirty, first thing you know she’s in trouble. Give that some thought.” Anita wondered if they had been stupid. Had they gone too far? They had displeased Reuel and perhaps disgusted him, made him sick of the sight of them, just as he was sick of Teresa. She was ashamed and regretful and at the same time she thought Reuel wasn’t fair. She made a face at Margot to indicate this, turning down the corners of her mouth. But Margot took no notice. She was tapping her fingertips together, looking demurely and cynically at the back of Reuel’s head. Anita woke up in the night with an amazing pain. She thought at first she’d been wakened by some calamity, such as a tree falling on the house or flames shooting up through the floorboards. This was shortly before the end of the school year. She had felt sick the evening before, but everybody in the family was complaining of feeling sick, and blaming it on the smell of paint and turpentine. Anita’s mother was painting the linoleum, as she did every year at this time. Anita had cried out with pain before she was fully awake, so that everybody was roused. Her father did not think it proper to phone the doctor before daybreak, but her mother phoned him anyway. The doctor said to bring Anita in to Walley, to the hospital. There he operated on her and removed a burst appendix, which in a few hours might have killed her. She was very sick for several days after the operation, and had to stay nearly three weeks in the hospital. Until the last few days, she could not have any visitors but her mother. This was a drama for the family. Anita’s father did not have the money to pay for the operation and the stay in the hospital—he was going to have to sell a stand of hard-maple trees. Her mother took the credit, rightly, for saving Anita’s life, and as long as she lived she would mention this, often adding that she had gone against her husband’s orders. (It was really only against his advice.) In a flurry of independence and self-esteem she began to drive the car, a thing she had not done for years. She visited Anita every afternoon and brought news from home. She had finished painting the linoleum, in a design of white and yellow done with a sponge on a dark-green ground. It gave the impression of a distant meadow sprinkled with tiny flowers. The milk inspector had complimented her on it, when he stayed for dinner. A late calf had been born across the creek and nobody could figure out how the cow had got there. The honeysuckle was in bloom in the hedge, and she brought a bouquet and commandeered a vase from the nurses. Anita had never seen her sociability turned on like this before for anybody in the family. Anita was happy, in spite of weakness and lingering pain. Such a fuss had been made to prevent her dying. Even the sale of the maple trees pleased her, made her feel unique and treasured. People were kind and asked nothing of her, and she took up that kindness and extended it to everything around her. She forgave everyone she could think of—the principal with his glittery glasses, the smelly boys on the bus, unfair Reuel and chattering Teresa and rich girls with lamb’s-wool sweaters and her own family and Margot’s father, who must suffer in his rampages. She didn’t tire all day of looking at the thin yellowish curtains at the window and the limb and trunk of a tree visible to her. It was an ash tree, with strict-looking corduroy lines of bark and thin petal leaves that were losing their fragility and sharp spring green, toughening and darkening as they took on summer maturity. Everything made or growing in the world seemed to her to deserve congratulations. She thought later that this mood of hers might have come from the pills they gave her for the pain. But perhaps not entirely. She had been put in a single room because she was so sick. (Her father had told her mother to ask how much extra this was costing, but her mother didn’t think they would be charged, since they hadn’t asked for it.) The nurses brought her magazines, which she looked at but could not read, being too dazzled and comfortably distracted. She couldn’t tell whether time passed quickly or slowly, and she didn’t care. Sometimes she dreamed or imagined that Reuel visited her. He showed a sombre tenderness, a muted passion. He loved but relinquished her, caressing her hair. A couple of days before she was due to go home, her mother came in shiny-faced from the heat of summer, which was now upon them, and from some other disruption. She stood at the end of Anita’s bed and said, “I always knew you thought it wasn’t fair of me.” By this time Anita had felt a few holes punched in her happiness. She had been visited by her brothers, who banged against the bed, and her father, who seemed surprised that she expected to kiss him, and by her aunt, who said that after an operation like this a person always got fat. Now her mother’s face, her mother’s voice came pushing at her like a fist through gauze. Her mother was talking about Margot. Anita knew that immediately by a twitch of her mouth. “You always thought I wasn’t fair to your friend Margot. I was never fussy about that girl and you thought I wasn’t fair. I know you did. So now it turns out. It turns out I wasn’t so wrong after all. I could see it in her from an early age. I could see what you couldn’t. That she had a sneaky streak and she was oversexed.” Her mother delivered each sentence separately, in a reckless loud voice. Anita did not look at her eyes. She looked at the little brown mole beneath one nostril. It seemed increasingly loathsome. Her mother calmed down a little, and said that Reuel had taken Margot to Kincardine on the school bus at the end of the day’s run on the very last day of school. Of course they had been alone in the bus at the beginning and the end of the run, ever since Anita got sick. All they did in Kincardine, they said, was eat French-fried potatoes. What nerve! Using a school bus for their jaunts and misbehaving. They drove back that evening, but Margot did not go home. She had not gone home yet. Her father had come to the store and beat on the gas pumps and broken them, scattering glass as far as the highway. He phoned the police about Margot, and Reuel phoned them about the pumps. The police were friends of Reuel’s, and now Margot’s father was bound over to keep the peace. Margot stayed on at the store, supposedly to escape a beating. “That’s all it is, then,” Anita said. “Stupid God-damned gossip.” But no. But no. And don’t swear at me, young lady. Her mother said that she had kept Anita in ignorance. All this had happened and she had said nothing. She had given Margot the benefit of the doubt. But now there was no doubt. The news was that Teresa had tried to poison herself. She had recovered. The store was closed. Teresa was still living there, but Reuel had taken Margot with him and they were living here, in Walley. In a back room somewhere, in the house of friends of his. They were living together. Reuel was going out to work at the garage every day, so you could say that he was living with them both. Would he be allowed to drive the school bus in future? Not likely. Everybody was saying Margot must be pregnant. Javex, was what Teresa took. “And Margot never confided in you,” Anita’s mother said. “She never sent you a note or one thing all the time you’ve been in here. Supposed to be your friend.” Anita had a feeling that her mother was angry at her not only because she’d been friends with Margot, a girl who had disgraced herself, but for another reason as well. She had the feeling that her mother was seeing the same thing that she herself could see—Anita unfit, passed over, disregarded, not just by Margot but by life. Didn’t her mother feel an angry disappointment that Anita was not the one chosen, the one enfolded by drama and turned into a woman and swept out on such a surge of life? She would never admit that. And Anita could not admit that she felt a great failure. She was a child, a know-nothing, betrayed by Margot, who had turned out to know a lot. She said sulkily, “I’m tired talking.” She pretended to fall asleep, so that her mother would have to leave. Then she lay awake. She lay awake all night. The nurse who came in the next morning said, “Well, don’t you look like the last show on earth! Is that incision bothering you? Should I see if I can get you back on the pills?” “I hate it here,” Anita said. “Do you? Well, you only have one more day till you can go home.” “I don’t mean the hospital,” Anita said. “I mean here. I want to go and live somewhere else.” The nurse did not seem to be surprised. “You got your grade twelve?” she said. “O.K. You can go in training. Be a nurse. All it costs is to buy your stuff. Because they can work you for nothing while you’re training. Then you can go and get a job anyplace. You can go all over the world.” That was what Margot had said. And now Anita was the one who would become a nurse, not Margot. She made up her mind that day. But she felt that it was second best. She would rather have been chosen. She would rather have been pinned down by a man and his desire and the destiny that he arranged for her. She would rather have been the subject of scandal. “Do you want to know?” said Margot. “Do you want to know really how I got this house? I mean, I didn’t go after it till we could afford it. But you know with men—something else can always come first? I put in my time living in dumps. We lived one place, there was just that stuff, you know that under-carpeting stuff, on the floor? That brown hairy stuff looks like the skin off some beast? Just look at it and you can feel things crawling on you. I was sick all the time anyway. I was pregnant with Joe. This was in behind the Toyota place, only it wasn’t the Toyota then. Reuel knew the landlord. Of course. We got it cheap.” But there came a day, Margot said. There came a day about five years ago. Debbie wasn’t going to school yet. It was in June. Reuel was going away for the weekend, on a fishing trip up to northern Ontario. Up to the French River, in northern Ontario. Margot had got a phone call that she didn’t tell anybody about. “Is that Mrs. Gault?” Margot said yes. “Is it Mrs. Reuel Gault?” Yes, said Margot, and the voice—it was a woman’s or maybe a young girl’s voice, muffled and giggling—asked her if she wanted to know where her husband might be found next weekend. “You tell me,” said Margot. “Why don’t you check out the Georgian Pines?” “Fine,” said Margot. “Where is that?” “Oh, it’s a campground,” the voice said. “It’s a real nice place. Don’t you know it? It’s up on Wasaga Beach. You just check it out.” That was about a hundred miles to drive. Margot made arrangements for Sunday. She had to get a sitter for Debbie. She couldn’t get her regular sitter, Lana, because Lana was going to Toronto on a weekend jaunt with members of the high-school band. She was able to get a friend of Lana’s who wasn’t in the band. She was just as glad that it turned out that way, because it was Lana’s mother, Dorothy Slote, that she was afraid she might find with Reuel. Dorothy Slote did Reuel’s bookkeeping. She was divorced, and so well known in Walley for her numerous affairs that high-school boys would call to her from their cars, on the street, “Dorothy Slot, she’s hot to trot!” Sometimes she was referred to as Dorothy Slut. Margot felt sorry for Lana—that was why she had started hiring her to take care of Debbie. Lana was not going to be as good-looking as her mother, and she was shy and not too bright. Margot always got her a little present at Christmastime. On Saturday afternoon Margot drove to Kincardine. She was gone only a couple of hours, so she let Joe and his girlfriend take Debbie to the beach. In Kincardine she rented another car—a van, as it happened, an old blue crock pot of a thing like what the hippies drove. She also bought a few cheap clothes and a rather expensive, real-looking wig. She left them in the van, parked in a lot behind a supermarket. On Sunday morning she drove her car that far, parked it in the lot, got into the van, and changed her clothes and donned the wig, as well as some extra makeup. Then she continued driving north. The wig was a nice light-brown color, ruffled up on top and long and straight in the back. The clothes were tight pink denim pants and a pink-and-white striped top. Margot was thinner then, though not thin. Also, buffalo sandals, dangly earrings, big pink sunglasses. The works. “I didn’t miss a trick,” said Margot. “I did my eyes up kind of Cleopatra-ish. I don’t believe my own kids could’ve recognized me. The mistake I made was those pants—they were too tight and too hot. Them and the wig just about killed me. Because it was a blazing hot day. And I was kind of awkward at parking the van, because I’d never driven one before. Otherwise, no problems.” She drove up Highway 21, the Bluewater, with the window down to get a breeze off the lake, and her long hair blowing and the van radio tuned to a rock station, just to get her in the mood. In the mood for what? She had no idea. She smoked one cigarette after another, trying to steady her nerves. Men driving along kept honking at her. Of course the highway was busy, of course Wasaga Beach was jammed, a bright, hot Sunday like this, in June. Around the beach the traffic was just crawling, and the smell of French fries and noon-hour barbecues pressed down like a blanket. It took her a while just to find the campground, but she did, and paid her day fee, and drove in. Round and round the parking lot she drove, trying to spot Reuel’s car. She didn’t see it. Then it occurred to her that the lot would be just for day visitors. She found a parking place. Now she had to reconnoitre the entire grounds, on foot. She walked first all through the campground part. Trailer hookups, tents, people sitting out beside the trailers and tents drinking beer and playing cards and barbecuing lunch—more or less just what they would have been doing at home. There was a central playground, with swings and slides kept busy, and kids throwing Frisbees, and babies in the sandbox. A refreshment stand, where Margot got a Coke. She was too nervous to eat anything. It was strange to her to be in a family place yet not part of any family. Nobody whistled or made remarks to her. There were lots of long-haired girls around showing off more than she did. And you had to admit that what they had was in better condition to be shown. She walked the sandy paths under the pines, away from the trailers. She came to a part of the grounds that looked like an old resort, probably there long before anybody ever thought of trailer hookups. The shade of the big pines was a relief to her. The ground underneath was brown with their needles—hard dirt had turned to a soft and furry dust. There were double cabins and single cabins, painted dark green. Picnic tables beside them. Stone fireplaces. Tubs of flowers in bloom. It was nice. There were cars parked by some of the cabins, but Reuel’s wasn’t there. She didn’t see anybody around—maybe the people who stayed in cabins were the sort who went down to the beach. Across the road was a place with a bench and a drinking fountain and a trash can. She sat down on the bench to rest. And out he came. Reuel. He came out of the cabin right across from where she was sitting. Right in front of her nose. He was wearing his bathing trunks and he had a couple of towels slung over his shoulders. He walked in a lazy, slouching way. A roll of white fat sloped over the waistband of his trunks. “Straighten up, at least!” Margot wanted to yell at him. Was he slouching like that because he felt sneaky and ashamed? Or just worn out with happy exercise? Or had he been slouching for a long time and she hadn’t noticed? His big strong body turning into something like custard. He reached into the car parked beside the cabin, and she knew he was reaching for his cigarettes. She knew, because at the same moment she was fumbling in her bag for hers. If this was a movie, she thought—if this was only a movie, he’d come springing across the road with a light, keen to assist the stray pretty girl. Never recognizing her, while the audience held its breath. Then recognition dawning, and horror—incredulity and horror. While she, the wife, sat there cool and satisfied, drawing deep on her cigarette. But none of this happened, of course none of it happened; he didn’t even look across the road. She sat sweating in her denim pants, and her hands shook so that she had to put her cigarette away. The car wasn’t his. What kind of car did Dorothy Slut drive? Maybe he was with somebody else, somebody totally unknown to Margot, a stranger. Some stranger who figured she knew him as well as his wife. No. No. Not unknown. Not a stranger. Not in the least a stranger. The door of the cabin opened again, and there was Lana Slote. Lana, who was supposed to be in Toronto with the band. Couldn’t baby-sit Debbie. Lana, whom Margot had always felt sorry for and been kind to because she thought the girl was slightly lonesome, or unlucky. Because she thought it showed, that Lana was brought up mostly by old grandparents. Lana seemed old-fashioned, prematurely serious without being clever, and not very healthy, as if she were allowed to live on soft drinks and sugared cereal and whatever mush of canned corn and fried potatoes and macaroni-and-cheese loaf those old people dished up for supper. She got bad colds with asthmatic complications, her complexion was dull and pale. But she did have a chunky, appealing little figure, well developed front and back, and chipmunk cheeks when she smiled, and silky, flat, naturally blond hair. She was so meek that even Debbie could boss her around, and the boys thought she was a joke. Lana was wearing a bathing suit that her grandmother might have chosen for her. A shirred top over her bunchy little breasts and a flowered skirt. Her legs were stumpy, untanned. She stood there on the step as if she was afraid to come out—afraid to appear in a bathing suit or afraid to appear at all. Reuel had to go over and give her a loving little spank to get her moving. With numerous lingering pats he arranged one of the towels around her shoulders. He touched his cheek to her flat blond head, then rubbed his nose in her hair, no doubt to inhale its baby fragrance. Margot watched it all. They walked away, down the road to the beach, respectably keeping their distance. Father and child. Margot observed now that the car was a rented one. From a place in Walkerton. How funny, she thought, if it had been rented in Kincardine, at the same place where she rented the van. She wanted to put a note under the windshield wiper, but she didn’t have anything to write on. She had a pen but no paper. But on the grass beside the trash can she spied a Kentucky Fried Chicken bag. Hardly a grease spot on it. She tore it into pieces, and on the pieces she wrote—or printed, actually, in capital letters—these messages: YOU BETTER WATCH YOURSELF, YOU COULD END UP IN JAIL. • THE VICE SQUAD WILL GET YOU IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT. • PERVERTS NEVER PROSPER. • LIKE MOTHER LIKE DAUGHTER. • BETTER THROW THAT ONE BACK IN THE FRENCH RIVER, IT’S NOT FULL GROWN. • SHAME. • SHAME. She wrote another that said “BIG FAT SLOB WITH YOUR BABY-FACED MORON,” but she tore that up—she didn’t like the tone of it. Hysterical. She stuck the notes where she was sure they would be found—under the windshield wiper, in the crack of the door, weighed down by stones on the picnic table. Then she hurried away with her heart racing. She drove so badly, at first, that she almost killed a dog before she got out of the parking lot. She did not trust herself on the highway, so she drove on back roads, gravel roads, and kept reminding herself to keep her speed down. She wanted to go fast. She wanted to take off. She felt right on the edge of blowing up, blowing to smithereens. Was it good or was it terrible, the way she felt? She couldn’t say. She felt that she had been cut loose, nothing mattered to her, she was as light as a blade of grass. But she ended up in Kincardine. She changed her clothes and took off the wig and rubbed the makeup off her eyes. She put the clothes and the wig in the supermarket trash bin—not without thinking what a pity—and she turned in the van. She wanted to go into the hotel bar and have a drink, but she was afraid of what it might do to her driving. And she was afraid of what she might do if any man saw her drinking alone and came up with the least remark to her. Even if he just said, “Hot day,” she might yelp at him, she might try to claw his face off. Home. The children. Pay the sitter. A friend of Lana’s. Could she be the one who had phoned? Get takeout for supper. Pizza—not Kentucky Fried, which she would never be able to think of again without being reminded. Then she sat up late, waiting. She had some drinks. Certain notions kept banging about in her head. Lawyer. Divorce. Punishment. These notions hit her like gongs, then died away without giving her any idea about how to proceed. What should she do first, what should she do next, how should her life go on? The children all had appointments of one kind or another, the boys had summer jobs, Debbie was about to have a minor operation on her ear. She couldn’t take them away; she’d have to do it all herself, right in the middle of everybody’s gossip—which she’d had enough of once before. Also, she and Reuel were invited to a big anniversary party next weekend; she had to get the present. A man was coming to look at the drains. Reuel was so late getting home that she began to be afraid he’d had an accident. He’d had to go around by Orangeville, to deliver Lana to the home of her aunt. He’d pretended to be a high-school teacher transporting a member of the band. (The real teacher had been told, meanwhile, that Lana’s aunt was sick and Lana was in Orangeville looking after her.) Reuel’s stomach was upset, naturally, after those notes. He sat at the kitchen table chewing tablets and drinking milk. Margot made coffee, to sober herself for the fray. Reuel said it was all innocent. An outing for the girl. Like Margot, he’d felt sorry for her. Innocent. Margot laughed at that. She laughed, telling about it. “I said to him, ‘Innocent! I know your innocent! Who do you think you’re talking to,’ I said, ‘Teresa?’ And he said, ‘Who?’ No, really. Just for a minute he looked blank, before he remembered. He said, ‘Who?’ ” Margot thought then, What punishment? Who for? She thought, he’ll probably marry that girl and there’ll be babies for sure and pretty soon not enough money to go around. Before they went to bed at some awful hour in the morning, she had the promise of her house. “Because there comes a time with men, they really don’t want the hassle. They’d rather weasel out. I bargained him down to the wire, and I got pretty near everything I wanted. If he got balky about something later on, all I’d have to say was ‘Wigtime!’ I’d told him the whole thing—the wig and the van and where I sat and everything. I’d say that in front of the kids or anybody, and none of them would know what I was talking about. But he’d know! Reuel would know. Wigtime! I still say it once in a while, whenever I think it’s appropriate.” She fished a slice of orange out of her glass and sucked, then chewed on it. “I put a little something else in this besides the wine,” she said. “I put a little vodka, too. Notice?” She stretched her arms and legs out in the sun. “Whenever I think it’s—appropriate.” Anita thought that Margot might have given up on vanity but she probably hadn’t given up on sex. Margot might be able to contemplate sex without fine-looking bodies or kindly sentiments. A healthy battering. And what about Reuel—what had he given up on? All Margot’s hard bargaining would just be coming up against one thing—whether Reuel was ready or not. Bargaining. Bargaining, calculations, houses and money. Anita could not imagine that. How did you turn love and betrayal into solid goods? She had opted instead for arrivals and departures, emotions at the boiling point, a faithfulness to one kind of feeling, which often involved being faithless to almost everything else. “Now you,” said Margot, with an ample satisfaction. “I told you something. Time for you to tell me. Tell me how you decided to leave your husband.” Anita told her what had happened in a restaurant in British Columbia. Anita and her husband, on a holiday, went into a roadside restaurant, and Anita saw there a man who reminded her of a man she had been in love with—no, perhaps she had better say infatuated with—years and years ago. The man in the restaurant had a pale-skinned, heavy face, with a scornful and evasive expression, which could have been a dull copy of the face of the man she loved, and his long-legged body could have been a copy of that man’s body if it had been struck by lethargy. Anita could hardly tear herself away when it came time to leave the restaurant. She understood that expression—she felt that she was tearing herself away, she got loose in strips and tatters. All the way up the Island Highway, between the dark enclosing rows of tall fir and spruce tress, and on the ferry to Prince Rupert, she felt an absurd pain of separation. She decided that if she could feel such a pain, if she could feel more for a phantom than she could ever feel in her marriage, she had better go. So she told Margot. It was more difficult than that, of course, and it was not so clear. “Then did you go and find that other man?” said Margot. “No. It was one-sided. I couldn’t.” “Somebody else, then?” “And somebody else, and somebody else,” said Anita, smiling. The other night when she had been sitting beside her mother’s bed, waiting to give her mother an injection, she had thought about men, putting names one upon another as if to pass the time, just as you’d name great rivers of the world, or capital cities, or the children of Queen Victoria. She felt regret about some of them but no repentance. Warmth, in fact, spread from the tidy buildup. An accumulating satisfaction. “Well, that’s one way,” said Margot staunchly. “But it seems weird to me. It does. I mean—I can’t see the use of it, if you don’t marry them.” She paused. “Do you know what I do, sometimes?” She got up quickly and went to the sliding doors. She listened, then opened the door and stuck her head inside. She came back and sat down. “Just checking to see Debbie’s not getting an earful,” she said. “Boys, you can tell any horrific personal stuff in front of them and you might as well be speaking Hindu, for all they ever listen. But girls listen. Debbie listens.… “I’ll tell you what I do,” she said. “I go out and see Teresa.” “Is she still there?” said Anita with great surprise. “Is Teresa still out at the store?” “What store?” said Margot. “Oh, no! No, no. The store’s gone. The gas station’s gone. Torn down years ago. Teresa’s in the County Home. They have this what they call the Psychiatric Wing out there now. The weird thing is, she worked out there for years and years, just handing round trays and tidying up and doing this and that for them. Then she started having funny spells herself. So now she’s sometimes sort of working there and she’s sometimes just there, if you see what I mean. When she goes off, she’s never any trouble. She’s just pretty mixed up. Talk-talk-talk-talk-talk. The way she always did, only more so. All she has any idea of doing is talk-talk-talk, and fix herself up. If you come and see her, she always wants you to bring her some bath oil or perfume or makeup. Last time I went out, I took her some of that highlight stuff for her hair. I thought that was taking a chance, it was kind of complicated for her to use. But she read the directions, she made out fine. She didn’t make a mess. What I mean by mixed up is, she figures she’s on the boat. The boat with the war brides. Bringing them all out to Canada.” “War brides,” Anita said. She saw them crowned with white feathers, fierce and unsullied. She was thinking of war bonnets. She didn’t need to see him, for years she hadn’t the least wish to see him. A man undermines your life for an uncontrollable time, and then one day there’s nothing, just a hollow where he was, it’s unaccountable. “You know what just flashed through my mind this minute?” Margot said. “Just the way the store used to look in the mornings. And us coming in half froze. We had a hard life but we didn’t know it.” We had power, Anita thought. It’s a power of transformation you have, when you’re stuffed full of fear and eagerness—not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it. “She used to come and beat on the door,” said Margot, in a flattened, disbelieving voice. “Out there. Out there, when Reuel was with me in the room. It was awful. I don’t know. I don’t know—do you think it was love?” From up here the two long arms of the breakwater look like floating matchsticks. The towers and pyramids and conveyor belt of the salt mine look like large floating toys. The lake is glinting like foil. Everything seems bright and distinct and harmless. Spellbound. “We’re all on the boat,” says Margot. “She thinks we’re all on the boat. But she’s the one Reuel’s going to meet in Halifax, lucky her.” Margot and Anita have got this far. They are not ready yet to stop talking. They are fairly happy.