The Love Of A Good Woman

Rich As Stink

While the plane was pulling up to the gate on a summer evening in 1974, Karin reached down and got some things out of her backpack. A black beret which she pulled on so it slanted over one eye, a red lipstick which she was able to apply to her mouth by using the window as a mirror-it was dark in Toronto-and a long black cigarette holder which she held ready to clamp between her teeth at the right moment. The beret and the cigarette holder had been filched from the Irma la Douce outfit her stepmother had worn to a costume party, and the lipstick was something she had bought for herself.

She knew that she could hardly manage to look like a grown-up tart. But she would not look like the ten-year-old who had got on the plane at the end of last summer, either.

Nobody in the crowd looked at her twice, even when she stuck the cigarette holder in her mouth and put on a sullen leer. Everybody was too anxious, distraught, delighted, or bewildered.

Lots of them seemed to be in costume themselves. Black men swished along in bright robes and little embroidered hats, and old women sat bowed on suitcases with shawls over their heads. Hippies were all in beads and tatters, and she found herself hedged in for a few moments by a group of somber-looking men who wore black hats and had little ringlets dangling down their cheeks.

People waiting to meet passengers were not supposed to get in here, but they did anyway, slipping through the automatic doors. In the crowd on the other side of the baggage carousel Karin spotted her mother, Rosemary, who had not yet seen her. Rosemary was wearing a long dark-blue dress with gold and orange moons on it and had her hair freshly dyed, very black, piled up in a toppling bird’s nest on top of her head. She looked older than she did in Karin’s memory, and a little forlorn. Karin’s glance swept past her-looking for Derek. Derek was easy to find in a crowd because of his height and his shining forehead and his pale, wavy, shoulder-length hair. Also because of his bright steady eyes and satirical mouth, and his ability to stay still. Not like Rosemary, who was twitching and stretching and staring about now in a dazed, discouraged way.

Derek wasn’t standing behind Rosemary, and he wasn’t anywhere nearby. Unless he had gone to the men’s room, he wasn’t there.

Karin removed the cigarette holder and pushed the beret back on her head. If Derek wasn’t there, the joke lost its point. Playing a joke like that on Rosemary would just turn into confusion-when Rosemary looked confused enough, bereft enough, already.

“You’re wearing lip-stick,” Rosemary said, wet eyed and dazzled. She wrapped Karin in her winglike sleeves and her smell of cocoa butter. “Don’t tell me your father lets you wear lipstick.”

“I was going to fool you,” Karin said. “Where’s Derek?” “Not here,” said Rosemary.

Karin spotted her suitcase on the carousel; she ducked and eeled her way between bodies and dragged it off. Rosemary tried to help her carry it, but Karin said, “Okay. Okay.” They pushed through to the exit doors and past all the waiting people who had not had the nerve or the patience to push inside. They did not speak until they were out in the hot night air and moving towards the parking lot. Then Karin said, “What’s the matter-you two having one of your squalls?”

“Squall” was the name Rosemary and Derek themselves used to describe their fights, which were blamed on the difficulties of working together on Derek’s book.

Rosemary said with dire serenity, “We aren’t seeing each other anymore. We aren’t working together.”

“Really?” said Karin. “You mean you’ve broken up?”

“If people like us can break up,” Rosemary said.

The lights of cars were still pouring down every road into the city, and at the same time pouring out of it, around the big curving overpasses and in streams underneath them. There was no air-conditioning in Rosemary’s car-not because she couldn’t afford it, but because she did not believe in it-and so the windows had to be open, letting the traffic noise rush in like a river on the gassy air. Rosemary hated driving around Toronto. When she came to the city once a week to see the publisher she worked for, she made the trip on a bus, and at other times she usually had Derek drive her. Karin kept quiet while they got off the airport highway and drove east on 401, and turned, after eighty or so miles of her mother’s jumpy concentration, onto the secondary highway that would take them nearly to where Rosemary lived.

“So has Derek gone away?” Karin said, then “Has he gone off on a trip?”

“Not that I know of,” Rosemary said. “But then I wouldn’t know.”

“How about Ann? Is she still there?”

“Probably,” said Rosemary. “She never goes anywhere.”

“Did he take his stuff and all?”

Derek had brought more things to Rosemary’s trailer than were strictly necessary for the work on his bundles of manuscripts. Books, of course-not just the books that had to be referred to but books and magazines to read during breaks in the work, when he might lie down on Rosemary’s bed. Records to listen to. Clothes, boots to wear if he decided to hike back into the bush, pills for stomach troubles or headaches, even the tools and lumber with which he built a gazebo. His shaving things were in the bathroom, also a toothbrush and his special toothpaste for sensitive gums. His coffee grinder was on the kitchen counter. (A newer, fancier one that Ann had bought sat on the counter of the kitchen in what was still his house.)

“All cleared out,” said Rosemary. She pulled into the lot of a doughnut shop that was still open, on the edge of the first town on this highway.

“Coffee to keep me alive,” she said.

Usually when they stopped at this place Karin stayed with Derek in the car. He wouldn’t drink such coffee. “Your mother is addicted to places like this because of her awful childhood,” he said. He didn’t mean that Rosemary had been taken to places like this but that she had been forbidden to go into them, just as she had been forbidden all fried or sugary food, and kept to a diet of vegetables and slimy porridge. Not because her parents were poor- they were rich-but because they were food fanatics before their time. Derek had known Rosemary only a short while-compared, say, to the years that Karin’s father, Ted, had known her-but he spoke more readily than Ted ever would about her early life and divulged details about it, such as the ritual of weekly enemas, that Rosemary’s own stories left out.

Never, never, in her school-year life, her life with Ted and Grace, would Karin find herself in a place with this horrid smell of scorched sugar and grease and cigarette smoke and rank coffee. But Rosemary’s eyes ranged with pleasure over the selection of doughnuts with cream (spelled “creme”) and jelly filling, with butterscotch and chocolate icing, the crullers and eclairs, and dutchies and filled croissants and monster cookies. She saw no reason for rejecting any of this, except perhaps the fear of getting fat, and she could never believe that such food was not just what everybody was craving.

At the counter-where you were not supposed to sit for more than twenty minutes, according to the sign-were two very fat women with massive curly hairdos, and between them a thin boyish-looking but wrinkled man, who was talking fast and seemed to be telling them jokes. While the women were shaking their heads and laughing, and Rosemary was picking out her almond croissant, he gave Karin a wink that was lewd and conspiratorial. It made her realize that she was still wearing lipstick. “Can’t resist, eh?” he said to Rosemary, and she laughed, taking this for country friendliness.

“Never can,” she said. “You’re sure?” she said to Karin. “Not a thing? “

“Little girl watching her figure?” that wrinkled man said.

There was hardly any traffic north of this town. The air had turned cooler and smelled swampy. The frogs were making such a loud noise in some places that you could hear them over the noise of the car. This two-lane highway wound past stands of black evergreens and the softer darkness of small juniper-spotted fields, farms going back to the bush. Then on a curve the headlights lit up the first jumble of rocks, some of them glittery pink and gray and some a dried-blood red. Soon this was happening more and more often, and in places the rocks, instead of being jumbled and jammed together, were laid as if by hand in thick or thin layers, and these were gray or greenish white. Limestone, Karin remembered. Limestone bedrock, alternating here with the rocks of the Precambrian Shield. Derek had taught her about that. Derek said that he wished he had been a geologist because he loved rocks. But he wouldn’t have loved making money for mining companies. And history drew him too-it was an odd combination. History for the indoor man, geology for the outdoor man, he said, with a solemnity that told her he was making a joke of himself.

What Karin wanted to get rid of now-she wished it would just flow out of the car windows on the rush of midnight air-was her feeling of squeamishness and superiority. About the almond croissant, the bad coffee that Rosemary was sipping almost surreptitiously, and the man at the counter, and even about Rosemary’s youthful hippielike dress and the messy heap of hair. Also she’d like to get rid of her own missing of Derek, the sense that there was space to fill, and a thinning out of possibility. She said out loud, “I’m glad, I’m glad he’s gone.”

Rosemary said, “Are you really?”

“You’ll be happier,” Karin said.

“Yes,” said Rosemary. “I’m getting my self-respect back. You know you don’t realize how much you’ve lost of your self-respect and how much you miss it till you start getting it back. I want you and me to have a really good summer. We could go on little trips, even. I don’t mind driving where it isn’t hairy. We could go hiking back in the bush where Derek took you. I’d like to do that.”

Karin said, “Yeah,” though she wasn’t at all sure that without Derek they wouldn’t get lost. Her thoughts were not really on hiking but on a scene last summer. Rosemary on the bed, rolled up in a quilt, weeping, stuffing handfuls of the quilt and the pillow into her mouth, biting on them in a rage of grief, and Derek sitting at the table where they worked, reading a page of the manuscript. “Can you do anything to quiet your mother?” he said.

Karin said, “She wants you.”

“I can’t cope with her when she’s like this,” said Derek. He laid down the page he’d finished and picked up another. Between pages he looked up at Karin, with a long-suffering grimace. He looked worn out, old and haggard. He said, “I can’t stand it. I’m sorry.”

So Karin went into the bedroom and stroked Rosemary’s back, and Rosemary too said that she was sorry.

“What’s Derek doing?” she said.

“Sitting in the kitchen,” said Karin. She didn’t like to say “reading.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I should go in and talk to you.”

“Oh, Karin. I’m so ashamed.”

What had happened to start such a row? Calmed down and cleaned up, Rosemary always said it was the work, disagreements they had about the work. “Then why don’t you quit working on his book?” Karin said. “You’ve got all your other stuff to do.” Rosemary edited manuscripts-that was how she had met Derek. Not because he had submitted his book to the publisher she worked for-he hadn’t done so yet-but because she knew a friend of his and the friend had said, “I know a woman who could be a help to you.” And in a little while Rosemary had moved to the country and into the trailer that was not far from his house, so that she could be closer to him to do this work. At first she kept her apartment in Toronto, but then she let it go, because she was spending more and more time in the trailer. She still did other work but not so much of it, and she managed her one workday a week in Toronto by leaving at six o’clock in the morning and getting home after eleven at night.

“What’s this book about?” Ted had said to Karin.

Karin said, “It’s sort of about the explorer La Salle and the Indians.”

“Is this guy a historian? Does he teach at a university?”

Karin didn’t know. Derek had done a lot of things-he had worked as a photographer; he had worked in a mine and as a surveyor; but as far as his teaching went she thought it had been in a high school. Ann spoke of his work as being “outside the system.”

Ted himself taught at a university. He was an economist.

She didn’t, of course, tell Ted or Grace about the grief brought on, apparently, by disagreements about the book. Rosemary blamed herself. It’s the tension, she said. Sometimes she said it was the menopause. Karin had heard her say to Derek, “Forgive me,” and Derek had said, “Nothing to forgive,” in a voice of cool satisfaction.

At this Rosemary had left the room. They did not hear her start to weep again, but they kept waiting for it. Derek looked hard into Karin’s eyes-he made a comical face of distress and bewilderment.

So what did I do this time?

“She’s very sensitive,” said Karin. Her voice was full of shame. Was this because of Rosemary’s behavior? Or because Derek seemed to be including her-Karin-in some feeling of satisfaction, of despising, that went far beyond this moment. And because she could not help but feel honored.

Sometimes she just got out. She went up the road to see Ann, and Ann always seemed glad that she had come. She never asked Karin why, but if Karin said, “They’re having a stupid fight,” or- later on, when they’d come up with the special word-“They’re having one of their squalls,” she never seemed surprised or displeased. “Derek is very exacting,” she might say, or “Well, I expect they’ll work it out.” But if Karin tried to go further, saying “Rosemary’s crying,” Ann would say, “There’s some things I just think it’s better not to talk about, don’t you?”

But there were other things she would listen to, though sometimes with a smile of reservation. Ann was a sweet-looking, rounded woman with light-gray hair cut in bangs and falling loose over her shoulders. When she talked she often blinked, and didn’t quite meet your eyes (Rosemary said that this was nerves). Also her lips-Ann’s lips-were so thin they almost disappeared when she smiled, always with her mouth closed, in a way of holding something back.

“You know how Rosemary met Ted?” said Karin. “It was at the bus stop in the rain and she was putting on lipstick.” Then she had to backtrack and explain that Rosemary had to put on her lipstick at the bus stop because her parents didn’t know she wore it-lipstick being forbidden by their religion, as well as movies, high heels, dancing, sugar, coffee, and alcohol and cigarettes, it goes without saying. Rosemary was in her first year of college and did not want to look like a religious geek. Ted was a teaching assistant.

“But they already knew who each other were,” Karin said, and explained about their living on the same street. Ted in the gatehouse of the biggest of the rich houses, his father being the chauffeur-gardener and his mother the housekeeper, and Rosemary in one of the more ordinary-rich houses across the street (though the life her parents led in it was not ordinary-rich at all, since they played no games and never went to parties or took a trip and for some reason used an icebox instead of a refrigerator, until the ice company went out of business).

Ted had a car he had bought for a hundred dollars, and he felt sorry for Rosemary and picked her up in the rain.

When Karin was telling this story she remembered her parents telling it, laughing and interrupting each other in their practiced way. Ted always mentioned the price of the car and its make and year (Studebaker, 1947) and Rosemary mentioned the fact that the passenger door would not open and Ted had to get out and let her climb in over the driver’s seat. And he would tell how soon he took her to her first movie-in the afternoon-and the name of the movie was Some Like It Hot, and he came out in broad daylight with lipstick all over his face, because whatever it was that other girls did with lipstick, blot it or powder it or whatever, Rosemary had not learned to do. “She was very enthusiastic,” he always said.

Then they got married. They went to a minister’s house; the minister’s son was a friend of Ted’s. Their parents didn’t know what they were going to do. And right after the ceremony Rosemary started her period and the first thing Ted had to do as a married man was go out and buy a box of Kotex.

“Does your mother know you tell me these things, Karin?”

“She wouldn’t mind. And then her mother had to go to bed when she found out, she felt so awful that they’d got married. If her parents had known she was going to marry an infidel they would have shut her up in this church school in Toronto.”

“Infidel?” said Ann. “Really? What a pity.”

Maybe she meant that it was a pity, after all this trouble, that the marriage hadn’t lasted.

Karin scrunched down in the seat. Her head bumped Rosemary’s shoulder.

“Does this bother you?” she said.

“No,” said Rosemary.

Karin said, “I’m not really going to sleep. I want to be awake when we turn up into the valley.”

Rosemary started to sing.

“Wake up, wake up, Darlin Cory-”

She sang in a slow, deep voice, imitating Pete Seeger on the record, and the next thing Karin knew the car had stopped; they had climbed the short, rutted bit of road to the trailer and were sitting under the trees outside it. The light was on over the door. No Derek inside, though. None of Derek’s stuff. Karin didn’t want to move. She squirmed and protested in delicious crankiness, as she could not have done if anybody except Rosemary had been there.

“Out, out,” Rosemary said. “You’ll be in bed in a minute, come on,” she said, tugging and laughing. “You think I can carry you?” When she had pulled Karin out, and got her stumbling towards the door, she said, “Look at the stars. Look at the stars. They’re wonderful.” Karin kept her head down, grumbling.

“Bed, bed,” said Rosemary. They were inside. A faint smell of Derek-marijuana, coffee beans, lumber. And the smell of the closed-up trailer, its carpets and cooking. Karin flopped fully dressed on her narrow bed, and Rosemary flung her last-year’s pajamas at her. “Get undressed or you’ll feel awful when you wake up,” she said. “We’ll get your suitcase in the morning.”

Karin made what seemed to her the greatest effort that could be required in her life, heaved herself to a sitting position, and dragged off her clothes, then pulled on her pajamas. Rosemary was going around opening windows. The last thing Karin heard her say was “That lipstick-what was the idea of that lipstick?” and the last thing she felt was a washcloth’s motherly, ungentle attack on her face. She spat its taste out, revelling in this childishness and in the cool field of the bed beneath her, and her greed for sleep.

That was on Saturday night. Saturday night and early Sunday morning. On Monday morning Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit Ann?” and Rosemary said, “Sure, go ahead.”

They had slept late on Sunday and had not left the trailer all day. Rosemary was dismayed that it was raining. “The stars were out last night, the stars were out when we got home,” she said. “Raining on the first day of your summer.” Karin had to tell her that it was okay, she felt so lazy she didn’t want to go out anyway. Rosemary made her cafe au lait and cut up a melon, which wasn’t quite ripe (Ann would have noticed, but Rosemary didn’t). Then at four o’clock in the afternoon they made a big meal of bacon and waffles and strawberries and fake whipped cream. The sun came out around six, but they were still in their pajamas; the day was destroyed. “At least we didn’t watch television,” Rosemary said. “We’ve got that to congratulate ourselves on.”

“Up till now,” said Karin, and switched it on.

They were sitting amid piles of old magazines that Rosemary had hauled out of the cupboard. These had been in the trailer when she moved in, and she said she was finally going to throw them out-after she had sorted through them to see if there was anything worth keeping. Not much sorting got done because she kept finding things to read aloud. Karin was bored at first but allowed herself to be drawn into this old time, with its quaint advertisements and unbecoming hairstyles.

She noticed the blanket folded and placed on top of the telephone. She said, “Don’t you know how to turn the phone off?”

Rosemary said, “I don’t really want it off. I want to hear it ring and not answer it. To be able to ignore it. I don’t want it too loud, is all.”

But it didn’t ring, all day.

Monday morning the blanket was still over the phone and the magazines were back in the closet, because Rosemary couldn’t decide to throw them out after all. The sky was cloudy, but it wasn’t raining. They got up very late again because they had watched a movie till two in the morning.

Rosemary spread some typed pages out over the kitchen table. Not Derek’s manuscript-that big stack was gone. “Was Derek’s book really interesting?” Karin said.

She had never thought to talk to Rosemary about it before. The manuscript had been just like a big tangled roll of barbed wire that sat all the time on the table, with Derek and Rosemary trying to untangle it.

“Well, he kept changing it,” Rosemary said. “It was interesting but it was confused. First La Salle was all that interested him and then he got onto Pontiac and he wanted to cover too much and he was never satisfied.”

“So you’re glad that you’re rid of it,” said Karin.

“Enormously glad. It was just unending complications.”

“But don’t you miss Derek?”

“The friendship is played out,” said Rosemary in a preoccupied way, bending over a sheet of paper and making a mark on it. “What about Ann?”

“That friendship, I guess it’s played out too. In fact I’ve been thinking.” She put her pen down. “I’ve been thinking of getting out of here. But I thought I’d wait for you. I didn’t want you to come back and find everything dislocated. But the reason for being here was Derek’s book. Well, it was Derek. You know that.”

Karin said, “Derek and Ann.”

“Derek and Ann. Yes. And now that reason is gone.”

That was when Karin said, “Okay if I go up the road and visit Ann?” And Rosemary said, “Sure, go ahead. We don’t have to make up our minds in a hurry, you know. It’s just an idea I had.”

Karin walked up the gravel road and wondered what was different. Aside from the clouds, which were never there in her memories of the valley. Then she knew. There were no cattle pasturing in the fields, and because of this the grass had grown up, the juniper bushes had spread out, you could no longer see the water in the creek.

The valley was long and narrow, with Ann and Derek’s white house at the far end of it. The valley floor was pasture that had been flat and tidy last year with the creek winding cleanly through it. (Ann had rented the land to a man who had Black Angus cattle.) The wooded ridges rose steeply on either side and closed in at the far end, behind the house. The trailer Rosemary rented had originally been put in place for Ann’s parents, who moved down there when the valley filled up with snow in the winter. They had wanted to be nearer to the store, which stood then at the corner of the township road. Now there was nothing but the cement platform with two holes in it where the gas tanks had been and an old bus with flags over the windows, where some hippies were living. They sometimes sat on the platform and waved back solemnly and elaborately to Rosemary as she drove past.

Derek said they had weed growing in the bushes. But he wouldn’t buy from them, not trusting their security.

Rosemary refused to smoke with Derek.

“I’m too turbulent around you,” she said. “I don’t think it would be good.”

“Suit yourself,” said Derek. “It might help.”

Neither would Ann smoke. She said she would feel silly. She had never smoked anything; she didn’t even know how to inhale.

They didn’t know that Derek had let Karin try once. She didn’t know how to inhale either, and he had to teach her. She tried too hard; she inhaled too deeply and had to fight to keep from throwing up. They were out in the barn, where Derek kept all the rock samples he had collected up on the ridges. Derek tried to steady her by telling her to look at the rocks.

“Just look at them,” he said. “Look into them. See the colors. Don’t try too hard. Just look and wait.”

But what calmed her down eventually was the lettering on a cardboard box. There was a pile of cardboard boxes which Ann had packed things in when she and Derek had moved back here from Toronto, a couple of years ago. One of them had a silhouette of a toy battleship on the side, and the word dreadnought. The first part of the word-dread-was in red lettering. The letters shimmered as if written in neon tubing, and issued a command to Karin that had to do with more than the word’s meaning. She had to dismember it and find the words inside.

“What are you laughing at?” Derek said, and she told him what she was doing. The words came tumbling out miraculously.

Read. Red. Dead. Dare. Era. Ear. Are. Add. Adder. “Adder” was the best. It used up all the letters.

“Amazing,” said Derek. “Amazing Karin. Dread the Red Adder.”

He never had to tell her not to mention any of this to her mother or to Ann. When Rosemary kissed her that night she sniffed her hair and laughed and said, “God, the smell of it’s everywhere, Derek’s such a dedicated old pothead.”

This was one of the times when Rosemary was happy. They had been to Derek and Ann’s house to eat supper on the closed-in sun porch. Ann had said, “Come with me, Karin, see if you can help me get the mousse out of the mold.” Karin had followed her, but came back-pretending it was to get the mint sauce.

Rosemary and Derek were leaning across the table teasing each other, making kissing faces. They never saw her.

Maybe it was that same night, leaving, that Rosemary laughed at the two chairs set outside the back door. Two old dark-red metal-tube chairs, with cushions. They faced west, towards the last remnants of the sunset.

“Those old chairs,” said Ann. “I know they’re a sight. They belonged to my parents.”

“They’re not even all that comfortable,” said Derek.

“No, no,” said Rosemary. “They’re beautiful, they’re you. I love them. They just say Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann watching the sunset at the end of the day’s labors.”

“If they can see it through the pea vines,” Derek said.

The next time Karin went out to pick vegetables for Ann, she noticed the chairs were gone. She didn’t ask Ann what had become of them.

Ann’s kitchen was in the basement of the house, just partly underground. You had to go down four steps. Karin did that, and pressed her face against the screen door. The kitchen was a dark room, with bushes growing against its high windows-Karin had never been there when the light was not on. But it wasn’t on now, and at first she thought the room was empty. Then she saw somebody sitting at the table, and it was Ann, but her head was a different shape. She had her back to the door.

She had cut her hair. It was cut short and fluffed out like any gray-haired matron’s. And she was doing something-her elbows moved. She was working in the dim light, but Karin couldn’t see what the work was.

She tried the trick of making Ann turn around by staring at the back of her head. But it didn’t work. She tried running her fingers lightly down the screen. Finally she made a noise.

“Woo-oo-ooo-woo.”

Ann got up and turned around so reluctantly that Karin had the swift unreasonable suspicion that she might have known who was there all the time-might have seen Karin coming, in fact, and arranged herself in this guarded position.

“It’s me, it’s me. It’s your lost child,” said Karin.

“Why so it is,” said Ann, unhooking the door. She didn’t greet Karin by hugging her-but then she and Derek never did that.

She had got fatter-or the short hair made her look that way- and her face had red blotches on it, as if bugs had been biting her. Her eyes looked sore.

“Do your eyes hurt?” Karin said. “Is that why you’re working in the dark?”

Ann said, “Oh, I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed the light wasn’t on, I was just cleaning some silver and I thought I could see fine.” Then she seemed to make an effort to brighten up, speaking as if Karin was some much younger child. “Cleaning silver is such a boring job, it must have put me in a trance. What a good thing you came along to help me.”

As a temporary tactic, Karin became this much younger child. She sprawled in a chair beside the table and said boisterously, “So-where’s old Derek?” She was thinking that this strange behavior of Ann’s might mean that Derek had gone off on one of his expeditions over the ridges and not come back, leaving both Ann and Rosemary. Or that he was sick. Or depressed. Ann had once said, “Derek wasn’t depressed half so often once we left the city.” Karin had wondered if “depressed” was the right word. Derek seemed to her critical, and sometimes fed up. Was that depression?

“I’m sure he’s around somewhere,” Ann said.

“He and Rosemary had a big split-up, did you know that?”

“Oh yes, Karin. I knew that.”

“Do you feel sorry about it?”

Ann said, “This is a new way I’ve got of cleaning silver. I’ll show you. You just take a fork or spoon or whatever and you dip it in this solution here in the basin and leave it just a moment and then you take it out and dip it in the rinse water and wipe it dry. See? It shines just as well as ever it did when I used to do all that rubbing and polishing. I think so. I think it’s just as good a shine. I’ll get us some fresh rinse water.”

Karin dipped a fork. She said, “Yesterday Rosemary and I did what we wanted all day. We never even got dressed. We made waffles and we read stuff in these old magazines. Old Ladies’ Home Journals.”

“Those were my mother’s,” said Ann with a slight stiffness.

“She’s lovely,” said Karin. “She’s engaged. She uses Pond’s.”

Ann smiled-that was a relief-and said, “I remember.”

“Can this marriage be saved?” said Karin, taking on a deep ominous tone. Then she changed to wheedling and whining.

“The problem is that my husband is really mean and I just don’t know what to do about him. For one thing he has gone and eaten up all our children. It’s not because I don’t give him good meals to eat either because I do. I slave all day over a hot stove and make him a delicious dinner and then he comes home and the first thing he does is pull a leg off the baby-”

“Now stop,” said Ann, not smiling anymore. “Just stop, Karin.”

“But I really want to know,” said Karin, in a subdued but stubborn voice. “Can this marriage be saved? “

All last year, when she thought of the place where she most wanted to be, Karin had thought of this kitchen. A big room whose corners stayed dim even when the light was on. The patterns of green leaves brushing the windows. All the things here and there that strictly speaking didn’t belong in a kitchen. The treadle sewing machine and the big overstuffed armchair, its maroon covering oddly worn to gray-green on the armrests. The large painting of a waterfall done long ago by Ann’s mother when she was just a bride and had the time, which she never had again.

(“A lucky thing for all of us,” said Derek.)

There was the sound of a car in the yard and Karin thought, could it be Rosemary? Had Rosemary been the one to get depressed, left alone; had she followed Karin for company?

When she heard the boots on the kitchen steps she knew it was Derek.

She called out, “Surprise, surprise. Look who’s here!”

Derek came into the room and said, “Hullo Karin,” without a trace of welcome. He set a couple of bags down on the table. Ann said politely, “Did you get the right film?”

“Yes,” said Derek. “What’s this muck?”

“For cleaning the silver,” Ann said. To Karin, as if to apologize, she said, “He’s just been to town to get some film. To take pictures of his rocks.”

Karin bent over the knife she was drying. It would be the worst thing in the world if she should cry (last summer it would have been impossible). Ann asked about some other things- groceries-that Derek had got, and Karin raised her eyes deliberately and fixed them on the front of the stove. It was a kind of stove no longer made, Ann had told her. A combination wood-and-electric stove with a sailing ship stamped on the door of the warming oven. Above the ship, the words clipper stoves.

That, too, she had remembered.

“I’d think Karin could be a help to you,” said Ann. “She could help you set up the rocks.”

There was a slight pause during which they might have looked at each other. Then Derek said, “Okay, Karin. Come on and help me take pictures.”

Many of the rocks were just sitting around on the barn floor-not yet sorted or labelled. Others sat on shelves, separately displayed, with printed cards to identify them. For some time Derek was silent, moving these around, then fiddling with the camera, trying to get the best angle and the proper light. When he started to take the pictures he gave brief orders to Karin, getting her to shift the rocks or tilt them, and pick up others from the floor, to be photographed even without labels. It didn’t seem to her that he really needed-or wanted-her help at all. Several times he drew in his breath as if he was going to say this-or tell her something else that was important and unpleasant-but then all he said was “Shift to the right a little,” or “Give me a look at the other side.”

All last summer Karin had nagged in her brat way and requested in a serious way to be taken along on one of Derek’s forays, and finally he had said she could come. He made it as hard as he could, a test. They sprayed themselves with Off!, but it didn’t entirely prevent the bugs from getting at them, burrowing into their hair and finding a way under neck bands and shirt cuffs. They had to squelch through boggy places where their boot prints immediately filled up with water, then climb up steep banks covered with berry canes and wild rosebushes and tough, tripping vines. Also clamber over smooth, tilted outcrops of bare rocks. They wore bells around their necks, so that they could locate each other if separated, and so any bears could hear them coming and stay clear.

They came on one big mound of bear scat, with a fresh glisten to it and an apple core only half digested.

Derek had told her that there were mines all through this country. Almost every known mineral was there but usually not enough to make them profitable, he said. He had visited all these abandoned, almost forgotten mines and hacked out his samples or simply picked them up off the ground. “The first time I brought him home he just disappeared up the ridge and found a mine,” Ann said. “I knew then that he’d probably marry me.”

The mines were a disappointment, though Karin would never have said so. She had been hoping for some Ali Baba cave with a gleam of glittery rocks in the darkness. Instead Derek showed her a narrow entryway, almost a natural split in the rock, blocked off now by a poplar tree that had taken root in that absurd place and grown up crooked. The other entry, that Derek said was the most feasible anywhere, was just a hole in the side of a hill, with rotted beams lying on the ground or still supporting part of the roof and bricks holding back some of the earth and rock rubble. Derek pointed out the faint tracks where the rails had run for the ore cart. Pieces of mica were lying around, and Karin collected some. They at least were beautiful and looked like authentic treasure. They were like flakes of smooth dark glass that turned to silver when you held them to the light.

Derek said she should take just one piece and that for a private keepsake, not to be shown to people. “Keep it under your hat,” he said. “I don’t want talk about this place.”

Karin said, “Do you want me to swear to God?”

He said, “Just remember.” Then he asked her if she wanted to see the castle.

Another disappointment, and a joke. He led her to a cement-walled ruin that he said had probably been a storage place for ore. He showed her the break in the tall trees, filled up with saplings, where the rail line had run. The joke was that some of the hippies had got lost in here a couple of years ago and come out with the report of a castle. Derek hated people making mistakes like that, not seeing what was in front of their eyes or could be figured out with the right information.

Karin walked around the top of the crumbling wall and he did not tell her to watch her footing or be careful she didn’t break her neck.

On the way home there was a thunderstorm and they had to stay inside a heavy thicket of cedars. Karin could not keep still-she couldn’t tell if she was scared or elated. Elated, she decided, and she jumped up and ran in circles, throwing up her arms and shrieking in the brightness of the light that penetrated even this shelter. Derek told her to calm down, just to sit and count to fifteen after each flash and see if that didn’t bring the thunder.

But she thought he was pleased with her. He didn’t think she was scared.

It was the truth, that there were people whom you positively ached to please. Derek was one of them. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could keep you and have contempt for you forever. Fear of the lightning, fear when she saw the bear scat, or the wish to believe the ruin was the ruin of a castle-even a failure to recognize the different qualities of mica, pyrite, quartz, silver, feldspar-any of that could make Derek decide to give up on her. As he had given up in different ways on Rosemary and Ann. Out here with Karin he was more seriously himself, he paid everything the honor of his serious attention. When he was with her and not with either of them.

“Notice some elements of doom and gloom around here today?” Derek said.

Karin slid her hands over a piece of quartz that looked like ice with a candle inside. She said, “Is it because of Rosemary?”

“No,” said Derek. “This is serious. Ann got an offer on this place. A shark from Stoco came out and told her some Japanese company wants to buy it. They want the mica. To build ceramic engine blocks for cars. She’s thinking about it. She can sell it if she wants to. It’s hers.”

Karin said, “Why would she want to? Sell it?”

“Money,” said Derek. “Try money.”

“Doesn’t Rosemary pay her enough rent?”

“How long is that going to last? The pasture isn’t rented this year, the land’s too soggy. The house needs money spent or it’ll fall down. I’ve worked four years on a book that isn’t even finished. We’re running low. You know what the real-estate guy said to her? He said, ‘This could be another Sudbury.’ He didn’t say that for a joke.”

Karin didn’t see why he would. She knew nothing about Sudbury. “If I was rich I could buy it,” she said. “Then you could go on like now.”

“Someday you will be rich,” Derek said matter-of-factly. “But not soon enough.” He was putting the camera away in its case. “Keep on the right side of your mother,” he said. “She’s rich as stink.”

Karin felt her face heat up, she felt the shock of those words. It was something she’d never heard before. Rich as stink. It sounded hateful.

He said, “Okay-into town to see when they’ll develop this.” He didn’t ask if she wanted to go along and she could hardly have answered him anyway; her eyes were filling up disastrously. She was struck and blinded by what he’d said.

She had to go to the bathroom, so she walked over to the house.

There was a good smell from the kitchen-the smell of some slow-cooking meat.

The only bathroom was upstairs. Karin could hear Ann up there, moving around in her room. She didn’t call or look in at her. But when she started to go downstairs again, Ann called her.

She had put makeup on her face so it didn’t look so blotchy.

There were piles of clothes lying around on the bed and on the floor.

“I’m trying to get things organized,” Ann said. “There’s clothes here I’d forgotten I had. I have to get rid of some of them once and for all.”

That meant she was serious about moving out. Getting rid of things before she moved out. When Rosemary was getting ready to move out she packed her trunk while Karin was at school. Karin never saw her choose the things that went into it. She just saw them turn up later, in the apartment in Toronto and now in the trailer. A cushion, a pair of candlesticks, a big platter-familiar but forever out of place. As far as Karin was concerned it would be better if she had not brought anything at all.

“You see that suitcase,” Ann said. “Up there on top of the wardrobe? Do you think you could just climb up on a chair and tilt it over the edge so that I could catch it? I tried but I got dizzy. Just tilt it over and I’ll catch it.”

Karin climbed up and pushed the suitcase over so that it teetered on the edge of the wardrobe, and Ann caught it. She thanked Karin breathlessly and plopped it down on the bed.

“I’ve got the key, I’ve got the key here,” she said.

The lock was stiff and the clasps hard to pry open. Karin helped. When the lid fell back a smell of mothballs rose from a heap of limp cloth. The smell was well known to Karin from the secondhand stores where Rosemary liked to shop.

“Are these your mom’s old things?” she said.

“Karin! It’s my wedding dress,” said Ann, half laughing. “That’s only the old sheet it’s wrapped up in.” She picked the grayish cloth away and lifted out a bundle of lace and taffeta. Karin cleared a place for it on the bed. Then very carefully Ann began turning it right side out. The taffeta rustled like leaves.

“My veil, too,” Ann said, lifting a film that clung to the taffeta. “Oh, I should have taken better care of it.”

There was a long fine slit in the skirt that looked as if it could have been made by a razor blade.

“I should have had it hanging up,” said Ann. “1 should have had it in one of those bags you get from the cleaner’s. Taffeta is so fragile. That cut came from where it was folded. I knew that too. Never, never fold taffeta.”

Now she began to separate one piece of material from another, lifting it bit by bit with little private sounds of encouragement, until she was able to shake the whole thing into the shape of a dress. The veil was loose on the floor. Karin picked it up.

“Net,” she said. She talked to keep the sound of Derek’s voice out of her head.

“Tulle,” said Ann. “T-u-l-l-e. Lace and tulle. Shame on me for not taking better care. It’s a wonder it lasted as well as it has. It’s a wonder it lasted at all.”

“Tulle,” said Karin. “I never heard of tulle. I don’t think I ever heard of taffeta.”

“They used a lot of it,” Ann said. “Once upon a time.”

“Do you have a picture of you in it? Do you have a picture of your wedding?”

“Mother and Dad had a picture, but I’ve no idea what became of it. Derek isn’t one for wedding pictures. He wasn’t even one for weddings. I don’t know how I got away with it. I had it in the Stoco church, think of that. And I had my three girlfriends, Dorothy Smith and Muriel Lifton and Dawn Challeray. Dorothy played the organ and Dawn was my bridesmaid and Muriel sang.”

Karin said, “What color did your bridesmaid wear?”

“Apple green. A lace dress with chiffon inserts. No, the other way round. Chiffon with lace.”

Ann said all this in a slightly skeptical voice, examining the seams of the dress.

“What did the one who sang sing?”

“Muriel. ‘O Perfect Love.’ O, Perfect Love, all human love transcending-but it’s really a hymn. It’s really talking about a divine kind of love. I don’t know who picked it.”

Karin touched the taffeta. It felt dry and cool.

“Try it on,” she said.

“Me?” Ann said. “It’s made for somebody with a twenty-four-inch waist. Did Derek get away to town? With his film?”

She didn’t listen to Karin say yes. She must of course have heard the car.

“He thinks he has to get a pictorial record,” she said. “I don’t know why all the hurry. Then he’s going to get it all boxed and labelled. He seems to think he’s never going to see it again. Did he give you the impression the place was sold?”

“Not yet,” said Karin.

“No. Not yet. And I wouldn’t do it unless I had to. I won’t do it unless I have to. Though I think I will have to. Sometimes things just become necessary. People don’t have to make it all into a tragedy or some personal kind of punishment.”

“Can I try it?” Karin said.

Ann looked her over. She said, “We have to be very careful.”

Karin stepped out of her shoes and her shorts and pulled off her shirt. Ann lowered the dress over her head, shutting her up for a moment in a white cloud. The lace sleeves had to be worked down delicately, until the points they ended in were lying on the backs of Karin’s hands. They made her hands look brown, though she wasn’t tanned yet. The hooks and eyes had to be done up all down the side of the waist, then there were more hooks and eyes at the back of the neck. They had to hold a band of lace tight around Karin’s throat. Wearing nothing underneath the dress but her underpants, she felt her skin prickle at the touch of lace. Lace was more deliberate, in its here-and-there contact, than anything she was used to. She shrank from feeling it against her nipples, but fortunately it was looser there, pooked out where Ann’s breasts had been. Karin’s chest was still almost flat, but sometimes her nipples felt swollen, tender, as if they were going to burst.

The taffeta had to be pulled out from between her legs and arranged into a bell-like skirt. Then lace fell in loops over the skirt.

“You’re taller than I thought,” Ann said. “You could walk around in it if you just held it up a bit.”

She took a hairbrush from the dresser and began to brush Karin’s hair down over her lace-covered shoulders.

“Nut-brown hair,” she said. “1 remember in books, girls used to be described as having nut-brown hair. And you know they did use nuts to color it. My mother remembered girls boiling walnuts to make a dye and then putting the dye on their hair. Of course if you got the stain on your hands it was a dead giveaway. It was so hard to get out.

“Hold still,” she said, and shook the veil down over the smooth hair, then stood in front of Karin to pin it on. “The headdress to this has disappeared altogether,” she said. “I must have used it for something else or given it away to somebody to wear at their wedding. I can’t remember. Anyway it would look silly nowadays. It was a Mary Queen of Scots.”

She looked around and picked some silk flowers-a branch of apple blossoms-out of a vase on the dresser. This new idea meant she had to take the pins out and start again, bending the apple blossom stem to make a headdress. The stem was stiff, but at last she got it bent and pinned to her satisfaction. She moved out of the way and gently pushed Karin in front of the mirror.

Karin said, “Oh. Can I have it for when I get married?”

She didn’t mean that. She had never thought of getting married. She said it to please Ann, after all Ann’s effort, and to cover her embarrassment when she looked into the mirror.

“They’ll have something so different in style then,” Ann said. “This isn’t even in style now.”

Karin looked away from the mirror and looked into it again, better prepared. She saw a saint. The shining hair and the pale blossoms, the faint shadows of the falling lace on her cheeks, the storybook dedication, the kind of beauty so in earnest about itself that there is something fated about it, and something foolish. She made a face to crack that face open, but it didn’t work-it seemed as if the bride, the girl born in the mirror, was now the one in control.

“I wonder what Derek would say if he saw you now,” Ann said. “I wonder if he’d even know it was my wedding dress?” Her eyelids were fluttering in their shy troubled way. She stood close to take the blossoms and pins out. Karin smelled soap from under her arms, and garlic on her fingers.

“He’d say, What kind of a stupid outfit is that?” said Karin, doing a superior Derek voice, as Ann lifted the veil away.

They heard the car coming down the valley. “Speak of the devil,” said Ann. Now she was in such a great hurry to undo the hooks and eyes her fingers were clumsy and trembling. When she tried to pull the dress over Karin’s head something got caught.

“Curses,” Ann said.

“You go on,” said Karin, muffled up. “You go on and let me. I’ve got it.”

When she emerged she saw Ann’s face twisted in what looked like grief.

“I was just kidding about Derek,” she said. But perhaps Ann’s look was just one of alarm and concern about the dress.

“What do you mean?” Ann said. “Oh. Hush. Forget it.”

Karin stood still on the stairs to hear their voices in the kitchen. Ann had run down ahead of her.

Derek said, “Is that going to be good? Whatever you’re making?”

“I hope so,” said Ann. “It’s osso buco.”

Derek’s voice had changed. He wasn’t mad anymore. He was eager to make friends. Ann’s voice was relieved, out of breath, trying to match up with his new mood.

“Is there going to be enough for company?” he said.

“What company?”

“Just Rosemary. I hope there’s enough, because I asked her.”

“Rosemary and Karin,” Ann said calmly. “There’s enough of this, but there isn’t any wine.”

“There is now,” said Derek. “I got some.”

Then there was some muttering or whispering from Derek to Ann. He must be standing very close to her and talking against her hair or her ear. He seemed to be teasing, pleading, comforting, promising to reward her, all at once. Karin was so afraid that words would surface out of this-words she would understand and never forget-that she went banging down the stairs and into the kitchen, calling, “Who’s this Rosemary? Did I hear ‘Rosemary’?”

“Don’t sneak up on us like that, enfant,” said Derek. “Make a little noise so we hear you coming.”

“Did I hear ‘Rosemary’?”

“Your mother’s name,” he said. “I swear to you, your mother’s name.”

All the tight displeasure was gone. He was full of challenges and high spirits, as he’d been sometimes last summer.

Ann looked at the wine and said, “That’s lovely wine, Derek, that’ll go beautifully. Let’s see. Karin, you can help. We’ll set the long table on the porch. We’ll use the blue dishes and the good silver-isn’t it lucky we just cleaned the silver. We’ll put two sets of candles. The tall yellow ones in the middle, Karin, and a circle of little white ones around them.”

“Like a daisy,” Karin said.

“That’s right,” said Ann. “A celebration dinner. Because you’re back for the summer.” “What can I do?” said Derek.

“Let me think. Oh-you can go out and get me some things for the salad. Some lettuce and some sorrel, and do you think there’s any cress in the creek?”

“There is,” said Derek. “I saw some.”

“Get some of that too.”

Derek glided a hand round her shoulders. He said, “All will be well.”

When they were almost ready Derek put on a record. This was one of the records he had taken to Rosemary’s place and must have brought back here. It was called Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute, and it had a cover that showed a group of old-fashioned, exquisitely thin ladies, all wearing high-waisted dresses, with little curls down in front of their ears, and dancing in a circle. The music had often inspired Derek to do a stately and ridiculous dance, in which Karin and Rosemary would join him. Karin could match him in a dance, but Rosemary couldn’t. Rosemary tried too hard, she moved a little late, she tried to imitate what could only be spontaneous.

Karin started dancing now, round the kitchen table where Ann was tearing salad and Derek was opening the wine. “Ancient airs and dances for the lute” she sang raptly. “My mom is coming to supper, my mom is coming to supper.”

“I believe Karin’s mom is coming to supper,” said Derek. He held up his hand. “Quiet, quiet. Is that her car I hear?”

“Oh, dear. I should at least wash my face,” said Ann. She dropped the greens and hurried into the hall and up the stairs.

Derek went to stop the record. He took the needle back to the beginning. When he had it going again he went out to meet Rosemary-a thing he did not usually do. Karin had intended to run out herself. But when Derek did, she decided not to. Instead she followed Ann up the stairs. Not all the way, though. There was a small window on the landing where nobody ever halted or looked out. A net curtain over it, so that you were not likely to be seen.

She was quick enough to see Derek stepping across the lawn, going through the gap in the hedge. Long, eager, stealthy strides. He would be in time to bend and open the car door, to open it with a flourish and help Rosemary out. Karin had never seen him do that, but she knew he meant to do it now.

Ann was still in the bathroom-Karin could hear the shower. There would be a few minutes for her to watch undisturbed.

And now she heard the car door shut. But she did not hear their voices. She couldn’t, with the music pouring through the house. And they hadn’t come into sight in the gap in the hedge. Not yet. And not yet. And not yet.

Once after Rosemary left Ted she came back. Not to the house- she was not supposed to come to the house. Ted delivered Karin to a restaurant and there Rosemary was. The two of them had lunch in the restaurant. Karin had a Shirley Temple and chips. Rosemary told her that she was going to Toronto, that she had a job there with a publisher. Karin did not know what a publisher was.

Here they come. Pressing together through the gap in the hedge, where they should have gone single file. Rosemary is wearing her harem pants, made of thin, soft, raspberry-colored cotton. Her shadowy legs show through. Her top is of heavier cotton covered with embroidery and some tiny, sewn-on mirrors. She seems to be concerned about her piled-up hair-her hands fly up, in a gesture of charming nervousness, to loosen some more little wisps and curls that can flutter and dangle around her face. (Something the way those ladies’ curls dangle over their ears, on the cover of Ancient Airs and Dances.) Her fingernails are painted to match her pants.

Derek is not putting his hands on Rosemary anywhere but looks as if he is always just about to do so.

“Yes, but will you live there?” said Karin in the restaurant.

Tall Derek bends close to Rosemary’s wild pretty hair, as if that is a nest he is all but ready to drop into. He is so intent. Whether he touches her or not, whether he speaks to her or not. He is pulling her to him, studiously attending to the job. But being pulled himself, being tempted to delight. Karin can just recognize that lovely flirting feeling when you’re saying, No, I’m not sleepy, no, I’m still awake-

Rosemary at this moment doesn’t know what to do, but thinks she doesn’t yet have to do anything. Look at her spinning around in her cage of rosy colors. Her cage of spun sugar. Look at Rosemary twittering and beguiling.

Rich as stink, he said.

Ann comes out of the bathroom, her gray hair dark and damp, pushed flat to her head, her face glowing from the shower. “Karin. What are you doing here?” “Watching.” “Watching what?”

“A pair of lover-do vers.”

“Oh now Karin,” says Ann, going on down the stairs.

And soon come happy cries from the front door (special occasion) and from the hallway, “What is that marvellous smell?” (Rosemary). “Just some old bones Ann’s simmering” (Derek).

“And that-it’s beautiful,” says Rosemary as the sociable flurry moves into the living room. Speaking of the bunch of green leaves and June grass and early orange lilies Ann has stuck in the cream jug by the living-room door.

“Just some old weeds Ann hauled in,” says Derek, and Ann says, “Oh well, I thought they looked nice,” and Rosemary says again, “Beautiful.”

Rosemary said after lunch that she wanted to get Karin a present. Not for a birthday and not for Christmas-just a wonderful present.

They went to a department store. Every time Karin slowed down to look at something, Rosemary showed immediate enthusiasm and willingness to buy it. She would have bought a velvet coat with a fur collar and cuffs, an antique-style painted rocking horse, a pink plush elephant that looked about a quarter life-size. To put an end to this miserable wandering, Karin picked out a cheap ornament-the figure of a ballerina poised on a mirror. The ballerina did not twirl around, there was no music played for her-nothing that could justify the choice. You would think that Rosemary would understand that. She should have understood what such a choice said-that Karin was not to be made happy, amends were not possible, forgiveness was out of the question. But she didn’t see that. Or she chose not to. She said, “Yes. I like that. She’s so graceful. She’ll look pretty on your dresser. Oh, yes.”

Karin put the ballerina away in a drawer. When Grace found it, she explained that a friend at school had given it to her and that she couldn’t hurt the friend’s feelings by saying it wasn’t the kind of thing she liked.

Grace wasn’t so used to children then, or she might have questioned such a story.

“I can understand that,” she said. “I’ll just give it to the hospital sale-it’s not likely she’ll ever see it there. Anyway they must have made hundreds like it.”

Ice cubes cracked downstairs, as Derek dropped them into the drinks. Ann said, “Karin’s around somewhere, I’m sure she’ll pop up in a minute.”

Karin went softly, softly up the remaining stairs and into Ann’s room. There were the tumbled clothes on the bed, and the wedding dress, again wrapped up in its sheet, lying on top of them. She took off her shorts and her shirt and her shoes and began the desperate, difficult process of getting into this dress. Instead of trying to put it on over her head, she wriggled her way up into it, through the crackling skirt and lace bodice. She got her arms into the sleeves, being careful not to snag the lace with a fingernail. Her fingernails were mostly too short to be a problem, but she was careful anyway. She pulled the lace points over her hands. Then she did up all the hooks at the waist. The hardest thing was to do the hooks at the back of the neck. She bent her head and hunched her shoulders, trying to make those hooks easier to get at. Even so, she had a disaster-the lace ripping a little under one arm. That shocked her and even made her stop for a second. But it seemed she had gone too far to give up now, and she got the rest of the hooks fastened without mishap. She could sew up that tear when she got the dress off. Or she could lie, and claim she had noticed it before she had put the dress on. Ann might not see it anyway.

Now the veil. She had to be very careful with the veil. Any tear would show. She shook it all out and tried to secure it with the branch of apple blossoms, just as Ann had done. But she couldn’t get the branch to bend properly or the slippery pins to hold it. She thought it might be better to tie the whole thing on with a ribbon or a sash. She went to Ann’s closet to see if she could find something. And there hung a man’s tie rack, a man’s ties. Derek’s ties, though she had never seen him wearing a tie.

She pulled a striped tie off the rack and tied it around her forehead, tying it at the back of her head, holding the veil firmly in place. She did this in front of the mirror and when it was done she saw that she had created a gypsy effect, a flaunting comic effect. An idea came to her which forced her to undo with strenuous effort all those hooks and eyes, then pad the front of the dress with tightly wadded-up clothing from Ann’s bed. She filled and overfilled the lace that had hung limp, being fashioned for Ann’s breasts. Better this way, better to make them laugh. She could not then get all the hooks done up afterwards, but she got enough to hold the clownish cloth bosom in place. She got the neck band fastened as well. She was sweating all over when she finished.

Ann didn’t wear lipstick or eye makeup, but on the top of the dresser there was, surprisingly, a pot of hardened rouge. Karin spat in it and rubbed round splotches on her cheeks.

The front door led into the hall at the bottom of the stairs, and from this hall a side door led into the sunporch, and another door (on the same side) led into the living room. You could also go directly from the porch into the living room, through a door at the far end. The house was oddly planned or not planned at all, Ann said. Things had been altered or added on just as people thought of them. The long narrow glassed-in porch was no good for catching the sun, since it was on the east side of the house and shaded, in any case, by a stand of poplar saplings that had got out of hand and grown up quickly, as poplars do. In Ann’s childhood the porch’s main use was for storing apples, though she and her sister had loved the roundabout route provided by the three doors. And she liked the room now, for serving supper in during the summertime. When the table was pulled out there was hardly room to walk between the chairs and the inner wall. But if you seated people along one side, facing the windows, and at either end-that was the way the table was set tonight-there was room for a thin person, and certainly for Karin, to pass.

Karin came downstairs barefoot. Nobody could see her from the living room. And she chose not to go into that room by the usual door, but to enter the porch and go alongside the table and then appear, or burst in on them, from the porch where they would never have expected her to be.

The porch was already shadowy. Ann had lit the two tall yellow candles, though not the little white ones that were clustered round them. The yellow ones had a scent of lemons, which she was probably counting on to dispel any stuffiness in the room. Also she had opened the window at one end of the table. On the stillest evening you could always get a breeze from the poplars.

Karin used both hands to hold her skirt as she went past the table. She had to hold it up slightly so that she could walk. And she did not want the taffeta to make a noise. She meant to start singing “Here comes the bride” just as she appeared in the doorway.

Here comes the bride

Fair, fat, and wide.

See how she wobbles

From side to side-

The breeze came towards her with a little gust of energy and pulled her veil. But it was held to her head so tightly that she had no worries about losing it.

As she turned to go into the living room the whole veil rose and drifted through the flames of the candles. The people in the room no sooner saw her than they saw the fire that was chasing her. She herself had just time to smell the lace as it crumbled-a queer poisonous edge on the smell of the marrow bones cooking for dinner. Then a rush of nonsensical heat and screams, a brutal pitching into darkness.

Rosemary got to her first, pounding her head with a cushion. Ann ran for the crock in the hallway and threw water, lilies, grass, and all onto her fiery veil and hair. Derek tore the rug up off the floor, sending stools and tables and drinks crashing, and was able to wrap Karin tightly and suffocate the last flames. Some bits of lace stayed smoldering in her soaked hair, and Rosemary got her fingers burned, tearing them out.

The skin on her shoulders and on her upper back and on one side of her neck was marred by burning. Derek’s tie had kept the veil back a little from her face and so saved her from the most telling traces. But even when her hair grew long again and she brushed it forward, it could not altogether hide the damage to her neck.

She had a series of skin grafts, and then she looked better. By the time she was in college she could wear a bathing suit.

When she first opened her eyes in the room in the Belleville hospital, she saw all sorts of daisies. White daisies, yellow and pink and purple daisies, even on the windowsill.

“Aren’t they lovely?” Ann said. “They keep sending them.

They keep sending more, and the first ones are still fresh, or at least not ready to throw out. Everywhere they stop on their trip they send some. They ought to be in Cape Breton by now.”

Karin said, “Did you sell the farm?”

Rosemary said, “Karin.”

Karin closed her eyes and tried again.

“Did you think it was Ann?” said Rosemary. “Ann and Derek are off on a trip. I was just telling you. Ann did sell the farm, or anyway she’s going to. That’s a funny thing for you to be thinking about.”

“They’re on their honeymoon,” said Karin. This was a trick- to bring Ann back if it was really her-to make her say, reprovingly, “Oh, Karin.”

“It’s the wedding dress making you think of that,” Rosemary said. “They’re actually on a trip looking for where they want to live next.”

So it was really Rosemary. And Ann on the trip. Ann on the trip with Derek.

“It would have to be a second honeymoon,” Rosemary said. “You never hear about anybody going on their third honeymoon, do you? Or their eighteenth honeymoon?”

It was all right, everybody was in the right place. Karin felt as if she might be the one who had brought this about, through some exhausting effort. She knew she should feel satisfaction. She did feel satisfaction. But it all seemed unimportant in some way. As if Ann and Derek and perhaps even Rosemary were behind a hedge that was too thick and troublesome to climb through.

“I’m here though,” said Rosemary. “I’ve been here all the time. But they won’t let me touch you.”

She said this last thing as if it was a matter for heartbreak.

She still says this once in a while.

“What I remember most is that I couldn’t touch you and wondering if you understood.”

Karin says yes. She understood. What she doesn’t bother to say is that back then she thought Rosemary’s sorrow was absurd. It was as if she was complaining about not being able to reach across a continent. For that was what Karin felt she had become- something immense and shimmering and sufficient, ridged up in pain in some places and flattened out, otherwise, into long dull distances. Away off at the edge of this was Rosemary, and Karin could reduce her, any time she liked, into a configuration of noisy black dots. And she herself-Karin-could be stretched out like this and at the same time shrunk into the middle of her territory, as tidy as a bead or a ladybug.

She came out of that, of course, she came back to being a Karin. Everybody thought she was just the same except for her skin. Nobody knew how she had changed and how natural it seemed to her to be separate and polite and adroitly fending for herself. Nobody knew the sober, victorious feeling she had sometimes, when she knew how much she was on her own.