Dance of the Happy Shades

and lean-tos; not possible on these streets, but there.
    “What are they saying,” said Edith, putting on more coffee. She was surrounded in her kitchen by the ruins of the birthday party—cake and molded jellies and cookies with animal faces. A balloon rolled underfoot. The children had been fed, had posed for flash cameras and endured the birthday games; nowthey were playing in the back bedrooms and the basement, while their parents had coffee. “What are they saying in there?” said Edith.
    “I wasn’t listening,” Mary said, holding the empty cream pitcher in her hand. She went to the sink window. The rent in the clouds had been torn wide open and the sun was shining. The house seemed too hot.
    “Mrs. Fullerton’s house,” said Edith, hurrying back to the living-room. Mary knew what they were talking about. Her neighbours’ conversation, otherwise not troubling, might at any moment snag itself on this subject and eddy menacingly in familiar circles of complaint, causing her to look despairingly out of windows, or down into her lap, trying to find some wonderful explanatory word to bring it to a stop; she did not succeed. She had to go back; they were waiting for cream.
    A dozen neighbourhood women sat around the living room, absently holding the balloons they had been given by their children. Because the children on the street were so young, and also because any gathering-together of the people who lived there was considered a healthy thing in itself, most birthday parties were attended by mothers as well as children. Women who saw each other every day met now in earrings, nylons and skirts, with their hair fixed and faces applied. Some of the men were there too—Steve, who was Edith’s husband, and others he had invited in for beer; they were all in their work clothes. The subject just introduced was one of the few on which male and female interest came together.
    “I tell you what I’d do if I was next door to it, “Steve said, beaming good-naturedly in expectation of laughter. “I’d send my kids over there to play with matches.”
    “Oh, funny,” Edith said. “It’s past joking. You joke, I try to do something. I even phoned the Municipal Hall.”
    “What did they say?” said Mary Lou Ross.
    “Well
I
said couldn’t they get her to paint it, at least, or pull down some of the shacks, and they said no they couldn’t. Isaid I thought there must be some kind of ordinance applied to people like that and they said they knew how I
felt
and they were very
sorry—
”
    “But no?”
    “But no.”
    “But what about the chickens, I thought—”
    “Oh, they wouldn’t let you or me keep chickens, but she has some special dispensation about that too, I forgot how it goes.”
    “I’m going to stop buying them,” Janie Inger said. “The supermarket’s cheaper and who cares that much about fresh? And my God, the smell. I said to Carl I knew we were coming to the sticks but I somehow didn’t picture us next door to a barnyard.”
    “Across the street is worse than next door. It makes me wonder why we ever bothered with a picture window, whenever anybody comes to see us I want to draw the drapes so they won’t see what’s across from us.”
    “Okay, okay,” Steve said, cutting heavily through these female voices. “What Carl and I started out to tell you was that, if we can work this lane deal, she has got to go. It’s simple and it’s legal. That’s the beauty of it.”
    “What lane deal?”
    “We are getting to that. Carl and I been cooking this for a couple of weeks, but we didn’t like to say anything in case it didn’t work out. Take it, Carl.”
    “Well she’s on the lane allowance, that’s all,” Carl said. He was a real estate salesman, stocky, earnest, successful. “I had an idea it might be that way, so I went down to the Municipal Hall and looked it up.”
    “What does that mean, dear?” said Janie, casual, wifely.
    “This is it,” Carl said. “There’s an allowance for a lane, there always has been, the idea being if the area ever got built up they would put a lane through. But they never thought that would happen, people just built where they liked. She’s got part of her house and half a dozen shacks sitting right wherethe lane has to go through. So what we do now, we get the municipality to put through a lane. We need a lane anyway. Then she has to get out. It’s the law.”
    “It’s the law,” said Steve, radiating admiration. “What a smart