Dance of the Happy Shades

little mound of her stomach like a four-months’ pregnancy that rode preposterously under her skinny chest. She had knobby fleshless legs and her arms were brown and veined and twisted like whips. Her head was rather big for her body and with her hair pulled tightly over her skull she had the look of an under-nourished but maliciously intelligent baby.
    “You go on back to bed,” she said to May. May went instead to the kitchen mirror and began combing her hairand twisting it around her finger to see if it would go into a page-boy. She had remembered that it was today Eunie Parker’s cousin was coming. She would have taken Hazel’s curlers and done her hair up, if she thought she could do that without her grandmother knowing.
    Her grandmother closed the door of the front room where Hazel was asleep. She emptied out the coffee pot and put in water and fresh coffee. She got a pitcher of milk out of the icebox, sniffed at it to make sure it was still all right and lifted two ants out of the sugar bowl with her spoon. She rolled herself a cigarette on a little machine she had. Then she sat at the table and read yesterday’s newspaper. She did not speak another word to May until the coffee had perked and she had dampered the fire and the room was almost as light as day.
    “You get your own cup if you want any,” she said.
    Usually she said May was too young to drink coffee. May got herself a good cup with green birds on it. Her grandmother didn’t say anything. They sat at the table drinking coffee, May in her long nightgown feeling privileged and ill at ease. Her grandmother was looking around the kitchen with its stained walls and calendars as if she had to keep it all in sight; she had a rather sly abstracted look.
    May said conversationally, “Eunie Parker has her cousin coming today. Her name is Heather Sue Murray.”
    Her grandmother did not pay any attention. Presently she said, “Do you know how old I am?”
    May said, “No.”
    “Well take a guess.”
    May thought and said, “Seventy?”
    Her grandmother did not speak for so long that May thought this was only another of her conversational blind alleys. She said, informatively, “This Heather Sue Murray has been a Highland dancer ever since she was three years old. She dances in competitions and all.”
    “Seventy-eight,” her grandmother said. “Nobody knows that, I never told. No birth certificate. Never took the pension. Never took relief.” She thought a while and said, “Never was in a hospital. I got enough in the bank to cover burial. Any headstone will have to come out of charity or bad conscience of my relatives.”
    “What do you want a headstone for?” May said sullenly, picking at the oilcloth at a spot where it was worn through. She did not like this conversation; it reminded her of a rather mean trick her grandmother had played on her about three years ago. She had come home from school and found her grandmother lying on that same couch in the back room where she slept now. Her grandmother lay with her hands dropped at her sides, her face the colour of curdled milk, her eyes closed; she wore an expression of pure and unassailable indifference. May had tried saying “Hello” first and then “Grandma” more or less in her everyday voice; her grandmother did not flick a muscle in her usually live and agitated face. May said again, more respectfully, “Grandma” and bending over did not hear the shallowest breath. She put out her hand to touch her grandmother’s cheek, but was checked by something remote and not reassuring in that cold shabby hollow. Then she started to cry, in the anxious, bitten-off way of someone who is crying with no one to hear them. She was afraid to say her grandmother’s name again; she was afraid to touch her, and at the same time afraid to take her eyes off her. However, her grandmother opened her eyes. Without lifting her arms or moving her head she looked up at May with a contrived, outrageous innocence and a curious spark of triumph. “Can’t a person lay down around here?” she said. “Shame to be such a baby.”
    “I never said I
wanted
one,” her grandmother said. “Go and get some clothes on,” she said coldly, as May experimentally stuck one shoulder up through the loose neck of hernightgown. “Unless you think you are one of them Queens of Egypt.”
    “What?” said May looking at her shoulder splotched un-pleasantly with peeling sunburn.
    “Oh, one of them Queens of Egypt I