Dance of the Happy Shades

understand they got at the Kinkaid Fair.”
    When May came back to the kitchen her grandmother was still drinking coffee and looking at the want-ad section of the city paper, as if she had no store to open or breakfast to cook or anything to do all day. Hazel had got up and was ironing a dress to wear to work. She worked in a store in Kinkaid which was thirty miles away and she had to leave for work early. She tried to persuade her mother to sell the store and go and live in Kinkaid which had two movie theatres, plenty of stores and restaurants and a Royal Dance Pavilion; but the old woman would not budge. She told Hazel to go and live where she liked but Hazel for some reason did not go. She was a tall drooping girl of thirty-three, with bleached hair, a long wary face and on oblique resentful expression emphasized by a slight cast, a wilful straying of one eye. She had a trunk full of embroidered pillowcases and towels and silverware. She bought a set of dishes and a set of copper-bottomed pots and put them away in her trunk; she and the old woman and May continued to eat off chipped plates and cook in pots so battered they rocked on the stove.
    “Hazel’s got everything she needs to get married but she just lacks one thing,” the old woman would say.
    Hazel drove all over the country to dances with other girls who worked in Kinkaid or taught school. On Sunday morning she got up with a hangover and took coffee with aspirin and put on her silk print dress and drove off down the road to sing in the choir. Her mother, who said she had no religion, opened up the store and sold gas and ice cream to tourists.
    Hazel hung over the ironing-board yawning and tenderlyrubbing her blurred face and the old woman read out loud, “Tall industrious man, thirty-five years old, desires make acquaintance woman of good habits, non-smoker or drinker, fond of home life, no triflers please.”
    “Aw, Mom,” Hazel said.
    “What’s triflers?” May said.
    “Man in prime of life,” the old woman read relentlessly, “desires friendship of healthy woman without encumbrances, send photograph first letter.”
    “Aw cut it out, Mom,” Hazel said.
    “What’s encumbrances?” May said.
    “Where would you be if I did get married?” Hazel said gloomily with a look on her face of irritable satisfaction.
    “Any time you want to get married you can get.”
    “I got you and May.”
    “Oh, go on.”
    “Well I have.”
    “Oh, go on,” the old woman said with disgust. “I look after my ownself. I always have.” She was going to say a lot more, for this speech was indeed a signpost in her life, but the moment after she had energetically summoned up that landscape which was coloured vividly and artlessly like a child’s crayon drawing, and presented just such magical distortions, she shut her eyes as if oppressed by a feeling of unreality, a reasonable doubt that any of this had ever existed. She tapped with her spoon on the table and said to Hazel, “Well you never had such a dream as I had last night.”
    “I never do dream anyway,” Hazel said.
    The old woman sat tapping her spoon and looking with concentration at nothing but the front of the stove.
    “Dreamt I was walking down the road,” she said. “I was walking down the road past Simmonses’ gate and I felt like a cloud was passing over the sun, felt cold, like. So I looked up and I seen a big bird, oh, the biggest bird you ever saw, blackas that stove top there, it was right over me between me and the sun. Did you ever dream a thing like that?”
    “I never dream anything,” Hazel said rather proudly.
    “Remember that nightmare I had when I was sleeping in the front room after I had the red measles?” May said. “Remember that nightmare?”
    “I’m not talking about any nightmare,” the old woman said.
    “I thought there was people in coloured hats going round and round in that room. Faster and faster so all their hats was blurred together. All the rest of them was invisible except they had on these coloured hats.”
    Her grandmother put her tongue out to lick off some specks of dry tobacco that were stuck to her lips, then got up and lifted the stove lid and spat into the fire. “I might as well talk to a barn wall,” she said. “May, put a coupla sticks in that fire I’ll fry us some bacon. I don’t want to keep the stove on today any longer’n I can help.”
    “It’s going to be hotter today than it was yesterday,” Hazel said placidly. “Me and