Dance of the Happy Shades

exploring in the dark a new dimension of bitterness. She had a feeling that her grandmother did not
believe
in her own reasons any more, that she did not care, but would go on pulling these same reasons out of the bag, flourishing them nastily, only to see what damage they could do. Her grandmother said, “Heather-miss-what’s-her-name. I
seen
her, stepping out of the bus this morning.”
    May walked out of the store straight through the back room and through the kitchen to the back yard. She went and sat down by the pump. An old wooden trough, green with decay, ran down from the spout of the pump to an island of cool mud in the dry clumps of grass. She sat there and after a while she saw a big toad, rather an old and tired one she thought, flopping around in the grass; she trapped it in her hands.
    She heard the screen door shut; she did not look. She saw her grandmother’s shoes, her incredible ankles moving towards her across the grass. She held the toad in one hand and with the other she picked up a little stick; methodically she began to prod it in the belly.
    “You quit that,” her grandmother said. May dropped the stick. “Let that miserable thing go,” she said, and very slowly May opened her fingers. In the close afternoon she could smell the peculiar flesh smell of her grandmother who stood over her; it was sweetish and corrupt like the smell of old apple peel going soft, and it penetrated and prevailed over the more commonplace odours of strong soap and dryironed cotton and tobacco which she always carried around with her.
    “I bet you don’t know,” her grandmother said loudly. “I bet you don’t know what’s been going through my head in there in the store.” May did not answer but bent down and began to pick with interest at a scab on her leg.
    “I been thinking I might sell the store,” her grandmother said in this same loud monotonous voice as if she were talking to a deaf person or some larger power. Standing looking at the ragged pine-blue horizon, holding her apron down in an old woman’s gesture with her flat hands, she said, “You and me could get on the train and go out and see Lewis.” It was her son in California, whom she had not seen for about twenty years.
    Then May had to look up to see if her grandmother was playing some kind of trick. The old woman had always said that the tourists were fools to think one place was any better than another and that they would have been better off at home.
    “You and me could take a trip to the coast,” her grandmother said. “Wouldn’t cost so much, we could sit up nights and pack some food along. It’s better to pack your own food, you know what you’re getting.”
    “You’re too old,” May said cruelly. “You’re seventy-eight.”
    “People my age are travelling to the Old Country and all over, you look in the papers.”
    “You might have a heart attack,” May said.
    “They could put me in that car with the lettuce and tomatoes,” the old woman said, “and ship me home cold.” Meanwhile May could see the coast; she saw a long curve of sand like the beach at the lake only longer and brighter; the very words,
The Coast
, produced a feeling of coolness and delight in her. But she did not trust them, she could not understand; when in her life had her grandmother promised her any fine thing before?
    There was a man standing at the front of the store drinking a lemon-lime. He was a small middle-aged man with a puffy, heat-shiny face; he wore a white shirt, not clean, a pale silk tie. The old woman had moved her stool up to the front counter and she sat there talking to him. May stood with her back to both of them looking out the front door. The clouds were dingy; the world was filled with an old, dusty unfriendly light that seemed to come not from the sky alone but from the flat brick walls, the white roads, the grey bush-leaves rustling and the metal signs flapping in the hot, monotonous wind. Ever since her grandmother had followed her into the back yard she had felt as if something had changed, something had cracked; yes, it was that new light she saw in the world. And she felt something about herself—like power, like the unsuspected still unexplored power of her own hostility, and she meant to hold it for a while and turn it like a cold coin in her hand.
    “What company are you travelling for?” her grandmother said. The man said, “Rug Company.”
    “Don’t they let a man go home to his family on the