Dance of the Happy Shades

It was a picture I was much inclined to resist. Yet I had no doubt that this was true, all this was true and exactly as it happened. It was what she would do; all her life as long as I had known her led up to that flight.
    “Where was she going?” I said, but I knew there was no answer.
    “I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. Oh, Helen, when they came after her she tried to run. She tried to
run.
”
    The flight that concerns everybody. Even behind my aunt’s soft familiar face there is another, more primitive old woman, capable of panic in some place her faith has never touched.
    She began folding the clothes up and putting them back in the box. “They nailed a board across her bed. I saw it. You can’t blame the nurses. They can’t watch everybody. They haven’t the time.
    “I said to Maddy after the funeral, Maddy, may it never happen like that to you. I couldn’t help it, that’s what I said.” She sat down on the bed herself now, folding things and putting them back in the box, making an effort to bring her voice back to normal—and pretty soon succeeding, forhaving lived this long who would not be an old hand at grief and self-control?
    “We thought it was hard,” she said finally. “Lou and I thought it was hard.”
    Is this the last function of old women, beyond making rag rugs and giving us five-dollar bills—making sure the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without?
    She was afraid of Maddy—through fear, had cast her out for good. I thought of what Maddy had said: nobody speaks the same language.
    When I got home Maddy was out in the back kitchen making a salad. Rectangles of sunlight lay on the rough linoleum. She had taken off her high-heeled shoes and was standing there in her bare feet. The back kitchen is a large untidy pleasant room with a view, behind the stove and the drying dishtowels, of the sloping back yard, the CPR station and the golden, marshy river that almost encircles the town of Jubilee. My children who had felt a little repressed in the other house immediately began to play under the table.
    “Where have you been?” Maddy said.
    “Nowhere. Just to see the Aunts.”
    “Oh, how are they?”
    “They’re fine. They’re indestructible.”
    “Are they? Yes I guess they are. I haven’t been to see them for a while. I don’t actually see that much of them any more.”
    “Don’t you?” I said, and she knew then what they had told me.
    “They were beginning to get on my nerves a bit, after the funeral. And Fred got me this job and everything and I’ve been so busy—” She looked at me, waiting for what I would say, smiling a little derisively, patiently.
    “Don’t be guilty, Maddy,” I said softly. All this time the children were running in and out and shrieking at each other between our legs.
    “I’m not guilty,” she said. “Where did you get that? I’m not guilty.” She went to turn on the radio, talking to me over her shoulder. “Fred’s going to eat with us again since he’s alone. I got some raspberries for dessert. Raspberries are almost over for this year. Do they look all right to you?”
    “They look all right,” I said. “Do you want me to finish this?”
    “Fine,” she said. “I’ll go and get a bowl.”
    She went into the dining room and came back carrying a pink cut-glass bowl, for the raspberries.
    “I couldn’t go on,” she said. “I wanted my life.”
    She was standing on the little step between the kitchen and the dining room and suddenly she lost her grip on the bowl, either because her hands had begun to shake or because she had not picked it up properly in the first place; it was quite a heavy and elaborate old bowl. It slipped out of her hands and she tried to catch it and it smashed on the floor.
    Maddy began to laugh. “Oh, hell,” she said. “Oh, hell, oh
Hel
-en,” she said, using one of our old foolish ritual phrases of despair. “Look what I’ve done now. In my bare feet yet. Get me a broom.”
    “Take your life, Maddy. Take it.”
    “Yes I will,” Maddy said. “Yes I will.”
    “Go away, don’t stay here.”
    “Yes I will.”
    Then she bent down and began picking up the pieces of broken pink glass. My children stood back looking at her with awe and she was laughing and saying, “It’s no loss to me. I’ve got a whole shelf full of glass bowls. I’ve got enough glass bowls to do me the rest of my life. Oh, don’t stand there looking at me, go and get me a