Dance of the Happy Shades

high-pitched and not trustful laughter. Mrs. Fullerton was old, as she had said—older than you might think, seeing her hair still fuzzy and black, her clothes slatternly-gay, dime-store brooches pinned to her ravelling sweater. Her eyes showed it, black as plums, with a soft inanimate sheen; things sank into them and they never changed. The life in her face was all in the nose and mouth, which were always twitching, fluttering, drawing tight grimace-lines down her cheeks. When she came around every Friday on her egg deliveries her hair was curled, her blouse held together by a bunch of cotton flowers, her mouth painted, a spidery and ferocious line of red; she would not show herself to her new neighbours in any sad old-womanish disarray.
    “Thought I was his mother,” she said. “I didn’t care. I had a good laugh. But what I was telling you,” she said, “a day in summer, he was off work. He had the ladder up and he was picking me the cherries off of my black-cherry tree. I came out to hang my clothes and there was this man I never seen before in my life, taking the pail of cherries my husband hands down to him. Helping himself, too, not backward, he sat down and ate cherries out of my pail. Who’s that, I said tomy husband, and he says, just a fellow passing. If he’s a friend of yours, I said, he’s welcome to stay for supper. What are you talking about, he says, I never seen him before. So I never said another thing. Mr. Fullerton went and talked to him, eating my cherries I intended for a pie, but that man would talk to anybody, tramp, Jehovah’s Witness, anybody—that didn’t need to mean anything.”
    “And half an hour after that fellow went off,” she said, “Mr. Fullerton comes out in his brown jacket and his hat on. I have to meet a man downtown. How long will you be, I said. Oh, not long. So off he goes down the road, walking down to where the old tram went—we was all in the bush then—and something made me look after him. He must be hot in that coat, I said. And that’s when I knew he wasn’t coming back. Yet I couldn’t’ve expected it, he liked it here. He was talking about putting chinchillas in the back yard. What’s in a man’s mind even when you’re living with him you will never know.”
    “Was it long ago?” said Mary.
    “Twelve years. My boys wanted me to sell then and go and live in rooms. But I said no. I had my hens and a nanny goat too at that time. More or less a pet. I had a pet coon too for a while, used to feed him chewing gum. Well, I said, husbands maybe come and go, but a place you’ve lived fifty years is something else. Making a joke of it with my family. Besides, I thought, if Mr. Fullerton was to come back, he’d come back here, not knowing where else to go. Of course he’d hardly know where to find me, the way it’s changed now. But I always had the idea he might of suffered a loss of memory and it might come back. That has happened.
    “I’m not complaining. Sometimes it seems to me about as reasonable a man should go as stay. I don’t mind changes, either, that helps out my egg business. But this baby-sitting. All the time one or the other is asking me about baby-sitting.I tell them I got my own house to sit in and I raised my share of children.”
    Mary, remembering the birthday party, got up and called to her little boy. “I thought I might offer my black cherries for sale next summer,” Mrs. Fullerton said. “Come and pick your own and they’re fifty cents a box. I can’t risk my old bones up a ladder no more.”
    “That’s too much,” Mary said, smiling. “They’re cheaper than that at the supermarket.” Mrs. Fullerton already hated the supermarket for lowering the price of eggs. Mary shook out her last cigarette and left it with her, saying she had another package in her purse. Mrs. Fullerton was fond of a cigarette but would not accept one unless you took her by surprise. Baby-sitting would pay for them, Mary thought. At the same time she was rather pleased with Mrs. Fullerton for being so unaccommodating. When Mary came out of this place, she always felt as if she were passing through barricades. The house and its surroundings were so self-sufficient, with their complicated and seemingly unalterable layout of vegetables and flower beds, apple and cherry trees, wired chicken-run, berry patch and wooden walks, woodpile, a great many roughly built dark little sheds, for hens or rabbits or a goat. Here was no open or