Dear Life

house we were allowed to express ourselves as we liked. Though I don’t think my parents themselves would ever have spoken of “good works” or of “doing good.”
    My uncle was satisfied, for the moment. He said that we’d have to drop the subject, as he himself needed to be back at his practice doing his own good works by one o’clock.
    It was probably then that my aunt picked up her fork and began to eat. She would have waited until the bristling was over. This may have been out of habit, rather than out of alarm at my forwardness. She was used to holding back until she was sure that my uncle had said all that he meant to say. Even if I spoke to her directly, she would wait, looking at him to see if he wanted to do the answering. What she did say was always cheerful, and she smiled just as soon as she knew it was okay to smile, so it was hard to think of her as being suppressed. Also hard to think of her as my mother’s sister, because she looked so much younger and fresher and tidier, as well as being given to those radiant smiles.
    My mother would talk right over my father if she had something she really wanted to say, and that was often the case. My brothers, even the one who said he was thinking of becoming a Muslim so that he could chastise women, always listened to her as an equal authority.
    “Dawn’s life is devoted to her husband,” my mother had said, with an attempt at neutrality. Or, more drily, “Her life revolves around that man.”
    This was something that was said at the time, and it wasnot always meant as disparagement. But I had not seen before a woman of whom it seemed so true as Aunt Dawn.
    Of course it would have been quite different, my mother said, if they’d had children.
    Imagine that. Children. Getting in Uncle Jasper’s way, whining for a corner of their mother’s attention. Being sick, sulking, messing up the house, wanting food he didn’t like.
    Impossible. The house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his. Even if he was at his practice next door, or out on a call, things had to be ready for his approval at any moment.
    The slow realization that came to me was that such a regime could be quite agreeable. Bright sterling spoons and forks, polished dark floors, comforting linen sheets—all this household godliness was presided over by my aunt and arrived at by Bernice, the maid. Bernice cooked from scratch, ironed the dish towels. All the other doctors in town sent their linens to the Chinese laundry, while Bernice and Aunt Dawn herself hung ours out on the clothesline. White from the sun, fresh from the wind, sheets and bandages all superior and sweet-smelling. My uncle was of the opinion that the Chinks went too heavy on the starch.
    “Chinese,” my aunt said in a soft, teasing voice, as if she had to apologize to both my uncle and the laundrymen.
    “Chinks,” my uncle said boisterously.
    Bernice was the only one who could say it quite naturally.
    Gradually, I became less loyal to my home, with its intellectual seriousness and physical disorder. Of course it took all a woman’s energy to keep up such a haven as this. You could not be typing out Unitarian manifestos, or running off to Africa. (At first I said, “My parents went to
work
inAfrica,” every time a person in this house spoke of their running off. Then I got sick of making the correction.)
    Haven was the word. “A woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.”
    Did Aunt Dawn actually say that? I don’t think so. She shied away from statements. I probably read it in one of the housekeeping magazines I found in the house. Such as would have made my mother puke.
    At first I explored the town. I found a heavy old bicycle in the back of the garage and took it out to ride without thinking of getting permission. Going downhill on a newly gravelled road above the harbor I lost control. One of my knees was badly scraped, and I had to visit my uncle at his practice attached to the house. He dealt expertly with the wound. He was all business then, matter-of-fact, with a mildness that was quite impersonal. No jokes. He said he couldn’t remember where that bike had come from—it was a treacherous old monster, and if I was keen on bicycling we could see about getting me a decent one. When I got better acquainted with my new school and with the rules about what girls there did after they reached their teens, I realized that biking was out of the question, so