Dear Life

that he was too bulky to ride up beside her. Or maybe the beard needed space. I don’t see Oneida looking downtrodden or unhappy at the arrangement, nor her father looking actually unhappy. Dignity was what he had, and plenty of it. She had something different. When she went into a store or even walked on the street, there seemed to be a little space cleared around her, made ready for whatever she might want or greetings she might spread. She seemed then a bit flustered but gracious, ready to laugh a little at herself or the situation. Of course she had her good bones and bright looks, all that fair dazzle of skin and hair. So it might seem strange that I could feel sorry for her, the way she was all on the surface of things, trusting.
    Imagine me, sorry.
    The war was on, and it seemed things changed overnight. Tramps no longer followed the trains. Jobs opened up, and the young men were not searching for jobs or hitching rides but appearing everywhere in their dull blue or khaki uniforms. My mother said it was lucky for me that I was howI was, and I believed she was right but told her not to say that outside the house. I was home from Goderich, finished with my apprenticing, and I got work right away doing the books at Krebs’s department store. Of course it might have been said, and probably was, that I got the job because of my mother working there in dry goods, but there was also the coincidence of Kenny Krebs, the young manager, going off to join the Air Force and being killed on a training flight.
    There was shock like that and yet a welcome energy everywhere, and people going around with money in their pockets. I felt cut off from men of my own age, but my being cut off in a way was nothing so new. And there were others in the same boat. Farmers’ sons were exempt from service to look after the crops and the animals. I knew some who took the exemption even though there was a hired man. I knew that if anybody asked me why I was not in service it would be a joke. And I was ready with the response that I had to look after the books. Krebs’s books and soon others. Had to look after the figures. It wasn’t quite accepted yet that women could do that. Even by the end of the war, when they’d been doing some of it for a while. For truly reliable service it was still believed you needed a man.
    I’ve asked myself sometimes, Why should a harelip, decently if not quite cleverly tidied up, and a voice that sounded somewhat peculiar but was capable of being understood, have been considered enough to keep me home? I must have got my notice, I must have gone to the doctor to get an exemption. I simply don’t remember. Was it that I was so used to being exempted from one thing or another that I took it, like a lot of other things, completely for granted?
    I may have told my mother to be quiet on certain matters, but what she said did not usually carry much weight withme. Invariably she looked on the bright side. Other things I knew but not from her. I knew that because of me she was afraid to have any more children and had lost a man who was once interested in her when she told him that. But it didn’t occur to me to feel sorry for either of us. I didn’t miss a father dead before I could have seen him, or any girlfriend I could have had if I’d looked different, or the brief swagger of walking off to war.
    My mother and I had things we liked to eat for supper, and radio programs we liked to listen to, and always the BBC overseas news before we went to bed. My mother’s eyes would glisten when the king spoke, or Winston Churchill. I took her to see the movie
Mrs. Miniver
, and she was affected by that as well. Drama filled our lives, the fictional kind and the real kind. The evacuation from Dunkirk, the brave behavior of the royal family, the bombing of London night after night and Big Ben still ringing to announce its somber news. Ships lost at sea and then, most dreadfully, a civilian boat, a ferry, sunk between Canada and Newfoundland, that close to our own shores.
    That night I could not sleep and walked the streets of the town. I had to think of the people gone to the bottom of the sea. Old women, nearly old women like my mother, hanging on to their knitting. Some kid bothered by a toothache. Other people who had spent their last half hour before drowning complaining of seasickness. I had a very strange feeling that was part horror and part—as near as I can describe it—a kind of chilly exhilaration. The