Dear Life

been anywhere in sight.
    One thing I came to understand on that visit, or when I thought about it afterwards. A man I didn’t quite recognize spoke to me, and after a minute I realized he was somebody I’d known for years and greeted on the street for half my life. If I’d seen him there I might have known him, in spite of certain ravages of age. But here I hadn’t, and we laughed about that, and he wanted to know if I was moving into the boneyard.
    I said I hadn’t realized they called it that, but yes, I guessed I was.
    Then he wanted to know whether I played euchre, and I said I did, up to a point.
    “That’ll be good,” he said.
    And I thought then, Just living long enough wipes out theproblems. Puts you in a select club. No matter what your disabilities may have been, just living till now wipes them out, to a good measure. Everybody’s face will have suffered, never just yours.
    That made me think of Oneida, and how she looked while she was talking to me about moving in. She was not slender anymore but gaunt, tired, no doubt, from the nights of getting up with me, but her age was telling, beyond that. Her beauty had been delicate all along. A blond woman’s easily flushing kind of looks, with that strange mixture of apology and high-class confidence about it was what she’d had, and lost. When she set out to make her proposal to me, she looked strained and her expression was peculiar.
    Of course if I had ever had the right to choose, I would naturally, according to my height, have picked a smaller girl. Like the college girl, dainty and dark-haired, who was related to the Krebses and worked there for a summer.
    One day that girl had said to me in a friendly way that I could get a better job done on my face, nowadays. I’d be amazed, she said. And it wouldn’t cost, with OHIP.
    She was right. But how could I explain that it was just beyond me to walk into some doctor’s office and admit that I was wishing for something I hadn’t got?
    Oneida was looking better than formerly when she showed up in the midst of my packing and discarding. She’d had her hair done, and the color changed somewhat, maybe browner.
    “You mustn’t throw everything out in one fell swoop,” she said. “All you’d collected for that town history.”
    I said I was being selective, though that was not entirely true. It seemed to me that both of us were pretending to care about what happened, more than we really did. When I thought about the town history now, it seemed as if one town must after all be much like another.
    We did not mention my going into the apartment building. As if that had all been discussed and taken for granted long ago.
    She said that she was going off on one of her trips, and this time she named the place. Savary Island, as if that was enough.
    I asked politely where that was and she said, “Oh, it’s off the coast.”
    As if that answered the question.
    “Where an old friend of mine lives,” she said.
    Of course that might be true.
    “She’s on e-mail. She says that’s what I should do. I’m not keen on it somehow. But I might as well try it.”
    “I suppose you never know till you try.”
    I felt as if I should say something more. Ask about the weather there, or something, out where she was going. But before I could think of what to say she gave a most unusual little shriek or cry, and then put her hand to her mouth and moved with large cautious steps to my window.
    “Careful, careful,” she said. “Look. Look.”
    She was laughing almost soundlessly, a laugh that might even indicate that she was in pain. She moved one hand behind her back to hush me as I got to my feet.
    In the backyard of my house there was a birdbath. I had put it in years ago so that my mother could watch the birds. She was very fond of birds and could recognize them bytheir song as well as their appearance. I had neglected it for a good while and had just filled it up that morning.
    Now what?
    It was full of birds. Black-and-white, dashing up a storm.
    Not birds. Something larger than robins, smaller than crows.
    She said, “Skunks. Little skunks. More white in them than black.”
    But how beautiful. Flashing and dancing and never getting in each other’s way, so you could not tell how many there were, where each body started or stopped.
    While we watched, they lifted themselves up one by one and left the water and proceeded to walk across the yard, swiftly but in a straight diagonal line. As if they were proud of