Dear Life

the new models finally on the scene, and farmers who’d made money in the war ready to turn in the old ones, he had a talk with Belle. The horse Freckles was God knows how old and stubborn on any sort of hill.
    He found that the car dealer had been taking notice of him, though not counting on a visit.
    “I always thought you and your sister was Mennonites but ones that wore a different kind of outfit,” the dealer said.
    That shook Jackson up a little but at least it was better than husband and wife. It made him realize how he must have aged and changed over the years, and how the person who had jumped off the train, that skinny nerve-racked soldier, would not be so recognizable in the man he was now. Whereas Belle, so far as he could see, was stopped at some point in life where she remained a grown-up child. And her talk reinforced this impression, jumping back and forth, into the past and out again, so that it seemed she made no difference between their last trip to town and the last movie she had seen with her mother and father, or the comical occasion when Margaret Rose—now dead—had tipped her horns at a worried Jackson.
    It was the second car that they had owned, a used one of course, that took them to Toronto in the summer of 1962. This was a trip they had not anticipated and it came at an awkward time for Jackson. For one thing, he was building anew horse barn for the Mennonites, who were busy with the crops, and for another, he had his own harvest of vegetables coming on that he had sold to the grocery store in Oriole. But Belle had a lump that she had finally been persuaded to pay attention to, and she was booked now for an operation in Toronto.
    What a change, Belle kept saying. Are you so sure we are still in Canada?
    This was before they got past Kitchener. Once they got on the new highway she was truly alarmed, imploring him to find a side road or else turn around and go home. He found himself speaking sharply at that—the traffic was surprising him too. She stayed quiet all the way after that, and he had no way of knowing whether she had her eyes closed because she had given up or because she was praying. He had never known her to pray.
    Even this morning she had tried to get him to change his mind about going. She said the lump was getting smaller, not larger. Since the health insurance for everybody had come in, she said, nobody did anything but run to the doctor, and make their lives into one long drama of hospitals and operations, which did nothing but prolong the period of being a nuisance at the end of life.
    She calmed down and cheered up once they got to their turnoff and were actually in the city. They found themselves on Avenue Road, and in spite of exclamations about how everything had changed, she seemed to be able on every block to recognize something she knew. There was the apartment building where one of the teachers from Bishop Strachan had lived. In its basement there was a shop where you could buy milk and cigarettes and the newspaper.Wouldn’t it be strange, she said, if you could go in there and still find the
Telegram
, where there would be not only her father’s name but his smudgy picture, taken when he still had all his hair?
    Then a little cry, and down a side street she had seen the very church—she could swear it was the very church—in which her parents had been married. They had taken her there to show her, though it wasn’t a church they had gone to. They did not go to any church, far from it. It was sort of a joke. Her father said they had been married in the basement but her mother said the vestry.
    Her mother could talk readily then, she was like anybody else.
    Perhaps there was a law at the time, to make you get married in a church or it wasn’t legal.
    At Eglinton she saw the subway sign.
    “Just think, I have never been on a subway train.”
    She said this with some sort of mixed pain and pride.
    “Imagine remaining so ignorant.”
    At the hospital they were ready for her. She continued to be lively, telling them about her horrors in the traffic and about the changes, wondering if there was still such a show put on at Christmas by Eaton’s store. And did anybody still read the
Telegram
?
    “You should have driven in through Chinatown,” one of the nurses said. “Now that’s something.”
    “I’ll look forward to seeing it on my way home.” She laughed, and said, “If I get to go home.”
    “Now don’t be silly.”
    Another nurse was talking