Dear Life

Franklin was asleep. He was really asleep, I could always tell if he was shamming.
    I hate going to sleep knowing there are dirty dishes on the table, but I had felt suddenly too tired to do them with Gwen helping as I knew she would. I meant to get up early in the morning to clear things away.
    But I woke to full daylight and a clatter in the kitchen and the smell of breakfast as well as the smell of cigarettes. Conversation too, and it was Franklin talking when I would have expected Gwen. I heard her laughing at whatever he said. I got up at once and hurried into my clothes and fixed my hair, a thing I never usually bother with so early.
    All the safety and merriment of the evening was gone from me. I made a good deal of noise coming down the stairs.
    Gwen was at the sink with a row of sparkling clean glass jars on the draining board.
    “Done the dishes all by hand because I was scared I wouldn’t get the hang of your dishwasher,” she said. “Then I got hold of these jars up there and I thought I might as well do them while I was at it.”
    “They haven’t been washed in a century,” I said.
    “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
    Franklin said he’d gone out and tried the car again, but no go. He had got hold of the garage though, and they’d said that somebody could come up and look at it this afternoon. But he thought instead of waiting around he’d tow the car down there and they could get at it this morning.
    “Gives Gwen a chance to get at the rest of the kitchen,” I said, but neither one was interested in my joke. He said no, Gwen had better go with him, they’d want to talk to her since it was her car.
    I noticed that he had a little trouble saying the name Gwen, having to push aside Dolly.
    I said I had been joking.
    He asked if he could make me any breakfast and I said no.
    “How she keeps her figure,” Gwen said. And somehow even this compliment turned into a thing they could laugh at together.
    Neither gave any sign of knowing how I felt, though it seemed to me I was behaving oddly, with every remark I made coming out like some brittle kind of mockery. They are so full of themselves, I thought. It was an expression that came from I don’t know where. When Franklin went out to prepare the car to be towed she followed, as if she didn’t want to lose sight of him for a moment.
    As she left she called back that she could never thank me enough.
    Franklin tooted the horn to wish me good-bye, a thing he never did normally.
    I wanted to run after them, pound them to pieces. I walked up and down as this grievous excitement got more and more of a hold on me. There was no doubt at all about what I should do.
    In a fairly short time I went out and got into my car, having dropped my house key through the slot in the front door. I had a suitcase beside me, though I had already more or less forgotten what I’d put in it. I had written a terse note saying that I had to check some facts about Martha Ostenso and then I started to write a longer note which I intended to address to Franklin but did not want Gwen to see when she came back with him as she surely would. It said that he must be free to do as he wished and that the only thing that was unbearable to me was the deception or perhaps it was self-deception. There was nothing for it but for him to admitwhat he wanted. It was ridiculous and cruel to make me watch it and so I would just get out of the way.
    I went on to say that no lies, after all, were as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling to make the whole puke stay down in our stomachs, eating us alive, as he would find out soon enough. And so on, a berating that became in even so short a space somewhat repetitive and rambling and more and more without dignity or grace. I understood now that it would have to be rewritten before I could let it go to Franklin so I had to take it with me and send it through the mail.
    At the end of our driveway I turned in the other direction from the village and the garage, and in no time, as it seemed, I was driving east on a major highway. Where was I going? If I didn’t make up my mind soon I was going to find myself in Toronto, and it seemed to me that far from getting into a hiding place there I was bound to run into places and people all tied up with my former happiness, and Franklin.
    To keep this from happening I turned and headed for Cobourg. A town that we had never been in together.
    It wasn’t even noon yet. I