Dear Life

heard it read to her? Or been left to read it by herself?
    If so, her response had not been satisfactory. Whose ever could be?
    Suppose she said that it was lovely? He would have hated that.
    Or she might have wondered out loud how he could get away with what he had got away with. The smut, she might have said. That would have been better, but not as much better as you might think.
    Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry? And not too much or not too little, just enough.
    He put his arms around me, lifted me down from the chair.
    “We can’t afford rows,” he said.
    No indeed. I had forgotten how old we were, forgotten everything. Thinking there was all the time in the world to suffer and complain.
    I could see the key now, the one I had put through the slot. It was in a crack between the hairy brown mat and the doorsill.
    I would have to be on the lookout for that letter I had written as well.
    Supposing I should die before it came? You can think yourself in reasonable shape and then die, just like that. Ought I to leave a note for Franklin to find, just in case?
    If a letter comes addressed to you from me, tear it up.
    The thing was, he would do what I asked. I wouldn’t, in his place. I would rip it open, no matter what promises had been made.
    He’d obey.
    What a mix of rage and admiration I could feel, at his being willing to do that. It went back through our whole life together.

FINALE
    The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last—and the closest—things I have to say about my own life
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THE EYE
    W HEN I was five years old my parents all of a sudden produced a baby boy, which my mother said was what I had always wanted. Where she got this idea I did not know. She did quite a bit of elaborating on it, all fictitious but hard to counter.
    Then a year later a baby girl appeared, and there was another fuss but more subdued than with the first one.
    Up until the time of the first baby I had not been aware of ever feeling different from the way my mother said I felt. And up until that time the whole house was full of my mother, of her footsteps her voice her powdery yet ominous smell that inhabited all the rooms even when she wasn’t in them.
    Why do I say ominous? I didn’t feel frightened. It wasn’tthat my mother actually told me what I was to feel about things. She was an authority on that without having to question a thing. Not just in the case of a baby brother but in the matter of Red River cereal which was good for me and so I must be fond of it. And in my interpretation of the picture that hung at the foot of my bed, showing Jesus suffering the little children to come unto him. Suffering meant something different in those days, but that was not what we concentrated on. My mother pointed out the little girl half hiding round a corner because she wanted to come to Jesus but was too shy. That was me, my mother said, and I supposed it was though I wouldn’t have figured it out without her telling me and I rather wished it wasn’t so.
    The thing I really felt miserable about was Alice in Wonderland huge and trapped in the rabbit hole, but I laughed because my mother seemed delighted.
    It was with my brother’s coming, though, and the endless carryings-on about how he was some sort of present for me, that I began to accept how largely my mother’s notions about me might differ from my own.
    I suppose all this was making me ready for Sadie when she came to work for us. My mother had shrunk to whatever territory she had with the babies. With her not around so much, I could think about what was true and what wasn’t. I knew enough not to speak about this to anybody.
    The most unusual thing about Sadie—though it was not a thing stressed in our house—was that she was a celebrity. Our town had a radio station where she played her guitar and sang the opening welcome song which was her own composition.
    “Hello, hello, hello, everybody—”
    And half an hour later it was, “Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, everybody.” In between she sang songs that were requested, as well as some she picked out herself. The more sophisticated people in town tended to joke about her songs and about the whole station which was said to be the smallest one in Canada. Those people listened to a Toronto station that broadcast popular