Friend of My Youth

with Ben, when they were both so young, a world of ceremony, of safety, of gestures, concealment. Fond appearances. More than appearances. Fond contrivance. (Shethought when she left that she would have no use for contrivance anymore.) She had been happy there, from time to time. She had been sullen, restless, bewildered, and happy. But she said most vehemently, Never, never. I was never happy, she said.
    People always say that.
    People make momentous shifts, but not the changes they imagine.
    Just the same, Georgia knows that her remorse about the way she changed her life is dishonest. It is real and dishonest. Listening to Raymond, she knows that whatever she did she would have to do again. She would have to do it again, supposing that she had to be the person she was.
    Raymond does not want to let Georgia go. He does not want to part with her. He offers to drive her downtown. When she has gone, he won’t be able to talk about Maya. Very likely Anne has told him that she does not want to hear any more on the subject of Maya.
    “Thank you for coming,” he says on the doorstep. “Are you sure about the ride? Are you sure you can’t stay to dinner?”
    Georgia reminds him again about the bus, the last ferry. She says no, no, she really wants to walk. It’s only a couple of miles. The late afternoon so lovely, Victoria so lovely. I had forgotten, she says.
    Raymond says once more, “Thank you for coming.”
    “Thank you for the drinks,” Georgia says. “Thank you, too. I guess we never believe we are going to die.”
    “Now, now,” says Raymond.
    “No. I mean we never behave—we never behave as if we believed we were going to die.”
    Raymond smiles more and more and puts a hand on her shoulder. “How should we behave?” he says.
    “Differently,” says Georgia. She puts a foolish stress on theword, meaning that her answer is so lame that she can offer it only as a joke.
    Raymond hugs her, then involves her in a long chilly kiss. He fastens onto her with an appetite that is grievous but unconvincing. A parody of passion, whose intention neither one of them, surely, will try to figure out.
    She doesn’t think about that as she walks back to town through the yellow-leafed streets with their autumn smells and silences. Past Clover Point, the cliffs crowned with broombushes, the mountains across the water. The mountains of the Olympic Peninsula, assembled like a blatant backdrop, a cutout of rainbow tissue paper. She doesn’t think about Raymond, or Miles, or Maya, or even Ben.
    She thinks about sitting in the store in the evenings. The light in the street, the complicated reflections in the windows. The accidental clarity.

Wigtime

    When her mother was dying in the Walley Hospital, Anita came home to take care of her—though nursing was not what she did anymore. She was stopped one day in the corridor by a short, broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with clipped grayish-brown hair.
    “I heard you were here, Anita,” this woman said, with a laugh that seemed both aggressive and embarrassed. “Don’t look so dumfounded!”
    It was Margot, whom Anita had not seen for more than thirty years.
    “I want you to come out to the house,” Margot said. “Give yourself a break. Come out soon.”
    Anita took a day off and went to see her. Margot and her husband had built a new house overlooking the harbor, on a spot where there used to be nothing but scrubby bushes and children’s secret paths. It was built of gray brick and was long and low. But high enough at that, Anita suggested—high enough to put some noses out of joint across the street, in the handsome hundred-year-old houses with their prize view.
    “Bugger them,” said Margot. “They took up a petition against us. They went to the Committee.”
    But Margot’s husband already had the Committee sewed up.
    Margot’s husband had done well. Anita had already heard that. He owned a fleet of buses that took children to school and senior citizens to see the blossoms in Niagara and the fall leaves in Haliburton. Sometimes they carried singles clubs and other holidayers on more adventurous trips—to Nashville or Las Vegas.
    Margot showed her around. The kitchen was done in almond—Anita made a mistake, calling it cream—with teal-green and butter-yellow trim. Margot said that all that natural-wood look was passé. They did not enter the living room, with its rose carpet, striped silk chairs, and yards and yards of swooping pale-green figured