Friend of My Youth

curtains. They admired it from the doorway—all exquisite, shadowy, inviolate. The master bedroom and its bath were done in white and gold and poppy red. There was a Jacuzzi and a sauna.
    “I might have liked something not so bright myself,” said Margot. “But you can’t ask a man to sleep in pastels.”
    Anita asked her if she ever thought about getting a job.
    Margot flung back her head and snorted with laughter. “Are you kidding? Anyway, I do have a job. Wait till you see the big lunks I have to feed. Plus this place doesn’t exactly run itself on magic horsepower.”
    She took a pitcher of sangria out of the refrigerator and put it on a tray, with two matching glasses. “You like this stuff? Good. We’ll sit and drink out on the deck.”
    Margot was wearing green flowered shorts and a matching top. Her legs were thick and marked with swollen veins, the flesh of her upper arms was dented, her skin was brown, mole-spotted, leathery from lots of sun. “How come you’re still thin?” she asked with amusement. She flipped Anita’s hair. “How come you’re not gray? Any help from the drugstore? You look pretty.” She said this without envy, as if speaking to somebody younger than herself, still untried and unseasoned.
    It looked as if all her care, all her vanity, went into the house.
    Margot and Anita both grew up on farms in Ashfield Township. Anita lived in a drafty shell of a brick house that hadn’t had any new wallpaper or linoleum for twenty years, but there was a stove in the parlor that could be lit, and she sat in there in peace and comfort to do her homework. Margot often did her homework sitting up in the bed she had to share with two little sisters. Anita seldom went to Margot’s house, because of the crowdedness and confusion, and the terrible temper of Margot’s father. Once, she had gone there when they were getting ducks ready for market. Feathers floated everywhere. There were feathers in the milk jug and a horrible smell of feathers burning on the stove. Blood was puddled on the oilclothed table and dripping to the floor.
    Margot seldom went to Anita’s house, because without exactly saying so Anita’s mother disapproved of the friendship. When Anita’s mother looked at Margot, she seemed to be totting things up—the blood and feathers, the stovepipe sticking through the kitchen roof, Margot’s father yelling that he’d tan somebody’s arse.
    But they met every morning, struggling head down against the snow that blew off Lake Huron, or walking as fast as they could through a predawn world of white fields, icy swamps, pink sky, and fading stars and murderous cold. Away beyond the ice on the lake they could see a ribbon of open water, ink-blue or robin’s-egg, depending upon the light. Pressed against their chests were notebooks, textbooks, homework. They wore the skirts, blouses, and sweaters that had been acquired with difficulty (in Margot’s case there had been subterfuge and blows) and were kept decent with great effort. They bore the stamp of Walley High School, where they were bound, and they greeted each other with relief. They had got up in the dark in cold roomswith frost-whitened windows and pulled underwear on under their nightclothes, while stove lids banged in the kitchen, dampers were shut, younger brothers and sisters scurried to dress themselves downstairs. Margot and her mother took turns going out to the barn to milk cows and fork down hay. The father drove them all hard, and Margot said they’d think he was sick if he didn’t hit somebody before breakfast. Anita could count herself lucky, having brothers to do the barn work and a father who did not usually hit anybody. But she still felt, these mornings, as if she’d come up through deep dark water.
    “Think of the coffee,” they told each other, battling on toward the store on the highway, a ramshackle haven. Strong tea, steeped black in the country way, was the drink in both their houses.
    Teresa Gault unlocked the store before eight o’clock, to let them in. Pressed against the door, they saw the fluorescent lights come on, blue spurts darting from the ends of the tubes, wavering, almost losing heart, then blazing white. Teresa came smiling like a hostess, edging around the cash register, holding a cherry-red quilted satin dressing gown tight at the throat, as if that could protect her from the freezing air when she opened the door. Her eyebrows were black wings made with a pencil, and she used