Friend of My Youth

another pencil—a red one—to outline her mouth. The bow in the upper lip looked as if it had been cut with scissors.
    What a relief, what a joy, then, to get inside, into the light, to smell the oil heater and set their books on the counter and take their hands out of their mittens and rub the pain from their fingers. Then they bent over and rubbed their legs—the bare inch or so that was numb and in danger of freezing. They did not wear stockings, because it wasn’t the style. They wore ankle socks inside their boots (their saddle shoes were left at school). Their skirts were long—this was the winter of 1948–49—but there was still a crucial bit of leg left unprotected. Some country girls wore stockings under their socks. Some even wore ski pants pulled up bulkily under their skirts. Margot and Anita wouldnever do that. They would risk freezing rather than risk getting themselves laughed at for such countrified contrivances.
    Teresa brought them cups of coffee, hot black coffee, very sweet and strong. She marvelled at their courage. She touched a finger to their cheeks or their hands and gave a little shriek and a shudder. “Like ice! Like ice!” To her it was amazing that anybody would go out in the Canadian winter, let alone walk a mile in it. What they did every day to get to school made them heroic and strange in her eyes, and a bit grotesque.
    This seemed to be particularly so because they were girls. She wanted to know if such exposure interfered with their periods. “Will it not freeze the eggs?” was what she actually said. Margot and Anita figured this out and made a point, thereafter, of warning each other not to get their eggs frozen. Teresa was not vulgar—she was just foreign. Reuel had met and married her overseas, in Alsace-Lorraine, and after he went home she followed on the boat with all the other war brides. It was Reuel who ran the school bus, this year when Margot and Anita were seventeen and in grade twelve. Its run started here at the store and gas station that the Gaults had bought on the Kincardine highway, within sight of the lake.
    Teresa told about her two miscarriages. The first one took place in Walley, before they moved out here and before they owned a car. Reuel scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the hospital. (The thought of being scooped up in Reuel’s arms caused such a pleasant commotion in Anita’s body that in order to experience it she was almost ready to put up with the agony that Teresa said she had undergone.) The second time happened here in the store. Reuel, working in the garage, could not hear her weak cries as she lay on the floor in her blood. A customer came in and found her. Thank God, said Teresa, for Reuel’s sake even more than her own. Reuel would not have forgiven himself. Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes did a devout downward swoop, when she referred to Reuel and their intimate life together.
    While Teresa talked, Reuel would be passing in and out ofthe store. He went out and got the engine running, then left the bus to warm up and went back into the living quarters, without acknowledging any of them, or even answering Teresa, who interrupted herself to ask if he had forgotten his cigarettes, or did he want more coffee, or perhaps he should have warmer gloves. He stomped the snow from his boots in a way that was more an announcement of his presence than a sign of any concern for floors. His tall, striding body brought a fan of cold air behind it, and the tail of his open parka usually managed to knock something down—Jell-O boxes or tins of corn, arranged in a fancy way by Teresa. He didn’t turn around to look.
    Teresa gave her age as twenty-eight—the same age as Reuel’s. Everybody believed she was older—up to ten years older. Margot and Anita examined her close up and decided that she looked burned. Something about her skin, particularly at the hairline and around the mouth and eyes, made you think of a pie left too long in the oven, so that it was not charred but dark brown around the edges. Her hair was thin, as if affected by the same drought or fever, and it was too black—they were certain it was dyed. She was short, and small-boned, with tiny wrists and feet, but her body seemed puffed out below the waist, as if it had never recovered from those brief, dire pregnancies. Her smell was like something sweet cooking—spicy jam.
    She would ask anything, just as she would tell anything. She asked Margot and Anita if they