Friend of My Youth

“Fasten your seat belts! Adjust your oxygen masks! Say your prayers! We’re takin’ to the highway!” Then he’d sing to himself, just under the racket of the bus, as they got clear of town. Nearer home his mood of the morning took over, with its aloofness and unspecific contempt. He might say, “Here you are, ladies—end of a perfect day,” as they got off. Or he might say nothing. But indoors Teresa was full of chat. Those school days she talked about led into wartime adventures: a German soldier hiding in the garden, to whom she had taken a little cabbage soup; then the first Americans she saw—black Americans—arriving on tanks and creating a foolish and wonderful impression that the tanks and the men were all somehow joined together. Then her little wartime wedding dress being made out of her mother’s lace tablecloth. Pink roses pinned in her hair. Unfortunately, the dress had been torn up for rags to use in the garage. How could Reuel know?
    Sometimes Teresa was deep in conversation with a customer. No treats or hot drinks then—all they got was a flutter of her hand, as if she were being borne past in a ceremonial carriage. They heard bits of the same stories. The German soldier, the black Americans, another German blown to pieces, his leg, in its boot, ending up at the church door, where it remained, everybody walking by to look at it. The brides on the boat. Teresa’s amazement at the length of time it took to get from Halifax to here on the train. The miscarriages.
    They heard her say that Reuel was afraid for her to have another baby.
    “So now he always uses protections.”
    There were people who said they never went into that store anymore, because you never knew what you’d have to listen to, or when you’d get out.
    In all but the worst weather Margot and Anita lingered at the spot where they had to separate. They spun the day out alittle longer, talking. Any subject would do. Did the geography teacher look better with or without his mustache? Did Teresa and Reuel still actually carry on, as Teresa implied? They talked so easily and endlessly that it seemed they talked about everything. But there were things they held back.
    Anita held back two ambitions of hers, which she did not reveal to anybody. One of them—to be an archeologist—was too odd, and the other—to be a fashion model—was too conceited. Margot told her ambition, which was to be a nurse. You didn’t need any money to get into it—not like university—and once you graduated you could go anywhere and get a job. New York City, Hawaii—you could get as far away as you liked.
    The thing that Margot kept back, Anita thought, was how it must really be at home, with her father. According to her, it was all like some movie comedy. Her father beside himself, a hapless comedian, racing around in vain pursuit (of fleet, mocking Margot) and rattling locked doors (the granary) and shouting monstrous threats and waving over his head whatever weapon he could get hold of—a chair or a hatchet or a stick of firewood. He tripped over his own feet and got mixed up in his own accusations. And no matter what he did, Margot laughed. She laughed, she despised him, she forestalled him. Never, never did she shed a tear or cry out in terror. Not like her mother. So she said.
    After Anita graduated as a nurse, she went to work in the Yukon. There she met and married a doctor. This should have been the end of her story, and a good end, too, as things were reckoned in Walley. But she got a divorce, she moved on. She worked again and saved money and went to the University of British Columbia, where she studied anthropology. When she came home to look after her mother, she had just completed her Ph.D. She did not have any children.
    “So what will you do, now you’re through?” said Margot.
    People who approved of the course Anita had taken in lifeusually told her so. Often an older woman would say, “Good for you!” or, “I wish I’d had the nerve to do that, when I was still young enough for it to make any difference.” Approval came sometimes from unlikely quarters. It was not to be found everywhere, of course. Anita’s mother did not feel it, and that was why, for many years, Anita had not come home. Even in her present sunken, hallucinatory state, her mother had recognized her, and gathered her strength to mutter, “Down the drain.”
    Anita bent closer.
    “
Life
,” her mother said. “Down the
drain
.”
    But another time,