Friend of My Youth

this was costing, but her mother didn’t think they would be charged, since they hadn’t asked for it.) The nurses brought her magazines, which she looked at but could not read, being too dazzled and comfortably distracted. She couldn’t tell whether time passed quickly or slowly, and she didn’t care. Sometimes she dreamed orimagined that Reuel visited her. He showed a sombre tenderness, a muted passion. He loved but relinquished her, caressing her hair.
    A couple of days before she was due to go home, her mother came in shiny-faced from the heat of summer, which was now upon them, and from some other disruption. She stood at the end of Anita’s bed and said, “I always knew you thought it wasn’t fair of me.”
    By this time Anita had felt a few holes punched in her happiness. She had been visited by her brothers, who banged against the bed, and her father, who seemed surprised that she expected to kiss him, and by her aunt, who said that after an operation like this a person always got fat. Now her mother’s face, her mother’s voice came pushing at her like a fist through gauze.
    Her mother was talking about Margot. Anita knew that immediately by a twitch of her mouth.
    “You always thought I wasn’t fair to your friend Margot. I was never fussy about that girl and you thought I wasn’t fair. I know you did. So now it turns out. It turns out I wasn’t so wrong after all. I could see it in her from an early age. I could see what you couldn’t. That she had a sneaky streak and she was oversexed.”
    Her mother delivered each sentence separately, in a reckless loud voice. Anita did not look at her eyes. She looked at the little brown mole beneath one nostril. It seemed increasingly loathsome.
    Her mother calmed down a little, and said that Reuel had taken Margot to Kincardine on the school bus at the end of the day’s run on the very last day of school. Of course they had been alone in the bus at the beginning and the end of the run, ever since Anita got sick. All they did in Kincardine, they said, was eat French-fried potatoes. What nerve! Using a school bus for their jaunts and misbehaving. They drove back that evening, but Margot did not go home. She had not gone home yet. Her fatherhad come to the store and beat on the gas pumps and broken them, scattering glass as far as the highway. He phoned the police about Margot, and Reuel phoned them about the pumps. The police were friends of Reuel’s, and now Margot’s father was bound over to keep the peace. Margot stayed on at the store, supposedly to escape a beating.
    “That’s all it is, then,” Anita said. “Stupid God-damned gossip.”
    But no. But no. And don’t swear at me, young lady.
    Her mother said that she had kept Anita in ignorance. All this had happened and she had said nothing. She had given Margot the benefit of the doubt. But now there was no doubt. The news was that Teresa had tried to poison herself. She had recovered. The store was closed. Teresa was still living there, but Reuel had taken Margot with him and they were living here, in Walley. In a back room somewhere, in the house of friends of his. They were living together. Reuel was going out to work at the garage every day, so you could say that he was living with them both. Would he be allowed to drive the school bus in future? Not likely. Everybody was saying Margot must be pregnant. Javex, was what Teresa took.
    “And Margot never confided in you,” Anita’s mother said. “She never sent you a note or one thing all the time you’ve been in here. Supposed to be your friend.”
    Anita had a feeling that her mother was angry at her not only because she’d been friends with Margot, a girl who had disgraced herself, but for another reason as well. She had the feeling that her mother was seeing the same thing that she herself could see—Anita unfit, passed over, disregarded, not just by Margot but by life. Didn’t her mother feel an angry disappointment that Anita was not the one chosen, the one enfolded by drama and turned into a woman and swept out on such a surge of life? She would never admit that. And Anita could not admit that she felt a great failure. She was a child, a know-nothing, betrayed by Margot, who had turned out to know a lot. She saidsulkily, “I’m tired talking.” She pretended to fall asleep, so that her mother would have to leave.
    Then she lay awake. She lay awake all night. The nurse who came in the next morning said, “Well, don’t you