Friend of My Youth

could not pay the electricity bill or their suppliers. They could not keep on running the Confectionery. At least they believed they couldn’t. Maybe they simply had not the heart to go on.
    The store was locked. A sign went up on the door: “ CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE .” Nearly a year went by before the place was reopened. It had been turned into a laundromat.
    People said it was Maria’s mother, that big, meek, bent-over woman, who insisted on bringing charges against her daughter. She was scared of the English language and the cash register, but she brought Maria into court. Of course, Maria could only be charged as a juvenile, and she could only be sent to a place for young offenders, and nothing could be done about the boys at all. They all lied anyway—they said it wasn’t them. Maria’s parents must have found jobs, they must have gone on living inVictoria, because Lisa did. She still swam at the Y, and in a few years she was working at Eaton’s, in Cosmetics. She was very glamorous and haughty by that time.
    Neil always has vodka and orange juice for them to drink. That’s Brenda’s choice. She read somewhere that orange juice replenishes the vitamin C that the liquor leeches away, and she hopes the vodka really can’t be detected on your breath. Neil tidies up the trailer, too—or so she thinks, because of the paper bag full of beer cans leaning against the cupboard, a pile of newspapers pushed together, not really folded, a pair of socks kicked into a corner. Maybe his housemate does it. A man called Gary, whom Brenda has never met or seen a picture of, and wouldn’t know if they met on the street. Would he know her? He knows she comes here, he knows when; does he even know her name? Does he recognize her perfume, the smell of her sex, when he comes home in the evening? She likes the trailer, the way nothing in it has been made to look balanced or permanent. Things set down just wherever they will be convenient. No curtains or placemats, not even a pair of salt and pepper shakers—just the salt box and pepper tin, the way they come from the store. She loves the sight of Neil’s bed—badly made, with a rough plaid blanket and a flat pillow, not a marriage bed or a bed of illness, comfort, complication. The bed of his lust and sleep, equally strenuous and oblivious. She loves the life of his body, so sure of its rights. She wants commands from him, never requests. She wants to be his territory.
    It’s only in the bathroom that the dirt bothers her a bit, like anybody else’s dirt, and she wishes they’d done a better job of cleaning the toilet and the washbasin.
    They sit at the table to drink, looking out through the trailer window at the steely, glittering, choppy water of the lake. Here the trees, exposed to lake winds, are almost bare. Birch bones and poplars stiff and bright as straw frame the water. Theremay be snow in another month. Certainly in two months. The seaway will close, the lake boats will be tied up for the winter, there’ll be a wild landscape of ice thrown up between the shore and the open water. Neil says he doesn’t know what he’ll do, once the work on the beach is over. Maybe stay on, try to get another job. Maybe go on unemployment insurance for a while, get a snowmobile, enjoy the winter. Or he could go and look for work somewhere else, visit friends. He has friends all over the continent of North America and out of it. He has friends in Peru.
    “So what happened?” Brenda says. “Don’t you have any idea what happened to Maria?”
    Neil says no, he has no idea.
    The story won’t leave Brenda alone; it stays with her like a coating on the tongue, a taste in the mouth.
    “Well, maybe she got married,” she says. “After she got out. Lots of people get married who are no beauties. That’s for sure. She might’ve lost weight and be looking good even.”
    “Sure,” says Neil. “Maybe have guys paying her, instead of the other way round.”
    “Or she might still be just sitting in one of those places. One of those places where they put people.”
    Now she feels a pain between her legs. Not unusual after one of these sessions. If she were to stand up at this moment, she’d feel a throb there, she’d feel the blood flowing back down through all the little veins and arteries that have been squashed and bruised, she’d feel herself throbbing like a big swollen blister.
    She takes a long drink and says, “So how much money did you get out of