Friend of My Youth

their friend has to understand how Barbara balances contact with absences, just as they have to understand that Barbara doesn’t want to
do
anything. She does plenty, of course. She does the cooking, she manages the resort. But when people find out how much she has read, and that she’s never been to college, they sometimes suggest that she should go, she should get a degree.
    “What for?” says Barbara.
    And it turns out that she doesn’t want to be a teacher, or a scholar, or a librarian, or an editor, or to make television documentaries, or review books, or write articles. The list of things that Barbara doesn’t want to do is as long as your arm. Apparently she wants to do what she does—read, and go for walks, eat and drink with pleasure, tolerate some company. And unless people can value this about her—her withdrawals, her severe indolence (she has an air of indolence even when she’s cooking an excellent dinner for thirty people)—they don’t remain among the company she tolerates.
    When Murray was busy renovating and borrowing money and involving himself in municipal life, Barbara was reading. She had always read, but now she let it take up more and more of her time. The children had started to school. Some days Barbara never left the house. There was always a coffee cup by her chair, and a pile of fat dusty books from the library,
Remembrance of Things Past, Joseph and His Brothers
, books by lesserRussians whom Murray had never heard of. Barbara has a real mania for reading, his mother said—isn’t she worried about bringing all those books from the library into the house? You never know who has been handling them.
    Reading such heavy books, Barbara grew heavier herself. She did not get really fat, but she put on twenty or twenty-five pounds, well distributed over her tall, never delicate frame. Her face changed, too—flesh blurred its firm lines, making her look softer and in a way younger. Her cheeks puffed out and her mouth looked more secretive. Sometimes she had—she still has—the expression of a self-absorbed and rather willful little girl. Nowadays she reads skimpy-looking books by Czechs or Japanese or Rumanians, but she is still heavy. Her hair is still long, too, and black, except around the face, where it has gone white, as if a piece of veiling had been thrown over it.
    Murray and Barbara are driving down out of the hills, from twisting, hilly roads to the flat, straight grid of the farmland. They are driving to Walley, for a special reason. Two weeks ago Barbara discovered a lump in the flesh of one of her buttocks. She was drying herself after coming out of the pond—it was the last swim, the last spurt of warm weather of the year. The lump was about the size of a marble. “If I wasn’t so fat, I’d probably have found it sooner,” she said, without particular regret or alarm. She and Murray spoke of the lump as they would of a bad tooth—a nuisance that had to be dealt with. She had it removed in the hospital in Walley. Then there had to be a biopsy.
    “Is it possible to have cancer of the buttock?” she asked the doctor. “What an undignified thing!”
    The doctor said that the lump could be a floater—malignant cells that had their origin somewhere else in the body. A sealed message. And they could remain a mystery—bad cells whose home base could never be found. If indeed they proved to be bad cells at all. “The future is unclear till we know,” said the doctor.
    Yesterday the doctor’s receptionist phoned and said that the results were in. She made an appointment for Barbara to see the doctor in his office in Walley that afternoon.
    “Is that all?” Murray said.
    “All what?”
    “Is that all she said?”
    “She’s just the receptionist. That’s all she’s supposed to say.”
    They are driving between walls of corn. The stalks are eight or nine feet high. Any day now the farmers will start to cut them. The sun is low enough even by midafternoon to shine through the cornstalks and turn them to coppery gold. They drive through an orderly radiance, mile after mile.
    Last night they stayed up late; they watched an old, old movie,
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
. Murray had seen it when he was a child, in the Roxy Theatre, in Walley. All he had remembered was the part about Buddy getting killed and Henry Fonda chipping out the pine-tree coffin.
    Thinking about that, he starts to sing. “ ‘Oh, they cut down the old pine tree, and they hauled it away