Friend of My Youth

the high cupboards.
    “Parents and children, Karin,” he says, sighing, sighing, looking humorous. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we—have children. Then they always want us to be the same, they want us to be parents—it shakes them up dreadfully if we should do anything they didn’t think we’d do. Dreadfully.”
    “I guess she’ll get used to it,” Karin says, without much sympathy.
    “Oh, she will, she will. Poor Megan.”
    Then he says he’s going uptown to have his hair cut. He doesn’t want to leave it any longer, because he always looks and feels so foolish with a fresh haircut. His mouth turns down as he smiles—first up, then down. That downward slide is what’s noticeable on him everywhere—face slipping down into neck wattles, chest emptied out and mounded into that abrupt, queer little belly. The flow has left dry channels, deep lines. Yet Austin speaks—it’s his perversity to speak—as if out of a body that is light and ready and a pleasure to carry around.
    In a short time the phone rings again and Karin has to climb down and answer it.
    “Karin? Is that you, Karin? It’s Megan!”
    “Your father’s just gone up to get a haircut.”
    “Good. Good. I’m glad. It gives me a chance to talk to you. I’ve been hoping I’d get a chance to talk to you.”
    “Oh,” says Karin.
    “Karin. Now, listen. I know I’m behaving just the way adult children are supposed to behave in this situation. I don’t like it. I don’t like that in myself. But I can’t help it. I’m suspicious. I wonder what’s going on. Is he all right? What do you think of it? What do you think of this woman he’s going to marry?”
    “All I ever saw of her is her picture,” Karin says.
    “I am terribly busy right now and I can’t just drop everything and come home and have a real heart-to-heart with him. Anyway, he’s very difficult to talk to. He makes all the right noises, he seems so open, but in reality he’s very closed. He’s never been at all a personal kind of person, do you know what I mean? He’s never done anything before for a
personal
kind of reason. He always did things
for
somebody. He always liked to find people who
needed
things done for them, a lot. Well, you know that. Even bringing you into the house, you know, to look after Mother—it wasn’t exactly for Mother’s sake or his sake he did that.”
    Karin can picture Megan—the long, dark, smooth hair, parted in the middle and combed over her shoulders, the heavily made-up eyes and tanned skin and pale-pink lipsticked mouth, the handsomely clothed plump body. Wouldn’t her voice bring such looks to mind even if you’d never seen her? Such smoothness, such rich sincerity. A fine gloss on every word and little appreciative spaces in between. She talks as if listening to herself. A little too much that way, really. Could she be drunk?
    “Let’s face it, Karin. Mother was a snob.” (Yes, she is drunk.) “Well, she had to have something. Dragged around from one dump to another, always doing good. Doing good wasn’t her thing at all. So now,
now
, he gives it all up, he’s off to the easy life. In Hawaii! Isn’t it bizarre?”
    “Bizarre.” Karin has heard that word on television and heard people, mostly teen-agers, say it, and she knows it is not the church bazaar Megan’s talking about. Nevertheless that’s what the word makes her think of—the church bazaars that Megan’smother used to organize, always trying to give them some style and make things different. Striped umbrellas and a sidewalk café one year, Devonshire teas and a rose arbor the next. Then she thinks of Megan’s mother on the chintz-covered sofa in the living room, weak and yellow after her chemotherapy, one of those padded, perky kerchiefs around her nearly bald head. Still, she could look up at Karin with a faint, formal surprise when Karin came into the room. “Was there something you wanted, Karin?” The thing that Karin was supposed to ask her, she would ask Karin.
    Bizarre. Bazaar. Snob
. When Megan got in that dig, Karin should have said, at least, “I know that.” All she can think to say is “Megan. This is costing you money.”
    “Money, Karin! We’re talking about my
father
. We’re talking about whether my father is sane or whether he has flipped his
wig
, Karin!”
    A day later a call from Denver. Don, Austin’s son, is calling to tell his father that they better forget about the dining-room furniture, the cost of