Friend of My Youth

manners would bang it.
    “I know, I know who that’ll be,” says their mother. “It’ll be Mrs. Loony Buttler, what do you want to bet?” She slips out of her canvas shoes and slides the archway doors open carefully, without a creak. She tiptoes to the front window of the no longer used living room, from which she can squint through the shutters and see the front veranda. “Oh, shoot,” she says. “It is.”
    Mrs. Buttler lives in one of the three cement-block houses across the road. She is a tenant. She has white hair, but she pushes it up under a turban made of different-colored pieces of velvet. She wears a long black coat. She has a habit of stopping children on the street and asking them things. Are you just getting home from school now—did you have to stay in? Does your mother know you chew gum? Did you throw bottle caps in my yard?
    “Oh, shoot,” their mother says. “There isn’t anybody I’d sooner not see.”
    Mrs. Buttler isn’t a constant visitor. She arrives irregularly, with some long rigmarole of complaint, some urgent awful news. Many lies. Then, for the next several weeks, she passes the house without a glance, with the long quick strides and forward-thrust head that take away all the dignity of her black outfit. She is preoccupied and affronted, muttering to herself.
    The knocker sounds again, and their mother walks softly to the doorway into the front hall. There she stops. On one side of the big front door is a pane of colored glass with a design so intricate that it’s hard to see through, and on the other, where a pane of colored glass has been broken (one night when we partied a bit too hard, their mother has said), is a sheet of wood. Their mother stands in the doorway barking.
Yap-yap-yap
, shebarks, like an angry little dog shut up alone in the house. Mrs. Buttler’s turbanned head presses against the glass as she tries to see in. She can’t. The little dog barks louder. A frenzy of barking—angry excitement—into which their mother works the words
go away, go away, go away
. And
loony lady, loony lady, loony lady. Go away, loony lady, go away
.
    Mrs. Buttler stands outside for some time in the white heat. She blocks the light through the glass.
    On her next visit she says, “I never knew you had a dog.”
    “We don’t,” their mother says. “We’ve never had a dog. Often I think I’d like a dog. But we’ve never had one.”
    “Well, I came over here one day, and there was nobody home. Nobody came to the door, and, I could swear to it, I heard a dog barking.”
    “It may be a disturbance in your inner ear, Mrs. Buttler,” their mother says next. “You should ask the doctor.”
    “I think I could turn into a dog quite easily,” their mother says later. “I think my name would be Skippy.”
    They got a name for Mrs. Buttler. Mrs. Buncler, Mrs. Buncle, and finally Mrs. Carbuncle. It suited. Without knowing exactly what a carbuncle was, Joan understood how the name fitted, attaching itself memorably to something knobby, deadened, awkward, intractable in their neighbor’s face and character.
    Mrs. Carbuncle had a daughter, Matilda. No husband, just this daughter. When the Fordyces sat out on the side veranda after supper—their mother smoking and Morris smoking, too, like the man of the house—they might see Matilda going around the corner, on her way to the confectionery that stayed open late, or to get a book out of the library before it closed. She never had a friend with her. Who would bring a friend to a house ruled by Mrs. Carbuncle? But Matilda didn’t seem lonely or shy or unhappy. She was beautifully dressed. Mrs. Carbuncle could sew—in fact, that was how she made what money she made,doing tailoring and alterations for Gillespie’s Ladies’ and Men’s Wear. She dressed Matilda in pale colors, often with long white stockings.
    “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy gold hair,” their mother says softly, seeing Matilda pass by. “How can she be Mrs. Carbuncle’s daughter? You tell me!”
    Their mother says there is something fishy. She wouldn’t be at all surprised—she wouldn’t be at
all
surprised—to find out that Matilda is really some rich girl’s child, or the child of some adulterous passion, whom Mrs. Carbuncle is being paid to raise. Perhaps, on the other hand, Matilda was kidnapped as a baby, and knows nothing about it. “Such things happen,” their mother says.
    The beauty of Matilda, which prompted this talk, was truly of the