Friend of My Youth

challenging expression.
    But before this, before Matilda got a job, or cut her hair, something happened that showed Joan—by then long past being in love—an aspect, or effect, of Matilda’s beauty that she hadn’t suspected. She saw that such beauty marked you—in Logan, anyway—as a limp might, or a speech impediment. It isolated you—more severely, perhaps, than a mild deformity, because it could be seen as a reproach. After she realized that, it wasn’t so surprising to Joan, though it was still disappointing, to see that Matilda would do her best to get rid of or camouflage that beauty as soon as she could.
    Mrs. Buttler, Mrs. Carbuncle, invading their kitchen as she does every so often, never removes her black coat and her multicolored velvet turban. That is to keep your hopes up, their mother says. Hopes that she’s about to leave, that you’re going to get freeof her in under three hours. Also to cover up whatever god-awful outfit she’s got on underneath. Because she’s got that coat, and is willing to wear it every day of the year, Mrs. Carbuncle never has to change her dress. A smell issues from her—camphorated, stuffy.
    She arrives in mid-spiel, charging ahead in her talk—about something that has happened to her, some person who has outraged her, as if you were certain to know what it was or who. As if her life were on the news and you had just failed to catch the last couple of bulletins. Joan is always eager to listen to the first half hour or so of this report, or tirade, preferably from outside the room, so that she can slip away when things start getting repetitious. If you try to slip away from where Mrs. Carbuncle can see you, she’s apt to ask sarcastically where you’re off to in such a hurry, or accuse you of not believing her.
    Joan is doing that—listening from the dining room, while pretending to practice her piano piece for the public-school Christmas concert. Joan is in her last year at the public grade school, and Matilda is in her last year at high school. (Morris will drop out, after Christmas, to take over the lumberyard.) It’s a Saturday morning in mid-December—gray sky and an iron frost. Tonight the high-school Christmas Dance, the only formal dance of the year, is to be held in the town armory.
    It’s the high-school principal who has got into Mrs. Carbuncle’s bad books. This is an unexceptional man named Archibald Moore, who is routinely called by his students Archie Balls, or Archie Balls More, or Archie More Balls. Mrs. Carbuncle says he isn’t fit for his job. She says he can be bought and everybody knows it; you’ll never pass out of high school unless you slip him the money.
    “But the exams are marked in Toronto,” says Joan’s mother, as if genuinely puzzled. For a while, she enjoys pushing things along, with mild objections and queries.
    “He’s in cahoots with them, too,” says Mrs. Carbuncle. “Them, too.” She goes on to say that if money hadn’t changed hands he’d never have got out of high school himself. He’s verystupid. An ignoramus. He can’t solve the problems on the blackboard or translate the Latin. He has to have a book with the English words all written in on top. Also, a few years ago, he made a girl pregnant.
    “Oh, I never heard that!” says Joan’s mother, utterly genteel.
    “It was hushed up. He had to pay.”
    “Did it take all the profits he made on the examinations?”
    “He ought to have been horsewhipped.”
    Joan plays the piano softly—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” is her piece, and very difficult—because she hopes to hear the name of the girl, or perhaps how the baby was disposed of. (One time, Mrs. Carbuncle described the way a certain doctor in town disposed of babies, the products of his own licentious outbursts.) But Mrs. Carbuncle is swinging around to the root of her grievance, and it seems to be something about the dance. Archibald Moore has not managed the dance in the right way. He should make them all draw names for partners to take. Or else he should make them all go without partners. Either one or the other. That way, Matilda could go. Matilda hasn’t got a partner—no boy has asked her—and she says she won’t go alone. Mrs. Carbuncle says she will. She says she will make her. The reason she will make her is that her dress cost so much. Mrs. Carbuncle enumerates. The cost of the net, the taffeta, the sequins, the boning in the midriff (it’s strapless), the twenty-two-inch