Friend of My Youth

zipper. She made this dress herself, putting in countless hours of labor, and Matilda wore it once. She wore it last night in the high-school play on the stage in the town hall, and that’s all. She says she won’t wear it tonight; she won’t go to the dance, because nobody has asked her. It is all the fault of Archibald Moore, the cheater, the fornicator, the ignoramus.
    Joan and her mother saw Matilda last night. Morris didn’t go—he doesn’t want to go out with them anymore in the evenings. He would sooner listen to the radio or scribble figures, probably having to do with the lumberyard, in a special notebook. Matilda played the role of a mannequin a young manfalls in love with. Their mother told Morris when she came home that he was smart to stay away—it was an infinitely silly play. Matilda did not speak, of course, but she did hold herself still for a long time, showing a lovely profile. The dress was wonderful—a snow cloud with silver sequins glinting on it like frost.
    Mrs. Carbuncle has told Matilda that she has to go. Partner or not, she has to go. She has to get dressed in her dress and put on a coat and be out the door by nine o’clock. The door will be locked till eleven, when Mrs. Carbuncle goes to bed.
    But Matilda still says she won’t go. She says she will just sit in the coal shed at the back of the yard. It isn’t a coal shed anymore, it’s just a shed. Mrs. Carbuncle can’t buy coal any more than the Fordyces can.
    “She’ll freeze,” says Joan’s mother, really concerned with the conversation for the first time.
    “Serve her right,” Mrs. Carbuncle says.
    Joan’s mother looks at the clock and says she is sorry to be rude but she has just remembered an appointment she has uptown. She has to get a tooth filled, and she has to hurry—she has to ask to be excused.
    So Mrs. Carbuncle is turned out—saying that it’s the first time she heard of filling teeth on a Saturday—and Joan’s mother immediately phones the lumberyard to tell Morris to come home.
    Now there is the first argument—the first real argument—that Joan has ever heard between Morris and their mother. Morris keeps saying no. What his mother wants him to do he won’t do. He sounds as if there were no convincing him, no ordering him. He sounds not like a boy talking to his mother but like a man talking to a woman. A man who knows better than she does, and is ready for all the tricks she will use to make him give in.
    “Well, I think you’re very selfish,” their mother says. “I think you can’t think of anybody but yourself. I am very disappointed in you. How would you like to be that poor girl with her loony mother? Sitting in the
coal shed
? There are things a gentlemanwill do, you know. Your father would have known what to do.”
    Morris doesn’t answer.
    “It’s not like proposing marriage or anything. What will it cost you?” their mother says scornfully. “Two dollars each?”
    Morris says in a low voice that it isn’t that.
    “Do I very often ask you to do anything you don’t want to do? Do I? I treat you like a grown man. You have all kinds of freedom. Well, now I ask you to do something to show that you really can act like a grownup and deserve your freedom, and what do I hear from you?”
    This goes on a while longer, and Morris resists. Joan does not see how their mother is going to win and wonders that she doesn’t give up. She doesn’t.
    “You don’t need to try making the excuse that you can’t dance, either, because you can, and I taught you myself. You’re an elegant dancer!”
    Then, of all things, Morris must have agreed, because the next thing Joan hears is their mother saying, “Go and put on a clean sweater.” Morris’s boots sound heavily on the back stairs, and their mother calls after him, “You’ll be glad you did this! You won’t regret it!”
    She opens the dining-room door and says to Joan, “I don’t hear an awful lot of piano-playing in here. Are you so good you can give up practicing already? The last time I heard you play that piece through, it was terrible.”
    Joan starts again from the beginning. But she doesn’t keep it up after Morris comes down the stairs and slams the door, and their mother, in the kitchen, turns on the radio, opens the cupboards, begins putting together something for lunch. Joan gets up from the piano bench and goes quietly across the dining room, through the door into the hall, right up to the front door. She puts her