Friend of My Youth

not care for the journalist’s wit, which they think cynical, or for his opinions, but they are pleased that a girl from this town has got herself attached to a famous, or semi-famous, person.
    She has told her husband that she will be staying here for a week. It’s Sunday evening when she arrives, a Sunday late in May, with Morris cutting the first grass of the year. She plans to leave on Friday, spending Saturday and Sunday in Toronto. If her husband should find out that she has not spent the entire week with Morris, she has a story ready—about having decided, when Morris no longer needed her, to visit a woman friend she has known since college. Perhaps she should tell that story anyway—it would be safer. She worries about whether she should take the friend into her confidence.
    It is the first time she has ever managed anything of this sort.
    The apartment building runs deep into the lot, its windows looking out on parking space or on the Baptist church. A driving shed once stood here, for the farmers to leave their horses in during the church service. It’s a red brick building. No balconies. Plain, plain.
    Joan hugs Morris. She smells cigarettes, gasoline, soft, worn, sweaty shirt, along with the fresh-cut grass. “Oh, Morris, you know what you should do?” she shouts over the sound of the lawnmower. “You should get an eyepatch. Then you’d look just like Moshe Dayan!”
    Every morning Joan walks to the post office. She is waiting for a letter from a man in Toronto, whose name is John Brolier. She wrote to him and told him Morris’s name, the name of Logan, the number of Morris’s post-office box. Logan has grown, but it is still too small to have home delivery.
    On Monday morning she hardly hopes for a letter. On Tuesday she does hope for one. On Wednesday she feels sheshould have every reasonable expectation. Each day she is disappointed. Each day a suspicion that she has made a fool of herself—a feeling of being isolated and unwanted—rises closer to the surface. She has taken a man at his word when he didn’t mean it. He has thought again.
    The post office she goes to is a new, low pinkish brick building. The old one, which used to make her think of a castle, has been torn down. The look of the town has greatly changed. Not many houses have been pulled down, but most have been improved. Aluminum siding, sandblasted brick, bright roofs, wide double-glazed windows, verandas demolished or enclosed as porches. And the wide, wild yards have disappeared—they were really double lots—and the extra lots have been sold and built on. New houses crowd in between the old houses. These are all suburban in style, long and low, or split-level. The yards are tidy and properly planned, with nests of ornamental shrubs, round and crescent-shaped flower beds. The old habit of growing flowers like vegetables, in a row beside the beans or potatoes, seems to have been forgotten. Many of the great shade trees have been cut down. They were probably getting old and dangerous. The shabby houses, the long grass, the cracked sidewalks, the deep shade, the unpaved streets full of dust or puddles—all of this, which Joan remembers, is not to be found. The town seems crowded, diminished, with so many spruced-up properties, so much deliberate arrangement. The town of her childhood—that haphazard, dreamy Logan—was just Logan going through a phase. Its leaning board fences and sun-blistered walls and flowering weeds were no permanent expression of what the town could be. And people like Mrs. Buttler—costumed, obsessed—seemed to be bound to that old town and not to be possible anymore.
    Morris’s apartment has one bedroom, which he has given to Joan. He sleeps on the living-room sofa. A two-bedroom apartmentwould surely have been more convenient for the times when he has visitors. But he probably doesn’t intend to have visitors, very many of them, or very often. And he wouldn’t want to lose out on the rent from the larger apartment. He must have considered taking one of the bachelor apartments in the basement, so that he’d be getting the rent from the one-bedroom place as well, but he must have decided that that would be going too far. It would look mingy, it would call attention. It would be a kind of self-indulgence better avoided.
    The furniture in the apartment comes from the house where Morris lived with their mother, but not much of it dates from the days when Joan lived at home. Anything that looked