Friend of My Youth

alfalfa-sprout sandwich. Really. It was that bad.”
    “No, I haven’t room” is what Joan keeps saying as she and Morris go through the boxes. There are things here she would have thought she’d want, but she doesn’t. “No. I can’t think where I’d put it.” No, she says, to their mother’s dance dresses, the fragile silk and cobwebby georgette. They’d fall apart the first time anybody put them on, and Claire, her daughter, will never be interested in that kind of thing—she wants to be a horse trainer. No to the five wineglasses that didn’t get broken, and no to the leatherette-bound copies of Lever and Lover, George Borrow, A. S. M. Hutchinson. “I have too much stuff now,” she says sadly as Morris adds all this to the pile to go to the auction rooms. He shakes out the little rug that used to lie on the floor in front of the china cabinet, out of the sun, and that they were not supposed to walk on because it was valuable.
    “I saw one exactly like that a couple of months ago,” she says. “It was in a secondhand store, not even an antique store. Iwas in there looking for old comics and posters for Rob’s birthday. I saw one just the same. At first I didn’t even know where I’d seen it before. Then I felt quite shocked. As if there were only supposed to be one of them in the world.”
    “How much did they want for it?” says Morris.
    “I don’t know. It was in better condition.”
    She doesn’t understand yet that she doesn’t want to take anything back to Ottawa because she herself won’t be staying in the house there for much longer. The time of accumulation, of acquiring and arranging, of padding up the corners of her life, has come to an end. (It will return years later, and she will wish she had saved at least the wineglasses.) In Ottawa, in September, her husband will ask her if she still wants to buy wicker furniture for the sunroom, and if she would like to go to the wicker store, where they’re having a sale on summer stock. A thrill of distaste will go through her then—at the very thought of looking for chairs and tables, paying for them, arranging them in the room—and she will finally know what is the matter.
    On Friday morning there is a letter in the box with Joan’s name typed on it. She doesn’t look at the postmark; she tears the envelope open gratefully, runs her eyes over it greedily, reads without understanding. It seems to be a chain letter. A parody of a chain letter, a joke. If she breaks the chain, it says, DIRE CALAMITY will befall her. Her fingernails will rot and her teeth will grow moss. Warts as big as cauliflowers will sprout on her chin, and her friends will avoid her. What can this be, thinks Joan. A code in which John Brolier has seen fit to write to her? Then it occurs to her to look at the postmark, and she does, and she sees that the letter comes from Ottawa. It comes from her son, obviously. Rob loves this sort of joke. His father would have typed the envelope for him.
    She thinks of her child’s delight when he sealed up the envelope and her own state of mind when she tore it open.
    Treachery and confusion.
    Late that afternoon, she and Morris open the trunk, which they have left till the last. She takes out a suit of eveningclothes—a man’s evening clothes, still in a plastic sheath, as if they had not been worn since being cleaned. “This must be Father’s,” she says. “Look, Father’s old evening clothes.”
    “No, that’s mine,” says Morris. He takes the suit from her, shakes down the plastic, stands holding it out in front of him over both arms. “That’s my old soup-and-fish—it ought to be hanging up in the closet.”
    “What did you get it for?” Joan says. “A wedding?” Some of Morris’s workmen lead lives much more showy and ceremonious than his, and they invite him to elaborate weddings.
    “That, and some things I have to go to with Matilda,” Morris says. “Dinner dances, big dress-up kinds of things.”
    “With Matilda?” says Joan. “Matilda
Buttler
?”
    “That’s right. She doesn’t use her married name.” Morris seems to be answering a slightly different question, not the one Joan meant to ask. “Strictly speaking, I guess she doesn’t have a married name.”
    Joan hears again the story she just now remembers having heard before—or read before, in their mother’s long, lively letters. Matilda Buttler ran off to marry her boyfriend. The expression “ran off” is their mother’s, and