Friend of My Youth

avails the sceptred race!” says Joan suddenly when they are driving back to the apartment. And as soon as they get there she goes to the bookcase—it’s the same old glass-fronted bookcase. Morris didn’t sell that, though it’s almost too high for this living room. She finds their mother’s
Anthology of English Verse
.
    “First lines,” she says, going to the back of the book.
    “Sit down and be comfortable, why don’t you?” says Ruth Ann, coming in with the late-afternoon drinks. Morris gets whiskey-and-water, Joan and Ruth Ann white-rum-and-soda. Aliking for this drink has become a joke, a hopeful bond, between the two women, who understand that they are going to need something.
    Joan sits and drinks, pleased. She runs her finger down the page. “Oh what, oh what—” she murmurs.
    “Oh, what the form divine!” says Morris, with a great sigh of retrieval and satisfaction.
    They were taught specialness, Joan thinks, without particular regret. The tag of poetry, the first sip of alcohol, the late light of an October afternoon may be what’s making her feel peaceful, indulgent. They were taught a delicate, special regard for themselves, which made them go out and grab what they wanted, whether love or money. But that’s not altogether true, is it? Morris has been quite disciplined about love, and abstemious. So has she been about money—in money matters she has remained clumsy, virginal.
    There’s a problem, though, a hitch in her unexpected pleasure. She can’t find the line. “It’s not in here,” she says. “How can it not be in here? Everything Mother knew was in here.” She takes another, businesslike drink and stares at the page. Then she says, “I know! I know!” And in a few moments she has it; she is reading to them, in a voice full of playful emotion:
    “Ah, what avails the sceptred race
,
    Ah, what the form divine!
    What every virtue, every grace
,
    Rose Aylmer
—
Rose
Matilda—
all
were thine!”
    Morris has taken off his glasses. He’ll do that now in front of Joan. Maybe he started doing it sooner in front of Ruth Ann. He rubs at the scar as if it were itchy. His eye is dark, veined with gray. It isn’t hard to look at. Under its wrapping of scar tissue it’s as harmless as a prune or a stone.
    “So that’s it,” Morris says. “So I wasn’t wrong.”

Differently

    Georgia once took a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.
    Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out.
    The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together. They still live together, in Ontario, on a farm. They sell raspberries, and run a small publishing business. When Georgia can get the money together, she goes to Vancouver to visit her sons. This fall Saturday she has taken the ferry across to Victoria, where she used to live. She did this on an impulse that she doesn’t really trust, and by midafternoon, when she walks up the driveway of the splendid stonehouse where she used to visit Maya, she has already been taken over some fairly shaky ground.
    When she phoned Raymond, she wasn’t sure that he would ask her to the house. She wasn’t sure that she even wanted to go there. She had no notion of how welcome she would be. But Raymond opens the door before she can touch the bell, and he hugs her around the shoulders and kisses her twice (surely he didn’t use to do this?) and introduces his wife, Anne. He says he has told her what great friends they were, Georgia and Ben and he and Maya. Great friends.
    Maya is dead. Georgia and Ben are long divorced.
    They go to sit in what Maya used to call, with a certain flat cheerfulness, “the family room.”
    (One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.”
    “Listen, old man, you don’t do it with pillows,” Ben said