Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

friends. Perhaps he thought these were the sorts of scenes that would appeal to me in my present way of life. Or perhaps he picked them blindly off the rack. He always included a return address—reminding me of his existence and letting me know where he was, in case of any news.
    I had given up expecting that kind of news, myself. I never even found out if it was Andrew that Queenie went away with, or somebody else. Or whether she stayed with Andrew, if he was the one. When my father died there was some money left, and a serious attempt was made to trace her, but without success.

    But now something has happened. Now in the years when my children are grown up and my husband has retired, and he and I are travelling a lot, I have a notion that sometimes I see Queenie. It’s not through any particular wish or effort that I see her, and it’s not as if I believe it is really her, either.
    Once it was in a crowded airport, and she was wearing a sarong and a flower-trimmed straw hat. Tanned and excited, rich-looking, surrounded by friends. And once she was among the women at a church door waiting for a glimpse of the wedding party. She wore a spotty suede jacket and she did not look either prosperous or well. Another time she was stopped at a crosswalk, leading a string of nursery-school children on their way to the swimming pool or the park. It was a hot day and her thick middle-aged figure was frankly and comfortably on view, in flowered shorts and a sloganed T-shirt.
    The last and the strangest time was in a supermarket in Twin Falls, Idaho. I came around a corner carrying the few things I had collected for a picnic lunch, and there was an old woman leaning on her shopping cart, as if waiting for me. A little wrinkled woman with a crooked mouth and unhealthy-looking brownish skin. Hair in yellow-brown bristles, purple pants hitched up over the small mound of her stomach—she was one of those thin women who have nevertheless, with age, lost the convenience of a waistline. The pants could have come from some thrift shop and so could the gaily colored but matted and shrunken sweater buttoned over a chest no bigger than a ten-year-old’s.
    The shopping cart was empty. She was not even carrying a purse.
    And unlike those other women, this one seemed to know that she was Queenie. She smiled at me with such a merry recognition, and such a yearning to be recognized in return, that you would have thought that this was a great boon—a moment granted to her when she was let out of the shadows for one day in a thousand.
    And all I did was stretch my mouth pleasantly and impersonally, as at a loony stranger, and keep on going towards the checkout.
    Then in the parking lot I made an excuse to my husband, said I’d forgotten something, and hurried back into the store. I went up and down the aisles, looking. But in just that little time the old woman seemed to have gone. She might have gone out right after I did; she might be making her way now along the streets of Twin Falls. On foot, or in a car driven by some kind relative or neighbor. Or even in a car she drove herself. There was the bare chance, though, that she was still in the store and that we kept going up and down the aisles, just missing each other. I found myself going in one direction and then in another, shivering in the icy climate of the summer store, looking straight into people’s faces, and probably frightening them, because I was silently beseeching them to tell me where I could find Queenie.
    Until I came to my senses and convinced myself that it wasn’t possible, and that whoever was or was not Queenie had left me behind.

The Bear Came Over the Mountain

    Fiona lived in her parents’ house, in the town where she and Grant went to university. It was a big, bay-windowed house that seemed to Grant both luxurious and disorderly, with rugs crooked on the floors and cup rings bitten into the table varnish. Her mother was Icelandic—a powerful woman with a froth of white hair and indignant far-left politics. The father was an important cardiologist, revered around the hospital but happily subservient at home, where he would listen to strange tirades with an absentminded smile. All kinds of people, rich or shabby-looking, delivered these tirades, and kept coming and going and arguing and conferring, sometimes in foreign accents. Fiona had her own little car and a pile of cashmere sweaters, but she wasn’t in a sorority, and this activity in her house was