Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

abstraction and set him up as a man of a certain authority, therefore the man of the house. I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. The only observation I had made of couples was of my aunts and uncles and of my mother and father, and those husbands and wives seemed to have remote and formalized connections and no obvious dependence on each other.
    Bill continued eating as if he had not heard this mention of his profession and his employer, and Alfrida began to question me about my courses. She was still smiling, but her smile had changed. There was a little twitch of impatience and unpleasantness in it, as if she was just waiting for me to get to the end of my explanations so that she could say—as she did say— ”You couldn’t get me to read that stuff for a million dollars.”
    “Life’s too short,” she said. “You know, down at the paper we sometimes get somebody that’s been through all that. Honors English. Honors Philosophy. You don’t know what to do with them. They can’t write worth a nickel. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?” she said to Bill, and Bill looked up and gave her his dutiful smile.
    She let this settle.
    “So what do you do for fun?” she said.
    A Streetcar Named Desire was being done in a theater in Toronto at that time, and I told her that I had gone down on the train with a couple of friends to see it.
    Alfrida let the knife and fork clatter onto her plate.
    “That filth,” she cried. Her face leapt out at me, carved with disgust. Then she spoke more calmly but still with a virulent displeasure.
    “You went all the way to Toronto to see that filth.”
    We had finished the dessert, and Bill picked that moment to ask if he might be excused. He asked Alfrida, then with the slightest bow he asked me. He went back to the sunporch and in a little while we could smell his pipe. Alfrida, watching him go, seemed to forget about me and the play. There was a look of such stricken tenderness on her face that when she stood up I thought she was going to follow him. But she was only going to get her cigarettes.
    She held them out to me, and when I took one she said, with a deliberate effort at jollity, “I see you kept up the bad habit I got you started on.” She might have remembered that I was not a child anymore and I did not have to be in her house and that there was no point in making an enemy of me. And I wasn’t going to argue—I did not care what Alfrida thought about Tennessee Williams. Or what she thought about anything else.
    “I guess it’s your own business,” Alfrida said. “You can go where you want to go.” And she added, “After all—you’ll pretty soon be a married woman.”
    By her tone, this could mean either “I have to allow that you’re grown up now” or “Pretty soon you’ll have to toe the line.”
    We got up and started to collect the dishes. Working close to each other in the small space between the kitchen table and counter and the refrigerator, we soon developed without speaking about it a certain order and harmony of scraping and stacking and putting the leftover food into smaller containers for storage and filling the sink with hot, soapy water and pouncing on any piece of cutlery that hadn’t been touched and slipping it into the baize-lined drawer in the dining-room buffet. We brought the ashtray out to the kitchen and stopped every now and then to take a restorative, businesslike drag on our cigarettes. There are things women agree on or don’t agree on when they work together in this way—whether it is all right to smoke, for instance, or preferable not to smoke because some migratory ash might find its way onto a clean dish, or whether every single thing that has been on the table has to be washed even if it has not been used—and it turned out that Alfrida and I agreed. Also, the thought that I could get away, once the dishes were done, made me feel more relaxed and generous. I had already said that I had to meet a friend that afternoon.
    “These are pretty dishes,” I said. They were creamy-colored, slightly yellowish, with a rim of blue flowers.
    “Well—they were my mother’s wedding dishes,” Alfrida said. “That was one other good thing your grandma did for me. She packed up all my