Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

was happening? Was there no goodbye, no awareness that when Mike climbed into the truck on that last afternoon, he was going for good? No wave, no head turned towards me—or not turned towards me—when the truck, heavy now with all the equipment, lurched down our lane for the last time? When the water gushed out—I remember it gushing out, and everybody gathering round to have a drink—why did I not understand how much had come to an end, for me? I wonder now if there was a deliberate plan not to make too much of the occasion, to eliminate farewells, so that I—or we—should not become too unhappy and troublesome.
    It doesn’t seem likely that such account would be taken of children’s feelings, in those days. They were our business, to suffer or suppress.
    I did not become troublesome. After the first shock I did not let anybody see a thing. The hired man teased me whenever he caught sight of me (“Did your boyfriend run away on you?”), but I never looked his way.
    I must have known that Mike would be leaving. Just as I knew that Ranger was old and that he would soon die. Future absence I accepted—it was just that I had no idea, till Mike disappeared, of what absence could be like. How all my own territory would be altered, as if a landslide had gone through it and skimmed off all meaning except loss of Mike. I could never again look at the white stone in the gangway without thinking of him, and so I got a feeling of aversion towards it. I had that feeling also about the limb of the maple tree, and when my father cut it off because it was too near the house, I had it about the scar that was left.
    One day weeks afterwards, when I was wearing my fall coat, I was standing by the door of the shoe store while my mother tried on shoes, and I heard a woman call, “Mike.” She ran past the store, calling, “Mike.” I was suddenly convinced that this woman whom I did not know must be Mike’s mother—I knew, though not from him, that she was separated from his father, not dead—and that they had come back to town for some reason. I did not consider whether this return might be temporary or permanent, only—I was now running out of the store—that in another minute I would see Mike.
    The woman had caught up with a boy about five years old, who had just helped himself to an apple out of a bushel of apples that was standing on the sidewalk in front of the grocery shop next door.
    I stopped and stared at this child in disbelief, as if an outrageous, an unfair enchantment had taken place before my eyes.
    A common name. A stupid flat-faced child with dirty blond hair.
    My heart was beating in big thumps, like howls happening in my chest.

    Sunny met my bus in Uxbridge. She was a large-boned, bright-faced woman, with silvery-brown, curly hair caught back by unmatched combs on either side of her face. Even when she put on weight—which she had done—she did not look matronly, but majestically girlish.
    She swept me into her life as she had always done, telling me that she had thought she was going to be late because Claire had got a bug in her ear that morning and had to be taken to the hospital to have it flushed out, then the dog threw up on the kitchen step, probably because it hated the trip and the house and the country, and when she—Sunny—had left to get me Johnston was making the boys clean it up because they had wanted a dog, and Claire was complaining that she could still hear something going bzz-bzz in her ear.
    “So suppose we go someplace nice and quiet and get drunk and never go back there?” she said. “We have to, though. Johnston invited a friend whose wife and kids are away in Ireland, and they want to go and play golf.”
    Sunny and I had been friends in Vancouver. Our pregnancies had dovetailed nicely, so that we could manage with one set of maternity clothes. In my kitchen or in hers, once a week or so, distracted by our children and sometimes reeling for lack of sleep, we stoked ourselves up on strong coffee and cigarettes and launched out on a rampage of talk—about our marriages, our fights, our personal deficiencies, our interesting and discreditable motives, our foregone ambitions. We read Jung at the same time and tried to keep track of our dreams. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive daze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and The Cocktail Party .
    Our