Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

husbands were not in this frame of mind at all. When we tried to talk about such things with them they would say, “Oh, that’s just literature” or “You sound like Philosophy 101.”

    Now we had both moved away from Vancouver. But Sunny had moved with her husband and her children and her furniture, in the normal way and for the usual reason—her husband had got another job. And I had moved for the newfangled reason that was approved of mightily but fleetingly and only in some special circles—leaving husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage (except of course the children, who were to be parcelled about) in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy or deprivation or shame.
    I lived now on the second floor of a house in Toronto. The people downstairs—the people who owned the house—had come from Trinidad a dozen years before. All up and down the street, the old brick houses with their verandahs and high, narrow windows, the former homes of Methodists and Presbyterians who had names like Henderson and Grisham and McAllister, were full up with olive-or brownish-skinned people who spoke English in a way unfamiliar to me if they spoke it at all, and who filled the air at all hours with the smell of their spicy-sweet cooking. I was happy with all this—it made me feel as if I had made a true change, a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage. But it was too much to expect of my daughters, who were ten and twelve years old, that they should feel the same way. I had left Vancouver in the spring and they had come to me at the beginning of the summer holidays, supposedly to stay for the whole two months. They found the smells of the street sickening and the noise frightening. It was hot, and they could not sleep even with the fan I bought. We had to keep the windows open, and the backyard parties lasted sometimes till four o’clock.
    Expeditions to the Science Centre and the C.N. Tower, to the Museum and the Zoo, treats in the cooled restaurants of department stores, a boat trip to Toronto Island, could not make up to them the absence of their friends or reconcile them to the travesty of a home that I provided. They missed their cats. They wanted their own rooms, the freedom of the neighborhood, the dawdling stay-at-home days.
    For a while they did not complain. I heard the older one say to the younger one. “Let Mom think we‘re happy. Or she’ll feel bad.”
    At last a blowup. Accusations, confessions of misery (even exaggerations of misery, as I thought, developed for my benefit). The younger wailing, “Why can’t you just live at home?” and the older telling her bitterly, “Because she hates Dad.”
    I phoned my husband—who asked me nearly the same question and provided, on his own, nearly the same answer. I changed the tickets and helped my children pack and took them to the airport. All the way we played a silly game introduced by the older girl. You had to pick a number—27, 42—and then look out of the window and count the men you saw, and the 27th or 42nd man, or whatever, would be the one you had to marry. When I came back, alone, I gathered up all reminders of them—a cartoon the younger one had drawn, a Glamour magazine that the older one had bought, various bits of jewelry and clothing they could wear in Toronto but not at home—and stuffed them into a garbage bag. And I did more or less the same thing every time I thought of them—I snapped my mind shut. There were miseries that I could bear—those connected with men. And other miseries—those connected with children—that I could not.
    I went back to living as I had lived before they came. I stopped cooking breakfast and went out every morning to get coffee and fresh rolls at the Italian deli. The idea of being so far freed from domesticity enchanted me. But I noticed now, as I hadn’t done before, the look on some of the faces of the people who sat every morning on the stools behind the window or at the sidewalk tables—people for whom this was in no way a fine and amazing thing to be doing but the stale habit of a lonely life. Back home, then, I would sit and write for hours at a wooden table under the windows of a former sunporch now become a makeshift kitchen. I was hoping to make my living as a writer. The sun soon heated up the little room, and the backs of my legs—I would be wearing shorts—stuck to the chair. I could smell the peculiar sweetish chemical odor of my