Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

plastic sandals absorbing the sweat of my feet. I liked that—it was the smell of my industry, and, I hoped, of my accomplishment. What I wrote wasn’t any better than what I’d managed to write back in the old life while the potatoes cooked or the laundry thumped around in its automatic cycle. There was just more of it, and it wasn’t any worse—that was all.
    Later in the day I would have a bath and probably go to meet one or another of my women friends. We drank wine at the sidewalk tables in front of little restaurants on Queen Street or Baldwin Street or Brunswick Street and talked about our lives—chiefly about our lovers, but we felt queasy saying “lover,” so we called them “the men we were involved with.” And sometimes I met the man I was involved with. He had been banished when the children were with me, though I had broken this rule twice, leaving my daughters in a frigid movie-house.
    I had known this man before I left my marriage and he was the immediate reason I had left it, though I pretended to him—and to everyone else—that this was not so. When I met him I tried to be carefree and to show an independent spirit. We exchanged news—I made sure I had news—and we laughed, and went for walks in the ravine, but all I really wanted was to entice him to have sex with me, because I thought the high enthusiasm of sex fused people’s best selves. I was stupid about these matters, in a way that was very risky, particularly for a woman of my age. There were times when I would be so happy, after our encounters—dazzled and secure—and there were other times when I would lie stone-heavy with misgiving. After he had taken himself off, I would feel tears running out of my eyes before I knew that I was weeping. And this was because of some shadow I had glimpsed in him or some offhandedness, or an oblique warning he’d given me. Outside the windows, as it got dark, the backyard parties would begin, with music and shouting and provocations that later might develop into fights, and I would be frightened, not of any hostility but of a kind of nonexistence.
    In one of these moods I phoned Sunny, and got the invitation to spend the weekend in the country.

    “It’s beautiful here,” I said.
    But the country we were driving through meant nothing to me. The hills were a series of green bumps, some with cows. There were low concrete bridges over weed-choked streams. Hay was harvested in a new way, rolled up and left in the fields.
    “Wait till you see the house,” Sunny said. “It’s squalid. There was a mouse in the plumbing. Dead. We kept getting these little hairs in the bathwater. That’s all dealt with now, but you never know what will be next.”
    She did not ask me—was it delicacy or disapproval?—about my new life. Maybe she just did not know how to begin, could not imagine it. I would have told her lies, anyway, or half-lies. It was hard to make the break but it had to be done. I miss the children terribly but there is always a price to be paid. I am learning to leave a man free and to be free myself. I am learning to take sex lightly, which is hard for me because that’s not the way I started out and I’m not young but I am learning.
    A weekend, I thought. It seemed a very long time.
    The bricks of the house showed a scar where a verandah had been torn away. Sunny’s boys were tromping around in the yard.
    “Mark lost the ball,” the older one—Gregory—shouted.
    Sunny told him to say hello to me. “Hello. Mark threw the ball over the shed and now we can’t find it.”
    The three-year-old girl, born since I’d last seen Sunny, came running out of the kitchen door and then halted, surprised at the sight of a stranger. But she recovered herself and told me,
    “There was a bug thing flew in my head.”
    Sunny picked her up and I took up my overnight bag and we walked into the kitchen, where Mike McCallum was spreading ketchup on a piece of bread.

    “It’s you,” we said, almost on the same breath. We laughed, I rushed towards him and he moved towards me. We shook hands.
    “I thought it was your father,” I said.
    I don’t know if I’d got as far as thinking of the well driller. I had thought, Who is that familiar-looking man? A man who carried his body lightly, as if he would think nothing of climbing in and out of wells. Short-cropped hair, going gray, deep-set light-colored eyes. A lean face, good-humored yet austere. A customary, not disagreeable,