Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

sand Lorna offered an explanation.
    “This is a bad time of year for Brendan. Teaching summer school is really nerve-racking, you have to do so much so fast.”
    Polly said, “Yeah? It’s not just me, then?”
    “Don’t be stupid. Of course it isn’t you.”
    “Well, that’s a relief. I thought he kind of hated my guts.”
    She then spoke of a man at home who wanted to take her out.
    “He’s too serious. He’s looking for a wife. I guess Brendan was too, but I guess you were in love with him.”
    “Was and am,” said Lorna.
    “Well, I don’t think I am.” Polly spoke with her face pressed into her elbow. “I guess it might work though if you liked somebody okay and you went out with them and made up your mind to see the good points.”
    “So what are the good points?” Lorna was sitting up so that she could watch Elizabeth ride the dolphin.
    “Give me a while to think,” said Polly, giggling. “No. There’s lots. I’m just being mean.”
    As they were rounding up toys and towels she said, “I really wouldn’t mind doing all this over again tomorrow.”
    “Me neither,” said Lorna, “but I have to get ready to go to the Okanagan. We’re invited to this wedding.” She made it sound like a chore—something she hadn’t bothered speaking about till now because it was too disagreeable and boring.
    Polly said, “Oh. Well, I might come by myself then.”
    “Sure. You should.”
    “Where is the Okanagan?”

    The next evening, after putting the children to bed, Lorna went into the room where Polly slept. She went to get a suitcase out of the closet, expecting the room to be empty—Polly, as she thought, still in the bathroom, soaking the day’s sunburn in lukewarm water and soda.
    But Polly was in bed, with the sheet pulled up around her like a shroud.
    “You’re out of the bath,” said Lorna, as if she found all this quite normal. “How does your burn feel now?”
    “I’m okay,” said Polly in a muffled voice. Lorna knew at once that she had been and probably still was weeping. She stood at the foot of the bed, not able to leave the room. A disappointment had come over her that was like sickness, a wave of disgust. Polly didn’t really mean to keep hiding, she rolled over and looked out, with her face all creased and helpless, red from the sun, and her weeping. Fresh tears came welling up in her eyes. She was a mound of misery, one solid accusation.
    “What is it?” Lorna said. She feigned surprise, she feigned compassion.
    “You don’t want me.”
    Her eyes were on Lorna all the time, brimming not just with her tears, her bitterness and accusation of betrayal, but with her outrageous demand, to be folded in, rocked, comforted.
    Lorna would sooner have hit her. What gives you the right, she wanted to say. What are you leeching onto me for? What gives you the right?
    Family. Family gives Polly the right. She has saved her money and planned her escape, with the idea that Lorna should take her in. Is that true—has she dreamed of staying here and never having to go back? Becoming part of Lorna’s good fortune, Lorna’s transformed world?
    “What do you think I can do?” said Lorna quite viciously and to her own surprise. “Do you think I have any power? He never even gives me more than a twenty-dollar bill at a time.”
    She dragged the suitcase out of the room.
    It was all so false and disgusting—setting her own lamentations up in that way, to match Polly’s. What did the twenty dollars at a time have to do with anything? She had a charge account, he never refused her when she asked.
    She couldn’t go to sleep, berating Polly in her mind.

    The heat of the Okanagan made summer seem more authentic than the summer on the coast. The hills with their pale grass, the sparse shade of the drylands pine trees, seemed a natural setting for so festive a wedding with its endless supplies of champagne, its dancing and flirtation and overflow of instant friendship and goodwill. Lorna got rapidly drunk and was amazed at how easy it was, with alcohol, to get loose from the bondage of her spirits. Forlorn vapors lifted. She went to bed still drunk, and lecherous, to Brendan’s benefit. Even her hangover the next day seemed mild, cleansing rather than punishing. Feeling frail, but not at all displeased with herself, she lay by the shores of the lake and watched Brendan help Elizabeth build a sand castle.
    “Did you know that your daddy and I met at a wedding?” she asked.
    “Not