Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

entered the house—in fact since she had first understood that the voices she heard came from her own back yard and belonged to Polly and Lionel—Lorna had not thought of the vision she’d had, mile after mile, of Polly lashed to the back door. She was surprised by it now as you sometimes are surprised, long after waking, by the recollection of a dream. It had a dream’s potency and shamefulness. A dream’s uselessness, as well.
    Not quite at the same time, but in a lagging way, came the memory of her bargain. Her weak and primitive neurotic notion of a bargain.
    But what was it she had promised?
    Nothing to do with the children.
    Something to do with herself?
    She had promised that she would do whatever she had to do, when she recognized what it was.
    That was hedging, it was a bargain that was not a bargain, a promise that had no meaning at all.
    But she tried out various possibilities. Almost as if she was shaping this story to be told to somebody—not Lionel now—but somebody, as an entertainment.
    Give up reading books.
    Take in foster children from bad homes and poor countries.
    Labor to cure them of wounds and neglect.
    Go to church. Agree to believe in God.
    Cut her hair short, stop putting on makeup, never again haul her breasts up into a wired brassiere.
    She sat down on the bed, tired out by all this sport, this irrelevance.

    What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.
    It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.
    So, nothing now but what she or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret, or strange.
    Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious.
    Elizabeth called again, “Mommy. Come here.” And then the others—Brendan and Polly and Lionel, one after the other, were calling her, teasing her.
    Mommy.
    Mommy.
    Come here.

    It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

What Is Remembered

    In a hotel room in Vancouver, Meriel as a young woman is putting on her short white summer gloves. She wears a beige linen dress and a flimsy white scarf over her hair. Dark hair, at that time. She smiles because she has remembered something that Queen Sirikit of Thailand said, or was quoted as saying, in a magazine. A quote within a quote—something Queen Sirikit said that Balmain had said.
    “Balmain taught me everything. He said, ‘Always wear white gloves. It’s best.’”
    It’s best . Why is she smiling at that? It seems so soft a whisper of advice, such absurd and final wisdom. Her gloved hands are formal, but tender-looking as a kitten’s paws.
    Pierre asks why she’s smiling and she says, “Nothing,” then tells him.
    He says, “Who is Balmain?”

    They were getting ready to go to a funeral. They had come over on the ferry last night from their home on Vancouver Island to be sure of being on time for the morning ceremony. It was the first time they’d stayed in a hotel since their wedding night. When they went on a holiday now it was always with their two children, and they looked for inexpensive motels that catered to families.
    This was only the second funeral they had been to as a married couple. Pierre’s father was dead, and Meriel’s mother was dead, but these deaths had happened before Pierre and Meriel met. Last year a teacher at Pierre’s school died suddenly, and there was a fine service, with the schoolboy choir and the sixteenth-century words for the Burial of the Dead. The man had been in his mid-sixties, and his death seemed to Meriel and Pierre only a little surprising and hardly sad. It did not make much difference, as they saw it, whether you died at sixty-five or seventy-five or eighty-five.
    The funeral today was another matter. It was Jonas who was being buried. Pierre’s