Runaway

himself, had been friends of the girls’ parents—he still thought of these two as
the girls
—and now that all of the parents were dead he felt it was his duty to keep the daughters, as much as possible, out of each other’s hair.
    Joanne was now thirty years old, Robin twenty-six. Joanne had a childish body, a narrow chest, a long sallow face, and straight, fine, brown hair. She never tried to pretend she was anything but an unlucky person, stunted halfway between childhood and female maturity. Stunted, crippled in a way, by severe and persisting asthma from childhood on. You didn’t expect a person who looked like that, a person who couldn’t step outside in winter or be left alone at night, to have such a devastating way of catching on to other, more fortunate people’s foolishness. Or to have such a fund of contempt. All their lives, it seemed to Willard, he’d been watching Robin’s eyes fill up with tears of wrath, and hearing Joanne say, “What’s the matter with you now?”
    Tonight Robin had felt only a slight sting. Tomorrow was her day to go to Stratford, and she felt herself already living outside Joanne’s reach.
    “What’s the play, Robin?” Willard asked, to smooth things as much as he could. “Is it by Shakespeare?”
    “Yes.
As You Like It.
”
    “And can you follow him all right? Shakespeare?”
    Robin said she could.
    “You’re a wonder.”
    For five years Robin had been doing this. One play every summer. It had started when she was living in Stratford, training to be a nurse. She went with a fellow student who had a couple of free tickets from her aunt, who worked on costumes. The girl who had the tickets was bored sick—it was
King Lear
—so Robin had kept quiet about how she felt. She could not have expressed it anyway—she would rather have gone away from the theater alone, and not had to talk to anybody for at least twenty-four hours. Her mind was made up then to come back. And to come by herself.
    It wouldn’t be difficult. The town where she had grown up, and where, later, she had to find her work because of Joanne, was only thirty miles away. People there knew that the Shakespeare plays were being put on in Stratford, but Robin had never heard of anybody going to see one. People like Willard were afraid of being looked down on by the people in the audience, as well as having the problem of not following the language. And people like Joanne were sure that nobody, ever, could really like Shakespeare, and so if anybody from here went, it was because they wanted to mix with the higher-ups, who were not enjoying it themselves but only letting on they were. Those few people in town who made a habit of seeing stage productions preferred to go to Toronto, to the Royal Alex, when a Broadway musical was on tour.
    Robin liked to have a good seat, so she could only afford a Saturday matinee. She picked a play that was being done on one of her weekends off from the hospital. She never read it beforehand, and she didn’t care whether it was a tragedy or a comedy. She had yet to see a single person there that she knew, in the theater or out on the streets, and that suited her very well. One of the nurses she worked with had said to her, “I’d never have the nerve to do that all on my own,” and that had made Robin realize how different she herself must be from most people. She never felt more at ease than at these times, surrounded by strangers. After the play she would walk downtown, along the river, and find some inexpensive place to eat—usually a sandwich, as she sat on a stool at the counter. And at twenty to eight she would catch the train home. That was all. Yet those few hours filled her with an assurance that the life she was going back to, which seemed so makeshift and unsatisfactory, was only temporary and could easily be put up with. And there was a radiance behind it, behind that life, behind everything, expressed by the sunlight seen through the train windows. The sunlight and long shadows on the summer fields, like the remains of the play in her head.
    Last year, she saw
Antony and Cleopatra.
When it was over she walked along the river, and noticed that there was a black swan—the first she had ever seen—a subtle intruder gliding and feeding at a short distance from the white ones. Perhaps it was the glisten of the white swans’ wings that made her think of eating at a real restaurant this time, not at a counter. White tablecloth, a few fresh flowers, a