Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

did not know where to turn it on. I said to myself that I was afraid of Hugo. I entertained the possibility that Hugo might be right, nothing would happen. But I wanted something to happen, I wanted Hugo to crash.
    When I woke up, Hugo was gone and the pump was thumping as usual. Dotty was pounding on the door at the top of the basement stairs.
    “You won’t believe your eyes what’s down here. I’m up to my knees in water. I just put my feet out of bed and up to my knees in water. What happened? You hear the pump go off?”
    “No,” I said.
    “I don’t know what could’ve gone wrong, I guess it could’ve got overworked. I had a couple of beers before I went to bed elst I would’ve known there was something wrong. I usually sleep light. But I was sleeping like the dead and I put my feet out of bed and Jesus, it’s a good thing I didn’t pull on the light switch at the same time, I would have been electrocuted. Everything’s floating.”
    Nothing was floating and the water would not have come to any grown person’s knees. It was about five inches deep in some places, only one or two in others, the floor being so uneven. It had soaked and stained the bottom of her chesterfield and chairs and got into the bottom drawers and cupboards and warped the bottom of her piano. The floor tiles were loosened, the rugs soggy, the edges of her bedspread dripping, her floor heater ruined.
    I got dressed and put on a pair of Hugo’s boots and took a broom downstairs. I started sweeping the water towards the drain outside the door. Dotty made herself a cup of coffee in my kitchen and sat for a while on the top step watching me, going over the same monologue about having a couple of beers and sleeping more soundly than usual, not hearing the pump go off, not understanding why it should go off, if it had gone off, not knowing how she was going to explain to her mother who would certainly make it out to be her fault and charge her. We were in luck, I saw. ( We were?) Dotty’s expectation and thrifty relish of misfortune made her less likely than almost anyone else would have been to investigate just what had gone wrong. After the water level went down a bit, she went into her bedroom, put on some clothes and some boots which she had to drain first, got her broom and helped me.
    “The things that don’t happen to me, eh? I never get my fortune told. I’ve got these girl friends that are always getting their fortune told and I say, never mind me, there’s one thing I know and I know it ain’t good.”
    I went upstairs and phoned the University, trying to get Hugo. I told them it was an emergency and they found him in the library.
    “It did flood.”
    “What?”
    “It did flood. Dotty’s place is under water.”
    “I turned the pump on.”
    “Like hell you did. This morning you turned it on.”
    “This morning there was a downpour and the pump couldn’t handle it. That was after I turned it on.”
    “The pump couldn’t handle it last night because the pump wasn’t on last night and don’t talk to me about any downpour.”
    “Well there was one. You were asleep.”
    “You have no idea what you’ve done, do you? You don’t even stick around to look at it. I have to look. I have to cope. I have to listen to that poor woman.”
    “Plug your ears.”
    “Shut up, you filthy moral idiot.”
    “I’m sorry. I was kidding. I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry. You’re bloody sorry. This is the mess you made and I told you you’d make and you’re bloody sorry.”
    “I have to go to a seminar. I am sorry. I can’t talk now, it’s no good talking to you now, I don’t know what you’re trying to get me to say.”
    “I’m just trying to get you to realize .”
    “All right, I realize. Though I still think it happened this morning.”
    “You don’t realize. You never realize.”
    “You dramatize.”
    “ I dramatize!”
    Our luck held. Dotty’s mother was not so likely as Dotty to do without explanations and it was, after all, her floor tiles and wallboard that were ruined. But Dotty’s mother was sick, the cold wet weather had undermined her too, and she was taken to hospital with pneumonia that very morning. Dotty went to live in her mother’s house, to look after the boarders. The basement had a disgusting, moldy smell. We moved out too, a short time later. Just before Clea was born we took over a house in North Vancouver, belonging to some friends who had gone to England. The quarrel between us subsided