Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

them have managed something. Both of them have decided what to do about everything they run across in this world, what attitude to take, how to ignore or use things. In their limited and precarious ways they both have authority. They are not at the mercy . Or think they are not. I can’t blame them, for making whatever arrangements they can make.
    After the boys had gone to bed and Gabriel and Clea had settled to watch television, I found a pen and got the paper in front of me, to write my letter, and my hand jumped. I began to write short jabbing sentences that I had never planned:
    This is not enough, Hugo. You think it is, but it isn’t. You are mistaken, Hugo .
    That is not an argument to send through the mail.
    I do blame them. I envy and despise.
    Gabriel came into the kitchen before he went to bed, and saw me sitting with a pile of test papers and my marking pencils. He might have meant to talk to me, to ask me to have coffee, or a drink, with him, but he respected my unhappiness as he always does; he respected the pretense that I was not unhappy but preoccupied, burdened with these test papers; he left me alone to get over it.

How I Met My Husband
    We heard the plane come over at noon, roaring through the radio news, and we were sure it was going to hit the house, so we all ran out into the yard. We saw it come in over the tree tops, all red and silver, the first close-up plane I ever saw. Mrs. Peebles screamed.
    “Crash landing,” their little boy said. Joey was his name.
    “It’s okay,” said Dr. Peebles. “He knows what he’s doing.” Dr. Peebles was only an animal doctor, but had a calming way of talking, like any doctor.
    This was my first job—working for Dr. and Mrs. Peebles, who had bought an old house out on the Fifth Line, about five miles out of town. It was just when the trend was starting of town people buying up old farms, not to work them but to live on them.
    We watched the plane land across the road, where the fairgrounds used to be. It did make a good landing field, nice and level for the old race track, and the barns and display sheds torn down now for scrap lumber so there was nothing in the way. Even the old grandstand boys had burned.
    “All right,” said Mrs. Peebles, snappy as she always was when she got over her nerves. “Let’s go back in the house. Let’s not stand here gawking like a set of farmers.”
    She didn’t say that to hurt my feelings. It never occurred to her.
    I was just setting the dessert down when Loretta Bird arrived, out of breath, at the screen door.
    “I thought it was going to crash into the house and kill youse all!”
    She lived on the next place and the Peebles thought she was a countrywoman, they didn’t know the difference. She and her husband didn’t farm, he worked on the roads and had a bad name for drinking. They had seven children and couldn’t get credit at the Hi-Way Grocery. The Peebles made her welcome, not knowing any better, as I say, and offered her dessert.
    Dessert was never anything to write home about, at their place. A dish of Jello or sliced bananas or fruit out of a tin. “Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,” my mother used to say, but Mrs. Peebles operated differently.
    Loretta Bird saw me getting the can of peaches.
    “Oh, never mind,” she said. “I haven’t got the right kind of a stomach to trust what comes out of those tins, I can only eat home canning.”
    I could have slapped her. I bet she never put down fruit in her life.
    “I know what he’s landed here for,” she said. “He’s got permission to use the fairgrounds and take people up for rides. It costs a dollar. It’s the same fellow who was over at Palmerston last week and was up the lakeshore before that. I wouldn’t go up, if you paid me.”
    “I’d jump at the chance,” Dr. Peebles said. “I’d like to see this neighborhood from the air.”
    Mrs. Peebles said she would just as soon see it from the ground. Joey said he wanted to go and Heather did, too. Joey was nine and Heather was seven.
    “Would you, Edie?” Heather said.
    I said I didn’t know. I was scared, but I never admitted that, especially in front of children I was taking care of.
    “People are going to be coming out here in their cars raising dust and trampling your property, if I was you I would complain,” Loretta said. She hooked her legs around the chair rung and I knew we were in for a lengthy visit. After Dr. Peebles went back to his office or