Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

sound so desperate.”
    “Yes.”
    “Did you read them all?”
    “Yes.”
    “Did it take you that long to figure out there’d been a mistake?”
    “No. I was curious.”
    “You look familiar to me. So many people do, because of the store. I see so many people.”
    I tell her my name, my real name, why not? It means nothing to her.
    “I see so many people.” She holds the bag of letters over the wastebasket, lets it drop. “I can’t keep them around any more.”
    “No.”
    “I will just have to let her suffer.”
    “Eventually she will figure it out.”
    “What if she doesn’t? It’s not my concern.”
    “No.”
    I no longer want to talk to her, I no longer want to hear her stories. The air around her seems harsh, as if she gave off a shriveling light.
    She looks at me. “I don’t know why I got the idea it might be you. You don’t look much younger than I am. I always understood they were younger.”
    Then she says, “You know more about my life than the girls who work for me or my friends or anybody, except I suppose her. I’m sorry. I really would like not to see you any more.”
    “I don’t live here. I’m going away. In fact I might go away tomorrow.”
    “It’s just life, you know. It’s just the usual thing. It isn’t that we didn’t have a good life together. We didn’t have children, but we did what we wanted. He was a very kind man, easy to be with. And successful. I always felt he could have been more successful, if he had pushed himself. But even so. If I told you his name you might recognize it.”
    “You don’t need to.”
    “No. Oh, no. I wouldn’t.”
    She makes a little bitter face, a swallowing face, ending with a humorous line of the mouth, that would dispose of you. I turn away almost in time not to see it.
    I go out onto the street and it is still light in the long evening. I walk and walk. In this city of my imagination I walk past stone walls up and down steep hills, and see in my mind that girl Patricia. Girl, woman, the sort of woman who would call her daughter Samantha—very slim, dark, fashionably dressed, slightly nervous, slightly artificial. Her long black hair. Her long black hair uncombed and her face blotched. She sits in the dark. She walks around the rooms. She tries smiling at herself in the glass. She tries putting on make-up. She confides in a woman, goes to bed with a man. She takes her daughter to the park but not to the same park. She avoids certain streets, never opens certain magazines. She suffers according to rules we all know, which are meaningless and absolute. When I think of her I see all this sort of love as you must have seen, or see it, as something going on at a distance; a strange, not even pitiable, expenditure; unintelligible ceremony in an unknown faith. Am I right, am I getting close to you, is that true?
    But you were the one, I keep forgetting, you were the one who said it first .
    How are we to understand you?
    Never mind. I invented her. I invented you, as far as my purposes go. I invented loving you and I invented your death. I have my tricks and my trap doors, too. I don’t understand their workings at the present moment, but I have to be careful, I won’t speak against them.

The Found Boat
    At the end of Bell Street, McKay Street, Mayo Street, there was the Flood. It was the Wawanash River, which every spring overflowed its banks. Some springs, say one in every five, it covered the roads on that side of town and washed over the fields, creating a shallow choppy lake. Light reflected off the water made everything bright and cold, as it is in a lakeside town, and woke or revived in people certain vague hopes of disaster. Mostly during the late afternoon and early evening, there were people straggling out to look at it, and discuss whether it was still rising, and whether this time it might invade the town. In general, those under fifteen and over sixty-five were most certain that it would.
    Eva and Carol rode out on their bicycles. They left the road—it was the end of Mayo Street, past any houses—and rode right into a field, over a wire fence entirely flattened by the weight of the winter’s snow. They coasted a little way before the long grass stopped them, then left their bicycles lying down and went to the water.
    “We have to find a log and ride on it,” Eva said.
    “Jesus, we’ll freeze our legs off.”
    “Jesus, we’ll freeze our legs off!” said one of the boys who were there too at the water’s