Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

look back at the fire once. I walked ahead. Robina pushed me once, to keep me from going into the ditch. When she touched me I jumped.
    “You’re going like a person walking in its sleep. I only grabbed you to keep you from going headlong into that ditch.”
    When we got past the cars, and there was room, Robina came up to walk beside me. I had the feeling that if she could have moved all around me, been in front and behind and on both sides at once, that was what she would do. She would close me off, she would peer into me until she found whatever she wanted, and got it rearranged. Meanwhile she said, “If you let one bad thing like this bother you there’s going to be a lot of trouble for you in this world.”
    I was not trying in any way to punish Robina or worry her. I did mean to answer. Some of the time I believed that I had answered, just as in a light sleep you will keep telling yourself you must do something—shut a window, turn off a light—and so convince yourself, in your sleep, that you have actually done it. And after such a sleep you can never be sure at all what has really happened, what has really been said, and what you have dreamed. I never did know afterwards if Robina had really spoken to me from time to time as I thought she had, in an uncharacteristically soft and bothered voice, threatening or promising something, scaring and reassuring.
    Or if she had ever said, “Listen. I’ll show you my arm.”
    If she did, I never answered that either.

    When I was in high school, or home from college for the weekend, I sometimes saw Robina walking along the main street, with her flopping sleeve, her one whole swinging arm, her long steps that always seemed to be taking her downhill. She had not worked for us for a long time. When my father came home for good, with a nurse who wanted her own way in the kitchen, there was no place left for her, and no money either. When I saw her I had to be reminded of my childhood, which seemed so long ago, and full of panic and disgrace. For I had changed, things had changed for me, I believed that with luck and good management I could turn out to seem like anybody else. And this is in fact what I have done.
    She looked odd to me, Robina did; absurd, obsessed, not very clean. Nevertheless I would have spoken to her, I was prepared. But she would turn her head away and never speak, showing me that I had become one of those people who had committed an offense against her.

    She may be dead now, Robina. Jimmy and Duval may be dead too, though that is hard to imagine. I am still a few years away from retiring. I am a widow, a civil servant, I live on the eighteenth floor of an apartment building. I don’t mind being alone. In the evenings I read, I watch television. No, that is not always true. Sometimes I sit in the dark, drinking whiskey and water, thinking uselessly and helplessly, almost comfortably, about things like this that I had forgotten, or could not bear to think about for a long time.
    When everybody is dead who could have remembered it, then I suppose the fire will be finished with, it will be just as if nobody had ever run through that door.

Marrakesh
    Dorothy was sitting in a straight-backed chair on the side porch, eating nuts. She had taken to buying nuts from the machine in the drugstore. She ate them from the white paper bag with the picture of a squirrel on it. At the age of seventy she had been forced to give up cigarettes, because of chest pains. The school board had never been able to get her to do that. A one-time petition, signed by parents, had failed. Gordie Lomax—dead now himself—brought her the petition which had been sent first to the school board. She looked over it critically as if it had been a spelling test. “Tell them it’s my only vice,” she said firmly, and Gordie went back and told them.
    “She says it’s her only vice.”
    Viola predicted that Dorothy would get fat, switching to nuts, but nothing could make Dorothy fat and never had. Viola was put out because she could not do the same, could not eat nuts and apples. Viola had a plate.
    Dorothy was by herself at present. Viola had gone to the cemetery, taking Jeanette. Early in the morning, before breakfast, she had stripped the flower border of delphiniums, which were at their peak now, blooming in every shade of blue and purple. She wanted a bouquet for her husband’s grave, one for Dorothy’s husband’s grave (she had taken him over, because Dorothy seldom