Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

half-professional way, but she was cool. They did little work on their yard. She had worked in the town library, until she got sick. Dorothy and Viola were more apt to see her there than around her own house. She wore a college girl’s skirt and sweater, a barrette in her shoulder-length hair (she was the college girl of fifteen years ago, she hadn’t kept up with the times in quite the way Jeanette had) and she had a low-pitched well-bred voice that many people in town found subtly insulting. Also such confidence and homeliness as Dorothy had seldom seen met together in one face.
    “Good-looking men will often pick a girl like that,” Viola said. “Could it be they are not interested in looks when they have got so much themselves?”
    Blair King in a neighborly way approached the porch, but did not come up. Instead he rested a foot on the step and leaned on his knee. He was good-looking, but his looks were getting set, worn. His smile, like his voice, was accomplished, mechanical. The trouble with his wife was telling on him.
    “I’ve been admiring her car every time I go in and out.”
    “She bought it in Europe last year and had it shipped back. How is your wife?”
    It did not bother Dorothy to ask that, though she knew the story: Nancy King was dying of cancer. Death at thirty-six might be tragic, but she no longer, to tell the truth, understood the meaning of the word tragic. She asked to make conversation.
    “She’s not too uncomfortable at the moment.”
    “Is it hot in the hospital?” She kept him talking because an idea was coming to her.
    “The new wing is all air conditioned.”

    “I asked Blair King next door,” said Dorothy. “I asked him to come over and spend the evening with us.”
    “You inviting people,” said Viola. “What next? The skies may fall.”
    “I don’t know what we’ll give him,” she said later. “He’ll probably expect a drink. Those radio people don’t go out for the evening and drink tea.”
    “Radio people?” said Jeanette. “I thought it sounded like a fancy name. A media name.”
    “Where is that sherry?” said Dorothy. She did not drink; she had been telling the truth when she reported that smoking was her only vice; but Viola had got to like sherry in her bank-managing-hostessing days, and usually kept a bottle of it in the house.
    “How can we offer him sherry?” Viola appealed to Jeanette. “You know what they always call sherry? The old ladies’ drink .”
    “I’ll go to the liquor store,” Jeanette said comfortingly, “and get a bottle of gin, and I’ll pick up some tonic and see if I can get a few limes, and that will be very nice on a hot night. Nobody can complain of a gin and tonic.”
    Viola was still not satisfied. “He’ll want something to eat.”
    “Cucumber sandwiches,” said Dorothy.
    “Lovely. Like Oscar Wilde,” said Jeanette mystifyingly. “I’ll pick up a cucumber too.” She rebraided her hair, humming—happy at the prospect of getting out by herself for half an hour?—and ran out to her car, singing, “Gin a-and ton-ic, lime a-and cucumber—”
    “She is going to the stores in her bare feet,” said Viola.

    In the middle of the afternoon Jeanette lay out in the back yard, in the sun. Viola could not see her, that was something to be thankful for. “Is that what passes for a bikini?” Viola would have said. “I thought it was a couple of ribbons she had tied around herself.”
    But Viola’s bedroom was at the front of the house, Dorothy’s at the back. They always took afternoon naps, it broke up the day. When she was a teacher, Dorothy had thought of afternoon naps as a summer luxury. Teaching tired her during the last years, and she did not even have the whole summer to herself, since the Department of Education in its infinite wisdom had decided that she should spent three weeks living in a hot rented room in Toronto taking courses that would enable her to introduce new methods and perspectives into her classroom teaching. (Naturally, she did nothing of the sort, but went on successfully teaching just as she always had.) When she came home from Toronto, there was Jeanette. But Jeanette did little to upset her pattern of life, and she would go upstairs every afternoon and stretch out for her nap. Sometimes she pictured Jeanette downstairs in the living room, reading a book, or out on the porch lying in the swing, with one foot now and then tapping the floor boards, to keep the swing rocking, and