Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

discomfort pass a life. The train is westbound out of Calgary. I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.
    Girl friend. Mistress . Nobody says mistress any more, that I know of. Girl friend sounds brash, yet has a spurious innocence, is curiously evasive. The possibilities of mystery and suffering that hung around the old-fashioned word have entirely disappeared. Violetta could never have been anybody’s girl friend. But Nell Gwyn could, she was more modern.
    Elizabeth Taylor: mistress.
    Mia Farrow: girl friend.
    This is exactly the sort of game Hugh and Margaret and I would have taken up in our old evenings together, or more likely Margaret and I would have taken it up, amusing then irritating Hugh with our absorption in it.
    Neither word would hang well on Margaret.
    Last spring we went downtown to buy her a new dress. I was amused and touched by her thriftiness, her cautious taste. She is a rich girl, she lives in the Uplands with her old mother, but she drives a six-year-old Renault, dented along one side, she carries sandwiches to school, she wishes not to give offense.
    I tried to persuade her to buy a long straight dress, heavy dark green cotton with gold and silver embroidery.
    “It makes me feel like a courtesan,” she said. “Or like somebody trying to look like a courtesan, which is worse.”
    We left the shop and went to a department store where she bought a rose-colored wool with three-quarter sleeves and self-covered buttons and belt, the sort of dress she always wore, in which her tall flat-chested figure appeared as usual dry, shy, unyielding. Then we went to a secondhand bookshop, and decided to buy each other presents. I bought her Lala Rookh and she bought me a copy of The Princess , from which we recited to each other as we walked down the street:
    Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.…
    We were often giddy, like high school girls. Was this normal, when you come to think of it? We made up stories about people we saw on the street. We laughed so hard we had to sit down on a bus-stop bench, and the bus came, and we still laughed, waving it on. The edge of hysteria. We were attracted to each other because of the man, or to the man because of each other. I used to go home worn out from talking, from laughing, and say to Hugh, “It’s ridiculous. I haven’t had a friend like this in years.”

    Sitting at the dinner table with us, where she so often sat, she told us she wanted to be called Margaret, not Marg any more. Marg is what most people call her, what the other teachers call her. She teaches English and Physical Education at Hugh’s school, the school where Hugh is Principal. Marg Honecker, they say, she’s a great girl when you get to know her, really Marg is a wonderful person , and you know from the way they say it that she isn’t pretty.
    “ Marg is so gawky, in fact it’s just like me. I think Margaret would make me feel more graceful,” she said at the dinner table, surprising me with the modest hope behind the droll tone. I was concerned for her as I would have been for a daughter and I always remembered, afterwards, to say Margaret. But Hugh did not bother, he said Marg.
    “Margaret has quite nice legs. She should wear her skirts shorter.”
    “Too muscular. Too athletic.”
    “She should grow her hair.”
    “She has got hair growing. On her face.”
    “What a mean thing to say.”
    “I didn’t pass judgment on it, I stated a fact.”
    It is a fact. Margaret has a soft down growing in front of her ears, at the corners of her mouth. She has the face of a fair, freckled, twelve-year-old boy. Alert, intelligent, bony in a delicate way, often embarrassed. There is something very attractive about Margaret, I would often say, and Hugh would say yes, she was just the sort of woman about whom other women would say there was something very attractive. And why did they say that? he asked. Because she was no threat.
    No threat.
    Why is it a surprise to find that people other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

    We entertained the young teachers. Young men in jeans, young girls in jeans too, or tiny leather skirts. Longhaired, soft-spoken, passive but critical. Teachers have changed. Margaret wore her knee-length rose wool, sat on a hassock