Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

for which her legs were too long, helped with the coffee, did not say twenty words all evening. I was in one of my long, peacock dresses, I tried for rapport. I was not above congratulating myself on my flexibility, my au-courant -ness, yes, my un-middle-aged style. I was flaunting myself in front of somebody. Margaret? Hugh? Hugh’s real pleasure came from Margaret, when everybody had gone.
    “The trouble is I just don’t know if I relate . I don’t know if I relate to all this interpersonal relating . I mean, sometimes I think all I am is head tripping—”
    I laughed at her too, I was proud of her in the perverse way a parent will be proud of a demure child who imitates self-important guests after they have gone home. But it was between Hugh and Margaret, really, that such bracing airs of boundless skepticism blew. He loved her for her wit, her cynicism, her deceptions. Less than lovable these seem to me now. They are both shy, Hugh and Margaret, they are socially awkward, easily embarrassed. But cold underneath, you may be sure, colder than us easy flirts with our charms and conquests. They do not reveal themselves. They will never admit to anything, never have to talk about anything, no, I could claw their skin and it would be my own fingers that would bleed. I could scream at them till my throat bursts and never alter their self-possession, change the look of their sly averted faces. Both blond, both easy blushers, both cold mockers.
    They have contempt for me.
    That is rubbish of course. Nothing for me. All for each other. Love .
    I am coming back from visiting relatives in various parts of the country. These are people to whom I feel bound by irritable, almost inexpressible, bonds of sympathy, and whose deaths I dread nearly as much as I do my own. But I cannot tell them anything and they cannot do anything for me. They took me fishing and out to dinner and to see the view from high buildings, what else could they do? They never want to hear bad news from me. They value me for my high spirits and my good looks and my modest but tangible success—I have translated a collection of short stories and some children’s books from French into English, they can go into libraries and find my name on the book jackets—and the older and unluckier among them, particularly, feel that I have an obligation to bring them these things. My luck and happiness is one of the few indications they have now that life is not entirely a downhill slide.
    So much for kin, so much for visiting.
    Suppose I come back to the house and they are both there, I come in and find them in bed, just as in the Dear Abby letters in the paper (at which I do not intend to laugh again)? I go to the closet and take out my remaining clothes, I begin to pack, I talk diplomatically to the bed.
    “Would you like a cup of coffee, I imagine you’re awfully tired?”
    To make them laugh. To make them laugh as if they were reaching out their arms to me. Inviting me to sit on the bed.
    On the other hand, perhaps I go into the bedroom and without a word pick up everything I can find—a vase, a bottle of lotion, a picture off the wall, shoes, clothes, Hugh’s tape recorder—and hurl these things at the bed, the window, the walls; then grab and tear the bedclothes and kick the mattress and scream and slap their faces and beat their bare bodies with the hairbrush. As the wife did in God’s Little Acre , a book I read aloud to Hugh, with a comic accent, during a long dusty car trip across the prairies.
    We may have told her that. Many anecdotes, of our courtship and even our honeymoon, were trotted out for her. Showing off. I was. What Hugh was doing I have no way of knowing.
    A howl comes out, out of me, amazing protest.
    I put my arm across my open mouth and to stop the pain I bite it, I bite my arm, and then I get up and lower the little sink and wash my face at it, and put on blusher and comb my hair, and smooth my eyebrows and go out.
    The cars in the train are named after explorers, or mountains or lakes. I often traveled by train when the children were small, and Hugh and I were poor, because the train allowed children under six to ride free. I remember the names written on the heavy doors, and how I used to have to push the doors and hold them open and urge the scrambling unsteady children through. I was always nervous between cars, as if the children could fall off somehow, though I knew they couldn’t. I had to sleep close beside them at night