Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

houses. Some of the ideas my mother had conceived and carried out could not help but make me see the sense in this conformity.
    Also, the paint, the brushes, the turpentine, were left for me to clean up, since my mother always worked till she was exhausted, then stretched out groaning on the couch.
    “There,” said my grandmother with annoyance and satisfaction, “she will get herself involved in something like that, which she ought to know will wear her out, and she will not be able to do any of the things that have to be done. She will be painting the cupboards when she would be better off getting your father’s dinner.”
    Truer words were never spoken.

    After supper I went out, in spite of the weather. A blizzard in town hardly seemed like a blizzard to me; so much was blocked out by the houses and the buildings. I met my friend Betty Gosley, another country girl who was staying in town with her married sister. We were pleased and rather excited to be in town, to be able to go out like this into some kind of evening life, not just the dark and cold and rushing storms that wrapped our houses in the country. Here were the streets leading into one another, the lights evenly spaced, a human design that had taken root and was working. People were curling at the curling rink, skating at the Arena, watching the show at the Lyceum Theater, shooting pool in the poolroom, sitting around in two cafés. From most of these activities we were barred by age or sex or lack of money, but we could walk around, we could drink lemon Cokes—the cheapest thing—in the Blue Owl Café, watching who came in, talking with a girl we knew who worked there. Betty and I were not exactly at the center of power, and we spent a lot of time, like nonentities at court, discussing the affairs of those more powerful and fortunate, speculating on the ups and downs of their careers, judging harshly of their morals. We told each other that we would not for a million dollars go out with certain boys, the truth being that we would have dissolved in happiness if these boys had even called us by name. We talked about which girls might be pregnant. (The winter following this, Betty Gosley herself became pregnant, by a neighboring farmer with a speech impediment and a purebred dairy herd, whom she had never so much as mentioned to me; she then withdrew, abashed and proud, into the privileged life of married women, and could talk of nothing but kitchen showers, linens, baby clothes, morning sickness, which made me both envious and appalled.)
    We walked past the house where Mr. Harmer lived. His were the upstairs windows. The lights were on. What did he do in the evenings? He did not take advantage of the entertainment offered in town, was not to be found at the movies or the hockey games. He was not really very popular. And this was why I had chosen him. I liked to think I had a special taste. His pale fine hair, his soft mustache, his narrow shoulders in his worn, tweed, leather-patched jacket, the waspish words which were his classroom substitute for physical force. Once I had talked to him—it was the only time I had talked to him—in the town library. He had recommended to me a novel about Welsh coal miners, which I did not like. There was no sex in it, only strikes and unions, and men.
    Walking past his house, loitering under his windows, with Betty Gosley, I did not show my interest in him in any straightforward way but instead made scornful jokes about him, called him a sissy and a hermit, accused him of shameful private practices which kept him home evenings. Betty joined in this speculation but did not really understand why it had to be so wild or go on so long. Then to keep her interest up I began to tease her, I pretended to believe she was in love with him. I said I had seen him looking up her skirt going up the stairs. I said I was going to throw a snowball at the wall between his windows, call him down for her. She was entertained at first by this fantasy, but before long she grew cold and bewildered and cranky, and headed back towards the main street by herself, forcing me to follow.
    And all this wildness, crudity, hilarity, was as far as possible from my private dreams, which were of most tender meetings, chaste embraces melting into holy passion, harmony shadowed by the inevitable parting, high romantic love.

    Aunt Madge had been happily married. The happiness of her marriage was remembered and commented on, even in that community