Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

pie crust, that’s what it is,” cried Aunt Madge in mock distress. “She’s just plain running away from my pie.”
    “That may be it,” I said.
    “You eat a piece before you go. It won’t take long to cool.”
    “She isn’t going,” my grandmother said, still lightly. “She isn’t walking out into that storm.”
    “It isn’t a storm ,” I said, looking for help towards the window, which showed solid white.
    My grandmother put her cup down, rattling it on the saucer. “All right. Go then. Just go. Go if you want to. Go and get frozen to death.”
    I had never heard my grandmother lose control before. I had never imagined that she could. It seems strange to me now, but the fact is that I had never heard anything like plain hurt or anger in her voice, or seen it on her face. Everything had been indirect, calmly expressed. Her judgments had seemed remote, full of traditional authority, not personal. The abdication here was what amazed me. There were tears in her voice, and when I looked at her there were tears in her eyes and then pouring down her face. She was weeping, she was furious and weeping.
    “Never mind then. You just go. Go and get yourself frozen to death like what happened to poor Susie Heferman.”
    “Oh, dear,” said Aunt Madge. “That’s true. That’s true.”
    “Poor Susan living all alone,” my grandmother said, addressing me as if that were my fault.
    “It was out on our old line, dear,” said Aunt Madge comfortingly. “You wouldn’t know who we mean. Susie Heferman that was married to Gershom Bell. Mrs. Gershom Bell. Susie Heferman to us. We went to school with her.”
    “And Gershom died last year and both her daughters are married and away,” my grandmother said, wiping her eyes and her nose with a fresh handkerchief from her sleeve, composing herself somewhat, but not ceasing to look at me angrily. “Poor Susan had to go out by herself to milk the cows. She would keep on her cows and go on by herself. She went out last night and she should have tied the clothesline to the door but she didn’t, and on the way back she lost her path, and they found her this noon.”
    “Alex Beattie phoned us,” Aunt Madge said. “He was one of the ones found her. He was upset.”
    “Was she dead?” I said foolishly.
    “They cannot thaw you back to life,” my grandmother said, “after you have been lying in a snowbank overnight in this weather.” She had stopped crying.
    “And think of poor Susie there just trying to get from the stable to the house,” Aunt Madge said. “She shouldn’t have hung on to her cows. She thought she could manage. And she had the bad leg. I bet that give out on her.”
    “That’s terrible,” I said. “I won’t go home.”
    “You go if you like,” my grandmother said at once.
    “No. I’ll stay.”
    “You never know what can happen to a person,” said Aunt Madge. She wept too, but more naturally than my grandmother. With her it was just a comfortable bit of leakage round the eyes, it seemed to do good. “Who would have thought that would be the end of Susie, she was more my age than your grandmother’s and what a girl for dances, she used to say she’d ride twenty miles in an open cutter for a good dance. We traded dresses once, we did it for a joke. If we had ever known then what would happen now!”
    “Nobody knows. What would be the use of it?” my grandmother said.

    I ate a large supper. No more mention was made of Susie Heferman.
    I understand various things now, though my understanding them is not of much use to anybody. I understand that Aunt Madge could feel sympathy for my mother because Aunt Madge must have seen my mother, even before her illness, as an afflicted person. Anything that was exceptional she could see, simply, as affliction. But my grandmother would have to see an example. My grandmother had schooled herself, watched herself, learned what to do and say; she had understood the importance of acceptance, had yearned for it, had achieved it, had known there was a possibility of not achieving it. Aunt Madge had never known that. My grandmother could feel endangered by my mother, could perhaps even understand—at some level she would always have to deny—those efforts of my mother’s that she so successfully, and never quite openly, ridiculed and blamed.
    I understand that my grandmother wept angrily for Susie Heferman and also for herself, that she knew how I longed for home, and why. She knew and did not