Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

understand how this had happened or how it could have been different or how she herself, once so baffled and struggling, had become another old woman whom people deceived and placated and were anxious to get away from.

Memorial
    Eileen woke up in full daylight to see June standing beside the bed holding a tray. On the tray was a mug of coffee, cream and sugar, slices of homemade whole-wheat toast.
    “Oh, Lord. That’s what I was going to do for you.”
    “What was?”
    “Bring you coffee in bed. I was awake earlier. I was just waiting. I was waiting till it got a little more light.”
    Eileen did not say that she had been awake all night, or almost all night, aware of the firmness of the mattress, the smoothness of the sheets, and herself as a foreign and uncalled-for object on top of them.
    “How can you live without a watch?” said June, and set the tray down. “It’s just as well you didn’t get up and try anything. You couldn’t have worked the grinder.”
    Indeed Eileen had forgotten. They ground their own coffee. They got two or three kinds of beans from an import store downtown, and produced their own blend.
    “Anyway I had to get up,” June said. “There’s an incredible lot of things to do.”
    “I can help.”
    “Help me now by drinking your coffee and staying put while I get some of the thundering herd out of the way.”
    She meant the children, that was what she always called them. The same now. The same bright offhand tone. She was already dressed, in orange pants and an embroidered Mexican blouse of unbleached cotton. She looked entirely as usual, her sandy hair pulled back and held with an elastic band, long wispy bangs loose on her forehead. The same look of quivering eagerness, bossiness, busyness, both touching and infuriating. Missionary wife. Ruddy skin, a rough texture to her cheeks and neck. Bereavement had heightened her color, if anything.
    Eileen saw that she had been naive to have expected a change. She had thought June’s body might have loosened, in her grief, that her voice might have grown uncertain, or been silenced. But last night when they embraced, at the airport, she felt her sister’s body humming as always with its separate power; she heard June’s voice break through her own beginning consolations with edgy insistence, almost triumphing.
    “It’s so windy, did you have a horrible flight?”

    June sent the younger children off to school. June and Ewart had seven children—that is, seven counting Douglas. The first five were boys. Then they had adopted two girls, of Indian or part-Indian blood. The youngest was still in kindergarten. Douglas had been seventeen.
    Eileen could hear June talking on the phone.
    “I don’t want their feelings repressed but I don’t want them artificially stimulated, either. Do you see what I mean? Yes. That’s their normal environment. I think they’re better off. But I want them to have an opportunity to express their grief. If they want to express their grief. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Thank you. Thanks so much.”
    Then she phoned to arrange for a coffee-maker.
    “I knew at the time I should have bought a fifty-cup model and not the thirty. I always end up doing this. Oh, no. No, it’s all arranged. No, I’d rather . Thanks tons.”
    Following this she phoned several people and asked if they had rides to the funeral, or memorial service, as it was being called. She phoned up other people and asked if they would mind providing rides for the people who were having difficulties; then she phoned the first people back and told them when and where they could be picked up. Eileen was up by this time, dressing, going back and forth to the bathroom. From the recreation room, downstairs, she heard rock music, turned unusually, perhaps deferentially, low. The older children must be down there. She wondered where Ewart was. She had the impression that not all these arrangements June was making were really necessary, or that, at least, it was not necessary for June to make them. Surely people could have figured out their rides for themselves. She found that she disliked even the tone of June’s voice on the telephone. Good morning, hi! Hi, it’s June! Such a cheerful buoyant matter-of-fact voice, and wasn’t there in this very buoyancy some challenge, some lively insistence on control? Could it be said that June wished for admiration? Well, why not? If it will help. If anything will help.
    Nevertheless Eileen disliked this tone, she