Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

pants and shirt. His hair had grown down to his earlobes. “Would you like to see my Japanese garden?” he said to Eileen. “I was just out giving the shrubs a bit of attention. You can’t take your eyes off them when they’re getting started.”
    His voice was cheerful, but she caught in his vicinity a smell of bad, sad, sleepless breath, masked not vanquished by mouthwash.
    “Of course I’d like.”
    She followed him through the garage, and outside. It was a mild cloudy February day. “It might be sunny yet,” Ewart said. He bent back the wet branches for her, he warned her where the slope of the great lawn was slippery, he was as usual a kind and worried host. Wealth had made him courteous beyond all normal requirements, reticent, conciliatory, mysterious. When June first met him, at university—both she and Eileen had gone to their local university on scholarships—he seemed to have no friends. June went after him with the same badgering, comforting zeal she later showed towards African students, drug addicts, people in jail, Indian children. She took him to parties, where he early found his role as drink-server, host- and hostess-helper, neighbor- and occasionally police-mollifier, holder of heads of people being sick in the bathroom, confidant of girls whose boy friends were being mean to them. June said she was showing him life. She considered him deprived, handicapped, his name and his money marking him just as sadly, in her view, as a mulberry splotch on the face, a club foot. Nobody thought she meant to marry him. Nor did she think so. It took a while for her to see the possibilities, Eileen believed. She did bring him home, but that was all in her program of showing him life.
    Eileen and June and their mother still lived then in the upstairs of a house behind a barbershop, on Becker Street. The rooms were dark, but had compensations. A fresh, soapy, masculine smell, from the barbershop. At night a rosy flash entering the front room from the café on the corner. Their mother had cataracts on both eyes. She lay on the chesterfield—she was stately, even lying down—and issued demands. She wanted glasses of water, pills, cups of tea; she wanted blankets removed and tucked in, her hair combed and braided. She also wanted radio stations phoned up and reproved for the use of slangy, vulgar, ungrammatical language; she wanted complaints delivered to the barbershop and the grocery store; she wished old friends or acquaintances to be contacted and given reports on her deteriorating health, and asked why they had not been to see her. June brought Ewart and made him sit and listen. By majoring in psychology June had tried to get round the problem of their mother, just as Eileen had tried to do by the study of English literature. June had been more successful. Eileen was gratified by the high incidence of crazy mothers in books, but failed to put this discovery to any use. June, on the other hand, was able to present their mother to her friends with no apologies but plenty of prior explanation and post-discussion. She made people feel privileged . Ewart had to listen to a long, melancholy, garbled and untrue story about how their family was related to Arthur Meighen, former Prime Minister of Canada. June told him he was getting a firsthand look at the delusions fostered in people of a certain temperament by a no-exit socioeconomic situation. (She was learning by leaps and bounds the language that would serve her well for the rest of her life.) Eileen could not help but be impressed by this unexpected reaping of advantages, this sudden objectivity.
    “It’s easier for me of course because I’m the second child,” June told her, and anyone else who might be listening. “I was released from guilt,” she said, “it was all piled onto Eileen.” Under the kind but hard scrutiny of those Psychology, Sociology majors, Eileen, gloomy enough by that time anyway as a graduate student, saw herself moving guilt-crippled, unaware; dragging her irrelevant, mistaken courses in Literature, her disagreeable lover (Howie, that was, the man she later married and divorced); blundering like a bat in daylight. Astonishing how in one year June was able to shed her teenage plumpness, her fumbling for words, her innocence, dependency, confusion and gratitude. Who would have thought she had a loud clear voice waiting, a flushed bony face and nervous hurrying body waiting to be revealed, as well as all that certainty? Only a