Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

knew, not by his voice or by the way he moved, but by a certain weight, a density and stubbornness he had, standing in front of her.
    “Eileen. You were crying. That’s very kind of you.”
    Not for Douglas, she had not been crying for Douglas.
    “Eileen you know it’s been a great help to June, having you here.”
    “I haven’t done anything. I wish I could do something.”
    “Just having you here. June values you so much.”
    “Does she?” said Eileen, not disbelievingly. How Ewart compelled politeness, even when they were both drunk.
    “She is not able to express herself sometimes. She seems—you know, sometimes she seems a little—bossy. She is aware of it. But it is hard to change.”
    “Eileen.” Ewart moved the two steps that brought him against her.
    Eileen was a hospitable woman, particularly when drunk. This embrace did not exactly take her by surprise. It had been predicted, though she would be hard put to say how. Perhaps with Eileen—alone, wayward, astonishingly limp at times though brisk enough at others—such an embrace could always be predicted. And she permitted, she almost welcomed it, how could she extricate herself without gross unkindness? Even if this had not been in her plans, she could shift her expectations around enough to make room for it, thinking, as she usually thought at such moments, why not?
    Women like this, women who think like this, are generally believed to be lackadaisical, purely wanting in spirit, dazed receptacles, pitiable. Other women express this opinion and men too, the very men in fact who have burrowed in them with every sign of gratitude and appreciation. Eileen knew this. She found it far from the fact. She supposed she was easily aroused. At the moment, not very much so; she did not anticipate great pleasure from her brother-in-law Ewart—who was now maneuvering her, with more determination and adroitness than she would have expected, toward the back seat of the larger car—but she did more than suffer him. Nearly always she did more than that She liked their faces at these times. She liked their seriousness—lovely devout and naked seriousness, attention to realities, their own realities.
    Repetition of her name was all the speech she got from him. She had heard that before. What did Ewart mean by that name, what was Eileen to him? Women have to wonder. Pinned down not too comfortably on a car seat—one leg crooked and held against the back of the seat in danger of getting a cramp—they will still look for clues, and store things up in a hurry to be considered later. They have to believe that more is going on than seems to be going on; that is part of the trouble.
    What Eileen meant to Ewart, she would tell herself later, was confusion. The opposite of June, wasn’t that what she was? The natural thing for a man in pain to look for, who loves and fears his wife. The brief restorative dip. Eileen is aimless and irresponsible, she comes out of the same part of the world accidents come from. He lies in her to acknowledge, to yield—but temporarily, safely—to whatever has got his son, whatever cannot be spoken of in his house. So Eileen, with her fruitful background of reading, her nimble habit of analysis (material and direction different from June’s, but the habit not so different, after all), can later explain and arrange it for herself. Not knowing, never knowing, if that is not all literary, fanciful. A woman’s body. Before and during the act they seem to invest this body with certain individual powers, they will say its name in a way that indicates something particular, something unique, that is sought for. Afterwards it appears that they have changed their minds, they wish it understood that such bodies are interchangeable. Women’s bodies.

    Eileen was packing. She folded the wrinkled, stained caftan and put it at the bottom of her suitcase, in a hurry lest June, who had two or three times passed her door, should decide to come in. She and June were alone in the house. The children were all back at school today, and Ewart had driven over to town to get some piping for the water system. June was to drive Eileen to the airport.
    June did come in. “It’s too bad you have to go so soon,” she said. “I feel we haven’t done anything for you. We haven’t taken you anywhere. If you could stay a few days longer.”
    “I didn’t expect,” said Eileen. She was not appalled as she would have been the first day, not surprised. She