Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

just behind the walls, and an amplified voice, luxuriant, powerful, reciting place names that could not quite be understood. I bought a movie magazine and my sister bought chocolate bars with the money we had been given. I was going to say to her, “Give me a bite or I won’t show you the way back,” but she was so undone by the grandeur of the place, or subdued by her dependence on me, that she broke off a piece without being asked.
    Late in the afternoon we got on the Ottawa train. We were surrounded by soldiers. My sister had to sit on my mother’s knee. A soldier sitting in front of us turned around and joked with me. He looked very much like Bob Hope. He asked me what town I came from, and then he said, “Have they got the second story on there yet?” in just the sharp, unsmiling, smart-alecky way that Bob Hope would have said it. I thought that maybe he really was Bob Hope, traveling around incognito in a soldier’s uniform. That did not seem unlikely to me. Outside of my own town—this far outside it, at least—all the bright and famous people in the world seemed to be floating around free, ready to turn up anywhere.
    Aunt Dodie met us at the station in the dark and drove us to her house, miles out in the country. She was small and sharp-faced and laughed at the end of every sentence. She drove an old square-topped car with a running board.
    “Well, did Her Majesty show up to see you?”
    She was referring to the legal secretary, who was in fact her sister. Aunt Dodie was not really our aunt at all but our mother’s cousin. She and her sister did not speak.
    “No, but she must have been busy,” said my mother neutrally.
    “Oh, busy,” said Aunt Dodie. “She’s busy scraping the chicken dirt off her boots. Eh?” She drove fast, over washboard and potholes.
    My mother waved at the blackness on either side of us. “Children! Children, this is the Ottawa Valley!”

    It was no valley. I looked for mountains, or at least hills, but in the morning all it was was fields and bush, and Aunt Dodie outside the window holding a milk pail for a calf. The calf was butting its head into the pail so hard it slopped the milk out, and Aunt Dodie was laughing and scolding and hitting it, trying to make it slow down. She called it a bugger. “Greedy little bugger!”
    She was dressed in her milking outfit, which was many-layered and colored and ragged and flopping like the clothes a beggarwoman might wear in a school play. A man’s hat without a crown was shoved—for what purpose?—on her head.
    My mother had not led me to believe we were related to people who dressed like that or who used the word bugger. “I will not tolerate filth,” my mother always said. But apparently she tolerated Aunt Dodie. She said they had been like sisters, when they were growing up. (The legal secretary, Bernice, had been older and had left home early.) Then my mother usually said that Aunt Dodie had had a tragic life.
    Aunt Dodie’s house was bare. It was the poorest house I had ever been in, to stay. From this distance, our own house—which I had always thought poor, because we lived too far out of town to have a flush toilet or running water, and certainly we had no real touches of luxury, like Venetian blinds—looked very comfortably furnished, with its books and piano and good set of dishes and one rug that was bought, not made out of rags. In Aunt Dodie’s front room there was one overstuffed chair and a magazine rack full of old Sunday school papers. Aunt Dodie lived off her cows. Her land was not worth farming. Every morning, after she finished milking and separating, she loaded the cans in the back of her pickup truck and drove seven miles to the cheese factory. She lived in dread of the milk inspector, who went around declaring cows tubercular, we understood, for no reason but spite, and to put poor farmers out of business. Big dairy interests paid him off, Aunt Dodie said.
    The tragedy in her life was that she had been jilted. “Did you know,” she said, “that I was jilted?” My mother had said we were never to mention it, and there was Aunt Dodie in her own kitchen, washing the noon dishes, with me wiping and my sister putting away (my mother had to go and have her rest), saying “jilted” proudly, as somebody would say, “Did you know I had polio?” or some such bad important disease.
    “I had my cake baked,” she said. “I was in my wedding dress.”
    “Was it satin?”
    “No, it was a nice