Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

sign. Nobody had made much of this good sign to me yesterday, I thought.
    I sat there for an hour at least after I had hung up the phone. I made a cup of instant coffee and my hands were shaking so I could hardly get the water into the cup, then couldn’t get the cup to my mouth. I let it go cold. Haro came out in his pyjamas at last. He gave me one look and said, “Easy, Val. Has she gone?”
    “She’s some better. She’s responding to treatment.”
    “The look of you I thought the other.”
    “I’m so amazed.”
    “I wouldn’t’ve given five cents for her chances yesterday noon.”
    “I know. I can’t believe it.”
    “It’s the tension,” Haro said. “I know. You build yourself up ready for something bad to happen and then when it doesn’t, it’s a queer feeling, you can’t feel good right away, it’s almost like a disappointment.”
    Disappointment. That was the word that stayed with me. I was so glad, really, grateful, but underneath I was thinking, so Cam didn’t kill her after all, with his carelessness and craziness and going out and neglecting her he didn’t kill her, and I was, yes, I was, sorry in some part of me to find out that was true. And I knew Haro knew this but wouldn’t speak of it to me, ever. That was the real shock to me, why I kept shaking. Not whether Mother lived or died. It was what was so plain about myself.
    Mother got well, she pulled through beautifully. After she rallied she never sank back. She was in the hospital three weeks and then she came home, and rested another threeweeks, and after that went back to work, cutting down a bit and working ten to four instead of full days, what they call the housewives’ shift. She told everybody about Cam and his friends coming to the hospital. She began to say things like, “Well, that boy of mine may not be much of a success at anything else but you have to admit he has a knack of saving lives.” Or, “Maybe Cam should go into the miracle business, he certainly pulled it off with me.” By this time Cam was saying, he is saying now, that he’s not sure about that religion, he’s getting tired of the other priests and all that not eating meat or root vegetables. It’s a stage, he says now, he’s glad he went through it, self-discovery. One day I went over there and found he was trying on an old suit and tie. He says he might take advantage of some of the adult education courses, he is thinking of becoming an accountant.
    I was thinking myself about changing into a different sort of person from the one I am. I do think about that. I read a book called
The Art of Loving
. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same. What has Cam ever done that actually hurt me, anyway, as Haro once said. And how am I better than he is after the way I felt the night Mother lived instead of died? I made a promise to myself I would try. I went over there one day taking them a bakery cake—which Cam eats now as happily as anybody else—and I heard their voices out in the yard—now it’s summer, they love to sit in the sun—Mother saying to some visitor, “Oh yes I was, I was all set to take off into the wild blue yonder, and Cam here, this
idiot
, came and danced outside my door with a bunch of his hippie friends—”
    “My God, woman,” roared Cam, but you could tell he didn’t care now, “members of an ancient holy discipline.”
    I had a strange feeling, like I was walking on coals and trying a spell so I wouldn’t get burnt.
    Forgiveness in families is a mystery to me, how it comes or how it lasts.

Tell Me Yes or No
    I persistently imagine you dead.
    You told me that you loved me years ago. Years ago. And I said that I too, I was in love with you in those days. An exaggeration.

    In those days I was a young girl, but didn’t know it because times were different then. At the age when young girls nowadays are growing their hair to their waists, traveling through Afghanistan, moving—it seems to me—as smoothly as eels among their varied and innocent and transitory loves, I was sleepily rinsing diapers, clad in a red corduroy dressing gown, wet across the stomach; I was pushing a baby carriage or a stroller along the side of the road to the store (so habitually that without this prop my arms felt a disturbing lightness, my body weight had to be redistributed, tilted back), I was reading and falling asleep on the evening couch. We are pitied for this