Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

was bored.
    When she first came to visit, as a young girl, Jeanette’s hair had been short and brown. Later on it was blonde. One year she appeared with it puffed up in what looked like a heap of bubbles on top of her head. In those days she would color her eyelids blue up to the eyebrows, she wore sheath dresses in patterns of orange and purple, yellow and scarlet. Her stylish, provocative air, after her thoughtful drabness as a young girl, came as a surprise. But the way she looked now was even more surprising. She had led her hair grow long and wore it either in a single braid down her back or loose, pale, and frizzy. She wore jeans and a peasant blouse and a collection of beads and metal jewelry. Most of the time no shoes. She also wore little childish print dresses, short as playsuits which bared her back and revealed that she was wearing no brassiere. Not that there was any need. She was a thirtyish woman with the figure of an eleven-year-old child.
    “Is she trying to be a hippie, do you think?” said Viola mildly. “They must think it funny when she’s teaching.” Viola was a great one for the smile to the face and the knife in the back. It was her social life as a banker’s wife that had trained her. She was getting at Dorothy, really, because Jeanette was Dorothy’s granddaughter. Both Dorothy and Viola were well-enough satisfied with the arrangement of living together. It was economical and provided company, as well as help in case of accident or illness. They drew comfort from each other’s presence in the way young quarrelsome children do, or long-married apparently uncongenial couples, the comfort being so inexplicable and largely unrecognizedthat what showed on the surface—what they thought they felt—was mostly wariness, irritation, concern for strategy.
    “That’s the way the majority of them dress around the college nowadays,” Dorothy said.
    “Teachers too?”
    “It makes no difference.”
    “I wonder will she ever get married?” remarked Viola, not at random.
    Dorothy had seen pictures in magazines of this new type of adult who appeared to have discarded adulthood. Jeanette was the first one she had seen close up and in the flesh. It used to be that young boys and girls would try to look like grown men and women, often with ridiculous results. Now there were grown men and women who would try to look like teen-agers until, presumably, they woke up on the brink of old age. It was a strange thing to see the child already meeting the old woman in Jeanette’s face. One moment she looked younger than she had done ten years ago, her face pale without make-up, her mouth wide and secretive. She looked fresh, clean, dreamy and self-absorbed. Then with a change of light or mood or body chemistry this same face showed itself bruised, bluish, sharp, skin more than a little shriveled under the eyes. A great deal had been simply skipped out.
    From where Dorothy sat on the porch the street looked hotter and shabbier than it had looked any other summer. This was because the trees were gone. Last fall the men who worked for the municipality had come along and cut down all the elm trees, those tall, old, deeply shading trees whose branches used to darken and brush against the upstairs windows of many of the houses, and in October bury the lawns in leaves. The trees were all diseased, some already half-dead, and they had to be taken down before the winter storms made them dangerous. During the winter it was not obvious how much this had changed the street, since thetrees were not the main thing about the street then; the snowbanks were. But now Dorothy noticed a great difference. The overhanging trees had isolated the houses and made the yards seem bigger; they had kept the patched narrow pavement flowing with light and shade, like a river.
    Jeanette had raised a lament at once.
    “The trees!” she said, as soon as she stepped out of her little cream-colored foreign car. “The beautiful trees! Who cut them down?”
    “The municipality,” Dorothy said.
    “They would.”
    “They had no choice,” said Dorothy, exchanging with her granddaughter a dry kiss, a token embrace. “It was Dutch elm disease.”
    “The same thing that’s happening everywhere,” Jeanette cut in on her, hardly listening. “It’s all part of the same destruction. The whole country is turning into a junkyard.”
    Dorothy could not agree. She could not speak for the country but this town was hardly turning into a