Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

ceiling, their flowerpattern, all her own. Arthur had not liked her taking up dressmaking because he thought she was too smart for it. All the hard work she had done in History had given him an exaggerated idea of her brains. “Besides,” she told him, “it takes more brains to cut and fit, if you do it right, than to teach people about the War of 1812. Because, once you learn that, it’s learned and isn’t going to change you. Whereas every article of clothing you make is an entirely new proposition.”
    “Still it’s a surprise,” said Arthur, “to see the way you settle down.”
    It surprised everybody, but not Et herself. She made the change easily, from a girl turning cartwheels to a town fixture. She drove the other dressmakers out of business. They had been meek, unimportant creatures anyway, going around to people’s houses, sewing in back rooms and being grateful for meals. Only one serious rival appeared in all Et’s years, and that was a Finnish woman who called herself a designer. Some people gave her a try, because people are never satisfied, but it soon came out she was all style and no fit. Et never mentioned her, she let people find out for themselves; but afterwards, when this woman had left town and gone to Toronto—where, from what Et had seen on the streets, nobody knew a good fit from a bad—Et did not restrain herself. She would say to a customer she was fitting, “I see you’re still wearing that herringbone my foreigner friend tacked together for you. I saw you on the street.”
    “Oh, I know,” the woman would say. “But I do have to wear it out.”
    “You can’t see yourself from behind anyway, what’s the difference.”
    Customers took this kind of thing from Et, came to expect it, even. She’s a terror, they said about her, Et’s a terror. She had them at a disadvantage, she had them in their slips and corsets. Ladies who looked quite firm and powerful, outside, were here immobilized, apologetic, exposingsuch trembly, meek-looking thighs squeezed together by corsets, such long sad breast creases, bellies blown up and torn by children and operations.
    Et always closed her front curtains tight, pinning the crack.
    “That’s to keep the men from peeking.”
    Ladies laughed nervously.
    “That’s to keep Jimmy Saunders from stumping over to get an eyeful.”
    Jimmy Saunders was a World War I veteran who had a little shop next to Et’s, harness and leather goods.
    “Oh, Et. Jimmy Saunders has a wooden leg.”
    “He hasn’t got wooden eyes. Or anything else that I know of.”
    “Et you’re terrible.”

    Et kept Char beautifully dressed. The two steadiest criticisms of Char, in Mock Hill, were that she dressed too elegantly, and that she smoked. It was because she was a teacher’s wife that she should have refrained from doing either of these things, but Arthur of course let her do anything she liked, even buying her a cigarette holder so she could look like a lady in a magazine. She smoked at a high school dance, and wore a backless satin evening dress, and danced with a boy who had got a high school girl pregnant, and it was all the same to Arthur. He did not get to be Principal. Twice the school board passed him over and brought in somebody from outside, and when they finally gave him the job, in 1942, it was only temporarily and because so many teachers were away at war.
    Char fought hard all these years to keep her figure. Nobody but Et and Arthur knew what effort that cost her. Nobody but Et knew it all. Both of their parents had been heavy, and Char had inherited the tendency, though Et wasalways as thin as a stick. Char did exercises and drank a glass of warm water before every meal. But sometimes she went on eating binges. Et had known her to eat a dozen cream puffs one after the other, a pound of peanut brittle, or a whole lemon meringue pie. Then pale and horrified she took down Epsom salts, three or four or five times the prescribed amount. For two or three days she would be sick, dehydrated, purging her sins, as Et said. During these periods she could not look at food. Et would have to come and cook Arthur’s supper. Arthur did not know about the pie or the peanut brittle or whatever it was, or about the Epsom salts. He thought she had gained a pound or two and was going through a fanatical phase of dieting. He worried about her.
    “What is the difference, what does it matter?” he would say to Et. “She would still be beautiful.”
    “She